Wasiikitataq lloqlla aparunman. It seems that the flood is going to wash away your home. Stentor Danielson, 22:40,
30.5.03
I just ran accross the most succinct refutation of Jack Chick that I've ever seen. First recall that Chick's modus operandi is to make people fear eternal damnation if they don't accept Jesus. Then turn to 1 John chapter 4 verse 18:
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
One could say that the point is that, once you accept Jesus, you no longer have to fear hell. But I wonder how real love can be if it's born and maintained out of fear.
The whole chapter (which I saw in a non-Chick context on Notes of a Left-Wing Cub Scout) is nice. This also supports my interpretation that Jesus' message was basically "stop worrying about the afterlife."
Stentor Danielson, 23:16,
Best-selling author Erich von Däniken has opened a theme park in Interlaken, enabling mere mortals to have close encounters with his fantastic theories.
Housed in replica pyramids, Indian temples and golden planets, “Mysteries of the World” showcases past cultures and their possible contact with extraterrestrials.
Von Däniken’s books, including “Chariots of the Gods”, argue that knowledge gained through contact with aliens enabled the ancient Egyptians, for example, to construct their giant pyramids.
However, the author told swissinfo: “This is not a UFO park.”
Since Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom came out, there's been renewed talk about the pitfalls of democracy. Specifically, the problem of concern is that democracy and liberalism (in the broad sense) don't always go together. The obvious cases are the election of Hitler and the feared Islamist victory in a democratizing Middle Eastern nation.
I haven't read Zakaria's book (though I'd like to, as I enjoy his columns), but the general idea seems rather obvious, and applicable in some degree to any political system. The issue at hand is that liberalism is an end, whereas democracy is a means. Liberalism is a way of organizing society, whereas democracy is a way of making decisions about how to organize society (the distinction is a bit fuzzy because democratic institutions like voter registration and electoral districts are ends required to be able to exercise democratic means). No means guarantees a certain end, though it can make some more or less likely.
Thus, if you focus on the means, you may find them producing ends you don't like (as I mentioned before). And conversely, if you focus strictly on the ends (narrowly defined, as participation in a certain type of decisionmaking process can be as important an outcome as the decision reached), you could wind up using some pretty unsavory means if others fail to produce the right ends. Which is why liberal democracy is such a balancing act (as is, say, a dictatorial theocracy -- you have to make sure the despot makes doctrinally correct decisions while retaining power).
Stentor Danielson, 23:42,
A graduating senior's plan to sing a religious song at commencement ceremonies for her public high school has stirred a court fight over the separation of church and state.
Rachel Honer was told by administrators at Winneconne High School that she would have to use the words ``He,'' ``Him'' and ``His'' in place of three mentions of God in the lyrics.
On the question of constitutionality I tend to side with Honer (because the song is something she's doing on her own individual initiative), though on the question of what would be the best course of action I lean toward the school. But the real reason I'm posting this is because it's so different from the kind of thing that would happen at my (public) high school. The chorus and band unabashedly perform hymns in the Christmas concert, with nobody thinking twice about it.
Stentor Danielson, 23:13,
In a study published this week in the science journal Nature, scientists from the University of Kent in southeast England say farmers who hunt and shoot can help restore Britain's lost wildlife.
Government agencies have already been trying to encourage environmentally sustainable farming practices through habitat improvement grants. So far, however, success has been limited, according to the University of Kent's professor of biodiversity management, Nigel Leader-Williams.
... "According to our research, it's people involved with country sports who take up these subsidy schemes," Leader-Williams explained. "They plant new woodland because they want foxes and pheasants to live in it."
Hunters are an interesting bit of the environmentalist picture. They do a lot for the environment, as the story quoted above is not the first time I've heard that type of result. But there's an uneasy relationship with the rest of the environmental movement. The conflict with the animal rights movement should be obvious. Hunters tend to favor private, local control, in contrast to the focus of much of the environmental discourse on global governmental actions like the Kyoto Protocol (though there's an interesting, and underexploited, parallel with indigenous sovereignty movements). Perhaps because hunting is a traditional masculine activity, hunters tend to be conservative, in contrast to the leftist leanings of the environmental movement's leadership. Most interestingly (to me. at least) is the way hunter-conservationists show the virtues of practical involvement with the environment as a way to foster stewardship. This contrasts with the "wilderness" ideology (which, I hasten to add, is hardly the consensus of non-hunter environmentalists, though it is a widely-held view) that sees human involvement with nature as inherently degrading.
Stentor Danielson, 00:40,
28.5.03
(follow-up to the previous post)
There are plenty of examples of the Mr. Jordan strategy in politics. The trade sanctions on Cuba and Iraq were in part justified by Mr. Jordan -- if we hurt the people enough, they'll rise up against their dictator. "Divest from Israel" campaigns at colleges are a sort of double-Mr. Jordan -- the activists pressure the school to withdraw its investments in certain companies, which in turn pressures those companies to cease operations in Israel, thus pressuring Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank. Note that a characterization of "Mr. Jordan" does not apply when the immediate target is a body with a clear responsibility to the activist group. So, for example, for Americans to pressure the US government to pressure Ariel Sharon would not constitute a Mr. Jordan because the US government is supposed to represent and be the agent of Americans' wishes regarding Middle East policy.
By giving it a goofy name, I've probably tipped you off to the fact that I'm skeptical of the Mr. Jordan strategy, though the justice of it varies (the software company is more complicit in HLS's doings than the Iraqi people are in the Hussein regime), as does the potential effectiveness. The Mr. Jordan strategy also seems like it wouldn't be very effective in general, as it seems more likely to provoke a backlash against the instigators than to result in passing along the pressure to the real target. To be justified, a Mr. Jordan strategy would have to be used when the need to pressure the real target is very high, direct pressure on the real target is practically impossible, and the passing on of the pressure is likely.
Stentor Danielson, 23:44,
At 3 a.m. one recent morning, animal rights activists enraged by a company that tests products on animals gathered outside the home of an executive.
... "We'll be back," the group, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, later warned the executive on its Web site. "We know where you live, we know where you work, and we'll make your life hell until you pull out of HLS."
What made the noisy protest unusual was that its target wasn't an executive with Huntingdon Life Sciences: It was a manager of a Los Angeles company that just sells software to Huntingdon.
... On Sunday, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty announced it would begin a week of similar demonstrations nationwide outside homes of people with often tenuous ties to animal research. The group says such tactics have "broken new ground in the struggle for animal liberation."
I think of this tactic -- pressuring a target by proxy -- as the "Mr. Jordan strategy." Mr. Jordan was my 6th grade math teacher. When someone in the class didn't do his homework, Mr. Jordan would assign extra homework to the entire class. This was no punishment for the offender, because he would just skip the new assignment as well. Mr. Jordan's explanation was that if the good kids in the class didn't want to get extra homework, we'd go after the offender and make him start doing his work. The assumption was that his peers would have more influence than his teacher.
Stentor Danielson, 23:44,
(Part 2: my response)
A charitable reading of this article would be that it's a restatement of the old saying "the perfect is the enemy of the good." So something must be done about the forces of perfection, so that their second-guessing doesn't undermine the good. What that something is is never revealed, suggesting that it's something most readers wouldn't like to hear -- perhaps a revival of the Sedition Act, or maybe just a repeat of the public scorn that brought down the Dixie Chicks. I'll be charitable and assume Naim was short on space, but it comes off sounding like a sort of veiled threat that could be averted if the lite anti-Americans get the message.
The problem with this article is that it places the blame on the lite anti-Americans. American policy is taken as given, so the question is whether the public will make the most of it by supporting it, or undermine it by criticizing it. But the lite anti-American position is based on the idea that American policy is not a given. It could get worse -- slipping away from that on-the-balance-good status -- if it isn't constantly urged to be better. And that it could feasibly be better than it is.
Naim grants the assumption that both pro-Americans and lite anti-Americans ultimately share the same ideals and differ only in their degree of idealism/pragmatism. So here's a way that America could defuse the threat of lite anti-Americanism: live up to those ideals. Instead of telling people to stop complaining, stop giving them something to complain about.
Of course, it's also possible that I'm interpreting his category of "lite anti-American" too broadly. The only concrete clue he gives for identifying what level of dissent constitutes anti-Americanism is a reference to a French book about how Republicans staged September 11 as part of some evil plot. While the book's sales were high, I suspect that a large proportion of people who bought it were motivated more by fascination with weird theories and curiosity due to the book's hype than by inclination to actually believe it.
Stentor Danielson, 01:01,
There is murderous anti-Americanism, and then there is anti-Americanism lite. The first is the anti-Americanism of fanatical terrorists who hate the United States—its power, its values, and its policies—and are willing to kill and to die in order to hurt the United States and its citizens. The second is the anti-Americanism of those in the United States and abroad who take to the streets and the media to rant against the country but do not seek its destruction.
Both lite anti-Americans and U.S. policymakers share the illusion that anti-Americanism that falls short of terrorism carries few concrete costs. Lite anti-Americans will tell you that they love the United States but despise its policies and that criticizing its government is indeed healthy.
... Those who partake and spread lite anti-Americanism, even while sharing the principles and values the United States stands for, undermine the country’s ability to defend such principles abroad. After all, international influence requires power, but it also depends on legitimacy. Such legitimacy flows from the acceptance of others who not only allow but even welcome the use of that influence. Maybe U.S. legitimacy abroad was undermined by Bush’s threats to act alone in Iraq and to impose the will of his administration on others. But such actions were interpreted by much of the world through the lens of deep suspicions about the United States that predate Bush’s presidency. Ultimately, the automatic rejection by lite anti-Americans of U.S. international actions may be as bad for the world as giving the superpower a blank check to exert its power without the constraints imposed by the international community.
So if the study of languages is a scientific enterprise, the effort to preserve them is not. It is a political question: which voices represent the communities whose languages are fading?
Hearing how his ancestors were punished for speaking their own language at school, a young speaker might be persuaded by an elder to learn the ancestral tongue. That is a reason to preserve that language in the archives. Suppose, though, that the tales of days long gone do not resonate with this hypothetical child. Is it science's job to help the elder preserve his sense of importance at the expense of the younger?
Language bullies who try to shame a child into learning his grandfather's language are not morally different from the language bullies who tried to shame the grandfather into learning English. The elucidation of language in all its complexity is an enthralling scientific enterprise. But "saving endangered languages" is not a part of it.
This is an important issue. There is no shortage of instances in which language loss is the result of clear injustices, such as Turkey's ban on teaching and broadcasting in Kurdish and assimilationist boarding schools for Native American and Aboriginal Australian children. But most language loss seems to come as a result of less clear-cut forces. Some languages lose their usefulness -- if you need to use Spanish to conduct business and deal with the government, why bother retaining Quechua? Some also get labeled "old-fashioned" or "rural" in contrast to progressive urban tongues.
Languages tend to disappear because they lose their critical mass of functionality (both utilitarian functionality, in terms of who it allows you to communicate with, and prestige functionality, in terms of what it says about you that you can speak a certain language, and the joy of knowing a language). People are lazy, and beyond a small population of language geeks most people will not retain an unneccessary language.
It seems that language loss is in part due to an individual-vs-the system dynamic, meaning that we can't assume a dying tongue has simply lost out fair and square in the marketplace of languages. When confronted with the larger society that speaks a different language, individual speakers of a minority language will tend to lose out. Forcibly altering the larger system -- for example, through government bilingualism or subsidies to minority-language publications and broadcasts -- can help a little. On one hand, there's something uncomfortable about this approach. It resembles subsidizing producers of Betamax videos so that they aren't driven out of business by VHS. But of course few people's identity and sense of self-worth is tied up in watching Beta videos, whereas that is true of language. It seems that the real way for a language to remain viable is community cooperation among people with a shared interest in preserving the language, creating a sort of local home for the language. That's what we see in the revival of Native American languages. The problem is that -- in part due to a history of clearly unjust language loss -- minority language communities are disempowered, lacking the social, economic, and political resources to establish a viable language community. And outside aid can easily fall into a top-down language preservation approach like that criticized in the article I quoted.
Stentor Danielson, 11:34,
Secondly, new Democrats generally support gay rights, abortion rights, gun control and military interventions. A lot of old Democrats are pro-family, antiabortion, pro-gun, and believe we should pay attention to our problems here at home.
... Most Republicans are honest conservatives; most Democrats are honest progressives. Most ''new Democrats'' are fraudulent phonies.
We usually think of the New Democrats as the right wing of the party (hence centrists overall), a group that gave up the old left's socialist-sounding goals (especially on economic issues) to appeal to the center of the electorate. So they take a lot of flak from the left wing of the party. This is the first I've heard them attacked by a Democrat for being too far to the left (granted, the paragraph before the one I quoted criticized them for being too far to the right on trade). I think this writer (Mark Calafati) represents an important faction of the Democratic party that's often lost between characterizing the Old Democrats as Wellstone-esque progressives and attacking the social conservatives of the right.
This letter also highlights the problems of characterizing political parties according to whether they favor change or not (the progressive-conservative axis). Calafati implicitly describes himself as a progressive. Yet his opinions on social issues -- pro-gun, pro-life, pro-family -- are clear markers of social conservatism today, a far cry from the agenda of the modern left wing. The overall platform that he advocates sounds much like that proposed by the progressive faction in the early part of the 20th century and largely enacted in the New Deal. The name became simply a label for a package of policy ideals, rather than a description.
Stentor Danielson, 11:05,
26.5.03
UFO theories are more than just alternative descriptions of how the world is. They often come with ethical guidelines, explaining how we ought to relate to aliens. For example, ZetaTalk makes much of the distinction between "Service-to-Others," the philosophy of the Zeta race that has come to help us survive the passage of Planet X, and "Service-to-Self," the philosophy of other aliens who have won over the world's leaders. The Luciferian Liberation Front, on the other hand, draws on Ayn Rand's Objectivsm to come to the opposite conclusion -- don't trust aliens who advocate altruism. And Alien Resistance claims that aliens are agents of Satan (and that aliens are actually angels or other divinities -- a reversal of the von Däniken/Sitchin thesis that angels and other divinities are actually aliens).
There are a few things screwed up in this template. I'd fix them, but Blogger won't let me edit my template anymore. Grrrr ... I'd put Blogger in the Kiosk, if I could change the Kiosk.
An abundance of charred corncobs and kernels indicate that corn was the agricultural mainstay here. Based on this find, Mr. Simms and his colleagues at Utah State Univeristy in Logan believe that the Anasazi maintained several small farmsteads and moved among them, to increase the tribe's chances of survival in the parched desert. "What they have is a series of these little houses and depending on where their corn is producing, those are the ones they will live in," he says. "They're moving people to the production. That is very different from the way our culture does it. We load things into trucks, trains, and we move the production to the people."
Anthropologists have known for years that the Ansazi thrived as farmers in this fragile desert ecosystem. They've wondered how. Archeologist and crew member Buck Benson says this site strengthens the now-accepted theory that the Anasazi were farmers who did not simply settle down. "They have to be able to pick up and move when either the arable land is used up beyond growing capability or, if situations change like climate, or other factors like another group moving in and there is possible confrontation. The Anasazi were able to leave the area, let it regenerate itself and then come back," he says.
I've known about inter-year mobility on the part of small-scale farmers before -- it's the essence of the swidden (slash-and-burn) system. But this is the first I've heard of intra-year mobility. This combines interestingly with an offline mention I came across today of southwestern Native Americans using temporal spreading out of agriculture -- planting an early crop, a mid-summer one, and a late crop -- to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. It's undoubtedly a lot of work, and a far cry from the agriculture-enabled leisure concept that we used to have. But it's also an intelligent way to survive in an environment that has incredible and unpredictable variation in rainfall from place to place and month to month. And it also reminds me that the more I learn, the fuzzier the boundary between hunter-gatherer and farming lifestyles becomes.
Stentor Danielson, 00:13,
25.5.03
A while back Tacitus praised Ecclesiastes, which also happens to be my favorite book of the Bible. So when I ran across the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (via a link on index to common creationist claims, which I found via Morat), I figured I'd see what kind of a fisking they gave Ecclesiastes.
The SAB throws out any pretense at being a more objective, accurate version and instead proclaims itself an anti-Christian text set up to counterbalance the wealth of pro-Christian Bibles out there. The editors have tried their hardest to find something wrong with every verse they could. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the SAB more or less approves of Ecclesiastes. Many verses were given the "thumbs up" symbol, which marks the few passages the editors say are actually worthwhile -- the sum total of which they say could fit into a small brochure. The few negatives they find are contradictions, most of which are minor or stretched.
So, Ecclesiastes: approved by atheists and fundamentalists alike.
Stentor Danielson, 17:46,
The ultimate tragedy is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather that vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written literature composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets and saints. In short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience. Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence.
Our goal at the National Geographic Cultures Initiative is to focus global attention on the plight of the ethnosphere. To do so, we will be launching a series of journeys that will take our readers and viewers to places where the cultural beliefs, practices, and adaptations are so inherently wondrous that one cannot help but come away dazzled by the full range of the human imagination.
I hope that the National Geographic Cultures Initiative is more scientifically astute in its execution, and that Wade Davis's introduction to it is just dressed up in this kind of language for public appeal. The attitude he describes is reminiscent of late 19th century white attitudes toward Native Americans. Though official policy remained extermination or assimilation, that era saw an upwelling of nostalgia for the fading Native peoples. Early anthropologists went out to document dying cultures, ways of life inevitably giving way to modernity but whose passing should be lamented. Yet today we see a revival of Native culture among many tribes, a desire to fight for and affirm their identity rather than being pitied. Davis's description takes on the earlier nostalgic mantle, evoking a mystical sense of cultural diversity. He gives no hint of what type of socio-cultural-political struggles are involved in the demise of the cultures he's interested in (a complete dodge of the question of blame), leaving the impression that they're simply fading away for mysterious reasons. With no sense of causality or struggle, Davis can't offer any possibility of change, of adaptation to modernity and fighting cultural loss. The best he can do is document these cultures before they disappear, so that we in the educated West can appreciate what elders have failed to hand down to their children.
Stentor Danielson, 16:29,
debitage 
Today's Quechua lesson: