Let us be clear what is going on. The oligarchy thinks that money spent on old and poor and sick people is money that they could have instead. They have long had their eyes on cutting spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government services and regulatory agencies so that the savings generated could be used to continue their tax cuts or give them even more. In addition, they have long wanted to get their hands on the Social Security trust funds to invest in the modern casino that is the stock market. Such a massive influx of capital will undoubtedly boost stock prices and make a lot of wealthy people even more wealthy. Hence we see the repeated calls for the privatization of Social Security, the raising of the age for eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, and cuts in government programs and services. In this ‘debate’, they are aided by the media in that a proposal is only described as ‘serious’ and even ‘courageous’ if it harms a lot of poor and vulnerable people…
Mano Singham (“The ‘Fiscal Cliff’ and the ‘Grand Bargain’”)
04 December 2012
Quotation of the Day
02 December 2012
The Perils of Research
So, it seems that Chris Rodda has got her copy of the new edition of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies only to find that not only was it not published by a bigger outfit than Thomas Nelson, not only did it not contain the promised pages of new documentation for his outlandish claims, but it wasn’t even a new edition. Yes, the new edition of Barton’s work announced at Amazon was nothing but leftover copies of the Thomas Nelson edition. Chris Rodda went over it page by page and literally nothing had been changed.
God, what a disappointment. I feel quite confident that those couple dozen pages of documentation would have cleared everything up, made it all plain, and revealed to us that what he was writing was actually reasonable, rather than a dish of moldy cabbage that somehow got pushed to the back of the refrigerator. Research is like that sometimes; you expect a diamond and you get cubic zirconium; you expect enlightenment and you get Carlos Castaneda’s dissertation.
Think of the feelings of those Beatle enthusiasts when the long-lost first recording of “Please Please Me” turned up (in the back of somebody’s closet as I recall. No, that was the newspaper I kept of the first landing on the moon …) It should have been a slower, blusier, Roy Orbisonesque arrangement—but instead it was essentially identical to the version found on their second single. (The drummer was different—the moody magnificent Pete Best had been replaced by some interloper—but the same essential feel.) That must have been a real disappointment—it was for me, anyway. And so the slow version recedes into the mists of prehistory, an artefact like Jane Austen’s First Impressions, intriguing to think about, but perpetually out of reach.
Am I making sense this first Sunday of Advent in the year twelve thousand twelve of the Holocene era? I doubt it very much. We live in senseless times. Uganda fires a blow in the War on Xmas with a promise of new anti-gay laws in time for the holidays—as if the old ones weren’t severe enough. Republicans in the US Congress unveil more plans to increase the wealth of the idle bloodsucking class (or “job-creators” as they like to ironically call themselves) by robbing the nation pension fund that employees have paid into all their lives. We live in senseless times; why should I be immune to the zeitgeist?
And speaking of senseless, ever tried to follow a David Barton footnote? Footnotes are supposed to be helpful guides pointing to sources, not joke roadsigns that point you to nowhere, or useless decorations put in to give the appearance of research in the absence of evidence. Of course real research takes you off those convenient well-lit roads into the shadowy hinterland of unexamined sources. You read that such-and-such paper had a reporter at the front, you open the crumbling pages with excitement—and it turns out that the so-called reporter was only sending out political diatribes from a point some fifty miles away from the scene of action. Can’t be helped; research is like that.
Many years ago I spent considerable time and money running down a copy of the first (unrevised) edition Alfred Meacham’s Wigwam and War Path only to find that there really was no such thing. The so-called first edition is nothing but early copies of the supposedly revised edition with an errata sheet and no signature on the author’s picture in the front of the volume. There are numerous minor corrections throughout, some of which are identical to those on the errata sheet, and some of which are not, but it is manifestly the same edition, and the editorial confusion that is manifest in the volume is the same no matter which printing you use. That was a disappointment—but, as I say, research is all too often like that.
So, to recap on the David Barton saga: first, when Thomas Nelson pulled The Jefferson Lies for its inaccuracies, Barton announced that he had a bigger publisher for the book, and that it would be new and improved. Second, when a new edition was announced, the new publisher is (apparently) Barton himself, through his own Wallbuilders press. Third, when the book is actually delivered, it turns out to be published by Thomas Nelson, not by a new and bigger publisher, and it is the same old book, not new and improved. Pretty much a clean miss all the way around.
God, what a disappointment. I feel quite confident that those couple dozen pages of documentation would have cleared everything up, made it all plain, and revealed to us that what he was writing was actually reasonable, rather than a dish of moldy cabbage that somehow got pushed to the back of the refrigerator. Research is like that sometimes; you expect a diamond and you get cubic zirconium; you expect enlightenment and you get Carlos Castaneda’s dissertation.
Think of the feelings of those Beatle enthusiasts when the long-lost first recording of “Please Please Me” turned up (in the back of somebody’s closet as I recall. No, that was the newspaper I kept of the first landing on the moon …) It should have been a slower, blusier, Roy Orbisonesque arrangement—but instead it was essentially identical to the version found on their second single. (The drummer was different—the moody magnificent Pete Best had been replaced by some interloper—but the same essential feel.) That must have been a real disappointment—it was for me, anyway. And so the slow version recedes into the mists of prehistory, an artefact like Jane Austen’s First Impressions, intriguing to think about, but perpetually out of reach.
Am I making sense this first Sunday of Advent in the year twelve thousand twelve of the Holocene era? I doubt it very much. We live in senseless times. Uganda fires a blow in the War on Xmas with a promise of new anti-gay laws in time for the holidays—as if the old ones weren’t severe enough. Republicans in the US Congress unveil more plans to increase the wealth of the idle bloodsucking class (or “job-creators” as they like to ironically call themselves) by robbing the nation pension fund that employees have paid into all their lives. We live in senseless times; why should I be immune to the zeitgeist?
And speaking of senseless, ever tried to follow a David Barton footnote? Footnotes are supposed to be helpful guides pointing to sources, not joke roadsigns that point you to nowhere, or useless decorations put in to give the appearance of research in the absence of evidence. Of course real research takes you off those convenient well-lit roads into the shadowy hinterland of unexamined sources. You read that such-and-such paper had a reporter at the front, you open the crumbling pages with excitement—and it turns out that the so-called reporter was only sending out political diatribes from a point some fifty miles away from the scene of action. Can’t be helped; research is like that.
Many years ago I spent considerable time and money running down a copy of the first (unrevised) edition Alfred Meacham’s Wigwam and War Path only to find that there really was no such thing. The so-called first edition is nothing but early copies of the supposedly revised edition with an errata sheet and no signature on the author’s picture in the front of the volume. There are numerous minor corrections throughout, some of which are identical to those on the errata sheet, and some of which are not, but it is manifestly the same edition, and the editorial confusion that is manifest in the volume is the same no matter which printing you use. That was a disappointment—but, as I say, research is all too often like that.
So, to recap on the David Barton saga: first, when Thomas Nelson pulled The Jefferson Lies for its inaccuracies, Barton announced that he had a bigger publisher for the book, and that it would be new and improved. Second, when a new edition was announced, the new publisher is (apparently) Barton himself, through his own Wallbuilders press. Third, when the book is actually delivered, it turns out to be published by Thomas Nelson, not by a new and bigger publisher, and it is the same old book, not new and improved. Pretty much a clean miss all the way around.
01 December 2012
Quotation of the Day
Many mysteries remain about the origins of the universe; how rapidly it has expanded, and how all the atomic parts fit together. There is a lot left to learn. But not about whether or not the universe was created in seven days. It wasn’t. Rubio is wrong—it is not a dispute for theologians. It is not a dispute at all.
There are not two sides to every issue. Some have thirteen sides and others have one.
10 November 2012
Quotation of the Day
It long has been my opinion that, sooner or later, it is the responsibility of the Democratic party to the future of the republic and the political commonwealth to beat the Republicans so badly in so many areas that the Republicans are faced with a choice of either historical irrelevance, or wringing the craziness out of their party by enforcing a set pf party orthodoxy that does not include creationism, gay-bashing, anti-science lunacy, and the crackpot economic theory that has infected the party ever since Arthur Laffer found that cocktail napkin in the airport bar. Until that glorious day when we have proportional voting, viable third parties, and sparkling white unicorn ponies, like it or not, the Democratic party is the only political institution capable of doing that job. That it largely has shirked that job ever since the first time somebody yelled “peacenik!” at it in the late autumn of 1972 does not make the job less real, or the urgency of doing it less immediate.
Charles P. Pierce
(“How the Democrats Can Make the Republicans Pay”)
09 November 2012
Quotation of the Day
Any ideology based on the premise that facts don’t count will eventually fail. You can coast for a while on false beliefs, just as you can drive for hundreds of miles with a faulty gas gauge. But there comes a point when the tank runs dry and the best bullshit in the world won’t convince that engine to turn over. Fortunately for us, the Romney machine sputtered and died before it was able to roll over the entire nation and run the ship of state aground.
Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew
05 November 2012
A Horse Race and a Hanging
A reader signing himself Harley writes in response to my account of the reporters’ race to cover the hanging of the Modoc leaders in October 1873 (Dubious Documents: The Unlikely Life of William Drannan):
But where to start? The Modoc war is not the best known of the conflicts between the invading Euro-Americans and the peoples they found in their path, and it was far from typical, so perhaps a few words are in order about the conflict. The Modoc people lived along the present-day California-Oregon border until 1864, when they were assigned by treaty to Klamath Reservation, and were required to abandon their ancestral lands altogether. Some of them moved there voluntarily in 1867, and the rest were taken there at the end of 1869, but they abandoned the reservation en masse in the spring of 1870. Many, perhaps most, refused to return. In November 1872 a small force of soldiers from Fort Klamath were sent to escort them there, the Modocs resisted, and fled to their traditional stronghold in today’s Lava Bed National Monument. There they holed up, resisting attempts by the army to force them out, and by peace commissioners to entice them to come out voluntarily.
February and March of 1873 were taken up with peace negotiations, and during that time newspaper correspondents set up bases at various army locations, covering the war from there. One of them, Edward Fox of the New York Herald, went so far as to ride into the Modoc encampment during one of the peace conferences to talk with the Modoc leaders, interviewing Captain Jack and John Schonchin among others. Another, H. W. Atwell of the Sacramento Record, spent an uncomfortable night at the Modoc encampment, under threat of death from some of the more volatile warriors, when he accompanied a peace commissioner during some tense negotiations.
These negotiations came to an abrupt end in April, when at a prearranged signal members of the Modoc delegation opened fire on the U. S. representatives, killing two of them and wounding others. When open hostilities resumed immediately after the Modocs were driven from their lava stronghold into the open, where they split up into small bands and were captured. Those who had taken part in the murders under a flag of truce were put on trial in July and six of them were sentenced to be hanged. Two of the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment at the last moment, but Captain Jack, John Schonchin, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were in fact hanged on 3 October 1873.
The major newspapers sent out reporters to cover the event. Fox and Atwell returned, and the San Francisco Chronicle sent out a newcomer to the scene, H. S. Shaw. (The Chronicle’s coverage had been somewhat inconsistent since its original reporter, Robert Bogart, was driven from the scene when his coverage was deemed too favorable to the Modocs.) The powerful Associated Press (not the current outfit of that name), usually represented by a reporter from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, was conspicuous by its apparent absence.
None of the reporters took note of a Jacksonville teamster named William Turner who was working at the fort. Had they known his background, however, they might have smelt a rat. Turner was a former editor of a Jacksonville newspaper, the Oregon Sentinel, and he was not there by chance. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin had hired him to represent the interests of the press association.
Fox’s coverage was probably the most thorough, including a review of the major events of the war and final interviews with the Modoc leaders, in addition to an account of the execution itself. But the execution was the notable event, and all reporters wanted to be the first to get the news out. Being first was critical in more than one sense; it took time to telegraph information, and there was only one key available at Jacksonville; whoever got there first would quite possibly keep possession of the key long enough to keep his rivals’ stories out of the papers till the next day.
Fox’s preparations were formidable: he had nine horses spaced out along the ninety-mile road to Jacksonville, and three couriers to carry the message. He also had a secret weapon the others didn’t know about; he planned to send a dispatch describing the preliminaries first, before the execution, to seize control of the key, to which his account of the execution would be added, so that even if another reporter’s courier got their before his second message, his account would still go out first. (He had not reckoned on the local power wielded by the Associated Press, however, as we will see.)
Against this the other two reporters openly on the scene sought alternatives. Atwell decided to try for Ashland, which was closer, but the road was little better than a trail in some places, and it would be difficult to make good time. Like Fox, he set up a chain of horses and couriers along his route, and prepared for the event. Shaw decided to try for Yreka, sending his account there by carrier pigeon.
Turner kept his preparations as private as possible. He arranged secretly to clear an old trail, once used to bring supplies to the fort from Jacksonville, but now abandoned. Like the others he had multiple horses and couriers to carry his report of the execution along his chosen path. Unlike the others, he was not concerned with creating a comprehensive report, but only in getting the news of the hanging out first.
The hanging of the Modoc leaders has been described many times since then, both by eyewitnesses and by those attempting to make sense of events, but these four reporters were among the first to attempt it, and certainly were the first to get their versions into print. The events were simple enough. The troops assembled to escort them at 8:30 in the morning, at 9:30 the prisoners were brought forth, by 9:50 they were placed on the gallows, at 10:00 the sentence was read, at 10:18 the ropes were adjusted, and by 10:25 it was all over.
The reporters wrote rapidly, standing by their horses, and within minutes the reports were handed to the various couriers and the race was on. Shaw’s pigeons were launched, but seemed clueless about what they were supposed to do, and circled aimlessly about, finally settling on some nearby branches. The rest, however, were more or less successfully on their way.
Fox’s first courier, sent out well in advance with a report covering the previous day’s activities including the complete military orders for the execution, arrived first, and thus gained control of the key as he had planned. He had written “more to come” at the end of the dispatch, to indicate that this was not the complete transmission, and seemingly felt confident that that would be enough to hold the wire for him. The trouble was, Western Union was hopelessly entwined with the Associated Press; its operators had been acting as local stringers for it throughout the war, and operator had orders to send its dispatch through first if at all possible. Both Turner’s agent and Fox’s arrived before Fox’s first dispatch had been concluded, but as Turner’s agent had arrived some thirty minutes before Fox’s, the telegraph operator used that as an excuse to terminate Fox’s story at the “more to come” point, and to send Turner’s account before resuming Fox’s. The result was that Turner’s brief story became the first news of the execution to reach the outside world.
Atwell, who had tried to get his story out via Ashland, fell victim to some extremely bad luck. One of his couriers had an accident on the road and fell off his horse. (According to one account he was inebriated at the time.) This mishap caused his story to be delayed for a further day, putting him squarely behind the others in the race. And to finish things off, Shaw’s pigeons never did make it to Yreka, and his story was apparently lost. He and Fox, however, had an arrangement by which Fox’s courier carried a version of his story to go out on the Jacksonville line. It took the operator there twenty-two hours to transmit all the material provided by the various reporters.
And this, dear readers, is the story of how the news of the Modoc executions first reached the outside world from Fort Klamath. The sources include the reporters’ own accounts in their respective papers, as well as a number of pieces in the Yreka Journal, the Yreka Union, and the Oregon Sentinel. As I said in my original piece, this did make a considerable local stir at the time, but it was barely reported outside the region. In a later piece I intend to cover William F. Drannan’s account with a bit more detail, but this is as much as I can stand to do at the moment. Drannan will have to wait.
You suggest that according to Drannan’s story of the dispatch race he tried the route that was farther away—you suggest this as Ashland, Oregon, the closer location being Yreka Station (I can't find this on modern maps so is this just nearby Yreka?) Drannan's account of the dispatch race says that it was from Fort Klamath to either Ashland or Jacksonville. He suggests he went to Ashland because it was closer than Jacksonville. Drannan's numbers state this is 80 miles of trail to Ashland versus 100 miles of wagon road to Jacksonville, modern trails and roads suggest a trip of 70 miles versus 75 to 90 miles so his guesses were accurate enough. Modern day Yreka is not closer than either of these destinations, it is about 100 miles away. If the next account of this story was in 1960 then Drannan's account is the only account that can be considered either first hand, or second hand and alive as an adult at the time. The 1960 account is written solely as a history from someone who was probably not born at the time of the events.Okay, reader Harley has in fact caught me out in a major inaccuracy in my account. You see, I was writing fairly quickly (and entirely from memory) when I wrote that, and I carelessly substituted Yreka for Jacksonville. Yreka, you see, was the town that carried most of the telegraphic correspondence from the front during the Modoc war: government dispatches, reporters’ accounts, and private messages all went out primarily from that location. The hanging, however, was another matter. It took place at Fort Klamath, and the main telegraph station for dispatches from that place was Jacksonville. There are other problems with the story as I related it then, and as there is, as far as I know, no full account of events available either in print or on the internet, I thought I would take a moment to relate the story as it happened, based on contemporary accounts.
But where to start? The Modoc war is not the best known of the conflicts between the invading Euro-Americans and the peoples they found in their path, and it was far from typical, so perhaps a few words are in order about the conflict. The Modoc people lived along the present-day California-Oregon border until 1864, when they were assigned by treaty to Klamath Reservation, and were required to abandon their ancestral lands altogether. Some of them moved there voluntarily in 1867, and the rest were taken there at the end of 1869, but they abandoned the reservation en masse in the spring of 1870. Many, perhaps most, refused to return. In November 1872 a small force of soldiers from Fort Klamath were sent to escort them there, the Modocs resisted, and fled to their traditional stronghold in today’s Lava Bed National Monument. There they holed up, resisting attempts by the army to force them out, and by peace commissioners to entice them to come out voluntarily.
February and March of 1873 were taken up with peace negotiations, and during that time newspaper correspondents set up bases at various army locations, covering the war from there. One of them, Edward Fox of the New York Herald, went so far as to ride into the Modoc encampment during one of the peace conferences to talk with the Modoc leaders, interviewing Captain Jack and John Schonchin among others. Another, H. W. Atwell of the Sacramento Record, spent an uncomfortable night at the Modoc encampment, under threat of death from some of the more volatile warriors, when he accompanied a peace commissioner during some tense negotiations.
These negotiations came to an abrupt end in April, when at a prearranged signal members of the Modoc delegation opened fire on the U. S. representatives, killing two of them and wounding others. When open hostilities resumed immediately after the Modocs were driven from their lava stronghold into the open, where they split up into small bands and were captured. Those who had taken part in the murders under a flag of truce were put on trial in July and six of them were sentenced to be hanged. Two of the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment at the last moment, but Captain Jack, John Schonchin, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were in fact hanged on 3 October 1873.
The major newspapers sent out reporters to cover the event. Fox and Atwell returned, and the San Francisco Chronicle sent out a newcomer to the scene, H. S. Shaw. (The Chronicle’s coverage had been somewhat inconsistent since its original reporter, Robert Bogart, was driven from the scene when his coverage was deemed too favorable to the Modocs.) The powerful Associated Press (not the current outfit of that name), usually represented by a reporter from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, was conspicuous by its apparent absence.
None of the reporters took note of a Jacksonville teamster named William Turner who was working at the fort. Had they known his background, however, they might have smelt a rat. Turner was a former editor of a Jacksonville newspaper, the Oregon Sentinel, and he was not there by chance. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin had hired him to represent the interests of the press association.
Fox’s coverage was probably the most thorough, including a review of the major events of the war and final interviews with the Modoc leaders, in addition to an account of the execution itself. But the execution was the notable event, and all reporters wanted to be the first to get the news out. Being first was critical in more than one sense; it took time to telegraph information, and there was only one key available at Jacksonville; whoever got there first would quite possibly keep possession of the key long enough to keep his rivals’ stories out of the papers till the next day.
Fox’s preparations were formidable: he had nine horses spaced out along the ninety-mile road to Jacksonville, and three couriers to carry the message. He also had a secret weapon the others didn’t know about; he planned to send a dispatch describing the preliminaries first, before the execution, to seize control of the key, to which his account of the execution would be added, so that even if another reporter’s courier got their before his second message, his account would still go out first. (He had not reckoned on the local power wielded by the Associated Press, however, as we will see.)
Against this the other two reporters openly on the scene sought alternatives. Atwell decided to try for Ashland, which was closer, but the road was little better than a trail in some places, and it would be difficult to make good time. Like Fox, he set up a chain of horses and couriers along his route, and prepared for the event. Shaw decided to try for Yreka, sending his account there by carrier pigeon.
Turner kept his preparations as private as possible. He arranged secretly to clear an old trail, once used to bring supplies to the fort from Jacksonville, but now abandoned. Like the others he had multiple horses and couriers to carry his report of the execution along his chosen path. Unlike the others, he was not concerned with creating a comprehensive report, but only in getting the news of the hanging out first.
The hanging of the Modoc leaders has been described many times since then, both by eyewitnesses and by those attempting to make sense of events, but these four reporters were among the first to attempt it, and certainly were the first to get their versions into print. The events were simple enough. The troops assembled to escort them at 8:30 in the morning, at 9:30 the prisoners were brought forth, by 9:50 they were placed on the gallows, at 10:00 the sentence was read, at 10:18 the ropes were adjusted, and by 10:25 it was all over.
The reporters wrote rapidly, standing by their horses, and within minutes the reports were handed to the various couriers and the race was on. Shaw’s pigeons were launched, but seemed clueless about what they were supposed to do, and circled aimlessly about, finally settling on some nearby branches. The rest, however, were more or less successfully on their way.
Fox’s first courier, sent out well in advance with a report covering the previous day’s activities including the complete military orders for the execution, arrived first, and thus gained control of the key as he had planned. He had written “more to come” at the end of the dispatch, to indicate that this was not the complete transmission, and seemingly felt confident that that would be enough to hold the wire for him. The trouble was, Western Union was hopelessly entwined with the Associated Press; its operators had been acting as local stringers for it throughout the war, and operator had orders to send its dispatch through first if at all possible. Both Turner’s agent and Fox’s arrived before Fox’s first dispatch had been concluded, but as Turner’s agent had arrived some thirty minutes before Fox’s, the telegraph operator used that as an excuse to terminate Fox’s story at the “more to come” point, and to send Turner’s account before resuming Fox’s. The result was that Turner’s brief story became the first news of the execution to reach the outside world.
Atwell, who had tried to get his story out via Ashland, fell victim to some extremely bad luck. One of his couriers had an accident on the road and fell off his horse. (According to one account he was inebriated at the time.) This mishap caused his story to be delayed for a further day, putting him squarely behind the others in the race. And to finish things off, Shaw’s pigeons never did make it to Yreka, and his story was apparently lost. He and Fox, however, had an arrangement by which Fox’s courier carried a version of his story to go out on the Jacksonville line. It took the operator there twenty-two hours to transmit all the material provided by the various reporters.
And this, dear readers, is the story of how the news of the Modoc executions first reached the outside world from Fort Klamath. The sources include the reporters’ own accounts in their respective papers, as well as a number of pieces in the Yreka Journal, the Yreka Union, and the Oregon Sentinel. As I said in my original piece, this did make a considerable local stir at the time, but it was barely reported outside the region. In a later piece I intend to cover William F. Drannan’s account with a bit more detail, but this is as much as I can stand to do at the moment. Drannan will have to wait.
04 November 2012
Quotation of the Day
There is a reason why the first thing a historian needs to learn to be a good historian is historiography, also known as the history of history. There is almost no known historical fact and there certainly isn’t any analysis of a historical fact that hasn’t been disputed at least once and, more likely, argued to death by men with beards and an unnatural appreciation for tweed.
Geds (“Menzies Contra Reality, Part 1”)
Bronze-age Goat-herders My Ass
One of the words I don’t really get is the term “construct” when used as a pejorative noun. This is a scholarly construct some Wikipedia editor will write dismissively in explaining why there should be no article on the Ebionite gospel, or the Ur-Hamlet is nothing but a modern construct.—as though that were a reason for neglecting the evidence on the subject. As Jason Thibeault points out (“Jim Garlow: Sexual orientation is a ‘modern construct’, therefore a choice”) so is gravity a modern construct, but that doesn’t mean that people could float off the earth until Isaac Newton named the force and described it in mathematical terms.
I mean, gee whiz, most things are modern constructs, if they are of any importance. Today’s Puritan Bible—the Hebrew Tanach in the Septuagint order alongside the Greek New Testament writings—is a modern construct. The second law of thermodynamics, so much beloved by the anti-evolution crowd, is a modern construct. The Rapture, for christ’s sake, is a modern construct. While the Rapture is bullshit, the second law of thermodynamics is (as far as I know) still the best scientific approximation of the truth, and the Puritan Bible at least closer to the original texts than its predecessors (though that’s not saying much), all are recent constructs viewed against the long reach of history.
It’s not the recentness of the construct that matters, it is its utility, or its beauty, or its ability to explain the evidence. In the case of the phrase “sexual orientation,” however, we are not even talking about a construct of any sort, but only of a different phrase for something that has been understood for centuries: different people are sexually aroused by different things.
The ancients were quite aware of this fact; there’s nothing new about it. Different things turn different people on. At present we have a more detailed understanding of human sexuality than in ancient times, and we have made categories and lists of the various possibilities; orientation is part of this and refers to the gender to which one is sexually attracted, as in same (homo) or different (hetero). The increasing precision of the terminology may be new, but the knowledge isn’t.
This character that Jason is replying to—apparently his name is Jim Garlow, though I don’t know who that is otherwise—gets the meaning wrong in his little diatribe, by the way; he says that sexual orientation is how one sees oneself, which it most emphatically is not. But that’s only the beginning of his willful ignorance; he’s trying to make a distinction between attraction and practice. As his parallel he claims that every healthy heterosexual male is naturally polygamous, but that these men don’t have to act on that natural desire. Similarly, therefore, just as men who are attracted to women other than their lawfully wedded wives don’t have to act on their attractions, so men who are attracted to other men don’t have to act on theirs. How this bizarre concept is supposed to be any sort of parallel he doesn’t explain. I mean, a man who is attracted to more than one woman can still have sex with somebody, by his reasoning, but who is the other man supposed to have sex with? Or is he supposed to remain celibate? Or what, exactly?
No, Jason nails this one, and I was with him all the way through this paragraph:
No, no, no… The iron-age urban dwellers who wrote the books that would eventually be incorporated into the bible were far from the bronze-age goat-herders whose lifestyle they idealized (and probably made up). That’s like calling Tennyson a medieval jouster because he liked to write about them. And as for the claim that modern-day homophobes get their fix from the Bible—do they really? Out of that vast collection of noble poetry, blood-drenched history, clever fables and upward of a thousand lies (as one of Mark Twain’s characters put it) there are no more than a few references to homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, Romans 1:27), and while they are nasty, they hardly constitute a major theme. One of the indications of just how desperate Bible-believing homophobes are is they way they have read homosexuality into various passages, such as the destruction of the cities of the plain by fire. No, it doesn’t look as if they get it from the Bible; rather they use the Bible as a crutch for their prejudices.
I mean, when was the last time you saw any of them complain about people who reap to the very edges of their fields, not leaving anything for the poor and the alien? But that's in there too; check out Leviticus 23:22. It's in the book, as Johnny Standley used to object to those who didn't believe in the power of Grandma's lye soap.
I mean, gee whiz, most things are modern constructs, if they are of any importance. Today’s Puritan Bible—the Hebrew Tanach in the Septuagint order alongside the Greek New Testament writings—is a modern construct. The second law of thermodynamics, so much beloved by the anti-evolution crowd, is a modern construct. The Rapture, for christ’s sake, is a modern construct. While the Rapture is bullshit, the second law of thermodynamics is (as far as I know) still the best scientific approximation of the truth, and the Puritan Bible at least closer to the original texts than its predecessors (though that’s not saying much), all are recent constructs viewed against the long reach of history.
It’s not the recentness of the construct that matters, it is its utility, or its beauty, or its ability to explain the evidence. In the case of the phrase “sexual orientation,” however, we are not even talking about a construct of any sort, but only of a different phrase for something that has been understood for centuries: different people are sexually aroused by different things.
The ancients were quite aware of this fact; there’s nothing new about it. Different things turn different people on. At present we have a more detailed understanding of human sexuality than in ancient times, and we have made categories and lists of the various possibilities; orientation is part of this and refers to the gender to which one is sexually attracted, as in same (homo) or different (hetero). The increasing precision of the terminology may be new, but the knowledge isn’t.
This character that Jason is replying to—apparently his name is Jim Garlow, though I don’t know who that is otherwise—gets the meaning wrong in his little diatribe, by the way; he says that sexual orientation is how one sees oneself, which it most emphatically is not. But that’s only the beginning of his willful ignorance; he’s trying to make a distinction between attraction and practice. As his parallel he claims that every healthy heterosexual male is naturally polygamous, but that these men don’t have to act on that natural desire. Similarly, therefore, just as men who are attracted to women other than their lawfully wedded wives don’t have to act on their attractions, so men who are attracted to other men don’t have to act on theirs. How this bizarre concept is supposed to be any sort of parallel he doesn’t explain. I mean, a man who is attracted to more than one woman can still have sex with somebody, by his reasoning, but who is the other man supposed to have sex with? Or is he supposed to remain celibate? Or what, exactly?
No, Jason nails this one, and I was with him all the way through this paragraph:
Each person in society contributes to the society most optimally when they are healthy, happy and in a career well suited to them. Finding a loving consenting partner (or multiple, if polyamory is allowed for those that so choose) to support you and to provide comfort and yes, even consensual sexual relations, is a big factor in determining whether or not someone will be happy. So it is objectively better for society if people who are naturally gay have all the same recourses toward autonomy, toward self-directed pursuit of happiness as do straights and straight-enoughs.But then, with his final paragraph, he lost me:
But these people would never see that, because some bronze-age goat herders wove their homophobia into their Bible and said God wrote it.Oh, man, bronze-age goat-herders? Did you have to go there?
No, no, no… The iron-age urban dwellers who wrote the books that would eventually be incorporated into the bible were far from the bronze-age goat-herders whose lifestyle they idealized (and probably made up). That’s like calling Tennyson a medieval jouster because he liked to write about them. And as for the claim that modern-day homophobes get their fix from the Bible—do they really? Out of that vast collection of noble poetry, blood-drenched history, clever fables and upward of a thousand lies (as one of Mark Twain’s characters put it) there are no more than a few references to homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, Romans 1:27), and while they are nasty, they hardly constitute a major theme. One of the indications of just how desperate Bible-believing homophobes are is they way they have read homosexuality into various passages, such as the destruction of the cities of the plain by fire. No, it doesn’t look as if they get it from the Bible; rather they use the Bible as a crutch for their prejudices.
I mean, when was the last time you saw any of them complain about people who reap to the very edges of their fields, not leaving anything for the poor and the alien? But that's in there too; check out Leviticus 23:22. It's in the book, as Johnny Standley used to object to those who didn't believe in the power of Grandma's lye soap.
26 September 2012
Quotation of the Day
If freedom of religion, conscience and speech are to mean anything, religious doctrines, symbols and assertions must be open to inquiry, criticism and, indeed, ridicule. Otherwise, the human thought process will be shut down by force of law in order to protect the sensibilities of the superstitious, and free inquiry into the most central issues facing humanity since the birth of the species will be effectively foreclosed.
Hussein Ibish, Blasphemy: an indispensable human right
23 September 2012
Quotation of the Day
The ‘right to religion’ is meant to be the right to a personal religion and belief. But when religion is part of the state, or judicial system, it is no longer a matter of religious belief but of political power.
In fact, religion in the state, educational system or judicial system is the end of any form of equality, choice, rights, freedoms or democratic politics.
Maryam Namazie, “This is about Politics, not Religion”
18 September 2012
Quotation of the Day
Libertarians postulate that unfettering everyone’s most self-serving economic motives is the best way to create a vibrant, egalitarian economy, just as unfettering a giant unstable slope of rocks on a steep hillside is the best way to create a stone cathedral at the base of the hill. MRAs hold that men are unfairly treated in today’s world by comparison to women, while simultaneously holding that the subjugation of women is natural and inevitable and no big deal. Libertarianism and MRAism are philosophies that will not withstand honest and rigorous investigation by a moderately bright 7-year-old, in other words, and yet the ranks of skeptics’groups are crawling with both.
Chris Clarke, “Cats, Skepticism, and MRAs”
01 September 2012
Thought for the Day
Why would anyone think that an ancient set of works, any ancient set of works, would provide moral guidance on much of anything? The Biblical writers learned their “values” from their culture. That’s how we do it too.
26 August 2012
Like on Sunday
Sitting here, in front of my computer, I feel a sudden jolt of sadness shake me. And then it crosses my mind—it’s sunday. Sunday evening. Hello darkness my old friend; LoS is back. Like on Sunday. A sense of sorrow, of regret, that all good things were coming to an end and there was nothing left to look forward to. In my journal, after trying to explain it a couple of times, I started just saying that I feel “like on sunday”, and then just abbreviating it LoS.
Originally, of course, it was about the weekend—a time that had been so bright with promise friday night reduced to ashes of might-have-beens on sunday. A time when the consequences of procrastination had to be faced and that massive assignment given two weeks ago actually had to be done in a handful of hours. A time when the demons danced and the forces of hell rejoiced.
But for most of my life sunday evening has meant no more than any other time; my schedule is as likely to involve me doing something on the weekend as doing something on weekdays. And yet, still the feeling comes. There is something basic, primeval, in this rhythm of despair. The number of times I’ve had the sense of LoS wash over me on a sunday night cannot be counted.
And therein lies the rub. Cherry-picking, confirmation bias, all that sort of thing. Does LoS really happen on schedule, appearing on the summons of a long-ago school schedule? Being more than usually self-obsessed I’ve actually kept records of this feeling, along with other irrational shafts of displeasure, and—at least while I was actually keeping the record—discovered that LoS was no more likely to happen on a sunday evening than at any other time. Nor was I particularly prone to it on a sunday. I just notice it more, apparently, when it does come then.
And yet—and yet it feels to me as if it does. Many times, like the bolt from the blues just now, I have felt the familiar stroke of a minor chord across the strings of my spirit and believed myself to be participating in a long-dead ritual set in the stones of my childhood and mindlessly perpetuated by some sort of cosmic clock. But it probably isn’t. Far more likely it is nothing more than the consequence of a choice of label given when groping for a shorthand to describe a nameless impression a long time ago.
Originally, of course, it was about the weekend—a time that had been so bright with promise friday night reduced to ashes of might-have-beens on sunday. A time when the consequences of procrastination had to be faced and that massive assignment given two weeks ago actually had to be done in a handful of hours. A time when the demons danced and the forces of hell rejoiced.
But for most of my life sunday evening has meant no more than any other time; my schedule is as likely to involve me doing something on the weekend as doing something on weekdays. And yet, still the feeling comes. There is something basic, primeval, in this rhythm of despair. The number of times I’ve had the sense of LoS wash over me on a sunday night cannot be counted.
And therein lies the rub. Cherry-picking, confirmation bias, all that sort of thing. Does LoS really happen on schedule, appearing on the summons of a long-ago school schedule? Being more than usually self-obsessed I’ve actually kept records of this feeling, along with other irrational shafts of displeasure, and—at least while I was actually keeping the record—discovered that LoS was no more likely to happen on a sunday evening than at any other time. Nor was I particularly prone to it on a sunday. I just notice it more, apparently, when it does come then.
And yet—and yet it feels to me as if it does. Many times, like the bolt from the blues just now, I have felt the familiar stroke of a minor chord across the strings of my spirit and believed myself to be participating in a long-dead ritual set in the stones of my childhood and mindlessly perpetuated by some sort of cosmic clock. But it probably isn’t. Far more likely it is nothing more than the consequence of a choice of label given when groping for a shorthand to describe a nameless impression a long time ago.
27 July 2012
Quotation of the Day
Tilting the playing field in favor of the established rich at the expense of small businesses, tax payers, along with fair competition and brilliant innovation, is not a bug, this a feature of modern day conservative policy. The conservative CEO class has looted the nation for three decades under that policy. With President Mitt Romney they can dream of one more big score, but they can absolutely count one of their own to help pull up the ladder and give them and their spoils safe passage to the gleaming offshore paradises that await, when the jig is finally up.
23 July 2012
Thought for the Day
I wish people could be OK with that, with the fact that religion isn't true. After all, they can still go to church. They can still pray. They can still observe the rituals and special days. They can still read holy books and discuss teachings. They can still imagine heaven. They can still contemplate hell. They can still fantasize about knowing, all by themselves, deep secrets of the universe.
Religion does not need to be true for people to be interested in it, inspired by it, educated by it, moved by it. But it needs to be true if people are going to learn about the universe and about people.
And it's not true, so let's not ask it to be, and let's not try to extract knowledge where there is none to be had.
03 July 2012
Quotation of the Day
A government with the power to force us to buy health insurance can also force restaurants to serve black people.
Bruce Bartlett as quoted by Andrew Sullivan
30 June 2012
Time and Timbuktu
Barbarians are smashing the tombs of the Muslim saints in Timbuktu, and nobody gives a shit. Certainly I don’t; it’s not my field. And they aren’t my saints—and I wouldn’t care if they were. Hell, you could drag the bones of Galileo and Samuel Clemens and Martin Luther King about the streets and have one merry old celebration desecrating them and it wouldn’t bother me any; let the dead take care of the dead as some old wise guy once said. You could do the same with my bones for that matter, once I’m dead and not using them any longer. It’s all one to me.
I care more about the old libraries of Timbuktu, though it’s still not my field and I couldn’t read them if I had them sitting right here in front of me. So far, if the reports be true, the old documents with their ghosts of the thoughts of the dead and forgotten are safe; the barbarians care nothing about them. But that’s the thing—who knows what a barbarian will choose to destroy next? That’s the cool thing about barbarism; it takes no effort of any kind to eradicate permanently what generations of human beings have treasured and preserved so that the memory of humankind may be kept to some limited extent alive. It takes effort to remember; none to forget.
We hear that an assault on one of these old shrines was deflected when local citizens formed a human chain to protect it from the vandals. Cynically we may suppose that they were doing it for all the wrong reasons—superstition, fanaticism, tourism. What’s the difference? It’s a magnificent gesture, a finger of light given to the darkness. Inevitably the darkness of oblivion wins, order dissolves into chaos, nothing is left but firefly glow in the darkness. Oblivion is easy; continuity is hard. Which, when you think about it, is why the barbarians can be given no quarter. There is no compromise between existence and non-existence, movement and stillness, light and darkness. Darkness inevitably wins in the long run—but we live in the short run. And there light can prevail. It’s not much—but it’s all we’ve got.
I care more about the old libraries of Timbuktu, though it’s still not my field and I couldn’t read them if I had them sitting right here in front of me. So far, if the reports be true, the old documents with their ghosts of the thoughts of the dead and forgotten are safe; the barbarians care nothing about them. But that’s the thing—who knows what a barbarian will choose to destroy next? That’s the cool thing about barbarism; it takes no effort of any kind to eradicate permanently what generations of human beings have treasured and preserved so that the memory of humankind may be kept to some limited extent alive. It takes effort to remember; none to forget.
We hear that an assault on one of these old shrines was deflected when local citizens formed a human chain to protect it from the vandals. Cynically we may suppose that they were doing it for all the wrong reasons—superstition, fanaticism, tourism. What’s the difference? It’s a magnificent gesture, a finger of light given to the darkness. Inevitably the darkness of oblivion wins, order dissolves into chaos, nothing is left but firefly glow in the darkness. Oblivion is easy; continuity is hard. Which, when you think about it, is why the barbarians can be given no quarter. There is no compromise between existence and non-existence, movement and stillness, light and darkness. Darkness inevitably wins in the long run—but we live in the short run. And there light can prevail. It’s not much—but it’s all we’ve got.
24 June 2012
Quotation of the Day
The handful of men, and smaller number of women, who have spent the last year actively trying to ruin people’s lives, and those who have recently joined them when they realized that their ass-grabbing culture was threatened as well, really have only one motivation: They don’t want to live in a world in which women can tell guys to fuck off without said woman paying a cost of some kind, being put in her place, or a threat being made against her so she will think twice about speaking up in the future.
24 May 2012
Quotation of the Day
If this country actually did have that famous rule of law that we talk so often about, if we actually cared about the UN Convention Against Torture that we pushed through 30 years ago, if we actually gave a damn about torture and human rights as we so often grandly claim to, that trial would have taken place here. But we don’t mean any of those things. We condemn every other nation for doing what we do, then we feign offense at the outrageous suggestion that we are hypocrites. We arrest and prosecute others, like the son of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, for torture and we issue grandiose statements of our eternal commitment to human rights. That, ladies and gentlemen, is American exceptionalism.
03 May 2012
Quotation of the Day
[R]eason must be the guiding principle of our democracy. In a nation of citizens from so many different backgrounds and beliefs, the only way we can solve our problems is through cultivating intelligent, moral, and ethical interactions among all people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
StatCounter
