On a number of occasions, I have read in UU publications or heard from UU pulpits that Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a Unitarian. Although Unitarians responded positively to Schweitzer's person and his theology, to count him as a Unitarian is misleading. Unitarians were among the first Americans to respond to the work of Schweitzer at his hospital in Lambarene in Gabon, started in 1913, although they took some time to do so. In 1947, Dr. Charles Joy, an administrator of relief programs, and Melvin Arnold, the editor in chief of the Beacon Press, brought to Schweitzer in Lambarene a check to the amount of $ 4,000, a contribution which was significant and welcome in the post-war years. In September of 1947, there appeared a special number of The Christian Register devoted to Schweitzer, with a contribution from Joy and Arnold. However, they had been beaten out in chronological terms by an article published in the Reader's Digest the year before, written by a Catholic priest, Father John O'Brien. Schweitzer had been an outstanding intellectual figure in Europe for many years, because of his musicological, theological, and philosophical publications, and his musical performances, still preserved in recordings of his performance of the organ music of Bach.
Unitarian interest in Schweitzer did not diminish with time. Thirteen years later, in 1961, George Marshall, then minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, invited Schweitzer to become an honorary Unitarian. Schweitzer wrote back:
"I thank you cordially for your offer to make me an honoured member of the Unitarian Church. I accept with pleasure. Even as a student I worked on the problem and history of the Unitarian church and developed sympathy for your affirmation of Christian freedom at a time when it resulted in persecution. Gradually I established closer contact with Unitarian communities and became familiar with their faith-in-action. Therefore I thank you that through you I have been made an honoured member of this church."
This response was published by Marshall in the news bulletin of the Church of the Larger Fellowship on Nov. 24, 1961, and presumably is the root of the often-repeated statement that Schweitzer was a Unitarian. However, Unitarians have generally overlooked the clarification of this statement which was published in Time magazine on the following December 8, 1961. Schweitzer stated in an interview with Time:
"For a long time now I have had connections with the Unitarian church. But there is no question of my breaking with the Lutheran Church. I am a Protestant, but above all I am a scientist, and as such I can be on good terns with all Protestant churches."
I enjoy the point of view that Schweitzer expressed, speaking expressly from the Lutheran side of a divide that he was free to cross from his side, but which Unitarians are not always free to cross from their side. In some contexts they are free to share in the Christian community, and sometimes they are not. My only contribution to the field of Biblical scholarship in the broad sense was made at the invitation of a fine Lutheran scholar. More recently I have found my invited contribution to a progressive Christian campus ministry to be viewed with some suspicion by a Lutheran minister who had not read and will never read the well-thumbed Greek New Testament which is one of my constant companions. Go figure.
LinguistFriend
Reference
Brabazon, James (1975). Albert Schweitzer Putnam, New York.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
"Phlegm" is the watchword
"Today I live in the gray, muffled, smelless, puffy, tasteless half-world of those who have colds."
Robertson Davies
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
The Con went well enough, the only infractions fairly minor ones. When I was a kid, the ChaliceDad was given to snapping "nothing is to become airborne!" when things were thrown in the house. Much to theCSO's consternation, I found a few months ago that I had picked up this phrase when a kid in a store was throwing something and I scolded him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Turns out the phrase works well on YRUUers who throw frisbees in the sanctuary, too.
We were supposed to write our favorite vacation destination on our nametags. My area being my area, lots of people wrote "Cape Cod." Not one for vacationing, I wrote "Vacations are for slackers. Get a job, Hippie!"
It was a hit.
But I woke up this morning with a sore throat and my condition has not improved throughout the day. So now I have taken to my bed. Judge Judy is on in the background and the CSO is stopping by to discuss the roleplaying game we're working on to amuse Our-Hero-Charlie-the-Vanquisher and some of our other friends. (Premise: CC, who is leading the game, plays Sherlock Holmes who is sick in bed at 221B Baker street with a terrible headcold. The players play Baker Street Irregulars, whom he sends out to solve at first petty crimes. As they grow in Holmes' estimations and in street cred, they take on more an more interesting cases. If they get stumped, they can come back to Holmes for advice, but sometimes he will be more helpful than other times. We think we will play a few hours a week for a couple of months. Could be fun. I played a lot of RPGs in high school and every few years get a hankering to do it again for a bit. I write a plot, our friends play through it, then I forget about it for another few years. Two years ago, I did a game set in the 1930's at a Mobster's country home. Our friends had to play the members of a ladies band hired to play for the mobster's birthday and of course hijinks ensued when they got there and were hired to keep his daughter from running away with the town ne'er do well.)
Life is imitating art because my own headcold is plaguing me. My usual tactic when sick is to write letters to people I know who could use to hear cheerful words more often. I tend to get self-pitying when ill, and this is a good antidote. So I think I will go do some of that.
CC
Robertson Davies
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
The Con went well enough, the only infractions fairly minor ones. When I was a kid, the ChaliceDad was given to snapping "nothing is to become airborne!" when things were thrown in the house. Much to theCSO's consternation, I found a few months ago that I had picked up this phrase when a kid in a store was throwing something and I scolded him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Turns out the phrase works well on YRUUers who throw frisbees in the sanctuary, too.
We were supposed to write our favorite vacation destination on our nametags. My area being my area, lots of people wrote "Cape Cod." Not one for vacationing, I wrote "Vacations are for slackers. Get a job, Hippie!"
It was a hit.
But I woke up this morning with a sore throat and my condition has not improved throughout the day. So now I have taken to my bed. Judge Judy is on in the background and the CSO is stopping by to discuss the roleplaying game we're working on to amuse Our-Hero-Charlie-the-Vanquisher and some of our other friends. (Premise: CC, who is leading the game, plays Sherlock Holmes who is sick in bed at 221B Baker street with a terrible headcold. The players play Baker Street Irregulars, whom he sends out to solve at first petty crimes. As they grow in Holmes' estimations and in street cred, they take on more an more interesting cases. If they get stumped, they can come back to Holmes for advice, but sometimes he will be more helpful than other times. We think we will play a few hours a week for a couple of months. Could be fun. I played a lot of RPGs in high school and every few years get a hankering to do it again for a bit. I write a plot, our friends play through it, then I forget about it for another few years. Two years ago, I did a game set in the 1930's at a Mobster's country home. Our friends had to play the members of a ladies band hired to play for the mobster's birthday and of course hijinks ensued when they got there and were hired to keep his daughter from running away with the town ne'er do well.)
Life is imitating art because my own headcold is plaguing me. My usual tactic when sick is to write letters to people I know who could use to hear cheerful words more often. I tend to get self-pitying when ill, and this is a good antidote. So I think I will go do some of that.
CC
Has anybody proved that TV is dangerous?
I got:
I would say that Tv commercials do as much damage to that as drugs do. Let's get rid of them....:-)
in my comments box and it made me wonder. Are there any studies supporting that TV is as dangerous as people think it is? I've had this argument with LinguistFriend a few times recently as well and the issue is making me curious.
I get that it can be a contributing factor to obesity, but I guess I'm looking for something a little more direct.
To me, it seems evident that illegal drugs are easily traced to a whole range of societal ills, while television and television commercials are imperfect ways to spend one's time but to me pretty obviously not as damaging. Crystal Meth kills people, thighmaster ads do not.
I know TV violence gets a pretty bad rap, but the studies are inconclusive, as far as I've heard. My mom said once that she saw a sstudy where they let kids watch the Power Rangers and then go out on the playground. They immediately started kicking. Not kicking each other, kicking the air. On continued observation, there was a lot of air kicking, but this never actually translated into kicking each other. This is very consistent with how I remember behaving as a child.
My suspicion is that Joel is right that people are quite selective of thier vices. I don't know that I've met anyone who claims television screwed up their minds and continues to smoke up, but I'm pretty confident they exist.
But for the rest of us, if you had to choose between letting your kid watch Desperate Housewives and letting your kid smoke up, would it really be a hard choice?
CC
I would say that Tv commercials do as much damage to that as drugs do. Let's get rid of them....:-)
in my comments box and it made me wonder. Are there any studies supporting that TV is as dangerous as people think it is? I've had this argument with LinguistFriend a few times recently as well and the issue is making me curious.
I get that it can be a contributing factor to obesity, but I guess I'm looking for something a little more direct.
To me, it seems evident that illegal drugs are easily traced to a whole range of societal ills, while television and television commercials are imperfect ways to spend one's time but to me pretty obviously not as damaging. Crystal Meth kills people, thighmaster ads do not.
I know TV violence gets a pretty bad rap, but the studies are inconclusive, as far as I've heard. My mom said once that she saw a sstudy where they let kids watch the Power Rangers and then go out on the playground. They immediately started kicking. Not kicking each other, kicking the air. On continued observation, there was a lot of air kicking, but this never actually translated into kicking each other. This is very consistent with how I remember behaving as a child.
My suspicion is that Joel is right that people are quite selective of thier vices. I don't know that I've met anyone who claims television screwed up their minds and continues to smoke up, but I'm pretty confident they exist.
But for the rest of us, if you had to choose between letting your kid watch Desperate Housewives and letting your kid smoke up, would it really be a hard choice?
CC
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Friday, April 21, 2006
"It's like OWL, except with drugs!"
Had the end of year meeting that I assume is standard with the youth coordinator. She asked the standard questions, how I was doing, the direction I'd like to see YRUU heading in ("Life is stressful, but I'm ok" and "With more religion. I think we're too much like a scout troop as is," respectively.)
And the youth coordinator mentioned what folks want to do next year. There's teaching OWL, and the Drug Education program.
"I could do OWL, though I'd rather lead discussions about faith. What's the drug education program?"
"Well, it's sort of like OWL for drugs. THe focus is on minimizing harm. We talk about why people do take drugs the health effects of doing so and how they can do it most safely if they are going to."
All the sudden I knew exactly how religious conservatives feel when faced with OWL.
"But recreational drugs are bad for everybody," I said. "I mean, everyone agrees that meth seriously fucks you up, but people will say marijuana is harmless. Given my students and my friends who've smoked it regularly I really don't believe that. Pot smokers rarely understand how bad they smell and how obvious the odor is. When I smell that on a GRE student, I can almost always go to my grade book and find little homework done and lower scores. And the long term pot smokers I know are a lot like the long term alcoholics. If you have something that takes the pain away every time life gets difficult, you really don't develop into a whole person. My experience is, like alocholics, pot smokers are often little children emotionally."
(Which, I understand, is not to say that every person who smokes pot regularly is a little kid emotionally though the anecdotal correlation is strong, at least in my life. But the teenage years and young adult years are when we, for good reasons and less important ones, do some of our most intense feeling. It seems like a pretty important time. Emotionally, we should all be there for it, IMHO. Though I'm sure people who quit using or quit drinking grow up eventually. Well, some of them do. Jokes about the president not welcome.)
The youth coordinator had sat attentively through all of this, which is to her credit as it was basically a rant. She said comforting things about how our youth generally show distate for drugs and we agreed that I was better off teaching OWL or talking about religion.
For what it's worth, if adults want to screw themselves up emotionally, that really is up to them. I don't love that my tax money goes to fix them up again, but I can see that it is the least bad option. I can even see that the drug war is not working and we should try something else, though I don't think we as a religion have much business crusading on the issue for the same reason I don't like it when we crusade on other political issues.
CC
And the youth coordinator mentioned what folks want to do next year. There's teaching OWL, and the Drug Education program.
"I could do OWL, though I'd rather lead discussions about faith. What's the drug education program?"
"Well, it's sort of like OWL for drugs. THe focus is on minimizing harm. We talk about why people do take drugs the health effects of doing so and how they can do it most safely if they are going to."
All the sudden I knew exactly how religious conservatives feel when faced with OWL.
"But recreational drugs are bad for everybody," I said. "I mean, everyone agrees that meth seriously fucks you up, but people will say marijuana is harmless. Given my students and my friends who've smoked it regularly I really don't believe that. Pot smokers rarely understand how bad they smell and how obvious the odor is. When I smell that on a GRE student, I can almost always go to my grade book and find little homework done and lower scores. And the long term pot smokers I know are a lot like the long term alcoholics. If you have something that takes the pain away every time life gets difficult, you really don't develop into a whole person. My experience is, like alocholics, pot smokers are often little children emotionally."
(Which, I understand, is not to say that every person who smokes pot regularly is a little kid emotionally though the anecdotal correlation is strong, at least in my life. But the teenage years and young adult years are when we, for good reasons and less important ones, do some of our most intense feeling. It seems like a pretty important time. Emotionally, we should all be there for it, IMHO. Though I'm sure people who quit using or quit drinking grow up eventually. Well, some of them do. Jokes about the president not welcome.)
The youth coordinator had sat attentively through all of this, which is to her credit as it was basically a rant. She said comforting things about how our youth generally show distate for drugs and we agreed that I was better off teaching OWL or talking about religion.
For what it's worth, if adults want to screw themselves up emotionally, that really is up to them. I don't love that my tax money goes to fix them up again, but I can see that it is the least bad option. I can even see that the drug war is not working and we should try something else, though I don't think we as a religion have much business crusading on the issue for the same reason I don't like it when we crusade on other political issues.
CC
If you thought the men were afraid of YOU...
I have several friends who subscribe to the Maureen Dowd theory that men are easily intimidated creatures who won't date strong women. (Seriously, Jewish guys, call me. I know a gorgeous woman who manages stores for Bennetton and wants to open up one in Tel Aviv. Too cool.)
Anyway, if you fear scaring the men away because you're a lawyer, or you read three languages, or you always know who did it on CSI halfway through or whatever, do not fear, it could be worse.
Madeline Albright can leg press 400 pounts.
Poor girl is never going to land herself a man that way.
CC
Ps. Ok, Ok, I fixed it.
Anyway, if you fear scaring the men away because you're a lawyer, or you read three languages, or you always know who did it on CSI halfway through or whatever, do not fear, it could be worse.
Madeline Albright can leg press 400 pounts.
Poor girl is never going to land herself a man that way.
CC
Ps. Ok, Ok, I fixed it.
My home town paper kicks butt
Around the ChaliceAbode, we mostly bitch about the Washington Post. We read it pretty rarely, preferring the NYT on the weekends and google news during the week.
But the Washington Post did pick up for Pulitzer Prizes this week, and that rocks.
I was particularly pleased to see Robin Givhan from the Style section get the nod. This peice had me bitching for weeks about Dick Cheney, a coourius sarcamstance* for this blog. A fashion writer who really writes about the symbolism and meaning of clothes is a very good thing.
CC
*I've picked up the phrase "a coorious sarcamstance" from Laurie R. King's fine novel The Moor. Expect to see it a lot until I get tired of it.
But the Washington Post did pick up for Pulitzer Prizes this week, and that rocks.
I was particularly pleased to see Robin Givhan from the Style section get the nod. This peice had me bitching for weeks about Dick Cheney, a coourius sarcamstance* for this blog. A fashion writer who really writes about the symbolism and meaning of clothes is a very good thing.
CC
*I've picked up the phrase "a coorious sarcamstance" from Laurie R. King's fine novel The Moor. Expect to see it a lot until I get tired of it.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
CUUMBAYA on Immigration
I agree with much of what Joel has to say here. As I discussed in one of my earlier immigration posts, people are saying the same things about central American immigrants now that they said about European immigrants. (An old boss of mine who had a German last name once railed against immigrants for their lack of education, etc. The temptation to say "That's what Ben Franklin said about the Germans and you came out all right" was huge, but I managed to refrain.)
I honestly don't think that racism is at the root of it, I think the dislike of immigrants is rooted in exactly the same impulse that makes yuppies who built a beach house someplace rail against further development. People fear the tragedy of the commons. And they feared it just as much when the immigrants were white.
That said, "racism" is a very powerful word, and if we are willfully misusing it to harness its power to do some good, I can certainly understand that, but I think we should leave the more underhanded political tactics to activists, who are doing just fine with them. (From an underhanded tactics standpoint, I'm still pissed when I think of the UUAWO email I got that said the filibuster was about freedom of speech. My own religion should not be (a)lying to me or (b) assuming I never had high school civics.)
Sinkford's statement, is worth a look if only for the God-awful picture of him. (I think I saw Janice Dickenson make that pose on "America's Next Top Model" last night.)
My guess is that he takes the standard "let anyone who wants to have citizenship immediately" stance, though I don't actually know for certain what he thinks since he doesn't actually talk about laws, but ideals. That's actually OK and the proper place for a religion to be speaking from. At the same time, I agree with Joel's take that "everybody who has a conscience agrees with me and sees the issue as I do" is a rotten way for a liberal religious leader to be talking.
And I also agree with Joel that pretending that the immigrants are appearing out of clean air is sort of silly. They are coming from countries that are either (a) very poor, (b) very corrupt, and often (c) both. To say "let's let everyone into America" is to cry "band-aids! We need more band-aids!" at a gaping wound. Students who come here to study, people who love American culture, etc, might well want to be Americans. But people who are just coming for a job would probably just as soon stay with their families in central America if they could afford it.
To me, a more permanent solution would be greater foreign aid and sustainable development projects in central America. We should be putting greater economic and diplomatic pressure on other countries to take care of their poor and educate their people.
If everybody is eating, then far fewer people will want to come here. If far fewer people want to come here, then we can take care of the immigrants we get all the better.
CC
I honestly don't think that racism is at the root of it, I think the dislike of immigrants is rooted in exactly the same impulse that makes yuppies who built a beach house someplace rail against further development. People fear the tragedy of the commons. And they feared it just as much when the immigrants were white.
That said, "racism" is a very powerful word, and if we are willfully misusing it to harness its power to do some good, I can certainly understand that, but I think we should leave the more underhanded political tactics to activists, who are doing just fine with them. (From an underhanded tactics standpoint, I'm still pissed when I think of the UUAWO email I got that said the filibuster was about freedom of speech. My own religion should not be (a)lying to me or (b) assuming I never had high school civics.)
Sinkford's statement, is worth a look if only for the God-awful picture of him. (I think I saw Janice Dickenson make that pose on "America's Next Top Model" last night.)
My guess is that he takes the standard "let anyone who wants to have citizenship immediately" stance, though I don't actually know for certain what he thinks since he doesn't actually talk about laws, but ideals. That's actually OK and the proper place for a religion to be speaking from. At the same time, I agree with Joel's take that "everybody who has a conscience agrees with me and sees the issue as I do" is a rotten way for a liberal religious leader to be talking.
And I also agree with Joel that pretending that the immigrants are appearing out of clean air is sort of silly. They are coming from countries that are either (a) very poor, (b) very corrupt, and often (c) both. To say "let's let everyone into America" is to cry "band-aids! We need more band-aids!" at a gaping wound. Students who come here to study, people who love American culture, etc, might well want to be Americans. But people who are just coming for a job would probably just as soon stay with their families in central America if they could afford it.
To me, a more permanent solution would be greater foreign aid and sustainable development projects in central America. We should be putting greater economic and diplomatic pressure on other countries to take care of their poor and educate their people.
If everybody is eating, then far fewer people will want to come here. If far fewer people want to come here, then we can take care of the immigrants we get all the better.
CC
One of my very few fuzzy kitty posts.
The cats have figured out that the CSO is away this week. This morning all three of them were in the bed with me. Thus, I don't get a whole bed to myself even when theCSO is away. Ah well.
Even better was last week. Boris, the alpha cat, is sort of mean to Cool Disco Dan and Esperanto. He had chewed a spot on his leg and I had to hold him down while TheCSO put a bandage on him. Of course, Boris makes the full range of angry cat noises and bites at my and claws me. (Anyone thinking "Why doesn't she just wrap him in a towel?" is seriously underestimating this cat.)
Anyway, this was taking place in the kitchen and I look up and Dan and Esperanto have just come in and are watching, transfixed. After a minute, Dan climbs up on the kitchen table to give himself a better view.
The Chalicerelative is always telling me how her dog is just like a person. I believed that about my cats right then.
CC
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Final thought for the morning
A few months ago, my church's gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender group had a service. I invited someone I know whom I thought would appreciate it.
Recently, she and I were talking and she said "It must have taken so much courage for them to get up and talk about that in front of the church. I've long wished that I could do something like that at my church, but people would just take it too badly. I just couldn't."
As much as I bitch about other aspects of UUism, I'm glad to be here.
CC
Recently, she and I were talking and she said "It must have taken so much courage for them to get up and talk about that in front of the church. I've long wished that I could do something like that at my church, but people would just take it too badly. I just couldn't."
As much as I bitch about other aspects of UUism, I'm glad to be here.
CC
On breaking up with Jesus
For me, religion has always seemed like a significant other. Some people pledge devotion to their one true love in high school and that's it. Some have one love for awhile, then switch in middle age. Some take awhile to settle down, but when they do, it's for life. Some never completely commit to anything and flit from faith to faith (I privately think of such people as Beliefsluts.)
One of my YRUU folks said the other day that he was his girlfriend's "pet" because she has decided she doesn't believe in love. After telling him the story of the time I as a ten-year-old announced at the dinner table that I had decided I didn't believe in marriage and wanted to live with another woman when I grew up and how my parents freaked out, I said that people often make rash decisions about such things when they are young, but my advice would be to not let oneself be a pet to early and wait and see if the girl who doesn't believe in love comes around.
I tend to think that people who flat out decide they don't believe in organized religion have a similar maturity level to that girl.
Ideally, you find a faith and really get to know it and stick to it, but sometimes things change.
Anyway, Owen Edgerton nicely plays out this theme in this essay.
CC
One of my YRUU folks said the other day that he was his girlfriend's "pet" because she has decided she doesn't believe in love. After telling him the story of the time I as a ten-year-old announced at the dinner table that I had decided I didn't believe in marriage and wanted to live with another woman when I grew up and how my parents freaked out, I said that people often make rash decisions about such things when they are young, but my advice would be to not let oneself be a pet to early and wait and see if the girl who doesn't believe in love comes around.
I tend to think that people who flat out decide they don't believe in organized religion have a similar maturity level to that girl.
Ideally, you find a faith and really get to know it and stick to it, but sometimes things change.
Anyway, Owen Edgerton nicely plays out this theme in this essay.
CC
Wince-worthy
Boston Legal is one of my favorite shows on television, but I made it exactly four minutes into last night's episode.
If you saw the beginning of last night's Boston Legal, not all people with Asperger's are like that. That said, the general pattern of how they behave when under lots of pressure matches my experience well.
I am a great fan of mysteries. Without thinking anything of it, I watch body parts and people interviewed about their recently murdered spouses and all sorts of things that will be highly disturbing in real life.
But that I couldn't watch.
Always odd what's going to get to you...
CC
If you saw the beginning of last night's Boston Legal, not all people with Asperger's are like that. That said, the general pattern of how they behave when under lots of pressure matches my experience well.
I am a great fan of mysteries. Without thinking anything of it, I watch body parts and people interviewed about their recently murdered spouses and all sorts of things that will be highly disturbing in real life.
But that I couldn't watch.
Always odd what's going to get to you...
CC
Seven Principles
I've been meaning to write about my beefs with the seven principles, but Peacebang expressed it perfectly:
I think they've been a help to us in the past ten years, and have become a hindrance in the past five or six. Why? Because too many overly-earnest UUs have adopted them as a quasi-creed, and because we generally grossly misinterpret the first principle and use it in a disturbingly, narcissistic "Don't Tell Me I Can't Say/Do That Cuz I Got Inherent Worth And Dignity" way that violates its original intent.
So now I don't have to.
CC
I think they've been a help to us in the past ten years, and have become a hindrance in the past five or six. Why? Because too many overly-earnest UUs have adopted them as a quasi-creed, and because we generally grossly misinterpret the first principle and use it in a disturbingly, narcissistic "Don't Tell Me I Can't Say/Do That Cuz I Got Inherent Worth And Dignity" way that violates its original intent.
So now I don't have to.
CC
What love looks like, what rape looks like
The Happy Feminist has
another great post, this one about various issues relating to the Duke rape case.
This section really got me:
From where I sit, it sounds like Doe was acting like someone who was absolutely terrified. She was not acting like someone who was eager to set up the Duke lacrosse players. The guard's opinion is further fascinating to me because it illustrates very clearly the problems rape victims face. The guard for some reason felt herself qualified just by looking at Doe to determine whether Doe had been raped-- and felt no hesitation about essentially labeling her a liar. I have seen this time and again. Victims with whom I have worked have frequently been labeled as liars because they are not acting the way a rape victim is "supposed" to act.
I also have seen this as a pattern far beyond this trial. It is very weird to me that people think they know how other people would react in a given situation. For many years, I came off as really cold (I hate to hug) and it took forever to convince some people I really cared about them.
Anyway, I don't really have a point here, other than I always thought it was weird to hear "If you loved me, you would have done X." And it is weird to hear "she wasn't behaving like I think rape victims should act, so she must not be a rape victim."
Do we really know each other all that well?
CC
Ps. I sympathize with anyone who reads this and finds a certain contradiction between my own tendency to want to figure people out and make decisions about them, and the problems I see here. The best defense I can mount is that while I can get a general impression of a person someitmes long before other people can, I still can't predict how they would react in a certian situation. I am quick to say "There's something about her I don't trust," I would never say "she's not acting like a rape victim."
And by the way, Cassandra struck again last night. There's a guy in a group of old friends of mine who has never liked me and has always treated me badly. I eventually distanced myself from this group due to his behavior. I hung out with them again last night, something I haven't done regularly in about two years, and found that he had started to treat them badly too and had been more or less kicked out of the group. They spent much of our hang out time parroting my complaints of two years ago back at me as if they were new information.
Sigh.
another great post, this one about various issues relating to the Duke rape case.
This section really got me:
From where I sit, it sounds like Doe was acting like someone who was absolutely terrified. She was not acting like someone who was eager to set up the Duke lacrosse players. The guard's opinion is further fascinating to me because it illustrates very clearly the problems rape victims face. The guard for some reason felt herself qualified just by looking at Doe to determine whether Doe had been raped-- and felt no hesitation about essentially labeling her a liar. I have seen this time and again. Victims with whom I have worked have frequently been labeled as liars because they are not acting the way a rape victim is "supposed" to act.
I also have seen this as a pattern far beyond this trial. It is very weird to me that people think they know how other people would react in a given situation. For many years, I came off as really cold (I hate to hug) and it took forever to convince some people I really cared about them.
Anyway, I don't really have a point here, other than I always thought it was weird to hear "If you loved me, you would have done X." And it is weird to hear "she wasn't behaving like I think rape victims should act, so she must not be a rape victim."
Do we really know each other all that well?
CC
Ps. I sympathize with anyone who reads this and finds a certain contradiction between my own tendency to want to figure people out and make decisions about them, and the problems I see here. The best defense I can mount is that while I can get a general impression of a person someitmes long before other people can, I still can't predict how they would react in a certian situation. I am quick to say "There's something about her I don't trust," I would never say "she's not acting like a rape victim."
And by the way, Cassandra struck again last night. There's a guy in a group of old friends of mine who has never liked me and has always treated me badly. I eventually distanced myself from this group due to his behavior. I hung out with them again last night, something I haven't done regularly in about two years, and found that he had started to treat them badly too and had been more or less kicked out of the group. They spent much of our hang out time parroting my complaints of two years ago back at me as if they were new information.
Sigh.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Caps over Thrashers, 6-4
(Why does Atlanta need a hockey team, anyway?)
The CSO and I were at Verizon Center for the last Washington Capitols game of the season. We went with other teachers from my Test Prep company. It was pretty fun.
Highlights:
Simple minds, simple pleasures...
CC
The CSO and I were at Verizon Center for the last Washington Capitols game of the season. We went with other teachers from my Test Prep company. It was pretty fun.
Highlights:
- Free Jersey night. And may I say that I make a Jersey that I got for free with the purchse of a five dollar ticket look GOOD.
- When a fight broke out and my friends and I were like "Fight? This isn't a real fight? I'm not seeing blood here!" Yeah, we won't be voting for any Peacemaking resolutions.
- They have a thing where you can text message the jumbotron. CC spent much of the night tapping out "Princeton Review Sucks!" and sending it up there.
Simple minds, simple pleasures...
CC
Now I'm not a huge fan of protesters, but...
This is ridiculous. An Elementary school principal decided that the school needed to be "locked down" because some high schools were having walkouts protesting immigration. (Only a high school kid would think that a bunch of high school kids walking out of a high school would make an impact on anybody significant to the immigration debate.)
The problem is she read the wrong procedure and used the "lock down" procedure appropriate for nuclear attack. She had the kids going to the bathroom in buckets so they wouldn't have to leave their classrooms.
Actually, that's not the problem.
The problem is that she went straight by what she thought was the procedure, not thinking about it at all. Actually, the real problem might have been that she thought that elementary school kids needed to be locked down at all. (I protested all the time as a kid under somewhat heavy coercion from the Chalicerelative, but I can't imagine a bunch of kids doing that. Well, maybe if some obnoxious parent was encouraging it, but it's still unlikely...)
Someone should do something about this. Anybody want to all march out of work at the same time?
CC
The problem is she read the wrong procedure and used the "lock down" procedure appropriate for nuclear attack. She had the kids going to the bathroom in buckets so they wouldn't have to leave their classrooms.
Actually, that's not the problem.
The problem is that she went straight by what she thought was the procedure, not thinking about it at all. Actually, the real problem might have been that she thought that elementary school kids needed to be locked down at all. (I protested all the time as a kid under somewhat heavy coercion from the Chalicerelative, but I can't imagine a bunch of kids doing that. Well, maybe if some obnoxious parent was encouraging it, but it's still unlikely...)
Someone should do something about this. Anybody want to all march out of work at the same time?
CC
Monday, April 17, 2006
The resurrection of the body
PB is talking about the issue of bodily resurrection on her blog. Personally, I'm not a fan, but I did think this article on the issue was interesting.
CC
CC
Sunday, April 16, 2006
An evening with Our-Hero-Charlie-the-Vanquisher
TheCSO and I were feeling peckish yesterday afternoon, so we headed over to the shabby little game store in the next town over to hang out with the our friend Tina, who works there. She's married to Our-hero-Charlie-the-Vanquisher, a beloved ex-boyfriend of CC's. Tina is pregnant, which is still a bit of a head trip for CC. ((So you don't have to follow the link: CC dated OHCTV off and on for seven years. He wants give his first born son the first and middle name "Charles Fredrick," a name which goes back five generations in his family. We figured we'd call him "Fred." So off and on for seven years, CC imagined herself the mother of a kid named Fred and now his wife is going to bear a Fred instead. I don't in any way envy her and she's much better suited to OHCTV than I ever was. It's not about the guy, it's about my loose conception of what Fred would be like. (Which is either more or less disturbing depending on one's prespective.) But it's still a headtrip. Luckily, it won't be right now. Tina's having a girl and naming her "Victoria," which a certain blogger is welcome to consider a shout-out, though it isn't one.))
Anyway, there was an active Axis and Allies game going on, so theCSO and Charlie and I played Arkham Asylum, which we won twice. (Arkham Asylum is a cooperative board game that you play against the game. You should play it. It's fun. It takes hours and is incredibly freaking complicated, but it's fun.) At one point Tina said of Charlie and me "You two argue like a brother and a sister. Of course, that would make the stuff that happened in high school kinda gross..."
We decided to go out for dinner. Tina drove my car and talked to TheCSO, I was the passenger in OHCTV's car. As we drove, I asked Charlie if Tina would be having a baby shower.
"I don't think so," Charlie said. "She doesn't have that many female friends and the ones she has are really poor."
(And a collective sigh of "awww..." goes up from my readership.)
Oh fine.
We got to the restaurant and we all sat down.
"So," I said. "Can I throw the baby shower?"
Tina was very excited and very happy. Her mom is in Idaho, so I tentatively suggested that in addittion to her female friends, we invite her stepmother and her sisters, Charlie's mother and sister, my mother and a math teacher she and I both liked in high school. (I haven't mentioned that I've known Tina for fourteen years, too, have I? She's the one who engineered Charlie and I getting together in the first place.) She started listing off the female friends she did have, and she actually got quite a list together.
We will have it at TheChaliceabode. The baby is expected in August, so we will probably have it in June, perhaps the Saturday before I leave for GA. The CSO will like that as this means I will want to do a bunch more work on the house by then and probably do some repainting in the living room. I'll put up a buffet of snacks in the study, we will play whatever sort of games people play in the living room. Goodness knows I've never thrown a baby shower before, but I assume there are books on the subject. I'm sure that it will be a nice party.
But me throwing a baby shower might be the biggest headtrip of all. Honestly, it's like going to Richard Dawkins for spiritual counseling.
CC
Anyway, there was an active Axis and Allies game going on, so theCSO and Charlie and I played Arkham Asylum, which we won twice. (Arkham Asylum is a cooperative board game that you play against the game. You should play it. It's fun. It takes hours and is incredibly freaking complicated, but it's fun.) At one point Tina said of Charlie and me "You two argue like a brother and a sister. Of course, that would make the stuff that happened in high school kinda gross..."
We decided to go out for dinner. Tina drove my car and talked to TheCSO, I was the passenger in OHCTV's car. As we drove, I asked Charlie if Tina would be having a baby shower.
"I don't think so," Charlie said. "She doesn't have that many female friends and the ones she has are really poor."
(And a collective sigh of "awww..." goes up from my readership.)
Oh fine.
We got to the restaurant and we all sat down.
"So," I said. "Can I throw the baby shower?"
Tina was very excited and very happy. Her mom is in Idaho, so I tentatively suggested that in addittion to her female friends, we invite her stepmother and her sisters, Charlie's mother and sister, my mother and a math teacher she and I both liked in high school. (I haven't mentioned that I've known Tina for fourteen years, too, have I? She's the one who engineered Charlie and I getting together in the first place.) She started listing off the female friends she did have, and she actually got quite a list together.
We will have it at TheChaliceabode. The baby is expected in August, so we will probably have it in June, perhaps the Saturday before I leave for GA. The CSO will like that as this means I will want to do a bunch more work on the house by then and probably do some repainting in the living room. I'll put up a buffet of snacks in the study, we will play whatever sort of games people play in the living room. Goodness knows I've never thrown a baby shower before, but I assume there are books on the subject. I'm sure that it will be a nice party.
But me throwing a baby shower might be the biggest headtrip of all. Honestly, it's like going to Richard Dawkins for spiritual counseling.
CC
Cool stuff on the UU blogosphere.
A really nicely-written peice on CUUMBAYA.
and
Language Games and Arbitrary Marks has an insider's guide to St. Louis for all us tourists who will show up for GA.
CC
Ps. Oh yeah, and this isn't UU, but it is appealling on many levels.
and
Language Games and Arbitrary Marks has an insider's guide to St. Louis for all us tourists who will show up for GA.
CC
Ps. Oh yeah, and this isn't UU, but it is appealling on many levels.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
A whole new level of dysfunction.
The Chaliceparents and I live in the same neighborhood, and like many families do, we swap around some chores. TheCSO does everybody’s taxes and handyman stuff around my parents’ and brothers’ house. My mother and I swap foods and baked goods every now and again. My brothers mow our lawn and my folks take our trash and recycling to the dump in their pickup every other week or so. Today was a trash day, and my parents had a young woman whom I hadn’t met before with them.
My parents are given to taking in various deadbeats, so I didn’t pay much attention to her. We’d filled the truck when my mother finally turned and introduced her to me as my brother’s girlfriend.
“Watch out,” I said. Out of respect for my parents, I didn’t say what I usually say to Oliver’s girlfriends which is “if he hits you, call the cops.”
She giggled sweetly, “People keep telling me that...”
“A hundred million Elvis fans might not all be wrong.” She laughed and nodded as if she understood the expression. So she’s not totally dumb. She had a keychain hanging off her jeans from a grocery story discount club. So she at least occasionally buys her own food. That alone put her in the seventy fifth percentile of Oliver’s women. Her clothes were clean and from better designers than I would have expected.
I’m wary here because the last girlfriend of Oliver’s whom I liked turned out to be a fifteen-year-old runaway, and not the one he was prosecuted for.
When my mother and I were alone in the kitchen, I finally said “So is she living with you guys, too?”
“Yes,” my mother said. “But she sleeps upstairs. I won’t have her staying with those boys.” (Item: Something like three of my brothers’ friends live in my parents’ basement at any given time.)
I laughed. “Well, of course, grandmother didn’t let me stay with theCSO when he visited either.”
“Oh she’s not going to be seeing Oliver for a long time,” my mother said blithely. “After all, he’s going to be in jail for two years?”
“Wha?”
“Yeah, on those kiddie porn charges from his earlier arrest."
"He had another trial?"
"It was SO unfair! One of Oliver’s friends admitted that some of the porn was HIS, but the police officer said Oliver had downloaded the porn and the jury believed the policeman!”
(Item: Under Virginia law, it doesn’t matter if it is your kiddie porn, if it is on your computer, you can be prosecuted.)
My mother went on to detail various other unfair aspects to the trial, none of which she actually saw because she was a witness and thus kept separate. Her entire account sounded like my mother’s perception of the Chalicerelative’s perception, which might be pretty far afield from what actually went on. TheCSO and I are going to order a transcript of the trial.
Finally I said, “Umm… You guys didn’t invite me? I took off three days from work last year for those trials?” I typically find out from “google news” when Oliver has been in trouble since it picks up my local paper. But I would have thought SOMEBODY would have told me about a trial with stakes this high. I mean, I’m hosting a family brunch tomorrow and have been in frequent contact with my family in planning logistics for that.
“Oliver said this case would be a slam dunk?”
“Since when do you take legal advice from Oliver?”
My mother sort of giggled and shrugged and she and my father and the girlfriend got back in the truck and drove away.
CC
Ps. Even if Oliver was to some degree railroaded, he is not a good guy and has been guilty of plenty of things he didn't get punished for, so this is not particularly depressing me. The toughest moment of the morning was when I googled Oliver Smith in google news, but forgot to add "Virginia," and was thus treated to news of all of the Oliver Smiths worldwide who pitch for little league teams in California, win golf tournaments in the UK and host fundraising dinners for ladies running for county commissioner in Tennessee.
My parents are given to taking in various deadbeats, so I didn’t pay much attention to her. We’d filled the truck when my mother finally turned and introduced her to me as my brother’s girlfriend.
“Watch out,” I said. Out of respect for my parents, I didn’t say what I usually say to Oliver’s girlfriends which is “if he hits you, call the cops.”
She giggled sweetly, “People keep telling me that...”
“A hundred million Elvis fans might not all be wrong.” She laughed and nodded as if she understood the expression. So she’s not totally dumb. She had a keychain hanging off her jeans from a grocery story discount club. So she at least occasionally buys her own food. That alone put her in the seventy fifth percentile of Oliver’s women. Her clothes were clean and from better designers than I would have expected.
I’m wary here because the last girlfriend of Oliver’s whom I liked turned out to be a fifteen-year-old runaway, and not the one he was prosecuted for.
When my mother and I were alone in the kitchen, I finally said “So is she living with you guys, too?”
“Yes,” my mother said. “But she sleeps upstairs. I won’t have her staying with those boys.” (Item: Something like three of my brothers’ friends live in my parents’ basement at any given time.)
I laughed. “Well, of course, grandmother didn’t let me stay with theCSO when he visited either.”
“Oh she’s not going to be seeing Oliver for a long time,” my mother said blithely. “After all, he’s going to be in jail for two years?”
“Wha?”
“Yeah, on those kiddie porn charges from his earlier arrest."
"He had another trial?"
"It was SO unfair! One of Oliver’s friends admitted that some of the porn was HIS, but the police officer said Oliver had downloaded the porn and the jury believed the policeman!”
(Item: Under Virginia law, it doesn’t matter if it is your kiddie porn, if it is on your computer, you can be prosecuted.)
My mother went on to detail various other unfair aspects to the trial, none of which she actually saw because she was a witness and thus kept separate. Her entire account sounded like my mother’s perception of the Chalicerelative’s perception, which might be pretty far afield from what actually went on. TheCSO and I are going to order a transcript of the trial.
Finally I said, “Umm… You guys didn’t invite me? I took off three days from work last year for those trials?” I typically find out from “google news” when Oliver has been in trouble since it picks up my local paper. But I would have thought SOMEBODY would have told me about a trial with stakes this high. I mean, I’m hosting a family brunch tomorrow and have been in frequent contact with my family in planning logistics for that.
“Oliver said this case would be a slam dunk?”
“Since when do you take legal advice from Oliver?”
My mother sort of giggled and shrugged and she and my father and the girlfriend got back in the truck and drove away.
CC
Ps. Even if Oliver was to some degree railroaded, he is not a good guy and has been guilty of plenty of things he didn't get punished for, so this is not particularly depressing me. The toughest moment of the morning was when I googled Oliver Smith in google news, but forgot to add "Virginia," and was thus treated to news of all of the Oliver Smiths worldwide who pitch for little league teams in California, win golf tournaments in the UK and host fundraising dinners for ladies running for county commissioner in Tennessee.
Friday, April 14, 2006
"Goodness, those GA hotels are classy,"
I thought as I looked over the list of GA hotels. I mean, check it out, y'all. We've got the Adams Mark, two different Renaissance hotels, the Holiday Inn, the Omni. And the prices top out at $130.
Now I think of these as very expensive hotels. $130 a night is probably a good deal.
But I'm a simple girl. I don't require much. Free wifi, clean sheets, maybe a hot tub someplace, and I'm happy. So I find myself asking, why do we have only the best hotels? And is there a better deal to be had in downtown St. Louis?
I'll take the second question first.
Of course there's a better deal to be had in St. Louis.
Even the most cursory search turns up several good hotels at much better prices.
The Econo Lodge Riverfront, for example, starts at 81 bucks per night and is .3 of a mile from the convention center hotels, making it forty dollars a night cheaper than many of the hotels the UUA reccomends.
Similarly, the Hampton Inn is $105 per night if you have AAA. It is only a quarter mile from the convention center.
If you're willing to drive in for fifteen miles every morning, you can stay for as little as forty bucks a night at the Super 8 out by the airport. The drive every day will suck, but even if you pay $10 a day to park at the Holiday Inn across the street from the convention center, you'll still save a bundle.
So why, you may ask, is the UUA only making deals with the expensive hotels. What makes it worth it to potentially exclude people who could almost attend, but would seriously need to cut costs?
Environmentalism.
The UUA has a long and detailed list of requirements. The requirements, intentionally or not, strongly favor the more expensive hotels. After all, the classy hotels already use china plates and serve organic foods, and they are used to kowtowing to weird demands from rich people. Older hotels that haven't been refurbished and still lack low-flow shower heads, and of course any places where one might be expected to handle a ketchup packet, are beneath our notice.
The UUA could have made two lists, hotels and hotels that get our environmental seal of approval. But we're too pure for that, so instead we assume that of course our members want to pay something like $200 extra for five nights to shower under less water. So we exclude any hotel that doesn't meet our standards.
And we wonder why we are a religion full of yuppie white people.
Sigh.
CC
Ps. Here's a hotel map of downtown St. Louis.
PPs. Boy in the Bands also notes that a new bus company will make it cheaper to get to GA from the midwest.
Now I think of these as very expensive hotels. $130 a night is probably a good deal.
But I'm a simple girl. I don't require much. Free wifi, clean sheets, maybe a hot tub someplace, and I'm happy. So I find myself asking, why do we have only the best hotels? And is there a better deal to be had in downtown St. Louis?
I'll take the second question first.
Of course there's a better deal to be had in St. Louis.
Even the most cursory search turns up several good hotels at much better prices.
The Econo Lodge Riverfront, for example, starts at 81 bucks per night and is .3 of a mile from the convention center hotels, making it forty dollars a night cheaper than many of the hotels the UUA reccomends.
Similarly, the Hampton Inn is $105 per night if you have AAA. It is only a quarter mile from the convention center.
If you're willing to drive in for fifteen miles every morning, you can stay for as little as forty bucks a night at the Super 8 out by the airport. The drive every day will suck, but even if you pay $10 a day to park at the Holiday Inn across the street from the convention center, you'll still save a bundle.
So why, you may ask, is the UUA only making deals with the expensive hotels. What makes it worth it to potentially exclude people who could almost attend, but would seriously need to cut costs?
Environmentalism.
The UUA has a long and detailed list of requirements. The requirements, intentionally or not, strongly favor the more expensive hotels. After all, the classy hotels already use china plates and serve organic foods, and they are used to kowtowing to weird demands from rich people. Older hotels that haven't been refurbished and still lack low-flow shower heads, and of course any places where one might be expected to handle a ketchup packet, are beneath our notice.
The UUA could have made two lists, hotels and hotels that get our environmental seal of approval. But we're too pure for that, so instead we assume that of course our members want to pay something like $200 extra for five nights to shower under less water. So we exclude any hotel that doesn't meet our standards.
And we wonder why we are a religion full of yuppie white people.
Sigh.
CC
Ps. Here's a hotel map of downtown St. Louis.
PPs. Boy in the Bands also notes that a new bus company will make it cheaper to get to GA from the midwest.
Culosi case
Here's the family's statement. I'm sure there are many good beuracracy reasons for not informing the family so they could have the man's last rights performed, but ick.
CC
CC
First, they came for the ninjas.
It's very easy to make fun of this story, where ATF agents randomly jumped a guy dressed as a ninja who was coming home from a costume party. Usually, I confine criticisms of the police to incidents with the county police local to me. This one was federal agents and in Georgia, but I found it so egregious that I wanted to write about it anyway.
One of the agents commented:Seeing someone with something across the face, from a federal standpoint — that’s not right
Note how she manages to justify jumping someone solely for his choice of attire AND imply that there's something wrong with the fact that local police might not have done so.
There is a point to me doing this, you know. While ninjas aren't under attack in everybody's community, there are certainly a lot of unjustified police killings in mine. (By which I mean two. But two, within a few months in one county is too many.) And, of course, you see petitions every Sunday that no one will read all about national politics.
As far as I can tell, nobody cares what happens locally.
But locally is where you can make change, and locally is where your voice is most loudly heard. "Stop domestic wiretapping!" is a nearly pointless cry. "I think our County police could use a citizens' review board. What are the channels I would need to go through to set one up?" are words that might well do some actual good.
If you are all about telling your national government what to do on issues of security, but you don't have a clue what your local cops are up to, you're wasting your chance to make real change.
I strongly suspect that it comes down to the fact that in national politics, merely having an opinion and signing a petition makes one feel like an activist. With local stuff, you really do have to work at it. (And admittedly, I haven't done anything on my police shootings, either, though I'm working up to it.)
CC
*P.S. In the Culosi case, it has now been three months since the shooting and the results of the internal investigation have not been released. (The ballistics tests are done. How long does it take to interview a bunch of people?) The family has announced they are going to sue. Good for them.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
I so wanted to like this manifesto
Bill Barr has been pumping the Euston Manifesto, a document by a bunch of very smart progressives in the UK.
At first, I was very enthused. I am predisposed toward kindness to anything that comes from the UK in the first place, and I was very happy with what I read at first.
I agree with them so much on so many things. It is indeed time to quit whining about how we got into the war in Iraq and focus on doing as much good as we can there. I agree that the Baathists are some nasty folks and to pull the troops now leave them in control is to do a disservice to human rights worldwide. I agree that treating women like crap and punishing people of the wrong religion is not a cultural choice, it is just wrong. I agree that America is flawed, but it takes some pretty severe intellectual laziness to ignore the flaws of other places to make America seem so much worse.
But as a good UU, I read the lyrics of the hymn very carefully before I sing it.
I won't be singing this one.
Here are the main points I disagree with:
1. "Democracy for everybody! Right now!" I do think that democracy is the EVENTUAL best solution for everybody. But if China becomes a Democracy right now, it will turn into post-Soviet Russia, except even less equipped to feed people. For an even simpler example, look at Pakistan. If there were a free election today, human rights would go back to the stone age. Witness the difficulty they are having right now with getting a government in Iraq that both represents the people and lets women have rights.
2. Trade unions are the Bee's Knees for everybody Trade unions, like all bureaucracies, eventually stop being about their members and start to further their own interests. I'm not saying they haven't done good things, but when the Unions have had the power to bring a company to its knees, they have often been corrupted by it. (Note also how a few years ago Northwests' mechanics utterly fucked themselves over by going to a union that promised them better stuff. The union's "no concessions" platform ended up in a strike. Had the other workers gone along with a sympathy strike, Northwest would have gone bankrupt and everyone would have been screwed. So they didn't. And with all the airlines that HAVE gone bankrupt, it was pretty simple for Northwest to hire a staff of scabs, in fact they had done so before the strike began. Now that we're out of the "broken kneecaps" phase of unions, the "have a bunch of scabs already on the payroll" plan worked fine for Northwest and thus the union utterly screwed its members and got every one of them canned.) In an increasingly global and interdependant world, I question how effective labor unions can be without seriously fucking over some other people. The recent transit strikes, where the evening news featured lots of people going "They make more than I do! And their health insurance is BETTER! Why the hell do they have to strike and keep ME from a day's pay!" seem pretty representative. People do not seem to get angry at the administration for denying workers benefits they themselves don't have. They get angry at the workers, who by refusing to do their jobs over nickles and dimes really mess with other people's lives.
3. Globalization (when it means the spread of corporations) is so bad, we should keep people from choosing it I find the idea that people should be protected from their desire to self-determine and globalize oh so patronizing. There are abusive elements to the way some big companies behave, but in the end, nobody forces people to take a job we see as crappy that helps them feed their families. As far as I can tell, many liberals have completely romanticized what living life without modern conveniences is like. Witness Pakistan, where people CAN leave the refugee camps and return to their cute little villages but are in huge numbers refusing to because the refugee camps, shantytowns though they are, have clean water, schools and medical care.
4. Anyone who is Anti-Zionist is an anti-semite Uh, no.
Sigh.
CC
who owes TheCSO much credit for this peice as we talked it over together at great length.
At first, I was very enthused. I am predisposed toward kindness to anything that comes from the UK in the first place, and I was very happy with what I read at first.
I agree with them so much on so many things. It is indeed time to quit whining about how we got into the war in Iraq and focus on doing as much good as we can there. I agree that the Baathists are some nasty folks and to pull the troops now leave them in control is to do a disservice to human rights worldwide. I agree that treating women like crap and punishing people of the wrong religion is not a cultural choice, it is just wrong. I agree that America is flawed, but it takes some pretty severe intellectual laziness to ignore the flaws of other places to make America seem so much worse.
But as a good UU, I read the lyrics of the hymn very carefully before I sing it.
I won't be singing this one.
Here are the main points I disagree with:
1. "Democracy for everybody! Right now!" I do think that democracy is the EVENTUAL best solution for everybody. But if China becomes a Democracy right now, it will turn into post-Soviet Russia, except even less equipped to feed people. For an even simpler example, look at Pakistan. If there were a free election today, human rights would go back to the stone age. Witness the difficulty they are having right now with getting a government in Iraq that both represents the people and lets women have rights.
2. Trade unions are the Bee's Knees for everybody Trade unions, like all bureaucracies, eventually stop being about their members and start to further their own interests. I'm not saying they haven't done good things, but when the Unions have had the power to bring a company to its knees, they have often been corrupted by it. (Note also how a few years ago Northwests' mechanics utterly fucked themselves over by going to a union that promised them better stuff. The union's "no concessions" platform ended up in a strike. Had the other workers gone along with a sympathy strike, Northwest would have gone bankrupt and everyone would have been screwed. So they didn't. And with all the airlines that HAVE gone bankrupt, it was pretty simple for Northwest to hire a staff of scabs, in fact they had done so before the strike began. Now that we're out of the "broken kneecaps" phase of unions, the "have a bunch of scabs already on the payroll" plan worked fine for Northwest and thus the union utterly screwed its members and got every one of them canned.) In an increasingly global and interdependant world, I question how effective labor unions can be without seriously fucking over some other people. The recent transit strikes, where the evening news featured lots of people going "They make more than I do! And their health insurance is BETTER! Why the hell do they have to strike and keep ME from a day's pay!" seem pretty representative. People do not seem to get angry at the administration for denying workers benefits they themselves don't have. They get angry at the workers, who by refusing to do their jobs over nickles and dimes really mess with other people's lives.
3. Globalization (when it means the spread of corporations) is so bad, we should keep people from choosing it I find the idea that people should be protected from their desire to self-determine and globalize oh so patronizing. There are abusive elements to the way some big companies behave, but in the end, nobody forces people to take a job we see as crappy that helps them feed their families. As far as I can tell, many liberals have completely romanticized what living life without modern conveniences is like. Witness Pakistan, where people CAN leave the refugee camps and return to their cute little villages but are in huge numbers refusing to because the refugee camps, shantytowns though they are, have clean water, schools and medical care.
4. Anyone who is Anti-Zionist is an anti-semite Uh, no.
Sigh.
CC
who owes TheCSO much credit for this peice as we talked it over together at great length.
On matters McKinney
One time in my political fundraising days, a coworker and I were manning the nametag table outside of a major fundraising event for a Congressman who shall of course remain nameless. I was writing a nametag for a lobbyist who had neglected to RSVP (grr) when I heard my new coworker having a bit of difficulty. She vigorously discussing something with a portly man in an expensive suit. Both of them looked confused.
Figuring exactly what was going on, I rushed to my coworker's side.
"Why Representative Sensenbrenner!" I cooed*. "We're so glad you could join us this evening. You're comped, of course. Why don't I take you right in to the Congressman!"
I could swear I heard my coworker mutter "he wasn't wearing his pin..." in the background as I led the powerful man away. His dignity must have been preserved because both my coworker and I kept our jobs.
It happens.
CC
*He's not my favorite guy either, but a job's a job. At my current job, I do work with a company I very much respect. The pay is the same.
Figuring exactly what was going on, I rushed to my coworker's side.
"Why Representative Sensenbrenner!" I cooed*. "We're so glad you could join us this evening. You're comped, of course. Why don't I take you right in to the Congressman!"
I could swear I heard my coworker mutter "he wasn't wearing his pin..." in the background as I led the powerful man away. His dignity must have been preserved because both my coworker and I kept our jobs.
It happens.
CC
*He's not my favorite guy either, but a job's a job. At my current job, I do work with a company I very much respect. The pay is the same.
The birth-control-at-the-Pharmacy issue gets even more annoying
Two questions:
1. It's one thing to not want to be handing out the abortion pill. I don't like that, but I understand that. What what the hell is the deal with refusing to give antibiotics to a lady who has just HAD an abortion?
I'm sorry, is letting the lady get sick and die the Christian thing to do?
2. If a Christian Scientist got a job as a pharmacist and refused to do anything to help cure sick people, would we be OK with that? I don't mean to imply insult to Christian Scientists would do that sort of thing, but it's a further extension of the logic we're dealing with here. (Actually, Christian Scientists are not inherently against abortion, so this could be an interesting test case.)
CC
1. It's one thing to not want to be handing out the abortion pill. I don't like that, but I understand that. What what the hell is the deal with refusing to give antibiotics to a lady who has just HAD an abortion?
I'm sorry, is letting the lady get sick and die the Christian thing to do?
2. If a Christian Scientist got a job as a pharmacist and refused to do anything to help cure sick people, would we be OK with that? I don't mean to imply insult to Christian Scientists would do that sort of thing, but it's a further extension of the logic we're dealing with here. (Actually, Christian Scientists are not inherently against abortion, so this could be an interesting test case.)
CC
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Things I didn't know about Mommies with full-time jobs until I worked with some
My new office has a lot of mothers. Some of the things I don't love about being around parents have been reinforced (e.g. You have a kid at home. You are with that kid some 16 hours a day. So why on earth do you come to work and want to talk about nothing but your kid? A chick has to read "Parents" magazine just to keep up with the conversation in the lunchroom because how to deal with the fact that Junior is biting the other kids at preschool is all anybody talks about.)
But I have learned a few new things from the experience thus far and overall, my attitude toward parents has improved.
1. You don't get sick time of your own, it all goes to when your kid is sick. Either that, or you take twice as much and everyone hates you.
2. I'm planning to go to GA. I've already filled out the form. My co-workers know two months in advance. I will do absolutely as much work as possible leading up to my time off to make it easier on them and no one will care. People with sick children do not get that chance. They call in the day of and everyone else is saddled with extra work and the less tolerant people hate them for it.
3. Parents really do develop soft skills, at least some parents do. One lady got a call last week that her 9-year-old daughter had been suspended from school. Another kid had been bugging the daughter and the daughter had whipped around and said "I'm gonna kill you!" Nobody would have batted an eyelash when I was a kid, but understandably, that's a big deal these days. Working mom is two cubes away and I can hear the conversation that follows.
Working mom was like a freaking hostage negotiator. She was totally on the vice principal's side. Oh, of course. But the important thing was that ALL the kids learn from this situation. And... And...
I don't remember. But the upshot is that the suspenstion was cut from eight days to two and Working Mom and the Vice Principal were cooing at each other like sorority girls at the end.
Working Mom got off the phone, filled us in on what we'd all been listening to anyway, then got back to work.
But I have learned a few new things from the experience thus far and overall, my attitude toward parents has improved.
1. You don't get sick time of your own, it all goes to when your kid is sick. Either that, or you take twice as much and everyone hates you.
2. I'm planning to go to GA. I've already filled out the form. My co-workers know two months in advance. I will do absolutely as much work as possible leading up to my time off to make it easier on them and no one will care. People with sick children do not get that chance. They call in the day of and everyone else is saddled with extra work and the less tolerant people hate them for it.
3. Parents really do develop soft skills, at least some parents do. One lady got a call last week that her 9-year-old daughter had been suspended from school. Another kid had been bugging the daughter and the daughter had whipped around and said "I'm gonna kill you!" Nobody would have batted an eyelash when I was a kid, but understandably, that's a big deal these days. Working mom is two cubes away and I can hear the conversation that follows.
Working mom was like a freaking hostage negotiator. She was totally on the vice principal's side. Oh, of course. But the important thing was that ALL the kids learn from this situation. And... And...
I don't remember. But the upshot is that the suspenstion was cut from eight days to two and Working Mom and the Vice Principal were cooing at each other like sorority girls at the end.
Working Mom got off the phone, filled us in on what we'd all been listening to anyway, then got back to work.
The more things change...
From The New Republic...
Benjamin Franklin complained during the colonial era that Germans immigrating to Philadelphia "are generally the most stupid of their nation. ... Few of their children know English." In 1921, Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote, "The new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, with its lower standard of living and characteristic racial differences has intensified many existing social problems and created a number of new ones."
And Henry Cabot Lodge thought the lowest of the low were the Italian Immigrants, one of whom was the Grandfather of Tom Tancredo, who today says nasty things about Central American Immigrants.
CC
who really can't stand all the freaking yuppies who have moved into all the new condo developments in Fairfax County and torn down those old postwar Cape Cod tract houses to build their stupid McMansions. Hello? My family has been in Virginia for generations? Where do all these lawyers and lobbyists from rube states think they get off moving in and tearing down our fugly houses to build a different kinds of fugly house?
Benjamin Franklin complained during the colonial era that Germans immigrating to Philadelphia "are generally the most stupid of their nation. ... Few of their children know English." In 1921, Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote, "The new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, with its lower standard of living and characteristic racial differences has intensified many existing social problems and created a number of new ones."
And Henry Cabot Lodge thought the lowest of the low were the Italian Immigrants, one of whom was the Grandfather of Tom Tancredo, who today says nasty things about Central American Immigrants.
CC
who really can't stand all the freaking yuppies who have moved into all the new condo developments in Fairfax County and torn down those old postwar Cape Cod tract houses to build their stupid McMansions. Hello? My family has been in Virginia for generations? Where do all these lawyers and lobbyists from rube states think they get off moving in and tearing down our fugly houses to build a different kinds of fugly house?
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Advice for living
If someone mentions to you that they were teased as a child, don't assume you know why and confidently tell them that you would never tease somone about obvious defect one or obvious defect two. I was on the receiving end of this one recently. I was thinking about obvious defect three, but the person's enthusiastic acknowledgements of the obviousness of the two previous defects sucked.
And the time, I let it go and didn't even mention the real cause of said teasing. But it has bothered me ever since.
When things bother me, I write about them.
CC
And the time, I let it go and didn't even mention the real cause of said teasing. But it has bothered me ever since.
When things bother me, I write about them.
CC
Everything breaks down at sociopathy
I was trying to figure out how to tell this story without mentioning that I'd had a bunch of psychological testing done. But I mentioned that last post. Again, I'm fine and have escaped some pretty serious demons through what is I assume the grace of a few well-placed strands of DNA. (Of course, the indirect effect of said demons in others was inescapable, but that's another post. Actually, it is in some ways exactly this post. People unaffected by such things don't have their minds go into places like this in the dark hours of a sleepless night. I assume.)
Anyway, so this was hours and hours of filling out multiple choice batteries, describing ink blots and making up stories to go along with pictures. When it was all over, the psychologist who had administered the tests went to her computer and was compiling my bill.
Being me, I started looking at her books as I was waiting. She had quite a few on crime and the criminal mind.
"Do you do forensic work?" I asked.
She smiled. "Yes." My bill was printing.
"Can I ask you something about that?"
"Sure."
"Do sociopaths have souls?"
She looked at me for a long moment, but not nearly as long a moment as a lot of people would have. "True sociopathy is not as common as most people think. But the real ones? No. They don't have souls."
"Hmmm..." I said. "I tend to agree. I confess I've been working on this one in my own head for years. As closely as I can figure, the soul is what inside us that is receptive to the force some people call "God." And I am really loath to label another human being as soulless, but that's the conclusion I'd come to. They just can't pick up on God's radio signals." She nodded as if that sounded reasonable to her. "But it upsets me that my religion breaks down at sociopathy."
She gave a tired laugh, "oh, Honey. Psychology breaks down at sociopathy, too. Everything breaks down at sociopathy."
I'm certain I thanked her for her time and said goodbye, but my memory of the conversation stops there.
(Item: Boris, one of our cats, just nosed the bedroom door open and I about jumped out of my skin.)
So, I guess what I am asking here is does anybody else have a theological framework where the concept of a person who can't really concieve that other people feel even fits?
Many people take a "Well, if my girlfriend with clinical depression loved me enough, she'd cheer up" approach to mental illness and assume that anything can be overcome by sheer willpower. That people with ADHD don't fail to focus on you every minute because they don't like you, it's just the way their heads work, is really a post of it's own, but suffice to say such thinking is useless in this contest. A friend told me once about a sociopath she knew who was genuinely broken up about the fact that his sister didn't like him any more after he stole her visiting daughter's money and left his neice stranded on vacation. He can do something really obviously awful one minute, then be distressed that his victim doesn't love him the next.
Such a person is missing peices that are necessary for a moral consciousness beyond the very basic cops and robbers level.
As a universalist, I know they well be OK in the hereafter, but how does one minister to them on earth?
CC
Anyway, so this was hours and hours of filling out multiple choice batteries, describing ink blots and making up stories to go along with pictures. When it was all over, the psychologist who had administered the tests went to her computer and was compiling my bill.
Being me, I started looking at her books as I was waiting. She had quite a few on crime and the criminal mind.
"Do you do forensic work?" I asked.
She smiled. "Yes." My bill was printing.
"Can I ask you something about that?"
"Sure."
"Do sociopaths have souls?"
She looked at me for a long moment, but not nearly as long a moment as a lot of people would have. "True sociopathy is not as common as most people think. But the real ones? No. They don't have souls."
"Hmmm..." I said. "I tend to agree. I confess I've been working on this one in my own head for years. As closely as I can figure, the soul is what inside us that is receptive to the force some people call "God." And I am really loath to label another human being as soulless, but that's the conclusion I'd come to. They just can't pick up on God's radio signals." She nodded as if that sounded reasonable to her. "But it upsets me that my religion breaks down at sociopathy."
She gave a tired laugh, "oh, Honey. Psychology breaks down at sociopathy, too. Everything breaks down at sociopathy."
I'm certain I thanked her for her time and said goodbye, but my memory of the conversation stops there.
(Item: Boris, one of our cats, just nosed the bedroom door open and I about jumped out of my skin.)
So, I guess what I am asking here is does anybody else have a theological framework where the concept of a person who can't really concieve that other people feel even fits?
Many people take a "Well, if my girlfriend with clinical depression loved me enough, she'd cheer up" approach to mental illness and assume that anything can be overcome by sheer willpower. That people with ADHD don't fail to focus on you every minute because they don't like you, it's just the way their heads work, is really a post of it's own, but suffice to say such thinking is useless in this contest. A friend told me once about a sociopath she knew who was genuinely broken up about the fact that his sister didn't like him any more after he stole her visiting daughter's money and left his neice stranded on vacation. He can do something really obviously awful one minute, then be distressed that his victim doesn't love him the next.
Such a person is missing peices that are necessary for a moral consciousness beyond the very basic cops and robbers level.
As a universalist, I know they well be OK in the hereafter, but how does one minister to them on earth?
CC
Silly things people forward.
At CUUMBAAYA, Joel stuck up a post recently saying that his co-workers were forwarding around the psychopath test.
This post will make more sense if you take a second and check it out.
I came up non-pyschopath. Actually, I recently paid a lot of money to confirm that I have no psychoses whatsoever. (I'm aware that as a general rule, people who brag about how their psychological tests reveal them to be not demonstrably crazy are to be avoided. I consider myself to be an exception. Suffice to say, it's wise to get oneself tested for all of one's potential genetic diseases.)
The psychopath test is, of course, debunked on Snopes, but I still like it. I am especially fond of how, though it is surely inaccurate, it focuses on weeding out those among us who are not just sociopaths but smart sociopaths. It has been my experience that stupid sociopaths really are pretty harmless. Kind of like how one imagines a caveman focused on his own physical survival.
BTW, my coworkers are forwarding the Japanese IQ test around.
Here are the instructions are in English
1. Get everyone across the river. Only 2 persons on the raft at a time
2. The father can not stay with any of the daughters without their mother's presence
3. The mother can not stay with any of the sons without their father's presence
4. The thief (striped shirt) can not stay with any family member if the Policeman is not there
5. Only the Father, the Mother and the Policeman know how to operate the raft
6. To move the people click on them.
7. To move the raft click on the pole on the opposite side of the river.
(Actually, when I look at the instructions on the site, I could swear that the instructions are in Chinese, which would indeed make the test difficult for the average citizen of Japan. Don't totally trust me on this one. I was planning to study in China in college and I took some classes and then tutored a Chinese guy who was learning English for awhile, but my Chinese really sucks, especially when outside the comfort of the pinyin. When the CSO gets home, I will have him take a look. He's had some Japanese.)
CC
who realizes she has conflated a few things here, but is writing this more to amuse herself than to impart valuable information on psychology, or Asian langauages.
This post will make more sense if you take a second and check it out.
I came up non-pyschopath. Actually, I recently paid a lot of money to confirm that I have no psychoses whatsoever. (I'm aware that as a general rule, people who brag about how their psychological tests reveal them to be not demonstrably crazy are to be avoided. I consider myself to be an exception. Suffice to say, it's wise to get oneself tested for all of one's potential genetic diseases.)
The psychopath test is, of course, debunked on Snopes, but I still like it. I am especially fond of how, though it is surely inaccurate, it focuses on weeding out those among us who are not just sociopaths but smart sociopaths. It has been my experience that stupid sociopaths really are pretty harmless. Kind of like how one imagines a caveman focused on his own physical survival.
BTW, my coworkers are forwarding the Japanese IQ test around.
Here are the instructions are in English
1. Get everyone across the river. Only 2 persons on the raft at a time
2. The father can not stay with any of the daughters without their mother's presence
3. The mother can not stay with any of the sons without their father's presence
4. The thief (striped shirt) can not stay with any family member if the Policeman is not there
5. Only the Father, the Mother and the Policeman know how to operate the raft
6. To move the people click on them.
7. To move the raft click on the pole on the opposite side of the river.
(Actually, when I look at the instructions on the site, I could swear that the instructions are in Chinese, which would indeed make the test difficult for the average citizen of Japan. Don't totally trust me on this one. I was planning to study in China in college and I took some classes and then tutored a Chinese guy who was learning English for awhile, but my Chinese really sucks, especially when outside the comfort of the pinyin. When the CSO gets home, I will have him take a look. He's had some Japanese.)
CC
who realizes she has conflated a few things here, but is writing this more to amuse herself than to impart valuable information on psychology, or Asian langauages.
Guh, CC can't sleep
And she's due to get up in exactly four hours and take the ChaliceRelative to get cataract surgery.
CC
CC
Monday, April 10, 2006
Linguist Friend: THE CAVE MONASTERY: AT THE RELIGIOUS HEART OF RUSSIA
In mid-September of 1991, a few weeks after Boris Yeltsin persuaded the soldiers and tanks of the Soviet Army to neither arrest him nor open fire on Moscow crowds during the August 18-22 coup attempt, I travelled from the medical school where I worked in Los Angeles to a medical meeting in Kiev, the cultural center of ancient Russia and the capital of modern Ukraine. A flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt was followed by one from Frankfurt to Kiev. The Union of European Phoniatrists, physicians who specialize in medical aspects of voice and speech, was holding their 17th congress in Kiev on September 17th through 21st, at the invitation of the head of the Moscow research institute of phoniatry, Dr. Yurii Vasilenko, whose Ukrainian origin was obvious in the accent with which he spoke Russian. I had met him two years before at a large medical meeting in Prague, where he had promised to invite me to this Kiev meeting, which at that time was already being planned.
The meeting was fascinating, with a group of mostly German European physicians meeting together with mainly Russian and Ukrainian physicians in a hotel located on the periphery of Kiev, but the groups were largely separated by language. I was the only Russian-speaking Westerner besides an Israeli physician and one East German physician. I had been asked to lecture in English, which was understood by most of the Europeans, but when Russians conversing with me in Russian asked when I would speak, and what language I would speak in, their disappointment was patent when I replied that I had been asked to lecture in English. So, after a day or so of this, one afternoon I went back to my room and sat down and wrote out my lecture in Russian. When the time came for me to deliver my talk, it turned out that the slides were inverted in the projector. So I looked out over the auditorium and commented in Russian while the projectionist inverted the slides, "the projectionist wanted to show that I came from the other side of the world, where everyone is upside down!" When the Russians laughed at once, and then a few seconds later so did the Europeans when they got the translation of my comment, I knew that everything would work and the lecture would go well.
For the Russian and Ukrainian physicians, the meeting was a valued opportunity to
catch up with Western medical knowledge and to make personal contacts. I in turn was happy to be able to make further contact with European and Russian colleagues in the
scientific specialty of the physiology of the larynx. Furthermore, since I spent much of the first part of my academic life in the pursuit of Russian and Byzantine-Slavic studies, my visit to Kiev was also an exposure to the realia of ancient Slavic Christian religious culture. When I walked through the ancient Cathedral of St. Sophia in the city of Kiev, dating from the 11th c., at first I was puzzled at the familiarity of the Old Russian inscriptions scratched on the columns, until I recalled that I had read them long before in a Russian archeological monograph on the cathedral that was on my bookshelves at home in Los Angeles.
However, the most startling view of the trip had no horizon. It was the tunnels underneath the Cave Monastery in Kiev, on the riverbank above the Dnieper. The Cave Monastery, dating from the same period as the Cathedral of St. Sophia, shares with it the distinction of being part of the cradle of Russian Christianity. When invaders would ride into Kiev a thousand years ago, it was to these tunnels beneath the monastery that the monks would retreat, to emerge when the enemy departed. Religion also took a dreadful beating in Soviet Russia, and religious artefacts were systematically destroyed, sometimes in bonfires of icons. But, here at the Cave Monastery, Russian religion was reemerging, like the monks coming out of their caves.
The caves contain many artefacts and mummies of medieval monks. I had to restrain myself from discussing them with my fellow visitors, since we were forbidden to speak above a whisper in the caves. When I talked with the monks, only a few of them were older and well educated. Many were very young, and not well educated either about historical Christianity beyond the customary rituals, or learned in the Old Slavic langue of the earliest Slavic books, still the language of the Byzantine Slavic liturgy. I ached at this, and felt that I would like to come back to Kiev in a different persona and teach them the ancient language of the earliest Slavic Christian books, which served as the first common literary language of Eastern Europe in the middle ages, like Latin in the West. In the course of writing my doctoral dissertation on details of the grammar of the Old Slavic language, I had read through all of the published texts of the earliest manuscripts preserved in this language, all of which were works translated from Greek Christian literature, as well as their Greek originals, until the language of the Old Slavic texts was as transparent to me as the New York Times. However, at the Cave monastery, I realized for the first time the extent to which not only many Russian Jews, but also the Christians, had been deracinated by the years of the Soviet regime. And eerily, cliche'd though it sounds, suddenly I realized that here, in the winding tunnels beneath the Cave Monastery, I could easily imagine that I might hear the soft thud of the heartbeat of Russia.
Russia's ancient religious traditions have been a part of Russian nationalism, and sometimes part of a system of enslavement, both political and intellectual. At times they make the content of Western European religion clearer by contrast. The resentment of Western missionary efforts in Russia is partly nationalistic, but it is also part of the awareness of the extent to which East European cultural identity has been organized around the traditions of Byzantine-Slavic religion, with an intellectual style very different from the West. Those who bridge Western and East European religious traditions, like Jaroslav Pelikan and Ihor Shevchenko, have combined different worlds as surely as scholars like Harry Wolfson, who worked at the boundaries of Jewish and Christian traditions. Sometimes it is only by coming to know others that we truly recognize ourselves.
LinguistFriend
The meeting was fascinating, with a group of mostly German European physicians meeting together with mainly Russian and Ukrainian physicians in a hotel located on the periphery of Kiev, but the groups were largely separated by language. I was the only Russian-speaking Westerner besides an Israeli physician and one East German physician. I had been asked to lecture in English, which was understood by most of the Europeans, but when Russians conversing with me in Russian asked when I would speak, and what language I would speak in, their disappointment was patent when I replied that I had been asked to lecture in English. So, after a day or so of this, one afternoon I went back to my room and sat down and wrote out my lecture in Russian. When the time came for me to deliver my talk, it turned out that the slides were inverted in the projector. So I looked out over the auditorium and commented in Russian while the projectionist inverted the slides, "the projectionist wanted to show that I came from the other side of the world, where everyone is upside down!" When the Russians laughed at once, and then a few seconds later so did the Europeans when they got the translation of my comment, I knew that everything would work and the lecture would go well.
For the Russian and Ukrainian physicians, the meeting was a valued opportunity to
catch up with Western medical knowledge and to make personal contacts. I in turn was happy to be able to make further contact with European and Russian colleagues in the
scientific specialty of the physiology of the larynx. Furthermore, since I spent much of the first part of my academic life in the pursuit of Russian and Byzantine-Slavic studies, my visit to Kiev was also an exposure to the realia of ancient Slavic Christian religious culture. When I walked through the ancient Cathedral of St. Sophia in the city of Kiev, dating from the 11th c., at first I was puzzled at the familiarity of the Old Russian inscriptions scratched on the columns, until I recalled that I had read them long before in a Russian archeological monograph on the cathedral that was on my bookshelves at home in Los Angeles.
However, the most startling view of the trip had no horizon. It was the tunnels underneath the Cave Monastery in Kiev, on the riverbank above the Dnieper. The Cave Monastery, dating from the same period as the Cathedral of St. Sophia, shares with it the distinction of being part of the cradle of Russian Christianity. When invaders would ride into Kiev a thousand years ago, it was to these tunnels beneath the monastery that the monks would retreat, to emerge when the enemy departed. Religion also took a dreadful beating in Soviet Russia, and religious artefacts were systematically destroyed, sometimes in bonfires of icons. But, here at the Cave Monastery, Russian religion was reemerging, like the monks coming out of their caves.
The caves contain many artefacts and mummies of medieval monks. I had to restrain myself from discussing them with my fellow visitors, since we were forbidden to speak above a whisper in the caves. When I talked with the monks, only a few of them were older and well educated. Many were very young, and not well educated either about historical Christianity beyond the customary rituals, or learned in the Old Slavic langue of the earliest Slavic books, still the language of the Byzantine Slavic liturgy. I ached at this, and felt that I would like to come back to Kiev in a different persona and teach them the ancient language of the earliest Slavic Christian books, which served as the first common literary language of Eastern Europe in the middle ages, like Latin in the West. In the course of writing my doctoral dissertation on details of the grammar of the Old Slavic language, I had read through all of the published texts of the earliest manuscripts preserved in this language, all of which were works translated from Greek Christian literature, as well as their Greek originals, until the language of the Old Slavic texts was as transparent to me as the New York Times. However, at the Cave monastery, I realized for the first time the extent to which not only many Russian Jews, but also the Christians, had been deracinated by the years of the Soviet regime. And eerily, cliche'd though it sounds, suddenly I realized that here, in the winding tunnels beneath the Cave Monastery, I could easily imagine that I might hear the soft thud of the heartbeat of Russia.
Russia's ancient religious traditions have been a part of Russian nationalism, and sometimes part of a system of enslavement, both political and intellectual. At times they make the content of Western European religion clearer by contrast. The resentment of Western missionary efforts in Russia is partly nationalistic, but it is also part of the awareness of the extent to which East European cultural identity has been organized around the traditions of Byzantine-Slavic religion, with an intellectual style very different from the West. Those who bridge Western and East European religious traditions, like Jaroslav Pelikan and Ihor Shevchenko, have combined different worlds as surely as scholars like Harry Wolfson, who worked at the boundaries of Jewish and Christian traditions. Sometimes it is only by coming to know others that we truly recognize ourselves.
LinguistFriend
Harvard Divinity School really does seem to think I'm an alum
Now I am invited to an Alumni/ae event on May 10.
CC
CC
Immigration protest completely snarls DC mass transit
I could see the lines at Metro from I-66, no mean feat, I can assure you, as it means that the lines went from in the station, across a bridge that passes over the highway and presumably out into the parking lot. This is 4th-of-July-level subway traffic.
Bodes well for them having had a good turnout
Bodes well for them having had a good turnout
Sunday, April 09, 2006
"How can you be a UU and kill people?"
a girl in my YRUU group asked. We were making brownies for a bake sale and the subject of the discussion was UUs in the military.
"Well," I said, bearing in mind that this girl goes to a quaker school, "A UU in the military could probably give you a more reasonable answer than I can, and I am trying to arrange it so one can come here and talk to the group. But as far as I know, most people are OK with the police having to kill people every now and again when those people are trying to kill them or trying to hurt somebody else. At this point, our soldiers in Iraq aren't fighting another army, they are trying to keep order and trying to keep Iraq from breaking out into a civil war. I really don't think they are killing anybody they don't strictly feel they have to. As far as I can tell, at this point they are more or less the cops. Like the cops, sometimes they don't behave as they should, but I don't doubt that any UUs over there are doing the best they can to be just and reasonable in a difficult situation."
My little soliloquy wasn't enough of an explanation, I know, but it seemed to satisfy her for the moment and the conversation moved on to other things, most notably the similarity between Quaker values and UU values. (Swoon! Why can't teaching RE ALWAYS be like that??)
I've been thinking a lot about the UUs and violence issue. There is a part of my brain that cries out for structure, and that part loves the idea of being able to say that violence is against my religion.
But in the end, I can't believe it.
TheCSO and I have had a lot of talks about the Christian Peacemaker Teams recently. He has strong objections to them, likening them to skiers who knowingly go onto a dangerous mountain then endanger rescuers when the inevitable avalanche occurs. Admittedly, the CPT was less than gracious upon being rescued, putting out a press release describing their members in glowing terms and not bothering to mention the soldiers who had rescued them. (Note that the press release says the prisoners were "released" Yeah, they were "released" when a bunch of British, American and Iraqi soldiers showed up on the doorstep of the place where they were being held. I think most of us would say they were "rescued" and I do agree with the CPT's critics that the CPT was quite uncharitable there.) After much, much negative media reaction, they did issue a statement thanking the soldiers.
What makes the issue even muddier is that these folks were only released when an insurgent who was being interrogated by the Americans gave up the address of the place where they were being held. And I think we all know what "interrogated by the Americans" means these days.
To have been saved by violence, or at least soldiers, puts these advocates of nonviolence in an almost impossible Public Relations position. Given that they had specifically requested not to be rescued, I'm not sure any statement could have remained true to their principles yet had the proper tone.
((FWIW, here's an interesting (and far more sympathetic) essay on the CPT folks from Canada. ))
I've been giving a lot of thought to the proposed study action issue.
I'm torn, and not the least by the fact that all that's being debated right now is whether we should study and discuss the thing. I'm usually a great fan of studying and discussing things, at least in the beginning. In junior high school, I played Stephen Hopkins in 1776 and greatly relished being able to say "Well, in all my years I ain't never heard, seen nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn't be talked about. Hell yeah! I'm for debating anything. Rhode Island says yea!" every night.
My observation is that the UUA only puts out two kinds of statements, vague and intolerable. The proposed study action issue is of the first sort, asking the reader to examine the issue of violence from many perspectives*. It includes mildly annoying political ideas about identifying the forms of intervention we will support that if accepted I am certian will result in many long-winded, statements about what President Whoever believes on behalf of all the member congregations, as well as hasty assurances that we will listen to all points of view and more philosophical questions like "What are the hallmarks of peaceful cultures?" and "What role do human physiology and psychology play in the perpetuation of violence?"
But I'm pretty certian the meat of the question is "Should we become a peace church?," or as the tentative study action issue puts it, "Should we, the Unitarian Universalist Association and member congregations, reject violence in any form?"
I really think we overstate our case when we talk about becoming a peace church. Quite arguably, this war was unjust. But just wars do happen, and I don't think we should shrink from fighting them. The study action issue states "Our principles are models for peacemaking yet we act as if violence is more effective than nonviolence in certain situations." I don't see the contradiction in that. Maslow's statement that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail seems relevant here. If violence is our hammer, not every problem can be most effectively solved by violence, but some problems are nails. Sometimes, something is threatened that it is worth using violence to defend.
Besides, that "violence cannot solve problems" is a belief, and last I checked we weren't supposed to be in the business of telling our members what to believe. That's one reason why I so disliked the "tell the YRUUers how to come off as consciencious objectors" portion of the anti-recruitment YRUU class I attended. I love those guys and would be devestated if any of them died in a war, but "here's how to appear to be a consciencious objector so you can get out of getting drafted" is not the same lesson as asking them whether they have a fundamental objection to war in the first place.
I am especially suspicious of the statement that we will "Honor and support the challenges of military and law enforcement personnel and their families." I don't think I have to remind regular readers that we aren't doing so hot at that right now, and I assume things would only get worse as we got on a peace crusade. Conformity on this issue is leading to enough unpleasantness for military and veteran UUs already. As a peace church we would face many of the same problems the Christian Peacemakers are facing in trying to resolve these contradictions, except that our problems would be within our own churches as police officers and members of the armed forces found that their careers were now against their religion because a vote of GA said so.
We aren't the Quakers, the Witnesses or the Mennonites. This isn't our tradition. It could be our new tradition, but I worry that it wouldn't reflect who we are, but what we're fearing right now.
Pacifists will say that if every church were a peace church "The baptized Catholic leader of Nazi Germany, Adolph Hitler, would have been raised within a progressive peace church by a strong pacifist Catholic mother who would have nurtured and loved and protected little Adolph from the cruelty of his father and the cruelty of his society." That particular pacifist goes on to say that if only the churches were pacifist, the (as far as I know non-religious) Columbine shooters would have been well-adjusted, too.
This is an extreme, but I don't think completely unrealistic example of the sort of thinking that worries me. One who assumes that if US troops left Iraq today, then tomorrow the Iraqis would govern themselves in peaceful anarchy and everything in the region would be much improved without the police-type protection the troops are providing is also among the sweetly delusional.
Katy-the-Wise once preached that sentimentality was one of the seven deadly sins, defining it as "overvaluing something for reasons not of fact but of desire." She provided the quite UU-palatable example of parental notification laws for abortions. These laws are written with the idea that every set of parents will be warm and wise and understanding with only the good of their children at heart. The reality that some pregnant girls fear getting beaten or thrown out of the house is ignored for not fitting into the view of reality that the conservatives who write these laws have chosen.
It seems apposite to me to categorize our desire to be a peace church, along with my desire to have violence be against my religion, as falling within the sin of sentimentality.
CC
* Though if we do accept it, one of the first suggested actions is "Advocate for peacemaking initiatives at all levels of government." That's what UUism needs. More lobbying. Because what we're doing has been such a terribly effective use of our time.
"Well," I said, bearing in mind that this girl goes to a quaker school, "A UU in the military could probably give you a more reasonable answer than I can, and I am trying to arrange it so one can come here and talk to the group. But as far as I know, most people are OK with the police having to kill people every now and again when those people are trying to kill them or trying to hurt somebody else. At this point, our soldiers in Iraq aren't fighting another army, they are trying to keep order and trying to keep Iraq from breaking out into a civil war. I really don't think they are killing anybody they don't strictly feel they have to. As far as I can tell, at this point they are more or less the cops. Like the cops, sometimes they don't behave as they should, but I don't doubt that any UUs over there are doing the best they can to be just and reasonable in a difficult situation."
My little soliloquy wasn't enough of an explanation, I know, but it seemed to satisfy her for the moment and the conversation moved on to other things, most notably the similarity between Quaker values and UU values. (Swoon! Why can't teaching RE ALWAYS be like that??)
I've been thinking a lot about the UUs and violence issue. There is a part of my brain that cries out for structure, and that part loves the idea of being able to say that violence is against my religion.
But in the end, I can't believe it.
TheCSO and I have had a lot of talks about the Christian Peacemaker Teams recently. He has strong objections to them, likening them to skiers who knowingly go onto a dangerous mountain then endanger rescuers when the inevitable avalanche occurs. Admittedly, the CPT was less than gracious upon being rescued, putting out a press release describing their members in glowing terms and not bothering to mention the soldiers who had rescued them. (Note that the press release says the prisoners were "released" Yeah, they were "released" when a bunch of British, American and Iraqi soldiers showed up on the doorstep of the place where they were being held. I think most of us would say they were "rescued" and I do agree with the CPT's critics that the CPT was quite uncharitable there.) After much, much negative media reaction, they did issue a statement thanking the soldiers.
What makes the issue even muddier is that these folks were only released when an insurgent who was being interrogated by the Americans gave up the address of the place where they were being held. And I think we all know what "interrogated by the Americans" means these days.
To have been saved by violence, or at least soldiers, puts these advocates of nonviolence in an almost impossible Public Relations position. Given that they had specifically requested not to be rescued, I'm not sure any statement could have remained true to their principles yet had the proper tone.
((FWIW, here's an interesting (and far more sympathetic) essay on the CPT folks from Canada. ))
I've been giving a lot of thought to the proposed study action issue.
I'm torn, and not the least by the fact that all that's being debated right now is whether we should study and discuss the thing. I'm usually a great fan of studying and discussing things, at least in the beginning. In junior high school, I played Stephen Hopkins in 1776 and greatly relished being able to say "Well, in all my years I ain't never heard, seen nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn't be talked about. Hell yeah! I'm for debating anything. Rhode Island says yea!" every night.
My observation is that the UUA only puts out two kinds of statements, vague and intolerable. The proposed study action issue is of the first sort, asking the reader to examine the issue of violence from many perspectives*. It includes mildly annoying political ideas about identifying the forms of intervention we will support that if accepted I am certian will result in many long-winded, statements about what President Whoever believes on behalf of all the member congregations, as well as hasty assurances that we will listen to all points of view and more philosophical questions like "What are the hallmarks of peaceful cultures?" and "What role do human physiology and psychology play in the perpetuation of violence?"
But I'm pretty certian the meat of the question is "Should we become a peace church?," or as the tentative study action issue puts it, "Should we, the Unitarian Universalist Association and member congregations, reject violence in any form?"
I really think we overstate our case when we talk about becoming a peace church. Quite arguably, this war was unjust. But just wars do happen, and I don't think we should shrink from fighting them. The study action issue states "Our principles are models for peacemaking yet we act as if violence is more effective than nonviolence in certain situations." I don't see the contradiction in that. Maslow's statement that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail seems relevant here. If violence is our hammer, not every problem can be most effectively solved by violence, but some problems are nails. Sometimes, something is threatened that it is worth using violence to defend.
Besides, that "violence cannot solve problems" is a belief, and last I checked we weren't supposed to be in the business of telling our members what to believe. That's one reason why I so disliked the "tell the YRUUers how to come off as consciencious objectors" portion of the anti-recruitment YRUU class I attended. I love those guys and would be devestated if any of them died in a war, but "here's how to appear to be a consciencious objector so you can get out of getting drafted" is not the same lesson as asking them whether they have a fundamental objection to war in the first place.
I am especially suspicious of the statement that we will "Honor and support the challenges of military and law enforcement personnel and their families." I don't think I have to remind regular readers that we aren't doing so hot at that right now, and I assume things would only get worse as we got on a peace crusade. Conformity on this issue is leading to enough unpleasantness for military and veteran UUs already. As a peace church we would face many of the same problems the Christian Peacemakers are facing in trying to resolve these contradictions, except that our problems would be within our own churches as police officers and members of the armed forces found that their careers were now against their religion because a vote of GA said so.
We aren't the Quakers, the Witnesses or the Mennonites. This isn't our tradition. It could be our new tradition, but I worry that it wouldn't reflect who we are, but what we're fearing right now.
Pacifists will say that if every church were a peace church "The baptized Catholic leader of Nazi Germany, Adolph Hitler, would have been raised within a progressive peace church by a strong pacifist Catholic mother who would have nurtured and loved and protected little Adolph from the cruelty of his father and the cruelty of his society." That particular pacifist goes on to say that if only the churches were pacifist, the (as far as I know non-religious) Columbine shooters would have been well-adjusted, too.
This is an extreme, but I don't think completely unrealistic example of the sort of thinking that worries me. One who assumes that if US troops left Iraq today, then tomorrow the Iraqis would govern themselves in peaceful anarchy and everything in the region would be much improved without the police-type protection the troops are providing is also among the sweetly delusional.
Katy-the-Wise once preached that sentimentality was one of the seven deadly sins, defining it as "overvaluing something for reasons not of fact but of desire." She provided the quite UU-palatable example of parental notification laws for abortions. These laws are written with the idea that every set of parents will be warm and wise and understanding with only the good of their children at heart. The reality that some pregnant girls fear getting beaten or thrown out of the house is ignored for not fitting into the view of reality that the conservatives who write these laws have chosen.
It seems apposite to me to categorize our desire to be a peace church, along with my desire to have violence be against my religion, as falling within the sin of sentimentality.
CC
* Though if we do accept it, one of the first suggested actions is "Advocate for peacemaking initiatives at all levels of government." That's what UUism needs. More lobbying. Because what we're doing has been such a terribly effective use of our time.
Request to Chalisseurs
If you're going to write about The Chaliceblog someplace, please provide a link back.
Thanks,
CC
Ps. Props to Joel for naming my readers.
Pps. I don't recall anybody coming out against the UUA's support of gay marriage. I don't have a problem with us supporting it as a general concept. I don't especially cotton to us taking a stand on specific legislation and I REALLY don't like us saying from the pulpit or in RE that this candidate or that candidate is a good guy or not a good guy. (Yes, Bush is technically no longer a candidate, but you know what I mean.)
Thanks,
CC
Ps. Props to Joel for naming my readers.
Pps. I don't recall anybody coming out against the UUA's support of gay marriage. I don't have a problem with us supporting it as a general concept. I don't especially cotton to us taking a stand on specific legislation and I REALLY don't like us saying from the pulpit or in RE that this candidate or that candidate is a good guy or not a good guy. (Yes, Bush is technically no longer a candidate, but you know what I mean.)
TheCSO requested that I minimize my rants about DC area police shootings, but...
I have to say that if the DC superior court put a quadrapelegic man who needed a nurse 20 hours a day in jail for ten days for having one marijuana cigarette, and in that time managed to kill him, and the report they produced on it was six pages long, then I really don't think the IHOP shooting or the dead optometrist will be taken all that seriously.
CC
CC
"Why does it cost $2,000 per day to film at the Smithsonian?"
(an answer to a question asked here.)
1. Extra security.
2. Whenever artifacts are taken out of storage, you have to go through extensive restoration and preservation.
3. Remember the last scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where the ark of the convenant is carefully packed away in a crate, then taken painstakingly to a giant warehouse with carefully monitored conditions and filed away? My impression is that, to a greater or lesser degree, is a decent representation of what the Smithsonian archives looks like. Getting a bunch of stuff from that warehouse to wherever the filmmakers are filming and back without damaging said stuff probably is quite expensive.
4. The $2,000 per day figure is probably in truth somewhat arbitrary, but documentary filming access is usually bought on a "per day" basis, so the Smithsonian is just going with the industry standard.
CC
1. Extra security.
2. Whenever artifacts are taken out of storage, you have to go through extensive restoration and preservation.
3. Remember the last scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where the ark of the convenant is carefully packed away in a crate, then taken painstakingly to a giant warehouse with carefully monitored conditions and filed away? My impression is that, to a greater or lesser degree, is a decent representation of what the Smithsonian archives looks like. Getting a bunch of stuff from that warehouse to wherever the filmmakers are filming and back without damaging said stuff probably is quite expensive.
4. The $2,000 per day figure is probably in truth somewhat arbitrary, but documentary filming access is usually bought on a "per day" basis, so the Smithsonian is just going with the industry standard.
CC
Word of the Day
Chode /chohd/ also spelled "Choad"
Pretty much an all-purpose dirty word at this point, Chode comes from Indian vernacular for "to fuck." Probably go here by way of the UK.
CC learned it from a gay guy named Ryan she went to college with, who said it was specifically the very sensitive area of muscle between scrotum and anus, though lots of people think it is a word for a short, yet wide, penis.
CC
Hey, I was asked...
Pretty much an all-purpose dirty word at this point, Chode comes from Indian vernacular for "to fuck." Probably go here by way of the UK.
CC learned it from a gay guy named Ryan she went to college with, who said it was specifically the very sensitive area of muscle between scrotum and anus, though lots of people think it is a word for a short, yet wide, penis.
CC
Hey, I was asked...
Remember when conseratives LIKED hardworking, very religious people with closeknit families?
When I start feeling too libertarian, I go off and reread The Road to Wigan Pier. Which is not to say that I am a big Orwell fan. Honestly, I think the best thing to come out of "1984" was that really badass Macintosh commercial. (Seriously, if you don't remember it, go have a look at the quicktime version through the link. It's worth it. It was directed by the dude who did Blade Runner and it seriously kicks ass.)
Anway, I don't think even think a rereading of "The Road to Wigan Pier" would make me feel sympathy for this guy.
CC
Thinking "oh my goodness, that commercial is 22 years old!"
Anway, I don't think even think a rereading of "The Road to Wigan Pier" would make me feel sympathy for this guy.
CC
Thinking "oh my goodness, that commercial is 22 years old!"
Saturday, April 08, 2006
I like this woman, I don't like this man.
First off, I like this woman. A New York woman, Thao Nguyen, was flashed on the subway. Instead of doing what I would do, which is go home, shut the door and cry, this lady whipped out a cell camera and got a picture of the guy who had flashed her.
Nguyen went home and put the photo on the internet, where it was seen by thousands of people. It eventually ended up on the cover of New York magazine.
He got caught, of course. And now New York Magazine has a story on him.
In which he comes of as a massive massive chode.
For whatever reason, the magazine buries what a chode he is until late in the story. But after several breathless paragraphs about how healthy his five foot three self is from his raw food diet (???), finally we get to the, ahem, meat of the article where Hoyt says brilliant things like:
"I wouldn’t imagine somebody throwing it up on the Internet for millions of people and destroying your life like that,” he says. “It’s one thing to take it to the police. But on the Internet, I read a lot of people saying, ‘That was not too cool of her. That was really screwed up.’ ”
Hoyt believes that if he and Nguyen had only met under different circumstances, she might really like him. “You know, she’d go, ‘That guy’s pretty cool. He’s got this restaurant, and he’s fun,’ ” Hoyt says. “She’d probably want to go out with me.”
As Master Yoda would say, "right, that boy is not."
CC
Ps. If anybody gives you crap in New York City, a website called HollaBackNYC now exists solely for people to do what Nguyen did.
PPs. A google image search for "Dan Hoyt" reveals that way too many poor bastards share the guy's name.
Nguyen went home and put the photo on the internet, where it was seen by thousands of people. It eventually ended up on the cover of New York magazine.
He got caught, of course. And now New York Magazine has a story on him.
In which he comes of as a massive massive chode.
For whatever reason, the magazine buries what a chode he is until late in the story. But after several breathless paragraphs about how healthy his five foot three self is from his raw food diet (???), finally we get to the, ahem, meat of the article where Hoyt says brilliant things like:
"I wouldn’t imagine somebody throwing it up on the Internet for millions of people and destroying your life like that,” he says. “It’s one thing to take it to the police. But on the Internet, I read a lot of people saying, ‘That was not too cool of her. That was really screwed up.’ ”
Hoyt believes that if he and Nguyen had only met under different circumstances, she might really like him. “You know, she’d go, ‘That guy’s pretty cool. He’s got this restaurant, and he’s fun,’ ” Hoyt says. “She’d probably want to go out with me.”
As Master Yoda would say, "right, that boy is not."
CC
Ps. If anybody gives you crap in New York City, a website called HollaBackNYC now exists solely for people to do what Nguyen did.
PPs. A google image search for "Dan Hoyt" reveals that way too many poor bastards share the guy's name.
Taxpayers, it's time to get pissed
The Smithsonian has entered into a deal with Showtime where filmmakers other than Showtime will get severely restricted access to the Smithsonian's collection and employees.
The Smithsonian Institution is 74 percent taxpayer supported.
And they are not even releasing the details of the deal.
Sigh.
CC
The Smithsonian Institution is 74 percent taxpayer supported.
And they are not even releasing the details of the deal.
Sigh.
CC
Friday, April 07, 2006
Rituals of eating
So I'm in the grocery store this afternoon, buying some last minute ingrediants for tonight's dinner. I run into Tim, who is the brother of one of my high school friends. We walk around the store and chat for awhile. Tim is about to get out of school with a degree in graphic design. His sister Gwen is doing nifty things in the physics department of the University of Colorado.
The conversation winds down and I notice Tim is carrying only a box of pistachios.
He'd mentioned earlier that his mom was out of town and I know he lives with her.
"So, Tim," I said. "Would you like to kick off your big bachelor weekend with a home cooked meal? We'd love to have you..."
"What are you having?" Tim asked. (Goodness, I think, I invite him to dinner and he asks what I'm cooking. That's a fresh kid.)
"I'm making a chipotle chicken and mushroom pizza and we're having salad with it."
"Can't," he says. "I'm Catholic."
And I instantly feel bad for my assumption that he was being picky. Now we all know I wanted to tell him that I could make fish instead. And we all know he would have said I shouldn't make a fuss and he and his pistachios were fine. So I decided to save us both some awkwardness. I told him if he wanted to come over Saturday to give us a call and we said goodbye.
He works at Edie's, so I have no shortage of chances to invite him again, but his refusal has me reflecting on the fact that we as Unitarians have no dietary restrictions or food rituals at all.
I'm not even completely sorry we don't. I think often people who have that sort of thing get too caught up in the ritual but forget the meaning. At the same time, food can be a powerful thing. (Indeed, the superiority I feel when on a successful diet is far and away more intense than any religious zealotry I ever feel.)
What do we lose by not telling each other what to eat? What do we gain?
CC
The conversation winds down and I notice Tim is carrying only a box of pistachios.
He'd mentioned earlier that his mom was out of town and I know he lives with her.
"So, Tim," I said. "Would you like to kick off your big bachelor weekend with a home cooked meal? We'd love to have you..."
"What are you having?" Tim asked. (Goodness, I think, I invite him to dinner and he asks what I'm cooking. That's a fresh kid.)
"I'm making a chipotle chicken and mushroom pizza and we're having salad with it."
"Can't," he says. "I'm Catholic."
And I instantly feel bad for my assumption that he was being picky. Now we all know I wanted to tell him that I could make fish instead. And we all know he would have said I shouldn't make a fuss and he and his pistachios were fine. So I decided to save us both some awkwardness. I told him if he wanted to come over Saturday to give us a call and we said goodbye.
He works at Edie's, so I have no shortage of chances to invite him again, but his refusal has me reflecting on the fact that we as Unitarians have no dietary restrictions or food rituals at all.
I'm not even completely sorry we don't. I think often people who have that sort of thing get too caught up in the ritual but forget the meaning. At the same time, food can be a powerful thing. (Indeed, the superiority I feel when on a successful diet is far and away more intense than any religious zealotry I ever feel.)
What do we lose by not telling each other what to eat? What do we gain?
CC
A new kind of freelance journalism
This guy took donations, saying that when he got enough money, he'd write a story on Los Alamos.
And what a story he wrote.
I hope this kind of journalism takes off, and I hope he gets an idea for another project because I will be more than happy to contribute.
CC
Ps. And the guy's blog isn't half bad either.
And what a story he wrote.
I hope this kind of journalism takes off, and I hope he gets an idea for another project because I will be more than happy to contribute.
CC
Ps. And the guy's blog isn't half bad either.
This also is a good thing (updated)
I really start to feel unhip and crusty when I'm in the mall these days. I spent my time in the mall as a kid, but my underwear was safely inside my clothes. And my rude t-shirts do not in retrospect seem as rude as their rude t-shirts.
Something about "I taught your boyfriend that thing you like" plastered across the chest of a ten-year-old girl is pretty disconcerting.
Ditto "I'm not a slut, I'm just popular!" on a sixteen year old.
Ditto "I was molested by Micheal and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" on anybody.
Well, a lady named Jenifer Hoffman has seen what I've seen and actually did something about it. She started a company called Emotional Armor making t-shirts with more positive slogans.
Some of them, e.g. "I believe in me" are a little hokey, but they have some like "Princess. Not in need of rescue" that sound edgy enough to pass in the halls of a junior high school.
Good stuff.
CC
(update: I had the company's name wrong. The ever-observant Sean Parker Dennison pointed this out and I fixed it.)
Something about "I taught your boyfriend that thing you like" plastered across the chest of a ten-year-old girl is pretty disconcerting.
Ditto "I'm not a slut, I'm just popular!" on a sixteen year old.
Ditto "I was molested by Micheal and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" on anybody.
Well, a lady named Jenifer Hoffman has seen what I've seen and actually did something about it. She started a company called Emotional Armor making t-shirts with more positive slogans.
Some of them, e.g. "I believe in me" are a little hokey, but they have some like "Princess. Not in need of rescue" that sound edgy enough to pass in the halls of a junior high school.
Good stuff.
CC
(update: I had the company's name wrong. The ever-observant Sean Parker Dennison pointed this out and I fixed it.)
Very Cool
One of my friends has fibromyalgia. I can't quite see her getting in to belly dancing, but it's neat that there are some new treatments.
CC
CC
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Cassandra gripes
I have a sense of people who will be more trouble than they are worth. I’m not quite certain how I do it, though someone who knows about such things has suggested that in early life, I found it necessary to be able to learn a lot about someone’s mood quickly.
I can’t quite apply this knack to my own life consistently, though my general principal that how someone is in bed is very significant to their character has never been disproved. But when a friend tells me about a new friend or a new significant other, I can often get a sense of them very quickly.
Quite often, I will tell a person that their new significant other is a poor choice and a year later, they will be heartbroken and I will have been right, but feel bad.
Most dramatically, this happened with a close friend who knew a woman who was divorcing. Upon meeting this lady, I instantly had a bad feeling about her. She said “cooking is my therapy” and anyone who talks about therapy casually at great length is trouble, and said a few other things that were mild red flags, but the sum of the slightly odd things she said did not add up to the feeling of dread she gave me.
She invited my friend to be on the board of a small charity she worked for. I said then that I felt she was doing it to give herself greater power to manipulate the charity.
My friend ignored me, joined the board and had been on it about a year when the woman ran off with tens of thousands of dollars from the charity.
This is not the first time this has happened. This is like the billionth time it has happened and it is irritating to be in the position of someone who knows what's going to happen, yet isn't believed, over and over again.
Some of it in common sense. Someone will basically treat you the way they treat other people. Hard to believe that the great guy who invents insulting nicknames for his ex-wife will someday invent some for you, but it's almost certainly true. The sense I can get for someone from casual interactions seems to be beyond this. (For another sign, people who are very kind to non-relative kids of the opposite gender tend to be very good people. I don't know how I got this idea, but it's usually correct.)
I guess what gets me the most is that I don’t have any proof. There’s nothing I can point to that is actual evidence, but sometimes I just know. That my subconscious is good at telling when people are shifty and can see things I don’t is as good an explanation as any. But I can’t quite say “I have an intuitive sense that your new boyfriend is really insecure and is going to break your heart just because he can” or “Fire your accountant, just trust me, do it.”
I can’t give my friends a rational reason why they should listen to me, but I’m always a bit irritated when they come to me with broken hearts after the fact.
Does anyone else have this problem?
CC
I can’t quite apply this knack to my own life consistently, though my general principal that how someone is in bed is very significant to their character has never been disproved. But when a friend tells me about a new friend or a new significant other, I can often get a sense of them very quickly.
Quite often, I will tell a person that their new significant other is a poor choice and a year later, they will be heartbroken and I will have been right, but feel bad.
Most dramatically, this happened with a close friend who knew a woman who was divorcing. Upon meeting this lady, I instantly had a bad feeling about her. She said “cooking is my therapy” and anyone who talks about therapy casually at great length is trouble, and said a few other things that were mild red flags, but the sum of the slightly odd things she said did not add up to the feeling of dread she gave me.
She invited my friend to be on the board of a small charity she worked for. I said then that I felt she was doing it to give herself greater power to manipulate the charity.
My friend ignored me, joined the board and had been on it about a year when the woman ran off with tens of thousands of dollars from the charity.
This is not the first time this has happened. This is like the billionth time it has happened and it is irritating to be in the position of someone who knows what's going to happen, yet isn't believed, over and over again.
Some of it in common sense. Someone will basically treat you the way they treat other people. Hard to believe that the great guy who invents insulting nicknames for his ex-wife will someday invent some for you, but it's almost certainly true. The sense I can get for someone from casual interactions seems to be beyond this. (For another sign, people who are very kind to non-relative kids of the opposite gender tend to be very good people. I don't know how I got this idea, but it's usually correct.)
I guess what gets me the most is that I don’t have any proof. There’s nothing I can point to that is actual evidence, but sometimes I just know. That my subconscious is good at telling when people are shifty and can see things I don’t is as good an explanation as any. But I can’t quite say “I have an intuitive sense that your new boyfriend is really insecure and is going to break your heart just because he can” or “Fire your accountant, just trust me, do it.”
I can’t give my friends a rational reason why they should listen to me, but I’m always a bit irritated when they come to me with broken hearts after the fact.
Does anyone else have this problem?
CC
Studying the slurs
A helpful person gave me this link, which is a directory of racial slurs. As a cultural artifact, it is something fascinating. I found that movies I've never even heard of live on as ethic slurs.
Whether a term that white people mostly for other white people (e.g. Yankee, Brit, Redcoat, POHM, WASP, Paddy Wagon) counts as a racial slur is an interesting question. Somehow, I'm not quite getting "redcoat," what the 1700's era American soldiers called the British soldiers, as a racial slur or ethnic slur (after all, the patriots were Brits transplanted a few generations before, how could they really be any different ethnically,) but whatever. Oddly enough, they left out "yuppie," which should probably be there as WASP is.
None of those words would be listed in the dictionary as slurs any more than "boat people" was, but all of them have the power to hurt people in the right context.
IN DC, we had a politician lose his job a few years ago for using the word "Niggardly," which comes from the Scandanavian "hnogard" and has nothing to do with race. Googling the word reveals that a teacher got fired for using it in 2002. FWIW, the racial slur comes from Niger, which is Latin for "black." (That said, anyone who makes such a mistake probably isn't cut out to be a politician anyway.)
I, for one, will do my best to let others cheer for the Yankees, exterminate their wasps, and shop for red coats without giving them the what for they may deserve, but the larger question of how we communicate with each other still stands.
Sad, yet funny, story: When I was a little kid, we did some sort of simulation exercise in the forth grade where the class was divided into loyalists and patriots. For a week, we did things like writing letters to each other arguing about who should pay for the French and Indian war.
Within that week, the groups developed a whole range of insults for one another, primarily "Brit Brats" for the loyalists and "tax cows" for the patriots, though there were many, many variations.
If a bunch of forth graders can work that fast, polite discourse may be doomed.
CC
Whether a term that white people mostly for other white people (e.g. Yankee, Brit, Redcoat, POHM, WASP, Paddy Wagon) counts as a racial slur is an interesting question. Somehow, I'm not quite getting "redcoat," what the 1700's era American soldiers called the British soldiers, as a racial slur or ethnic slur (after all, the patriots were Brits transplanted a few generations before, how could they really be any different ethnically,) but whatever. Oddly enough, they left out "yuppie," which should probably be there as WASP is.
None of those words would be listed in the dictionary as slurs any more than "boat people" was, but all of them have the power to hurt people in the right context.
IN DC, we had a politician lose his job a few years ago for using the word "Niggardly," which comes from the Scandanavian "hnogard" and has nothing to do with race. Googling the word reveals that a teacher got fired for using it in 2002. FWIW, the racial slur comes from Niger, which is Latin for "black." (That said, anyone who makes such a mistake probably isn't cut out to be a politician anyway.)
I, for one, will do my best to let others cheer for the Yankees, exterminate their wasps, and shop for red coats without giving them the what for they may deserve, but the larger question of how we communicate with each other still stands.
Sad, yet funny, story: When I was a little kid, we did some sort of simulation exercise in the forth grade where the class was divided into loyalists and patriots. For a week, we did things like writing letters to each other arguing about who should pay for the French and Indian war.
Within that week, the groups developed a whole range of insults for one another, primarily "Brit Brats" for the loyalists and "tax cows" for the patriots, though there were many, many variations.
If a bunch of forth graders can work that fast, polite discourse may be doomed.
CC
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
On posting anonymously to "The Chaliceblog"
I do have sitemeter.
So if you're someone I know, or even a semi-regular poster, and you post some confrontational rubbish and don't even have the nads to sign your name, I won't humiliate you by posting your name, though I could, but the CSO and I will make fun of you privately.
CC
who likes her coffee black, her men smart and her sentences run-on
So if you're someone I know, or even a semi-regular poster, and you post some confrontational rubbish and don't even have the nads to sign your name, I won't humiliate you by posting your name, though I could, but the CSO and I will make fun of you privately.
CC
who likes her coffee black, her men smart and her sentences run-on
Sigh.
I just got the meeting minutes from the Youth Ministry Committee meeting I attended.
My voicing my concerns was left out of the minutes.
I wrote back politely asking if, since we had a few free days, I could find a speaker on the experience of military service and how it could align with UU values.
CC
who very rarely writes about her own church and really shouldn't do so at all, but this is just ridiculous.
My voicing my concerns was left out of the minutes.
I wrote back politely asking if, since we had a few free days, I could find a speaker on the experience of military service and how it could align with UU values.
CC
who very rarely writes about her own church and really shouldn't do so at all, but this is just ridiculous.
Help out the Clueless White Girl (updated)
I suppose I deserve this for what I did to Happy Feminist. Recently she wrote an extremely reasonable post detailing the new rules for discourse in her comments sections. Ever the wiseass, I respond in the comments with "So, to clarify, can we or can we not use ethnic slurs?"
Today, just a few days, later, ethnic slurs are very much on my mind.
In a discussion on illegal immigration someplace else, I wrote:
That said, I am a particular fan of boat people. Anyone with the brains, guts and fortitude to build a raft out of old tires and sail it here has genes America needs, IMHO.
Not wanting to offend, I had even looked the term Boat People up in Wikipedia to make sure central Americans didn't consider if offensive.
Having used it, I was swiftly told that I had slurred Asians. I think it is pretty clear from the context that I did not intend it to mean Asians, both because of the surrounding conversation of central Americans and because anyone who built a boat out of tires and sailed it here from Asia would have to be very impressive indeed to survive the trip at all. As is also clear from the context, I didn't mean it as a slur, either. As someone born in 1978, I've mostly seen the term used for central Americans, Haitians in particular. Whatever use the term had in regards to people escaping from communist Asian countries was quite literally before my time. (Ever notice how everybody is always trying to escape from communist countries? The only one who thinks they are great places to live is Michael Moore.)
I could make the argument that I also am a boat person, though my family's boats were a few hundred years ago and bigger.*
I've learned my lesson about the term "boat people."
But I guess what I need to know now is:
1. How do I know if something is an ethnic slur?
(e.g. The Shorter OED doesn't have the term "boat people." The Big Dog says that boat people is a term for people who have fled a country by boat but doesn't mention any slur aspect whatsoever. (If onelooks up another common ethnic slur, "Disparaging and Offensive" are the first two words of the definition.)
The wikipedia article also treated the term neutrally. Googling the term reveals seemingly neutral uses on CNN and an organization called Boat People SOS raising money for immigrants displaced by Hurricaine Katrina.
I realize what is and isn't a slur is a matter of opinion, but is there a way to find out the general consensus?
2. Where do I find inoffensive terms?
Repeated requests at the other conversation for a non-offensive term for people who are not here in this country legally have thus far been ignored. At wikipedia, people say the term should be "undocumented aliens" but that sounds offensive, too. I hear "undocumented workers," too, but that term seems weird given that the person who is here illegally whom I know best doesn't work.
At this point, I don't even know where to go for the information.
Any suggestions?
CC
Update: Just so those of you who really do associate the term with Asians don't think I'm nuts, here's some pretty decent sources using it in a non-Asian, non-ethnic slur sort of way:
CNN
NPR
The BBC
Amnesty International
and someone was kind enough to email me and tell me that Thomas Friedman uses it in "the Lexus and the Olive Tree" where he makes the same point I did about the genetic possibilities of Central American immigrants who get here through acts of great courage.
*Sometimes I stop and let the idea that we are a nation founded by people who had the courage to get on those boats quietly blow my mind. Is there any question why we were the first people on the moon? America has done some rotten things, starting with the Native Americans, but it's hard not to be proud to be an American as I think about the people leaving home and striking out for the New World.
Today, just a few days, later, ethnic slurs are very much on my mind.
In a discussion on illegal immigration someplace else, I wrote:
That said, I am a particular fan of boat people. Anyone with the brains, guts and fortitude to build a raft out of old tires and sail it here has genes America needs, IMHO.
Not wanting to offend, I had even looked the term Boat People up in Wikipedia to make sure central Americans didn't consider if offensive.
Having used it, I was swiftly told that I had slurred Asians. I think it is pretty clear from the context that I did not intend it to mean Asians, both because of the surrounding conversation of central Americans and because anyone who built a boat out of tires and sailed it here from Asia would have to be very impressive indeed to survive the trip at all. As is also clear from the context, I didn't mean it as a slur, either. As someone born in 1978, I've mostly seen the term used for central Americans, Haitians in particular. Whatever use the term had in regards to people escaping from communist Asian countries was quite literally before my time. (Ever notice how everybody is always trying to escape from communist countries? The only one who thinks they are great places to live is Michael Moore.)
I could make the argument that I also am a boat person, though my family's boats were a few hundred years ago and bigger.*
I've learned my lesson about the term "boat people."
But I guess what I need to know now is:
1. How do I know if something is an ethnic slur?
(e.g. The Shorter OED doesn't have the term "boat people." The Big Dog says that boat people is a term for people who have fled a country by boat but doesn't mention any slur aspect whatsoever. (If onelooks up another common ethnic slur, "Disparaging and Offensive" are the first two words of the definition.)
The wikipedia article also treated the term neutrally. Googling the term reveals seemingly neutral uses on CNN and an organization called Boat People SOS raising money for immigrants displaced by Hurricaine Katrina.
I realize what is and isn't a slur is a matter of opinion, but is there a way to find out the general consensus?
2. Where do I find inoffensive terms?
Repeated requests at the other conversation for a non-offensive term for people who are not here in this country legally have thus far been ignored. At wikipedia, people say the term should be "undocumented aliens" but that sounds offensive, too. I hear "undocumented workers," too, but that term seems weird given that the person who is here illegally whom I know best doesn't work.
At this point, I don't even know where to go for the information.
Any suggestions?
CC
Update: Just so those of you who really do associate the term with Asians don't think I'm nuts, here's some pretty decent sources using it in a non-Asian, non-ethnic slur sort of way:
CNN
NPR
The BBC
Amnesty International
and someone was kind enough to email me and tell me that Thomas Friedman uses it in "the Lexus and the Olive Tree" where he makes the same point I did about the genetic possibilities of Central American immigrants who get here through acts of great courage.
*Sometimes I stop and let the idea that we are a nation founded by people who had the courage to get on those boats quietly blow my mind. Is there any question why we were the first people on the moon? America has done some rotten things, starting with the Native Americans, but it's hard not to be proud to be an American as I think about the people leaving home and striking out for the New World.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Quakerism question
I am thinking about the study action issue and will write something over the next few days.
But I'm curious about something. Are Quakers OK with the police using limited amounts of violence to keep order or in their own defense?
Just curious.
CC
But I'm curious about something. Are Quakers OK with the police using limited amounts of violence to keep order or in their own defense?
Just curious.
CC
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Defending Republicans is getting pretty freaking old, BTW
I sometimes feel like I'm a big crackpot on this politics-in-church issue. Lots of people give me a pat on the head and tell me that the things I describe certainly don't go on their churches or their friends' churches. Even I start to wonder if I've been unlucky and had more than my share of irritating experiences. Maybe the problem really isn't that bad.
Well, above is a bumper sticker that today's YRUU speaker passed out to the group.
The problem really is that bad.
The lady was there on the invitation of our staff youth person to talk about military recruitment in the schools. (Item: We went around the room and only one youth really saw military recruitment as a problem in his school.) I (as one of three youth leaders) was the only one who asked questions that challenged her assertions at all.
((e.g. "So if you're saying that the military is economically drafting people because the military is the best way for poor people to build a better life, by telling poor people not to enlist, aren't you discouraging them taking the best step they can for building a better life?" (Tautological, I realize, but the point seemed to need to be made explicitly. Anti-recruitment lady replied that if we cut military spending them that would help the poor have better lives. That would be a pretty hard position for her to defend if I really asked for details or evidence, but I let it go at this point.))
Toward the end she went in to great detail on how to start declaring yourself a conscientious objector. The other leaders chimed in with more advice. Finally, I said,
"Not to be the conservative again, but we are a creedless faith. Nothing in Unitarian Universalism says that you must be against war or be a conscientious objector. If you don't want to be one, there's nothing wrong with that and the people here will respect your choice."
And one guy said he didn't think he could be a conscientious objector.
I was impressed. It must have taken serious balls to say that with a room full of his peers smiling and nodding at the anti-recruitment lady.
After church, there was a Youth Ministry Committee Meeting where I waited two hours, ahem, until the new business portion of the meeting to bring out the bumpersticker and talk about my concerns.
I was assured that the class for the earlier service had gone quite differently, been very religious and very clear on how the recruitment issue was complicated and there were reasonable people on both sides.
But I'd still say that the recruitment lady's talk had no place as a Sunday Morning activity.
YRUU has so often been the really political girl scouts (with boys) that I am starting to wonder if I am suited to be a leader. A real committment to free thought is a difficult sell to high school kids who are God's own manichaees.
But at the same time, if I'm not there to keep the discussion inclusive, what will the kid who doesn't feel comfortable going along with the group do?
Seems to me it shouldn't just be my job, though...
CC
Saturday, April 01, 2006
CC and TheCSO liked "Thank you for Smoking."
"Thank You for Smoking" was not nearly so badass as it could have been, but TheCSO and I still had a good time. It makes me want to go get Buckley's book, however, as I'm sure it has sharper teeth.
TheCSO and I laughed regularly all the way through, but as we left the theater, I asked why on earth the movie was rated R. (There's very little real violence, and though Katie Holmes' beautiful breasts are mentioned several times, you don't actually see them.)
The CSO and I talked all the way home about movie rathings systems. My guess is that after a truly incisive social satire, we wouldn't have.
Still, we had a good time.
CC
TheCSO and I laughed regularly all the way through, but as we left the theater, I asked why on earth the movie was rated R. (There's very little real violence, and though Katie Holmes' beautiful breasts are mentioned several times, you don't actually see them.)
The CSO and I talked all the way home about movie rathings systems. My guess is that after a truly incisive social satire, we wouldn't have.
Still, we had a good time.
CC
Downside(?) to being the office Christian
(This makes more sense if you've read odd happenstance of the day.)
Late yesterday afternoon, two cubicles away, there's a lot of giggling going on. Several of the other girls in the office are all grouped together. CC wanders by casually.
"I like the cordless kind," one female voice says.
"Yeah. I hear Target is going to start carrying 'the Rabbit."
For a moment, CC is a bit offended that she has been left out of what is apparently a discussion of vibrators. Then she remembers. She's the office Christian.
Congenitally unable to leave well enough alone, she pokes her head in.
"Are you guys talking about vibrators?" She asks, making her voice willfully a little giggely.
"Yes," one girl says, indicating her friend "She and I are very open about things like that." There's general agreement that everyone is open.
CC generally thinks low things about people who feel the need to explain how open they are.
Anway, I left them to their vibrator discussion and went back to work, wondering what was sadder, that the office Christian is assumed to not know about vibrators, or that judging from the conversation, none of the other girls had tried the Hitachi magic wand.
CC
who one time was watching "Sex and the City" with a friend. Samantha was saying "And the best vibrator is..."
and CC said "the Hitachi Magic Wand" just before Samantha echoed "the Hitachi magic wand."
CC's friend looked on her with apparent new respect. Can't beat that for street cred.
Late yesterday afternoon, two cubicles away, there's a lot of giggling going on. Several of the other girls in the office are all grouped together. CC wanders by casually.
"I like the cordless kind," one female voice says.
"Yeah. I hear Target is going to start carrying 'the Rabbit."
For a moment, CC is a bit offended that she has been left out of what is apparently a discussion of vibrators. Then she remembers. She's the office Christian.
Congenitally unable to leave well enough alone, she pokes her head in.
"Are you guys talking about vibrators?" She asks, making her voice willfully a little giggely.
"Yes," one girl says, indicating her friend "She and I are very open about things like that." There's general agreement that everyone is open.
CC generally thinks low things about people who feel the need to explain how open they are.
Anway, I left them to their vibrator discussion and went back to work, wondering what was sadder, that the office Christian is assumed to not know about vibrators, or that judging from the conversation, none of the other girls had tried the Hitachi magic wand.
CC
who one time was watching "Sex and the City" with a friend. Samantha was saying "And the best vibrator is..."
and CC said "the Hitachi Magic Wand" just before Samantha echoed "the Hitachi magic wand."
CC's friend looked on her with apparent new respect. Can't beat that for street cred.
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