From the category archives:
This is almost too much – it really is painful. If you haven’t seen Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on Stephen Colbert’s show, watch it … if you dare! (I must say, I am curious what the tape looks like unedited.)
I admit that I doubted Colbert could sustain his character or make the show interesting for long – who would want to appear on it? I stand corrected.
Peter Levine on “why I am not a zealot about church and state”; well worth reading, quite independently of his excellent choice of source material. (Previous thoughts, from me, here).
You know, it’s very rare that I find myself agreeing with some Instapundit post about terrorism. Vanishingly rarely. And I find the tedious “media bias” paranoia on the right to be…tedious–wait did I say that? Still, the NYT account of the recent Canadian government action (in which they claim to have arrested the members of a terrorist group previously under monitoring when they accepted delivery of some 3 tons of ammonium nitrate) is sort of strange. I obviously don’t suggest that the headline should read “Muslims, trying to kill you, or trying to kill you and your children?”. That said, it actually is a little weird to have the info run as follows: 1) 17 Canadians arrested for plotting to blow things up; 2) the men were mainly of South Asian descent and varying ages as follows; 3) none were known to be affiliated with al Qaida (why would we even think they were? Oh.); 4) RCMP assistant comissioner notes: “They represent the broad strata of our society. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed” (right, now this is crazy, but do they have anything in common at all, like adhering to some fringe-group religious extremism? Anything?); 5) something something something; 6) something something something; 7) other stuff, also, stuff about border security, possibly zinging those who obsess about our southern border at the expense of real security; 8) “Islamic extremists.” Wait, what? Islamic extremists? Surely not!
It merely invites suspicion to dance around an obviously relevant point. I do not think that the risk of anti-Muslim pogroms among readers of the NYT rises appreciably as the issue is mentioned in earlier paragraphs of the article. If Nazis plot to blow stuff up, just go on and say they’re apparently Nazis in paragraph one. I promise not to go look up some random blonde guy and pistol-whip him. Unless he’s this one ex of my sister’s, who’s a racist skin, and…what? OT, sorry. If radical Islamists plot to blow things up, then just go on and say so.
UPDATE: James Wimberley’s point about the “Nazi’s” noted. Namely that they’re Nazis.
FURTHER UPDATE: I thought you all knew enough about me to know that I think Roger Simon is a crazy person–with a hat! It’s my birthday and everything, y’all; be charitible.
_Later_: Here is “Stringer’s try.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hMdc_RCyJg Superb.
I would like some “Koranic Tuna”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4995100.stm with my “BVM Toast”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4034787.stm, thanks. If I could talk Krishna into manifesting himself in some wasabi, lunch might get taken care of.
I feel bad for _Star Wars_ fans, I really do. Most of them are in a kind of “abusive relationship”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/08/revenge-of-the-sith/ with George Lucas. I see “via John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/may#thu-04-original_trilogy (a Vader-codependent himself) that, prior statements notwithstanding, Lucasfilm will “release the first three remastered Star Wars films unaltered”:http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html on DVD, together with the original theatrical release of each. This is the fake kiss-and-make-up period: now that everyone has bought the currently-available retroactively-reprocessed collection, and cried about that for a while, they can all go out and buy them again. “See.” they will say, “I _told_ you he was a good man!” Nine months from now he’ll announce an Ewoks/Gungans musical or something — “The Wizard of Endor,” maybe, or “My Fair Leia” — and the whole process will start over again.
The peculiar British tendency that is the “decent Left” numbers among its sacred texts Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. One of the most prominent Eustonian thinkers, the columnist Nick Cohen, has even mentioned Berman’s book as the reason for his own epiphany. But is it any good? Over at Aaronovitch Watch the Cous Cous Kid has been directing his attention to Berman’s work and noticing that the accounts Berman gives of other people’s ideas, of religion, and of historical events, ought to have impressed Cohen somewhat less than they did.
CCKs’ review is split into seven parts, so the easiest way to read his text is just to visit the site and scroll down. But for archive purposes, I also give the links to each part below.
“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119570 in comments on _Making Light_
Won’t change their minds [creationists] . They’ll say it’s a fake.
So maybe that means they won’t have to deal with it; but they’re just begging to have their kids suffer a catastrophic loss of faith when they discover that it’s demonstrably not a fake. You can only go so far in inculcating denial. Beyond that, the person has to want to deny the evidence.
bq. Or that it was put there by God to test our Faith.
God Almighty is infinite truth and light, but the God we deal with here on earth is lying to us? Doesn’t that make them some unpleasant variety of Gnostic?
Also, could they please explain what other apparently solid data is eligible to be dismissed in that fashion? Yes? And how they can tell the difference? One step past that point in any direction, they’ll fall into _”some parts of creation are More Real than others”_ : a muddy, fetid philosophical swamp that breeds errors by the swarm.
_”What do we know, and how do we know that we know it?”_ : There’s a reason it’s a classic.
bq. Or worse, it was put there by the Foul Deceiver to undermine said Faith.
Ooooookay, so Satan is a creative force, and had a hand in the creation of the world? That can’t be anything but Manichaeanism: a recurrent Christian heresy, explicitly rejected as doctrine by all the major denominations.
There’s your real problem with Creationism: it’s incompatible with Christianity.
Update: as Teresa points out in comments, I should make it clear that she’s responding to an earlier comment by “Serge”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119561.
AP:
NEW YORK – In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.
The study looked at complication rates within 30 days of heart bypass surgery and compared three groups of about 600 each: “those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.”
Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.
A kind of reverse placebo, I guess.
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn’t take part in the study, said the results didn’t surprise him….
Science, he said, “is not designed to study the supernatural.”
No, it’s designed to study the natural. Like, for example, whether prayer can help recovery from bypass surgery.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to the abstract in the American Heart Journal. The full text is behind a pay wall.
A while back I noted the “disquieting resemblance”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/02/separated-at-birth between the Emperor Gorg (of “Fraggle Rock”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009RQSSW/kieranhealysw-20/104-7889918-1956712) and L. Ron Hubbard (present whereabouts unknown). Now my sources have alerted me to “this clip”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sH42MMepT4&search=muppet from the short-lived “Muppets Tonight”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muppets_Tonight. The premise of the clip is a look back at “The Kermit Frog Club,” like the Mickey Mouse Club but with Kermit as the object of devotion and guest Cindy Crawford in the Annette Funicello role. (The MMC is outside the range of my pop culture: I have no idea what I’m talking about here.) Anyway, of interest are the muppet Frogsketeers, whose names are emblazoned on their shirts: along with Cindy, there’s Newt, Stu, and … L. Ron. Now that I look at the screenshot again, Newt’s crop of hair is also somewhat “evocative”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich.
“Amy Sullivan”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0604.sullivan.html writes about the prospect of the Democratic party recruiting evangelical or conservative Christians. Kevin Drum “comments”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_03/008354.php
bq. I have to confess that I’ve always been skeptical of the notion that liberals should spend much time trying to get the Christian evangelical community on our side. When push comes to shove, they just care way more about sex and “moral degeneracy” than they do about helping the poor or taking care of the environment, and that means that outreach efforts are ultimately doomed to failure.
Two quick points about this (with pictures!) below the fold.
[click to continue…]
The whole business with the Danish cartoons has now reached new levels of insanity with Christians and their churches being attacked in Nigeria and Pakistan. That the Danish newspaper had the right to publish its deplorable cartoons ought not to be in question. But it does not help the case for freedom of speech if Muslims can truthfully say that there is a double standard and that the sensibilities of Christians are regarded as a valid legal reason for restraining freedom of expression whereas theirs are not. Mark Kermode had “a piece in the Observer a week or so ago”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1707715,00.html concerning the film “Visions of Ecstasy”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098604/ which the British Board of Film Classification refused to grant a certificate to on the grounds that a successful prosecution under Britain’s blasphemy laws was likely to succeed. The film maker took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that that the refusal to grant classification was a breach of his rights under Article 10 of the Convention. He lost. In line with a previous judgement, the Court
bq. accepted that respect for the religious feelings of believers can move a State legitimately to restrict the publication of provocative portrayals of objects of religious veneration.
It is therefore simply not true to say that in Europe freedom of expression trumps the sensibilities of believers. What is true is that some believers, of some denominations, get legal protection from being offended, and others don’t. Not a satisfactory situation.
The full judgement of the ECHR (complete with concurring and dissenting opinions) is “here”:http://www.worldlii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/1996/60.html .
Last we heard from Andrew Sullivan, he was “hyping up the danger”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/11/the-papers-continue-fatuous/ of clerical thugs being able to blackmail western democracies into dismantling themselves. I suggested that, insofar as civil liberties were being eroded, this was something elites in these countries were doing to themselves. Now I see that he’s come up with an example from (noted democracy) Russia of, in his words “How Muslim Blackmail Works”:http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/how_muslim_blac.html. One of Russia’s leading Muslim clerics said that anyone planning to turn out for a gay pride parade in Moscow “should be flogged”. The parade was canceled, and QED says Sullivan. Except that, as “Cathy Young argues”:http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/2006/02/hyping-muslim-peril.html the news reports actually show a more complicated picture. The short version is that rather than being canceled in response to this pressure it was vetoed by the city government, and the muslim cleric was joined in his opposition to the parade by the Mayor, the local Russian Orthodox Bishop and others. Astonishingly, Putin’s Russia turns out not to be such a haven for free speech, civil society or popular dissent. Who’d have thought it?
A couple of unrelated thoughts as we wait for the Superbowl parties to start…
“It’s”:http://www.irish-tv.com/wander.asp available