Today’s a travel day for me. I’m returning from my Thanksgiving holiday, and plan to be home this evening and post something new then.
So till then…keep enjoying your weekend!
Who’s training who?
I must confess I’m not a chihuahua fan, although I’m a dog fan. This one is so especially little and skinny it looks almost fetal. But watch how good it is at getting its needs met:
Terrorist attack in Sinai kills over 200
There’s been a terrible terrorist attack in Egypt:
Egyptian state news agency MENA is reporting that the death toll from an attack on a mosque in the volatile northern Sinai Peninsula has risen to 235 people killed. The attack appeared to be the latest by the area’s local Islamic State affiliate. It added that 109 people had been wounded.
The attack on the al-Rawdah mosque, largely attended by Sufi Muslims, in the town of Bir al-Abd, 40 km (25 miles) from the North Sinai provincial capital of El-Arish.
Officials said militants in four off-road vehicles bombed the mosque and fired on worshippers during the sermon segment of Friday prayers.
ISIS may not hold a lot of territory anymore, but that doesn’t stop it from brutally murdering people. Sufi Moslems are particularly infuriating to ISIS (the likely perpetrators) because it’s a different sect that is more tolerant and less militant in general. More here:
Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that some ultra-orthodox Muslims consider heretical…
The mosque in the northern Sinai is known as the birthplace of an important Sufi cleric.
This is the sort of barbarism that was involved:
The gunmen had set up “ambush” locations and opened fire on ambulances as they were transporting wounded worshippers from al-Rawdah toward al-Arish before the arrival of security services, eyewitnesses reported.
Too much information about Rep. Joe Barton
Representative Joe Barton has learned a few facts of which everyone should be aware (read the link to understand what I’m talking about).
The first is that anyone over the age of thirty—certainly anyone over the age of forty—should never be sending nude photos or videos of him/herself to anyone not completely known and completely trusted. I would even amend that to omit all the words in that sentence after “anyone.”
Actually, it’s not a really smart idea at any age—and I include nubile young teens who trust their would-be-boyfriends or ex-boyfriends or hookup partners or sexting friends not to “share” the photos rather liberally. It doesn’t matter if the photos/videos were solicited. Many people may be the stars of their own porno flicks in their own minds, but it usually doesn’t translate that well to actual porno flicks in the real world or the cyberworld.
Another thing Joe Barton may have learned is that the people with whom one might be inclined to have a sexting and/or other uncommitted sexual relationship are not necessarily the un-scuzziest among us. That’s certainly something a member of Congress would do well to take into consideration. And that advice is not just limited to the members of Congress (and their members).
Barton showed an extreme lack of judgment. But he’s not guilty of anything other than stupidity and foolishness (and perhaps unfaithfulness to his wife, although I’m not sure of the time frame), whereas the woman (or women) in question may be guilty of something called “revenge porn.”
When I was young, the invention of the Polaroid camera enabled ordinary people to take their own pornographic photographs (not videos). Before that, one had to take or send a roll of film out for others to develop it. I believe that back then, ordinarily, the companies that did this would usually refuse to send people their photos back if they were deemed to be too racy. Otherwise, a person had to have his or her own darkroom, an investment most people weren’t inclined to make for a momentary thrill.
Now any spur-of-the-moment impulse can be indulged through any number and type of recording devices, and instantly disseminated (pun intended) around the world. Not necessarily a good idea.
The day after
There wasn’t a single political discussion at my family’s Thanksgiving celebration yesterday. For me that’s a big relief, because my experience is that such things never, never, never lead to anything good.
Did I eat too much yesterday? You betcha, but not enough to become ill.
My favorites? Too numerous to mention, but probably the cranberry compote my sister-in-law always makes, the sauerkraut in wine (yes, sauerkraut) a friend brings, and an amazing mashed potatoes with dill. That latter doesn’t sound so great, and I’m ordinarily not even a mashed potato fan, but it was irresistible. Among the many desserts there was a cranberry tart that’s become traditional and that is absolutely incredible.
No snow, no rain.
And today—why, turkey sandwiches (with the rest of the cranberry compote), turkey salad, and turkey soup, of course.
And you?
Happy Thanksgiving!
If I had my way, political discussions would be banned from the Thanksgiving table! But alas, I don’t have my way.
I’m going over to a pretty big feast at a relative’s house. Maybe later I’ll post some photos of the food, if I can remember to take them.
I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice!
How about looking at some backup evidence in the Moore allegations?
Since the allegations against Roy Moore came out, I’ve been patiently waiting (without much expectation) for some more detailed discussions of the evidence against him.
Waiting for employees of the Old Hickory House at the time to come forward. Waiting for photographs of the place. Waiting for a timeline of the allegations related to Moore’s movements and the accusers’ movements, and whether they dovetail with the timeline of the accusations. And so on and so forth.
Nothing on the subject seem to be forthcoming from the computers of the esteemed journalists who broke the stories. Nothing from Gloria Allred.
So now we have some offerings on the subject from Roy Moore’s camp. So far I don’t see that they’ve been successfully challenged, for the most part, although that may be coming soon. If you’re interested in taking a look, as I very much was, please see this as well as this.
I realize that the court of public opinion is not the court of law. But if we want to make decisions about guilt or innocence, truth or falsehood, can we not have some basic fact-checking? It’s pretty clear to me that—at least so far—the Moore-accuser camp (and Allred in particular, as well as the MSM) thinks it has time on its side, and has been playing out the clock.
I still don’t know whether the allegations of Beverly Nelson and Leigh Corfman (the two accusers with the very serious allegations) are true or false (in addition to the already-mentioned problems with the yearbook signing’s authentication or lack thereof). I don’t even know whether the Moore camp’s informants are telling the truth or not in their criticisms of Nelson and Corfman. I have an open mind about all of it. But the whole thing has been a rumor mill so far, from beginning to end.
Advice to students: on thinking
Here’s the text of a very interesting speech given to first year students by Adam J. MacLeod, an associate professor of law at Jones School of Law, Faulkner University (Montgomery, Alabama). Fascinating. The man does not pull any punches.
It’s a speech he gives in a course entitled “Foundations of Law.” That’s not something I recall from my law school days, although my guess is that it may be somewhat equivalent to old-fashioned “Jurisprudence,” which was already undergoing a (temporary?) switch to “Philosophy of Law” back then. It may surprise no one that this was my favorite area of law, hands down, rather than things like the Uniform Commercial Code (the details of which never seemed to penetrate my brain).
MacLeod has the following to say in his introduction to the article, which was not part of his speech to the students:
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.
After I went to law school I decided not to go into law. In those days—long long long ago—a legal education didn’t set my family back any significant amount (practically nothing compared to today), and so my defection wasn’t as big a financial deal as it would have been now. I had actually thought to drop out right after my first year, but I was talked out of that and finished up, knowing I was unlikely to go into the field. I was told that studying the discipline of law—what MacLeod refers to as “legal reasoning”—would help me throughout my life (although I don’t recall any units specially devoted to the topic).
And so it has. It really has—although it certainly hasn’t always made people love me. I use it every day. I use it in this blog. I think of it as applied logic.
One of the reasons I went to law school in the first place was that I had a natural affinity for that sort of reasoning. I had always been told—even as a little girl, even when female lawyers were rather rare—that I “talked like a lawyer.”
This was not a compliment, by the way. But I took it as such, at least partially. A lot of people hate lawyers, and I understand why. But having studied law, I have deep respect for our system of law, however flawed it may be. It is a daunting task to codify morality and try to pin it down in a legal system that is clear and fair. You may think ours falls very short of that, both on paper and in execution. And of course it does. But until you study law and try to devise a better system yourself, you may not appreciate what a valiant (not always, of course, but often) effort has been made over the centuries.
Here is a small excerpt from MacLeod’s speech to the law students. I think the words could be addressed to any student, at least at the high school level and above:
…Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.
Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.
Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “equality.”
Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful…
First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.
In fact, “isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of cheating.
Much more at the link.
Happy day-before-Thanksgiving to you!
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited reprint of a previous post.]
I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country—except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them. Even if the turkey ends up dry and overcooked, it’s nothing that a little gravy and cranberry sauce can’t fix. And although the turkey is the centerpiece, it’s the accompaniments that make the meal.
My theory on turkeys is that they’re like children: you coax them along and just do the best you can, but as long as you don’t utterly ruin or abuse them, they have their own innate characteristics that will manifest in the end. A dry and tough bird will be a dry and tough bird despite all that draping in fat-soaked cheesecloth, a tender and tasty one will withstand a certain amount of cooking incompetence.
One year my brother and I were cooking at my parents’ house and somehow we set the oven on “broil,” an error that was only discovered an hour before the turkey was due to be done. It was one of the best turkeys ever. Another time the turkey had turned deep bluish-purple on defrosting and was so hideous and dangerous-looking it had to be abandoned. Another terrible time, that has lived in infamy ever since, my mother decided turkey was passe and that we’d have steak on Thanksgiving.
Since I like to eat, I am drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?
For me, there are three traditional requirements—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. The cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too).
The traditional stuffing in my family is non-traditional: a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith apples cooked in fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft; and then mixed with prunes, almonds, and one Sara Lee poundcake reduced to crumbs by crushing with the hands.
Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious—giving thanks—but has no specific religious affiliation. So it’s a holiday that unites. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, except for those who don’t have relatives or friends to be with. One drawback is the terribly compressed travel time; I solve that by not usually traveling very far if I can possibly help it.
The main advantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over. The main disadvantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over.
I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers!
I’m going out now…
…to pick up an apple pie I ordered for Thanksgiving. I’m bringing it to my brother’s celebration, where there will be a ton of other desserts and a lot of people.
I was going to make a pie rather than buy one. Haven’t done that in a long time, and I thought it would be fun. But I couldn’t find my pie plate! Spent over an hour looking for it (or them, rather; I used to have several) last night, to no avail.
Where are they? In storage? In the dim recesses of some closet, where I couldn’t see them even with the help of a powerful flashlight?
Where, oh where, are the pie plates of yesteryear?
Coming soon to a school near you?
This news is from Britain, and it’s still an outlier. But perhaps not for long:
Teachers should not refer to pupils as “girls” or “ladies” because it means they are “constantly reminded of their gender”, the Government’s former mental health tsar [for schools] has said.
Natasha Devon told headteachers of the country’s leading girls’ schools that they should be using gender-neutral language when they address their students, and added that the same applied for boys.
Speaking at the Girls’ School Association’s annual conference in Manchester, she said that she would “never walk into a room in an-all girls’ school and say girls or ladies” because it was “patronising”…
Ms Devon said that rather than addressing children as “boys” or “girls”, teachers should use gender-neutral terms such as “pupils”, “students” or “people”.
“I think actually in some ways boys are more constrained by the expectation of their gender,” she said. “And whilst that is being challenged and changed I don’t think it’s helpful to keep saying ”˜girls, girls, girls, boys, boys, boys’, because there is so much implication that potentially goes with that.”
Ms Devon said that using the term “girls” can evoke a sense that they have to do everything perfectly which can “create a lot of anxiety” in children and teenagers.
Meanwhile, the term “boys” carries connotations of “being macho, not talking about your feelings, being told to man up”.
It goes on in that vein.
Devon—the “former mental health tsar” (what a phrase!) looks from the photo in the article to be about twenty years old. She certainly sounds like it. However, she’s 36, and from her background she appears to have been a pop self-help celebrity before being appointed tsar.
This woman may sound like a one-off wacko, but so did the promotors of a lot of other ideas that later gained wide currency.
On the sexual charges du jour
Right now I’m not inclined to write about the accused offenders du jour: Conyers and Charlie Rose. Conyers is denying the allegations and Rose has admitted them. Conyers remains in his position and Rose has been fired.
It’s not that these aren’t interesting stories. I’ve just written so much on the topic recently, and since every day there’s a new set of people being accused, I’ve decided I’m not going to try to write about every last one.
There is one thing I have to say about the Rose accusations, though. It’s something I’ve noticed in a lot of the stories about a lot of these men (take Anthony Weiner—please, as Henny Youngman would say): the prevalence of displaying one’s private parts in the hope of arousing (or intimidating?) the woman. Or perhaps it’s just something that sexually excites the men themselves.
I guess they never got the memo: women are aroused by different things than men are, ordinarily. I am certain there are plenty of women who would love nothing better than to have some guy expose himself, but they are still in a heavy minority. Men, on the other hand, are more visually oriented, and may project this tendency onto the women they’re seducing/assaulting. Or maybe, as I said, they don’t take the women into account at all, and it’s all about themselves or about power.
I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never been propositioned in the workplace or in academia (I’ve spent a lot of time in academia, and I was a fresh young thing at the time). But I certainly have seen exhibitionists, particularly in the subway. I remember seeing one when I was about ten years old, a creepy old guy in a moderately deserted subway car, and the expression on his face—of seeming triumph—was especially disturbing.
Looking up the phenomenon of exhibitionism just now, I found articles such as this, for example. Neither that site nor the others I found deal with anything other than people like the subway flasher. There’s no discussion of someone like Weiner or Rose. But my guess is that what drives them is a combination of narcissism, abuse of power, projection of the notions of male sexuality onto women, and their own titillation at engaging in the supposedly-forbidden activity.
In Rose’s mea culpa, he said:
I have behaved insensitively at times, and I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realise I was mistaken.
Do you think that last sentence is a self-serving lie? Or do you think he actually thought that? I think it’s a combination of the two, although his perception of the women’s feelings may not have been based on anything they did or said, but rather on the fact that he felt himself to be pretty much irresistible.
Ooops, I guess I wrote about this after all.