Obsidian Wings

Open Thread: Fast Away the Old Year Passes

by Doctor Science

To start off the open thread, here's a video of polar bears encountering spy cameras:

Links to other videos of seasonal interest:

The Luttrell Psalter Film: life in a medieval English village.

Man in a Blizzard, and why Roger Ebert thinks it deserves an Oscar nomination.

The Knitted Christmas Tree. It's *15 feet* tall.

My sinuses have dedicated themselves to Cthulhu (tags: unspeakable;oozing;ichor). Will the family be able to put on the New Year's Eve party without me? Stay tuned for this exciting adventure!

Have at it, folks. Happy New Year!

DADT and Rape Culture

by Doctor Science

In the discussion to Sebastian's post celebrating the end of DADT, commenter avedis took issue. I found avedis' comments more honest and comprehensible than most defenses of DADT, but they raise disturbing questions about rape culture in the military.

WARNING: POTENTIALLY TRIGGERY DISCUSSION OF RAPE AND RAPE CULTURE

e pluribus unum

by russell

"E pluribus unum", of course, being the motto on the obverse side of the Great Seal of the United States.  It's written on the swirly banner flying over the eagle's head.  The reverse side, of course, has that weird spooky pyramid with the radiant eyeball on top and those other cryptic Latin mottoes.

Long before we adopted "In God We Trust" as a way of distinguishing ourselves from the godless Russkies, e pluribus unum was our de facto national motto.  It means, basically, out of many, one.  For "many", you can read "13 states", or "lots of different kinds of people", and it has been interpreted in both ways right from the get.  

Back in the early days, "lots of different kinds of people" basically meant "different kinds of male northern Europeans".  As an aside, I often wonder whether, had the founders been able to gaze into the future to see exactly how broad a spectrum of folks would eventually be considered to have been "created equal", they would have given independence up as a bad job and decided that the yoke of English colony-hood was not such a weighty burden after all.  A digression, perhaps, for another day.

What about the "one" part?  Are we talking about "one nation", or "one people", or one what, exactly?

If one nation, what is the basis of the unity?  At the beginning, it seems like "one nation" meant that the various states assented to be governed by central, federal institutions.  At least, as regards some stuff.

If one people, what is the identity that we all share?  At the beginning, you could (maybe) argue for a common Anglo / northern European / mostly Protestant cultural heritage, and a specifically Anglo / common law political heritage.

What about now?

What I'm trying to understand, after watching the crazy dysfunctional drunken wild ride of American politics over the last, say, 40 or 50 years, is whether we really are one, or not.

Politically, we seem to be hanging together, more or less, although some folks seem to feel a constant urge to pull as much political autonomy back to a local scale as they possibly can.

As a people, I'm less sure.  There is certainly more cultural / ethnic / religious diversity now than in the early days, but that is not what worries me.  What worries me is that we do not seem to have a common understanding of what, fundamentally, it means to be American.

I wonder if there is a "there" there, anymore, and if there is, what it is.

Who are we?  Who do we want to be?  Is the only thing holding us together the inertia of a quarter millenium of history?  Or is there some underlying (if not so visible these days) common understanding of what we're about?  What obligations, if any, do we owe each other?  What responsibilities, if any, do we bear toward each other?

What unites us?

What, ultimately, is the point of being American, here in the early days of the 21st C?

Wee fish, ewe, a mare, egrets, moose

by Doctor Science

In the spirit of the season, and also "More Frequent Posting" --

Jim and Dylan are a gay couple living in the Chelsea area of New York City, and for some reason they're getting Santa's mail: letters addressed to their specific address and apartment, with gift requests for Santa from poor children. The New York Times posted a wonderfully heart-warming video about how the two men are trying to deal with the influx. It's pretty clear that Dylan wants to take an institutional approach -- give the letters to one of the city's organizations that tries to fulfill children's Christmas wishes. But Jim feels a personal responsibility for them, he wants to do this himself. Dylan says, "You don't think about it, you just give. That's always been your way, and I love that about you."

I tend to agree with Dylan, that maybe they should have taken a more practical approach, giving the letters to an organization that can deal with them more effectively. But I have to also acknowledge that the giving heart is admirable, too: we need that human sense of connection, along with our institutional efficiency.

The article about the video says that neither the couple nor the reporter were able to figure out *why* Santa's mail is coming to a particular Chelsea apartment. Chelsea itself is named for Chelsea House, where Clement Clarke Moore, the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas", was born and grew up.

I talked about this story with the family, and Sprog #2 recalls reading a children’s picture book in which Santa Claus is living in New York City undercover — on 22nd Street. I have been unable to track the book down so far, but my guess this may be the source of Jim & Dylan’s letters. The book would have been published before 2006. Does it ring a bell with any of you?

Don't Ask Don't Tell, Finally Gone

--by Sebastian

 

I don't have much to say on the underlying issue that isn't being said better elsewhere.  It was unjust, ridiculous, and it is well for the country and the armed forces that it is gone.  I'm not going to tell the stories of friends whose lives will be made better by this--though you should know that they definitely exist.  

I want to highlight one thing about how this has all played out in the last year.  This didn't end up passing bundled with anything else.  It wasn't attached to other bills, it wasn't hidden under an appropriations umbrella.  People voting against it didn't have the excuse of other bills they didn't like.  They are on a clear record.  People voting for it didn't burden it with unrelated or less popular issues.  They are on a clear record.  

Sometimes you can make a clear stand, on a clear issue.  Pelosi made the right choice to push the individual bill by itself.  And Reid finally let it stand on its own in the Senate.  Perhaps more things should be done like that.  

Goodbye DADT.  Good riddance.  

Axial tilt and the numinous

by Doctor Science

First of all, this is what a War on Christmas looks like:

I recall being taught that one reason Washington attacked on Christmas was specifically because (English) American colonists didn't celebrate the holiday. The German Hessian mercenaries did, though, and so would be hung over and vulnerable when Washington and his army made their surprise attack. In other words, at the time of the Revolution Christmas was unAmerican.

The people who fight back against the alleged War on Christmas by saying "Jesus is the reason for the season" know even less about Christian history than they do about American history. Christians celebrate Jesus' birth in late December (or early January, for the Eastern Orthodox) because there were already seasonal celebrations there that were thematically appropriate, especially the Birth of the Unconquered Sun. The season itself is the reason; Jesus became attached to it, not the other way around. The Christmas tree, the presents, the lights, the foods -- none of these are in origin Christian, though there are Christian glosses or justifications for all of them.

Jews often argue that Hanukkah is not an analogue to Christmas precisely because Hanukkah has an historical and scriptural basis in the revolt of the Maccabees -- the fact that we light candles at the winter solstice is mere coincidence.

I never really bought that, and in The Jewish Festivals: A Guide to Their History and Observance Hayyim Schauss argued that I was right. He pointed out that the Mishnah doesn't mention the Hanukkah candle-lighting, and that it's only barely discussed in the Gemara. There are different stories to explain the ceremony, too: that they commemorate the "Miracle of the Temple Oil", or that they represent eight spears found in the Temple and used as candle-holders during the re-dedication. Schauss concludes:

The Hanukkah lights, originally, had nothing to do with Hanukkah, but originated with an older festival that occurred at the same time of the year and that was forced out by the new Hanukkah festival.

That Hanukkah took the place of an older festival is no cause for surprise. For, as we have seen, this happened with every other festival of the Jews and of other peoples as well. A new period needs a new festival. But people do not take an ordinary week day and make a festival of it; they take over a day that previously had a festive character. And it is a general rule that the story, the explanation, is always about the new festival, but the ceremonies are carried over from the old festival. A new meaning and interpretation is sought for them, so that they will fit into the new festival. ... the original festival had to do with fire and light. It was no doubt a nature festival, one of those semi-holidays with a heathenish background that was bound up, not with the official Jewish religion, but with the folk belief. (p.224; I changed his spelling from "Chanukkoh")

Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, has been hosting a discussion about Jews and The Tree, because of all Christian customs the Christmas Tree is the hardest for non-Christians to resist. In the comments, Elaine Dent (a Lutheran pastor) says:

it feels like there is a similarity (perhaps I am wrong) between the Jewish question of tree or no tree and the tension Christians face: praise that we have found God-is-with-us in Jesus vs. what the secular/commercial culture is celebrating in this season. I love the tree and the gifts, etc, etc, yet I always find myself asking: and what does this have to do with God? I love the customs, and won't throw them out, but they sure can be distractions, and I find myself cutting back on how much I do and avoiding the stores. So here I am in the middle of the dominant Christian culture wondering what is spiritually helpful about a Christmas tree per se?

Rachel replied, speaking about:

the tension between Christmas as a basically secularized gift-giving festival and Christmas as a religious holiday filled with meaning for the faithful

I think both the rabbi and the pastor are missing that two different things are being called "secular" here.

There is a large element of the American Christmas that is IMHO truly divorced from religious feeling, that focuses on getting and spending. This is secular in the sense of commercial -- it is the realm of Homo economicus. "Secular" here means "of the world, of the time we live in" -- trivial, superficial, unspiritual.

But behind the word "secular" I also hear in saecula saeculorum -- "from age to age, cycle upon cycle". The sort of thing Schauss called "heathenish" and what the Revolutionary-era Americans shunned as "pagan" is not without religious feeling, but that feeling doesn't necessarily fall neatly within the bounds of a particular faith. It's within the realm Rudolf Otto named the numinous: the emotional spring behind or underneath religion.

To have a green tree in the house, filled with light, in the darkest and coldest time of year, as we feel the year turn from old to new -- how can that not be numinous? When we decorate with green branches and red berries, this isn't from Christian iconography --

"I remember hearing," said Susan distantly, "that the idea of the Hogfather wearing a red and white outfit was invented quite recently."

NO. IT WAS REMEMBERED.

(from Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett). The rising of the sun and the running of the deer, seeing our families and having enough to eat: all of these things are worth celebrating. Such celebrations don't have to be either secular or religious, in the usual sense: they are pagan in the sense of "rustic, countrified, what the common people do". Human, in other words.

So we do have a Yule Tree in our house, and at its top is the sun:

(image is a placeholder until we figure out where the frak we put the box of ornaments). As Schauss says, the story changes but the festival is the same -- we have more than enough to eat, and the Sun rises.

Ngrams R Us: A Monday Open Thread.

by Gary Farber

This new Google tool, which Bob Mackey mentioning reminded me that I'd bookmarked for blogging Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers by Patricia Cohen, is truly useful and neat, at first look: Books Ngram Viewer.  Look up key words, and phrases, and thus track concepts over time, and much else, in hundreds of millions of books over the past couple of centuries, by frequency.

Then dig.  Yum.

Some link-dumping for you: How To Use PeaceTalk 101 by Suzette Haden Elgin.  Check out her writings on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. 

Use of some of these techniques, which I first started reading Elgin's writings on in the early Eighties, might be helpful to some, but not to others. 

See also popularizer Deborah Tannen, though I agree with Elgin's critique of Tannen's extreme over-reliance on gender stereotyping.   As usual, I don't endorse everything either writer says, but they're both worth reading, in my opinion.

Which could lead one to G.K. Chesterton on this topic, if one ever feels cranky:

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

All I Want For Christmas Is World Peace ... But I'll Settle For The New START Treaty

by Jacob Davies

And for once, it looks like I might get what I want:

The Senate voted 66 to 32 to bring the treaty to the floor in a procedural vote that fell one short of the 67 required under the Constitution for approval once it comes to a final vote. Since one Democrat supporting the treaty was absent, that meant 67 senators were at least willing to hear debate on the treaty.

“Yes, I believe we will have the votes,” said Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and the leader of the treaty’s supporters. To Republican assertions that there was not enough time to deliberate, he noted that American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq did not take the holidays off. “Surely, we in the United States Senate can’t ask any less of ourselves as we sit in a warm chamber and talk about this treaty,” he said.

A little reminder of what the treaty does:

Under terms of the treaty, the number of nuclear missile launchers will be reduced by half. A new inspection and verification regime will be established, replacing the mechanism defined by the earlier treaty... the treaty wil limit the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550, which is down nearly two-thirds from the original START treaty, as well as 30% lower than the deployed strategic warhead limit of the 2002 Moscow Treaty. It will also limit the number of deployed and non-deployed inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers, submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments to 800. Also, it will limit the number of deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments to 700. The treaty allows for satellite and remote monitoring, as well as 18 on-site inspections per year to verify limits.

The treaty will leave the US with 800 launchers and 1,550 strategic warheads deployed, which is to say: a lot. US nuclear deterrence will remain intact (as it would with a much smaller number, mind you), and by allowing inspection of Russian nuclear weapons systems and facilities it should provide Americans with a great deal of comfort about Russian capabilities and intentions.

Russia is no longer the Soviet Union that dominated Eastern Europe. Its conventional military capabilities are a shambles, and there is nowhere for secret super-weapon programs to hide any more. (If they had 'em, they'd be selling 'em.) Even if Russia wanted to, it couldn't take aggressive actions on a significant scale, and there's no reason to believe that it wants to.

It is ringed with NATO countries that act as a tripwire against Russian military action in Europe. Russia has its problems, and America will continue to have its differences with Russia, but the paranoid belief on both sides that the other was bent on invasion and conquest has long ceased to have any realistic basis.

I don't quite see how we can have a world without nuclear weapons yet, but we could have a world with a lot fewer this Christmas. How about that?

Segregation Nation II: The Interactivating

by Jacob Davies

Just a quick link to a nifty mapping tool at the New York Times that illustrates how and where people of different races live; a little like the ones I posted a while back, but scalable.

One thing apparent in the Bay Area maps - I suspect elsewhere too, but I only know the Bay Area - is that much of the segregation is really just by income. Rich people live with other rich people, just like everyone else mostly lives with people of about their income level. It's just that almost all the rich people are white, and almost all the really poor people are Hispanic or black. In-between are all kinds of people though, and they tend to be more mixed-up.

Hopefully they'll do some more of these with other stats. I would love to see owner-occupied versus rental housing, for instance.

The Reign of Witches Has Not Passed

by Eric Martin

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

Glenn Greenwald has unearthed some disturbing accounts of the five month (and counting) detention of Army Private Bradley Manning, the suspect accused of leaking classified material to WikiLeaks. Again, he is a suspect who is accused of a crime:

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day—for seven straight months and counting—he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture.  In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article -- entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture."  By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity.  A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."

While his status as innocent until proven guilty renders this treatment exceedingly reprehensible, it should be noted that even subjecting the guilty to such inhumane punishment is beneath the principles of the United States. Or at least, it should be.

For those unfamiliar with the harrowing effects of prolonged solitary confinement and why there is little doubt that excessive use is the equivalent of a very severe form of torture, in addition to the links and descriptions provided in Greenwald's post, Hilzoy's masterful three part series on the treatement of Jose Padilla (Part III, with links to prior parts, here), as well as this follow up piece, is highly, highly recommended. 

In particular, Charles Dickens' words from Hilzoy's follow up are heart wrenching:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.

John Cole captures the troubling sadism that this country has reverted to in the face of a terrorist threat and, predictably, how this warped mindset has begun to pervert the entire criminal justice system - not just the system putatively reserved for a certain class of supsects (not that such selectivity provides an excuse or justification):

There is absolutely no reason for this whatsoever, other than the fact that the United States has morphed into a brutal and repressive regime that is terrified of dissent. The only difference between this treatment and what we imagine third world nations do is that we have cleaner and more modern facilities. Hell, at this point Manning would probably welcome physical torture- it would be a welcome diversion.

And yet, this goes on every day in the greatest nation in the world, the home of the free and the land of the brave. Brought to our collective knees in terror of a rosy-cheeked private who had the balls to allow our lies to be published. And for that, we must emulate those great men who have gone before us- Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and other great human rights leader, and publicly make a show of our ability to crush one man. Because that is what this is- a message to every one else. There is no other reason to be subjecting Manning to this behavior, as he could be safely secured at any county jailhouse in this nation. Hell, he could be returned to his unit and confined to quarters, and nothing would happen.

The treatment of Bradley Manning is microcosmic of a broader trend that does not speak well for the degree of civilization in our society. And yet we continue to lecture the world as if we were somehow exceptional.