Love it. We could probably pick any day of the year and survey history for things like this, but there is a poignance to Christmas, isn't there?
Two quibbles: 1) on Christmas Day in 1066 William would have still been known by the thoroughly appropriate sobriquet "William the Bastard" or, if you were trying to suck up to him (for rather obvious reasons, he was winning) "William of Normandy." 2) Are we fudging with Sir Isaac's birthday? According to the calendar he used himself at the height of his remarkable career, his birthday (which he'd surely have sneered at celebrating) was January 6.
I loved this essay. Literally delicious Americana.
Did Post and the Brothers Kellogg have disputes and rivalries with one another? Did the Cummins company ever claim that their patent overlapped with Dr. Kellogg's? Dirty tricks between entrepreneurs and shifting business rivalries and strategic litigation would have had ample precedent; I'm reminded of the steamship ferry rivalries that gave rise to the second-most important lawsuit in American history, the complex cluster of disputes that became Gibbons v. Ogden. I thrill to think something similar happened over, of all things, corn flakes, and involving characters as eccentric and colorful as John Kellogg.
Agreed that this is one of the best Throughputs yet made. Packed with science, oozing with love for the movies, and demonstrating that paying attention to what's real is helpful to storytelling.
Also, "warp and weft" is a great phrase that I haven't used in a long time but may well have cause to use in a trial I have coming up in about two weeks. Thanks for the reminder of this terrific metaphor.
Sounds like it was a terrific adventure. Should you find yourself in my city again, look me up. You can do better for donuts here than Voodoo. A lot better.
I was going to say, "Hey, where's Summer of Soul?" But that was 2021 and here it is the end of 2022 already, which tells you something about how I'm experiencing the passage of time. (But if you've not seen it, OMG make the time and see it.)
How many different bored apes were there? I think they were all the same ape, with different clothing or color schemes or such. We can have Trump-as-Batman, Trump-as-Thor, Trump-as-Thor-but-wearing-a-lime-green-cape, Trump-as-Sinatra-getting-out-of-a-helicopter-with-a-martini-only-it's-just-tap-water-with-an-olive-for-some-reason-because-he-doesn't-drink, Trump-as-Sinatra-getting-out-of-a-helicopter-with-a-martini-glass-of-tap-water-and-also-wearing-a-lime-green-cape, and so on. All at $100 apiece, all generated by a robot.
You raise an interesting question, which needn't be married to the subject matter of the OP:
...you can’t really hope in anything long-term without belief in a telos.
I'm not sure I agree. I have hope, for instance, that things like racism and sexism can be pushed back in social influence, over the course of time and with sustained effort, debate, and moral commitment. Telelogically, we'd use words like "defeated" rather than "pushed back" or "minimized," and those phrases do come easily where more moderated, nuanced terms feel less natural to write or speak. But the truth is, I lack hope that these things can be defeated. My real hope is for there to be, over the course of time, marginal and incremental improvements that are probably hard to measure but nevertheless real.
And I guess philosophically faith and hope are probably alloyed in some way. If "faith" is the belief in the reality of a given thing "X" despite the absence of evidence to support any belief in X, "hope" may well be the belief that "X," while not yet extant, one day will be. These are, I think, emotional rather than rational states of mind. It's different than "The sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning." We have very good reasons to anticipate that it will, so that sort of thing would fall outside my definition of the word "faith," even though the mechanics of the English language are such that it feels natural to say "I have faith that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning." "Confidence" might be a more accurate word.
Maybe I'm making that more complicated or precise than it needs to be.
Seems polite to circle back to the OP. We could take a teleological view of fusion power, I guess: the attainment of sufficient technology that fusion can be sustained in an energy-positive, controlled, and mass-scalable way. One may have or lack hope that such technology will be developed in the future, but as I've defined that word, it's a belief that exists in the absence of supporting evidence.
I hope you're right. I just don't share your optimism that things like the spending bill are either a) sufficiently impactful and/or b) par for the course. Maybe I'm just in a sour mood today.
But as I say, I'd be pleased if you turn out to be righter than me.
I can see conservative Christians (*) grumping about Pope Francis doing and saying things that are refreshingly consistent with the positive, good morality of actual Christian teachings, and that gives me a really good idea about the answer to this question. (Not that Francis and the RCC are above significant criticism for failing to properly reckon with their own past grave misdeeds, but some of the things Francis says and does are praiseworthy and these are the things that cheese off a bunch of American religious people who for some reason all happen to be politically conservative.)
It's true that young people aren't doing all the things us Olds wish they would. But it's not just climate change that is responsible for that. Or, more precisely, the doom-and-gloom that surrounds reporting of climate change. Alsotoo, us Olds ought to know better than to believe that large-scale clean and cheap fusion power is right around the corner. It's been about twenty years away for our entire lifetimes, and the fusion optimists still say it's at least twenty years away.
It's not right around the corner, and as was discussed here briefly but thoroughly last week, it's probably a lot more than twenty years away. Recent technology news is no excuse for continuing to defer making painfully hard economic and policy choices to protect our environment. (Which, as long as I'm belng plain-spoken about it, we aren't going to do -- democracies are really bad at making decisions like that and autocracies are also really bad at making decisions like that, albeit for different reasons than democracies.)
Conngress votes to remove bust of Roger Taney, replace with Thurgood Marshall:
Congress votes to remove a bust of the Dred Scott decision's author from the Capitol https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143113389/capitol-remove-roger-taney-dred-scott-statue?sc=18&f=1001
I wrote about Taney's statues being removed from the city of Baltimore some time ago:
Yes. Including at least one member of Congress, the aforementioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, who declared on 23 July 2022: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”
https://twitter.com/NextNewsNetwork/status/1551204108471861248
It's a shocking upset because I picked Brazil because everyone knew Brazil was going to take the whole thing this year and now the money I put into the pool is on fire.
A while back, I think it was Jaybird who pointed out that we were seeing some really nutty upsets in the World Cup. Got another one today. Good for the Croats! (Even though my bracket is toast.)
Just curious. What event has to happen before you would call something a "coup attempt", Pinky? Does someone have to actually fire a gun at a government official with the intent to overthrow that government?
One of the interactions I had in the last few days I was on twitter concerned this law. I clashed with other left-of-center people about it. They opposed the law because the wording used to protect the marriages in question did not specifically and explicitly include same-sex and interracial marriages.
Which was probably the way that Sen. Sinema drafted it, to give Republicans some cover on their right flanks when they voted for it. And that seemed to work, as an appreciable number of Republicans DID vote for it. Moreover, it puts the bill very squarely within the Constitution's grant of power to Congress under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, so this will be a very difficult law to get overruled when it is inevitably challenged.
But this wasn't morally pure enough for my left-of-center interlocutors, so they opposed it. Which made me want to face-palm in exasperation. Guys, we got the W and this goes a long way towards making sure we keep it. This is how politics works.
There were also right-of-center folks who opposed it because there was no explicit and overt statement that a religious entity wouldn't be required to recognize a marriage contrary to its religious tenets. Well, at least that's why they said they opposed it and I didn't think it necessary to challenge their sincerity though you can infer that I had doubts. (N.b., even before this law passed, there was no impediment at all to a religious entity refusing to perform a ceremony for, or recognize as religiously valid, marriages contrary to their doctrines; the new law does nothing to change that entirely appropriate state of affairs.)
It's a story that is at once weird and scary. It seems highly improbable that even as large a conspiracy as ~300 members could possibly have overthrown the government of Germany, they were well-armed enough that they probably could have killed a lot of people trying. And they seem to have had some German variant of the QAnon/sovereign citizen mythology that I had previously thought was principally a north American thing. Also the whole "every male in this family is named Heinrich and we use Roman numbers to distinguish who they are" thing is just weird weird weird.
I certainly see it more that way than not. The creation of a cake or a website strikes me as more of a commercial activity than an expressive one, even if the final product displays a great deal of artistry, skill, and craftsmanship. (Jack Phillips' cakes produced at Masterpiece Cakeshop are indeed beautiful.) But it's a fuzzy line when we're talking about commissioned artwork. I can see the argument that even if the work is commissioned, I still express myself in it. Much of the great artwork in the western canon was created on commission and therefore fits within the artistic constraints and requests of the commissioner. We don't stop respecting the artist or appreciating the artist's message for her having worked on commission.
Let's say the question is "What kind of shoes do you think would look good with this suit?" The shoe salesperson is making an artistic judgment (aesthetic, if you prefer) when presenting choices to the customer. But we'd never imagine that we'd permit a shoe store to not sell to someone based on their race, sex, sexual orientation or affinity, religion, or any other suspect class. It feels right and natural (to me, at least) to enforce the rights of individuals by using the government to prohibit that shoe store from discriminating on those bases. And if the shoe salesperson says "But my religion..." at least my immediate tendency is to respond with "Bullshit. Sell them the shoes." I'm not alone in that.
But if the question is "What should happen next in this movie's script?" we become very queasy about the government getting involved there. The movie is obviously a work of art, a work of expression, and it feels morally wrong and authoritarian for the government to involve itself in what does or doesn't go into it. There are probably more artistic choices being made, and they're probably more significant, than the shoe salesperson, but I suspect no one reading this words would be comfortable with the government having involvement in the making of a movie, excepting perhaps if there were good-faith national security concerns involved. And perhaps not even then. If the government were to say, "No, you can't depict this thing," pretty much everyone here would say, "Bullshit. The director can depict whatever she wants," or at the very minimum, demand the government come up with a damn good reason why she can't.
Decorating a wedding cake or crafting a website are somewhere in between these two things.
I refer the honorable commenter to a remark I made some moments ago:
I await a re-iteration of the usual rehash of whether statutes like anti-discrimination-in-public-accommodations laws constitute forced servitude to follow, but I’ll point out that “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article [the Fourteenth Amendment].”
And here it is. It wasn't that no one noticed those rights didn't exist, it's that those rights hadn't previously been made enforceable through statutes crafted to meet a Constitutional mandate. This is why these statutes are treated differently than, say, traffic regulations: they are specifically authorized by the Constitution to enforce its terms.
As a practical matter, the right to express ourselves freely has eternally been subject to substantial hole-poking by governmental and cultural influences, both before and after 1789. We have always had laws punishing defamation, prohibiting espionage such as dissemination of classified security information under threat of (potentially) death, restricting access to pornography or other obscene material, and the like. We have never had *absolutely* free speech and probably wouldn't like it much if we did, especially in today's brave new world of deepfake porn, targeted messaging algorithms, and instant global rumormongering. What constitutes those things (call them "exceptions" if you wish) is, and has always been, malleable according to prevailing norms and cultural pressures -- for instance, if someone were to have called Oscar Wilde a homosexual today, it's doubtful his response would have been a (foolish) defamation lawsuit, he'd probably say "Yeah I am, so what?" in response.
Ah yes, but what of the religious liberty of the government official who is compelled to violate his conscience by granting her a business license? ... The possibilities are endless.
Indeed. This is why Justice Scalia was right in his decision in the case of Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990): "The government's ability to enforce generally applicable prohibitions of socially harmful conduct, like its ability to carry out other aspects of public policy, cannot depend on measuring the effects of a governmental action on a religious objector's spiritual development."
On “Tales of Yuletides Past”
Love it. We could probably pick any day of the year and survey history for things like this, but there is a poignance to Christmas, isn't there?
Two quibbles: 1) on Christmas Day in 1066 William would have still been known by the thoroughly appropriate sobriquet "William the Bastard" or, if you were trying to suck up to him (for rather obvious reasons, he was winning) "William of Normandy." 2) Are we fudging with Sir Isaac's birthday? According to the calendar he used himself at the height of his remarkable career, his birthday (which he'd surely have sneered at celebrating) was January 6.
On “The Best To You Each Morning: The Cereal In America Story”
I loved this essay. Literally delicious Americana.
Did Post and the Brothers Kellogg have disputes and rivalries with one another? Did the Cummins company ever claim that their patent overlapped with Dr. Kellogg's? Dirty tricks between entrepreneurs and shifting business rivalries and strategic litigation would have had ample precedent; I'm reminded of the steamship ferry rivalries that gave rise to the second-most important lawsuit in American history, the complex cluster of disputes that became Gibbons v. Ogden. I thrill to think something similar happened over, of all things, corn flakes, and involving characters as eccentric and colorful as John Kellogg.
On “Supreme Court Upholds Title 42 Border Policy: Read It For Yourself”
It's a shame those concepts don't command more loyalty from the middle of the High Court's spectrum, though.
On “Video Throughput: Alien Twin Spin”
Agreed that this is one of the best Throughputs yet made. Packed with science, oozing with love for the movies, and demonstrating that paying attention to what's real is helpful to storytelling.
Also, "warp and weft" is a great phrase that I haven't used in a long time but may well have cause to use in a trial I have coming up in about two weeks. Thanks for the reminder of this terrific metaphor.
On “The Future’s So Bright?”
I can accept "proof" rather than "evidence."
On “The Oregon Doughnut Run”
Sounds like it was a terrific adventure. Should you find yourself in my city again, look me up. You can do better for donuts here than Voodoo. A lot better.
On “My Favorite Documentaries Of 2022: One Critic’s Best Of The Year List”
I was going to say, "Hey, where's Summer of Soul?" But that was 2021 and here it is the end of 2022 already, which tells you something about how I'm experiencing the passage of time. (But if you've not seen it, OMG make the time and see it.)
On “The Franklin Mint Wouldn’t Answer the Phone”
How many different bored apes were there? I think they were all the same ape, with different clothing or color schemes or such. We can have Trump-as-Batman, Trump-as-Thor, Trump-as-Thor-but-wearing-a-lime-green-cape, Trump-as-Sinatra-getting-out-of-a-helicopter-with-a-martini-only-it's-just-tap-water-with-an-olive-for-some-reason-because-he-doesn't-drink, Trump-as-Sinatra-getting-out-of-a-helicopter-with-a-martini-glass-of-tap-water-and-also-wearing-a-lime-green-cape, and so on. All at $100 apiece, all generated by a robot.
On “The Future’s So Bright?”
You raise an interesting question, which needn't be married to the subject matter of the OP:
I'm not sure I agree. I have hope, for instance, that things like racism and sexism can be pushed back in social influence, over the course of time and with sustained effort, debate, and moral commitment. Telelogically, we'd use words like "defeated" rather than "pushed back" or "minimized," and those phrases do come easily where more moderated, nuanced terms feel less natural to write or speak. But the truth is, I lack hope that these things can be defeated. My real hope is for there to be, over the course of time, marginal and incremental improvements that are probably hard to measure but nevertheless real.
And I guess philosophically faith and hope are probably alloyed in some way. If "faith" is the belief in the reality of a given thing "X" despite the absence of evidence to support any belief in X, "hope" may well be the belief that "X," while not yet extant, one day will be. These are, I think, emotional rather than rational states of mind. It's different than "The sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning." We have very good reasons to anticipate that it will, so that sort of thing would fall outside my definition of the word "faith," even though the mechanics of the English language are such that it feels natural to say "I have faith that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning." "Confidence" might be a more accurate word.
Maybe I'm making that more complicated or precise than it needs to be.
Seems polite to circle back to the OP. We could take a teleological view of fusion power, I guess: the attainment of sufficient technology that fusion can be sustained in an energy-positive, controlled, and mass-scalable way. One may have or lack hope that such technology will be developed in the future, but as I've defined that word, it's a belief that exists in the absence of supporting evidence.
"
I hope you're right. I just don't share your optimism that things like the spending bill are either a) sufficiently impactful and/or b) par for the course. Maybe I'm just in a sour mood today.
But as I say, I'd be pleased if you turn out to be righter than me.
On “The Franklin Mint Wouldn’t Answer the Phone”
I can see conservative Christians (*) grumping about Pope Francis doing and saying things that are refreshingly consistent with the positive, good morality of actual Christian teachings, and that gives me a really good idea about the answer to this question. (Not that Francis and the RCC are above significant criticism for failing to properly reckon with their own past grave misdeeds, but some of the things Francis says and does are praiseworthy and these are the things that cheese off a bunch of American religious people who for some reason all happen to be politically conservative.)
(*) It's been my longstanding observation that people who identify as "conservative Christians" are really into the "conservative" part, and not so much into the "Christian" part, of that label. A phenomenon we touched on briefly last week right here in these pages.
On “The Future’s So Bright?”
It's true that young people aren't doing all the things us Olds wish they would. But it's not just climate change that is responsible for that. Or, more precisely, the doom-and-gloom that surrounds reporting of climate change. Alsotoo, us Olds ought to know better than to believe that large-scale clean and cheap fusion power is right around the corner. It's been about twenty years away for our entire lifetimes, and the fusion optimists still say it's at least twenty years away.
It's not right around the corner, and as was discussed here briefly but thoroughly last week, it's probably a lot more than twenty years away. Recent technology news is no excuse for continuing to defer making painfully hard economic and policy choices to protect our environment. (Which, as long as I'm belng plain-spoken about it, we aren't going to do -- democracies are really bad at making decisions like that and autocracies are also really bad at making decisions like that, albeit for different reasons than democracies.)
On “Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 12/12/2022”
I'm aware that the Canadian system of government is more federalized than the United States'. Is it this federalized? (I don't know the answer.)
"
Conngress votes to remove bust of Roger Taney, replace with Thurgood Marshall:
Congress votes to remove a bust of the Dred Scott decision's author from the Capitol https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143113389/capitol-remove-roger-taney-dred-scott-statue?sc=18&f=1001
I wrote about Taney's statues being removed from the city of Baltimore some time ago:
https://ordinary-times.com/2016/02/12/the-destatuification-of-a-justice/
Today's decision is one I applaud. The Court needed a hero in the 1850's. Hell, the whole nation did. Instead, we got Roger Taney.
On “WWJD about Christian Nationalism?”
Something's missing here...
I think that's got it.
"
Yes. Including at least one member of Congress, the aforementioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, who declared on 23 July 2022: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”
https://twitter.com/NextNewsNetwork/status/1551204108471861248
On “Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 12/05/2022”
It's a shocking upset because I picked Brazil because everyone knew Brazil was going to take the whole thing this year and now the money I put into the pool is on fire.
"
A while back, I think it was Jaybird who pointed out that we were seeing some really nutty upsets in the World Cup. Got another one today. Good for the Croats! (Even though my bracket is toast.)
"
Just curious. What event has to happen before you would call something a "coup attempt", Pinky? Does someone have to actually fire a gun at a government official with the intent to overthrow that government?
"
One of the interactions I had in the last few days I was on twitter concerned this law. I clashed with other left-of-center people about it. They opposed the law because the wording used to protect the marriages in question did not specifically and explicitly include same-sex and interracial marriages.
Which was probably the way that Sen. Sinema drafted it, to give Republicans some cover on their right flanks when they voted for it. And that seemed to work, as an appreciable number of Republicans DID vote for it. Moreover, it puts the bill very squarely within the Constitution's grant of power to Congress under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, so this will be a very difficult law to get overruled when it is inevitably challenged.
But this wasn't morally pure enough for my left-of-center interlocutors, so they opposed it. Which made me want to face-palm in exasperation. Guys, we got the W and this goes a long way towards making sure we keep it. This is how politics works.
There were also right-of-center folks who opposed it because there was no explicit and overt statement that a religious entity wouldn't be required to recognize a marriage contrary to its religious tenets. Well, at least that's why they said they opposed it and I didn't think it necessary to challenge their sincerity though you can infer that I had doubts. (N.b., even before this law passed, there was no impediment at all to a religious entity refusing to perform a ceremony for, or recognize as religiously valid, marriages contrary to their doctrines; the new law does nothing to change that entirely appropriate state of affairs.)
"
It's a story that is at once weird and scary. It seems highly improbable that even as large a conspiracy as ~300 members could possibly have overthrown the government of Germany, they were well-armed enough that they probably could have killed a lot of people trying. And they seem to have had some German variant of the QAnon/sovereign citizen mythology that I had previously thought was principally a north American thing. Also the whole "every male in this family is named Heinrich and we use Roman numbers to distinguish who they are" thing is just weird weird weird.
On “303 Creative Case is About Free Speech, Not Discrimination”
I'm old enough to remember when we were told that it was a terrible thing that Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family and friends were denied service at a fine dining restaurant because of their political association with Donald Trump.
"
I certainly see it more that way than not. The creation of a cake or a website strikes me as more of a commercial activity than an expressive one, even if the final product displays a great deal of artistry, skill, and craftsmanship. (Jack Phillips' cakes produced at Masterpiece Cakeshop are indeed beautiful.) But it's a fuzzy line when we're talking about commissioned artwork. I can see the argument that even if the work is commissioned, I still express myself in it. Much of the great artwork in the western canon was created on commission and therefore fits within the artistic constraints and requests of the commissioner. We don't stop respecting the artist or appreciating the artist's message for her having worked on commission.
Let's say the question is "What kind of shoes do you think would look good with this suit?" The shoe salesperson is making an artistic judgment (aesthetic, if you prefer) when presenting choices to the customer. But we'd never imagine that we'd permit a shoe store to not sell to someone based on their race, sex, sexual orientation or affinity, religion, or any other suspect class. It feels right and natural (to me, at least) to enforce the rights of individuals by using the government to prohibit that shoe store from discriminating on those bases. And if the shoe salesperson says "But my religion..." at least my immediate tendency is to respond with "Bullshit. Sell them the shoes." I'm not alone in that.
But if the question is "What should happen next in this movie's script?" we become very queasy about the government getting involved there. The movie is obviously a work of art, a work of expression, and it feels morally wrong and authoritarian for the government to involve itself in what does or doesn't go into it. There are probably more artistic choices being made, and they're probably more significant, than the shoe salesperson, but I suspect no one reading this words would be comfortable with the government having involvement in the making of a movie, excepting perhaps if there were good-faith national security concerns involved. And perhaps not even then. If the government were to say, "No, you can't depict this thing," pretty much everyone here would say, "Bullshit. The director can depict whatever she wants," or at the very minimum, demand the government come up with a damn good reason why she can't.
Decorating a wedding cake or crafting a website are somewhere in between these two things.
"
I refer the honorable commenter to a remark I made some moments ago:
And here it is. It wasn't that no one noticed those rights didn't exist, it's that those rights hadn't previously been made enforceable through statutes crafted to meet a Constitutional mandate. This is why these statutes are treated differently than, say, traffic regulations: they are specifically authorized by the Constitution to enforce its terms.
As a practical matter, the right to express ourselves freely has eternally been subject to substantial hole-poking by governmental and cultural influences, both before and after 1789. We have always had laws punishing defamation, prohibiting espionage such as dissemination of classified security information under threat of (potentially) death, restricting access to pornography or other obscene material, and the like. We have never had *absolutely* free speech and probably wouldn't like it much if we did, especially in today's brave new world of deepfake porn, targeted messaging algorithms, and instant global rumormongering. What constitutes those things (call them "exceptions" if you wish) is, and has always been, malleable according to prevailing norms and cultural pressures -- for instance, if someone were to have called Oscar Wilde a homosexual today, it's doubtful his response would have been a (foolish) defamation lawsuit, he'd probably say "Yeah I am, so what?" in response.
"
Indeed. This is why Justice Scalia was right in his decision in the case of Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990): "The government's ability to enforce generally applicable prohibitions of socially harmful conduct, like its ability to carry out other aspects of public policy, cannot depend on measuring the effects of a governmental action on a religious objector's spiritual development."