Saturday, January 31, 2004
If you stepped in hot lava, would it burn through your shoe, or not?
Scott Rowland of U. of Hawaii has the answer to this question, and many more. Judging by the spelling, most of these questions probably come from eight-year-old kids. Which is great.
"States' rights" = "bollocks"
In the Calpundit thread that I reference below, some dude named Jay writes:
This was probably the result of a misguided compromise, since folks couldn't agree on what to call it, "The Civil War" or "The War of Northern Aggression".
It's a shame, because while I think that slavery was reprehensible, the South has also much to be proud about as well. Many brave, honorable (and highly skilled) men fought for the South. For the most part they didn't see themselves as fighting FOR slavery, but rather FOR states rights. In the end, they, and their Northern brethren, were betrayed by fire-eating politicians, who proved to make terrible generals.
This spin may seem pretty amazing to those of us who grew up in the liberal Northeast, but the sad fact is that it's the standard story among many Americans, particularly in the South. The soldiers were usually fighting honorably --- no, nobly --- for states' rights. Slavery? Merely incidental. In this version of events, the Civil War was like a tragic argument between two parties that were roughly equally wrong, rather than a case of the South's fighting tooth and nail to perpetuate a monstrous violation of human rights.
Downthread, Roger corrects Jay's version of events:
... I've read some recent (excellent) work that has looked at the events leading to the War. What they've found is that there is hardly a single speech given by ANY leading (or even minor) successionists prior to 1861 that wasn't almost entirely focused on the preservation of slavery. And there were a LOT of speeches; successionists had fanned out across the south, and were furiously trying to rouse the masses to their cause. They gave hundreds if not thousands of stump speeches, and transcripts, news reports, and original texts confirm that slavery was always THE issue. "States Rights" was simply not a major rallying cry, except in the context of the preservation of slavery.
So when did "States Rights" as a separate idea appear? Almost the day after the war ended. Southern Revisionism began quickly, and was flogged by most of the leading Southerners who'd previously led the Confederacy. But at least for the duration of the war, most Confederates were quite explicitly fighting for slavery, NOT for "States Rights."
The work Roger's referring to is probably Williams College historian Charles B. Dew's recent work Apostles of Disunion (bookstore links). The U. of Virginia Press's abstract for the book has this to say:
In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation.
Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argument--the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately--did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.
Over at the Amazon page for the book, we see that reviewer Timothy Hulsey points out the following:
Before the war, President Buchanan had rejected Kansas's petition to abolish slavery, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision mandated governmental support of slavery even in states which had determined to reject this "peculiar institution." Both of these decisions were clear violations of the doctrine of states' rights, yet slaveowning Southerners cheered. The problems came with the possibility that future states, given a free choice (and a Republican presidency), would not embrace slavery -- and might even endorse social and political equality for Black Americans.
By the way, do read the other Amazon reviews, where a bunch of adherents of the Civil War revisionist school nitpick or propose ridiculous counterfactuals whereby the North would have been the ones fighting for slavery. Yes, fine, that's all well and good, but the fact is that in this universe, the thing that got Southern soldiers to line up for duty, to kill or be killed, was the fear that the niggers would become free.
Now, I frequently read arguments that "Well, the North was fighting mostly for economic reasons, so the South couldn't have been fighting to preserve slavery." This argument is disingenuous: it ignores the simple fact that combatants need not be fighting for the same reason. The fact that the South was fighting to preserve slavery does not require that the North be fighting to end slavery.
In fact, the standard narrative I was taught is that the North wanted to preserve the Union, whereas the South wanted to preserve slavery. Louis Menand's superb book The Metaphysical Club (bookstore links) touches on this in some detail: before the Civil War became imminent, most Americans viewed abolitionism and Union as diametrically opposed. In order to preserve the Union, the abolitionists had to shut up, because they were pissing off Southerners. It was only much later that the causes of abolition and Union became conjoined; and it was the Southerners' (probably mistaken) belief that the Lincoln wasn't going to preserve slavery that joined them.
Anyway, all this is just to say: if you ever see someone, online or off, going on about how the South was was fighting for the noble cause of states' rights, then point them to Dew's book. Or just ignore them. They're full of it.
Friday, January 30, 2004
My vote cancels out y'all's!
Vermont doctors, Hawaiian hippies, wots the diff. (Via Everything Burns.)
The title of this post is, of course, an homage to the recent instantly classic Onion piece.
It features a woman's chest
OK, last MeFi link of the day ---
In trademark law, parody is a defense to trademark infringement. Eveready Battery Co. v. Adolph Coors Co., 765 F. Supp. 440 (N.D. Ill. 1991) (holding that a commercial advertisement of a well-known actor in a bunny outfit, banging a drum, was an effective parody of the plaintiff's mechanical toy rabbit advertising character). In the present case, consumers are highly unlikely to be confused as to the source of services for several reasons, including the following:
- the domain names are entirely different;
- the BOOBLE web site searches only provide content related to Adult web sites, including TGP sites, Adult stores, and Adult-related products like browser cleaners, pop-up filters, etc.; and
- the BOOBLE mark is distinct from the GOOGLE mark in that it differs in sound, appearance, commercial impression, and other relevant aspects:
- it features a woman's chest;
- it uses the phrase, 'The Adult Search Engine;'
- it posts a warning that the web site contains explicit content; and
- it disclaims any association with Google.com.
Incidentally, if Google's obnoxiousness continues to increase, I may have to jump ship and throw my free Google shirts (acquired through my dept., and acquaintances) into the back of the closet and start using Vivisimo.
BTW, if you've never used Vivisimo: it's a bit slower than Google, but it's definitely better for straight web search, at least when you want to sift through lots of search results. Yes, that's right: I said it's better than Google. OTOH "Vivisimo" is a horrible name --- I actually mistyped it "vivismo.com" the first time, which meant that (ironically) I had to fall back on Google, which intelligently figured out that I had misspelled it. Anyway, Konqueror users can type "vi:search terms" in your location bar; Mozilla/Netscape users will need the Vivisimo search plugin.
Getting married turns you into an arrogant, sanctimonious asshole
At least, judging by the example of Neil Steinberg. Reading this article made me want to [update: uncivil and violent speech deleted --- suffice it to say I said some nasty stuff here]. And I'm normally fine with marriage.
Maybe it's just the incredible awfulness of the writing and logic --- bad writing and sloppy thinking piss me off way more than political opinions that differ from mine.
But then, I should hardly have expected less from a mindless right-wing flack who barks obediently whenever RoveBushCo throw him the day's media-spectacle-of-the-moment, like a seal being tossed his fish: Arf! Arf! 1.5 billion dollars to promote marriage? Marriage good! Arf!
(Via MeFi, where none of the posters seems to have clued into the fact that Steinberg's column is a piece of politically motivated hackwork.)
167 buffalo wings in 34 minutes
The winner of this year's Wing Bowl may surprise you. (p.s. Here's her homepage.)
Fury
Do these creationist fuckwits never give up?
UPDATE: Maybe it's just Georgia. Looks like Civil War revisionists are piling on too.
Labels: evolution, science-education
We have trained mountain lions to eat people
Or so says David Baron. We must train them to fear us again, for their good and ours:
Near where the mountain lion would later eat the jogging teenager, the fleece and Teva-wearing residents of Boulder, Colo., reveled in living in a city surrounded by acres of open space. They were delighted to find so many Bambis munching on their front lawns, not realizing that as this prey species grew bolder around humans -- feeding all day long, rather than just at dawn and dusk, mountain lions would be drawn in after them. (Boulder was so fond of its deer that when wildlife biologists tried to conduct a study on them, activists staged nocturnal raids to liberate the animals from traps.)
...
In trying to "re-create a mythic past -- a time when man and beast lived in harmony," Baron writes, the residents of Boulder had removed the negative reinforcement that had made generations of mountain lions fear humans. A unilateral cease-fire in the war with mountain lions succeeded only in casting humans as the cats' new prey.
Not that Baron is advocating picking up a shotgun and shooting every animal with a demonstrated taste for human flesh. But as he tells the story of the frustrated wildlife biologists who tried to sound the alarm as the lions around Boulder grew bolder, in the period before the jogger's death, he suggests that some more humane aversion-training may be in order.
Call it modern-day predator control. Tagging or radio-collaring mountain lions that are seen by people would help biologists understand which individual cats have learned not to fear humans, and should be re-educated or shipped to a remoter locale. Montana officials, for instance, have had success using packs of trained dogs and beanbag-loaded guns to school grizzlies that spend too much time around humans.
Frankly I think more of America could use a big deer-eating predator species. On the East Coast, where there no natural predators left, deer are major pests. If we could only ship some of the good, human-fearing cougars to Jersey.
Thursday, January 29, 2004
NIH under attack for sex research
WaPo recently reported that the NIH is under attack. The backstory emerges in paragraph four:
But a recent one-two punch has put the NIH on the defensive. Late last fall, a conservative religious group released what it said was evidence that the NIH was financing scientifically useless studies of morally repugnant behavior, triggering a congressional inquiry. In December, an article in the Los Angeles Times suggested that improprieties were occurring in collaborations between NIH scientists and drug companies. Those claims prompted a fresh round of congressional questions.
ScienceNOW goes into more detail (non-free subscription required):
NIH began a sweeping review of its human sexuality research portfolio after the House came close to eliminating funding for four sexual research grants in July, and some lawmakers raised more questions at a 2 October hearing. A House Energy and Commerce committee staffer then forwarded to NIH a list of about 198 grants compiled by the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative advocacy group (Science, 31 October 2003, p. 758). The research topics ranged from research on AIDS and risky behaviors, such as drug use, to preventing teenage pregnancy. The Coalition's Andrea Lafferty called the studies "smarmy" and a waste of taxpayers' money.
Not so, says Zerhouni in a two-page letter sent to Commerce Committee chair Billy Tauzin (R-LA) and two senators. "The peer review process ... worked properly," and "I fully support NIH's continued investment in research on human sexuality," Zerhouni wrote. An attached six-page summary by institute directors provides detailed justification for three specific grants, including a study of prostitutes and truck drivers that NIH says will help prevent spreading HIV from truckers to their wives, and a conference on sexual functioning that could "improve the lives of millions of Americans" and shed light on dysfunction.
C'mon, if we can't count on government to fund scientific research into sex, then what the hell can we count on the government to fund? Is there anything that the average taxpaying American citizen cares more about than sex?
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Hijackers did not use box cutters
WaPo reports that they used Mace, pepper spray and knives instead on all but one of the flights, according to the bipartisan 9/11 commission created by Congress in 2002.
Speaking of which, what happened to the 9/11 commission web site? Google says it was up until recently. Could it have something to do with the fact that, for unexplained reasons, the White House and House Republicans have been trying to keep the commission's findings out of headlines, especially during next year's election season? From the article above ---
The commission, which has been hampered by obstacles since its creation in late 2002, announced yesterday that it will publicly press for a two-month extension of its statutory deadline, May 27. Any extension, which must be approved by Congress and the White House, would push the commission's work further into the presidential campaign.
The White House and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have said they would oppose any extension. But Kristen Breitweiser, widow of World Trade Center victim Ronald Breitweiser, said she hopes the appeal from the commission will change their minds.
You know, I don't lay the blame for 9/11 at the foot of anyone in our government, including Bush (and believe me, I blame Bush for lots of other things), but it's actually kind of amazing how suspiciously the Bush administration has been acting w.r.t. the 9/11 commission (see also this Salon article).
How brain-dead do you have to be to request or promise $87 billion of taxpayer money for Iraq reconstruction, $1.5 billion to promote marriage, and $1 billion for a Mars mission, but refuse a measly $11 million extra to investigate the single most deadly terrorist attack in history? This is absurd. I literally cannot figure out the reasoning behind it. It's like the Bush administration is actively trying to attract suspicion. Even putting aside the policy implications, it's an utterly idiotic political move as well: Are they just counting on the media not to give big play to this story?
This gives rise to the related question: Why aren't more Americans furious about this obvious oversight? I grew up in the New York area, and I was living in Manhattan in September of 2001; and I'll never forget what it was like to look downtown, day after day, to see that giant stinking brown dust cloud where the towers had been all my life. But for most Americans, maybe it was just another thing they saw on TV. Maybe kicking ass in Iraq has distracted them: Bush changed the channel, and now they've forgotten.
(Via Atrios.)
