Perhaps the absence of tragedy in Israel's mind can be explained through the onesidedness of its monotheism. Suffering is to be resolved in reality and not merely in the illusory feeling of the spectator. The prophet becomes the practical moralist, the politician and jurist, because he intends to end the suffering of the poor. And it is not enough for him to assume these various callings; he has to become a psychologist as well: he must make pity the primeval feeling of man; he must, as it were, discover in pity man as fellowman and man in general.
Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, p. 143.
I recently came across this ranking of Disney princesses in terms of how feminist they are. It actually clarified something for me about what bothers me whenever one comes across discussions of whether female protagonists are 'feminist'. The ranking given is:
(10) Aurora (Sleeping Beauty)
(9) Snow White (Snow White)
(8) Cinderella (Cinderella)
(7) Ariel (The Little Mermaid)
(6) Belle (Beauty and the Beast)
(5) Jasmine (Aladdin)
(4) Rapunzel (Tangled)
(3) Tiana (The Princess and the Frog)
(2) Pocahontas (Pocahontas)
(1) Mulan (Mulan)
It's very noticeable that, except for Rapunzel, this is chronological order. But the thing that struck me most was that the rationale for each place heavily depends on defining each character in terms of what happens to her. This is the whole reason, for instance, why Belle is so absurdly low on the list. The author notes that Belle is usually considered the most 'feminist' Disney princess, and then goes on to reject this by listing what happens to her in the movie -- she "voluntarily makes herself a prisoner" and "falls for a domineering man, because she thinks she can change him". What's left out are all the obvious reasons that explain why Belle is usually seen as Disney's most feminist female protagonist: she's the one whose character is least defined by, and thus least at the mercy of, other people, she stands up for herself the entire movie, she doesn't wait passively in the face of her problems but actively sets out to solve them, and (what is in its own way perhaps most important) she does what she thinks is right and is fairly consistently right because of it. Of all the Disney princesses, Belle is the one who is most consistently an agent in her own right. We see this with the supposed reasons why she gets her low ranking. She "voluntarily makes herself a prisoner" -- yes, by courageously negotiating for her father's release so that she can save his life. She "falls for a domineering man, because she thinks she can change him" -- no, because she falls for the man only when she has already changed him by refusing to be intimidated by him and insisting that he act like a civilized person, and he does.
The problem with this conception of a 'feminist protagonist' is that it defines 'feminist protagonist' as an entirely external status -- it's an approval the heroine gets solely to the extent that she's a good girl who makes sure she only ends up in the right kind of situation. One sign of this in the article is how often marriage comes up as a reason for downgrading the protagonist's status as feminist: marriage is a bad thing to want and a worse thing to achieve. There's no sense here that how strong a female character is could possibly depend on her: what makes a protagonist a 'feminist' protagonist or not is how she happens to fit or not into a man's world. This is perverse in the extreme.
Much the same thing can be said about 'feminist' antagonists, although I find it interesting that people don't talk about them as much. Aurora in Sleeping Beauty is a fairly passive character, but what often goes unremarked is that Prince Phillip is also quite passive, because the movie is structured as an elaborate indirect battle between Maleficent and the Three Good Fairies, and Aurora and Phillip are merely the pieces on the board. Maleficent uses Aurora as an instrument of revenge, and the Three Good Fairies bring Maleficent down by weakening Maleficent's curse and rasing Phillip up as an instrument of restoration. For all practical purposes the movie is a war between goddesses; like the ancient Olympians, who could not overturn the set will of an opposing god, neither Maleficent nor the Three Good Fairies can simply undo the other side's moves, and therefore must work around them. And the result is that the thing people really remember about Sleeping Beauty is neither Aurora nor Phillip but Maleficent, who is arguably still Disney's single best villain. Maleficent is the villain whose evil is least cartoonish and least derivative, and therefore darkest, and therefore least in need of any explanation in terms of any external factors. There's an increasing tendency to try to give psychological explanations to wicked queens in modern re-tellings of fairy tales -- in the recent Snow White and the Huntsman, for instance, Queen Ravenna's behavior is explained as a sort of lifelong retaliation against her kidnapping (and possible rape) as a young girl. In other words, she is a function of what was done to her. It is intended to humanize her, but contrary to the intention it dehumanizes her, robbing her of her own responsibility, the resolute wickedness that is her own most fascinating literary feature, and gives it to a man. It is impossible to imagine Maleficent, Mistress of All Evil, who wields the powers of Hell, ever being reducible to an output from a patriarchal input. She is a fairy-tale Lucifer, a beautiful and intelligent creature full of pride and glory who is evil because that is what she chooses to be, end of story. She is defined not by others, and certainly not by any men, but solely by her own character and choices. And she is an impressive villain because of it, standing out as distinctively memorable in a field full of stereotypes because of it. She is wicked in her own right.
* Charles Camosy has a good post on the increasing obsession with 'fact-checking'. One of the things that I think egregious about this is that it gives people an illusion of critical thinking without itself being based on critical thinking, a very dangerous thing given that people already are tempted to use political set-pieces and slogans in place of serious thought. The fundamental problem with fact-checking is that the conclusion of any checking of facts has to be relativized to the method of checking. To take a really simple example. Suppose the question is whether unemployment went up or down. The answer to this can depend on the particular metric used -- are we counting only active job seekers without a job as unemployed, for instance, or are we counting everyone who does not have a job, or everyone of working age who does not have a job? And what is your method for collecting this information? Each of these will give you a different kind of answer, each of these answers will be suitable for some questions, and it may well be that on some such measurements that unemployment goes up and on others it goes down. As Mike Flynn likes to point out, 'fact' comes from the Latin word for 'something made', and while etymology is not destiny, it is nonetheless true that facts always have an element of construction, or, to put it in other words, that you cannot actually make sense of a fact without knowing how it was reached. Just as certain theorems in geometry depend on what constructions are allowed, so too what facts you can get will depend on what methods you use. Fact-checkers, however, position themselves as bias-less and as presenting 'the answer', and therefore present as critical thinking what is in fact hubris.
The first question should always be: What kind of argument and situation provides the context here? The second question that should be asked is: On what basis would someone claim this? Then we can ask: What other bases could be used, and what claims would they yield? And finally we can ask: Was their basis the best basis to use given the argument and situation? Only with the final question are we really in a position to 'fact-check'; and you will notice here that good 'fact-checking' is primarily a form of practical evaluation, not theoretical -- it's really about the most useful and relevant ways of getting answers to certain kinds of problems, and whether someone is using them.
* Rebecca Stark and a number of others have started a new evangelical theology blog, Out of the Ordinary. All of those involved are quite excellent, so it should be a good blog.
* A recent study suggests that less than half of churchgoers in the U.S. are aware of the fact that they can register themselves officially as members of their church. Among Catholics that number is at about a third of churchgoers. This is quite remarkable given how much official membership rolls are used for charting numbers -- and it raises the question of how much purported declines in church membership are due to people who attend but never actually sign up. (Thinking about this, while I know very well that my parish has official rolls, I don't think I've ever actually filled out the paperwork, despite attending regularly. So it's not just ignorance that has an effect here.)
* Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding", a very famous little piece, in which Anderson presents basic atomic theory without using any words derived from Greek or Latin -- instead he uses Anglicized Germannic equivalents:
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.
* The IEP article on St. Jeanne-Francois Fremyot de Chantal, one of my favorite early modern saints; Fr. John Conley's discussion of her philosophical ideas is quite nice, considering how little her work is studied in philosophical circles. He has a book, The Suspicion of Virtue, that I haven't read, but hope to get around to at some point.
* The recent little kerfuffle over whether the Democratic Party platform should continue to mention support of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has led reporters to try to pin down the State Department on what Administration policy actually is on the matter. It turns out that the State Department won't be pinned down, which I thought was interesting. (The U.S. is not alone in this, of course; very few nations recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital -- only Israel, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in fact.) Actually, looking into it further, it's more complicated than that. In 1995 the U.S. Congress passed a law stating that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by no later than May of 1999. That law is still in effect. However, it had a wiggle-room clause, intended to give flexibility if something came up, which allows the President to issue a six-month waiver. And every six months since 1999 a waiver has been issued by whichever President was in office at the time. So I suppose the official position of the Unites States on whether Jerusalem is the capital of Israel is that we will some day have the official position that we have officially had the position since 1999 that it is, but that currently we officially have no official position on the matter. Sir Humphrey Appleby would be very proud.
* Randall Rauser discusses John W. Loftus's "Outsider Test". You occasionally find internet atheists trumpeting it. Technically the test is applied whenever anyone converts to Christianity, so the evidence for the notion that outsiderness contributes any special element to the discussion is pretty inconclusive at best; and even if that is set aside, then, as Rauser notes, it all turns out to boil down to 'consider the evidence and arguments fairly,' with a dubious rhetorical twist that seems deliberately rigged to underplay the extent to which serious evaluation of anything requires sympathetic understanding. The real response to people applying a double standard is to urge them to have more sympathetic understanding of other people's views, not less sympathetic understanding of their own. (It is not as if sympathetic understanding hasn't widely been recognized as essential to good critical thinking: for instance, it's one way you could put John Stuart Mill's test for higher pleasures in Utilitarianism, Chapter 2, and Mill was just adapting Plato's Socrates from the Republic. Loftus's own test requires that one start with sympathetic understanding of the outsider -- how else are you going to give an accurate assessment from the outsider's perspective; so the emphasis on the outsider's skepticism rather than sympathetic understanding of the outsider is an arbitrary choice for rhetorical purposes rather than anything substantive. The whole 'test' boils down to: 'sympathetically understand why the skeptic has the objections he does', and this, far from being the extraordinary thing Loftus claims, is just an advocacy of fair evaluation.)
* The trailer is out for the second Atlas Shrugged film:
The first one was very bland, although the aesthetic of it was pretty decent. A bit Russian, actually -- nothing on the level of quality of Tarkovsky or anything like that, but it had the sort of all-on-a-level, meandering, "we're not in a hurry to get to the point because the whole thing's the point, since, after all, why else are you bothering to watch it" feel of a great deal of decent Russian cinema. That fits Ayn Rand pretty well, since that's pretty much her novelistic style, but it doesn't exactly make for Hollywood. I thought the costuming and set design were actually quite nice; they blended 1950s corporate design elements with more contemporary elements in a way that was classy. They're investing more money in this one, and they have changed out the entire cast. It's an interesting line-up; the original was mostly young untried actors and actresses, this has a much more experienced roll-call, consistently mostly of high-quality TV actors. And then there's Samantha Mathis, who actually makes sense as a Dagny Taggart. And this movie will cover more of the more eventful part of the book. So it could be at least moderately interesting.
* The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ) keeps a massive strategic maple syrup reserve, which stockpiles massive quantities of maple syrup to prevent severe failures of the maple syrup market. It was in the news recently because it was the victim of a major heist.
We don't usually think of it as such, but real maple syrup (as opposed to the fake stuff) is a minor luxury item that is in relatively high demand, and Canada dominates about three-quarters of this large market, with Quebec dominating the market in Canada. So it gets treated as a strategic commodity, just like oil, its distribution carefully planned so as to maintain the viability of the market. Contrary to the way it has sometimes been portrayed, Canada as such does not have a designated Maple Syrup Reserve, although, honestly, given the way the Canadian government works it wouldn't be much of a surprise if they did. Rather, it is maintained by FPAQ, the world's most powerful maple syrup syndicate. The thieves hit an FPAQ warehouse, and stole millions of dollars (Canadian) in maple syrup. The warehouse had $30 million in maple syrup; it wasn't all stolen, and FPAQ is keeping mum about the exact amount, but it's certainly in the millions of dollars. It's actually rather brilliant. Genuine maple syrup is, as I said, a luxury item, so you can get an excellent price for it, but unlike many luxury items it would be easy to smuggle, easy to bootleg, and hard to trace. The thieves didn't grab the bottles; they siphoned it out of the warehouse bottles, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool to overflowing and still have some to spare, so that anyone not looking closely might not realize that anything had been stolen at all.
* I have been shamelessly lax in using diacritical marks for French names in this post. It led me to wonder why English is so rare among modern languages in having a Roman alphabet but no diacritical marks (we use them artificially when we think it's important to indicate deviant pronunciations, or in loanwords that have not been completely anglicized). It turns out that nobody knows. The best guess I've seen is that it has to do with the interaction between English pronunciation and spelling. English has a large number of phonemes, somewhere between 35 and 50 distinct sounds, in part because it has an unusual number of vowel-sounds. (For comparison, Spanish is in the 20s; and the most generous count for French, which also has an unusual number of vowel-sounds, although still fewer than English, is somewhere around the most conservative account for English.) At the same time, spelling in English is extraordinarily irregular, so only a small handful of these phonemes are associated with a regular spelling (consider: zoo, true, shoe, dew, through, you, Hindu; or, in the other direction: loud, famous, would, you, dough, mould). Some of the irregularity is due to the fact that the English alphabet is small in comparison to the sounds it has to represent; part of it is due to the fact that written English derives from many different dialects of English; and part of it is due to the fact that English-speakers are very resistant to spelling reform. You need a fairly regular phoneme representation to make diacritical marks worthwhile. So at the end of the day it seems that English has no diacritical marks because they wouldn't be good for much.
I've noted previously that English is in practice very sloppy about its syllables. It's not the only language -- anyone who listens to Quebecois French begins to wonder if they even know what a syllable is -- but English is also very generous with how you pronounce vowels. I suspect that the two are related, and I wonder if part of it's because the sheer quantity of phonemes in English are just too many to bother keeping track of without some clear way of doing so. (Of course, it's hard to disentangle this from the effects of the fact that there are just a lot of English speakers scattered over a large portion of the world, and not much to keep them in line.)
The fundamental concept of substance traverses all phases of philosophy and science. And in conformity with the loftiness and maturity of thought that Leibniz achieved with his principle of living force, Kant was able to break away from all scholasticism with regard to the concept of substance, and to make it a presupposition for the concepts of relation. The position that Kant gave to substance as a precondition for causality and reciprocity of action tore away, as it were, the absolute independence of substance. It has absoluteness as a category only as a "precondition" of causality. This absoluteness does not rest in the category itself, is not confined to it itself, but realizes itself only insofar as it makes causality possible, for the latter could not do its work without the former.
Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, p. 60. As stated I think this is somewhat misleading; the idea that substance is a precondition of causality and reciprocity of action is itself scholastic, by way of Wolff and Leibniz, and the idea of substance as having absolute independence is Cartesian (although Descartes was himself adapting scholastic ideas). It's not the content here so much as the way in which Kant proceeds in order to establish it that is the real divergence.
Eternal cities are not made by laws of men
yet here where old man Tiber keeps his place
one is shaped by ancient laws.
How long the count of years, a steady thrum,
how long since civil walls were made
in days of wolvish men,
how long since fair Egeria woke the fonts of right,
since every grove was filled with nodding gods!
How unforeseen transfiguration of all things,
by which each thing became a figure and a type!
Could any sibyl's thought foresee these praying hands,
that Aeneas seeking Latium would find the Lateran?