Giggle du jour

With thanks to commenter Bulldog Cajun at Joe.My.God.

I Knew It!

Believe it or not, I do think about other things than being snarky about right-wingers.

Northwest Coast totems

I spend a lot of time at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, which is no surprise, given my life-long fascination with the natural world and the way it works, which in my mature years has also become a fascination with human cultures and their origins. (Sometimes the processes can be remarkably similar, if mostly metaphorical.) On a couple of recent trips, I noticed the strong resemblance between the iconography of the Northwest Coast peoples of America, the high cultures of Meso-America, and the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific, and in fact an affinity between the art of those groups and certain motifs in Chinese and Japanese depictions of, for example, gods and demons -- common motifs, such as large, staring eyes and protruding tongues as a sign of power. I considered the possibility that there was a common origin somewhere back in the mists of time, especially since evidence points to origins of at least some of the American Indians and the peoples of the Pacific island in close proximity --possibly in Southeast Asia and/or the area of Indonesia and New Guinea.

Well, lo and behold! While reading Joseph Campbell's The Flight of the Wild Gander, a group of his essays that deal with the origins of myth and religion, I ran across a passage in "Bios and Mythos" (pp.30-31 of the New World Library edition of the collected works) in which Campbell notes the work of a number of anthropologists who have entertained similar ideas, specifically the work of Robert Heine-Gedern, who, he says, "showed that late Chou Dynasty art motifs had been somehow diffused from China to Indonesia and Middle America."

Maori totems

And searching through that rag-bag memory of mine, I remember references to the Lapita people of Taiwan, coastal Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, who are generally considered to be the ancestors of the peoples of the Pacific Islands. This ties in with another memory of a reference to the origins of some Amerindian languages in Southeast Asia, but I don't remember the specific locality that was mentioned. (This is kind of a sketchy association, since there are a number of languages spoken in that region, some of which are relatively recent results of movements of peoples from mainland China and possibly India. I really can't confess to be up to snuff on that particular area.)

The bottom line is that there is some validity to my idea of a common artistic tradition between America, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

(A side note: at the beginning of the exhibition "Ancient Americas," the Field has a video outlining the two main theories of how people arrived in the Americas from Asia: either via the Bering land bridge during the most recent glaciation, or by boat. These are always presented as two theories in opposition, but it occurs to me that they're not mutually exclusive. Another booby-trap engendered by either/or thinking.)

Polynesian panel

Culture Break: Eurhythmics: Doubleplusgood

My reaction to this story:

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.

A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

The only appropriate response:

Idiot du Jour

Bryan Fischer, who I don't really think is an idiot -- he's just an asshole who will say anything as long as it's derogatory and inflammatory. Today's pearl of wisdom:

Fischer was upset over a report saying that more than 50 percent of Los Angeles residents between the ages of 18 and 34 speak a language other than English in their homes while speaking English outside of it.

“You know what this means, ladies and gentlemen — we are losing the ability to talk to each other,” Fischer complained. “We’re losing the ability to communicate with each other. And this means that we’re on the road to no longer being one nation under God, indivisible. No longer one nation, no longer indivisible, and in many ways no longer under God.”

Instead, he said, the idea that people could speak more than one language was fracturing the U.S. into “subcultures.”

Don't look for logical consistency or any sort of coherence in that -- there isn't any.

Once upon a time, when I was in high school, you had to take at least two years of a foreign language -- it was a state requirement. And being conversant in another language was considered the mark of an educated person. (When I graduated, I spoke four with varying degrees of fluency. I continued German in college -- another requirement for graduation.) Now, it's cause for suspicion.

I should also note that in my neighborhood, one is likely to overhear conversations in Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi, any one of several African languages, and Vietnamese -- but English is still our lingua franca. (And I find that statement itself inexpressably funny, given that it's Italian -- English is not what you'd call a "pure" language.)

I wonder if Fischer has ever read Beowulf in the "original" English. I did.

Saturday Science: The Evolution of Words

I admit it: I'm a language nerd. Language fascinates me, and not only because it's one of the tools of my trade. Probably more than anything else, language is what sets us apart of other animals, and the way that our languages have developed provides some fascinating insights into our prehistory. And now, statisticians have developed a way to figure out when those changes happened:

A team of researchers in the U.S. and U.K. has developed a statistical technique that sorts out when changes to words' pronunciations most likely occurred in the evolutionary history of related languages.

Their model, presented recently in the journal Current Biology, gives researchers a renewed opportunity to trace words and languages back to their earliest common ancestor or ancestors - potentially thousands of years further into prehistory than previous techniques can do with any statistical rigor.

Merritt Ruhlen, in The Origin of Language, provides tables of words with equivalent meanings with task of sorting them into families. It's fascinating to see the various variations in sound that crop up. From the article:

For example, the modern languages of English and Latin descended from a common predecessor called proto-Indoeuropean. In English, the words father and foot took on an initial f sound, but in Latin those words retained their p sound, as in pater and ped. This transition occurred across the English language in many words that had featured a p sound.

That holds true within families -- the Romance languages have retained the "p" -- pere, padre -- while the Germanic languages have shifted to the "f" -- German vater. (Don't be fooled by the spelling -- it's still an initial "f" sound, which to me only emphasizes the fact that writing is pretty recent.)

Ruhlen, if I remember correctly, manages to get back about six or eight thousand years. This goes further:

"Our new method is another exciting step to understanding how languages and genes evolve," says Pagel. "It will allow us to go back in time further than before, making it possible to reconstruct ancient proto-languages, words that might have been spoken many thousands of years ago."

I recommend Ruhlen's book, by the way -- in addition to being highly informative, it's fun.

"I don't hate gays, but. . . ."

We're starting to hear that more and more. Jean Ann Esselink at The New Civil Rights Movement knows what it means, and lays it out plainly:

There seems to be a new strategy afoot by the anti-gay forces, who for years have been successful at depriving gay Americans of equal treatment by vilifying them. For the last half century, since the time when Harvey Milk urged gays to "come out, come out wherever you are," every passing year makes that character attack less productive. It was one thing when gays could be cast as deviants and criminals and mentally ill, but people don't like their sons and brothers and friends called names and disrespected. As a result, the traditional "God hates fags" rhetoric has been softening. Gay rights opponents are transitioning to a new, more devious posture. The words may sound kinder, but the message is not.

The same politicians, pundits and priests who once stood proudly and proclaimed their opposition to gays with words like "abomination", now preface their anti-gay remarks with a phrase like: "I don't hate gay people, but..." or "I have nothing against gay people but..." I named this tactic the "gay but" a few years ago after Rick Santorum was ballsy enough to speak those very words on camera.

What you need to remember about the "gay but" phenomenon is that what comes after "I don't hate gays but..." is usually an example of the hatred the speaker has just denied.

"Hate" is a stronger word than I would use, but considering the source is bigotry, maybe that's the right word after all. And the last comment there is key: consider "but" a flag announcing that you should ignore everything that came before -- the "I don't hate gays" part, which is a thinly disguised lie -- because what comes after the "but" is the real substance, which usually translates to something like "I just don't think they should be considered human beings."

One of the commenters brought up the equivalence with "Hate the sin, love the sinner," another one of those assaults on language and reason. That one is even better at demonstrating how these "Christians" (because they are almost always "Christians") can weave falsity into anything: the "sin" of course, is homosexual behavior, a viewpoint based not on any real understanding of morality but on cherry-picking 3,000 year-old (at least) tribal taboos from their holy book, the holy book of a tribe of nomads who considered women and children property and whose prime directive was "spawn 'til you die." (What is morality? Good question. Let's start with the idea that it has to do with the way you treat others, not what you do with your genitals.) What they don't admit is that that behavior is a result of an essential component of the "sinner's" identity: contrary to what the ex-gay movement preaches (a movement, let us note, that at present is in tatters because it is based on that lie), same-sex orientation is an integral part of one's personality and identity, which is the thing that makes the "love the sinner" part complete bullshit.

Go read Esselink's article. It's worth it.

Court Filing of the Year

Maybe the decade. It's short, read it -- the fun begins on page two. The set-up is that the prosecutor filed a motion to forbid the defense from referring to him as "the government," as being prejudicial.

Made my day.

Via Discourse.net.

Today's Must-Read

The uses of language have always fascinated me -- the ways in which we use words to shape concepts and discussions of ideas is a key element, I think, in understanding what we're really saying -- or hearing. David Sirota has a great piece at Salon on the way our political discourse has been corrupted by the way in which politicians, pundits, and the media describe agendas and policies.

Yes, indeed, I’m fixated on how this Orwellian scheme by the elite media, politicians, pundits and lobbyists constantly shifts the rhetorical boundaries so that political debates are narrowed to preference outcomes that serve monied interests. Why am I fixated? Because this scheme is as powerful a corrupting force in our politics as campaign contributions, yet unlike bundled checks and anonymous super PAC donations, this scheme goes almost completely unnoticed.

Via Tristero at Hullabaloo.

The Power of Words

From my friends at Nick's Place:

History Lesson

Via my Web pal Nikolaos, this article about human migration:

DNA from the hair demonstrates that indigenous Aboriginal Australians were the first to separate from other modern humans, around 70,000 years ago.

This challenges current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

An international team of researchers published their findings in the journal Science.

While the Aboriginal populations were trailblazing across Asia and into Australia, the remaining humans stayed around North Africa and the Middle East until 24,000 years ago.

Only then did they spread out and colonise Europe and Asia, but the indigenous Aborigines had been established in Australia for 25,000 years.

This sort of thing fascinates me -- it's one of those areas where evidence from all sorts of disciplines comes together -- genetics, archaeology, linguistics, you name it. Here's another article, from NYT, with slightly more detail.

Australian, the language, seems to be pretty much unique. According to Merritt Ruhlen in The Origin of Language, it's distantly related to Indo-Pacific (New Guinea), and very distantly related to other languages in the Austro-Pacific family -- Malaysian, Indonesian, and the various Pacific Island languages. And I mean distantly -- the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were pretty much isolated for several thousand years. In terms of language, that's a hell of a long time. (Think about how much English has changed in just a few hundred -- remember having to read Chaucer and Malory?)

Ah -- I've been away from this too long. I really need to catch up -- if I can ever get ahead of my review backlog, and decide whether I'm going to learn Japanese, and at least get started on a couple of other projects.

Language Changes

Something strikes me as off about this comment by Andrew Sullivan:

The temperance movements of the 19thC & 20thC were classic Protestant Christian movements, conservative in nature. Wesleyans, Methodists, arts colleges, working men's clubs, self-improvement, all that sort of thing. You could just as easily say it was "early 20th-century conservative Christians' grand social engineering agenda". All the more compelling since the war on drugs is its direct descendent and prosecuted just as vigorously by contemporary Christian conservatives. Failed social engineering can be a conservative enterprise as much as anything else.

Prohibition occurred during what is commonly referred to as the Progressive Era and was considered part of the progressive movement's agenda. And while "failed social engineering can be a conservative enterprise" there are plenty of modern-day self-proclaimed progressives who still back the war on drugs.

Yes, the period of the early 20th century when all this was happening liked to style itself "Progressive," but that word had a much different meaning then than it does now. And do keep in mind that "progressive" has been very recently hauled out of storage and dusted off to replace the toxic "liberal" so beloved as a target by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. You have to look a little more closely at what was actually going on in these movements, and the temperance movement is as good an example as any: the methods, the tactics, and ideology are pretty damned near fungible with those of the anti-gay, anti-science, forced birth advocates of today.

The temperance movement, and the other phenomena mentioned by Sullivan's interlocutor, were about social control and enforcing a particular vision of morality on the populace at large. (Although the other examples were more positive and the concept more palatable.) The fact that many more people were prepared to accept that morality as valid doesn't really matter -- it was enlisting government in the service of controlling personal choice, and as much as right-wingers might like to point at today's progressives as embodying the same philosophy, it seems that the shoe is on the other foot. (No, I'm not going to take the wingnut PC left fringe as representative of contemporary progressives, as seems to be the habit with the aforementioned Pimple-Butt and, in fact, most commentators.)

And even though "plenty of modern-day self-proclaimed progressives" back the war on drugs, that doesn't change the shape and philosophy of that particular endeavor (which has been, need I point out, almost as successful as the war in Iraq). It's the old saw about the extremes meeting: I don't see all that much difference in tactics and approach between, say, the far left fringe of the gay movement and the far-right fringe of the anti-gay movement. They meet at the fringe, just the way moderates meet at the middle.

Language changes, and those who are working against the perceived status quo are, by and large, going to call themselves "progressives." That applies whether their aims are what we would understand as progressive or not.

Soldiers

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this particular language shift, but it just jumped out at me again this morning, in this post by Pam Spaulding at AmericaBlog. (Pam seems to be a regular there these days, although she doesn't seem to have made it to the masthead.)

...Failed personal relationships, legal and financial problems and the stress of their jobs were factors motivating the soldiers to commit suicide, according to the report.

I'm not sure when serving in the military became a "job," but that's what it seems to be now. When I was of draft age, it was a duty, a responsibility, an adjunct of citizenship, almost a sacred calling. These days, soldiers are no longer discharged, they are "fired."

We keep hearing reports of morale problems in the armed forces, of which the one cited in Pam's blog is one of the latest (and most extreme). Of course, this is in large part because the war in Iraq is a shambles. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that 82% of Americans hate their jobs. If the Pentagon wants to rebrand itself, maybe it should go back to being the military, and not just an employer.

Welcome to the corporate state.

"Hommaseksual"

I've remarked a couple of times about the use of the word "homosexual" by anti-gay bigots and straights who may be well-eaning but ignorant. I was therefore quite interested to read these comments from Out Front Blog.

There are reasons the Christianists use the word "homosexual" and refuse point-blank to call us "gay." Here's one:

[T]he American people react more positively to the term "gay" than to the term "homosexual." And they cite poll numbers from Gallup to back up that contention: apparently Gallup numbers show that approval of "gay" people is more popular than approval of "homosexuals."

Can't have that, now, can we?

This usage is deliberate on their part because "homosexual" as a term to describe a person (i.e., used as a noun rather than an adjective) is demeaning. It has a h istory as a clinical term used to describe a pathology (and that itself was the result of ignorance and prejudice), and that's the image that the Christianists want to perpetuate. They can't admit that gays are in any way normal, even though it's demonstrably true that we are just as normal (and probably more so) than they are. Consequently, any religious front-man who says that "homosexuals" should be accorded the dignity due to any human being has made himself out to be a hypocrite by the very fact that he is using a loaded term to describe us.

That has consequences, and don't tell me the Dobson Gang's not aware of them. From the New York Blade:

Every May since 2001 a Gallup poll asked Americans “In general, do you think homosexuals should or should not have equal rights in terms of job opportunities?”

The yes responses are as follows: 2001: 85 percent; 2002 86 percent; 2003 88 percent; 2004: 89 percent; 2005: 90 percent/87 percent; and 2006: 89 percent.

Note the two percentages given in 2005. That year, Gallup asked half the respondents about equal rights for “gays and lesbians,” resulting in a 3 percent higher approval compared with the Galllup’s typical use of the term “homosexual.”

. . .

Switching the terms “gay” and “homosexual” also influenced the number of people who said they were against equal rights. According to the same Gallup poll mentioned above, in 2005, 7 percent said “gays and lesbians” should not have equal rights in terms of employment. But 11 percent said that “homosexuals” should not have equal rights. That translates to 4 percent change—in favor of LGBT equality—simply because of the terminology.

I've had a couple of brief exchanges about this with Misty Irons at More Musings On, taking exception to her use of the term. Her rationale is that she is dealing with conservative Christians who are stuck in that term. I'm afraid I can't quite accept that one -- the point is to get them unstuck. I will readily grant that on the list of conservative Christians who are sympathetic to gay equality, she's right at the top, but that only points up the problems we still face in breaking down prejudice. Even those who like us just don't get it.

John Aravosis has similar comments on this issue, if not quite so confrontational as mine (and how rare is that?).

There is also the very basic rule of common courtesy here: you call someone by the name they prefer for themselves. I might ask of these people, as I did recently concerning Orson Scott Card, who has quite neatly placed himself in the spotlight as an anti-gay bigot, if they still call African Americans "Negroes," and if not, why not?

The answers should be illuminating.

(Footnote: GLAAD gives the appropriate references from AP, NYT, and WaPo. And yet they seem to ignore their own style sheets with some regularity.)

Will the Real al Qaeda Please Stand Up?

From Atrios, reporting a story from the BBC.

But the bigger point is that US military has no idea if these guys were "al Qaeda," or, more specifically, "al Qaeda in Iraq," which isn't really "al Qaeda" in the sense of being "the bad guys who attacked on 9/11." They may have thought they were "bad guys," and they may in fact have been "bad guys," but most likely all they know is that they're dead Iraqis and we have a stenographic press.

I'm not the first to comment on the way the insurgents in Iraq (read "sectarian militias") have morphed into "al Qaeda," with the willing connivances of the MSM. They have as much to do with al Qaeda as most of the "terrorists" at Guananamo.

Thank you, Newt Gingrich, for introducing the Republican Party to Newspeak.

"Fallen Soldier"

This would be, perhaps, affecting if he were talking about a real soldier. As it stands, it's a maudlin piece of special pleading for one of the few in this criminal administration who has actually been caught out.

This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it. But you possess a greater knowledge of this case, a keen sense of the man caught up in this storm, and of the great contest and tensions that swirl around the Iraq war. To Scooter's detractors, and yours, it was the "sin" of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn't duck when the war lost its luster.

Makes me want to puke.

Remember what I've been saying about the use of language to undercut reality. Libby's trial never was about the war. That's a crock. It's about endangering national security for partisan political gain, about lying to duly appointed investigators, about obstructing the investigation.

What happened is that Scooter Libby lied under oath about who outed a covert CIA agent and got caught.

It's sort of astonishing the people who are rallying to the cause, and it's not only the blogosphere who are noticing. Found this via TPM. From a footnote in Judge Walton's ruling allowing the presentation of an amicus brief in support of Libby.

It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant. The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics' willingness in the future to step to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions even in instances where failure to do so could result in monetary penalties, incarceration, or worse. The Court will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries, as necessary in the interests of justice and equity, whenever similar questions arise in the cases that come before it.

The list of those involved in this brief is impressive, if you're into wingnut lawyers. Robert Bork is only the tip of the iceberg. I saw the list somewhere and can't remember where offhand, but it should be in the brief, linked to in the post (pdf). I do remember that the names I recognized were all frothing conservatives.

Sandy Levinson has a cogent comment on this. I'm not sure if it falls under the heading of "unfortunate precedents" or simply "hypocrisy."

I suspect that whole lot of people thought that Clinton was "guilty" of something that "most people would, or should [not], think of as criminal." At that time, of course, I remember being treated to lots of lectures about the necessity to uphold the "rule of law" even against the highest official in the land, come what may. These were not in fact silly lectures. I have concluded, from the perspective of almost a decade later, that an honorable man would have resigned the presidency rather than forced his supporters to engage in the kind of legal casuistry that we were exposed to.

It's interesting how principle dissolves when it gets down to particulars. (That is not a judgment, merely an observation.)

More on Language

The idea of rhetoric in a post-reality world, by Mark Danner.

Here, in Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official” told him:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante’s welcome above the gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

It's long, and really, really scary.

Desire

Another one of those words. Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin has an excellent post on the ex-gay movement and how they create their own language while passing it off as one that the rest of us speak.

It's no big news, the way language shapes thought. George Orwell wasn't making it up, you know, and it's become a staple of right-wing strategy at least since the days of Newt Gingrich, the most unpopular politician in America (although he may have lost that title to the president). Look, it's something that the advertising industry has known from day one.

One of the most obvious ways that the right manipulates language is the use of the word "theory" in creationist propaganda. It trades on the multiple definitions of the word, taking a specialized and quite clear definition and trading it off to the at-large, nonspecialized, fuzzier definition without comment or clarification, leading to vast confusion, which is part of the intent.

Also, the term "lifestyle," used with "homosexual" as a description of something that doesn't exist except for a minority of bois who've never managed to grow up, but now a term that can show up in a Gallup poll as denoting a whole (and very complex) subculture based on sexual orientation. (Actually, a couple of subcultures -- it's meant to include lesbians as well, who have their own cultural norms.) Tell me, would you give any credibility to anyone who went around talking about the "African-American lifestyle" or the "Roman Catholic lifestyle" -- or the "far-right Christianist lifestyle"? I thought not.

This is not to let the left off the hook. The very fact that I can refer to "African-American" is an indication of how pervasively the politically correct left has done its work, in some examples to the point of what I can only call "the commonsensically challenged." (If I see one more story about a controversy erupting because "someone might be offended," I think I will probably hemorrage.) I will say, however, that in terms of naming groups, the left at least has enough respect for the various groups that compose our larger culture that they are willing to use terms that originate within those groups, unlike the Christianists, who use "homosexual" instead of "gay" because they are arrogant enough to insist that we are as we are because of a decision we made -- it's a "lifestyle," not an orientation. (And, of course, this only demonstrates that our opinions and feelings don't matter. Nor, for that matter, does objective reality -- note the comment in the post above about "we think of it as a lifestyle." I guess that settles the matter. I'd be interested to hear how some of them refer to Blacks or Latinos in private, given the overt racism of the fringes.) This comes out of one side of their mouths while out of the other side we hear that "everyone is made in God's image and deserves respect for being a product of the Creator." When we're not "intrinsically disordered," that is.

It gets worse, and it's now -- or really, has been for a while -- part of acceptable public discourse. See this little bit of revisionism by the conservatives' great white hope, Fred Thompson. It's very well done. It's also so completely slanted that I can't even find an opening. Basically, he's taking on the activist judges because he wants judges who are going to legislate from the bench the way he thinks they should. With a section on poor abused Scooter Libby and what a rotten person Patrick Fitzgerald is. This is simply manipulating language in the service of a political goal, which is what we see in the ex-gay example and my own examples above. Essentially, one long fallacious argument presented as "normal" discourse by doing a bait-and-switch with meanings.

(Note the Update on my post about Sam Brownback and Evolution, below: As Jack Balkin points out so succinctly, Brownback is doing the same thing.)

Frame of Reference

What happens to your feelings about "pro-life" advocates if we start calling them "forced birth" advocates?

Digby posted this and makes this comment:

The "great moral issue" of when life begins is fascinating I'm sure. Much more fascinating than whether the state can compel people to bear children against their will.

He's writing on this op-ed by Dean Barnett. Irony of the day:

Unlike the often erroneous stereotype of the pro-life citizen, I didn't arrive at my position as a matter of religious faith. Rather, my conclusions flow strictly from logical inquiry.

The big moral question regarding abortion is, "When does life begin?" While most people agree that life begins at some point between conception and birth, pro-choice absolutists argue that life doesn't begin until the fetus is fully delivered. Thus, they can enthusiastically defend a procedure like "partial birth abortion" where the fetus is partially delivered and then brutally "terminated" before it is fully delivered. At the other end of the spectrum, pro-life absolutists, reflecting John Kerry's stated view, argue that life begins at the moment of conception.

Query: How can you claim to arrive at conclusions by logical inquiry if you never bother to define your terms? As in, what exactly do you mean by "life"? Is the mere fact of cellular activity occurring sufficient? Or must it be something that can be sustained without what is, in effect, total life-support? He may be satisfied with the results of his logical inquiry, but I'm not -- I have no idea where he's starting from, and he doesn't bother to explain it.

Of course, without that small detail, the whole piece falls apart.

You can get copies of The Handmaid's Tale online, cheap.

The Ultimate Ursprache

Taking a break from my onerous task of reading fantasy and science fiction (mostly) for review, I'm rereading after quite some time Merritt Ruhlen's The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. It's a hands-on guide to the relationships among our languages that results in the discovery of the ancestor of all modern languages. I think one reason Ruhlen's arguments are so persuasive is the way that he presents his material: the first few chapters include a series of worksheets in which the reader is presented with a list of words from various languages and asked to group them according to their similarity -- essentially, basic lessons in the taxonomy of language. He carries it through successively larger groups -- i.e., from Romance languages to Indo-European to Eurasiatic, each successive family including more groups, until he has developed strong groundwork for the idea of "Proto-Sapiens," the original Mother Tongue.

It's even more fascinating because he spends a chapter or so relating the purely linguistic evidence to some of the recent work in genetics and anthropology and palaeoanthropology to build a vivid picture of the radiation of Proto-Sapiens and its descendants.

I'm usually resistant to the idea of exporting the idea of "evolution" out of biology into other fields, but linguistics is one area where it works. And of course taxonomy, which is really what the book is about, is all about organizing things, which I think is a nice theoretical exercise.

Worth checking out.

(Language fascinates me -- it is so innately human and yet doesn't seem to be limited to us. [I have strong arguments against those who trashed the ape-language studies of the 1970s on methodological grounds -- "classical" methodology stacks the deck against the study and warps the result simply because language acquisition is strongly associated with socialization, and arguments that the studies were invalid because the researchers interacted with the subjects simply don't hold water. Bunch of bureaucrats.] It is also a way of shaping thought. One anomaly: I think most people are like me and dream in images, not words; I tend to think in a mix of words and images, which offers some translation difficulties sometimes -- maybe it's that right brain/left brain thing again. If I had gone on in psych, I probably would have developed a discipline incorporating some kind of evolutionary linguistics, which didn't exist as a field at the time -- I'm not sure if it does yet. It seems a natural outgrowth of areas like developmental psych and cognitive science.)

Out of the Mouths of Demagogues

More Christianist Newspeak, this time from the horse's mouth:

"We use that word — Christian — to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."

So now the word "Christian" only refers to those who have Dobson's permission to call themselves that. I would guess that leaves about 80% of those in this country who profess Christianity out in the cold. Must be nice to make words mean whatever you want by fiat. (Hereinafter known as the "Caterpillar Syndrome," for all you Alice in Wonderland fans.) And James Dobson "reading tea leaves." Isn't that witchcraft?

Here's Dobson on Romney:

"I still think that might be an impediment for him," Dobson said. "There are conservative Christians who will not vote for him because of his Mormon faith. I'm not saying that's the correct view or my view.

He's not saying it's not either. Have you noticed that about him? (Aside: a friend from my auction house days once said that retail jewelers are about on a par with rug dealers, which is two steps below used-car salesmen. Jus' sayin')

Andrew Sullivan refers to the "encouraging contempt" in these comments. Yeah, there's a minor dose of opposition to Dobson and what he stands for, but what's really an eye-opener for me (and I guess I should read more comments on some of these conservative posts, but they start to sound like a broken record) is the level of blind acceptance -- one commenter called Dobson "a man of integrity." How you can say that about someone who habitually misrepresents facts, when he's not actually making them up, is beyond me. Some of the commenters have it right: Dobson's not a "religious leader," he's a politician hiding behind a Bible. This post seems to me to be much more on point. This comment, I thought, was choice:

Maybe knowledge from my childhood eludes me, but didn’t Jesus take issue with the Pharisees (and others) who prayed out loud in public and committed other “public displays of faith” (PDF, just as annoying as PDA). It is possible that I have been at my desk too long today but wouldn’t someone who talks openly about their faith in a public position (at least in the manner that Dobson seems to be hinting at) be behaving in the same manner?

Says something about the political arm of evanglical Christianity.

Digby has a post that touches on the basis of this whole phenomenon, in terms of the magical thinking that seems to the basis for supporting people like Dobson and other extremists (and, in case you were wondering, I do consider Dobson an extremist). I have to say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised to to read the very direct and unequivocal answers to the evolution question by Jonah Goldberg's and Charles Krauthammer. (As opposed to the waffling by the other pundits questioned.)