"For Its Own Sake" has many benefits

The last chapter of Pirkei Avot is about the glories of Torah study

"Rabbi Meir (Mai-eer) said, anyone who engages in Torah study for its own sake ('lishma') merits many things. Not only that, but the entire world is worthwhile for him alone. He is called 'friend' and 'beloved,' he loves G-d, he loves man, he brings joy to G-d, he brings joy to man. It (the Torah) clothes him in humility and fear. It enables him to be righteous, pious, upright, and faithful. It distances him from sin and brings him to merit. [Others] benefit from him advice and wisdom, understanding and strength, as it says, 'To me is advice and wisdom, I am understanding, and strength is mine' (Proverbs 8:14). It gives him kingship, dominion and analytical judgment. It reveals to him the secrets of the Torah. He becomes as an increasing stream and an unceasing river. He becomes modest, slow to anger, and forgiving of the wrongs done to him. It makes him great and exalted above all of creation."

The trick is to ignore the fact that there are all these benefits, and do it anyway.....

Oopsies from April

The Angry Professor was honest, but it went to the wrong person. Of course... for general academic mayhem, you really can't beat an Angry Professor (technically, it's "the Angry Professor" but there's more than one of us....)

Pooh witnessed some dumb lawyer moves, most of which did tick off the judges involved.

End of Democracy and of Web 2.0

Gotta hawk a new carnival! Carnival of the Decline of Democracy - Round One by Ken Goldstein. If I'd known, I might have submitted this or this. Well, next time. There's lots of good (bad) material out there. How about this: the first attempt to put new restrictions on human rights back into the Constitution since the damn thing was written. (And, just for fun, backtracking and qualification at the same time)

Also, some disturbing new technical features: I'm getting spam in my Technorati RSS feed. Not the watchlist that you click to on the sidebar, but in bloglines, I'm getting multiple "hits" that are clearly splogs with no content or linkage relevant to the watch. I've been wondering for a while now when companies and spammers were going to notice Web 2.0 features like technorati tags. They glommed on to trackbacks quick enough.... Also, online pizza delivery and other companies that save your credit card info should ask for some kind of verification before taking on-line orders....

Update: I finally figured out why I was getting traffic from a website I consider a pretty inhospitable environment: pure dumb luck. They're using the technorati backtracks on articles they consider "of interest" to create rolling link blogs, and when I comment on an article they're tracking, it just happens.

Understatement of the Day, or, Why "Middle" and "Moderate" are two different words

Unity08 wants to create, by webroots (yes, I just made that word up: cite me!), a bipartisan presidential ticket for 2008. As David Broder points out

The practical difficulties facing the venture are enormous. Persuading prominent figures to submit their names for consideration will not be easy. ... it would be a huge risk for Republicans or Democrats who have been elected to a position of responsibility to abandon their party and run under the Unity08 banner.

There's your understatement. The article repeats the canard that internet users are "younger" when surveys have shown a remarkably wide range of ages and professions among us bloggerly types.

Then, of course, there's the problem of concept v. execution: what "moderates" are going to take such a radical step, and will they really be campaigning toward the middle?

Non Sequitur: Brett's got the lyrics to The Deepest Shelter In Town, which reminds me, in a roundabout way, of Shel Silverstein's I'm Standing on the Outside of your Shelter, as sung by Fred Hellerman.

Non Sequitur redux: Ozarque's got some great links up: on credulity in children, framing immigration and other issues, and cute, free toys. Also, because everyone's going to be linking to some version of it, Avedon Carol's commentary on RFK, Jr's election theft report and one lame attempt at rebuttal.

Sleep Meme

1. Do you use an alarm clock to wake up?
If the Little Anachronism doesn't get us up first.

2. What time does your alarm go off?
Weekdays: 6:25 am
Weekends: not at all, or 7:25

3. What sound does it make?
NPR news

4. Do you hit the snooze button? How many times?
Rarely. If I have the time to lounge, I just lounge.

5. If you have a partner, do they have a separate alarm?
No. Same kid, same clock.

6. Does your partner get up at the same time, earlier or later?
Spouse tends to get to bed earlier, can get up earlier more easily.

7. Is your clock set ahead? If so, by how much?
No. I use official time to reset my clocks regularly.

8. What's the first thing you do when you get up?
Go to the bathroom.

9. Do you eat breakfast? If so, what?
Weekdays: granola, cheerios, raisins; juice; coffee.
Weekends: chocolate chip corn muffins and assorted cheeses; waffles or pancakes

10. How long does it take you to get ready?
For what?

11. On the weekends, what time do you get up?
Depends. We sort of alternate getting up with Little Anachronism, so it could be 6-ish or it could be 8-ish...

12. Do you lounge or do you jump into action?
Depends on what needs doing. I like a little lounging in my schedule. But I'm capable of remarkable speed when provoked.

13. In an ideal world, what time would you get up?
Whenever.

14. How many hours of sleep do you typically get?
5-7 hours at night. An hour or two of nap about every third day, too.

15. How many hours of sleep do you want to get?
8-10 hours.

Via Little Professor

Self-Pity or Other-Pity?

Brian Ulrich points to this trenchant review of currently popular books on women in Islam. It's good stuff, to some extent, but I think there's a bit of oversensitivity here:

Meanwhile, the abundant pity that Muslim women inspire in the West largely takes the form of impassioned declarations about "our plight"--reserved, it would seem, for us, as Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern.

That's absurd. Read anything about Mormonism in US history, read any American (liberal, which is most of us) Jewish take on women in old orthodox (or new ultra-orthodox) communities, or -- taking this out of the realm of religion entirely -- Western discussions of women in patriarchal Asian societies. The rhetoric is identical, really; it's often overdrawn, the air of superiority is annoying because it is sometimes quite hypocritical, and the imposition of solutions is often poorly considered. However, I will go out on a little limb and say that the condition of women under Western liberal democracies is better -- legally, socially, economically, educationally, politically, on average and relative to males -- than the condition of women under religious fundamentalism, under family-first legal and social systems, or under pre-liberal Western societies.

We have made some progress, and though it's uncomfortable to talk about "superior" or "inferior" societies, and a bit silly to talk about one aspect (especially one as important as law and practice with regard to women) without talking about the totality, but a little realism and focus is important sometimes.

Problem with blogging from bloggerly sources: I wrote this, tucked it away, and then found the full article via HU-Islam (a member of the Sunni-Shii harmony bloggers group SuShi). After a pretty strong (and sorta convincing) indictment of the books under consideration, Laila Lalami goes on to say

Where does this leave feminists of all stripes who genuinely care about the civil rights of their Muslim sisters? A good first step would be to stop treating Muslim women as a silent, helpless mass of undifferentiated beings who think alike and face identical problems, and instead to recognize that each country and each society has its own unique issues.

"Unique" does not per se mean "unable to be generalized" and is often a cover for nitpicking and precisely the kind of relativism Lalami rejects earlier in the essay

A second would be to question and critically assess the well-intentioned but factually inaccurate books that often serve as the very basis for discussion. We need more dialogue and less polemic.

Well, that's an easy one: make your interlocutors defensive by claiming that only you want dialogue while they are clearly unhinged. "Dialogue" does not mean "polite exchanges tending to moderate compromise" but civil discourse between strongly held positions about very important and difficult issues. "Polemic" isn't a bad word.

A third would be to acknowledge that women--and men--in Muslim societies face problems of underdevelopment (chief among them illiteracy and poverty) and that tackling them would go a long way toward reducing inequities.

What's odd about that is that the vast majority of the Western feminists Lalami is beating on suggest precisely those sorts of issues as first-priority policies. She's beating up on strawmen. And strawwomen

As the colonial experience of the past century has proved, aligning with an agenda of war and domination will not result in the advancement of women's rights. On the contrary, such a top-down approach is bound to create a nationalist counterreaction that, as we have witnessed with Islamist parties, can be downright catastrophic. Rather, a bottom-up approach, where the many local, homegrown women's organizations are fully empowered stands a better chance in the long run. After all, isn't this how Western feminists made their own gains toward equality?

That's kind of ahistorical, which makes it my provenance. There have been many paths to empowerment, political and otherwise, in the West (there is a bit of occidentalism in Lalami's presentation, but we all need some categories to work with), some of which really were "top down," and most of which are dreadfully incomplete. "Bound to create a nationalist counterreaction" is the kind of "they're not as advanced as us, so all they can do is react emotionally" orientalism that Lalami is trying to reject.

So, the review is its own polemic, a worthwhile corrective but not an answer in itself, no matter how much it tries to present itself that way.

We have high speed access, so I'll make this quick...

Since the title is what people find when they search for you, make it good, for everyone.

PC World's 25 worst tech products of all time which really does contain some notorious dead-end decisions.

Carnival of the Vanities is up. Not sure why Technorati and pointed me to a random webhosting site; I sure hope that Technorati isn't going to get spamlinked to death. Also, the Carnival of Satire!

Hope this wasn't too long... apparently my haiku practice is going to pay off when I redesign my web pages.

eCherry Blossom? For Me?

John Patrick has awarded one of nine eCherry awards to yours truly, for my haiku

Politics Imperfect
Politics always
trumps scientific data.
Imperial decline.

And, though I don't read him regularly, his post just a few below the awards on How to be Catholic in the DaVinci Code era is a fantastic corrective to a lot of the lowbrow handwringing

The Church itself tests my faith far more than the DaVinci Code, or Dogma, or anything that Hollywood markets to Protestant America. If you really want to test somebody's faith, if you really want to see some cages rattled, you wait until an angry, practicing Catholic makes a movie.
...
RB once asked me how I can disagree with the Vatican and still call myself a Catholic. "Isn't religion all-or-nothing?" he asked. Answer: that is a protestant attitude toward religion; I am not a protestant; no, religion doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, what an odd assumption. I guess that would explain why you'd have to leave and start your own church!

It reminds me of something which I'd more or less forgotten for a while: I'd always felt that Jews and Catholics have a special affinity. (Ignoring, for a moment, the historical relationship, because sometimes it doesn't help) There's a huge theological gulf between the two faiths, of course, but there's also a remarkably congruent attitude towards faith within them: both of us are old, diverse communities with deep and complex histories, struggling to maintain unity out of massive differences and changes; both of us have rich legal and ritual traditions that are reasonably well known but praxis which is much more varied; both of us have a decidedly simplistic and somewhat negative public image, as well as considerable internal tensions which we prefer to keep internal.

For what it's worth, like John Patrick, I used to find it easier to talk about religion with Catholics than with Protestants. I don't know that it's really true anymore; most of my on-line friends seem to be devout atheists, while I'm more of an old-fashioned Jewish agnostic. But I do empathize.

Update: Karen Armstrong is pretty much my favorite religion writer, and she's got some sharp views on modern religion, anti-religion and the wisdom of agnostic transcendant views of God. Again, she comes from a Catholic perspective, teaches at a Jewish seminary, studies Buddhism seriously and is an historian. No wonder I like her.

Separtists Unite!

These were in the Carnival of Satire a while back, because I sent them. But I don't think I ever noted them here. So....
Miland Brown's Eight Tips for American Separtists [via]:

I guess if we get creative, every part of the USA is under illegal occupation by the USA. Here is a list of tips for creating your own American separatist cause! (These tips would work for non-American parts of the world too.)

1. Look over every treaty, agreement, document, or ruling that impacts the current legal status of the area in question. Go back as many centuries as you need to find the right dirt. Can you find even a single instance where someone forgot to dot an "i" or cross a "t"? Is there any technicality (no matter how minor) that could be highlighted? If so, congratulations! You can now claim that American sovereignty is illegal under American and international law and that all subsequent legislation by the USA is not binding.

2. Has even a single American military member been in your area since the time you can "prove" American ownership of you area is bogus? If so, you can now claim an invasion happened and can throw around the word occupation. It does not matter if shots were fired. The mere presence of American soldiers constitutes an act of war.

3. Did the people of your area actually vote to join the USA? If not, claim the annexation as illegal and undemocratic. If so, did it happen after the "occupation" began? Did people (or their descendents) who were not citizens of your area prior to American "occupation" participate in the vote? If so, dismiss the election and declare it invalid as the "occupiers" rigged the election by voting too.

4. Put up a web site bolding stating your "facts." Claim to be the legitimate representative of your nation under occupation. Be sure to put up lots of pages detailing the alleged violations of international law and showing American aggression. Be sure to get your site listed in as many places as possible. Be aggressive in search engine optimization. (Create a blog or two too!)

5. Have a forum at your site. Use it to repeat your claims over and over again and link to any website or news article which in any way could be twisted to support your arguments. Ruthlessly use ad hominem attacks on anyone who posts anything you disagree with. Calling them ignorant of international law and history or even racist should do the trick.

6. Head on over to Wikipedia, learn the ropes, and start inserting your version of history in every article you find! If you are subtle, good at edit wars, and have a lot of patience, you can make a real difference.

7. If you are brave, start up your own national bank and start issuing money and loans. You can also sell passports! When you get busted, use this as evidence of continued American aggression and attempts to silence your movement. Be sure to highlight on your site the "political prisoners" the USA puts in jail. (Go ahead and sell stamps too!)

8. Distance yourself from other separatists groups. Some Hawaiians, Texans, Alaskans, etc. may be claiming occupation but in your case it is real. You may all use the same arguments but there are important differences. Also, deny you are a separatist. Since your area was never legally American, you are not separating or seceding. You are asking to be restored. Further, make clear your area never has been and is not currently legally American.

Texans and Vermonters are more secessionist than Hispanics....

History Carnival... and more to come

Part One of the History Carnival is up, a highly selective, pedagogical focus. Part Two ought to be fun. In an interesting twist, she has posted the unedited submissions in the "A submitted B at C-blog" format that blogcarnival.com provides gratis to carnival hosts. So you can see everything sent in, as well as enjoy her selectivity.....