Be it resolved....

Be it resolved

• The size and type of screws, nuts, and other miscellaneous hardware which come with do-it-yourself kits will be clearly indicated so that replacements can be procured.
• Any and all baking recipes will clearly indicate a means of testing "done." Poking, toothpicks, jiggling, color, texture, etc., are all acceptable.
• Farmers markets are wonderful. It's not the farmer's fault if you go home and try to eat a honeydew melon and a dozen ears of corn.
• Stores which stock modular storage units are required to order more for you if your modular design exceeds the four units on the shelf, so you don't have to keep coming back weekly until you have the dozen you need. Alternately, stocking more than five of each color at a time would be acceptable.
• Any box which you've moved more than twice without opening is either priceless or garbage, and you'll never know which until you open it.
• Any room without a built-in light fixture must have a switched outlet

Discuss.

Comments Elsewhere: Parties and Dreams

Prompted by Jeremy's criticism of dKos's founder, I noted:

I'm not a Kos fan, as you're well aware. I'm actually struck by the fundamentally party-conservative -- not really liberal or progressive, but deeply, Big-D Democratic -- nature of Markos's project and his consistent unwillingness to actually address the coalition nature of the Democratic party. (also by the contrary consistent tendency of Republicans and 'mainstream' news sources to view Markos and the dKos crew as some kind of ultra-liberal, hard-left cadre) He clearly sees constituencies like progressives and women as subgroups within and subordinate to the Party rather than seeing the Party as an alliance of something like equals.

On a lighter note, Terry asked for "not-quite-coherent thoughts" and I offered this

I had a dream just last night in which I saw a short movie in which M*A*S*H* character Margaret Houlihan originally signed up to go to war in WWI, then spent the rest of the dream explaining to someone the historical trajectory of her career. Upon awakening I realized that my dream self neglected to notice that it would make her a lot older than she was, as WWII was actually her first war and the TV show takes place during the Korean conflict.

Quotations from Tosh #10: Utility

"For both nations and inviduals have sometimes made a virtue of neglecting history; and history has taken its revenge on them." -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 197.

"In the next century the nations revolted; and their revolt was nourished, everywhere, by history. It was the 'historic nations', the nations which were conscious of their history -- the Poles, Italians German -- which led the revolt; and all the nations in revolt began by discovering, or inventing, their history. No doubt the history which they discovered was not very good: the cosmopolitan historians of the eighteenth century were probably better as historians; but there was a large area of history which those historians had dangerously ignored and which now took its revenge." -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 197-198.

"It is right, I believe, to look for lessons in the past, to see its relevance to our own time, to observe the signs of continuity, connection and process. The past is not to be studied for its own sake. That is mere antiquarianism. But it is anachronistic, distorting, to judge the past as if it were subject to the present, as if the men of the eighteenth or the sixteenth or the tenth century had no right to be independent of the twentieth. We exist in and for our own time: why should we judge our predecessors as if they were less self-sufficient: as they existed for us and should be judged by us?" -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 200-1.

"The historian is amphibious: he must live some part of his life below the surface in order that, on emerging, he can usefully survey it from above. The historian who has specialized all his life may end as an antiquarian. The historian who has never specialized will end as a mere blower of froth. The antiquarian at least is useful to others." -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 201.

"If the future is not to be discovered but created, we need to recognize the power of such historical myths in helping to project a picture of the future which will rouse the enthusiasm or anger of the masses and sustain the faith or fanaticism of the elite." -- Alan Bullock, "Has History Ceased to be Relevant?" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 207.

"If one wants to know what is to be the future of history, one may well begin by studying the history of past futures." -- Alan Bullock, "Has History Ceased to be Relevant?" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 208.

"Of course, values based upon past experience have to be tested against and modified in the light of the new experience of each generation. But to ignore or throw them overboard, so that each generation starts again from scratch in the belief that no other has ever faced similar questions, and that nothing is to be learned from them, appears not only a form of arrogance but a wilful act of self mutilation." -- Alan Bullock, "Has History Ceased to be Relevant?" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 209.

Quotations from Tosh #9: Michael Howard

"'Socially useful' or 'relevant' history, whether consciously or unconsciously selected or tailored to meet contemporary social or political needs has no place in a university or anywhere else. But there is a danger that this is the kind of history that almost automatically would get taught, or at least learned, if the historical profession did not exist to prevent it." -- Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (1989), p. 12, cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 180.

"Far more than poets can historians claim to be the unacknowledged legislators of mankind; for all we believe about the present depends on what we believe about the past." -- Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (1989), p. 12, cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 180.

"And this perhaps indicates that the value of history as a training of the judgment and of the imagination is very limited if it is exercised only in recreating our own past, with little reference to the total context within which our society developed and, more particularly, the often very divergent structures of other societies whose development may have been of yet greater importance to the making of the world in which we live today. If it is, indeed, one of the major functions of the historian to explain the present by deepening our understanding of the past, then a study simply of our own society will not get us very far. Our awareness of the world and our capacity to deal intelligently with its problems are shaped not only by the history we know but by what we do not know. Ignorance, especially the ignorance of educated men, can be a more powerful force than knowledge. Ethnocentrism in historical studies, whatever its advantages in scholarly training, is likely to feed parochialism in the societies which those historians serve; and such parochialism can have pretty disastrous results." -- Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (1989), p. 12, cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 183.

"The past is a vast chain, every link of which must be kept in good repair." -- Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (1989), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 184.

"We have seen so much of this since the Second World War: people often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into disastrous decisions, and miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign societies with which they have to deal. It is an awareness for which no amount of strategic or economic analysis, no techniques of crisis-management or conflict-resolution and certainly no professed understanding of the 'objective historical process of the international class struggle' can provide a substitute. Such miscalculations are always dangerous. In our own day they may be lethal on a very large scale indeed." -- Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (1989), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 186.

"And this is a matter of which no historian can afford to be simply a dispassionate chronicler and analyst. However great his intellectual and moral detachment, in the last resort he is committed to the values, and to the society, that enables him to remain so detached. He is a member of the polis and cannot watch its destruction without himself being destroyed." -- Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (1989), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 187.

Rockets Red Glare, etc.

I'm not a fan of incendiary and explosive devices in the hands of amateurs, but it it's going to happen in my vicinity, I'm going to take pictures. Have a safe and happy Independence Day!

Quotations from Tosh #8: Mental Landscapes

"For blacks must read history with Indian eyes as well, and cannot fail to note that many of the New England 'fathers' participated not only in the forced migration and decimation of the original inhabitants but gave full strength to that trade in men which brought other dark men to these shores." -- Vincent Harding "Beyond Chaos: Black history and the search for the New Land" (1970) cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 156.

"Our studies can turn into bomb factories. ... We have a responsibility to historical facts in general, and for criticising the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular." Eric Hobsbawm, "The New Threat to History" (1993), cited by Catherine Hall in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 160.

"Fanon has been crucial to our understanding of the internal traumas of identity which are associated with colonisation and enslavement. For colonisation is never only about the external processes and pressures of exploitation. It is always also about the ways in which colonised subjects internally collude with the objectification of the self produced by the coloniser." Catherine Hall, "Histories, Empires and the Post-Colonial Moment" (1996) cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 163.

"Man spends his time devising techniques of which he afterwards remains a more or less willing prisoner." Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (1944) cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 172.

"There must be a permanent foundation in human nature and in human society, or the very names of man and society become meaningless." Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (1944) cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 174.

"Perhaps none of those who write so urgently about these problems have a very clear notion of the situation which they are trying to restore. But few of them can have realized how inappropriate it is to think of restoration at all, in the sense of returning to the historical past." -- Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (1965), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 177.

"History is not inevitably useful. It can bind us or free us. It can destroy compassion by showing us the world through the eyes of the comfortable ('the slaves are happy, just listen to them' - leading to 'the poor are content, just look at them'). It can oppress any resolve to act by mountains of trivia, by diverting us.into intellectual games, by pretentious 'interpretations' which spur contemplation rather than action, by limiting our vision to an endless story of disaster and thus promoting cynical withdrawal, by befogging us with the encyclopedic eclecticism of the standard textbook." -- Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (1970), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 193.

Comment Elsewhere: Ballot-rigging warning shot

In response to “McCain Predicts ‘Underdog’ Win in Final 48 Hours” (warning: Fox News. via) I wrote:

So, he's basically saying that the election will be stolen: there'll be no polls showing him in the lead, because he'll be losing by all accounts, and the vote-rigging operation will do the rest. There's no other reason I can think of to start pushing this kind of narrative now, instead of actually campaigning on issues like a real leader.

Paper ballots, please!

Oddly, however, my comment doesn't seem to be actually going through..... (it could have something to do with currently being on dial-up, or with Firefox.... or it might not.)

Quotations from Tosh #7: People in History

"The right-wing version of people's history is characteristically a history with the politics left out -- as in Trevelyan's English Social History -- a history devoid of struggle, devoid of ideas, but with a very strong sense of religion and of values. It is apt to idealise the family -- 'a circle of loved, familiar faces' -- and to interpret social relationships as reciprocal rather than exploitative. Class antagonisms may be admitted, but they are contained within a larger whole, and softened by cross-cutting ties. The characteristic location of right-wing people's history is in the 'organic' community of the past .... The ideology is determinedly anti-modern, with urban life and capitalism seen as alien intrusions on the body politic, splintering the age-old solidarities of 'traditional' life." -- Raphael Samuel "People's History" (1981), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 112.

"The attempt to recover the texture of everyday life may be associated with a 'neo-Romantic intellectual enterprise' -- one of the charges levelled against it; but it is perfectly compatible -- if that is to be the test of scientificity -- with elaborate day-charts and passionless prose." -- Raphael Samuel "People's History" (1981), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 115.

"Indeed it is unlikely that we shall ever be able effectively to combat bourgeois ideology until we can see how it arises in ourselves, until we explore the needs and desires it satisfies, and the whole substratum of fears on which it draws. Our understanding of socialism too might be less abstract, if we were to explore it historically 'from the bottom up', looking at its secret languages, its unarticulated passions, its cognitive unconscious and dissonances. Above all, the questions posed by feminism leave no category of Marxist historical analysis unscathed, and it is one of the strengths of people's history that it is proving a far more hospitable terrain for asking them than more abstract analytic planes. People's history also has the merit of raising a crucial question for both theoretical and political work - that of the production of knowledge, both the sources on which it draws and its ultimate point of address. It questions the existing intellectual division of labour and implicitly challenges the professionalised monopolies of knowledge. It makes democratic practice one of the yardsticks by which socialist thought is judged, and thus might encourage us not only to interpret the world, but to see how our work could change it." -- Raphael Samuel "People's History" (1981), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 116.

"Second, the discrepancy between the high quality of recent work in women's history and its continuing marginal status in the field as a whole (as measured by textbooks, syllabi, and monographic work) points up the limits of descriptive approaches that do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not address these concepts in terms that can shake their power and perhaps transform them." -- Joan Scott, "Gender: a useful category of historical analysis," (1988) cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 137.

"We must ask more often how things happened in order to find out why they happened; in anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo's formulation, we must pursue not universal, general causality but meaningful explanation." -- Joan Scott, "Gender: a useful category of historical analysis," (1988) cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 139.

"It is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts the body's sexuality. Sex-related differences between bodies are continually summoned as testimony to social relations and phenomena that have nothing to do with sexuality. Not only as testimony to, but also testimony for -- in other words, as legitimation." -- Maurice Godelier, "The Origins of Male Domination" (1981) cited by Joan Scott in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 141.

Quotations from Tosh #6: Marx and History

"History is a tragedy, but not a meaningless tragedy. Nor are we mere spectators: we have our parts in the action." -- Christopher Hill, "Marxism and History" (1948), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 87.

"Marx's influence on historians, and not only Marxist historians, is nevertheless based both upon his general theory (the materialist conception of history), with its sketches of, or hints at, the general shape of human historical development from primitive communalism to capitalism, and upon his concrete observations relating to particular aspects, periods and problems of the past." -- E. J. Hobsbawm, "Marx and History" (1984), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 93.

"It is also perfectly clear from the beginning that, since human beings have consciousness, the materialist conception of history is the basis of historical explanation, but is not historical explanation itself. History is not like ecology: human beings decide and think about what happens." -- E. J. Hobsbawm, "Marx and History" (1984), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 95.

"American historians, especially the most harshly anti-Marxian, generally confuse the two [Marxism with economic determinism] and then, since economic determinism is easy to refute, dismiss Marxism as being of no value. This game would prove entertaining, were it not that these same historians so often retreat into banal economic explanations to suit their convenience." -- Eugene Genovese, "Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South" (1968), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 101.

"It would be wonderful fun to list the respected and influential historians who have protected their jobs and families by eschewing the Marxist label while writing from a Marxian viewpoint and even greater fun to recount the multitude of ways in which the profession has misunderstood what they are in fact doing and saying." -- Eugene Genovese, "Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South" (1968), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 102.

Comment elsewhere: Six of one....

In response to a critical look at Clinton's continuing campaign I argued:

I'm ambivalent about this (not so much ambivalent about Clinton at the moment, but that's another discussion). The mantra with regard to the MI/FL crew -- "can't change the rules in the middle of the game" -- seems to apply here as well. Clinton's arguments about her electability aren't really more specious than Obama's arguments about his: both are untested premises in an arena where experimentation is fundamentally impossible. The superdelegate structure means that the near-tie in pledged delegates can't really determine anything, nor is it supposed to, like the first 45 minutes of most basketball games, or most sacred scriptures; since neither candidate has successfully convinced the democratic voters, there is no such thing as inevitability.

I see Clinton's argument. And if she believes, as so many of her supporters do, that Obama's electability really is weak, that he's a truly untested, risky candidate, then what she's doing actually makes sense for the party.

I don't like the way she's campaigning (you're right about that, for sure), and I think she's a huge liability in a general election, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss her arguments without acknowledging the liminal state both sides (and the party) is really in.

Jeremy's smart, though; I doubt I'll go unanswered.

p.s. I hadn't read this [via, but it's similar.... well, more Clinton-friendly, but still good points.