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Category: History

Fleeing to a better life

Consider the irony. A country famously founded by a search for a better life — freedom of conscious, economic opportunity, etc. — has no clue why people flee here.

Anti-immigration folk have focused on bogus results — "they're stealing our jobs [that none of us want to work in]" and "they're horrible criminals [even though immigrant populations tend to commit less crime than native-born ones]" — while making up a weird fantasy about why these folk are coming to the US — "they want to live on lavish welfare checks and collect Obamaphones [even though neither of those are a thing]."

Yes, there are criminals who come over the border illegally. But the vast majority — as demonstrated by the brutal hardship of the journey to get to the US southern border, or to cross it — are desperate, fleeing horrifying poverty and terrific domestic violence. That's why folk are coming with their families — because they don't want to leave their spouses and children behind in such an awful place.

One can debate whether people fleeing such horrible circumstances should be allowed in, but to simply deny that, and to instead lambaste them as frauds, murderers and rapists, and lazy bums, displays a profound cruelty, as well as an inability to try to address the root causes of such illegal immigration (beyond the dependence of a significant amount of the American economy on such workers).




Why Central American Refugees Will Keep Coming to the U.S.
“There is no way we can turn back”

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When the World Began: AD 1450

The College Board — which runs the Advanced Placement exams, including AP World History — is concerned that the latter covers too much stuff. (Or, as Emperor Joseph II says in Amadeus, "Too many notes.") And, yeah, I can see their concern. A good deep dive into world history takes a while to do.

But their solution — "So, hey, we won't test on anything before AD1450" is … well … kind of dumb.

The problem is that schools teach to the test. If your AP World History exam starts in 1450, that impacts not just that AP World History class, but all history classes. It also implies that only at that point does "important" history come up.

"Oh, that's okay," the College Board says, "We'll design two AP World History classes — one starting from 660 BC up to AD 1450, the second from AD 1450 onward. We'll just test on the second one."

Um, yeah. Because everyone will clamor to take that first class — or, if somehow, it's required, that they'll study all that earlier stuff — Rome, Greece, Egypt, not to mention ongoing also-important stuff in Asia and the Americas and Africa — just as diligently.

And that leaves aside that AD 1450 marks the point where Europe starts conquering the world, which doesn't at all distort the history of the world, nosirree.

Like I said, I get it — covering thousands of years of world history isn't easy. But that's world history, intrinsically. Creating some point before which we'll stay, "Stuff happened, but don't worry about it, we won't be testing you on it" is the simplest way to solve it. It's also the most simplistic, and the least helpful.




The College Board wants to cut thousands of years from its AP World History test. Teachers aren’t having it.
(CNN) — If you ask the company that runs the Advanced Placement tests, it’ll say it was trying to do world history teachers a favor.

There’s just too much history to cover and not enough time. So why not cut thousands of years from the AP World History test — and start at the year 1450 instead?

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Motives

One of my favorite WWII films is actually about the post-war period trying to come to grips with what happened during the war: Judgment at Nuremberg. A fictionalized account of the war crimes trials, it grapples in multiple directions with what happened in Germany to turn it into a nation that twisted the rule of law and human decency to commit atrocities against those they considered not worthy.

It’s in fact fascinating to watch those Germans, those Nazis, seek to defend themselves. Some are boldly proud of what they did (Werner Klemperer, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, does a remarkable job here). Some play the “We didn’t know what was happening” or “You had to go along with it” cards. Some, faced with the horror of what they’d done, the moral compromises they’d made, try simply to assert that their motivations were good, even if the results awful.

In the end, all the excuses fail. They were all part of the Nazi state. The motivations don’t matter so much as the results of the regime they supported, explicitly or implicitly.

It’s a powerful lesson, and one that we could all use a reminder of now and again.

Originally shared by +Talina Christine:

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Letters and Alphabets

We take writing and language for granted, but there's remarkable history and variability in how it's all constructed across time and space with humanity, and even large variation today — not just in language, but in how we convey it in writing.

Originally shared by +Yonatan Zunger:

This is a great family tree of alphabets — and isn't very conjectural at all, since we actually know how writing spread. The color codes are by kinds of writing.

The oldest forms of writing are true pictograms, not shown here; these are scripts like the earliest forms of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese writing, which are basically pictures (slightly stylized) of physical objects. These aren't full writing systems, in that they can generally only code things like "three sheep, four barrels of wine…"

These quickly evolved into logograms, a few of which are shown here in blue — not only the bulk of ancient Egyptian, but also modern Chinese and part of modern Japanese writing as well. In logograms, a small group of symbols represents a word, not phonetically but conceptually. (This is why the different Chinese languages, which sound almost nothing alike, can nonetheless share a single writing system! The writing codes ideas, not sounds.)

A common extension of logograms is to add sound representations, typically starting with using words to represent homonyms, and then adding logographic marks to indicate "the word symbolized by <X> which sounds like <Y>" to clarify synonyms, and so on. Nearly all logographic writing systems adopted this.

Ancient Egyptian did in particular, and an entire subbranch of its writing system started to adopt this more seriously, starting to use purely phonetic representations — that is, symbols that described sounds instead of concepts. This is one of the earliest forms of alphabetic writing.

This kind of "phonetic writing" then has a history which you can see here.

Abjads are scripts like Hebrew and Arabic, where each letter represents a syllable, but only uniquely describes the consonants; you're supposed to know the vowels from context. These work well in languages where the vowels vary following predictable rules and primarily indicate parts of speech, and so are still used in such languages to this day. (The name "abjad" comes from the first four letters of the old Arabic alphabet, a, b, j, and d.)

Abugidas (green) and alphabets (red) take this further, adding accent marks (in abugidas) or separate letter-signs (alphabets) for the vowels, as well. As Barry Powell argued in Homer and the Origins of the Greek Alphabet, this likely emerged as a pattern whenever abjads reached areas where the local language didn't have the same kinds of rules for vowels as Semitic languages, and the ability to explicitly code vowels was important for telling words apart — and, critically, for recording poetry and verse.

Finally, featural alphabets take the march towards phonetic clarity even further. The classic example of this is Hangul, the script invented for Korean in the 15th century. In these writing systems, symbols go beyond coding for sounds — they code for individual features, like "plosive sounds" (you stop the air and then suddenly release it, like t or p), "aspirated sounds" (with a breath), and so on. So for example, ㅌ can be immediately recognized as a voiceless, aspirated, alveolar plosive, or tʰ.

English is in many ways a strange case in this family. The Latin alphabet that it uses is a true alphabet: someone reading Latin immediately knows how to pronounce any word they see, just like someone reading Spanish or Polish would. But English both assembled its lexicon from a bunch of languages, and standardized its spelling system much earlier than most other modern languages — and unfortunately, did so not too long before a major change in how words were pronounced, which gives it all sorts of oddities like "silent e," how tough it is to cough through a rough slough, and so on. (There are not many languages where "being able to spell things correctly" is a televised sport!) In fact, despite its use of an alphabet, English is in many ways moving back towards being a logographic language, where you have to know what a word is (and which language it comes from) to know how to pronounce it.

Via +John Hardy

 

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A fine commencement speech

So ignore most of the snarky commentary in the article around this speech, and just pop forward in the YouTube of the whole commencement ceremony to 1:08:16 or so to hear Danielle Allen of Harvard talk about democracy and civic engagement. It’s short and compelling.

Also, and the reason this caught my eye, it was at my alma mater, Pomona College (though back in our day, we held all that graduation stuff inside the building behind them, not out on the quad … serves ’em right to get rained on).

Anyway, good speech, under 10 minutes in length. And if you want, you can cut straight to the video.




A Radically Woke and Deeply Conservative Commencement Address
At Pomona College, Danielle Allen spoke about the Declaration of Independence and its electric cord.

Original Post

TV Cartoons of Saturdays Past

For those who wonder why I am how I am today, I blame Saturday Morning Cartoons. This crop is from when I was in kindergarten or so, and (aside from Casper) I was an avid viewer of most of these at one time or another.

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Taking a Dive

The boy did diving at high school over the winter, which (I assume) led him to share this video with us this evening. Greg Louganis, at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Spectacular.

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A narcissistic Great Leader who dragged the world into war

I’m talking of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the monarch of Germany (1888-1918), of course.

Though there are a few similarities to another narcissistic Great Leader of a more contemporary time …




What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire? | The New Yorker

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As Recent History Fades to Distant History

Despite the snickers (and/or outrage) over the gaffe by Rep. Drew Ferguson (GOP from Alabama), posting a D-Day remembrance that featured a picture of German troops in the field, I’m ready to believe that the pic was put in place by “an intern at a digital media company that works with the congressman’s campaign”.

This goes right along with State Dept. spokeswoman Heather Nauert using D-Day as an example of how close the US/Germany relationship is.

The fact is, even if they kind of know about it, WW2 is practically as far in the past today as the Spanish-American War was when I was a kid.

It’s not that WW2 isn’t relevant to younger generations today, nor that (esp. from a State Dept. spokescritter) we shouldn’t expect more, but it’s gradually becoming more of an intellectual matter, not an emotional / cultural one. Perhaps that’s a contributing reason why there’s been a resurgence in alt-Right / fascistic / Nazi thought among younger people.

What we should expect are more mistakes like these. Not as part of a sinister conspiracy. Just because the history they touch on is increasingly distant, and increasingly less central to our world.




FACT CHECK: Did a Georgia Lawmaker Tweet a Photograph of Nazis on D-Day?

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Phonetic Alphabets

I was looking up some info on the subject, and found myself falling down the usual Wikipedia rabbit hole, so I thought I’d share.

What’s fascinating in part is not just the concept of a phonetic alphabet (spelling out letters as words so as to avoid confusion, esp.over radio or phone), but the number of such alphabets over the years, and the research that’s gone into them.




Allied Military phonetic spelling alphabets – Wikipedia

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The Evolution of Yearbook Signatures

The headline isn’t quite right — the article doesn’t delve much into the why of people signing yearbooks, or why it has changed over the decades. But it does cover the trends of change over time, which is itself interesting.

(I would guess it is also US-centric. I would think this sort of thing varies significantly by country.)




Why Do People Sign Yearbooks?
Commemorative class books evolved from practical notebooks into collections of hair clippings, rhyming couplets, and “have a great summer” wishes.

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It’s a Small World After All

One of the drawbacks of world history — at least as taught in the US — is the idea of separation. Culture X was here, Culture Y was there, don’t get them mixed up because that would make for a difficult test to write. But the reality is that all those “primitive” cultures ranged far and wide along trade routes. Which is why you find Near Eastern artifacts in Scotland, and Viking (or is it “Vandal”) graffiti in Constantinople.

I mean, not to over-exaggerate it in the opposite direction. We’re not talking about the AD 900 equivalent of farmers in Tanzania watching American shows on Chinese TV sets. But the idea that all these cultures, in as small a space as Europe and the Middle East, were separate and distinct and had no contact with one another, is not only kind of silly, but patently, by the evidence, false.




Viking Runes at Hagia Sophia
A small etching on the white marble parapet was written in runic script by a Viking mercenary.

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The Disaster of A.D. 79

I’ve had the privilege of visiting both Pompeii and Herculaneum. They are remarkable sites (and sights). A touring Pompeii exhibit — not, I think, the one mentioned in Chicago — came through Denver a few years back.

If you have the chance to go to such an exhibit (if not the places themselves), I highly recommend it. The lesson of life interrupted, of a glimpse of disaster overcoming people who had no clue it was coming, and just the plain old richness of understanding of Roman life that both these cities provide is well worth the effort.




Resurrecting Pompeii
A new exhibition brings the doomed residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum vividly to life

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On Cheesy Mac

Macaroni and Cheese is an American staple, but its history is an interesting one, as is how it fits into various subcultures in the US across racial and economic lines.




A Brief History of America’s Appetite for Macaroni and Cheese
Popularized by Thomas Jefferson, this versatile dish fulfills our nation’s quest for the ‘cheapest protein possible’

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Memorial Suspended

The USS Arizona memorial is indefinitely closed, due to structural issues.

For those who had been planning to visit (something that’s been on my list but never quite fulfilled):

Memorials to the Oklahoma and Utah are on the opposite side of Ford Island from the Arizona and are still open. The monument’s visitor center also remains open, and includes a museum, documentary on the attack and harbor tours.




Exterior Cracks Force Indefinite Closure of the USS Arizona Memorial
Workers are currently assessing the damage to the iconic structure that straddles the sunken ship

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Tweetizen Trump – 2018-05-28: “Memorial Day”

Memorial Day is a day set aside in memory of American soldiers who have fallen in combat.

So, Donald, what is the President of the United States up to?

You do start off nicely with a glossy recorded video about Memorial Day, focused mostly on your interaction with the child of a dead soldier last Memorial Day.

Still, it’s a nice sentiment overall, in keeping with the subject of the occasion. It would have been a solid capstone on the festivities to just leave things there.

But you’ve never been one to leave good enough alone, Donald.

Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!

Um, this is kind of a day to celebrate the lives and sacrifices of soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation, not of a guy with a convenient set of bone spurs, whose boastful “personal Viet Nam” was avoiding STDs.

Instead, this tweet suddenly seems all about … you. Your personal accomplishments in office. You frame it as about how all those dead soldiers would be “very happy and proud” about your ostensible accomplishments with the economy, though I’m kind of dubious about your ability to speak for people who have died in the line of duty, Donald.

Well, I’m sure that’s where you left things, right? I mean, it’s Memorial Day, a time for sober reflection and focus on those fallen soldiers.

Nope. You started watching — and regurgitating — Fox News about “Spygate”. On freaking Memorial Day.

“The President deserves some answers.” @FoxNews in discussing “SPYGATE.”

“Sally Yates is part of concerns people have raised about bias in the Justice Dept. I find her actions to be really quite unbelievable.” Jonathan Turley

“We now find out that the Obama Administration put the opposing campaigns presidential candidate, or his campaign, under investigation. That raises legitimate questions. I just find this really odd…this goes to the heart of our electoral system.” Jonathan Turley on @FoxNews

I just don’t even, Donald. Your monomania, your towering tone-deaf narcissism, your lack of internal filters or shame — it all has to be about you and your Bigly Monster from the Id. If Jesus Christ came back to Earth, I have no doubt you would tweet that “Jesus has returned. I’m sure he is very happy and proud of how well our country is doing today.”

One would hope that your pivoting from even a tangential discussion about Memorial Day and what it means, to instead re-bleating out the talking heads on Fox News about the made-up scandal you’re trying to set up against the very real scandal under investigation — one would hope that even your most dyed-in-the-wool followers would get an inkling of what a self-centered zany you are, Donald.

Somehow, I suspect too many will just turn over their brats on the BBQ and raise a beer in their toasts to you, instead of to the people this day was meant commemorate.

To those who have fallen, and to the families and friends of those still suffering from their sacrifice, my apologies for this yo-yo taking the spotlight from that sacrifice for his own ends.

LATE-BREAKING UPDATE!

Even as I was writing this, we got another Memorial Day video from you, Donald!

Thank you for joining us on this solemn day of remembrance. We are gathered here on the sacred soil of @ArlingtonNatl Cemetery to honor the lives and deeds of America’s greatest heroes, the men and women who laid down their lives for our freedom. #MemorialDay

Nice message, Donald. Glad you could drag yourself away from retweeting Trump-supporting Fox News conspiracy theorizing long enough to attend the ceremony.

But wait! There’s more!

The heroes who rest in these hallowed fields, in cemeteries, battlefields, and burial grounds near and far are drawn the full tapestry of American life. They came from every generation from towering cities and wind swept prairies, from privilege and from poverty…

Oh, jeez … are we going to get a whole series of video tweets, camera zeroed in on you, all about you speechifying at Arlington?

Our fallen heroes have not only written our history they have shaped our destiny. They saved the lives of the men and women with whom they served. They cared for their families more than anything in the world, they loved their families. They inspired their communities…

The words are good ones, Donald. I haven’t listened to the whole speech to discover if you go off-script midway through to talk about your huge electoral victory or MS-13 or how great the economy is or how Crooked Hillary tried to steal the election with an embedded FBI spy … but, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Book-ending the day with tasteful video remarks doesn’t make up for the tweets in-between. For shame.

Complete this pattern …

Granted there are lots of twists and turns and nuances involved, but the basic sequence of events in each pair is clear:

1. People who can make money doing dangerous and risky things try to do so, leading to substantial societal loss and harm (affecting most strongly those who weren’t making the money).

2. Everyone wrings their hands and Stern Measures Are Taken to Ensure This Never Happens Again.

3. People who can make money doing dangerous and risky things convince Congress that the Stern Measures are overreaching, unnecessary, and, hey, what are the chances this could ever possibly happen again now that we are so much wiser? Also, here’s some money to help you get elected next time around.

4. Congress gets rid of the Stern Measures.

5. GOTO 1

Originally shared by +Katie H.:

Original Post

On That Box (or two) of Cables in the Basement

If I’m significantly older than 35 am I allowed to have more than one box?

Originally shared by +Mitch Wagner:

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A look at Mike Pence and “Exiled” American Evangelicals

A fascinating article in Harpers about the focus by many in the US Evangelical Christian community on the Babylonian Exile of the Jews as a metaphor for what they see as their own marginalization by American secular / multi-cultural society. This is important in how that focus drives the Vice President, and how it provides cover for Donald Trump, who’s seen as Cyrus the Persian Emperor by folk in this camp: Sure, he’s a brutal pagan whose ways are ungodly, but he’s God’s selected tyrant, destined under the guidance of our Daniel [i.e., Pence] to free us and restore God’s own kingdom of Chosen People.

It’s a very Old Testament mental framework, and helps explain why so many Evangelicals seem to be so gung-ho over a guy who strikes me as about as un-Christ-like as one can get. It’s because they’re focused on the highly-supported white-haired Daniel beside him as their last, best, and clearly anointed hope.

(Alternately, if you are looking for a more old-school conservative view of Pence, you might want to check out George Will’s latest column, which concludes: “Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.”)




[Essay] | Exiled, by Meghan O’Gieblyn | Harper’s Magazine
Mike Pence and the evangelical fantasy of persecution

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Dark Things Cannot Stand the Light

It would be a depressing discussion over beer as to which is worse, torture or covering up torture, because torture is a depressing subject regardless of how you approach it.

But that aside, and regardless of “just following orders” or “yeah, we checked with legal first” excuses, the argument below is spot on here: covering up torture makes future torture more likely, if not inevitable.

So does rewarding someone who did so with the top job in the agency.

Originally shared by +Robert Hansen:

“Gina Haspel.”

sigh

Believe it or not, her involvement in the enhanced interrogation program (or, as John McCain and I call it, the torture program) really isn’t enough to disqualify her. Shocking, I know.

No, the reason to oppose her nomination goes deeper than that, and is something worse than torture. Yes, worse than torture: something so foul it’s considered the truly unforgivable sin of the intelligence professional.

Rule Number One is thou shalt submit thyself for judgment. Everything the spook does the spook must be accountable for, somewhere, to someone. It might be to an oversight committee, it might be to a DOJ investigation, it might be to the Inspector General’s office, it might be to a civil lawsuit, it might be to a FOIA request.

In the absence of being judged, intelligence agencies spiral out of control. There is always a risk intelligence agencies will lose sight of American values. By passing judgment on their acts we force the agencies to stay connected to the touchstone of our principles. To lie to Congress, to destroy documents of a scandal, to help people escape our society’s judgment — these are the unforgivable sins of the intelligence professional.

Torturing someone is bad enough. But concealing a torture program from Congressional oversight is even worse, because it means we’ll keep on torturing. It means that incoming agents will hear about Bob who was quietly allowed to retire after something, as opposed to seeing Bob hanging in a gibbet by the front door with a plaque beneath reading “TORTURER”. Incoming agents notice things like that and adjust their conduct accordingly.

Gina Haspel made it hard to hold people accountable for the torture program.

That’s worse than torture. She should not be nominated as Director of the CIA.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/washington/07intel.html




C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations
Despite requests and amid scrutiny about its secret detention program, the C.I.A. did not give the videotapes to a federal court hearing or to the Sept. 11 commission.

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