Welcome to Sunday, December 22, 2024, with only three days left until Christmas—the first day of Coynezaa. It’s also National Date Nut Bread Day (okay, but only if made with Medjools.
It’s also National CookiesExchange Day and Abilities Day. Speaking of dates, I can eat only Medjools, as once you have a good one, you’ll never go back. And they’re pretty healthy, too: here’s the ones I order from Amazon, though I know some people have stopped buying there. These are always soft, fresh, and juicy: if caramel could be fruit, it would be these. Click to go to the site:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 22 Wikipedia page.
There’s a Google Doodle today that gives you the chance to play the animated “Half Moon Game”. Click below to play:
Joe Cocker died on this day, age 70 in 2014: ten years ago. It was lung cancer that did him in; until he quit in 1991, he’d smoked two packs a day. But here he is singing “Feeling All Right” with a friend (click the video to stop it). I saw this live on t.v. What a hoot!
Da Nooz:
*The Wall Street Journal reports that the Saudi doctor who rammed a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, killing 5 people and wounding more than 200, was not an Islamist bent on killing unbelivers.
When a driver rammed a car through a festive Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg shortly after 7 p.m. on Friday, leaving five dead and more than 200 wounded, the country seemed to be facing a repeat of its worst Islamist terrorist attack in recent history.
Yet the suspect’s profile that began to emerge hours after the drama painted a surprising portrait—that of a Saudi exile and vocal anti-Islam activist—leaving a perplexed Germany unsure about what lessons should be drawn from the drama.
The attack had come just a day after a Christian service in Berlin commemorating the victims of an Islamist attack on Dec. 19, 2016, when a Tunisian man who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State had driven a truck through a Christmas market in the capital, leaving 13 dead.
Earlier this year, four people were killed in two Islamist attacks, which have become more frequent in the last decade in Germany. Security services specifically warned of a very high threat from Islamic assaults on Christmas markets in the run-up to the festive season.
The man’s nationality, age, and profession were a poor match for the profile of suspected Islamist attackers in the country in recent years, who were mostly young, recent arrivals from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan, some of them with a history of petty crime. Anis Amri, the 2016 attacker who was killed by Italian police while on the run, was a drug dealer who attended a radical mosque in Berlin that was under observation by security agencies.
“At this stage, it looks like the background for the act could be some dissatisfaction with the treatment of Saudi refugees in Germany,” said Horst Walter Nopens, chief prosecutor in Magdeburg.
For the time being, I’ll believe that story, but Malgorzata thinks the guy really was an Islamist who pretended to chafe against the treatment of refugees for several years, before killing Christians (“people of the book”; unbelievers who, says Islam, deserve death). We disagree on this, but I don’t know how we’ll get the correct answer unless other information emerges.
*The Associated Press has collected a lot of testimony and data from scientists suggesting that after humans crossed the Bering Strait to the Americas (estimated around 20,000 years ago), they quickly killed off the large mammals (“megafauna” like mastodons and giant sloths) in the New World. Now there’s evidence that humans cohabited with these mammals for perhaps 10,000 years, and arrived earlier than we thought.
For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.
But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier — perhaps far earlier — than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.
“There was this idea that humans arrived and killed everything off very quickly — what’s called ‘Pleistocene overkill,’” said Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. But new discoveries suggest that “humans were existing alongside these animals for at least 10,000 years, without making them go extinct.”
Some of the most tantalizing clues come from an archaeological site in central Brazil, called Santa Elina, where bones of giant ground sloths show signs of being manipulated by humans. Sloths like these once lived from Alaska to Argentina, and some species had bony structures on their backs, called osteoderms — a bit like the plates of modern armadillos — that may have been used to make decorations.
. . .These artifacts from Santa Elina are roughly 27,000 years old — more than 10,000 years before scientists once thought that humans arrived in the Americas.
Originally researchers wondered if the craftsmen were working on already old fossils. But Pacheco’s research strongly suggests that ancient people were carving “fresh bones” shortly after the animals died.
Clovis is a site in New Mexico, where archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s found distinctive projectile points and other artifacts dated to between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.
This date happens to coincide with the end of the last Ice Age, a time when an ice-free corridor likely emerged in North America — giving rise to an idea about how early humans moved into the continent after crossing the Bering land bridge from Asia.
And because the fossil record shows the widespread decline of American megafauna starting around the same time — with North America losing 70% of its large mammals, and South America losing more than 80% — many researchers surmised that humans’ arrival led to mass extinctions.
But more and more evidence keeps emerging suggesting that humans were well established in North America by 25,000 years or even more (see above). If that was the case, then they could have crossed over the Bering Strait 30,000 years ago, or more. I’m not expert on human migration, but I think we can expect to see the date for colonizing the Americas, with the settler-colonialists wiping out other mammals, pushed back farther and farther.
*At the Free Press, 24 notables tell us “What we learned this year.” A few answers:
MASIH ALINEJAD, activist:
Vigilance, resilience, and optimism are the three defining lessons I take from 2024. This year, I learned that the Islamic Republic is relentless—not only in its efforts to spread terror across the world but also in its determination to kill me, even though I live in New York City. This is not a single moment of awareness but a lesson that must be relearned every day. In November, I was reminded of the regime’s ruthless nature when the FBI arrested two men—New Yorkers from Brooklyn and Staten Island—who were lurking outside my home with plans to take my life. This was the third attempt in four years. At the last count, 15 people have been charged with plots to harm me on these shores. To be honest, it was the vigilance and determination of our security agencies that saved me. In a world where evil thrives on silence, we must learn never to take for granted the systems and people who work tirelessly to protect us.
JONATHAN HAIDT, professor and author:
I learned that when most people hate the status quo but feel that there is nothing they can do to change it, and then they are shown a way to change it if they act together, things can change astonishingly quickly. The textbook example is the fall of the Iron Curtain across so many countries that began in 1989. I think we also saw it this year as populist movements surprised analysts in many countries. I had an up-close look at it happening with the international movement to roll back the phone-based childhood and make schools phone-free.
BILL MAHER, comedian and host of Real Time with Bill Maher:
This year I finally read the letters I had, but had never read, that my father saved from three friends with whom he corresponded from the mid-1940s to the late ’60s. My parents met overseas during World War II and married in July 1951, so plainly they were romantically involved during that time, and I wish I had asked more nosy questions about that period when they were alive. But the letters revealed a giant secret: My father was engaged to someone else only three months before he wed my mother. I don’t have 100-percent proof, because I only have one half of the correspondence, and also people were more discreet in those days, but I’d bet the farm what happened was: Good Catholic boys just didn’t marry Jewish girls in 1951. But in the final hour, my father said, “Fuck it, I’m going to marry the woman I love.” I learned my father was the stand-up dude I always thought he was.
H.R. MCMASTER, former U.S. national security adviser:
I learned that we fail to learn from even our most proximate experiences, as the Joe Biden administration urged Israel not to aggressively prosecute the war that Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Tehran’s other proxies had perpetrated. Many of the people urging de-escalation had been attempting and failing to conciliate Tehran since the early days of the Barack Obama administration. Now, much of the discourse on the Ukraine war reveals that others have still not learned—even after Israel acted boldly to devastate Iran’s terrorists and proxy armies—that de-escalation is folly unless one’s enemies are convinced that they have been defeated.
RO KHANNA, U.S. House representative, California:
This year we saw just how deep the disconnect is between our party and the working class. The [Democratic] Party has failed to listen to people’s frustrations about communities being hollowed out and jobs going overseas. We can’t only go to rural communities and address Americans’ economic concerns during an election. It needs to be a core part of our agenda. We need to invest in American manufacturing, innovation, and bringing good-paying jobs back. We also can’t be the party of the working class and allow the ultra-wealthy to have an outsize influence in our democracy. We should be the party of reform. We can start by banning PAC and lobbyist donations. I’ve spoken out about these issues for years, and it’s time we finally change course.
There are a lot more, many with people beefing about how bad they were treated, but it’s still an interesting read. What did I learn? That if you want to fire off an angry email after some real or perceived insult, sit on it at least a day. And then, more often than not, ditch it and write something polite. You can be nice even when registering a complaint (I can’t say I’ve always succeeded here!). What did YOU learn?
*On his Skeptic site, Michael Shermer has published part II of his series “Why I am no longer woke,” this part called “Wokeness poisons science” (part I is here) reiterates the erosion of science by wokeness. Shermer gives a nice shout-out to Luana and me for our “stunning revelatory article, which he summarizes, but that’s all the bragging I’ll do. It’s important to realize that, at least in science, wokeness is not abating as organizations find ways to circumvent the rules and prize identity above merit.
The infiltration of wokeness into the sciences is now well documented, from the hiring practices of academic science departments based on a bingo-card of intersecting identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.) to granting agencies demanding statements explaining how the proposed research project will be supportive of or sensitive to oppressed minorities—even for scientific fields that have nothing to do with the woke focus on politics, economics, and social policies, such as astrophysics. Case in point: the German physicist Sabine Hössenfelder went out to her Twitter/X followers in 2022 to inquire what woke formulaic language she should plug into her grant proposal for studying black holes:
I wrote a research proposal about inflation (in the early universe, not in your supermarket) and it bounced back because I didn’t explain its relevance to “sex, gender, and diversity.” I need to add a paragraph on this. Anyone has an idea what to write?
. . . and a few examples from Scientific American, in which Shermer wrote a column for many years (there are more in the piece):
- Peak wokeness was reached in the September 2021 issue when it was explained “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” examples of which included Star Wars characters who were too white, toxically masculine, religious, ableist, eugenicist, and worst of all resolved their conflicts through “duels with phallic lightsabers.” Phallic lightsabers? What do these woke authors have on their minds?
- Then there was the November 2023 article “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong,” concluding from this (mis)reading of the scientific literature that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” This is pure blank slate pablum that if true would put an end to all women’s sports.
- As if all this were not problematic enough for a magazine with the word “scientific” in its title, the editors threw their weight behind the youth gender medicine and trans lobby, claiming that gender-affirming care for trans kids is good health care (it isn’t), that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is not a thing (it most certainly is), and that biological sex is on a spectrum (it is binary). Numerous scientists published rebuttals of these dubious claims, including the acclaimed evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins11 and the evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who has tracked this subject for years.12
Does anyone actually believe such claptrap? Obviously some do, and the fervor of their woke faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves (and others of parallel ideological stripes) of the truth of claims that nearly everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. It is also possible that the majority of people do not believe any of this woke ideology, but out of fear of cancel culture and being accused of bigotry and transphobia keep their mouths shut, leading to pluralistic ignorance, in which each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes it, even though most people do not. That calls forth the importance of speaking truth to power.
The infiltration of woke ideology into the sciences is only the thin end of the wedge splitting academia into warring factions, the topic of Part III of this series on why I am no longer woke.
*Are we really still discussing myths as if they were real over the Christmas holidays. In the NYT, Nicholas Kristof discusses the virgin birth with Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels. It could have been a metaphor!
So let’s go back to the Nativity. Of the four Gospels, two describe the virgin birth of Jesus, and two don’t mention it. The Gospel of Mark has people of Galilee referring to Jesus as the son of Mary, when the norm was to describe somebody as the son of his father. So did the neighbors growing up with Jesus regard him as fatherless?
We don’t know. Mark is the earliest Gospel written; Matthew and Luke are basically just revising it. Mark has no suggestion of a virgin birth. Instead, he says that neighbors called Jesus “son of Mary.” In an intensely patriarchal society, this suggests that Jesus had no father that anyone knew about, even one deceased. Yet even without a partner, Mary has lots of children: In Mark, Jesus has four other brothers and some sisters, with no recognized father and no genealogy.
You note that Matthew and Luke both borrowed heavily from Mark’s account but also seem embarrassed by elements of it, including the paternity question. Is your guess that they added the virgin birth to reduce that embarrassment?
Yes, but this is not just my guess. When Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark, each added an elaborate birth story — two stories that differ in almost every detail. Matthew adds a father named Joseph, who, seeing his fiancée pregnant, and not with his child, decides to break the marriage contract. Luke, writing independently, pictures an angel astonishing a young virginal girl, announcing that “the Holy Spirit” is about to make her pregnant.
The most startling element of your book to me was that you cite evidence going back to the first and second centuries that some referred to Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. These accounts are mostly from early writers trying to disparage Jesus, it seems, so perhaps should be regarded skeptically. But you also write that Panthera appears to have been a real person. How should we think about this?
Yes, these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them. The name Panthera, sometimes spelled differently in ancient sources, may refer to a panther skin that certain soldiers wore. The discovery of the grave of a Roman soldier named Tiberius Panthera, member of a cohort of Syrian archers stationed in Palestine in the first century, might support those ancient rumors.
Pagels has done some good work on the history of Christianity, but this all assumes that Jesus was based on a real person who claimed to be a messiah. And the debate about Tiberius Panthera as the person who raped Mary somehow reminds me of an intense debate about whether Paul Bunyan’s ox was really blue, for it could have been red. Somebody could do a good mitzvah by writing a popular and engaging book on how thin the evidence really is that Jesus was based on a real person, much less one who was crucified and resurrected. EVERYTHING is within the covers of that book, and there’s no corroborating evidence for a Jesus person save a one reference to a Jesus in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, big trouble!
Hili: Do you already know?A: What happened?Hili: Szaron vomited on the carpet.
Hili: Czy już wiesz?Ja: Co się stało?Hili: Szaron zwymiotował na dywan.
*******************
From Meow Lover, a useful tip:
From The Dodo Pet:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy, the flaws of Lamrackian inheritance:
Bill Maher’s show is on break till January, but here’s his prognostication of “future headlines”
From the Demon Rowling (Masih appears to be taking the holidays off). This is about Susie Green, described in a Times of London article as having founded a trans healthcare organization that now swears it will defy the UK’s new ban on puberty blockers.
Green is one of those who’ll go down with the Trans Titanic, taking as many kids as she’s allowed to take with her. This woman will never stop voluntarily. To do so would mean admitting doubts about what she did to her own son. https://t.co/ioWidEP6Jg
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 20, 2024
From Luana. Tell me why Biden pardoned this woman. Was this what pardons were meant for? She was sentenced to 40 years in 2002, and now will have served just 22.
‘Black Widow’ who killed 3 lovers for life insurance freed via Biden’s historic clemency initiative, leaving former prosecutor ‘pissed off’ https://t.co/p4htSwCwDs pic.twitter.com/AETGaSxk05
— New York Post (@nypost) December 20, 2024
From Malcolm, a police moggy in Amsterdam. I saw him on his houseboat! Everyone loves him.
Police cat in Netherlands pic.twitter.com/F1tZeVS6FZ
— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) November 15, 2024
From my feed; ducks change their minds:
Please enjoy these ducks changing their minds. pic.twitter.com/tDPZMgCddk
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) December 20, 2024
Also this: and how often does this happen? “Free food, yeah!”
Man in North Philly was happy to be arrested by his twin brother. pic.twitter.com/VtWvn1dZ2e
— Fight Factory 🥊 (@FightFactory) December 20, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
Probably gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz, this Dutch girl was just 13.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-22T11:39:22.921Z
Two posts from Doctor Cobb. First, the GACS:
I don’t know the story behind this photo so I’m going with “Gentlemen’s Cat Appreciation Society”. Ca. 1860 – 1880. http://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/coll…
— Cats of Yore (@catsofyore.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T06:05:00.425Z
Look at this crazy mite!
Today I found this impressive mite in some leaf litter.Oribatids are masters of self-protection: they've evolved protective armour flaps, some wear their old moults on their back like shields, and this Neotrichozetes spinulosa has instead opted to become a sentient pincushion! 🧪 #Invertebrates
— Frank Ashwood (@frankashwood.bsky.social) 2024-12-18T08:56:18.326Z
You wrote: “…there’s no corroborating evidence for a Jesus person save a one reference to a Jesus in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus.”
Researchers debate whether the references to a Jesus in Josephus were composed by Josephus. The text of Josephus was preserved by Christian scribes, and all researchers agree that substantial modifications were made. The only open question is “how substantial?” I do not agree that Josephus provides evidence for a historical Jesus.
I wrote about the issue of a historical Jesus in this essay: “Investigating Earliest Christianity without Jesus.” Pages 233–66 in Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Edited by Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna. London: Equinox, 2012.
For me a telling point is that the sentences immediately after the Jesus passage follow naturally if the entire passage is an insert, but are a weird conjunction if there is any Jesus passage.
The passage immediately before finishes: “… and since the people were unarmed, and were caught by men prepared for what they were about, there were a great number of them slain by this means, and others of them ran away wounded. And thus an end was put to this sedition.”
The passage immediately after begins “About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder, …”.
This naturally follows from the preceding “sad calamity”, but makes no sense following anything like the Testimonium Flavianum.
I lean in favour of the historical Jesus, who was also mentioned early on by Tacitus. My reasons include the following: He was mentioned in early non-religious texts, with no reason to push for his existence; someone had to come up with the various doctrines espoused in the New Testament – why not Jesus? (yes, I know Paul added much); Christianity was established in the early/mid first century, meaning the wool was pulled over lots of eyes, if he was merely a myth or composite; a number, besides Jesus, have been proclaimed the Messiah, so why not him?; and movements need—at least often—a charismatic leader to die for, so someone had to fill that role – why not rabbi Jesus?
Not terribly relevent for me one way or the other, as I’m not a believer in the divinity of Jesus, but I do believe it is easier to believe that he existed rather than that he did not.
I’m with you. Even though the arguments in favor of an historical Jesus rest more on reason than evidence, I find them persuasive.
That was AD 116, not really “early on”. Tacitus was likely just recounting stories then being said. It’s also possible that the Tacitus passage was a later addition.
Which? There is nothing contemporaneous.
The “mythicists” position is that there was indeed a Christian sect at that time, but they thought of “Jesus” as a divine being residing in heaven (much like now).
Why not a living, human Jesus? Well, for starters, Paul’s writing are the earliest, about only 2 decades after the supposed life, and Paul shows no awareness at all of any recently-lived Jesus. To Paul, Jesus is a being in heaven who is know from visions.
Let’s suppose Jesus had indeed recently lived. Would Paul, after the road to Damascus conversion: (1) go and talk to all the people who had lived with Jesus, asking them everying about everything Jesus said, or (2) not talk to any Christians, and instead wander around Arabia for three years before travelling to Jerusalem, and then declare that none of his teachings came from any human, but came only from Jesus in visions, and then pull one-upmanship in authority over those who would have been Jesus’s actual companions??
If Jesus was a recently lived human then (2) makes no sense, yet (2) is what Paul tells us.
The mythicist case is that the early church thought of Jesus as a divine, heavenly being, then, sometime after “Mark” (maybe 100 to 150 CE) allegorical stories started being regarded as historical. There need have been no duping of anyone. The transition would have occurred a couple of generations after the suppose events.
And just look at how many Christian writings from 100 CE to 250 CE are “against heresy” writings, as doctrine was hammered out. (And, of course, we only have those writings that later Christians choose to copy and so leave to us.)
Thanks for the comments. Points taken, and worthy of consideration, but…
1. I would argue that Tacitus was reasonably early;
2. I didn’t say there were any contemporaneous texts;
3. I don’t really see how the comment about the “‘mythicists’” has any bearing on the teachings ascribed to Jesus;
4. By the time of Paul, Christianity was well enough established to be under persecution by Nero – what or who would be compelling enough to cause Christians to go to their deaths? (how about a fanatic with a cause);
5. I don’t know what Paul would have done.
Back to Tacitus (yes, I realize that you question the veracity thereof, but what would be the point of the comments? They are certainly not pro-Christian): there are a number of elements in his account which line up with what is found in the Gospels:
1. You have a man identified as Christ (actually, a title, but one applied to Jesus), whose followers are Christians and have been persecuted;
2. Obviously, he (Christ) had done something to gain followers, viz., his preaching and fanatacism;
3. The manner of execution appears to fit that suffered by Christ;
4. The time is correct – during the reign of Tiberius;
5. Even a key player—Pontius Pilate—is identified.
No, I cannot positively say that there was a historical Jesus (perhaps I am even dead wrong), but to me, this evidence, plus that which I presented earlier, is compelling. Since I’m not a believer in the divine Jesus, it’s merely academic; however, believing in the historical Jesus seems a far easier to defend than the position to the contrary.
Anyway, I don’t have any further comments on the subject.
Re the Tacitus line:
As you likely know, the original text refers to “Chrestus”, a fairly common name, and distinct in the Greek from “Christos”, and the earliest extant manuscript (actually 11th century) shows signs of alteration. It could well be that the Tacitus original referred to an unrelated sect led by “Chrestus” and over time Christian scribes altered this to be about Christians. (It’s also possible that Tacitus mixed the two up, since he was writing more than a generation later.)
I actually think it implausible that a sect that was founded by a band of followers in Jerusalem in only AD 33 or so, could then be sufficiently established in sufficient numbers to be the cause of riots several thousand miles away in Rome only 20 or 30 years later. If the Rome events related by Tacitus were indeed about Christians, then that suggests that the Christian sect was older and more widespread than something started in the AD 30s.
The fact that Paul’s letters (AD 50s?) are to established and widespread churches in Greece, Turkey, Rome, etc, also suggests this. All of this suggests a sect established at least by AD 0 or so, which regarded Jesus as a divine being in heaven, known from scripture and visions, who was only turned into a human in an allegory written by “Mark” post the AD71 war with the Romans and the destruction of the Jewish temple.
So far today, readers’ attention seems to have been drawn to one item Jerry covered, the seasonal debate as to whether there ever was a real Jesus. Jerry wrote, “Somebody could do a good mitzvah by writing a popular and engaging book on how thin the evidence really is that Jesus was based on a real person, much less one who was crucified and resurrected”, and that wish has has been granted by historian and Jesus skeptic Richard Carrier. Jesus From Outer Space is an accessible condensation of his 700-page, academic tome On the Historicy of Jesus.
This is a topic which has fascinated me for years, and after much study I have come down firmly on the “non-historical” side. A few years I gave a talk on the subject, which Jerry kindly promoted promoted on this site. Since then I have been continually enlarging and updating it, and for the curious, here it is.
Please! Stop using the term “woke”.
Two reasons:
1. It isn’t accurate. The word is vague, it suggests someone has awakened to a ground truth that was hidden from them. It could apply to any belief, and even in the current context it was specific to black awareness of racism not the broader ideology of social justice being applied to a variety of identity classifications.
2. Use of the term immediately puts the author in the ranks of Trump, MAGA, or even worse. The very audience that most needs to open their minds and be less “work” will not read a single word beyond “woke”.
Unfortunately there isn’t a consensus yet on an alternate term. I think Social Justice Ideology (SJI) is a good candidate, but a widely read and respected author would need to publish the case for using the phrase.
I like the general use of “woke” as at least a placeholder for performative, progressive, left wing ideology until pedants find something that can be generally accepted as better. I use woke as above, and, in addition, as pejorative in describing people who expect everyone to be all in with the ideology and anyone who fails any single aspect is considered “other” and not of the tribe. On the right side of the political spectrum some years ago, George W. Bush described this tribalism with respect to his war on terror as either you’re with us or you are against us.
It is ironic that people use a polarizing term that invokes us/them thinking when that is the very phenomenon (tribalism) we should be trying to curtail. I view social justice ideology as tribalism raised to a higher level of abstraction. Broad categorical “us/them” thinking where imagined “groups” collude among themselves to oppress other “groups”. It’s essentially paranoid thinking embraced as intellectual insight.
In a sense you’re making one of my arguments for me, I think. We need to find a better term. One that isn’t already linked to the far right, and yes I recognize that any term chosen will be painted as being right wing extremism by the social justice ideology believers.
I sort of agree. I don’t like it but there’s no alternative for now.
When I state things like, “People are sick of woke” (which I did in talking about why Trump won in November) someone (usually a far-left person) will say, “what do you mean by woke?!” So then I have to trot out my standard list of behaviors that, in my opinion, fit the definition and that I think “any generic voter” in the US would recognize as such.
Bush’s comment is an old argument, having been used long ago to push a religious agenda: “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt. 12:30).
I prefer “oppressive Left”, even though it doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Look up “euphemism treadmill”. Steven Pinker has a lot to say on this. Bottom line: if some other phrase takes over, then Trump will start using that. Why? Because he knows that everyone knows what that means.
Stepping back a bit, while I find the woke crazy enough, what I really find disturbing is (yes, I’m using the term) mainstream media describing anyone questioning wokeness as right-wing just because Trump questions wokeness.
I see no problem with using the term woke to describe those things which people who self-identify as woke believe but essentially no-one else does.
The tattooed couple reminds me of the old story about an American couple who adopted a Chinese baby. They wanted to learn Chinese so they could understand him when he started talking.
And then there was the white American couple who decided after three children not to have any more. They had read in a book of statistics that every fourth child in the world is Chinese.
Or the time on “Modern Family” when Cam and Mitch adopted an Asian baby girl, and named her Lily. “Gee,” said Grandpa Jay, “You’d think they’d choose a name that would be easier for her to pronounce.”
“What did I learn? That if you want to fire off an angry email after some real or perceived insult, sit on it at least a day. And then, more often than not, ditch it and write something polite.”
Full agreement. I’ve been doing this (sort of thing) for years, after I read of Abraham Lincoln’s practice of writing angry letters (it does help to write it down, get it off your chest so to speak) and placing them in a drawer in his desk. He would then pull them out again 1-2 weeks later and read them. He only rarely sent them.
I do this often with responses to social media postings. It also gives me time to make it into a mini-essay, to refine my words, and to say what I really want to say. And also allows me time for editing to remove all “loaded” (emotional) words.
This practice has had many benefits.
Is the decision to do or not do this based on free will or determinism?
Regarding disciplining oneself to hold off for several days in responding to a social media posting or email, consider disciplining oneself to temporarily refrain from immediately responding in direct face-to-face conversations. I have considerable experience in thusly restraining myself. Determinism?
Definitely.
Biden pardoning a murderer is outrageous.
On a happier note, the ducks changing their minds is cute! 🦆🦆🦆🦆
What would the purpose be for a further eighteen years? I don’t have any special insights on the merits of this pardon. Do you?
I don’t know anything more than the linked NY Post article.
“Somebody could do a good mitzvah by writing a popular and engaging book on how thin the evidence really is that Jesus was based on a real person, much less one who was crucified and resurrected.”
Richard Carrier has come pretty close to achieving that. His book “On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason To Doubt” will probably never be popular with the general public, because the topic is arcane. But, it is written in a non pedantic way, using real everyday spoken English, and the case is laid out logically, clearly, and meticulously by a PhD very well-versed in the time frame and field, and with fluency in both Latin and Ancient Greek.
https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/191449024X/?ie=UTF8&tag=richardcarrier-20
There is also his “Jesus from outer space”, which I have not read but which I understand is a less scholarly version of the same thesis.
I find the question “Did Jesus exist?” meaningless without parameters. Just how much would a historical person have to resemble the fictionalized persona of tradition for us to say yes? If there was no actual preacher, possibly named Yeshua, who preached the Sermon on the Mount, somebody still had to write the lines. I know that preachers named Yeshua (a common name) existed in first century Palestine for the same reason I know that priests named Michael exist in the city of Philadelphia; it is a statistical certainty.
I remember back in early 2012 when the physics community was all abuzz about CERN possibly having detected the Higgs boson, but details were not yet available, I used to annoy colleagues with my noncommittal attitude: “Well, they seem to have detected SOMETHING. It may be a semantic question whether it is the Higgs. After we see how closely it matches the predicted properties of the theoretical Higgs, I’ll decide whether to call it Higgs.” (The properties matched well enough everyone agrees it is the Higgs..)
Let me tell you about my late friend Steve. He lived in San Francisco with a very smart and friendly German Shepherd dog named Mort and he owned a successful, modest sized plumbing company. He passed away a couple years ago. By the way, he was born of a virgin, he walked on water, and he rose from the dead.
Did Steve exist? You probably have no difficulty believing in a plumber named Steve and his German Shepherd dog in San Francisco. Though perhaps you are skeptical that he performed miracles and rose from the dead.
I remember being fascinated by Saul Kripke’s book, Naming and Necessity, when I was an undergrad philosophy major. From my vague memories, I think Kripke would argue that whether the “Jesus” named in the bible refers to a real person is, in large part, a semantic question… I really do need to reread that book.
Ditto all of the Greek and Roman gods. Humans are good at inventing stories and mythology involving gods. This in itself is not a strong argument.
Indeed.
Further, the stories/truths told about Jesus/Immanuel/”very naughty boy” might be as reliable as me saying I have Harald Bluetooth’s original battle-axe on my wall. It has had only six new blades and twenty seven new handles. “Only the facts were changed to protect the innocent, ma’am. “
We could also say that Santa Claus exists. There seems to have been a fourth century Greek dude from Asia Minor named Nicholas, or St. Nicholas as Christians call him, whose persona has evolved over the centuries into Santa Claus. I hazard a guess that flying reindeer are a modern mythological addition to the legend of Nicholas.
Re the Saudi doctor. I think Malgorzata is right. He hoodwinked the system. It makes absolutely zero sense that he was such a committed antiIslamist that the only recourse left to him was to plough into a bunch of Christians at a Xmas market.
https://x.com/amuse/status/1870744124787417547
His tweets when written in Arabic tell a different story.
https://x.com/DVATW/status/1870389468324147266
It feels as if the German government are gaslighting the public about the real issue. That is a much easier scenario for them to manage rather than to find a solution for a problem of their own making.
Will the media ever reveal the real story and motivations?
Thanks for pointing that out. I read once that a few Muslims will pretend to be Christian converts and use this a reason why they need asylum. (As that would a serious transgression in Saudi Arabia.)
I was suspicious as soon as I read the story.
Another tweet with more information about the driver. A Saudi woman had warned police about the man but they ignored her.
https://x.com/MaralSalmassi/status/1870413236996092217?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1870413236996092217%7Ctwgr%5E9e14ba3828d43e1e55922c66ba22b0b3c7cddf76%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F691827%2F
I have thought before that abandoning the transgender insanity will be difficult because of the resistance of some parents who have too readily agreed to harmful treatments of their children, bragged to the world about it, and are now unwilling to admit that they have made a mistake.
And also the resistance of a few of the “transgender” children themselves, e.g. the son of Elon Musk who mutilated himself in order to spite his abusive father.
I’m rereading the Stephen Fry book “Mythos”, a history of how Greek myth (Pre-Christian) described the creation of the universe, and the interaction between the gods and the mortals who lived in it. There’s lots of stuff (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that goes on between particles and waves in the telling. I can imagine that the virgin birth was yet another variation of the Helenic history version and beyond.
Suggest Sabine Hossenfelder use: “Dark Matter Lives” as a title for her research proposal.