Today's Topics: Animals, Books,
Breaking News, Foreign Language, Politics, Racism.
Animals
Wendy
Welch has spotted a specimen that deserves to be endangered—the
Animal Welfare Freeloader or Humane Society Welfare Cheat. While I'm
all in favor of people adopting a friend's kitten or puppy rather
than supporting the Humane (Pet Genocide) Society, and of animal
rescuers making pets available to people who don't support the
H(PG)SUS' rules,people can't have it all
their
own way, and had better not plan on sending unwanted kittens and
puppies to Humane Society shelters. Free the cats, save the puppies,
starve the Humane Society until it recognizes the need to protect and
respect the animals that have been friends to humankind for thousands
of years...and don't give HSUS a pretext for existing in its present
form, either.
Books
I'd
rather report that Juniper,
Gentian, and Rosemary is
being reprinted as a real book, but here's good news for those who
use e-books:
Foreign Language
Fair
disclosure: Arlene from Israel is about as biased as it's possible to
get, in this as in all her discussions of news from the Middle East.
However, in this post she explains an Arabic word that was new to me,
might be new to you, might be relevant or useful to you in the
future:
Politics
How
is it possible not to like the biblical idea of righteousness as
“justice”? One of the fascinating cultural tidbits it's easy for
English-speaking readers to overlook, in the Bible, is that in Bible
days (as reportedly in tribal Arab cultures) wealth was understood in
terms of generosity.
Lack
of wealth was often the clear result of injustice and oppression. If
the “you” of the Bible had more than someone else had, that was
likely to be because the other person had been unable to work, had
been a victim of war or of tribal “politics,” was a widow or
orphan, was away from his or her home, or some other misfortune—and
the benefit of being relatively well off was that God had appointed
you to redress these wrongs. One word for “righteous”
specifically means “empowered to enforce social justice,” in ways
the Bible clearly explains. The sacrificial system redistributed food
to people who would otherwise have been hungry; the law allowing
landowners to enjoy only “first fruits” of the harvest guaranteed
jobs (picking, processing, selling food) to people who did not own
land.
Biblical
virtue is not a matter of psychological self-help. Biblical virtue has muscle.
And there's no blather in the Bible about limiting how much people
can have, make, earn, and enjoy; just a very clear picture of a
culture that expected anyone who had anything, even a small coin or a few
sprigs of herbs left out of what others had just donated to them,
to want to
share the wealth with any neighbors who might be less fortunate.
Nevertheless,
when people have been taught more about Marx than about the Bible,
they can mess up even the wonderful idea of social justice...
Racism
To the following
insights into the Rachel Donezal story, I add:
1. Canny comment
Ed Decker shared yesterday: “She wants to be black, he [the Jenner
bore] wants to be a she, and I want to be tall.” For some strange
and no doubt terrible reason,
the D.M.V. refuse to acknowledge the 6'4” man trapped in a body
that's 5'8” and a bit, and 5'9” is the maximum height they'll
allow him to list on his driver's license. Ooohhh, the cruelty. ED develops this thought further here:
2. Personal
observation: If she really wanted to go to Howard, or Oakwood or
Spelman or whatever, at any time after 1980, she could've gone. In
years when their budgets have permitted, the Historically Black
Colleges have offered actual scholarships to
White (and other types of) students who wanted to earn an academic
degree with lots of background in African-American Studies. I used to
know a White guy who went to Howard on one. So what's the real story?
My husband, who went to McGill and whose ex-wife went to Howard, used
to cite jokes about Howard's academic and social-behavioral
standards, but they do have some; it's not to be confused with Harvard but it's a decent school.
So
why couldn't Rachel
Donezal get into Howard? Could this have anything to do with her, er
um, not having enough sense to listen to authentic Baltimoreans of
African descent...I can see a dumb left-winger dismissing Lloyd
Marcus as, ooh ick, a conservative, but that's not a smear likely to
stick to Ta-Nehisi Coates. We are definitely talking about a
dumber-than-dumb left-winger, here.
No comments:
Post a Comment