Ryan's Lair

Why I love The Daily Show

This news segment [requires RealPlayer] pokes fun at interfaith panels more effectively than I anything else I've seen. The scenario: an interfaith panel discussion on an "un-Semitic" performance of Fiddler on the Roof:

Reporter: Let's talk about the fiddling. Gratuitous?
Christian:I didn't understand why the fiddler was always on the roof.
Reporter: As a homosexual-- a little too Jewish?
Homosexual:I really couldn't say for certain because I'm not jewish
Reporter: Mm. hm. That was very brave.
Reporter: Christian guy. You're also a black guy. You're two things. Has that affected your experience at all?
Christian: Not really.
Reporter: I see. Wow. This is, uh, this is getting pretty intense. Should we … should we pause? Let's pause.

Brilliant stuff.

Uzbekistan Update

The Wanderlustress reports that all the Peace Corps volunteers in Uzbekistan are safe and accounted for.

SixApart is Blogging Again

I wasn't at all upset by the whole TypeKey idea like everyone else, since I'm quite excited about its implications for online scholarship and trusted peer review networks. But you have to tip your hat to SixApart for doing this.

Trouble in Uzbekistan

The Argus has more information on the bombings in Uzbekistan. I find myself hoping that the Wanderlustress is doing all right…

The Third Person Singular, Aorist Optative Middle is προδοῖτο

This is one of the best Onion pieces I have ever read. Classicists of the world rejoice!

Conrad nails it

Conrad is on a roll:

The fact that their actions threaten Taiwan's stability and have set back the cause of democracy in both Hong Kong and mainland China means nothing to Lien and Soong compared to their own thirst for power and patronage.

These are frightening times for Taiwan.

Brick House is in the House

Janet is now running from her own Blogspot space. So now I'm hooked into her Atom syndicated feed. Sweet.

She links to a Taipei Times story about a particularly nasty election poster done by KMT goons:

"The ad shows bin Laden saying `I am terrorist leader bin Laden, and I admire Taiwan's A-bian!'" he said, quoting the poster from memory.

On the poster, bold text also accuses Chen of "starting fires and inciting chaos wherever he goes."

The text is accompanied by a graphic of the collapse of one of the Twin Towers. A picture of Hussein holding a gun, saying "I am Hussein and you will all do as I say," figures prominently on the other side of the poster.

Around 600,000 copies of the poster were printed by the Tai-chung City KMT campaign headquarters 10 days before the election, Lin said.

"We had the foresight to think of using Hussein. We predicted that Chen would mess with the elections even before they happened," he said.

Bin Laden-image attacks have been used in the United States as well, with much success: two prominent examples are the underhanded ad attacking Max Cleland and the Yankees-funded ad by the Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values attacking Howard Dean.

The sickening part is that in the American context, the ads worked. In the Taiwanese context, the KMT goons still lost the election. Lesson learned: if you're going to engage in such media thuggery, you have a better chance of influencing the unwashed masses in the good ol' US of A.

Hoi barbaroi

I have plenty of friends who have family in the South, and occasionally try to defend Southern honor. We're not that bad, they say. Most of the time I try to be open-minded about it.

As Lisa notes, the Georgia House has voted 160-0, with no debate, to ban all female genital piercing. Because we all know that "female genital mutilation" is a pressing problem in the red hills of Georgia, and a decorative piercing of the clitoris by a female adult who pays for the procedure is of course the same as the forced clitoridectomy or labia-sewing of a 13-year old girl.

You wonder why we Ivory Tower élites think of the South as a breeding ground for slackjawed ignorance and unsophisticated, provincial thinking? This is a perfect example.

Blogging Taiwanese Politics

Check out an essential blog, aptly named Politics in Taiwan. Representin' for the DPP.

[Link via Keywords]

Invisible Adjunct is Signing Off

Go pay your respects here. IA has been one of the most dynamic and rewarding reads in all of the academic blogosphere. Essential, sobering reading for anyone going into the profession. Best of luck, IA. We'll miss you.

BOP has transcripts

Go read the Clarke transcripts at BOPNews: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

If you're a citizen of the United States, and you have the power to vote on who will be the next President, this is absolutely essential reading.

Stirling does a quick summary at the top of Part One. Scroll down and read the transcript first to form your own opinions.

Te quiero

I fell in love with Jamaica Plain tonight. Visited a huge apartment. Only a 30 minute commute by subway from Harvard Square, the rent $230 cheaper than what I pay in the lifeless neighborhood of Somerville's Beacon Street. The place is in a huge Victorian house, different rooms painted turquoise, baby blue, or orange. The living room will lose the TV and become a studio space for the artists who could be my roommates. Around the corner is Hyde Square, with wonderful markets, restaurants, and coffee shops. They're interviewing other folks over the next few weeks, but hopefully they choose me.

On the way to the apartment, I overheard a man speaking on his cell phone:

Te amo, te quiero, yo no puedo vivir sin ti.

Whether I take this apartment or not, I think the decision is pretty clear: Jamaica Plain is the place to be.

I am an anti-religion pig

It's always surprising to receive fresh comments on the website, since I have long been convinced that my readership was a miniscule group of family, friends and assorted religionists.

So when I get comments from people I don't know who call me an "anti-muslimic pig", I have two immediate reactions:

• "Hey, thanks for reading the site!"
• "I'm not an anti-muslimic pig. I'm an anti-religion pig."

I have absolutely no biases or prejudices when it comes to heaping ridicule upon religious traditions, especially traditions that take their books all too seriously.

I have poked fun at astrology, those wacky Pagans, militant Islam, Sudanese sorcery panic, Congo sorcery panic, wacky airline pilots who think they're on a mission from God, Christian fundies, fag-hating Baptists, anti-intellectual Hindu fundies, and anti-intellectual Christian fundies.

I linked to Allah because he is hilarious, and his humor hits a nerve. I met plenty of Muslims in India who took Sura 56:10-37 quite literally. They even added the Hadith tradition to claim that, were OBL to be captured and killed, he would receive 72 virgins, a number not present in the Qur'an. Allah's pictures of Yassin getting a lapdance are fantastic because they remind us that for people without a deracinated, ecumenical God, religion actually means something, and scriptures should be taken literally. Allah shows us the ridiculousness inherent in scripture, which is something I can understand people would not want to confront. But there it is: if Sura 56 is the literal truth, describing reality as it truly is, then there is a high probability that Yassin is currently being served fruit and hangover-free liquor by untouched female slaves.

Obviously, there is quite a deal of thoughtful commentary happening on the Yassin assassination. Juan Cole and The Revealer are useful references. Allah is also quite useful for weaving together news threads from a variety of sources, including ones sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

As to the question Sarah has posed- whether killing Yassin was justified or not- I think the question itself is meaningless. Justified according to whose vision of ethics, whose religious books? Israel and Palestine are at war. Men, women, and children will be slaughtered on both sides. There is no justification or nobility in this enterprise. Both sides seek to maximize destruction of the enemy and minimize the negative consequences of that destruction by mobilizing ideology, talk of "human rights", and other such nonsense.

They are at war, and there is no such thing as justification. I am utterly confused why people attempt to comfort themselves with ethical abstractions on this issue. Get the killing done, take your land and spoils, plant your flags, and be done with it. This business of rights and ethics and morality in war only prevents both sides from doing everything they could to win, which turns the war from a quick, horrific mess into a long, protracted, drawn-out horrific mess.

Paxton does Brooks

Nate Paxton also discusses that horrible David Brooks article, only he manages to do it without the bluster and snark. Nate, you're a better man than I. The zinger:

The real challenge that we face as a nation lies in concurrently learning to acknowledge religion in the public sphere and learning not to acknowledge religion in the public sphere.

All too true.

Overbeys in Politics

Here is a small list of Overbeys who have donated to presidential campaigns. Not enough data to determine whether my family is allied with the Forces of Light or those of Darkness. But still amusing. I don't know either of these folks.

The site involved, Fundrace 2004, is quite hilarious. You can snoop on your neighbors, spy on your friends and professors, or even check out the political activism of potential employees! There are also detailed color coded maps. Check out Boston here. Very cool, if a little Orwellian.

[Hat tip: Tom, who just returned from Indonesia and has kick-ass pictures of Borobodur here.]

The Times Goes Fundie

Why on earth does David Brooks have such a huge megaphone over on the editorial pages of the New York Times? Why not just stop pretending and give the column to a real demagogue, like Cal Thomas or Jerry Falwell?

Probably because Brooks coats his venomous anti-intellectualism with all the trappings of sophisticated writing. In his most recent article, "One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom", he sounds like a cosmopolitan book-club leader, or perhaps a skilled English teacher, coming up with a useful reading selection relevant to current events. But these paragraphs form the core message of the article:

But the more interesting phenomenon limned in Chappell's book is this: King had a more accurate view of political realities than his more secular liberal allies because he could draw on biblical wisdom about human nature. Religion didn't just make civil rights leaders stronger — it made them smarter.

Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class.

Whether the topic is welfare, education, the regulation of biotechnology or even the war on terrorism, biblical wisdom may offer something that secular thinking does not — not pat answers, but a way to think about things.

Got it. There is a universally applicable human nature, which is described accurately in the Bible, and by reading this deep wisdom you can solve problems more effectively than all those silly social scientists who waste time measuring things and doing math. Silly social scientists!

As for biblical wisdom as applied to the war on terror, I think we all know how this goes: the LORD actually hardened the heart of Saddam Hussein, so that we could be granted a glorious opportunity to destroy him and take his land. It's rather like what happened to King Sihon of Heshbon.

But King Sihon of Heshbon was not willing to let us pass through, for the LORD your God had hardened his spirit and made his heart defiant in order to hand him over to you, as he has now done. The Lord said to me, "See, I have begun to give Sihon and his land over to you. Begin now to take possession of his land." So when Sihon came out against us, he and all his people for battle at Jahaz, the LORD our God gave him over to us; and we struck him down, along with his offspring and all his people. At that time we captured all his towns, and in each town we utterly destroyed men, women, and children. We left not a single survivor. Only the livestock we kept as spoil for ourselves, as well as the plunder of the towns that we had captured. [Deut. 2:30-35]

Thanks, Biblical Wisdom, for the accurate, deep, and natural explanation. We can learn many lessons from this, indeed a new "way to think about things." The war on terror is obviously a fantastic opportunity to commit wholesale genocide for the purpose of acquiring land and booty, just as described in the Bible. And it's not like we'd be committing a crime, because the Lord goes around hardening hearts all the time, precisely for the purpose of allowing us to commit genocide. All those terrorists would have been perfectly willing to negotiate, just like the Egyptian Pharoah, had the LORD our God not directly intervened and manipulated them psychologically in order to give us the opportunity to destroy them utterly. Let's forget all our current policy considerations that actually worry about social, economic, or political ramifications for our decisions, and draw directly from Biblical Wisdom, which is obviously much more in touch with fundamental human nature. I'm with ya, David.

Oh no

The Celestine Prophecy will be made into a movie.

It's moments like this that I dread the most. They make me confront a fundamental tension felt by many students of religion: Should we feel paternalistic compassion for all the poor sots who view the Celestine Prophecy as some sort of inspirational, profound spiritual work? Or do we hold them in contempt for debasing themselves, for allowing their weak hearts and minds to wallow in such unbridled mediocrity?

Usually, contempt wins.

Allah gives comfort

The always riotous Allah gives us a God's-eye view of the fate of Sheikh Yassin. This is, indeed, what scriptural literalism is all about.

I love you too, Margaret

Margaret Cho totally loves me. Check out this excerpt from a list of things she loves:

…Madonna's "Bedtime Stories" CD, young lesbians with smart mouths, deep tissue massage especially if it is from the "Crusher" in Boston, staying home, getting dressed, RYAN, sleeping in, coming home, realizing that I have survived my childhood and am almost a middle aged woman,…

Don't worry. I won't let it go to my head or anything.

[Link via the Redhead]

This is the life

I'm sitting in my brand new study carrel in Widener Library. I lucked out and got a fifth-floor carrel, right next to a window overlooking Masachusetts Avenue. Plenty of sunlight, near the all-important Ind and IndL books, and a nice little locker to store my things. I am in nerd heaven right now.

Too bad Widener keeps such lame hours. If this place were open late, I'd be here studying till midnight every day …