History
oracknows | November 15, 2008Downfall was a great movie, arguably the greatest movie about Adolf Hitler's final days ever made. However, it contains one scene, one incredibly powerful scene, where aides bring Hitler news that the last defenses had fallen, that the divisions that Hitler thought he had no longer existed, and that the forces that were trying to reach Berlin to fight the Russians had been repulsed. It was at this point that Hitler finally realized that there was nothing left to stop the Soviet juggernaut from taking Berlin. At this point, Hitler finally realizes that the war is lost and that there is no hope…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of geology, and yet not required by the ontology of any geological theory, which does include overfolds, tectonic plates, upthrusts, the process of differential erosion, and so on. At the end of the theoretical explanation, the mountains have not disappeared so that we might now drive from Arizona to Los…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2008
Here's some characteristically excellent photography by my friend Lars of Arkland. He's recently moved to Visby on Gotland, a big old limestone slab in the Baltic Sea, where he's the Hauptnetzmeister of the National Heritage Board. The funny thing about the above picture is that it shows young vandals/graffiti artists to have a conscious and highly traditional perspective on the cultural heritage. Much more traditional than today's heritage administrators, who worry endlessly about whether their perspective is democratically informed, in touch with the times etc. While these administrators…
razib | November 11, 2008The New York Times has a piece up, After Breakthrough, Europe Looks in Mirror, which quotes people who wonder when Europe will have its own colored head of state. Let's ignore for a moment that the longest serving Prime Minister in British history was 1/8 Indian; that was nearly 200 years ago and despite his known and acknowledged colored heritage Lord Liverpool was first and foremost a scion of the British nobility. These sorts of self-flagellations make no sense. The United States is about 30% non-white (many Hispanics identify as racially white, but operationally the Hispanic/Latino…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
Right now on the Australian ABC network they are reshowing a program that was first shown in April this year on Professor Sir Gustav Nossal AO [and a three line slew of fruit salad of awards, qualifications, and honours]. The transcript is here, but it doesn't do justice to the man himself. Gus, as he likes to be called, is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met, and the one who I count working for as a great honour, when I was the communications manager at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, where I worked while I did my PhD, for ten years (the PhD took six).
He discovered…
oracknows | November 11, 2008Since I've been on the topic of the Holocaust again today in giving a victim of the Hitler Zombie a well and truly deserved taste of not-so-Respectful Insolence, before I get back to medicine and science tomorrow I can't help but note that it's been brought to my attention that a brand, spankin' new Jack Chick tract has made an appearance to darken the Internet for critical thinkers and skeptics everywhere. Heck, Chick's fundamentalist religious craziness is so toxic that rational believers (and even many not-so-rational believers) undergo a wave of neuronal apoptosis any time he appears.…
oracknows | November 11, 2008November 4, 2008
11:15 PM EST
A mousy little man sat, shaking his head in his hands, limned against the wall by the flickering blue glow of a flat screen TV. On the television, a huge crowd swelled in Grant Park in Chicago. The excitement was palpable, with a constant dull roar of the crowd that swelled periodically as the crowd thought that they saw the man whom they'd come to see.
The mousy man muttered, "How could this have happened?" He slumped back into his chair. "How?"
On the television, the object of his hatred strode upon the stage in front of the adoring crowd and began to speak.…
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
I was very pleased to receive today my copy of this book:
A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, edited by A. Tucker. Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
I got it because on pp 405-415 is my essay "Darwin", which I am rather proud of. I have long thought that Darwin as a philosopher of history is undervalued, but much more interesting than Hegel or Marx. Anyway, if you don't tell anyone, I have made a rough scan available here, although you really ought to make your library buy a copy.
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2008I've taken out a couple of extremely laddish books from the library to read for fun. Seeing constant mentions of ninjas and pirates on the web, I became curious about the historical reality of these matters. So I've started on Stephen Turnbull's Warriors of Medieval Japan (2005) and I've got David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag (1995) lined up next. Here's a fine passage from Turnbull:
"... even though the Age of Warring States was a time when samurai warfare went through its biggest revolution in history under the influence of strategy and technology from both Europe and China, it was also…
razib | November 6, 2008Over the past few months I've been reading books on American history seeing that I am American and I should know a bit about the country which I call home. For example, right now I'm reading Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877. I was surprised when I stumbled upon Richard Mentor Johnson, the 9th Vice President of the United States, between 1836 and 1840:
Following the war, Johnson returned to the House of Representatives, and was elevated to the Senate in 1819 to fill the seat vacated by John J. Crittenden, who resigned to become Attorney General. As his constituency…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
clock | November 3, 2008This is a website worth spending some time on and looking at every page:
This website is linked to a British Academy funded research project on the post-World War Two memorialisation of one of the main sites of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Serbia, the Semlin Judenlager. Established by Nazi Germany in December 1941 on the outskirts of Belgrade, Semlin (also known by its Serbian name SajmiÅ¡te) was one of the first concentration camps in Europe, created specifically for the internment of Jews. Between March and May 1942, approximately 7,000 Jewish women, children and the elderly (almost half…
aardvarchaeology | November 3, 2008
A year ago I showed some pictures of particularly cool finds that Claes Pettersson and his team from Jönköping County Museum had made in 17th century urban layers near their offices. One of them was the above clay mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. Claes believes that it may have been used to make candy. Now he knows where the motif came from.
The mould is actually a contact copy of a 1631 royal medal used to decorate military officers. And among Claes's finds is a piece of yet another mould copied from a coeval medal, this one an equestrian portrait. Muses Claes, "What have they…
evolvingthoughts | November 1, 2008
I used to think that Jews in general were able to avoid the confusion of biblical literalism with their rich tradition of allegorical and other forms of interpretation and commentary, but it seems that there are some - haredim - who follow the example of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and dismiss evolution as far-fetched and anti-biblical. The link is to an anonymous essay by a rabbi at the Jerusalem Post. In it he argues that the tradition of Orthodox Judaism permits a looseness of interpretation that means that science can rule out bad interpretations, which is very unlike the Christian literalist…
oracknows | November 1, 2008Thus far, the first decade of the 21st century not been good to that man who is arguably the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving.
The decade began its very first year with his crushing defeat in the libel lawsuit he instigated against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a defeat so resounding that it accomplished exactly the opposite of what he had intended: It ended with the judge concluding that he was, in fact, an "active" Holocaust denier (not just a Holocaust denier but an active Holocaust denier) Unfortunately, it cost Prof. Lipstadt and supporters a couple of…
terrasig | October 31, 2008Much hubbub is to be had today over the work of Dalhousie University mathematics professor, Dr Jason Brown, in solving the mystery of George Harrison's opening chord of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," played on a Rickenbacker 360/12 guitar. The PDF of Prof Brown's report is available online.
As the report and article show, The Beatles did indeed record this in one take with no overdubbing such that Harrison could not have played the chord alone. We now learn from Brown's work and others that Harrison and Lennon played two different guitars but the nice flavor was added by producer George…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2008
Dear Reader Dveej asked me to write some more about the Purse Torment Tavern south of Stockholm. Its name is Pungpinan which is pretty funny, as pung doesn't just mean purse or pouch, but in modern Swedish more commonly scrotum. The name might thus be translated "Purse Torment" or "Pain in the Ball Sack", or even "Scrotum Torture". (Boy am I gonna get hits from the S/M porn surfers now.)
The heyday of the Purse Torment Tavern lasted from about 1670 to 1805. This was back in the era of horse-drawn carriages, when Sweden was covered by a dense grid of rest stops where you could change horses…
oracknows | October 28, 2008Warning: Some of the links in this post go to hate sites. I include them because I think it's important for people to see exactly what white supremacists say in their own words, if they are curious to do so and thus learn how low these people will go. However, if you're at work you may not want to click on them.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have a major interest in World War II history and the Holocaust. Specifically, I've spent a fair amount of time writing about Holocaust denial. My interest in Holocaust denial derives from two sources. First, it's disgust at the racism, Hitler…