The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Seth Gordon:

Connie H. @ 22: As someone who keeps kosher I wish I could agree with you, but I'm not sure the kosher slaughterhouses are really that much better off than the rest of the meat industry.

It's true that humanely-raised animals are less likely to have the sort of lesions that render them un-kosher[*]. However, when an animal is slaughtered in a kosher fashion and it turns out to have those lesions, the carcass is just sold to a non-kosher vendor for processing. So even if humane farming practices could reduce the reject rate from, say, 30% to 20%, the cost of instituting those practices does not make up for the benefit.

Kosher consumers interested in humane farming practices might want to check out Mitzvah Meat.

(Disclaimer: I am not a customer of Mitzvah Meat; they're out of my price range. I deal with the ethical issues by just not eating very much meat.)

[*]An animal that would have died in a year had it not been slaughtered is considered neveilah, one subcategory of not-kosher; the rabbis consider lesions on the lungs as one sign that an animal is a neveilah, so animals are inspected for this problem after slaughter.

After a Dartmouth professor accidentally and fatally poisoned herself with dimethylmercury, MIT's chemistry department held a retraining session on What Gloves To Use (like What Fork To Use, only with higher stakes). My wife, a grad student in chemistry at the time, started using nitrile gloves for just about everything.

(She did pretty well coming out with a Ph.D. and no obvious liver disease. Fires, on the other hand....)

Note to the NH for Obama volunteers and staff: if you spend the next weekend laid up with the election-season equivalent of Con Crud, it's partly my fault. Please forgive me.

I want a T-shirt or at least a button saying "YES WE DID".

If I may quote from my alma mater's unofficial drinking song:

Penetration, fornication, copulation, fuck
Blow job, hand job, rim job, ream job, cunnilingus, suck
Eating beaver, dipping wick, taking it up the rear
These words don't mean a thing to me, 'cause I'm an engineer.

(to the tune of "Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech")

FWIW according to Jeet Heer, in the 1980s Buckley said that if he were a black South African he would support the African National Congress.

Grand Heresiarch of the Order of the Shrill Brad DeLong, who cited Heer, also reminds us of Buckley's attempt to posthumously rehabilitate Joe McCarthy.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a moderator disemvowelling a human face, forever.

See also The Moderate Martyr, an article about Mahmoud Muhammad Taha.

How did previous generations make sense of any media without these helpful annotations?

The late Yeshiyahu Leibowitz once pointed out that the (OT) Biblical prophets had no formal government positions. He argued that putting religious authorities inside the corridors of political power (he was referring, in particular, to the Israeli rabbinic bureauracy) ends up corrupting the religion, because part of being inside a political system is making political compromises, and after you've compromised yourself into a coalition government that does X, you're in no position to go back to your pulpit and give a fire-breathing speech about how X is an abomination unto the Lord.

In that vein, I would ask: Why did Huckabee insist that his campaign to rewrite the Constitution to meet God's standards would end with amendments regarding abortion and same-sex marriage? Are these God's only standards? What about, say, school prayer and evolution?

Wow. And they say Japanese culture values conformity.

Related: a proposal for a form of government in which democratically elected bodies define a measurement of social welfare and markets determine what policies the government should take to maximize that welfare.

See also the Cotton Patch version.

Born September 1969. I have some fragmentary memories going back to age three, but my earliest current-events-related memory is seeing a picture of Nixon on the cover of Newsweek with the headline "Will He Resign?"

I remember the Bicentennial. I remember very firmly believing that 1976 could not really be America's 200th birthday, no matter how many people were telling me it was, because the fireworks display I had seen the previous year was so spectacular, that must have been the 200th.

I also remember visiting a relative with an honest-to-goodness Teletype in his kitchen, and looking at the key labelled BREAK, and being afraid that I might give in to the temptation to push it and then the whole machine would fall apart.

While the starship Pride of Scandinavia is orbiting a remote library planet, its master, Captain Chazzerai, dies of what appears to be accidental radiation poisoning. But before he died, Chazzerai uploaded his consciousness into the ship's AI. The AI tries to convince a loyal midshipman that Chazzerai was murdered by his first mate, who is now the captain. On a vessel where that captain's word is law, who dares bring him to justice?

Starring Matt Damon as the midshipman, Ben Affleck as the chief engineer, Helen Mirren as Chazzerai's widow, and Christina Ricci as the midshipman's girlfriend. Robin Williams has a cameo as the manger of the ship's recycling plant.

Well, this makes me feel better about a similar trainwreck in a non-profit that I was involved with. I guess it's hard to tell a colleague in an organization that depends on volunteer labor "you're a nice guy, but you screwed up, and someone else has to do this job from now on".

Chris @ 30: I don't think the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has much to do with religious differences.

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world and is pretty much uninvolved with the conflict. A lot of the countries that have been giving Israel the most trouble over the past few decades (either through war or through subsidy of terrorists) are secular Arab countries, while the Saudi theocrats have just switched to the "let's make a deal" side. Yassir Arafat's widow is a Christian. Back in the day, Israel actually encouraged Islamic fundamentalism in the occupied territories, because they thought it would provide a counterweight to the secular Arab nationalists in the PLO. (Whoops!) Arab citizens of Israel support Palestinian nationalism but have hardly ever resorted to violence. (And if you say "well, that's because they're economically better-off than the Palestinians in the territories", you have to consider that a lot of suicide bombers also come from middle-class backgrounds.)

When two ethnic groups are at war, both sides will usually appeal to some ancient religious dispute or historical slight to whip up nationalistic fervor. However, that justification is not the real reason for the war. Outside observers should not be tricked into throwing up their hands and saying, "well, X and Y have been fighting one another for thousands of years, there's just no way to solve it".

Alan @ 15: Or, as Abba Eban said: "Men and nations act wisely after all other alternatives have been exhausted."

OK, check my math: Kadima, Olmert's party, has 29 seats. Labor-Meimad, which is at least as dovish as Kadima, has 19 seats. Shas, a religious party not averse to compromise on the territories, has 12 seats. Meretz-Yachad, the most left-wing Jewish party in the Knesset, has 5 seats. Gil, which seems to have no particular position on territorial issues, has 7 seats. That's 72 seats, a solid majority of the Knesset, before you even count the ten seats held by "Arab" parties.

(IIRC, back when Peres was PM, there was much grumbling on the right that his government did not represent a "Jewish majority".)

And if Kadima, L-M, or M-Y gain seats in the next election, then they won't depend on Shas, which is significant because Shas's leader is against dividing Jerusalem.

Olmert personally may not have much of a political future, but as I understand it, that has more to do with the recent Israeli fuckup in Lebanon than with the issue of land for peace.

See also this article from Arutz Sheva, Israel's fair and balanced news network: "Can Right-Wing Knesset Lobby Stop Olmert?"

I agree that as the nationalists lose access to the organs of state violence, they are more likely to become violent on a free-lance basis.

Dena: are the protests from Orthodox circles a sign that Annapolis is going to fail, or a sign that movers and shakers in the Orthodox world have reason to believe that Annapolis will succeed? I mean, surely the Israeli Cabinet[*] wouldn't have signed on to this process if they weren't prepared to tell the religious nationalists to go fly a kite.

[*]I say "the Israeli Cabinet" rather than "Olmert" because as I understand it, an Israeli PM doesn't have the same unilateral control over the executive branch that a US President has.

Heresiarch @ 438: I support the organized shunning of the Drews roughly as much as I support the sewing of red letters onto the clothing of adulterers.

Miss Manners once pointed out that customarily, there are a number of ways that polite society responds to impolite behavior, ranging from raised eyebrows to shunning, and the law only needs to be brought in when all these informal methods fail. If people give up on the informal methods, then that just leads to expanding the domain of the legal methods, and since the law is a blunt instrument, this is not an improvement.

So I think it's entirely appropriate that the Drews are being ostracized by their community: it seems beyond reasonable doubt that they have committed a very serious offense, and that offense is not being addressed by the courts.

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