Chris Wilson imagines a better spell-check:
There’s no reason why spell-check dictionaries need to be so behind the times. All the technology to build a relevant, timely spelling database already exists in search engines like Google and Microsoft’s own Live Search, which have a vast vocabulary of words and names and update their dictionaries in near real time.
A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn’t register as “kindness.” When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it’s probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness—they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, “how kind of me,” how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.
Massie explains why the new atheists can seem preachy:
…their religious counterparts…generally confine themselves to arguing that you are wrong (and, of course, damned) whereas Dawkins et al also demand that you acknowledge they are right. Worse still – and I say this as someone with a faith deficit – they insist upon going on and on and on about it. We get it, chaps.
Douglas Murray loses his:
Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that religion’s texts — the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities. Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which in its opening lines boasts ‘that is the book, wherein is no doubt’, plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century Arabia, then — just for starters — why was he stealing material? Or was he just repeating himself?
Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.
Bob Dylan’s "License to Kill" from the Letterman Show in 1984:
Fallows’ 2003 article on the case of killed Palestinian child Mohammed al-Dura seems all the more timely this week:
The truth about Mohammed al-Dura is important in its own right, because this episode is so raw and vivid in the Arab world and so hazy, if not invisible, in the West. Whatever the course of the occupation of Iraq, the United States has guaranteed an ample future supply of images of Arab suffering. The two explosions in Baghdad markets in the first weeks of the war, killing scores of civilians, offered an initial taste. Even as U.S. officials cautioned that it would take more time and study to determine whether U.S. or Iraqi ordnance had caused the blasts, the Arab media denounced the brutality that created these new martyrs. More of this lies ahead. The saga of Mohammed al-Dura illustrates the way the battles of wartime imagery may play themselves out.
What marriage can give you if you’re really, really lucky:
A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.
Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away. The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls "intensive companionship and sexual liveliness". The researchers nicknamed the couples "swans" because they have similar mental "love maps" to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes.
Picture taken on February 10, 2006 shows wild boars near Allersberg, Bavaria. The number of wild boars in Germany has grown in the last years due to a milder climate. They come closer to cities and private houses, devastate gardens, dig in the rubbish and scare people. By Timm Schamberger/AFP/Getty.
A full accounting of the man’s crusade against any recognition in law or even public culture of the dignity and equality of homosexuals has yet to appear in the various obits. But Neuhaus was central to redefining Republicanism as Christianism, to seeing religion as indistinguishable from politics, and to cementing the marginalization and disdain of gay people as a pillar of the Christianist movement.
It was therefore unsurprising that it was Neuhaus to whom president Bush turned when deciding whether to back amending the federal constitution to ensure that gay people were for ever defined as inferior to straight people under the law; and it was Neuhaus’ influence that allowed Bush to pursue this agenda without ever even acknowledging the existence of the human beings whose families he was seeking to penalize and stigmatize in the founding document. The homophobia of the Bush administration cannot be understood without understanding how Neuhaus personally pioneered and shaped it.
With Neuhaus as with Ratzinger, the gay issue was central and passionate and personal. This needs stating for the record.
In contemplating the continuing Gaza offensive, statistics of the civilian dead never quite sink in as a human event. That is why this piece on one single clan caught in the crossfire is useful, if brutal and sobering. One wonders what Washington’s opinion would be if thirty members of a single Jewish family were killed – even unintentionally – in the Middle Eastern conflict. No wonder talk of war crimes is surfacing, even in the Wall Street Journal. And Arab opinion seems increasingly moving toward Hamas. The chance of the PA establishing some post-war stability in Gaza certainly seems more remote. And the emergence of a poetntial terrorist training and recruiting ground in a failed and radicalized society in Gaza all the likelier. Friends and supporters of Israel should worry about this.
The Dish 