Year: 2013

An explanation from an anonymous conductor:

What’s with pointing up when you stop at a station?

We’re pointing at the conductor’s indication board, which is a zebra-striped sign. If the sign is in front of my window, it means that the entire train is on the platform. They don’t trust us to just look (see that other question about zoning out), so required procedure is to point to it at every station before we open the doors. The absolute biggest violation a conductor can make is opening the doors where there isn’t a platform. If that ever happens, the first thing supervision is going to ask you is, “Did you point to the board?”

Or, as that charming video suggests, they could be pantless.

He has a new book out:

For Love of Animals is an honest and thoughtful look at our responsibility as Christians with respect to animals. Many Christians misunderstand both history and their own tradition in thinking about animals. They are joined by prominent secular thinkers who blame Christianity for the Western world’s failure to seriously consider the moral status of animals. This book explains how traditional Christian ideas and principles—like nonviolence, concern for the vulnerable, respect for life, stewardship of God’s creation, and rejection of consumerism—require us to treat animals morally.

A bit about the author:

Charles Camosy is an assistant professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University. … His early work focused on medical and clinical ethics with regard to stem cell research and the treatment of critically ill newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit, which was the focus of his first book, Too Expensive to Treat? Finitude, Tragedy, and the Neonatal ICU. His second book, Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization, uses intellectual solidarity in an attempt to begin a sustained and fruitful conversation between Peter Singer and Christian ethics.

Let us know what you think we should ask Charles via the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here):

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Recent Dish thread on the morality of eating meat is here.

A leather bear mask:

Beard not included. Runner up: Edgar Allen Ho.

(Mask by SurlyBunny, available on Etsy)

Commenting on the Obamacare roll-out, Joe Klein insists that “surely, SOMEONE–maybe many people–should be fired for these opening pratfalls“:

I’ve been reading Tom Ricks’ excellent book about military leadership since World War II, The Generals. In it, Ricks argues that one of the reasons we were able to win World War II was that Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower were absolutely brutal when it came to relieving field commanders who were not up to the job–and also discerning enough to leave politically incorrect, but brilliant, leaders like George Patton in their positions. He also argues that in the subsequent, cold-war bureaucratization of the military, this rigorous practice has been largely abandoned.

Firing for cause doesn’t seem to exist in the Obama Administration, either. The most high-profile government officials who were removed from their positions over the past five years were the two Air Force generals who were responsible for the sloppy handling of nuclear weapons; Secretary of Defense Robert Gates–perhaps the best cabinet officer in both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations–ordered both firings.

Allison Meier takes note of a competition for designers to reimagine “the architecture of death”:

What happens when you die? Well, in a literal way, what happens to everyone else. You’re likely to have a traditional, costly, funeral, and then a small slot of land in a quiet sprawl of cemetery will be yours.  Yet this traditional way of death is arguably both a waste of land and money, and perhaps worse, practically begs for a person to be forgotten among the waves of tombstones that become less and less visited as the years tick by from that final date on the headstone. The Design for Death competition organized by Designboom with the Lien Foundation, ACM Foundation, and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) is aimed at rethinking this.

You can browse submissions here. Meier calls some of the ideas “a bit outlandish,” but adds:

[T]here’s something interesting at each of their cores that harkens to this idea of creating a place of peace that is actually meaningful and draws you to return and notice it, not like many cemeteries now that are secreted at the edges of the city.

Bernstein shakes his head:

Remember, the Bush administration strongly denied anything was going wrong in Iraq—not just for weeks, but years. The “Mission Accomplished” episode is remembered because it was an apt symbol for how the White House acted. Whatever line the White House set, conservatives almost universally followed. You may recall, for example, an extended period in which the emerging insurgency in Iraq was—quite preposterously—compared to largely mythical Nazi “bitter enders.” Right up until the run-up to the 2006 elections (that is, three years into the fiasco), there was virtually no public pressure from Republicans on the White House.

Nor was this dynamic restricted to Iraq. Republicans spent much of 2008 denying the recession that had already begun; that’s how John McCain got into trouble during the presidential campaign by claiming that economic fundamentals were sound.

This blog is one of the few that – after cheer-leading Bush into Iraq – pivoted over time to stringent and bitter criticism. I hope our coverage of the ACA website and effect on the individual market hasn’t pulled any punches either. But the difference is: in criticizing Obama, I’m joined by countless Democratic writers and outlets. When I took on Bush for over-spending at home and over-reaching abroad, I was effectively alone at the start. And over the years, only a handful of apostates joined me, as the right consigned me, and them, to the “raging lefty” category, without addressing our, you know, arguments. That ended with Obama’s election when all the debt Bush piled up could suddenly be blamed on the new guy. It’s as if the Tea Party could not believe in its own principles until a Democrat was in office.

That tells you a lot about the fundamentalist psyche and movement-think in the GOP. The Republicans need to open their minds and construct a conversation about policy and principle – one that is always open to internal criticism. Doubt is a conservative virtue – and the Republicans seem to have forgotten this entirely.