1648 is the beginning of the modern diplomatic era, with the Treaty of Westphalia. Among other things, it establishes the modern diplomatic state, the concept of national sovereignty, and pretty much eliminates religiously-motivated interstate warfare in Europe.
1214?
1215 is when the Magna Carta was first written. Due process, executive accountability and other foundations of English common law, writ large.
Either way, it’s gonna havea beat… but I don’t think we’ll like to dance to it.
Posted by protected static as politics at 9:52 AM UTC
Torture. Torture, torture, torture. If that isn’t a moral issue, I don’t know what is.
Put up or shut up, people. If you want to demonstrate the importance of moral leadership, now is the time – otherwise, you can take your lectures about the importance of faith and morality and those dreadful, humanistic, anti-religion progressives and stick ‘em sideways.
Posted by protected static as politics at 8:33 AM UTC
So, the ‘compromise’ bill on torture will do away with habeus corpus rights for detainees, and will allow the President to interpret Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as he sees fit – except where Congress will define certain “grave abuses” of Article 3 as war crimes.
How… considerate of them. Particularly since this Administration will simply issue a signing statement ignoring these restrictions if any of those “grave abuses” are considered by the White House to be necessary.
So America, how does it feel to be a nation that officially sanctions torture as a matter of policy?
The only compromise that has been made here has been this: we have compromised whatever moral standing we had left.
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:09 AM UTC
Yes, I know I’m late to this party, but my understanding is that anyone can dance… By and large, I didn’t care about Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks (a ‘provisional’ transcript of which may be found here) – the quote was taken out of context, the reaction was predictable, the apology clumsy. Same old, same old – not news. As Brian Dunbar over on Space For Commerce accurately snarked, “You’d think he was, like, the leader of a traditional religious faith or something. Darn it all if only he were a Unitarian or something.”
But this morning on Lawyers, Guns, & Money I found a link to an interesting analysis of Benedict’s remarks that went beyond the superficialities of the controversy. The main thrust of the piece is that Benedict wasn’t condemning Islam – he was ignoring it, denying it a place at the table of contemporary philisophical thought entirely:
[...]Think for a moment about what Benedict accomplishes, rhetorically, by leading off with this quotation. He divides Christianity — God as the logos, reason and the divine as intrinsically linked together — from not-Christianity (in this case, Islam), and sets up an association of the Christian opponents of his position with those non-Christians being criticized by the long-dead emperor. It’s a classic strategy of rhetorical coercion by dichotomizing, as Benedict is in effect narrowing the choices for his audience to two: Christianity, or not-Christianity. Reject the “hellenization” of Christianity and the equation of God and reason, Benedict is implicitly saying, and you’re not a Christian, you’re a Muslim. He more or less explicitly says this a bit later by declaring that “for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”
Since Benedict takes it for granted that none of his audience will want to self-identify with Islam, he’s effectively backed his potential opponents into a corner — a corner from which he can set about the other part of his self-appointed task, which is to critique the positivistic exclusion of reason from the realm of faith in Christian Europe and call for the return of a broader notion of reason.[...]
There is some great follow-up material in the comments, as well.
I was intrigued enough by this piece to go and read the transcript (what a radical idea!). While many of the theological nuances were admittedly beyond me, the language is overall fairly accessible. What I found most interesting was how much Benedict’s speech firmly buttresses what I’ve written abouthimpreviously – this Pope doesn’t want to lead a Crusade (as Dr. Jackson noted in his post, if Benedict was invoking the Crusades, he would have turned to the writings of Urban II, not quotations from Paleologus); no, Benedict wants to initiate a New Counter Reformation.
This isn’t simply about establishing the primacy of Catholicism, or reasserting the Papacy’s authority over the Church and its message – this is about rolling back the Enlightenment and denying the Church (and by extension, the faithful) a role in science and what we’ve come to see as ‘reason’. You know – the foundation of our science, technology, and our political heritage of liberal democracy.
Posted by protected static as politics at 8:51 AM UTC
So, what with it being Talk Like a Pirate Day and all that, I decided that merely mentioning it in passing with a few desultory “Yearghs!” and “Me hearties!” over on Mystery of the Haunted Vampire (where we loves us some pirates, yes we do – I think it has something to do with the floggings, but maybe that’s just me…) wouldn’t be enough. No, I needed to upload a WordPress plugin that will dynamically piratize (piratify? piraticate?) a WordPress blog’s content, comments and all.
Argh! Shiver me timbers! Uh, and all that…
At any rate, the plugin comes with a template to write your own filters, which inspired a little bit of whimsy on my part: what “Talk Like a(n) [X] Day” do you think the world can’t live without?
“…of life, [...] or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”
(emphasis in the original)
Just sayin’… But really, I don’t know why anyone is bothering to point this out now. I mean, after 200 years, this issue is pretty much settled, isn’t it?
No secret: I like gadgets. I like simple gadgets best, but I do like me some gadgety-goodness. And so it was that when I went to our local MegaBigBoxHomeSupplyStore to return a light fixture we weren’t going to need, I found myself wandering around in the hand tool section and I discovered a cell phone belt pouch that I had to have.
Woo-hoo! I escaped with less than $10 in damage! w00t!
*ahem*
You see, I hate carrying my phone in my pocket, but I’m really hard on your typical belt cases. But one? I don’t think I could break this puppy without tools. It’s high-density ballistic nylon, with a seriously strong belt clip, and it’s got elasticized loops for holding additional stuff as well as inside pockets that could hold credit cards or whatever. If you wanted to ditch the wallet, this pouch could easily do double duty.
Yeah, it’s on the big side, but I’m not going for fashion points here… I’ve stashed a $20 in it, and it holds some of the other stuff I like to carry perfectly – I carry a Spyderco folding knife, along with a ballpoint-sized version of the Fisher Space Pen, and I can put both of these in the pouch. In fact, I find the pouch preferable to my pocket for carrying the knife: even though WA law permits me to carry a knife on my person, I like having it out in the open. It’s far more obvious on the outside of the pouch than the belt clip is peeking out over my pants pocket…
Well, The Boy likes gadgets too, so I wasn’t surprised when I found him looking at the pouch coveteously a couple of mornings ago.
“Dad, is that yours.”
“Yup.”
“That’s pretty cool how it holds all your stuff like that.”
“Yeah, and it’s got this loop on the other side where I’m thinking of adding a small flashlight.” (One of those micro-MagLights would fit perfectly… but I digress.)
“Ooh, then you’d be ready for anything.” (pause) “Well, not anything. Anything where you needed to cut something or talk to someone or write something or see in the dark.”
Damn.
Posted by protected static as gadget, random at 9:50 AM UTC
1 curious child + 1 broken wiffleball discovered on playground + 1 finger inserted into wiffleball hole = 1 trip to the nurse’s office + 1 visit to school from Seattle Fire Department + 1 set of wire cutters
Yes, that was yesterday’s excitement at school. Care to imagine how the phone call went? If you guessed something along the lines of “Hello [static]? This is the nurse at The Boy’s school; I’m going to put him on so he can tell you what he did.” then you would be correct.
*sigh*
I will note that there appears to be a very specific algorithm for phone calls from school:
string disapprovingPhoneMessage = System.String.Format(
"Hello {0}, this is {1} at {2}'s school. I'm going to put {2} on the phone so {3} can tell you what {3} did.",
nameOfParent,
nameOrTitleOfPersonAtSchool,
nameOfChild,
appropriateGenderPronoun
);
Yes, he’s fine – no Frodo of the Nine Fingers for us.
I wonder what today’s drama will be…
Posted by protected static as random at 6:30 AM UTC
Seriously: when confronted with a text box labeled “Search for:” to the left of a button labeled ‘Search’, the convention is that you can type your search string into the text box, hit “Tab” to move focus away from the text box and onto the button, then hit “Enter” to commit the search. Every search engine I’ve ever used works this way.
Every. Single. One. Except yours.
If, after typing my search string into the input box, should I hit “Tab” then “Enter”, what happens? Why, I go back to the YouTube homepage! “Tab” doesn’t move focus to the “Search” button – it moves it to the big “YouTube: Broadcast Yourself” graphic in the upper left corner of the site. Since the graphic has a hyperlink back to the main page, that’s where I’m redirected.
C’mon guys. That’s just… lame. That’s a mistake I’d expect from an entry-level programmer.
(And yes, I filed a bug report… Dunno how their first level customer service people will deal with it…)
Update: Oy, it’s even worse that I thought…
YouTube’s UI is pretty conventional, following the standards for useability that Amazon pioneered: a top bar consisting of a static header and a tab control for navigation, then the dynamic content in the body and sidebars, then a static footer.
There are 8 UI elements in the header: the graphic, 5 links: “Sign Up”, “My Account”, “Viewing History”, “Help”, “Log In”, the “Search for” text box, and the “Search” button. Below that is the tab control: “Home”, “Videos”, “Channels”, “Groups”, “Categories”, “Upload”. Each of these tabs has sub-categories that I won’t go into. Below the tab control comes the main body of the site: dynamic content, search results, sidebar stuff. Below this comes a footer/bottom bar with the typical “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, yadda yadda links and a button for their RSS feed. Like I said, pretty conventional.
If focus is on the graphic and you start hitting “Tab” to navigate from element to element, guess what the progression is? You tab through each of the 5 top bar links, then on to the “Search” button, then on to the tab control, its links, then its subcategories, then all the links in the dynamic content and sidebar. Then you tab into the links of the footer, the RSS button, the address bar of the browser, then the member login text boxes and button (you hit the “Login” button before the user name and password text boxes), and then, finally… the “Search for:” text box.
That’s right – it’s the very last element you can tab into.
Hey guys, I know you have testers… And this is Web UI 101 stuff.
Posted by protected static as geek, programming at 8:41 PM UTC
Today, a comment spammer tried to leave their crap for a specific brand of penis pills over on Mystery of the Haunted Vampire. You’ll never guess who’s website he’d compromised to host his spammy nonsense. Never, ever, ever…
Give up?
The website was registered to the Korean Franciscan Brotherhood. Monks & penis pills… Where have I heard something like that before? Oh, yes:
Amor volat undique,
captus est libidine.
Iuvenes, iuvencule
coniunguntur merito.
(Cupid flies everywhere,
seized by desire.
Young men and women
are rightly coupled.)
Ah, the accidental surrealism and unintentional ironies of the Interwebs…
Posted by protected static as random, spam at 9:19 PM UTC
On the approach in to La Guardia, chatter rose nervously – most of us on the flight weren’t from New York; as we circled, a funereal silence fell over the cabin as people craned to look and the flight crew answered questions in hushed, reverent tones.
“No, The Hole stopped smoking two weeks ago.”
“Yes, I knew X, I trained with him/her.”
“No, I haven’t been able to bring myself to visit it.”
I will always remember that horrid, acrid burnt smell, and the now-fading and tattered ‘missing’ posters everywhere. “Have you seen me?” and knowing that the only possible answer was yes, I probably have seen you – the swirling, grey ash that was you, your life, your office, your building. You and 3000 other yous, ashes and ghosts covering Lower Manhattan.
It was during this trip that the anthrax attacks came to light. We sat in the master bedroom of an artist’s loft on the outskirts of the Village, sitting on the bed watching CNN and its scrolling ticker of hysteria, wondering if in fact, we should have left The Boy back home in Saint Louis. He napped on the bed, oblivious to our growing concern.
We didn’t visit The Hole, nor did we on our one or two subsequent trips when it was still The Hole… On one of these later trips, we visited a park in Brooklyn that overlooks Ground Zero – two years after the fact, people were still lighting candles regularly. Parts of the brick promenade and bronze railings were quite literally encased in wax from all the candles, transforming that little segment of sidewalk into something surreal and melted, Giger-esque and flowing.
I know we will return to New York – we have friends and family there. Eventually, I am sure, we will visit Ground Zero. When we do, I plan on borrowing a tradition and leaving a pebble. Somehow, it only seems proper. It is an acknowledgment, a moment of witness: yes, I have seen you.
I have seen all of you.
Posted by protected static as politics, random at 8:55 PM UTC