hammer or hand?

Slashdot-linked study finds that primate brains consider tools to be a part of the body. So it turns out what they teach in martial arts has a basis in evolutionary biology.

The findings "fairly clearly show that monkey tool use involves the incorporation of tools into the body schema, literally as extensions of the body," says Dietrich Stout, an archaeologist specializing in tool use at University College London. Scott Frey, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, Eugene, says that in humans, this ability to represent tools in the brain, combined with a capacity for innovation, "was no doubt a fundamental step in the development of technology."

Neat story for use in early world civ weeks.

on group bogs

Interesting post about the power and possibilities of group blogs. Good to save for reference in z-blog project.

anti-Pantload quotables

From Sadly, No -- a post that makes me sad. First, their link to a comment by John Emerson at Crooked Timber, who first nails DP as a lazy undergrad, but then shakes his head:

[T]he U.S. is doomed. Goldberg is going to successfully pull this off. The big Movement Conservatives will support him, or at least not blow his cover. The big media people will continue to pay him lots of money. And with his help, the American people will become just a smidgen stupider.

And Sadly's HTML Menken observes:

On the one pudgy hand, Pantload’s book — dishonestly and preposterously, natch — inoculates the Right from any association with or responsibility for historically extremist ideologies, pushing the historical blame, as it were, entirely on the Left. On the other, and in the more general sense, it simultaneously broadens wingnuts’ pejorative lexicon while narrowing liberals’.

It’s not about arguing over history at all; it’s about putting ammo — dishonest, historically illiterate ammo, to be sure, but then these people don’t care — into the hands of legions of True Believers. And no amount of incisive, historically informed criticism will stop it; if anything, the more we lefties prove that Jonah’s book is a pile of dogshit, the more we confirm wingnuts’ belief that it’s pure gold. Twenty years from now trolls will cite that renowned, famously persecuted scholar Jonah Goldberg in calling our kind Hitler’s descendants.

Sadly, sad. For America.

note to self

In the context of this previously linked post on Pantload's souces, Dave includes a quote from Griffin's Nature of Fascism that I'll like to quote in my intro. It's on the point of not falling into the trap of taking their words at face value, and looking instead at their actions:

[A]pproaching fascism primarily in terms of political theory and the history of ideas is misleading because it detracts attention from concrete events which constitute the real 'nature of fascism' and moreover euphemizes the immense human suffering caused when nebulous fascist ideals and policies became translated into gruesome political realities.

Yep.

Wilson's 'fascism' (sic)

Orcinus reader and historian who specializes in Wilson writes in to destroy the Pantload's chapter on Woodrow. A short summary:

Sure, Wilson was a racist. But so were most Americans at the time (note the lack of resistance to segregation, and the Republicans' declining to reverse Wilson's racist policies in the federal government once they took over). As this prof says, "To put it crudely, all fascists are racist, not all racists are fascist."

He grades Wilson on Payne's 13 points of definition:

• Wilson fails on the 'fascist negations' (being liberal himself, disliking communism but not really caring about it, and thinking conservatives too backwards);
• on fascist goals he gets a full point for suppression of dissent, plus a half point for imperial interventions in Mexico and Haiti;
• on fascist 'mobilizing passions' he gets a meager two points: one for strong executive aspects, and two halfpoints on a few others.

So that's a total of 4 of 13... and that's with him being generous. Wilson does similarly bad on Paxton's list. In total:

Wilson isn't scoring too highly on the fascism scale. Basically he fits Jonah's version of fascism because he supported reform and was a racist. Not exactly a convincing argument. Where's the love of war? It's not there. Where's the scapegoating of a minority? Again, it's not there, expect for a short period during the war. Where is the religious hatred? Wilson appointed the first Jewish and Catholic professors at Princeton and the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court. Where is the love of the military? Wilson respected the military but believed it had to be subservient to civilian leadership.

But what about showing Birth of a Nation in the White House? That means he's racist! And therefore fascist!

Birth of a Nation! I hear you cry. Yes, he saw it in the White House. (It was, for what it's worth, the second movie shown in the White House, not the first.) He was friends with Thomas Dixon in grad school, briefly. They stayed in touch, but were not close. Dixon asked Wilson to view a new movie that was a wonderful new teaching tool. Wilson loved movies and agreed. It was shown in the White House because Wilson was in mourning and so could not go to the theater (his wife died in August 1914; Birth was shown in February 1915). Did he say "It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true."? Probably not. The only eyewitness account, taken down decades later, claimed he sat silently through the movie and left without saying a word. I've held his program from the movie. It's been wadded up into a ball. His friend Dr. Cary Grayson picked it up and saved it. Did Wilson wad it up as he sat? We don't know, but it is an interesting possibility. He treated most of his theater programs gently.

Wilson MAY have told D.W. Griffith that "it's like teaching history with lightning", especially since the movie was promoted to Wilson as a new teaching tool. But the rest of the quote is likely Dixon's invention. I've spent a couple years tracking down the origins of this quote and I am fairly certain now that he did not praise Birth as in the quote, and in fact he refused to endorse or condemn it.

What a great service Dave provides by forwarding this professor's detailed thoughts. As for the Pantload... Dave himself has some comments on his sources. Lively and Abrams... lovely. A lot of other crap in there too.

I gather he just found the weight of historical evidence, which clearly shows a vicious anti-homosexuality as an expression of Nazi ideology in action, too "confusing" because it tended to obliterate the non-sequitur he wanted to publish.

A very serious argument that has never before been made with such care! Can't wait to get my hands on this. But refuse to pay more than a buck or so for it used.

more pantload takedowns

Professional duty to collect the best of them.

Review by Austin Bramwell in the American Conservative. One of the many good parts:

He makes much of his discovery, for example, that the Nazis supported organic farming and animal rights and even goes so far as to admonish us to “grapple with the fact that we’ve seen this sort of thing before.” Readers can spare themselves the energy. That Nazism and contemporary liberalism both promote healthy living is as meaningless a finding as that bloody marys and martinis may both be made with gin. Repeatedly, Goldberg fails to recognize a reductio ad absurdum. He tells us that Himmler bemoaned the Christian persecution of witches, just like Wiccan feminists do today, that Hitler once described his doctrine as “reality-based,” just like today’s progressives describe theirs, and that Mussolini was quite smart “by the standards of liberal intellectuals today.” In no case does Goldberg uncover anything more ominous than a coincidence.

Also some interesting observations about how DP admits the poverty of his thesis and disowns his own arguments, to the point where they become meaningless.

He qualifies his conclusions to the point of taking them all back, insisting that he does not actually mean to say that liberals are dangerous totalitarians. He grants that some of his points are trivial and others may appear outrageous, so that nothing he says should be taken as both true and interesting at the same time. He claims that movement conservatives also suffer from the totalitarian temptation, so that we are “all” fascists now. Why then link liberalism in particular with fascism? Here Goldberg is surprisingly candid: because, he argues, liberals do it to conservatives all the time.

He’s right, of course. Many liberals do impute nefarious designs to conservatives. With just a modicum of restraint, Goldberg could have written a very good book. “Look,” he could have said, “‘Fascism’ has no meaning today, but, in any case, not only does conservatism owe nothing to fascism, but, historically, conservatives in America generally opposed fascism while liberals and leftists often were sympathetic.” Instead, lacking even the excuse of ignorance, he chose to sling the term “fascism” around as casually as the most vulgar leftist. It does not speak well of Goldberg that, by his own admission, he wrote his first book not to enlighten but to exact revenge.

The Pantload dismisses the review here. He wishes someone else got assigned to it --- I BET he does.

Meanwhile, The Poor Man continues its in-first-person mockery of the Pantload. This post includes a pretty good hyperlinked summary of why this pot is so misguided in its attacks on certain kettles:

DEar Moron,

You are a joke. How someone who thinks the government should be allowed to imprison and torture people without any accountability, who supports a President who makes people pledge loyalty oaths to him, parades his militarism around in phony military outfits, subverts the free press, and believes that he has essentially supreme and unchecked power to do anything he wants and answer to no one - and, oh, yeah, started a war under false pretenses - how someone like this gets off calling the people who are against all this “fascists” is completely beyond me. If you want to talk about ‘totalitarian tendencies’, why don’t you try looking in the mirror?

Some Hippy

Funny because it's true!!!

textual associations

AS presents a visual chart of textual links within the Bible. Works out to look like a pretty rainbow.

Would be useful to show students to remind them of the coherency of a work over time, consistency of themes, etc. And then to suggest to them that they can apply this as an analytical tool to any text we read: How internally consistent is it? What are the common themes?

The 935

Countless lies that got us into Iraq? No, 935 of em.

And actually, if you check the study from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, the way they limited the study means there were actually thousands more. The 935 only includes (methodology link here):

• public statements from eight top officials (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Fleischer, McClellan, and Wolfowitz)
• statements about Iraq's possession of WMDs and its relationship to Al Quaeda
• statements for which dates are known

Most emphatically, the study OMITS "indirect lies" in which they do not directly say something false, but rather convey the same misinformation through implication or inference.

...and also does not include the thousands on thousands of cases in which other Republican warmongers, pseudo-Democratic cowards, and compliant media lapdogs repeated these lies. So the power of each lie is magnified.

This is the point Rachel Maddow just made on Countdown, who added that the timing of deception implies a concerted effort -- the number of lies spiked across the eight during strategic points at which they needed to sell the war.

And OMG it's even searchable!!

Goldberg links

So that was a long time between posts. In the meantime, Doughy Pantload's well-researched argument that has never before been made with such care has come out. It makes me cry inside. Here's a quick link list of some of the more effective takedowns:

In which Jonah asks his readers to research for him.

Followed by a Spencer scholar who actually responded to DP's request... and was rebuffed when the answer didn't suit what DP wanted. Bonus quote: "Where to begin? YOU ARE A BAD JEW . (Sorry. Just slipped out.)"

This guy also shows the problem at the heart of the Pantload's book: the fallacy of the undistributed middle:

All [animal rights activists] believe [in animal rights].

All [Nazis] believe [in animal rights].

Therefore all [animal rights activists] are [Nazis].

Logic is fun! I want to do more!

All [liberals] believe [orgasms are fun].

All [Nazis] believe [orgasms are fun].

Therefore all [liberals] are [Nazis].

Over here, Matthew Yglesias discusses why it's so hard to take the Pantload seriously.

"It seems that nothing gets conservatives off nearly so much as writing obviously unserious books with patently offensive titles, designed in every way to not be taken seriously, and then get huffy when people make fun of them without having given their precious works the deep consideration they deserve."

Sadly, No! has done the most work on this, from even before the thing came out. They note that DP says:

"For many socialists and progressives, socialism was racism and racism was socialism. Nazism was socialism for a race. The Nazi view was uglier and more extreme than anyone else’s, but it was not philosophically so distinct from the views of many progressives in America and socialists in Britain."

So what does it then mean that DP's own publication, the National Review', has its own long and distinguished history of racism. Doesn't that make them Nazis? Or at least "socialists" of some kind?

Sadly trashes DP's performance in a Salon interview. The best part: "the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I". Yeah, it has nothing to do with the fact that he, uh... FOUNDED THE FASCIST PARTY.

Teh stupid. it hurtz.

Rather than fry brain anymore right now, I'll just link to Neiwert's definitive review, his correct description of how fascists' occupation of the right in both voting patterns and financial support, and his bibliography of books where you could actually learn something. DN also comments on some specific factual errors resulting from mistranslations (see Sans Everything on the lack of research and linguistic knowledge that went into this, contrasted with how conservatives used to practice scholarship).

THIS is the definitive post on the substance of DP's book. Followed by the appendix with real sources (Orwell, Payne, Paxton, Eco, Griffin). Good work, Dave! You're a trooper!

And finally, he directs to John Emerson's review, which discusses how hard it is to respond to tripe like this.