Koran desecration feedback

Here's the latest on the Koran desecration story.

Muslims in several countries demonstrated Friday in resurgent anti-American anger over reported desecration of the Islamic holy book, the Koran, and some protesters called on their leaders to demand an apology from the United States.

The ironic thing is that US government's condemnation of Newsweek led to more coverage of Koran desecration in the US and international media. Then the FBI reports came out, triggering the latest round of protests.

The White House blamed Newsweek for inflaming Muslim opinion, but the blaming indirectly inflamed Muslim opinion even more.

Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain

Joseph F. O'Callaghan's Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain covers the time frame from 1063, when Spain was largely Muslim except for some small Christian kingdoms in the north, to 1248, when the Christian powers directly or indirectly controlled the entire Iberian Peninsula.

The narrative can be a bit confusing to someone who's not familiar with the general history and geography of the region, though the maps and the genealogical charts of the monarchs were quite helpful. Since kings Alfonso VII of Leon-Castile, Alfonso I Henriques of Portugal, and Alfonso I of Aragon all reigned at the same time, it's naturally difficult to keep everyone straight.

Later chapters covered the warfare techniques, which were interesting, along with finance and liturgy, which were too esoteric for my taste. O'Callaghan largely presented the Christian perspective, though he does quote some Muslim writers bemoaning the fact that the horrific Christians had taken over their glorious cities. He carefully examines the extent to which the Reconquest was a crusade, a topic I really didn't care about.

It's a decent book, and it may be the best treatment of the Reconquest.

American Dream

When the so-called welfare reform legislation was being debated a decade ago, there were plenty of arguments about what its consequences would be. I read American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare to find out what actually happened. Jason DeParle, the author, is a journalist who covers social policy for the New York Times. He interweaves the lives of three Black welfare mothers in Milwaukee with an analysis of welfare changes and consequences.

Focusing on specific people provides a concrete factual basis for discussion, in contrast to the pontificators on both sides of the debate who don't know what they're talking about. DeParle traces the lives of the women and their families from a Southern plantation to Chicago and from there to Wisconsin. You learn about their early years, work lives, attitudes, boyfriends, and children. DeParle reveals their experiences and their views of the world. Bad decisions, their subculture, and society as a whole all contribute to the difficulties they face in life.

When welfare changes force them to work, two of the women manage to find and hold onto jobs. For example, one becomes a nurse's aide, a low-paying tiring position that consists of wiping people's butts and other tasks that are necessary to take care of the infirm. Their incomes didn't improve significantly over what they previously received as a welfare check. The third woman, a crack addict, has a lot more difficulty.

Your judgment of welfare changes largely depends on your priorities and what aspects of the prior system you find objectionable. DeParle considers welfare reform to be a success, since poverty levels didn't rise and because many former welfare recipients found jobs. However, since my main concern is the quality of life of poorer Americans, I don't view forcing a mother of small children to work long hours to be progress.

The remainder of the book consists of policy wonk stuff: programs, proposals, politics, perceptions, and results. The politicians all come across as unimpressive to incompetent and the private organizations that dealt with welfare projects are far worse. Most of the programs that were supposed to provide job training were basically worthless. However, when people were required to work, or at least show up for particular activities, in order to receive a welfare check, many of them chose to drop off the welfare rolls instead.

As a liberal, I had a few complaints about the book. DeParle never addresses certain arguments against welfare restrictions, such as the possibility that, without a public safety net, companies can pay lower wages and demand more from the working poor. The families he presented often don't have enough to eat, a situation that concerns me a lot more than whether an able-bodies adult is on the public dole. Still, American Dream presents enough facts for you to form your own opinions while challenging your prior beliefs.

Metaphors We Live By

I picked up Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, to learn more about theoretical underpinnings of Lakoff’s Moral Politics. They argue that metaphors play a prominent role in human communication and how people comprehend the world.

For example, the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR manifests itself in a variety of phrases, such as “Your claims are indefensible” and “He attacked every weak point in my argument”. The authors examine the variety, structure, and coherence of metaphors, making a strong case that they reflect something more substantive and significant than mere linguistic shorthand. They propose an experiential approach to philosophy, emphasizing metaphor, as an alternative to objectivism or subjectivism.

Still, Metaphors We Live By was less rewarding than Moral Politics, in part because political thought interests me more than philosophy and linguistics do. The basic idea is sound, but the subtleties became repetitive after a while. Though I’m still curious to learn more about cognitive science, I’ll seek out another author’s perspective.

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky examines the impact that stress has on people. As motivation for the book’s title, Sapolsky first considers a zebra’s stress response to the presence of a predator, which effectively improves the zebra’s chances of surviving that short-term crisis. Humans in modern society deal with different kinds of long-term chronic stress, which in turn causes a variety of consequences.

Much of the book describes the functioning of major aspects of human physiology – digestion, circulation, sexuality, sleeping, etc. – and explores how stress affects that functioning. Sapolsky works his way up from hormones triggered by stress to the impact on daily life and long-term health. I learned a lot of physiology along the way, since I haven’t studied biology since high school.

Though the book’s subtitle mentions coping, only a single chapter discusses “Managing stress”. You should read the book to satisfy your intellectual curiosity, not as a self-help guide. The book has several amusing asides, but the biology exposition and the analysis of scientific research make it more challenging than the author’s The Trouble with Testosterone. Still, it’s worth reading if you're willing to put in the effort.

Doomsday Book

In Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, a young twenty-first century British historian travels back to the fourteenth century to observe daily life. Various complications arise in a story that alternates between the near future and the Middle Ages. The depiction of Medieval England was solidly researched. The main historical flaw I observed is that the treatment of children in the book reflected modern attitudes instead of the harsher and less sentimental approach of the Middle Ages.

However, the book’s characters and plot developments weren’t too exciting and didn’t justify its 578-page length. You’d expect more to happen to a modern young woman transported back to a different era. And the twenty-first century segment seemed rather pointless. While the Doomsday Book started out promising, and I liked the ending, it dragged out quite a bit in the middle. However, others must have a more charitable view of the book, since it won the Hugo and Nebula awards.

How the Irish Saved Civilization

Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization describes some significant historical events. Ireland was a chaotic, pagan region that was never part of the Roman Empire. During the fifth century, St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, which made the Irish people less warlike and more literate. Scholars at Irish monasteries eagerly acquired, studied, and copied Greek and Roman literature, helping preserve it after Western Rome collapsed. Subsequently, Irish missionaries spread Christianity and classical knowledge to England and the continent.

The book has some inaccuracies, such as omitting the presence of Christianity in Ireland before St. Patrick’s missionary work. Cahill unfairly dismisses the Arian heresy as a “debased, simpleminded form of Christianity” and understates the significance of the classic literature preserved by the Islamic world.

In much of the book, Cahill attempts to evoke the moods of the times. For example, an epic poem, which he quotes extensively, reveals the temperament of pagan Ireland. That whole approach left me skeptical, and I found the many excerpts from poems, Christian hymns, Patrick’s writings, Plato, and others to be distracting. Though the book is accessible, I’d prefer a more traditional, and less poetic, historical account.

Banning military recruiters

This will be an interesting case.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the nation's colleges and universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without losing federal funding.

The case, to be heard in the fall, poses a clash between government money and free speech.

A coalition of law schools last year won an appellate court ruling that said their right to free speech included the right to refuse to associate with military recruiters. The law schools argued that the Pentagon's policies on gays and lesbians in the military were discriminatory.

They cite an ironic precedent.

In their suit, the law schools argue that under the 1st Amendment's protection for free speech, they have a right not to associate with persons or organizations that espouse discriminatory policies — and they are relying on a recent and controversial Supreme Court precedent for this view.

Five years ago, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that the Boy Scouts had a free-speech right not to associate with homosexuals and thus could exclude from their ranks an openly gay scoutmaster from New Jersey. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the author of the opinion, said the Scouts' free-speech right of "expressive association" trumped a New Jersey law that prohibited discrimination against gays.

The same is true in the military recruiting case, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said last year.

In other words, the decision allowing the Boy Scouts to discriminate against gays is bolstering the legal case for limiting recruiting by an organization that discriminates against gays.