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It’s President’s Day, so it’s time to watch the traditional celebratory video: For all you historical revisionist, theocratic Christian Dominionist Tea Partiers out there, here’s “I Heard George Washington Weeping”. Your Thoughts?
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Washington
February 20th, 2012 
Daniel Fincke George Takei on Being Placed in Japanese Internment Camp
February 19th, 2012 Daniel Fincke He calls the place the American government made him live as a four year old a concentration camp and explains the racism he endured in his childhood: George Takei : Japanese Internment Camp Survivor from Conn Videos on Vimeo. He has more to say about it today, on the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. [...]
Should We Celebrate The Civil War With Hot Dogs and Fireworks?
January 12th, 2012 Daniel Fincke One of my favorite blog posts from the exceptional Ta-Nehisi Coates is one from last spring where he made the case for chucking the common wisdom, according to which the Civil War should be thought of as “tragic” and instead argued we should celebrate it the way we do the Revolutionary War. The whole provocative [...]
Is Occupy Wall Street “Doing It Rong”?
November 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Crommunist argues no, challenging the historical validity of oft-heard memes how successful protest movements are “supposed to” work: “The Occupy people don’t have a plan! All successful protest movements have clear goals and plans that are defined before the protest starts!” I suppose the second statement there is pure implication from the first. The truth, [...]
A Critique of Noble Lies And The “Theologies” They Create
November 10th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In this long post, I begin by explaining Plato’s formulation of the concept of a noble lie for those unfamiliar with it and then I explain in detail numerous problems I see with employing noble lies and with attempts to persuade people through “theological” arguments. I think all theology is either an explicit or an [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Ethics, Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, History, Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Morality, Morality, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, News Discussion, News Discussion, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocrats, Theocrats, Virtues, Virtues 
34 Comments »Fact Checking Pinker On World’s Bloodiest Atrocity
November 10th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Stephen Pinker argues that humanity is getting less bloodthirsty and more civilized. But Humphrey Clarke, of the Medieval history blog Quodlibeta, takes issue with some of the numbers that Pinker uses to argue that the 20th Century was, proportionately speaking, less bloody than [...]
100 Year Old Letters From Ordinary Atheists Explaining Their Atheism
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke (Image via Friendly Atheist) So, last week I happened to stumble upon an old Unreasonable Faith post celebrating the firebrand atheism of Charles Chilton Moore, whose turn of the century Kentucky newspaper, The Bluegrass Blade, was like the Pharyngula of its time. (Moore even did a stint in jail for scandalously claiming that “Jesus Christ was [...]
Posted in Atheism, History, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism 
Tags: Charles Chilton Moore, The Bluegrass Blade 7 Comments »A 1917 Subway Car Back In Service In NYC
September 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke There is a subway that I sometimes ride that shuttles back and forth all day between Grand Central Station and Times Square and it is the most wonderful subway advertising experience because the entire interior of the train will be designed as a giant ad for something—be it the baseball playoffs or a Broadway show [...]
Daily Hilarity: Republicans Confuse Reagan For Eisenhower
February 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke The Onion reports on the blunder: WASHINGTON—At a press conference Monday, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight D. Eisenhower for years. The GOP’s humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC [...]
The Role Of Honor In Moral Revolutions
February 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Kwame Anthony Appiah explores a thesis I’ve never heard before in his new book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen summarized by Matthew Pianalto: Judged by contemporary Western standards, honour has a mixed moral record. On the one hand, a sense of gentlemanly honour underwrote the practice of duelling, long after it had been [...]
Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Ethics, Ethics, History, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Virtues, Virtues Tags: Honor, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Matthew Pianalto, Moral Revolution, Philosopher's Magazine 4 Comments »The Banality Of Facts
February 23rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Sendai Anonymous picks apart a critique of Hannah Arendt’s famous analysis of Nazi Adolf Eichmann as embodying the banality of evil: It is the last paragraph of Sholem’s letter that seems to me most revealing: Sholem remarks that he regrets that she rejected the previous version of her analysis of evil, an analysis that was [...]
Posted in Historical Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, History, Philosophy Tags: Adolf Eichmann, Banality of Evil, Evil, Hannah Arendt 1 Comment »Darwin's Daily Routine
February 12th, 2011 Daniel Fincke There’s a fascinating website called Daily Routines, which documents, in its own words “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days”. Via Francis Darwin’s memories of his father’s life, they have an entry on the rigid routine of Darwin’s life in his middle and later years: 7 a.m. Rose and took a short [...]
Listen Here To An Audio Book Of Darwin's "Beagle Diary"
February 12th, 2011 Daniel Fincke BBC Radio 4 ran readings of Beagle’s Diary as its Book of the Week in December 2006. Here are all five episodes: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, and Episode 5. A description of the book from The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online: The Beagle Diary is read by Jo Stone-Fewings. Each episode is introduced by historian [...]
Would The Founding Fathers Ever Mandate People Buy Health Insurance?
February 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Some already did: In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance. Keep in mind that [...]
Posted in History, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Politics, Politics Tags: Health Care Reform, Private Mandate No Comments »Should We Fear An Influential Muslim Brotherhood Would Push Authoritarian Islamic Policies?
February 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Nathan Brown is a political science professor at George Washington University and director of the school’s Institute for Middle East Studies. He gives an overview of the Muslim Brotherhood’s evolution from their found through to today, explains how their renunciation of violent means came to pass decades ago, why al-Qaeda sees them as sell outs, [...]
Inside The Medieval Mind: Knowledge
August 25th, 2010 Daniel Fincke A description of the 6 part video which begins below (click through to watch the whole thing): One of the world’s greatest authorities on the Middle Ages, Professor Robert Bartlett of St Andrew’s University, investigates the intellectual landscape of the medieval world. In the first programme, Knowledge, he explores the way medieval man understood the world [...]
True Religion?
August 17th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Many a religious person defending her own religious beliefs will argue that a given politically, morally, or intellectually unflattering interpretation of her faith is simply not a true representation of her faith. While the question of who has the right or the adequate means to decisively determine with any rational clarity which competing interpretation of any [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, History, Judaism, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Pseudoscience, Rationalism, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Science, Science, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocrats, Theocrats Tags: Literalism, Philosophy of Science, Primitivism, Ronald Dworkin 12 Comments »Hitchens On Crass Responses To The Proposed Ground Zero Islamic Center
August 12th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Noting the shadiness and creepiness of public remarks by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the plan to build a mosque blocks away from the former site of the Twin Towers, Christopher Hitchens is nonetheless repulsed by the tactics adopted by his opposition. Starting with Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, he writes: [...]
Posted in Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens, History, Islam, Islam, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State Tags: 9/11 Victims, Abraham Foxman, Andalusia, Cordoba House, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, María Rosa Menocal, mosque, Mosque Near Ground Zero, Newt Gingrigh, Spain, The Ornament of the World, The Weekly Standard 1 Comment »William Shatner As Stanley Milgram In The 1975 Film “The Tenth Level”
July 25th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Stanley Milgram was the psychologist who performed the famous obedience experiments which involved getting normal people to go through with administering (what they thought were) extraordinarily painful shocks to other people out of deference to calm but firm orders from an authority figure. Now Mind Hacks points our attention to The Tenth Level a fascinating bit [...]
How Did American And British Accents Diverge?
July 17th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Common ancestry surprises are not just for species: Reading David McCullough’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents? The answer surprised me. I’d always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, [...]
Posted in History Tags: American Accents, American History, British Accents, British History No Comments »World War II Riddled With Cliches And Implausible Plot Turns
July 12th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Via Yglesias, comes this review of World War II: But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning. I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called [...]
Twain Uncensored
July 10th, 2010 Daniel Fincke The unabridged Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, delayed by Twain’s request for a century, is coming this fall. The New York Times describes choice passages: Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, [...]
Posted in Arts, Arts, Culture, History Tags: Cuban-Spanish War, Frances Cleveland, General Leonard Wood, Literature, Mark Twain 1 Comment »The Treaty Of Tripoli
July 4th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Article 11: Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [...]
George Washington’s Letter To Touro Synagogue
July 4th, 2010 Daniel Fincke The first president of our secular republic writes: To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island. Gentlemen, While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in [...]
“It Can’t Happen Here”
July 4th, 2010 Daniel Fincke PZ Myers calls our attention to Sinclair Lewis’s 75 year old words to warn us about how precious and precarious our freedom from theocracy and all other forms of tyranny really is: In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called “It Can’t Happen Here,” about an America taken over by a populist dictator. His hero [...]
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