Henry

My high school; big numbers

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:54:50 GMT

Two entirely disparate topics for one post. Those who don't want to read about my ruminations on my high school and its religious nature, i.e. most of you, should just go straight to "Who Can Name the Biggest Number?" by Scott Aaronson (who claims to be a professor at MIT but who, based on the picture on his home page, is clearly actually David Duchovny). It's mathematical in content, though written perhaps for the layperson, but if you're anything like me you'll find it utterly compellingly fascinating.

All right, on to dear old Westminster, hidden behind a cut tag.

The Spring 2009 issue of my high school's alumni magazine came last week. This month's articles include:

"Called to Serve: Alumni in the Ministry" (and rest assured, "ministry" is specifically Christian; there are no stories of alumni who are now rabbis, imams, druids, what have you)

A teaching profile of one of the school's Bible teachers (who is "blessed with six children and ten grandchildren", a phrasing utterly alien to my upbringing), who explains that his job involves "introducing students to the immutable verities conveyed to Moses, proclaimed by the prophets and consummately embodied in Jesus Christ who blazed a sure path for a sane existence in a confusing world"

A report on Christian Emphasis Week; this year's high school theme was "Feed My Sheep", and if they used religion to encourage people to fight hunger, I'm basically OK with that, even though the elementary school's week ended with "a sing-a-long celebrating the parables of Jesus"

A description of an alumnus-written book: "In The Love Revelation, Dr. Walthall introduces the reader to a new genre of Christian literature: witty and poignant fiction woven into the fabric of easily digested teaching about biblical love"

Out of fairness, that's not the only stuff in here. (There's also a lot of photos, some non-religiously-themed alumni books, a "sports roundup", and so on. And a picture of Rob Kutner with his daughter Sasha, who's adorable; congrats, Rob! Even if Sasha looks a little out of place in a column opposite blond children named Brantley and Churchill. No bonus points awarded for guessing which one of those is the boy.) But it's enough to make me realize that, while I don't think sending me to Westminster was the wrong choice—and I could have, at any point, said "This is too much, Mom and Dad, please get me out of here and into a sane school"—I believe that I would never, ever send my child to this school. Either my memory has whitewashed the place a little—and believe me, I still remember the Christian Emphasis Week speakers we had, and my New Testament Bible class, and so on—or the school has gotten even more religious since I left in 1991.

Moving

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:29:57 GMT

I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone out there that academia is one of the worst ways to try to make a living. An unemployed ordinary person who wants to move will do one of the following:

(a) Stay where he is until he finds a job, and then move to wherever that is;
(b) Move to where he wants to be, and then look for a job there.

An unemployed professor has neither of these options. We're not like accountants and programmers and salesmen and what have you; we don't have the option of looking for a job in May, and if we fail we look in June, and if we fail we look in July, and so forth. There is no searching until you find a job. There's the tenure track search around January, and there's the one-year positions around June (give or take a month in both cases), and that's it. So if a professor hasn't found a job by, say, July, he's not going to have a job for another year. And there's very little point in going to your favorite city and looking for a job there. No matter what city you're in, if it's of sufficient size, someone will be looking for an accountaint or a programmer or a salesman, but academia just doesn't work like that.

The upshot, for me and my wife, is that we don't really like Philadelphia at all and have no desire to stay now that my time at the University of Pennsylvania is over. Which means that right now we're packing so that we can move to...well. Boston unless I get a job elsewhere, in which case elsewhere. And that makes it really hard to plan, which is why we don't have a place to live in Boston (what were we going to do if we signed a lease and then I got a job in California?), or for that matter anything lined up there workwise. All we have is three weeks in which to pack up this apartment and drive the stuff, well, somewhere, and we'll kind of see what happens from there.

All things considered, this is far and away the worst year I've had since around 1995.

The King of Pitch

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:56:45 GMT

Lest it be lost in the shuffle: pitchman Billy Mays, who was born forty days before Michael Jackson, died three days after him. Man it's been a strange year.

Stupid stupid everything at once things

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:05:49 GMT

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once. —Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Dispatches from Germany

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:52:09 GMT

Day 1 of my First Overseas Experience has been posted over at my professional journal. Whee?

Anyway.

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:38:41 GMT

Though I expect they won't see it: just a note to Kate Guyton and Linnaea Stockall to let them know I'm thinking of them today. Hope all's well.

And that's all. No comments necessary, and you oughtn't post any sort of response on your own LJs, unless you happen to know Kate or Linnaea.

Clues are Clues

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:15:36 GMT

Courtesy of Eric Berlin: Matt Gaffney's contest crossword this week is a fantastic construction. Go solve it!

Yikes

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:06:20 GMT

Today, I received my (first!) passport in the mail. And just now, I have bought plane tickets to Frankfurt.

I've been out of the country twice, both times to Vancouver. And I haven't given all that many conference talks. So this is both exciting—and increasingly very scary.

Late night thought

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:32:10 GMT

With the upcoming Julie & Julia, based on the book based on the blog (side note: I hate her hate her hate her for being all famous just because she's got talent and stuff why can't I be famous), and of course Secret Diary of a Call Girl based on the book based on the blog, it struck me that movies-from-blogs may be the next Big Thing.

And what else has Hollywood liked recently? Well, Stardust and Coraline and the apparently-in-development Graveyard Book...

So it's obvious to me that if only a studio would make neilgaiman.com: the movie, it would break box office records! (This, incidentally, is why I am legally barred from coming within 150 yards of Hollywood.)

CiSRA thoughts

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 04 May 2009 09:59:42 GMT

All right, all right, I should get these down on metaphorical paper. I'm going to talk freely about the answers to the puzzles, so if that bothers you, go do the puzzles first or something.

A lot of these puzzles were fairly clever, really. I liked most of Round 1: "Snip" was very easy, "Derivation" was quite clever, "Entitlements" was a basically good idea that got a little rocky in places (I'm not really convinced that Chief Bromden was the one who flew over the cuckoo's nest).

In Group 2, I thought Reciprocity was fairly easy, Meet Your Match was fairly clever, Coherency was just irritating. Then there's Magical Mystery Tour. There's a lot I liked in this puzzle; in was in fact fun to work out the songs and artists. Even at that point, though, there are a few places an editor could have stepped in—for instance, to point out that if you're doing a puzzle around single-named musicians like Enya and Sting, it's not really accurate to include "Elvis" and "Kylie" and "Britney", who didn't actually record as one-named singers. And that cluing Kylie with her cover of a Little Eva song is a particularly bad idea. And while we're at it: the depiction of Rihanna's "Disturbia" isn't especially good.

At any rate, that wasn't really the problem with the puzzle. The problems with the puzzle are that, first, though the answer says "it is possible to narrow down the possible values of the empty cells to specific numbers", it is in fact not; it's possible to narrow down the values to a rather large set of possibilities, unless I missed something really fundamental. EDIT: I did in fact miss something fundamental, as Joe pointed out below, namely that the diagonals constrain the possibilities much further. I stand corrected.

And second—and this is the much bigger problem—the puzzle about one-named singers yields the clue phrase WHO SHOT JOHN. All right, the four teams who tried variations on "Lee Harvey Oswald" can probably be forgiven, but I suppose it makes sense to assume, given the title, that the John in question is John Lennon. But when the question is "Who shot John?", the answer is "Mark", which 21 teams tried and were told was wrong. And 29 teams were told that "Chapman" was wrong; and 18 teams were told that "Mark Chapman" was wrong. The answer—pardon me, the format they were looking for was "Mark David Chapman". And that's just irritating.

That put me in something of a bad frame of mind for the remainder of the hunt. So in Round 3, after dashing off the rather easy word search (I feel like there was a decent idea in there that needed a better execution than "dump these things into a word search"), I didn't have a lot of patience for things that weren't quite working out. Raindrops actually worked out close enough that I didn't mind it, and Systeme International was probably basically fine (not that "2dp" is an especially clear way of saying "to two decimal places") except that I made a transcription error at some point.

But oh, Cranial Cryptics, aka "We have to do something in each round that's just stupid". As puzzle ideas go—two words clued, one's a hat, one's a hat with a letter removed—it was basically fine, though once again there were some particular cluing problems. (Why use "Michael Jackson" to clue BAD, especially when Michael Jackson has a noteworthy hat? And is putting "admires a drystone wall" somewhere in the clue really a good way to indicate "and drop the word 'mortar' from the hat name"?) But once again, the fundamental problem was that, given no constraint on what the answer would be and no particular constraint on the answer phrase other than what letters you can pull out of a hat, they decided to go with QUIET WOMEN as a clue phrase for WIMPLE, the headgear worn by nuns. Really? Seriously? I tried "wimples" because they made "women" plural; lots of teams tried "veil" or "veils"; I saw that I wasn't the only one who considered "burqa" (though I didn't try it).... Kath suggested "nuns", which is why I tried "wimples", but even then I didn't really like it. This is just a terrible clue.

Group 4 had Frownies, to which I said, "Enh", and Higher Calling, where I decided I just didn't care enough to solve a five-dimensional tic-tac-toe problem. Then there were White Elephant and Date With Destiny, both of which fall into the aforementioned "If your puzzle idea doesn't quite work, maybe you're better off not doing it rather than doing it badly." They weren't bad, per se. But in White Elephant, I assume that the thought process was: "I'll do anagrams of zodiac signs plus a letter. Oh, hell, Capricorn and Sagittarius don't work. OK, for Capricorn, I'll add two letters, and for Sagittarius, I'll drop a letter instead." I mean, I solved it without a problem, mostly because "scorpion" and "aquariums" stood out (once again, if two of your twelve words don't really have a good option....), but that doesn't make the puzzle a good idea. Similarly, Date With Destiny...well, I have mixed feelings. It's kind of a good idea. And then again, it's kind of irritating that they managed to pick a day-and-year that worked with different months (the 11th in 1554), and that one of their "death by beheading" people was a samurai who committed seppuku. Once again, though, the main problem I had was that, when they needed a message that could be spelled with the first letters of months except for two letters, they hacked it so that one of those two letters would come from a French Revolution month and the other would come from a French Revolution year.

Finally, Round 5. I was annoyed enough that I got partway through All Sorts and lost interest, and decided I didn't care enough to even start Already Taken. And Bodybuilding was fine. And then Headless Snake... I can tell that this puzzle wanted to be a good idea. But the clues were just so bad! First of all, to get the prefixes into the clues typically required adding a word that sent the clue veering in weird directions, e.g. including "big" in the clue for (bi)TE, so that half a bite was clued as "To press one row of teeth into a big object". Big? What? Even setting that aside, though: "unique" was clued as a noun, "regular" was clued as a verb, "precise" was clued as a verb, "anticipated" was clued as a noun, "important" was clued as a noun, and "Sanskrit" was just clued weirdly. (Also: since "disgruntled" really was formed as "dis + gruntle", it's not a particularly clever back-formation.) Then, to top it all off—changing from one-named musicians to John Lennon is one thing, but having a puzzle based on missing prefixes end by, to quote the hint for the puzzle, "removing the suffix, rather than the prefix"—that's just shoddy.

Oh, and the metapuzzle. As I remarked to Kath, "It's like a metapuzzle, but without the 'meta'! Oh, also, without the 'puzzle'." There wasn't really anything "meta" to it; solving each puzzle gave you a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which you assemble. Which made it not all that puzzling either; more irritating, really, as I sat there rotating pieces with a graphics editor and trying to work around the gaps in my image. The final answer was...well, it was just another random answer, with no unifying theme, nothing clever, just another word.

So, overall impression: There were a few nice standalone puzzles here and there, but overall I'm glad I didn't put too much time in it, and kind of sorry I put in as much as I did.

CiSRA, revisited

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:24:04 GMT

The CiSRA competition having ended, I have any number of thoughts which I ought to get around to posting, but lest I forget, the two major lessons I learned are:

1. If there aren't any other particular constraints on either your clue phrase or your answer, you might as well make it unambiguous.
2. If the theme for your puzzle very nearly works but doesn't quite, maybe you're better off not using it instead.

Ah, puzzles

tahnan@suberic.net — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:46:11 GMT

Why can't I get a job solving puzzles all day? I suppose I have one, in some sense, but. Saxikath and I are now in fifth place in the CiSRA puzzle competition, not that we're competing for anything, but they're good puzzles. We're "Just a Couple of Hacks" (because Tah + Saxi = Taxi, taxis are hacks, get it?), and have gotten the exalted position of "fifth" by being one of the five teams who's solved six puzzles (and thus behind the team that's solved seven); fifth and not sixth by dint of my having hit on the right format for our sixth answer about fourteen seconds before the sixth-place team. And, you know, five hours behind plugh. Hi, plugh!

Anyway, I like solving puzzles, which is more or less the entire point of this post.

Vista Networking, followup

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:58:12 GMT

OK, so who's able and willing to read a Wireshark file, as was suggested?

Vista networking

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:18:05 GMT

OK, I give up. Who here knows anything about networking in Vista? Because I don't, and it's starting to get stupid that every time my wife's computer tries to connect to our network, not only does she get no internet connection, but it crashes the network, insofar as my computer can no longer even see the network until hers stops trying to connect to it.

UPDATE: The exact same thing happens when I physically connect her computer to the (D-Link) router with an Ethernet cable. That is, she has an unstable connection to the device that comes and goes but never connects her to the Internet, and meanwhile my computer stops being able to see the wireless network. Similarly, if I physically connect my computer, it works fine until I connect her computer to the wireless, at which point etc.

I've just updated the firmware on the router (D-Link DI-624). I should also note that she has no trouble connecting to another wireless network that isn't ours, which suggests that the problem could be with the way Vista talks to the D-Link router.

Things that make me extraordinarily happy

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:48:50 GMT

Some things that make me extraordinarily happy:

Rachel Maddow speaking extensively on the GOP movement to Teabag the White House, i.e., to mail tea bags to Washington, D.C., in protest ofsome sort of tax thing or other.
Puckishly gorgeous commentator Ana Marie Cox one-upping Maddow by discussing teabagging with her without breaking. ("Who wouldn't want to teabag John McCain?")
But really, most of all: after I've had to bail on going to my cousin's Passover seder due to waves of nausea, and facing a second night without a seder, having friends set up a webcam so that I could join in their seder in Massachusetts. Seriously, thank you guys so much. You have no idea how much it meant to me.

(On the other hand, things that make me extraordinarily irritated: not being able to avoid a major spoiler for a TV show I'm ostensibly trying to follow, because it has political ramifications which therefore show up on things like the Rachel Maddow Show.)

You really ought to give Iowa a try

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:13:30 GMT

One of the more adorable introductions I've read to a court decision:

This lawsuit is a civil rights action by twelve individuals who reside in six communities across Iowa. Like most Iowans, they are responsible, caring, and productive individuals. They maintain important jobs, or are retired, and are contributing, benevolent members of their communities.... Like many Iowans, some have children and others hope to have children. Some are foster parents. Like all Iowans, they prize their liberties and live within the borders of this state with the expectation that their rights will be maintained and protected—a belief embraced by our state motto.¹

¹The state motto of Iowa is: "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain." It is inscribed on the Great Seal of Iowa and on our state flag. See Iowa Code §§ 1A.1, 1B.1 (2009).

I mostly don't regret not becoming a lawyer, but I do kind of like reading court decisions.

(Also: one of the plaintiffs is named Otter Dreaming. Otter Dreaming!)

Barron Lands

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:18:59 GMT

You may recall that, several years ago, I took a careful look at the prologue to T.A. Barron's The Great Tree of Avalon.

Are you as excited as I am that I've finally gotten the chance to read the first chapter of the sequel?

(Finally got some things transferred over to a more permanent website, from the webarchive of my MIT pages. Still playing with the colors though.)

Farewell, O "Sci Fi" Channel

tahnan@suberic.net — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:08:11 GMT

I've complained about the idiocy that is the Sci Fi Channel before, and had it pointed out that "the people who run the SciFi Channel HATE sci fi".

But I had no idea how deep that hatred ran until I saw the news that they're changing their name to Syfy. Among other noteworthy points in the article:

1. The quote from the president of the channel—"We'll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we'll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand."—that shows he's a whole lot more steeped in corporate culture than science fiction culture.

2. The quote from one of the channel's creators: "We spent a lot of time in the '90s trying to distance the network from science fiction".

3. They'll be using the slogan "Imagine Greater", which they think "will resonate with both consumers and media buyers". It resonates with the prescriptivist in me, who looks at that and says, "Seriously? You're modifying a verb with an adjective?" (And I'm perfectly willing to accept that the second word in "run faster" is an adverb; I was even OK with "Think Different", in which the second word is still an adjective but is...I don't even know, it's just better than "Imagine Greater".)

If you'll pardon a quote from an actual science fiction TV show: "Weep for the future, Na'Toth. Weep for us all."

Sunday NYT puzzle

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 06:04:33 GMT

A question about one of the entries in the 3/8/09 puzzle:

"BUILT RAMPS TOUGH"? "Built Ford Tough" is familiar to me as an advertising slogan, but "Built Ram Tough" seems to be mostly on the web as a parody. Is that actually also a phrase, or did Kushner and Shortz screw up?

Crossword Tournament - Final Results

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:57:18 GMT

Pending any scoring changes, the results are up. Congrats to Tyler "Chicago Bulls" Hinman on the victory, and of course to Trip and Francis on their A-finals appearance. And congrats to Dan Katz, second in the B finals! (Curse you, Dan "possibly not actually human" Feyer! His minor lag on the seventh puzzle, which put him in a four-way tie for first, the tie being broken by times on the seventh puzzle, kept him out of the A finals and thus put him in the B finals).

Most readers of this LJ who want to know how other NPLers did are probably already looking at the rankings, so for the non-NPL-oriented folks, I'll happily report another top-ten showing for Katherine. And congratulations again to Erhard Konerding, who placed 94th in the pool of six hundred something competitors, and third among the rookies! (I don't know Erhard Konerding; it's just that Erhard Konerding is my favorite name on the list. No, totally lying. I know Erhard. It's also my favorite name on the list.)

For those of us watching the ACPT from home...

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:39:00 GMT

...Trip Payne and Francis Heaney are currently tied, minute-for-minute on each puzzle, for second and third place. (In first place: last year's C-division winner and current B-divisioner, Dan Feyer.)

Excluding Feyer, there're three B-division contestants clustered together at 17-19, one of them being Dan Katz, so there's a decent chance of seeing him in the B finals. (Go Dan!)

And fourth in the rookies: Erhard Konerding. (Go Erhard!)

Full (well, full-to-date) results at http://www.crosswordtournament.com/2009/index.htm.

Sigh.

tahnan@suberic.net — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:42:45 GMT

Most of my friends list will be confused, and perhaps some will be as saddened as I am. And it's odd, because pictures of cute three and a half year olds, even those from a year ago, don't typically make me sad. But this one does.

The state of Bobby Jindal

tahnan@suberic.net — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:35:27 GMT

I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said everywhere else, but nevertheless, a few thoughts:

Barack Obama could probably read the D.C. phone book and I'd feel better about myself and my country. I'm glad he didn't, because there were some nice rhetorical flourishes in there—not just the part about how staying in school is an investment in America, but more particularly the times that he referred to the American public as "the people who sent us here". It's a nice reminder, to Congress but also to us, that these people are in Washington to represent us.
Bobby Jindal. Wow. I'd never heard him speak before; I was mildly inclined to like him based on a profile a few years ago in the Brown Alumni Monthly. Halfway through his response, which I'm listening to now on c-span.org, I feel really condescended to. ("But Democratic leaders in Congress? They rejected this approach. Instead of trusting us to make decisions..." His tone makes it sound like he's explaining civics to a class of third graders.)
"Wasteful spending". Like, oh, no, buying new cars for the government (heaven forbid we buy the product of a troubled major American industry!), and building a train "from Las Vegas to Disneyland" (yes, thank you for trivializing infrastructure), and "something called volcano monitoring" (got it, you don't know what it's for, and it sounds sciencey, so it must be something dumb, because why would we want to know when a volcano might erupt? Insert your own editorial cartoon here of Jindal wearing a toga and giving that speech in the forum of Pompeii). Won't they please just stop?
Also, Rachel Maddow's reponse to Jindal invoking the reponse to Katrina is about right: "Um, ee-um, ahm, a, a ba ba ba ba ba".
Maybe these responses always sound like this, but: Obama laid out policy goals and particular policies. Sure, Republicans might disagree with the policies, but Jindal isn't discussing the policies, he's going through this long spiel about how you should once again believe in the Republican Party, and how members of the Republican Party are willing to work for you, and we're restoring faith in the Republican^TM brand. For comparison: Obama mentioned the Democrats as a party exactly four times; three of them were in the phrase "Democrats and Republicans" and the fourth in the sentence "That is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue." That is to say, while there may have been a few nods to party divisions ("I know there are some in this chamber and watching at home who are skeptical of whether this plan will work..."), not once did he explicitly contrast the two parties; he never called on Republicans to do the right thing, or thanked the Democrats for their work in passing the stimulus bill, or anything else that would make "Believe in the Republicans" a sensible response.

Also, was this really more important than new episodes of Scrubs? Sheesh!

On the human cost of "free speech"

tahnan@suberic.net — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:05:18 GMT

This post was sparked by a comment elsewhere in which S said "Freedom of speech and all that jazz" as a defense of a post by J that sparked an extended argument in J's LJ. Rather than post extensively in J's comments, I'll post it here. I fear I'm going to have to make some specific reference to J's original thread, but I'm not linking to it, so you'll just have to infer.

The following are some useful facts to remember about freedom of speech:

1. Freedom of speech is a legal defense, not a moral one. When J made her original post, no one attempted to violate her freedom of speech: no one called the police or otherwise took non-verbal action against her. Nor did anyone say "You aren't permitted to say that!" J's right to make her statement was never in doubt. The corrolary of the legal-vs.-moral fact is, to paraphrase Miss Manners, not everything permitted is obligatory. Just because one has the right to free speech does not mean one must, or even should, say everything one thinks at every moment.

2. Speech is an action. The philosopher J.L. Austin coined the term "speech act" for this very reason: every instance of saying (including writing) is an act, which in addition to its semantic content ("locutionary act") has a particular force ("illocutionary act") such as asking, ordering, requesting, warning, informing; and also has further effects ("perlocutionary act"). And even in a legal sense, while you cannot be punished in America for the content of your words, you can be punished for your illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. An example of the former is "incitement": if your uttering a sentence is also an order to riot, you can be held responsible for that act. An example of the latter is the classic "shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre": even though the content of your speech is protected ("there is a fire in here") and there was nothing illegal about your illocutionary act ("I warn you that there is a fire in here"—inappropriate when there is no fire, but legal), you can be held responsible for the consequences of your action.

J neither incited to riot nor shouted "Fire" (though again, no one has suggested a legal offense). Nevertheless, her speech—free though she may be to say it—has consequences, just like any other action she takes. She, like any other student, is free to take the action of never turning in a homework assignment, but that act has consequences (e.g., her professor may fail her). Similarly, she is free to take the action of saying "I cannot believe that some people are so babaric that they believe X"—but there are consequences, and one of them is that people who believe X may infer "She thinks I am stupid and barbaric" and may then not wish to speak to her.

Let me stress, too, another lesson from the study of linguistic pragmatics: some implications of the speaker may be detachable from the particular form of the utterance. J's opinion being "X is wrong", she could have expressed it in a number of ways: she can say "I believe X is wrong", "I'd never do X", "I don't think anyone should do X", "Only barbaric idiots would do X", and so on, and while they may in some sense carry the same message (J believes X is wrong), they will have different effects on her readers. A sizeable portion of the negative reaction to J's post was not to the content of her message (though there was plenty of that, to be sure), but to the way in which it was communicated—to the action, not the content.

As a final side note to S, though there are a few other people reading who might do well to be reminded: "overreact" is rarely acceptable in civil discourse. It's inherently dismissive of the feelings of others to tell them that they've overreacted.

Ah, Bishop Williamson

tahnan@suberic.net — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:33:59 GMT

Let's be clear on the fact that I don't have a deep love for the Catholic Church to begin with. And when I heard that Benedict was de-excommunicating "Bishop" Williamson, well, that wasn't a high point for them.

Now, though, I've discovered that denying the Holocaust is one of his more endearing qualities—and my apologies if this is old news, but somehow in my reading "Holocaust denier" overshadowed everything else the guy had said (even the rest of his anti-Semitism, such as his belief in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; best quote from the article is a director the Simon Wiesenthal Center calling Williamson "the Borat of the schismatic Catholic far-Right", but don't miss the "saying" at the bottom). Alas, the Society of Saint Pius X has removed the archive of Williamson's letters, as it's moved to the Saint Thomas Aquinas Seminary's website; and the latter has the occasional odd gap—for instance, it jumps directly from his August 2001 letter to his November 2001 letter.

So here, presented without further comment, is ~~the Google cache of his September 2001 letter~~ the archive.org archive of his letter (thanks, /dev/joe! Must remember to use archive.org!). I was going to pull out the singularly worthwhile quotes, but honestly it's just plain impossible to pick one or another, and I'd hate to take anything out of context and thereby keep you from tracking the full logical force of his argument.