I’ve got a new article up on the Liberty Fund website: “Bach’s Ode to Caffeine.” Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata, “Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht,” more often known in English as the “Coffee Cantata,” was likely first performed at Zimmermann’s Coffeehouse, where he was a regular performer. It’s a miniature comic opera in which a father wages a one-man War on Coffee.
If you’d like to hear the cantata, I highly recommend this performance on YouTube:
Once again, let’s look at an expression which is loaded with meaning that most people don’t think about. Some writers use it without thinking, others because they’re promoting their particular philosophy. The expression is “being on the right side of history.” If you don’t support a certain cause, you supposedly aren’t on the right side of history.
What does that mean, though, and why do you want to be on that side? It’s an idea that comes from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and its two bastard children, Marxism and Fascism. This idea, called historicism, holds that history inexorably follows a certain path. Your only choice is to go with the tide or against it.
If you put the phrase into your writing without thinking about it, you could be lending support to historicism without knowing it.
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Very recently I came upon a discussion in a Reddit atheist forum in which people talked about what to do with Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms. Suggestions included throwing them in a dumpster, defacing them, and using them as toilet paper. A minority objected, but the dominant sentiment was that it’s fine to do those things. The book-burning mentality is distressingly common in America. A few years ago there was a book-burning campaign against J. K. Rowling, different only in its motivation from many other burnings of Rowling’s works.
Burning books is a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. The burner is saying, in effect, “I can’t answer what this book says, so I’ll destroy it before people can read it.” It has been a favorite tactic of authoritarians for centuries. In The Magic Battery, Gottesmann burns Frieda’s book in public because he can’t bear the thought of people reading it. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice featured a cop grabbing someone from behind and a man throwing books into a fire on its seal. The Nazis publicly burned books by the thousands. It’s a distressingly common phenomenon in modern society as well.
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In a previous post, I quoted a statement by Hamline president Fayneese Miller referring to “a purported stand-off between academic freedom and equity.” This got me thinking about the way some have tried to change the meaning of the word “equity.” It’s hard to tell what Miller meant, since she’s the only one doing the purporting. Others, though, have tried to shift the meaning of “equity” from its traditional one.
The Merriam-Webster definition of “equity” gives several technical meanings in law and finance, as well as “justice according to natural law or right; specifically: freedom from bias or favoritism.” Equity means applying the same standards to everyone; it rejects, for example, laws giving special privileges to the nobility or denying rights to people on the basis of their appearance, sex, or religion.
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The situation at Hamline University, which I blogged about a few days ago, has gotten stranger. President Fayneese Miller’s recent statements suggest that the non-renewal of the contract of a lecturer for including Islamic art in an art course is the manifestation of some strange obsession.
The lowliness of the lecturer plays an important role in Miller’s raving. She emphasizes repeatedly that the lecturer was a mere “adjunct instruction” and insists that “the adjunct instructor chosen to teach the course in art history did not ‘lose her job.'” Easy for a university president to say. Not so easy to hear when you’re told you aren’t coming back next term. Miller adds that “the decision not to offer her another class was made at the unit level and in no way reflects on her ability to adequately teach the class.” That’s exactly the issue. A fully competent lecturer isn’t coming back, not because of any problems with her teaching, but because she didn’t follow the commandments of a conservative branch of a religion. But defending a lowly lecturer against a university president’s wrath is, says the university president, a “privileged reaction.”
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This post is something new. I’m thinking of making blog posts on classical music a regular feature here, for no better reason than that I love it. Liberty Fund has published several articles I’ve written on classical composers. If computer security expert Bruce Schneier can devote a post every Friday to squid, I think I can diversify too. I’ve added a WordPress category, “Music,” for these posts.
Here I’d like to talk about some composers whom I like but aren’t currently as well-known as the regulars on concert programs. The idea for this came when I learned that Vivaldi was known only to a few in the nineteenth century. He came to prominence, oddly, because of a piece which Fritz Kreisler wrote himself but attributed to Vivaldi. On the other side of the ledger, Louis Spohr and Joseph Joachim Raff were among the top-ranked composers of the nineteenth century but aren’t heard very much today.
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You may have heard about Hamline University’s recent outrageous action. Not everyone has, though, and there’s been misinformation going around, so let me start by summarizing it. A lecturer (not a professor), in a course on art history, devoted a session to Islamic art. Aware that some Muslims regard it as improper to portray Muhammad visually, he informed the class that he would be presenting such an image, a classic Islamic work from the 14th century, and gave people a chance to leave before showing the picture. A student complained anyway. The university announced that it would not renew the untenured lecturer’s contract, so strictly speaking, it didn’t fire the lecturer. The action, however, was intended as punishment for violating Islamic law. Hamline is a Methodist school, not an Islamic one, in Minnesota.
Since this is at least nominally a blog on writing, my focus won’t be on the university’s vile action, but on what played out at the Hamline Oracle, a student news publication. I suspect they took the actions they did under extreme pressure from the administration, but their rolling over as they did was an act of gross cowardice regardless.
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James Nicoll, a well-known reviewer of science fiction, has asked people not to nominate him for any Hugo awards.
Having won, they have gone on make extremely dubious choices for their Guests of Honour. Sergey Lukianenko an avid supporter of the ongoing Russian effort to obliterate Ukraine and Ukrainians, while Liu Cixin supports the Xinjiang internment camps. It’s their WorldCon, and they can do what they like but I am not going to supply implied support by standing for or accepting Hugo nominations connected to this WorldCon.
The video of the Chengdu presentation at Smofcon 2022 is up on YouTube. It provides some insight into how the 2023 Worldcon is going. Mostly, it’s going badly. The presentation was about a month ago, but I haven’t seen any significant change since then. Correct me if I’ve missed anything. My focus here isn’t on the logistical issues as such, but on the underlying problems.
PR #1 wasn’t out then and still isn’t out. Ben Yalow said that members won’t receive it “until everything is locked in to the satisfaction of people who get very nervous. … We’re holding off on releasing PR 1 until everything in PR 1 we know is absolutely, completely certain.”
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