Social Hygiene

“But we can still be friends, right?”

That link leads to a lovely little riff on the various forms of belief and unbelief from the Real Live Preacher, which includes this gem:

Or is yours that kind of arrogant faith that says, “Everyone else must be a complete idiot not to have faith and believe what I believe.” I hope not, because you seem so nice. Plus, I probably don’t believe what you believe, so now I’m stupid and how are we going to have a decent conversation once that’s established?

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Jiglu: Tags that don’t work

Something called “Jiglu,” I was told, would help readers navigate this site by automatically tagging posts and providing a running index for the various tags.

This turned out to be very cool except for two things: 1) Jiglu doesn’t work, at all; and 2) the people in charge of Jiglu don’t respond to e-mail, at all.

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“Charity girls”

Via Making Light I found this: “Do Cretins Take Over Every Time There’s a War? The Answer: Yes,” which in turn led to this, “In a Teenager’s Plight, the Forgotten History of the ‘Charity Girls‘”:

In what has remained a little-known episode in American history, close to 20,000 women, most of them infected with venereal diseases, were rounded up during and immediately after World War I and confined to prisons and reformatories without being formally charged with a crime.

Caught in periodic roundups of dance halls and wooded areas outside soldiers’ camps, some were prostitutes, others simply teenage girls attracted to the glamour of soldiers going off to war, or “charity girls” who had sex in exchange for meals or entertainment.

They were sometimes confined for a year or more, surrounded by barbed wire and guards. Often barred from contact with outsiders, the women were forced to undergo humiliating medical procedures.

This month [Michael] Lowenthal’s book, “Charity Girl,” based on material he uncovered in government reports and social work journals, was published by Houghton Mifflin.

Lowenthal’s own site provides more background on the history of these “detention houses and reformatories that received assistance from the United States government in caring for civilian persons whose detention, isolation, quarantine or commitment was found necessary for the protection of the military and naval forces of the United States against venereal diseases.”

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Democrats “find” religion. Again.

Here’s an annoying headline: “Clinton, Dems find religion.

It seems that Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spoke at an evangelical church. As always, this must be treated as unprecedented. Why? Because that’s the trope; that’s the template. Maintaining this template requires a very short memory — like Guy Pearce in Memento short. You have to forget about not just William Jennings Bryan and Jimmy Carter, but also about every other religious appearance or speech by Clinton and Obama.

In Clinton’s case, this has been comical. She’s been giving widely reported speeches on religious themes and in religious settings for more than 15 years and every time — every single time — it’s treated as something brand new and the result of some recent, cynically tactical calculus. Obama splashed onto the national stage with a 2004 speech in which he paraphrased a Rich Mullins praise chorus, yet his appearance at an evangelical church in 2007 is treated as some kind of startling novelty.

Both senators are, of course, running for president, so you can be sure of two things: 1) Over the next few months each of them will — repeatedly — speak on religious themes to religious groups; and 2) Each time they do it will — repeatedly — be reported on as unprecedented and indicative of some new political strategy.

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