There’s at least a third reason to stop state funding of the arts, and it’s the one I take most seriously as a literary scholar and writer. In the 17th century, a great religious dissenter, Roger Williams (educated at Cambridge, exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony), wrote the first case for total separation of church and state in the English language. Forced worship, said Williams, “stinks in God’s nostrils” as an affront to individual liberty and autonomy; worse still, it subjugated theology to politics.
Something similar holds true with painting, music, writing, video and all other forms of creative expression. Forced funding of the arts — in whatever trivial amounts and indirect ways — implicates citizens in culture they might openly despise or blissfully ignore. And such mandatory tithing effectively turns creators and institutions lucky enough to win momentary favour from bureaucrats into either well-trained dogs or witting instruments of the powerful and well-connected. Independence works quite well for churches and the press. It works even more wonderfully in the arts.
Nick Gillespie, featured guest for “Economist Debates: Arts Funding”, The Economist, 2012-08-29
August 29, 2012
QotD: Government funding for the arts “stinks in God’s nostrils”
Does your Paleontology department need a visit from the “Pizazz!!!” marketing consultants?
Lore Sjöberg likes dinosaurs, and thinks paleontologists have an awesome job … but that too many of them are phoning it in in the “naming newly identified dinosaurs” department:
In zoology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it. Normally this isn’t a big deal; at this point, the only living animal species being discovered are either some isolated sea slug or some type of antelope that everyone thought was the same as another type of antelope, but it turns out they can’t interbreed so — two different antelopes. In the latter case, everyone’s just going to keep calling it “an antelope” and in the former case, who cares?
However, there is one situation where animals are being given names that people are actually going to use, and that’s dinosaurs. Paleontologists have an awesome responsibility, as well as an awesome job. Whatever they name their long-extinct terrible lizards, that’s the name, and there’s a decent chance it’s going to show up on film or as a stuffed animal in a museum gift shop.
Some dinosaur names are ideal. Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, is objectively the best name that anything has ever had, with Wolf Blitzer coming in a distant second. And there’s the Triceratops, which sounds cool and means “three-horned face,” and also Pentaceratops, which is, OK, kind of derivative, but I’m still hoping they eventually discover a Hexaceratops.
Sadly, however, not all scientists are equally inspired. Here are a few dinosaurs that, international rules for nomenclature be damned, need new names.
Like most kids, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and one of the (few) highlight of the public school year was the (usually) annual trip to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto with their dinosaur displays. Yet every time I happen to see dinosaurs mentioned in the popular press these days, it’s almost always some killjoy paleontologist trying to strike one of those cool dinosaur names by “reclassifying” to either an unreadable/unpronounceable Latin tag or a name that’s so heart-stoppingly boring that it might as well be a serial number.
Unless it’s some deep-seated conspiracy to make paleontology as uncool as accountancy or technical writing, I can’t understand why so many scientists seem to want to kill the natural joy so many of us found when we first learned about their topic of study.
Update: Brian Switek responds to Sjöberg’s complaints in the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.
Now, there are some dinosaur names that I’m not totally enamored with. While I understand the dinosaur’s symbolic status, Bicentenaria argentina doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and the same goes for the unevocative Panamericansaurus (yes, named after Pan American Energy). Then there are the names that appeal to the more puerile portion of my sense of humor. Read the name Texasetes too fast and you may get the dinosaur confused with a part of the male anatomy (not to mention the actual debate over whether the name of Megalosaurus should really be “Scrotum“), and you should always be careful with the pronunciation of Fukuiraptor unless you’re actually trying to insult the allosaur.
But what baffles me is that Sjöberg didn’t pick any of these names. Instead, his list includes the likes of Spinosaurus and Giraffatitan. I get his beef with dinosaurs named after places (Albertosaurus, Edmontosaurus, etc.), and I agree that Gasosaurus was comically unimaginative, but Iguanodon? The second dinosaur ever named, and one of the most iconic prehistoric creatures named for the clue in its teeth that led Gideon Mantell to rightly hypothesize that the dinosaur was an immense herbivore? I have to wonder whether Sjöberg would consider “Iguanasaurus – the original proposed name for the dinosaur – to be a step back or an improvement.
I just don’t get Sjöberg’s contention that Giraffatitan is “terrible” because – *gasp* – the sauropod wasn’t actually a big giraffe. Strict literalism only in naming dinosaurs, please. And, really, what would Sjöberg suggest as a replacement for Spinosaurus? When Ernst Stromer found the theropod, the most distinctive thing about the dinosaur was its enormous vertebral spines. What would you call it? Suchomimus – a cousin of Spinosaurus – is a little more poetic, but I like Stromer’s choice just fine.
The wine cellar: proper storage for your wines
Kelvin Browne in the National Post on the modern wine cellar:
I like wine cellars even more than I like wine, which is saying something. I used to have one in the basement of an 1870s stone house. This fantasy cellar had the ancient stone walls of the home’s original foundation, new rough-hewn granite floors and wine racks made from reclaimed oak by a perfectionist craftsman. It kept wine at the requisite 56F to 57F, with humidity about 70%. Who knew cellars were in basements for a reason, as temperature and humidity didn’t need much mechanical assistance here to be ideal for wine?
I loved the cellar and bought cases for it to make sure the room was picturesque — right out of a French château. The room had a 600-bottle capacity. Practically speaking, my partner and I would have been fine with a 24-bottle wine fridge, but antique chairs and an elaborate tasting table don’t suit such a setup.
After we sold the farmhouse, we disposed of the wine to friends, also indulging in a massive liquidation binge ourselves, starting with wine at breakfast.
The enduring lesson: If you like wine, you’re likely a sensualist who loves the total experience, and that includes where you store your horde.
I’ve always wanted to have a wine cellar like that, but the corner of my basement that serves as my wine cellar will have to do: I can’t even afford to keep that fully stocked (and it holds a lot less than 600 bottles). Instead of the custom-crafted redwood or polished glass and stainless steel that some high-end cellars can boast, I have a pair of wooden Ikea bottle racks. They may not have the look of the “good” racks, but they work just as well … and far less expensively.
South Korea’s slow move to a smaller, more professional military
With a belligerent and unpredictable neighbour directly to the north, South Korea still maintains a large conscript military force. The government hopes to transition over time to a significantly smaller volunteer structure:
Six years ago the plan was to reduce troop strength 26 percent (from 680,000 to 500,000) by 2020. Then politics and North Korean aggression kept halting the reductions. Meanwhile it became clear that the birth rate was going lower, not increasing and within a decade there would be a lot fewer young men to conscript. At the same time the booming economy was producing more money, and technology, for more effective weapons and equipment that can replace soldiers. Another key element was that conscription was increasingly unpopular. The current crop of conscripts had parents who were born after the Korean war (1950-53), and only the grandparents (a rapidly shrinking group) remember why the draft is still necessary. Most of todays’ voters want to get rid of the draft. But when it comes time to actually make cuts, North Korea manages to change the subject.
Then came 2010, a year in which North Korea sank a South Korean corvette (which they denied, but the torpedo fragments recovered were definitely North Korean) and shelled a South Korea island (the northerners bragged about that). Since then, there has been more opposition to reducing military strength. But conscription is still unpopular and there are simply not enough young men to maintain current strength.
Meanwhile politicians are responding to public opinion and shrinking conscription service. It now varies from 21-24 months depending on the service. More conscripts can now serve in the police or social welfare organizations (for 26-36 months). Eventually, South Korea would like to have an all-volunteer force. But that won’t be affordable until the armed forces are down to only a few hundred thousand.
The Korean peninsula is one of the last remaining outposts of the Cold War. The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan is the most obvious sign that the two sides are still not at peace (the Korean War didn’t really end … it’s merely resting). Occasional shellings and attempted infiltration by North Korean special forces are frequent enough that they don’t get much international coverage. North Korea frequently accuses the South of similar kinds of provocation.
Brendan O’Neill on the rape debate
Always willing to take a contrarian stand, Brendan O’Neill refutes the very common meme:
In the words of Salma Yaqoob of Galloway’s Respect party, “rape occurs when a woman has not consented to sex”. Or in the widely reported phrasing of a spokesperson for Rape Crisis, “Sex without consent is rape”.
This sounds correct. It seems simple yet right to assert that if a woman has not consented to sex, then rape has occurred.
But it is wrong. More than that, the idea that all “non-consensual sex is rape”, as Galloway himself has now said in his clarification of his defence of Assange, represents a dangerous rewriting of what rape really means.
Feminists always focus on the state of mind of the woman or women involved in an alleged rape and disregard the state of mind of the man.
This is a terrible error, because in order for rape to have occurred, it is not enough to prove that the woman did not consent; we must also surely prove that the man knows she did not consent, or was utterly reckless as to the question of her consent, and carried on regardless.
That is, rape must involve an intention on the part of the man to commit rape. The man must have a guilty mind — or what is referred to in law as mens rea — in the sense that he knows he is committing rape. In leaving out this key component of rape, feminists are not only undermining the meaning and gravity of this crime — they are also displaying a cavalier disregard for some of the key democratic principles of the modern legal system.
