A frankenquote is a chimeric monster: you take two separate quotes from someone, and then you stitch them together with an ellipsis, and presto, you can make someone say all kinds of strange things. My favorite example of all time was found by John Lynch, in a fulsome review of some creationist tripe from the Discovery Institute by a theologian named Edward Oakes. It holds some kind of record.

In making his case, Oakes also states that

Darwin actually, if unwittingly, promulgated the charter for all later social Darwinists: “Let the strongest live and the weakest die… . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”

Astute readers may recognize the latter part of the quote comes from the final paragraph of Origin (Chapter XIV). The earlier part comes from chapter VII (‘Instinct’). Yes, folks. Oakes has constructed a quote from two statements seven chapters apart, possibly the longest ellipsis known to scholarship.

Creationists are very fond of frankenquotes. I’ve spotted a few, including one from Luskin where the ellipsis spanned -36 pages. Sometimes they put the words together so seamlessly that they don’t even bother to include the ellipsis.

And now I learn that the MRAs have adopted the habit.

You know, you’re really in trouble when you’re cribbing your rhetorical style from dishonest creationists.

I’m taking Dr Rubidium’s advice: to avoid zombie attacks, wear a cologne that smells like rotting people. She recommends a mix of putrescine, cadaverine, skatole, and dimethyl trisulfide, which sounds delightful.

Unfortunately, lacking easy access to those compounds, I’m dousing myself with Axe Body Spray instead. Same thing, right, or close enough.

If you want candy, don’t come to our house tonight — we’re following the recommendations of the Teal Pumpkin Project and are handing out glowsticks, instead. Not only do we not have to worry about child allergies, but we won’t have a house full of tempting candy. It’s also cheap: glow stick bracelets are less then ten cents each, so we’ll give out a bunch.

Otherwise, we’re celebrating by staying home and maybe getting a scary movie on netflix.

P.S. Daylight savings time ends tonight, so don’t forget to set your clocks back.

I’ve been increasing my daily penance of exercise by a considerable amount, and am now spending an hour or more a day making my brain send electrical impulses to large muscle groups generating somewhat rhythmic motions. This is not fun. I’m only doing it because the technology has not yet arrived to allow me to discard the decrepit husk of flesh supporting me, and place my brain in a vat with a nerve bundle connected directly to the internet. So it goes.

Anyway, what I’ve been doing to make it tolerable is hook my auditory nerve, via a sensory transduction interface made of meat, to a device that feeds my brain podcasts, downloaded off the internet. I know, you peons who have been chained to long commutes in a vehicle are already totally familiar with this medium, but my commute is about one minute long, and involves crossing the street. So until now I haven’t had much opportunity to soak in soundwaves long enough to get past the introductory title, but that’s changed.

Give me ideas! I’ve been listening to Welcome to Night Vale, which is nice, because here in Minnesota we’ve long been habituated to this form of entertainment by Prairie Home Companion, but this is like PHC as written by HP Lovecraft with a heart transplant from a gay socialist.

Need more. Light, weird, entertaining is best — heavy, too distracting stuff might get me run over by the massive farm equipment on our roads. Also, soon enough I’ll be bundled in layers and freezing in icy blizzards while walking, so it’s got to be amusing enough to motivate me to brave the winters.

This thread is for talking about whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories. Caine is your curator.

(Next thread)

Grading. Grading grading grading. Grading grading grading grading, grading grading grading. Grading.

Never having been able to make it through the book myself, I have to admire Kathryn Schulz, who read the whole thing, and thinks Henry David Thoreau was a wanker. Like Ayn Rand, it’s a mystery how such an obnoxious thinker became so revered.

Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.

As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.

Schulz does explain why he’s popular. His nature writing, when not soured with his philosophy, is excellent, and he appeals to something in the American psyche.

Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.

Ah. He was a primordial Republican.

If you noticed some really annoying slowdowns here on FtB over the last few days, we were being effectively ddos’ed by China. Not because we were a threat, but apparently because a Chinese search engine was being a bit overzealous and repetitive in slurping up links.

This situation has been corrected thanks to the efforts of our clever technical person, Alex. All hail Alex!