Joel's humanistic blog

Today is the 97th anniversary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and freethought educational pioneer whose persecution by both church and state and execution on trumped-up charges led to outrage and an international movement to emulate his ideas. Ferrer and other European educators wanted a "modern" approach to education based on freedom and reason, in place of the traditional one based on coercion, rote and indoctrination. Emma Goldman, who visited Sebastien Faure's French modern school La Ruche, conveys the atmosphere of the school in her description from her autobiography : He [Faure] had taken twenty-four orphan children and those of parents too poor to pay and was housing, feeding, and clothing them at his own expense. He had created an atmosphere at La Ruche that released the life of the child from discipline and coercion of any sort. He had discarded the old methods of education and in their place he established understanding for the needs of the child...

My second transcript for Equal Time for Freethought is now online: from last year's Hanukkah season, Barry Seidman 's holiday interview with Douglas Rushkoff . The interview started off with a subversive look at the historical origins of Hanukkah, based on Rushkoff's treatment of the subject in his book Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism . The role of circumcision led to a discussion of the modern Jewish take on the practice. The holiday also led to the issues of assimilation in general, and of Passover as another holiday which Rushkoff had an alternative take on. The touchy topic of what a humanistic secular Jew should think about the Israel situation was dealt with. Even technical difficulties were an opportunity for discussion: when noise interfered with the reception as he was discussing Passover being a de-idolization of the Egyptian gods, he said "I hear strange and exciting sounds" and "It's those gods coming back at me now". After...

Last month, dorkbot-nyc got off on a roll with its first meeting after the summer hiatus. Bret Doar showed his hybrid roboticized musical instruments including the Huffyphonic Gyrobanshee 1000 , a combination of a bicycle wheel and a guitar. Jon Lippincott demonstrated Vis Virtual Universe , which displays and navigates through a surreal 3D animated solar system, which he wrote from the ground up in C++ (which fit in with my blenderheaded fascination with all things related to 3D computer graphics). David Kareve explained his exhibit which uses freaked-out crash test dummies to explore the culture of fear reinforced by the terror alert system; I was tickled to see that his presentation of the various spoofs of the terror alert system included the Sesame Street one that I've had on my blog sidebar almost since the beginning of the blog (which I got from freeman, libertarian critter ): The next day's installment of the popular video blog Rocketboom did a segment covering t...

My transcript of Barry Seidman's Equal Time for Freethought interview with Harold Barclay, author of People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy , is now online .

Back in the days of VHS, one of the common items were cheap compilations of cartoons that had fallen into the public domain, and which could therefore be distributed by third party companies. (I still have a Daffy Duck videotape from 1989). Nowadays, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it's possible to see the same cartoons online for free. Archive.org is the dean of public domain video sites, but ReFrederator is a new site that, incredibly enough, posts a new cartoon each weekday! The cartoons include everything from old-fashioned Popeye action and Warner Bros. mischief (with looney standbys like A Corny Concerto , Pigs in a Polka , and Wackiki Wabbit ) to the exploits of far more obscure characters like Flip the Frog, Molly Moo-Cow, and Willie Whopper (Ub Iwerks's studio is the most consistently entertaining of the lesser-known studios sampled). Stylistic experimentation abounds in cartoons like The Dover Boys, Chuck Jones's pioneering 1942 foray into stylized a...

If you talk about the scientists who have said, "Well, we're very aggressive and we can't escape it because that's our nature", they have almost always been only looking at the male side of the human equation. — Judith Hand In late July and throughout the month of August, Equal Time for Freethought ran an extensive and detailed four-part analysis of the origins of violence and the prospects for peace, as informed by the issues of gender, human nature, and hierarchy. On July 30, August 6 and August 13, an epic three-part, 90-minute show aired with host Barry Seidman interviewing Judith Hand and Douglas Fry , respective authors of the intriguing books Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace and The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence . Both of these authors brought to light much interesting information about the interconnection between patriarchy and violence, and pointed to, well "the human potential...

Since its debut in the early days of the Web in 1997, Lawrence Knapp's Page of Fu Manchu has been the definitive Internet resource about Sax Rohmer's classic villain, charting Fu's influence, incarnations, and imitators. The site has just posted some screen captures I made of Fu Manchu's "cameo" in the Warner Bros. cartoon Have You Got Any Castles (1938) (thanks to ReFrederator for posting a nice print of the public domain cartoon online), as well as expanding its description of the appearance. Way back in 2001, I also contributed to the site's list of "clones" of Fu Manchu, the Fu-in-all-but-name in question being Iskandar from Jack Williamson's science fiction fantasy The Wizard of Life (1934).

A passage which deserves to be better known, from Oscar Wilde's famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism : Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in His mother's arms, smiling at her, ...

Following Paul Avrich in February, another major figure in the anarchist movement, Murray Bookchin, passed away last month. Reason 's Jesse Walker has posted an RIP, which also discusses the interactions between Bookchin and libertarianism. Like many individuals on the left and right (Ronald Radosh comes to mind), Bookchin was willing for a period to ally with libertarians, which he later downplayed when he became more dismissive of libertarianism. To illustrate this, Walker has an amusing side-by-side analysis of Bookchin with libertarianism's Murray Rothbard, with whom he at one point collaborated on something called the Left-Right Anarchist Supper Club, but he later dismissed him as an advocate of "naked greed" with "repulsive" ideas. I wasn't particularly familiar with Bookchin's stuff or his "social ecology" philosophy of eco-anarchism, but I've read a few bits. His famous New Left rant "Listen, Marxist!" was a cri...

My friend Barry Seidman 's article "A Critique of the New Religious Left" has been published on truthdig , "[i]n the tradition of Sam Harris", the popular author of The End of Faith whose "Atheist Manifesto" was previously published on the same site. As the title suggests, Seidman's article examines the attempts associated with people like Michael Lerner and Jim Wallis to tie left-wing politics to religion, which often involves a glossing over of the flaws of religion and a contemptuous downplaying of secularism as a source of social inspiration. In doing so, he utilizes the strong critiques of religion, including moderate religion, associated with people like Harris, Hector Avalos (whose book Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence is extensively cited), and Brian Flemming . There's also a nod to Carl Sagan's inspiring scientific insight that "humanity is the universe’s first successful attempt to understand itself...

A number of classic cartoons that have fallen into the public domain are available on Archive.org . One that's appropriate for the season is the 1957 cartoon Patriotic Popeye , featuring America's favorite sailor (and two of his nephews) engaged in summer pastimes.

Today, Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer's 1979 documentary about the legendary radical union Industrial Workers of the World , titled simply The Wobblies after the IWW's nickname, is being released on DVD. Last November, I saw the film at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (it was sweet to see a leftist documentary in a "real" movie theater). The film successfully captures the spirit of the IWW; the energy and avoidance of a static "talking-heads" feel is all the more remarkable given the limitations and age of the material available. The interviewees from the original era of the IWW in the early 1900s were by that time in their 80s and 90s, yet vividly conveyed their many-decades-old memories. The use of original documents and archival footage from the dawn of motion pictures was equally effective, conveying the social turmoil of the time, and the nature of work (such as a memorable shot of gigantic trees that dwarf the workers cutting them down). A p...

Steve Baldwin's Ghost Sites project tracks the underbelly of the Internet, documenting dot-com busts, defunct websites, and "Forgotten Web Celebrities" , and collecting such ephemera as ancient banner ads . Many posts highlight outdated websites that give ample evidence of not being updated in an inordinately long time, whether they're sites whose "Last Updated" date is more than a decade ago , which explain that they are meant to be viewed with Netscape 2.0 (or even older versions of the then-predominant browser), or which are just plain old . In this vein, the site recently posted my "foresnic notes" about a Looney Tunes website, the Non-Stick Looney Page , which has been inactive for so long that the latest addition is a group of desktop themes for Windows 95/98, and still has web buttons from 1996.

Today is the 25th anniversary to the day of the release of one of my favorite movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark . Another Indy fan has posted a detailed analysis of one of the many aspects that make it great: the spunky heroine Marion Ravenwood. UPDATE: While doing blog maintenance, I found out that the blog I linked to, That Little Round-Headed Boy ("Happiness is a warm blog"), has disappeared. Here's a quote of part of the post that gives a flavor of what's missing: [I]n the pairing of Indy and Marion, you have cinema alchemy, the Nick and Nora Charles of archaeology and high adventure. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK really isn't an action movie, per se. It's also one of the great romantic comedies. At the very least, it's a Howard Hawks-style adventure romance, in which the bickering way the characters keep hashing over their past history is just as important as the MacGuffin they are chasing. And Karen Allen's Marion is crucial to that. She helps define...

Danny Mydlack's excellent documentary Voices from the New American Schoolhouse about Fairhaven School (which I was fortunate enough to see at its premiere at AERO 's conference last year) got a boost of publicity last week when award-winning science fiction writer and all-round cool guy Cory Doctorow featured it on his popular blog Boing Boing . Given that Boing Boing is #1 on Technorati's listing of the Net's most-linked-to blogs , this certainly showed it off to a lot of people who don't follow alternative education. Right from the title of the post, "Documentary on radical free school - inspiring", it's clear that Doctorow is going to emphasize rather than downplay the departure from the status quo of schooling, even using the term "free school" (which some avoid who consider it passe in an aging-hippie way). Moreover, he refers to his own history of attending a free school that was started during the heyday of the movement in the ...

Once again, my promotional flyer for next month's dorkbot-nyc meeting (May 3) is up on the dorkbot website. See also: my post on dorkbot's fifth anniversary , dorkbotters map .

A flyer (PDF) that I made promoting this month's dorkbot-nyc meeting on the 5th is up on the dorkbot website. See also: my post on dorkbot's fifth anniversary , dorkbotters map .

One of those blog memes has passed my way due to my getting tagged by MDM . So: Four Jobs I’ve Had Student Math research Data entry Radio show staff (volunteer) Four Movies I can Watch Over and Over The Adventures of Robin Hood American Graffiti Big Trouble in Little China King Kong (original) Four Places I’ve Lived Lifelong NYCer Four TV Shows I Love Star Trek The Prisoner Scientific American Frontiers Mr. Bean Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven't seen (much of) Firefly Cowboy Bebop MST3K Batman Four places I've vacationed Israel Upstate NY Vienna Canada Four of my favorite dishes Spaghetti and meatballs Schnitzel Sushi To quote Woody Woodpecker: "Food! That's my favorite dish!" Four sites I visit daily the agony booth forum Blender nation Cartoon Brew rocket boom Four places I'd rather be right now: somewhere without cold winters a film festival a free school the Studio Ghibli Museum Four new bloggers I'm tagging Nick Sagan Mike Bren...

Last December, Current TV aired a 6 minute documentary on cable and online about the humanist Christmas and Hanukkah ripoff winter holiday Humanlight . It shows a good slice of the New York/New Jersey humanist culture, and portrays sympathetically humanists' attempt to carve out a space for their worldview. Equal Time for Freethought radio host Neil Murphy is shown in action at the studio, being amusingly described as a "talk show host" at a "liberal" network (which I can wish would actually show awareness of classical liberalism ). Other prominent local humanists featured include ETFF staff Tim and Lisa Ridge (with a personal look at their holiday customs) and Humanlight co-creator Joe Fox. The video diverts a good deal to cover the pointless "war on Christmas" pseudo-controversy, with some suitably obnoxious ranting from the Catholic League's William Donohue, who has also recently blustered against The Da Vinci Code and the South Park epi...

Today version 2.41 of the open source 3D software Blender has been released. It follows on the heels of last month's much larger-scale update to version 2.40 , but this post is sorta making up for me missing posting about that ;). In particular that version had an overhaul of the animation tools. Blender is a tool of choice of the subculture of low-budget computer graphics hobbyists. I first came across this culture when I came upon the POV-RAY raytracer and the related online contest, the Internet Raytracing Competition , in early 2002. This is a very "right-brained" program which generates 3D renders directly from a plaintext mathematical description of a scene (so Blender's graphical interface came as a relief even for a math major like me!). POV-RAY certainly has an interesting history behind it on its own, being maintained for over a decade by volunteers on the Net; it has one of the oldest continuosly operating domain names on the Net ; and the program...