The logic of Andalusada and sloth

It's been a long time since I did anything that merited the tag "regular writing." The most I can say is that I've reliably posted weeks in review for Andalusada consistently - that I've been writing on the Scrapbook rather regularly indeed.

I mentioned that I started a standardization campaign on Friday. It's sent me looking back over dozens of former pages, editing them to fit my new standard policies - and rereading them, because I usually haven't thought about any of them except to look them up for links. And it's left me wincing a lot, because of how awful my writing can get over there. And how inconsistent.

There's one thing about it that's managed to routinely get my attention, though: the times when I stop to explain why I wrote Andalusada the way I did on that point. Those side notes are fascinating to me. And since this is (alas) a vanity blog, and Andalusada is what I'm thinking about at present - and since a lot of those notes are going to get obliterated in the great reformatting to come - I'm going to start discussing the overarching forces that have shaped my work as a Demiurge.

The first of these forces, and it's a shameful one to admit, is sloth.

In which I talk about a papyrus fragment

The stores sell caramel apples and fresh cider, and there are racks of pumpkins outside the doors. The nights are colder now, and the blue hour comes too early. Autumn is upon us.

And instead of honoring that, I'm going to talk about a papyrus fragment, the details of which are found over here.

My first response was the one I posted on Slacktivist:

There's a strong tendency on the part of many scholars to err uncritically on the side of the exotic and non-traditional: the same person who takes the standard gospels as unreliable in their depiction of Jesus will then treat a text written centuries later, which makes outlandish claims attested to nowhere else, certainly no text written when there were still living witnesses to Jesus's life, as if it were very good evidence!

YES. THIS THIS THIS. Thank you so much for saying that. 

On a broader scale, my biggest issue with this whole topic is the horrible looming sense that there isn't going to be ANY intelligent, rational discussion about if and how this papyrus fragment means or matters: that people will, for personal psychological reasons, arbitrarily and dogmatically declare "Jesus was/wasn't married!"

Because as a relatively studied Christian (and usually the one who has to represent Christianity in my completely unchurched social circles), I waste enough time as it is dealing with the Rapture and Dan Brown. And maybe it's because I'm short of sleep, but I have no hope that popular culture won't make a mess with this, and I am tired of endless remedial cleanup.

 My expanded thoughts are as follows, below the cut.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 9/22/2012

No blogging happened for me until late on Wednesday night, when (powered by Concerta) I decided to forcibly reset my sleep schedule. There, in the twilight of it, the writing started:

• The first thing I posted was "Very Poor Introductions," linking back to the very first post I ever began on this (back when it was Ixbiliada.) It connected a few dots for me - in particular, I invented Annemarie Sansinger on the spot, because there was no plausible Bonaparte left to write Bonapartism: a Very Poor Introduction any more.
• Next up on the list, after some cleanup (about which more below), was a master page, keeping track of Andalusada's authors.
• The UCNA, the nation that is Moorish civilization as of Andalusada's present day, is a successor state. The third post of the week was the placeholder for what it succeeded: Umayyad Seville. Writing that (especially answering why?) was both satisfying and very, very instructive: I'm gonna have to revisit all of this later.
• And because I'd already introduced the "families" tag earlier, I decided to make "families" a bit more substantive by writing a substantive family to tag it with: the House of Umayya.
• Due to a terrible accident, a truly terrible post from I think May (regarding Ibero-Romance languages or something) was completely erased and lost. I took the opportunity to edit it a fair bit, turning it into something specifically about Moorish (the rest of Iberia be damned; I'm not even sure that Castilian is spoken.)
• And lastly, on Friday night, I finally posted an entirely place-holding page for the House of Sansinger, tying together a fair number of other assorted entries. I'm still editing it as of this posting.

If the writing was all I'd accomplished this week, that would've been enough. It wasn't.

Slacktivist says it like it is

It occurs to me that I've been essentially neglecting any writing about the Discourse of Decline recently - and just on time, Fred Clark (a smarter man than I) delivers:

Everybody knows that evangelical churches are more theologically conservative and orthodox. And everybody knows that mainline Protestant denominations are liberal and heterodox....

It goes something like this:

1: Find the most liberal theologians you can from mainline Protestant denominations — Tillich! Spong! — and then sketch caricatures of them that make them seem as outrageously liberal as possible.

2. Make these caricatures the avatars for mainline Protestant churches, always suggesting that they are typical, hugely popular and influential.

3. Cite this outrageous theological liberalism as the cause of mainline “decline.”

4. Contrast this mainline liberalism with the orthodoxy of evangelical churches.

5. Cite evangelical orthodoxy as the cause of the rapid growth of evangelicalism.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat. For years and years and years.

This is propaganda. It’s the shell-game that we evangelicals have been playing for decades now. And it’s a shifty, dishonest trick.

Fred, you nailed it.

A non-owner's taste in gun porn

weapons.

I haven't been there for awhile, though, and last night saw me glutting through its archives. Six or seven pages back, I stumbled across this:

I also have a real interest in guns with interesting histories. Guns with a long series of modifications, or pieces that were used by 2 or 3 or 4 or more different countries before finally finding their way to the US....

I could go on – K98k Mausers and MG42s taken from Nazi stockpiles and used by the fledgling Israeli state, Gewehr 88s used in WWI by Germany and then given to Turkey, updated to use spitzer ammo, and then reworked to look like Mausers... Vetterli rifles updated every time a European war looked imminent... They may not appeal to a lot of people, but to me those are the really interesting pieces. “If this rifle could talk…I’d need to learn three new languages to understand its story.”

What do you think? What do you find appealing in a prospective gun purchase?

And so, having neglected blogging for a few days, I thought I'd write about it here.

This fortnight in Andalusada: 9/15/2012

It's been two weeks since the last time I blogged about Andalusada. I have an excuse: last week I was driving into (and then driving home from) Pennsylvania, suffering a cold, and generally not writing about Andalusada very much anyways.

So it's been another fortnightly update here, and a very Russian one at that.

• September 6th saw the first post, "Christianities of Andalusada." I'll spare you the list of what it's about, because it was mostly about lists. (See for yourself.)
• September 6th also saw a post on the Eugenian calendar, because it was relevant to the writing about Great Russia and stuff that was going on in my head at the time.
• Seeing that I'd mentioned him many times, and that he's a pivotal figure in Russian history, and that I'd been writing about his calendar so much, I created a placeholder for Evgeny I yesterday...
• ...and today saw me start a new taxonomy, of the collapse and schism of Russian Orthodoxy.

The drive home on Sunday

Driving this weekend was uniformly awful. I got lost twice in two days; I burned an enormous amount of gas; there was no un-Christian radio for an enormous swathe of the travel time, so no consolation from the disappointment of the worship that day. Worst of all was the visibility - there was none. The rain came pissing down, so hard that I had to turn the wipers on full-speed to see the tail lights of the 18-wheelers not a dozen yards in front of me, so hard that I had to dime the volume to tell the radio static apart from the downpour outside.

All of that was worth the beauty of the last 90 minutes or so of the ride home.