Author: Daniel Harper

The May Day that mostly doesn’t get celebrated in UU congregations

I’m a day late in celebrating International Working People’s Day, the real Labor Day that’s celebrated pretty much everywhere in the world except in the U.S. My only excuse is that both my personal life and my professional life are overly full these past few weeks. My day-late celebration will include reading UU Patrick Murfin’s excellent May Day post on his blog, then singing a couple of classic labor songs from my short stint in the San Francisco Labor Chorus.

Many UU congregations celebrate the Euro-Pagan Beltane May Day, but there are very few which would seriously celebrate International Working People’s Day during a Sunday morning service. The only UU congregation that I can think of that might do so would be First Unitarian in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles church included “Solidarity Forever” and “The Commonwealth of Toil,” two classic union songs, in the hymnal they published in 1976. But I’m not sure what other UU congregations would be comfortable singing those songs on Sunday morning.

If your UU congregation sang a union song (any union song at all) either last Sunday — or if they plan to sing a union song in this Sunday’s service — I hope you post a comment to that effect.

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Today while walking in the Attleboro Springs Audubon Sanctuary, I saw Jacks-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in bloom. The dramatic striped spathe shelters a spadix on which the flowers are born. This is one of my favorite native flowers — we used to grow them when we lived in the rental share in Concord center — and seeing their blooms today prompted me to learn a little more about them.

According the Extension service of North Carolina State State University, individual Arisaema triphyllum plants can change between male and female from year to year: “This unique plant, which is pollinated by flies and gnats, has the ability to change gender.  A plant that starts out as male can spontaneously change to female the next year and vice versa. …”

Or, according to another source, first year plants only produce male flowers; then the plant becomes hermaphroditic, producing both male and female flowers. In any case, as is so often true, our stereotypical human norms around gender and biological sex being determined from birth do not apply to all organisms (the stereotypes don’t even always apply to human organisms).

A fascinating plant. Makes me want to start growing Arisaema triphyllum again.

Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum). Note the two trifoliate leaves, the striped spathe, and the pale green spadix inside the spathe.

Another person I need to learn about

Somehow a copy of The Week: The Best of the U.S. and International Media from June 17, 2022, wound up in our bathroom. In it, there was an obituary of Sophie Freud, granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and long-time professor of social work at Simmons University in Boston, who died on June 2, 2022, in Lincoln, Mass.

Apparently, Sophie called psychoanalysis a “narcissistic indulgence.” She compared Sigmund Freud to Adolph Hitler, saying both were “false prophets of the twentieth century.” Apparently, she also slammed so-called transference and counter-transference between male psychotherapists and female patients — with good reason, I think, as it seems a little too close to sexual misconduct.

She sounds like someone I want to know more about. With luck, a good biography will come out in the not too distant future.

Update, 4/30: The Lincoln Squirrel, the independent newspaper in Lincoln, Mass., provided a link to an excellent profile of Sophie Freud published back in 2007. And there was an obit in the NY Times. In 2007, Sophie Freud published her feminist memoir, Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family.

Another book I need to read

I’ve long been skeptical of the philosophical concept of the “social contract.” It always sounded anachronistic to me. The social contract is supposed to go back to prehistory, but the whole notion of a “contract” is actually a modern Western notion.

But I never thought about who gets to participate in the social contract. Back in 1997, Charles W. Mills published “The Racial Contract” in which he takes on philosophers like Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant. Apparently, in that book he argues that the people who get to participate in the social contract are white people. And if white people are the only people who get to participate in the social contract, then people of other skins colors… well, maybe they aren’t really people, but sub-people.

Cornell just issued a 25th anniversary edition. I really should buy a copy and read it….

Urban gulls…human shouting…

In the Mass Audubon class I’m taking, tonight’s lecture was on birds. We learned about a scientific paper titled, “Urban gulls show similar thermographic and behavioral response to human shouting and conspecific alarm cries” (Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 20 Sept. 2022). Equipment used in this research included a plush Cornish pasty and a child’s baby carriage with an infrared camera hidden inside it. No, I am not making this up. Apparently some ornithologists manage to have a sense of humor while doing serious science.

Thank a librarian

Today is National Library Workers Day. I managed to thank three librarians. I got the official name of the day wrong (I kept calling it “National Library Staff Appreciation Day”; I have no idea where I got that from). But I got the sentiment right.

If it seems kind of corny to thank a librarian or a library worker — it’s not. Library workers were on the front lines during the COVID lockdown, arranging for pickup of library books, getting coughed on by thoughtless library patrons who came to pick up books, putting together online resources to keep library patrons sane, and more. Then in the last two years, librarians have been on the front lines of the culture wars; the American Library Association recently reported that “for a second year in a row the number of books targeted for censorship nearly doubled from the previous year.”

One of the purposes of National Library Workers Day, by the way, is to “advocate for better compensation for all library workers.” Librarians are often woefully under-compensated; I think this is partly because library work is often viewed as “women’s work,” which to many people means it’s worth less. But librarians are actually critically important because they help promote the free and unfettered flow of information upon which a healthy democracy is founded.

Finally, Thursday is National Take Action for Libraries Day. That’s the day when you are encouraged to write to your elected representatives and tell them how important it is to support libraries. The theme this year is “Tell Congress: Stand Against Censorship.”

From the Old Web

Websites tend to disappear pretty quickly. But every once in a while, you run into a web page from the last century. I ran into such a web page today: “Journey to the Isles of Hiva, 1993,” with text and photos by Dennis Kawaharada of Kapi’olani Community College, Hawai’i. Considering the changes that have come to the Marquesas Islands, this web page is now something of a historical document.

And I appreciate the fact that the University of Hawai’i has kept this web page up, even though Dr. Kawaharada is now retired.

No conservative nerds

I can’t figure out if this is anti-intellectualism or something stranger. But a website calling itself the “Washington Free Beacon,” which is funded by conservative billionaire Paul Singer, recently ran a hatchet-job piece about Lucas Kunce, a Democrat in Missouri who plans to run for U.S. Senator in 2024. Of course a conservative website is going to oppose any Democratic candidate in this polarized world. But one of the reasons they gave for opposing Kunce was not his political policies, but the fact that he plays Magic: The Gathering:

“…In a free and just society, playing Magic: The Gathering with a journalist would disqualify someone from seeking public office. To paraphrase one of America’s most formidable intellectual prognosticators: ‘We don’t want nerds elected in Missouri….'”

(They link that phrase “formidable intellectual prognosticator” to a low-quality Youtube video of Donald Trump saying, “We don’t want perverts.”)

I’m not going to provide a link to the Washington Free Beacon hatchet-job, because as an ad hominem attack, it doesn’t deserve any incoming links. (I also won’t link to leftist websites that indulge in ad hominem attacks.) But you can read more about the Lucas Kunze story at File 770, a nerd website that I read regularly.

Anyway. I guess the Washington Free Beacon is saying that no one can be a political conservative who plays Magic (35 million people do so) — nor by extension can any other nerds, including people who read science fiction, watch Star Trek, are good at math, think science is cool, etc. This is political polarization run amok.

Scraped

The Washington Post investigated which websites got scraped to build up the database for Google’s chatbot. The Post has an online tool where you can check to see if your website was one of the ones that got scraped. And this online tool shows that danielharper.org was one of the websites that got scraped.

Screenshot showing the Washington Post online tool.

True, there were 233,931 websites that contributed more content than this one did. Nevertheless, I’m sure that Google will compensate me for the use of my copyright-protected material. So what if they used my material without my permission. Soon, a rep from Google will reach out to me, explaining why their scraping of my website is unlike those sleazy fly-by-night operations that steal copyright-protected material from the web to profit themselves without offering the least bit of compensation to the author. Not only will they pay me for the use of my material — they will also issue a written apology, and additional compensation because they forgot to ask permission before stealing, I mean using, my written work.

I heart Big Tech. They’re just so honest and ethical.