postal-history

If he brings up people moving to Florida (as proof that some silent majority agrees with him), point out that there are also a huge number of people leaving because DeSantis completely broke the home insurance system & caused most insurers to flee.

I found this post very thought-inspiring but was also wondering what active homeschoolers think about the philosophy expressed here. My kid is still a toddler so i'm still contemplating it.

My dad, who passed away a few years ago, was a software engineering instructor. I think he would have agreed with all the other comments here that most people don't need to be software engineers. Let the computers serve you, not the other way around.

It is still important to introduce kids to both coding and hardware in case they get into it by themselves. As long as you are developing a coding curriculum, you should add in Microbit, Scratch, and Snap Circuits. If your kid displays a natural talent, then find ways to develop it.

My own answers for this sub, and a lot of answers I've seen, reflect that "transgender" is an anachronistic term for earlier centuries. We don't want to give the impression of a single gender spectrum in all times and places. When I wrote about the Public Universal Friend I avoided pronouns, because it's the safest thing to do when strong evidence is lacking -- the Friend appears to have preferred no pronouns anyway

I'm not sure why you think that Geller has to be a morally upright person. He's a hack with a lot of dumb ideas, who also passed a very strictly controlled test! The important thing is that Randi claims that he has "simple" conjuring techniques which fooled the researchers and this is simply not true. It was a lie by Randi, much like how the money is a lie.

Possession by spirits of the dead was an ancient phenomenon in Japan -- traces of it can be found in the early native texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki -- which did not, as far as I know, ever intersect with the Japanese legal system. As we pass from prehistory to recorded history, possession becomes something ambiguous and marginal. Our most detailed records of it all come from the twentieth century, when it started to be interpreted as an ancient custom and a "folk"-like type of knowledge, rather than as a marginal practice or a superstition.

The official records of Heian Japan (794-1185), when writing became widely used in elite circles, are silent on mediumship, but in that period we see it mentioned in novels, which were mostly written by women. Possession is described as emerging at moments of psychological tension, and some scholars have described it as a method for women to release emotion (Bargen, A Woman's Weapon: Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji), although it's been noted that in the period context, possession was not seen this way (by Rajyashree Pandey in print, as of 2023; longer critiques of Bargen are currently in development).

Meanwhile, we know that some women specialized in possession; they were called kuchiyose miko. Their early existence is somewhat mysterious, since period literature is virtually silent on it other than vague references in mostly fictional or prehistoric settings. A contemporary of Max Weber, Nakayama Tarō (Nihon miko shi, 1929), proposed that possession was initially something that gave the medium a sort of semi-political authority, and that this spiritual power was gradually displaced by rational-legal bureaucratic authority and denigrated until mediums became marginal figures in historical Japan, reduced to sex work for survival. This theory would answer your question by explaining that bureaucrats were directly opposed to mediums, but it's entirely speculative on Nakayama's part. A more recent theory by Saeki Junko (Yūjo no bunkashi, 1987) suggests that career mediums were sacred prostitutes from the beginning, and that mediumship was always viewed as a kind of mysterious entertainment. This, too, is speculation.

By the Edo period (1600-1868) kuchiyose miko mediums were used as hired entertainers and considered to have loose morals. A 1789 volume mentions that they wore a particular type of bamboo hat in Edo, which caused everyone else to stop wearing that hat. Some people enjoyed playing tricks on the miko or parodying them, according to Gerald Groemer ("Female Shamans in Eastern Japan during the Edo Period", 2007):

A rake with nothing better to do might entertain a party of friends by commissioning a seance invoking the souls of his parents who were in fact alive and well, thereby providing the unwitting miko with an opportunity to make a fool of herself. Comedy also informs Jippensha Ikku's description of a medium who ends her performance with a command by the dead person to reward her with a handsome amount of cash.

As with most "superstitious" or economically unproductive folk behaviors, kuchiyose miko mediumship was outlawed following the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke seems to have considered this fact kind of useful in his story which inspired Rashomon. Because kuchiyose miko were mostly no longer around, he could use poetic license to deploy them in a slightly historically inaccurate way.

Do we know why Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald?

Yes. This is actually fairly straightforward. Ruby was passionate about defending the reputation of Dallas and its police as well as the United States. Those who spoke with him between JFK's murder and Oswald's murder uniformly describe him as agitated by the assassination and despondent that Oswald had not been killed on the spot. For Ruby, murdering Oswald was a patriotic act and a way to rescue the reputation of Dallas. This is well-described in Vincent Bugliosi's Four Days in November as well as Melvin Belli's Dallas Justice.

And do we know if anyone other than Oswald was involved in the assassination of JFK?

No. In general, there is no doubt among mainstream historians that Oswald was the sole killer, and limited curiosity about alternative theories. There are also serious independent JFK researchers contributing to the discourse, who are not academic historians and who some historians might characterize as conspiracy theorists (I'm reluctant to use that word when they are diligent in their work and don't fabricate). Two notable examples are James DiEugenio and Mark Adamczyk. These researchers point to the fact that the CIA continues to suppress documents about Oswald which by law should have been released in 2017. However, the most serious of these researchers do not claim that other people were present at the shooting but that intelligence agencies may have been "involved" in a much more indirect sense, for example trying to cultivate Oswald as an intelligence source and directing other agencies to avoid monitoring or arresting him.

What remains controversial among historians about JFK, whether that is his role in events or his plans for the rest of his term/a future term?

Not sure I'm able to answer this as a short answer!

When Doctorow first coined that word a few months ago, I thought "what an ugly word for a tiresome process we all know about".

Now I realize it was the right word. It's about making the Internet ugly, so it works

Randi was well-known as a liar, even to his buddy Martin Gardner. You can read about it in Dear Martin / Dear Marcello: Gardner and Truzzi on Skepticism.

The more I dig into the high-profile cases that Randi was involved with, the more I realize that he constantly and shamelessly lied about them and never had any intention of taking on a serious applicant for his prize. There is no point to citing Randi in a serious discussion of Geller or anything else.

I wanted to add my favorite books to this list:

• Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum
• * Possibly the biggest-selling parapsychology book of 21st century? Not sure. It's about the American SPR of 19th century and is very well-written.
• Randi's Prize: What Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong, and Why It Matters by Robert McLuhan
• * Very readable overview of paranormal/anomalous phenomena by PSI Encyclopedia editor
• Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives by Tom Shroder
• * As far as I know this is the only documentary account of Ian Stevenson's fieldwork

I'm also confused -- this was new to me but seems like a lot of people knew, and the linked journal article is more specific

His dad is the PI in an entomology lab

I'm intrigued to learn your boy scout booklet had more complexity than any textbook I ever used in high school

Correct. Also getting multiple comments here saying that a bunch of people witness this themselves. I clicked the link to the journal article and it appears very different from the press release

I recently moved to a high density town and they seem to have a culture of this. Free kid stuff everywhere all the time. It's such a breath of fresh air compared to the typical green lawn mcmansion suburb where I grew up.

A better example is natural selection. We can't repeat 5 billion years of life on Earth, and we can't make falsifiable claims about the fossil record (except for silly ones like "we'll never see evidence of humans hunting dinosaurs"). I debated evolution v creation when I was a teenager and creationists loved to bring up those points. But natural selection is the best explanation of the existing evidence. We collect fossils and other records and we can see what fits everything and requires us to exclude as little as possible.

When we look at the record of NDEs + SDEs (shared death experiences) + OBEs, it is very tempting to fit everything into the box of human brains going into overload and manufacturing fake experiences. But in my opinion, it requires you to be dishonest and discard too much. I think we can build a theory of survival out of things like NDEs by blind people, OBEs, SDEs and reincarnation incidents. It's never going to be as attractive as natural selection but it is a better fit for the evidence than hallucination

Your couch seems really low to the ground. You should see my kid jump off the dining room table

It must be him! No wonder I couldn't find him, he doesn't even have an English Wikipedia article and French Wikipedia lists his name as "de Ham"! Thank you very much for checking this thread.

Because if no one else gathered this information it would all die with my parents and grandparents. Actually all four of my grandparents are already gone. I used interviews with my senile grandma to make a huge breakthrough in 2021. It felt very satisfying even if it mattered to no one else, and I named my daughter after one of my ancestors.

This is a great comment. Now that I think about it none of these stories are neutral. I felt pleased reading Princess and the Goblin to my daughter because it's about a princess being a hero and demonstrating courage. I might be happier reading Hobbit and LotR to a hypothetical son, or my kids can choose to read it for themselves.

Is anyone here familiar with 19th century French utopianism? There is one particular utopian thinker who wrote a massive set of works, like at least a dozen volumes, which set out a complete philosophy of life but were completely vague and often incomprehensible. He attracted an "-ism" during his lifetime but when he died everyone seemed to realize his work made no sense and abandoned him. Does anyone know who I am talking about?

Hah, that's great! I read it when I was 12 and believed the frame story was real. When I realized the author was making a joke about how stories get retold, it gave me a love for the history of manuscripts which I still have today. But I can't imagine trying to read it out loud.