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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

31 Mar

Fun Pagan History:

The tradition of the Easter Bunny is actually an early environmental sustainability ritual. Rabbits are a food source that multiplies rapidly.

By tradition, in pre-Christian Europe, spring was a time you would hunt young rabbits both as a food source and as a means to control the rabbit population. People would often bring eggs on these hunts as a portable food source.

This evolved into a tradition of setting out caches of eggs for hunters on their trips, which were later colored both for aesthetic reasons and to make them easier to find.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

For the Space Book I've been reading a LOT about communes. One thing I've come to believe: A single generation can probably do real capital-S socialism commune life. I don't think it can be carried through generations.

Or, to the extent it can be done successfully, it's generally not so much socialisty as religious, with serious restrictions on things like education and interaction with the outside world.

Linklater, himself a former communard, said the big misconception is that eliminating private property eliminates the need for governance. He said it meant *more* governance because you have to enforce behaviors instead of just using money/property to incentivize.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

There's a lot of talk among space people about the importance of frontiers, implicitly or explicitly based on the Turner frontier thesis of 1893. I finally decided to sit down and read Turner's essays. Here's how he talks about the conquest of Native Americans:

"[When countries in Europe] expanded, [they] met other growing peoples whom [they] conquered. But in the case of the United states we have a different phenomenon.”

“The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”

This is why arguing about the use of the frontier metaphor isn't just semantics - there's a whole notion of how space will be, embedded in the advocacy discourse, and it's based on stuff that, aside from moral issues, is simply wrong.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

Here's something interesting:

Frederick Jackson Turner, creator of the "frontier thesis" of American history that dominated scholarship for 70 years, and created much of the Western Myth, gave his first paper on the topic in 1893 in Chicago.

Apparently the audience was bored.

According to a person who attended the audience was indifferent, and nobody asked any questions. Newspapers didn't report on it.

According to Faragher 1994, it took off due to the 1893 economic crisis, which it was thought to help explain.

I find this absolutely incredible, if true. I take it no historians 20 years later cared about the connection to the crisis, but the theory had gotten firmly planted. I wonder if this isn't a frequent trend occurrence.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

29 Mar

Historian of the US West, Patricia Limerick on how all groups want history to give them an uncomplexly special place:

"*Everyone* wants faith-affirming history; the disagreement is just a question of which faith any particular individual wants to see affirmed. Each group wants history to provide guidance, legitimacy, justification, and direction for their particular chosen group.

These contests over history, often focused on the [American] West, resemble and echo more familiar contests over religious faith.

Read 11 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

3 Feb

Astronaut Frank Borman's biography is mostly pretty straightforward, but he gets oddly eloquent when talking about his family. This is him recalling his thoughts before his flight on Gemini 7. He didn't sleep at all the night prior to launch:

“I didn’t feel fear; I felt agonizing concern for the wife and sons I loved. I didn’t want to be a heroic casualty in man’s conquest of space and I was not oblivious to the hazards involved. I wanted to stay a living, breathing husband and father.

There's a dichotomy in all this, a kind of conflict of interest. On one hand, there's a sense of mission accomplishment that becomes a very self-centered thing; the mission has been pounded until it alone is in sharp focus, with everything else blurred.

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