Alas, the wire report yesterday about a game of tag at a scout camp in Denmark where children, aged 11-14, acted as Jews wearing yellow Stars of David and tried to escape from adults pretending to be Nazis didn't have enough details to really be useful. For sure, they got all the trappings right down to the swastikas on the windows and the "arbeit macht frei" sign. What I want to know is how it was presented. Was the point to have fun teaching history, children laughing as they Nazis closed in on them, sort of thing, or was it handled more seriously? Then again, could such a re-enactment even theoretically be done seriously enough?
"I was shocked," Johanna Christiansen, a German woman, told the Ekstra Bladet newspaper on Thursday.
"It's wrong to expose children to this," said Christiansen, whose two daughters took part.
I don't really agree with that based on my own highschool visits to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I just wonder if the same scout camp would organize a similar game where kids would paint their faces black and get chased by slave merchants, with the school made up into a slave ship or plantation.
posted by Voice From The Hinterlands |
3:28 PM |
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
How do you know when you've made it in this business? Well, Jewish Ombudsman got linked at Romenesko...and I just got an e-mail from Luke Ford. Yup, I think I've made it...now I can just rest on my laurels and retire on that pension I haven't earned.
Along with all the usual radical-left and paleoconservative anti-war stuff, this latest wave of volunteer human shields heading for Iraq is worth an eyebrow-raising. The rhetoric is still the same:
The potential for white Western body parts flying around with the Iraqi ones should make them think again about this imperialist oil war.
The thing is who the speaker is. In this case it happens to be a Ken Nichols, who, as Reader Meredith points out, is no random socialist. In fact, he's a former U.S. marine in the 1991 Gulf War. On one hand, you'd think he'd know better. As the article continues:
"Putting yourself in danger is not going to help at all," said John Nicol, a British air force flyer shot down in 1991 and later paraded on Iraqi television. He was moved around by the Iraqis to various potential targets and experienced allied bombing nearby.
On the other hand, he is a Marine. Maybe he knows something that all the neo-cons on the radio don't?
posted by Voice From The Hinterlands |
7:06 PM |
Looking at the hit counter stats, a few observations concerning my Tara Zinslen post:
1) The fact that there seems to be a number of people out there interested in typing her name into search engines is vaguely disturbing.
2) The fact that said people exist has led to some opportunism in the blogosphere. For example (I think the only one), blogs like "totallyawesome" noted, "Dude, the more we mention Tara Zinslen around here, the more hits the site gets."
3) By intercepting some of those hits towards protocols with my Tara Zinslen post, I may have unintentionally triggered a turf war. Or so I read.
I'm not really sure where any of this is leading. I mean, it is 1:20 AM...
From the "Why Bronstein's Here Department" A surprising number of our hits from search engines come when people search for terms like "Tara Zinslen", "Making of a Gadol" and other items that would not be here were it not for our fuzzy acolyte...it might be Sam who makes us hip, but it's Bronstein who makes us pop.
What to do about Pee-Wee's wee-wee. In reading this piece, I was repulsed many times -- the seeming equivalence on child porn is quease-inducing -- but some points toward the end struck me as reminiscent of the anti-sex attitudes in the Modern Orthodox community and how that often seems only to increase the perception of members of the opposite sex as nothing other than sexual objects. I'd assume there's some similar attitude in other non-co-ed-minded communities.
In the Unintended Consequences Department: According to ESPN Magazine, unless Michael Jordan averages 20 points a game for the rest of the season (and he's currently at 18.2), Wilt Chamberlain, dead for 3 years, will regain the all-time highest career scoring average.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again:
Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut on the Columbia, admitted that he was, "so busy with all the experiments I didn't even have a chance to think about the Sabbath" this past week. Don't worry, though, he'll try to remember next week to say his prayer for Earth from above.
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