satyadasa

I know. I used to do this kind of drive-by all the time. I would announce that I have a new blog somewhere in hopes that you might be interested enough to click away from LJ and read it, even though I rarely if ever participate here. Some of you would go read it anyway. Thank you for that! Then I would promptly stop posting on the blog. Inshallah, that won't happen this time.

I have four posts to date on Sweet Land of Liberty, a blog oriented around my interests of left libertarian politics, the complexities of identity, and history.

Sweet Land of Liberty. Introduction to the blog's missions — 1. Reclaiming patriotism for progressivism and renewing progressivism through patriotism. 2. Exploring American liberty and identity through a genealogical and historical lens.

Terror and Liberty. Reaction to the #2 of "the base" calling President-elect Obama a "house negro". "Al-Zawahiri’s racism and his clear identification of a Democratic administration as his enemy makes it far more likely that the vast majority of Americans will come around to the following truth: All forces of division are alike—violent criminals, racists, tyrants, and corrupters of faith. Regardless of our identity, we are united.

Eli Melton's Slave. Thoughts on why I want to find my cousins through slavery. This post looks at an ancestor who lived in Rutherford County, North Carolina in 1790. I conclude that I probably can't find any direct proofs of cousinship (I don't necessarily mean just genetic) because all my white Southern ancestral lines left for the Midwest long before Emancipation.

Trane. Then I realize that there is one line of North Carolina Quakers I didn't research. One of their names? Coltrane. Sound familiar? If not proof, what I found is a pretty solid connection between my ancestors and a famous musician.

Eid Mubarak!

L'Shanah Tovah!

I was going to write something long concerning how Leviticus 19:33-34 and the literally dozens of Scriptural reminders in the Law and the Prophets that "the alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born" (NIV) should compel Christians toward advocating social attitudes and legal systems that make no distinction between citizen and non-citizen, but since this article [PDF] lays the research groundwork and says what I was wanting to say (and does so without me having to do a lot of work), I'll just make a brief comment.

Scripturally, there is much more to this than "love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt". There is even a commandment for impartiality between alien and brother (Deuteronomy 1:16) It's not only in the Torah but in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi, and other of the Old Testament Prophets from which Christians have tended to draw more social principles than the Torah. It is also certainly not one of those groups of commandments that Christians believe to have been abrogated for Gentiles by the sacrifice of Jesus. This isn't eating shellfish. It's a social justice principle echoed in the career of Jesus and the transnational, multilinguistic missionary explosion of the early Church. Can a self-professed advocate for a Biblical basis for the law really argue that people have different sets of rights based on where they were born or what nationality they hold? Or do they have to admit that concepts like "legal", "illegal", or even "immigrant" have completely secular origins?

Will the large intersection of people who a. see themselves as Biblical literalists who would better apply Scriptural principles to law and b. act as {insert nationality here} nativists ever see the inconsistency of their position? Perhaps those who are honest with themselves will. I have seen more hope for evangelical progressivism in the United States during this election cycle than I ever imagined I would see. For many others, it will always be a matter of relying on a select few verses that fit pre-existing culture clash memes, but I can see a future for the above argument in some important circles. Equality for aliens has certainly worked for social justice in Judaism, certainly has been emphasized by a great many Christians, and has parallels in Islam, but could it be part of a wider Christian, transmonotheist, or global spiritual movement against the nation-state?

I want a dual language / interlinear Tanakh / New Testament / Qur'an - with apocrypha.

It should have transliteration on one line, followed by word-by-word translation and then sentence-by-sentence translation into English (or another language I can read).

Crossposted from Facebook: Take A Stand

2008 Presidential Candidates: Obama. He's the only candidate in my lifetime whose election has the potential to facilitate a change in the culture of the Democratic Party towards left libertarianism - the principle that the coercive powers of both government and corporations need to be limited by a strong emphasis on the Constitution. He is also the only candidate who qualifies as a member of the religious left - someone who acknowledges and embodies that principles of faith have positive transformational potential in the fight against injustice - without privileging one religion or enshrining false interpretations of religion in our social law.

Party: Reluctantly Democratic. If the party transforms how I want it to under the leadership of Barack Obama, then I will be less reluctantly Democratic. I am a transnationalist left libertarian and there is no transnationalist left libertarian party.

( See my transnationlist religious secularist left libertarian answers below )

Wow, most of you are still here!

I guess I assumed everyone else had stopped posting too.

Though I have never been a weak person, I have long lacked control of my movements, awareness of my surroundings, and confidence in my physical abilities. I took many long distance walks, yet ambled along with bad posture, taking in the city a marathon walk at a time, yet looking, unless something caught my attention, primarily at my own shoes and the sidewalk in front of me. At boxing class today, after I moved from shadowboxing in the mirror to the punching bag, the teacher told me that my technique had improved immediately. I went from throwing random punches by extending my arms to using the force of my entire body, from thinking and worrying about every motion to just moving. All I needed, he said, was "a fucking target." He told me that I'll be ready to start sparring after a couple more sessions. What happens at Wu Tang PCA also happens outside. I left class at 5 and boxed all the way home—through Sara D. Roosevelt Park, across the Manhattan Bridge, through Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens, across the Gowanus Canal, down 3rd Avenue, past Our Lady of Częstochowa, then down 4th Avenue to my house. I moved like my target was putting my key in the door at 440 and that I needed to be aware the whole way. It was wonderful. Everything around me changed.

kop jai habibti yaa noo al-'ayn
อบใจ حبيبتي يا หนู العين

If you haven't seen me in a few years and would like to, your chance is coming up. I'm taking a train to KC early next week and will be in town until at least the first week of July. Leave me a message, call me, or go to Ruth Moore Park and throw a tennis ball at my house.

I got my mtDNA test results back from Argus BioSciences. Along with the scientific analysis, which was, pleasingly, much more technical than I had expected, Argus included a list of other people in my matrilineal haplogroup, either tested, like Jesse James and Tsar Nicholas II, or presumed, from their relationship through royal matrilineages to the Tsar.

This list was taken, word for word, from an article in Wikipedia. I knew this instantly, because I wrote the list in March 2006!

Does anyone here with no vision insurance need new glasses? I have several cards for LensCrafters that give the holder and household $80 off each complete pair of eyeglasses or prescription sunglasses for two years. I'll post them free. I didn't use any of them, because my insurance made it cheaper to buy from the ophthalmologist.

I set up Adium to use Google Talk, so now I don't have to by angry at Gmail anymore. Talk is turned off when I'm just checking my email, but I'm there when I'm open to chatting.

I went out to go to the ophthalmologist and get an exam, but I can't do a walk in 'appointment' until they open at 10. I'll stay up. An exam and glasses, with my vision insurance and coupon, should wind up costing $35 + $0.60(F) where F is the cost of frames.

I finally figure out how to add search results from Google Blog Search to Google Reader. This will help me more easily follow things I'll want to comment upon on the Radical Genealogist and elsewhere.

It's Spring Break, I'm not really doing anything on my papers, even though I've cut back to 3 days a week for my final 2 weeks at B&N. Let's hope it works better with 0. If I'm very motivated I'll go to the NYPL rather than back here to sleep after I do all I can today towards glasses.

It's warm enough that I can go to the store to get extra ingredients for my cooking in the middle of the night without needing a jacket, yet cool enough that cooking doesn't make my apartment too hot. The perfect night temperature.

* * *

BBC: 'Black Afrikaner' story to become film

From The Guardian 3 years ago:

Sandra's father wept and tried to explain to her about the laws which said she would have to attend a school for black or coloured children. Taking their cue from the state, the community punished the family: ignored at church, refused ice cream at shops, rejected by nine schools, cursed. Abraham Laing appealed in vain against Sandra's reclassification as coloured and she ended up in a boarding school 900km from home, lonely, a bedwetter. In 1967 she was reclassified white when the law changed to say the child of two white parents could not belong to another racial group. Blood tests proved she was the biological offspring of Abraham and Sannie.

By now Sandra felt more at ease with non-whites and at the age of 16 she eloped with a Zulu-speaking vegetable-seller, Petrus Zwane. "My father was furious because I married a black man. He threatened to shoot first me then himself if I ever put my foot over his threshold again." It was a step into another world, from ruling caste privilege to the oppression and poverty of townships. From apartheid there was no escape: Sandra would not be allowed to keep her two children unless she was reclassified coloured, as they were, but her father refused his consent, and without documents she had to eke out a living with odd jobs.

Deleted that really old book of books I'd been reading and replaced it with HTML copied from my LibraryThing. This should be faster to update.

Added a blogroll, including a link to items I've shared on Google Reader. If it has a feed, I read it there now. This includes blogs at Myspace, convenient if, like me, you have friends who blog there, but you don't like actually going to Myspace.

Constant subway announcement: "Pushcarts and pullcarts are not permitted on the escalator."

Pullcarts? What's the difference between a pushcart and a pullcart? Did someone say, "This isn't a pushcart. It's on the step below me so I'm obviously pulling it."

All the 'pull cart'/'pull cart' references I see on google are golf-related.

Knowing very little detail about early colonial Mozambique, I hadn't heard about this before, an eighteenth century expansion of European settlement in Southern Africa away from the more rigidly controlled (by European colonial governments/companies) coasts. This seems to be analogous at first to Boers expanding inland from the Cape, but had a very different character than in the also largely autonomous Dutch agricultural settlement of the Cape Province:

( 6ℙ )

Previous explanations of the difference between, say, the United States and Mexico, have tended to focus on the supposed higher Spanish Catholic tolerance for mixing resulting in a mixed population, and the lower English Protestant tolerance resulting in a non-mixed population. i would prefer to say that the difference is rather the acknowledgement of mixing, and thus the society allowing it to continue to take place multigenerationally rather than for people to be pushed off into one group or another and thus gradually become phenotypically less alike.

This distinction is extremely important. It acknowledges that people really do tend to be recently mixed in all descents from seventeenth century settler societies, as autosomal DNA tests are beginning to show. This is relevant not just to populations who have long-term ancestry in settler societies founded in post-Columbian colonial efforts. Even if your parents migrated from Ethiopia to Canada thirty years ago (or, of course, never left Ethiopia at all); these are just among the best documented and socially relevant in today's global identity structures.

If the difference is ideology formed in the past, it can be nullified in ideology formed about the past. Genealogy, traditional combined with genetic, has an important role to play here, as our results and those of our cousins begin to show the reality of a world in which ancestry is never location-bound for far in the past.

Too bad my research paper has to be on the twentieth century.

Whoa, my school is proud that its student services office is modeled after the DMV

The new OASIS, modeled after the improved New York State DMV Offices, combines the most vital administrative services at Hunter College into one conveniently located office.

Much like the DMV, it's closed on weekends. I can't get a new sticker for my card. I can't get into my own university library.