Thursday: swim, track, history

I took A. to her swim lesson. It went great and was extended to 45 minutes.

I took T. to track.

I ordered T. next size up pants, because he needed more pants and when I talked to him about that, he said he wanted them a little bigger.

I am trying to read Framing the Early Middle Ages. On page 32 there is a paragraph summarizing some of the puzzlers surrounding the decline of the eastern empire to the Byzantine heartland (Aegean plus Anatolian plains) followed by its recovery. “How the empire climbed out of the terminal crisis it appeared to be in in 717-18, and established itself as a prosperous, coherent, expansionist polity by the late ninth century, is not the subject of this book — nor is it easy to explain, for that matter — but it must be remembered that this revival did indeed occur: the crisis was superable, and was overcome. This can act as a warning against the teleologies that are often applied to western states in the same period; political structures did not have to break down after major military defeat and territorial loss.”

So. I think, I bet there was a climate thing going on there.

Very, very light googling confirms a pattern of droughts that matches the decline, followed by a wetter period that matches the recovery. Some people who are working in this area are arguing that you know, probably should not try to do history without the climate science. I am inclined to agree with them.

Not sure how well this book is going to hold up. It should not be this easy to notice big gaps.

ETA: I went to Savers in the morning and dropped some things off. I walked with M.

If You Are Going to Quote Scripture

So, I am reading Unstuffed, and I am not happy about it. There is a bunch of garbage in here about how stuff is paid for with money that you get from hard work. This is not a good description of reality, but, fine.

However, in a discussion of saying no, and how it is important to do, and etc., she says this. “In the end, a simple, direct no is usually the most effective. It eliminates the expectation of any other possible outcome and quickly frees up both the person asking and the person answering. It allows you to check off the item on your mental list instead of wasting additional thought on it. Even the Bible advocates a direct approach. Jesus, in Mathew 5:37, says, “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’, or ‘No”; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

OK, then, we are going to be doing scripture now.

This is fucking from the Sermon on the Mount and there is context and the context is all quite clearly about oaths. Really. He is running down the various commandments, and spends 4 verses on oaths. It is said, do not swear falsely. Well, do not swear at all! Not by this, not by that, not by the other thing, just yes or no and anything else is bad.

This is NOT about whether you are being weaselly on agreeing to or not agreeing to doing something that someone asks of you. It is about swearing an oath, and how followers of Jesus should — or, specifically should not — swear. Your word is supposed to be good, if you are a follower of Jesus, whether you swore an oath or not (actually, now that I think about this, boy is this politically relevant right now). You do not need a rule about not perjuring yourself, if you always tell the truth. And when you have a look at how far people have been willing to throw down over this scripture, misinterpreting it really seems pretty bad! ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath#Christian_tradition Altho would you really want to be in the company of Franklin Pierce for anything, ever, under any circumstances!

Look, I do not like the quoting of scripture in general. Please. Leave it be. If you cannot say this in a more general purpose way, I wonder why you wrote it at all. But if you are going to quote scripture, at the very least, try not to get a major chunk of the Sermon on the Mount wrong. It will stick in my craw, and I will complain. And I bet other people are going to be really put off by it, too.