Number
204
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Heard on the radio: "Stocks are cautiously higher." I don't think stocks all by themselves can be cautious. People may ascribe emotions to buyers and sellers of stocks.
Jan sent more signs:
On our recent trip to
Minnesota and South Dakota to visit friends, I came across three more signs for
my "silly signs list." Upon reaching a low spot in the road that
crosses a rather large stream, the sign said, "When flooded, do not drive
in." (Well, duh...) The other said, "Watch out for the
crosswinds." (They should be along any minute!") The third and my
favorite, "Beware of possible strong wind." (...or impossible weak
wind, or anyone standing here that might pass wind.) Enough!
I had to confess that I did drive into a flooded road once. I don't even know if it was a creek. I've been blown around by strong winds too. Would signs have helped?
Christopher Hitchens wrote in Slate about taboo words ("Hatred will always outpace linguistic correctness"), much in the news lately. In one example, "a local teacher praised her class for being so 'discriminating' and provoked floods of tears and much anguish." The students were accustomed to hearing "discriminating" used only to refer to racial prejudice, rather than its basic meaning, the ability to make fine distinctions.
University of Chicago scholars Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro compiled a list of Republican and Democrat terms, that is, words or phrases favored by politicians to tilt discussions to their own political ends. It's not clear to me why some of them mean one thing more than another, or why author Jack Shafer says that just the name Terri Schiavo "telegraphs to his ears the warblings of a pure-blooded Republican". Wouldn't the name have to be modified in some way before you could tell whether the speaker was Dem or GOP, like "vegetable Terri Schiavo" or "killed Terri Schiavo"? But Shafer's own phrasing reveals his own political opinions very clearly.
The Foreign Office in England wants to drop the term "war on terror" to avoid angering Muslims. Well, maybe that will work.
Got phobias? (overwhelming fears when no real threat exists.) A new one has been added ~ do you suppose it's in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders yet? ~ Islamophobia. This is applied to anyone who critiques Islamic ideas or behavior. Is it realistic to be afraid of jihadists? Thousands of Pakistani Muslims rioted in protest when the government changed Islamic (sharia) rape laws (e.g. four witnesses are necessary to prove rape ~ witnesses for the plaintiff, that is; it doesn't work with gang rapes). Usually the female (even if she's a child) is the one punished, often by death. It's like the old hippy joke, "Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not really after you."
Here, the psychiatric term phobia is applied to opinions that people object to morally or politically, thus avoiding the actual issues. It was probably inevitable that the term homophobia would arise when homosexuality was listed as a psychiatric disorder. So people were reduced to calling each other crazy. Now that homosexuality is no longer classified officially as a disease, we have a psychiatric label for people who object to it.
Islam itself is not listed as a mental disorder, so this one-sided name-calling allows people to ignore very specific legal and political realities, such as the instance of sharia rape laws in Pakistan. A Canadian judge is contemplating letting Canadian Muslims adhere to sharia law in their community there, at least for domestic issues such as divorce.
And now Iran has convened an anti-Holocaust conference, which was attended by our own David Duke. It always confuses me that the same people who deny the Nazi Holocaust are the ones who want to carry out one of their own. It's the logic thing again.
Hey, call me paranoid.
Something about the recent news has dredged up from my variable memory two passages from a couple of my favorite books, which illustrate common human difficulties in understanding experience and other people.
In Northanger Abbey, Chapter 16, by Jane Austen, the clever Henry Tilney is talking to simple Catherine Morland:
Henry smiled, and said,
“How very little trouble it can give you to understand the motive of other
people’s actions.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced, What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person’s feelings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered ~ but, How should I be influenced, What would be my inducement in acting so and so?”
The moral of this is: Many of us are inclined to evaluate the behavior and speech of people from very different ~ diverse! ~ cultures by our own standards. That is naive. Catherine was confused not only by her own lack of experience, but by her habit of reading lurid gothic novels ~ narrow experience plus narrow reading.
In Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, when a man named
Catchpole told Jim some not wholly unexpected but disturbing truths, Jim "felt curiously frightened, as if Catchpole were trying
to pick a quarrel with him." And after Catchpole had told him his
story, Jim thought, "It didn't seem the kind of
theory to which belief or disbelief could be attached."
The moral of this is: When we are confronted with unwelcome facts, we often feel defensive and reject them, or else refuse to make a judgment. That is dangerous. In Jim's case, it would be to his advantage to accept this new information, but he was stuck in a habit of self-defeating behavior that was hard for him to face and quit.
I'm reading Conservatize Me (a play on Supersize Me) by John Moe, subtitled: "How I tried to become a righty with the help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith, and Beef Jerky." Moe is a (liberal) radio producer and host in Seattle, and a humor writer, sort of a poor man's Dave Barry. He took a month to tour what he considers right-wing or conservative venues to see if he could be "converted". It's not easy to look fairly at ideas you consider the opposite of your own firmly held beliefs. He girded his loins, literally, by buying what he considered the appropriate and necessary wardrobe to fit in with both white collar and blue collar "rightys". He discovered that he liked beef jerky a lot. There's no bibliography so I guess he didn't do any intensive reading. I was puzzled by one remark he made when interviewing William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. Kristol was discussing how and why the country has changed, comparing today with the America of, say, 20 years ago, and Moe asked himself, "Why does this guy keep bringing up the past? Oh yeah. He's a conservative." Don't liberals consider the past too, or only the future? Maybe Moe is just a little too young to have a sense of the past (the past being the 1980s). Frankly, I'm puzzled, as the magazine subscription promos used to say. Maybe he was joking and I'm not sufficiently used to his style to tell. But I don't think so. This is the tricky thing about conveying humor through writing. It takes a lot of skill to do it without emoticons, and even if he did a wink wink nudge nudge, would we know for sure if he were laughing at Kristol or at himself?
I can't speak for other parts of the Mid-East but in the larger cities of Egypt where we visited (Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Hurghada), plus some smaller towns, there was a call to prayer (or is that wishes), three times a day. This was done on a city or town wide, public announcement system. Let the chanting begin!
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