A New Kind of Intolerance?

Here's a story that made me sad. If you don't have time to read it, let it suffice to say that a teenaged girl,  Jessica Ahlquist, went to court against her school in order to have a banner removed from the wall -- a prayer that had been written by a former student of the school and that had hung on the wall in the place for forty-nine years -- and she won. Ahlquist is an atheist and she found the prayer offensive.

Some have labeled this girl as "evil" and others have lauded her as a champion of the ideal of "separation of church and state" that is contained in the first amendment of the United States Constitution.

I have always been mystified by people's interpretation of this short passage:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [my italics]; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Timeline Tantrums

The latest panic is the new "timeline" thing on Facebook. If I gather correctly, this new setup will allow people to easily access one's past posts. Here's an excerpt from an article on the topic (hat tip: Dr. William Lutz):

...everyone will get the new Timeline. And here’s the important part: when you do, you’ll have just seven days to preview what’s there now, and hide anything you don’t want others to see.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Facebook Timeline makes it far easier for you to travel back through your Facebook posts – posts which normally disappeared off your Wall and into oblivion. The posts from these previous months and years are now accessible through new navigational elements on the right-side of your screen that let you quickly travel back in time to the day you were born.

You can fill in data from your pre-Facebook years using the new status update box, which now includes support for adding a specific year and various “life events.”  These events include things like marriages, births, deaths, new jobs, trips and vacations, new homes, and other things you might want to record in the scrapbook-like Timeline.

With Timeline’s added ability to find older posts, including those from the days before your boss, grandparents, mom and dad were on Facebook, users will need to do a rapid cleanup on their profiles when the Timeline goes live.

The One Basket Rebellion

Maybe there's more somewhere else?

One of my recurring themes/annoying repeated trumpetings (depending on your perspective) has been that the biggest mistake most people make is to assume things are either simple or, at least, to assume that they are simpler than they actually are. This is most likely a result of the fact that things are bigger than we are capable of understanding, but another post on that later.

Conventional wisdom guides many of us (especially those who like to say "well, he may be smart, but does he have common sense?"). But maybe it is a time to push certain bits of conventional wisdom aside and make room for more analysis. (Or, at least, to have a little fun.)

In Defense of "Happy Holidays"

As a "word guy" I am annoyed by a lot of things people say and I have referenced a few of them on H&R. And, like a lot of you, I'm turned off by "doublespeak" and jargon and I am suspicious of anything that is considered "politically correct," not only because being politically correct seems cowardly (even though it is often kind, though more often beneficial to the speaker), but because I have learned that whatever politically correct word or phrase one picks, someone is bound to figure out a way to be offended by it; and, even if a politically correct statement is okay today, it might not be okay tomorrow.

(Think of the progress from that most atrocious of n-words (from the corrupted word "negro") to the gentler "colored" to the proudly proclaimed "black" and, eventually, to the "politicaly correct" "African American" -- a phrase, by the way, that a black college student of mine one voiced violent objection to: "If I hear one more person in this room refer to black people as African Americans, I'm going to flip." His objection was that he was black, but of West-Indian descent and that calling him African American was simply incorrect and that is was also a default disregarding of his culture. He saw, he said, no more problem being referred to as "the black guy" than he would imagine a ginger person should have with being called "the red-haired guy.")

The Great Teacher (A Parable)

The school was a great, open field. The Great Teacher watched from the sunlit hill.

Three teachers stood before his class, next to a great stack of bricks -- special bricks, that were called "facts."

The first teacher picked up a fact-brick and held it out. One at time, the students approached and took the offering from his hands. When each student was supplied, the teacher commanded: "Now, keep returning to me and put your bricks in a stack. You will make the biggest pile possible, for I will hand you many, many bricks before the sun falls."

The Great Teacher frowned.