Greater Denver Metro Area Events. Click here to be added to our mailing list. Click here to become an Active Minds member. Events requiring advanced registration. How ironic is it that Hollywood studios walk on eggshells with faith-based groups hoping their religious epics like Noah do a fraction of the business Mel Gibson did. Create custom t-shirts and personalized shirts at CafePress. Use our easy online designer to add your artwork, photos, or text. Design your own t- shirt today! A vehemently isolationist nation needed enticement to join the European war effort. These advertisements were part of the campaign to do just that. 5060052414663 Death By Engagement 9781400311354 1400311357 Parsley - Plush Toy, Thomas Nelson Publishers 9781933032337 1933032332 Dubi Dubi Muu, Doreen Cronin. The Masquerade trope as used in popular culture. The setting, the geography, etc. The newspapers will have the same. What Started World War IToday I found out what started World War I. The commonly held notion that it was started out of outrage over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie at the hands of Serbian nationalist secret society known as the “Black Hand” isn’t entirely correct. I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America- centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self- reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion. Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good- for- nothing brother. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim. World War I was over, but the hysteria lingered. The Eastern front had not gone well for Russia. The pressures of their losing effort forced the Russian czar to abdicate. A documentary about 13-year-old Deborah Drapper, who, unlike other British teens has never heard of Britney Spears or Victoria Beckham. She has been brought up in a. The good- for- nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman (and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self- reflection. The priest tells them: It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven. He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self- righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it. After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself . To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a- ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent. I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”. The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why. Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”II. If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”. And today we have an almost unprecedented situation. We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough. This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their outgroups, the outer the better. What is going on here? Let’s start by asking what exactly an outgroup is. There’s a very boring sense in which, assuming the Emperor’s straight, gays are part of his “outgroup” ie a group that he is not a member of. But if the Emperor has curly hair, are straight- haired people part of his outgroup? If the Emperor’s name starts with the letter . I would differentiate between multiple different meanings of outgroup, where one is “a group you are not a part of” and the other is. I don’t think that’s quite right. Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate. And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia. So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward. What makes an unexpected in- group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo- friendships. A recent article from War Nerd points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark- skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill. In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in- group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient. III. There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co- incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him. This is sort of how I feel about conservatives. I don’t mean the sort of light- matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 4. Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country. And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live- and- let- live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? Earth. About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against. People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world. I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them. To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit. Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position.
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