I read this post by John Scalzi awhile ago. Both amusing and a pretty decent metaphor. Here are some highlights but worth reading the whole thing:
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon… Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:
A friend (a teacher) sent me a link to this:
Taylor Mali’s website is here.
To be a muddler is to recognize that the movement forward, however tentative the movement or however small the steps, is more valuable than a brief look at temporary tinsel. To be a muddler is to understand what optimism really is. To be a muddler is to be an American. There was muddling at Valley Forge. There was never a better muddler born than Abraham Lincoln. We do not celebrate our liberties because someone framed the Constitution one day, hanging a shining star, as it were, on the wall of the National Archives. We celebrate all the decades of muddling that we as a people — that We, The People — have done to make those words a living reality. When Martin Luther King, Jr. explained to the country, “Why We Can’t Wait,” he was announcing that the muddling had to accelerate. He wasn’t asking for the results. He was demanding the effort.
Brad DeLong’s observation from few months back is a keeper:
It is simply not the case that we can cheaply and easily buy things with money because it is valuable. It is, instead, the case that money is valuable because we can cheaply and easily buy things with it.
… [An] armed society … is the opposite of a civil society…
A favorite gun rights saying is “an armed society is a polite society.” [The suggestion is that if] we allow ever more people to be armed, at any time, in any place, this will provide a powerful deterrent to potential criminals. Or if more citizens were armed — like principals and teachers in the classroom, for example — they could halt senseless shootings ahead of time, or at least early on, and save society a lot of heartache and bloodshed.
As ever more people are armed in public, however — even brandishing weapons on the street — this is no longer recognizable as a civil society. Freedom is vanished at that point…
Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:
First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96) Continue reading
Brief and to the point:
“As a whole country reflects on these tragic events, we must recognize our society’s inability to deal with mental illness in a more effective way. It is also a clarion call to initiate effective legislation to keep automatic weapons out of the hands of private citizens.”
-Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Dec. 2012
“All colours on the palette are beautiful. And between adjacent colours harmony exists. At the completion of the work one should observe how the colours have randomly blended on the palette. Sometimes these random mixtures are so harmonious that it is impossible to forget the impression that they make. Often this accidental harmony is contrary to all expectations: the palette is a part of nature. If a certain mixture is particularly harmonious one should immediately try to enhance it. Even if this is usually futile, it helps one to understand why that harmony disappeared.”
– Wassily Kandinsky, The Palette
From her book:
It remains to be seen, as the current [2008] presidential campaign unfolds, whether Americans are willing to consider what the flight from reason has cost us as a people and whether any candidate has the will or the courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue affecting everything from scientific research to decisions about war and peace.
Interview with Bill Moyers in 2008 here. Her points are still very relevant today.
