Enjoying the view from Limbo
A Symptom.— Public shaming implies a character that is incapable of mercy, which implies a lack of empathy, which implies an inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, which implies seeing the other as specially separate and thus essentially unfamiliar. The inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, i.e., to see the subjectively unfamiliar as objectively familiar, indicates an uncivilized man....
Len Goodman, a BBC personality of some sort, joked during a discussion of various foods related to the Queen’s jubilee that he had once been hesitant to try curry, which his grandmother used to refer to as “foreign muck,” although he has since become an enthusiastic curry eater. In response to this utterly innocuous comment — the sort of comment that could only be...
Ken Jennings, a well-known former Jeopardy champion who will be guest-hosting the game show in the wake of Alex Trebek’s death, is under assault from the social media sensitivity police, or “compassion cops” as I prefer to call them, because he made a couple of remarks on Twitter some years ago that some people (aka the compassion cop mob) find so offensive that...
Perhaps it’s the Roman Catholic in me, but for whatever reason I am occasionally gripped by an inchoate need for purification through speech, a sort of confessional moment if you will, in which I divest myself of a few wayward thoughts in order to regain my equilibrium. This is one such occasion. Bear with me. Better yet, given that, if you are reading...
I clicked on an article from USA Today — a most aptly named rag at this moment — not to read the story, of course, but to see the pictures. Two pictures, to be precise. The first is a lighted roadside sign, the kind that normally says things like, “Church potluck at 7pm,” or “Everyone welcome.” This one reads, “Keep Social Distancing.” And...
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