Two different worlds

Sensitivity training seems kind of bogus to me, like ethics training, I think people know what is right and wrong, and when they choose to do wrong it is for personal gain or spite, not because they didn’t know any better. Basically it is a way of punishing people, and often the people furnishing it at a profit are well-connected.

And here we are again seeing two separate worlds. I have to tell you I don’t see many cases of people having to do sensitivity training for insulting muslims, in fact I don’t see any. If this was the enlightened KBW you would be asked to submit this fact to the crucible, but it’s not, and I know what a hard time you have trying to find the sources for what you have read, so I will just dismiss it out of hand. There are cases where people have to undergo this silly sensitivity training, but it’s more for being rude to women or other racial or cultural groups in general, I don’t think ever for Muslims in particular.

I don’t think outside of the first world you find much sensitivity training, but since you don’t approve of it anyway, isn’t that a mark of their superiority?

For a guy who admittedly doesn’t get around you are pretty up to date about the jokes that you hear. Myself as a guy who gets around a bit more, I still hear as many redneck, blonde, and ethnic jokes as I ever did. I haven’t noticed any change in frequency over the last thirty years.

We hippies were never intolerant of straight people. I guess we might have told jokes about them, but surely less than they made up about us, but otherwise we had no power, we had no jobs to refuse them, we didn’t have our own police force to arrest them, we didn’t run around yelling at them: “Hey quit your job, grow out your hair.” I will be dismissing this charge out of hand.

Bundy was just a con man, wrapping himself in the flag to avoid paying the government money he owed it. The right got all excited about it because they love a guy on a horse waving the American flag while defying the American government, and if you throw in a bunch of bums with guns they get a hard on. The lamestream media (I have become fond of the phrase, thank you Sarah) picked it up a little bit because the Fox was roaring, but then when he said those racist things the right dropped him like a hot potato and the lamestream media which was never all that interested in him in the first place, did likewise.

I haven’t heard anything about him in weeks. No wait a minute, I think I have heard that the local gov is trying to get his armed and crazy yahoos out of town before they shoot somebody, probably themselves.

I think the reason the gov hasn’t moved on him is that they don’t want anything like another Ruby Ridge or Waco. He isn’t going anywhere and they can pick him up at their leisure once this all dies down.

Tolerance

Your last post got posted twice. The first one was labeled as a draft, and it was identical to the second one, so I took the liberty of deleting it.

The diversity in Christianity today is there in spite of, not because of, what the Romans did. They were never totally successful in suppressing the non-conforming cults, although Lord knows they tried. It took centuries of warfare, and the eventual adoption of the concept of freedom of religion by most of the civilized nations, to undo the damage that was done by the Romans.

It seems that, in the current climate of political correctness, tolerance is kind of a one way street. I have read about American people being required to take "sensitivity training" at work, where they are instructed to be tolerant of the Muslims in their midst, but I have never heard of similar training in the Islamic countries instructing their people to be tolerant of the Christians, Jews, or Hindus in their midst. I don't get around much anymore but, last I heard, it was no longer cool to tell ethnic jokes, but blondes and Red Necks were still fair game. It's been a long time, but I don't remember the Hippies being nearly as tolerant of the regular people as they wanted the regular people to be tolerant of them.

As far as I'm concerned, you can do anything you want in KBW, but leave me out of it. I don't tell you that you have to take up arms against the creatures of the forest, don't tell me that I can't vote against gay marriage just because I don't like the idea. I don't see why KBW and Beaglsonia can't peacefully co-exist, but I don't see a corporate merger in our future. It's a big country, there should be plenty of room in it for both of us.

 I looked up that Bundy thing while you were gone. This guy defied a couple of court orders and stood down a bunch of federal agents in an armed confrontation. Why is he not in jail? I'm sure that, if you or I did something like that, we would be locked up. Why is everybody focusing instead on his racial statements? They were just words after all.

Then there's those federal agents. What were they thinking? The judge ordered Bundy to get his cattle off of government property, which he refused to do. So, instead of just arresting Bundy for contempt of court, they go about trying to confiscate his cattle, some 900 of them, which are wandering around somewhere in an 800,000 acre tract of open range land. Rounding up all those cattle would be a daunting task, even without the interference of those protesters. Both sides were well armed, and it was just lucky that no shots were fired, at least not at people. A cow and a bull were put down because somebody decided they were dangerous, but it certainly could have been worse. If it wasn't for that local sheriff, who went back and forth between the groups mediating a truce, who knows what might have happened?

So Bundy and his cattle are still running around loose in violation of two court orders, and all anybody cares about is some off the wall comments that he made about colored people. Am I the only one who sees something wrong in this picture?

Christianity today

I don’t have much to say in favor of Christianity so the fact that it’s bigger doesn’t mean much to me. I suppose it’s better for the Christians though, instead of being fed to the lions they can make atheists pray with them in the schools. Oh and we have to say ‘under God,’ when we say the pledge of allegiance (which was written by a socialist). I remember when that first went in when we were in grade school, and as a matter of fact when I had to join in with the pledge as a substitute, there was always just a second’s hesitation to remember to add the ‘new’ phrase.

And I think there is plenty of diversity in churches today, the Catholics, the Unitarians, the hard shell Baptists, the gay friendly, the out and out bull goose loonies, the tepid Methodists. Those Catholics though, I have to tell you, have always spooked me, the hats, the robes, the candles, the gross statues. My Hoosier guests of last week always want to see the interior of some big church, and I always feel a little relieved when we leave the place and I can breath in that fresh secular air.

Everybody in KBW would have to be a KBW New Man. We would not tolerate traitors who would ruin it for everybody else. I suppose there would be some diversity, you could prefer the Cubs to the Sox, chocolate to vanilla, baseball caps to fedoras. But anytime you were called on to defend your beliefs in the crucible and you refused, it would be off to reeducation camp with you.

To be a little more serious, that diversity vs mono culture is a sticky wicket. People can speak their own language, wear their own clothes, sing their own songs, but if they want to use drugs in their religious services, or do that female circumcision, or refuse to take off their

burkhas for their drivers license photos, there are problems. Probably these things are best determined on an individual basis.

Remember when we were young and they always spoke of the melting pot, and now you dare not mention that, you have to talk about the taco salad. It was a screwy thing in education school which was full of its own strain of political correctness, you were supposed to take concern of somebody who was different, but you had to treat him the same as everybody else, but you shouldn’t treat everybody the same, because they are different, it was just this circular thing, that they sort of wanted to talk about, but then they didn’t, it didn’t make any sense. The final message was that you were supposed to celebrate diversity, but they didn’t want to talk about it how you did that.

How about if everybody gets to have their own holiday and parade but the next 364 days they have to act like everybody else?

The Same Only Different

I guess it all depends on how you define "better". You seem to be saying that Christianity is better now than it used to be, mainly because it's bigger. I think it was better before because there was more diversity and personal freedom. If you didn't like the church in your neighborhood, you could just walk down the street a couple blocks and find a different one, kind of like the way our parents chose to send us to Elsdon Methodist instead of St. Gall's Catholic. I know that you weren't happy at Elsdon, but do you think you would have been any happier at St. Gall's?

Historically, loyalty to your religion was equated with loyalty to your state or empire. If the king changed his religion, so did everybody else, if they knew what was good for them. Although Christianity spun off of Judaism, it wasn't long before it became a stateless religion. The Romans wouldn't have minded that if the Christians had acknowledged the Roman gods as being supreme, which they refused to do. This made the Christians suspect in Roman eyes as being disloyal to the empire, which is why the Romans fed the Christians to the lions. Before long, however, there were more Christians than the lions could eat, so the Romans figured that, if they couldn't beat the Christians, they might as well join them. That still left the loyalty question to be solved, which the Romans tried to do by putting all the Christians in the same box.

I think you're right, though, about that butterfly flapping its wings. There is no way of knowing how everything might have turned out if that one thing had gone the other way.

Your comments about the "new man" being essential to KBW, got me to thinking. Would everybody in KBW have to be the new man, or would there be room for some diversity? I always thought that diversity was a good thing, in spite of what my conservative colleagues might say to the contrary. You may remember that I have said I have no problem with individual minority people, it's the minority groups that make me nervous. The trouble with any group is that, the bigger it gets, the more it tries to "take over" and marginalize the other groups. I guess I can't blame them for that, since one or more of the other groups did the same to them when they were in charge. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said, "As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master." Now why can't everybody be like that?

Okay, we've got two schools of thought here, diversity and mono culture. While diversity seems to be the natural order of things, when humans get involved they usually try to make a mono culture out of it. Mono culture is probably the best way to get the most bushels of corn per acre, but it's a lot of work to maintain. Then, if some new corn bug blows in from somewhere, you stand to lose the whole crop for that year. Diverse plantings are hard to maintain too, in their own way, if you want to do everything with big machines, which you pretty much have to do if you want to make any money nowadays. It's a puzzlement, but maybe we're on to something here. Lets think about it for awhile and see where it leads us.

Despicable people

Most likely if Christianity had not been recognized by the Roman Empire the only thing we would know about it was what we read in dusty history books. Or if the Romans hadn’t helped them organize and kick out the dissenters, well who knows what we would have. Maybe we would have those prudish hippies like the early Christians, or maybe we would have a bunch of unprudish hippies like the wiccans, or maybe we would have some wild-eyed animal and infant slaughtering secret avenging cult. Fifteen hundred years it’s just too long a stretch of time, just to many flaps of that damn butterfly’s wings for us to say if this hadn’t happened then something else would have happened. I guess that’s what sells history books, and I guess what makes them interesting, but I don’t think a single incident has that much effect over a thousand and a half years.

But I think you are saying that if the Romans hadn’t interfered all these little cults had gone their own ways and stayed out of politics, then Christianity would have had less of a poker up its ass, and that would have been a good thing. Well maybe, that would have been more like building the new man as opposed to seizing power and ordering your idealistic agenda from above. The new manis the way I am currently using with the KBW. Yes we are stalled at the armed gates of Beaglesonia, but our strategy is that if we can crack this nut, then cracking all the other nuts should be child’s play. Plus, we like to argue.

What right is Shelton defending? The right to talk trash about black people? Is the lesson that the NBA is going to learn is not to try to punish people who talk trash about black people? If this had been some other owner who had done something like this and the value of Shelton’s NBA team was plunging, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he would have been calling for the other guy’s butt.

If you really look into this Shelton guy you will find he is more despicable than you had previously imagined. Not that that’s the point, despicable people have the same rights under the law as decent folk.

A little short this morning.  I have some friends coming in at eleven from Indianapolis, and they will be leaving Friday morning so I might not be able to get back to you until after the weekend.

Hang Together or Hang Separately

 Before Christianity became legitimatized by the Roman Empire it consisted mostly of small groups, usually meeting in secret. There was little central leadership, which enabled each group to pretty much go its own way. This used to give Peter and Paul fits, they would travel from one group to the other or send them letters trying to keep them in line, only to have them drift off on their own tangents again. It must have been more fun being a Christian in those days, providing that you could avoid being thrown to the lions.

When the empire assimilated Christianity, they deemed it necessary to have everybody believing the same things. The bishops held a series of conferences trying to come up with a uniform doctrine of faith and, after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, they finally did. I don't think many people were happy with the finished product, but they were told that it was the best the bishops could do and they would just have to live with it. From that point on, the church leadership had to expend a lot of effort stifling dissent, often using draconian measures that were never completely successful. After about a thousand years of this, there was the Protestant Reformation, which sparked centuries of religious warfare. I think that the American Founding Fathers had the right idea with their separation of church and state. We've had some religious conflict in our nation's history, but nothing like what they had in Europe.

The reason I said that about Sterling was, they told him that he couldn't own the team anymore, and that he would have to sell it. Well I don't know much about sports, but I do know that, when somebody is trying to intimidate you, you can't give them what they want because it just encourages them. If I was in Sterling's shoes, my reaction would be, "If I can't own the team, ain't nobody going to own the team!" I guess you could call that spite, but I would call it teaching them a lesson. I had never heard of Sterling before this, so I don't know if he's a nice guy or a mean prick, but I still can't help but wonder what he's doing having a colored girl friend and being in the sports business if he doesn't like colored people. There's probably more to this story than meets the eye, but it's just sports, so I'm not likely to look into it any deeper. I'm more interested in that Bundy thing, and I'll try to remember to Wiki it this weekend.

 I think I told you this before, sometimes "they" just means other people. The Big They would have a hard time pushing their shit on us if all the regular people would just refuse to cooperate, but you can't tell them people nothing. That's why I hardly say "we" anymore.

I wasn't aware that Beaglesonia was standing in the way of your KBW. I mean, we're four hundred highway miles apart, maybe three hundred as the crow flies, and there's lots of neutral territory between us. If you want to submit a list of specific grievances, I'll have my people get together with your people, and maybe we can work something out.

We have met the enemy and he is us, well not me and you, just all those other guys

I haven’t given you much to work with because you have been lecturing me on the bible so I haven’t had much to work with either. We have a tendency to recite to each other what we have read, but then the other person has probably read that too, so I think we get a little boring.

Okay, I’ll disagree with the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was becoming the state religion. As far as the Catholic hierarchy I think those funny hats come from some remnant of the Roman Empire, and surely without their funny hats to shock and awe their congregations they would surely have been gone by now. But maybe, as a former prot, and I’m not so sure about the former part from the way you talk about the bible, maybe you meant that whole Catholic hierarchy was a bad thing. But the pope was hardly the big deal he is today back in the middle ages when he hardly a place to hang his funny hats, and the peasants were served by illiterate priests who didn’t know anything and cults were constantly popping up like corn, and today Christianity is going great guns, fading a little in Europe but holding its own in the USA and growing at astonishing rates all over the rest of the world, so I don’t see how you can say that sharing the glory of Rome hurt it in any way.

It’s not the cattle scam that I was talking about with Bundy, it was how the Foxies and the more rightward libertarians who love to see armed guys defying the government (unless they are lefty or nonwhite), and whatever the militias have morphed into, loved this guy, loved him to pieces, and then when he said that racist stuff, they all abandoned him like a bald headed stepchild, well except for the militia types who generally have links to identity churches.

One thing about the Sterling thing is that when you buy into a sports league you have to sign a contract where you have to agree to certain behaviors lest you bring disgrace to the league and hurt its profits, so he doesn’t have that much freedom of movement. I have no comprehension of why you would invite him to destroy everything he has, why would he want to do that? Some kind of petty rage, against I have no idea who, like some teenager setting fire to the school because he got reprimanded? No wonder nobody takes your advice.

I call it a firestorm because of how powerful and it is that nobody dares to defy it, a little like that satan worshipping thing maybe twenty years ago when all those people were railroaded into long prison terms, by being accused of abusing children in their satanic cults, and none of their sane neighbors dared to defend them lest they be seen as fellow satan worshippers.

Political correctness generally doesn’t extend too far beyond academia, and even there unless you are some prof trying to defend your job or get tenure, it is just an annoying and silly set of rules that most people laugh at.

This is not your mysterious They who are behind the firestorms, this is We, well certainly not sophisticated and dispassionate characters such as ourselves, but the majority of the people of this country. You conspiracists are prone to see some mysterious coalition pulling the strings and hoodwinking the public, but in fact it is the public who is doing these things and the mysterious They of people who you think run things are just holding on like riding the tiger.

That is why KBW is starting with the people and working its way up, though we are currently stalled at the front gate of Beaglesonia.