To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
31
May
2017
Okay, God, I apologize. In the past, I have occasionally argued that you don’t intervene in worldly events. I have even suggested that you cannot intervene to fix things down here.
I was wrong. I must have been. Because Dan Rather writes in his Facebook blog, “I end each of my days with a silent prayer for my country… I hope against hope as I slip off to sleep that our rapid descent into governmental chaos has hit a nadir -- only to awaken to a new set of incoherent tweets or explosive headlines. I pray again that our Constitutional government, the great gift of our Founding Fathers, will provide a safety net to catch us before everything we hold dear is no more…”
If a famous news anchor like Dan Rather believes you can do something about the state of the world, who am I to disagree?
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: God, Dan Rather, intervention, prayer
28
Sorry, there’s no opinion column today. My brain cells went dead this week. Not that there was nothing to write about. Trump’s performances in the Middle East and at NATO; the election for a leader of the Conservative party; Okanagan Lake rising to record levels; two men stabbed to death for defending a couple of Muslim women on a train in Portland, Oregon; the governor of Texas jokes about shooting journalists; the Manchester bombing – there was ample fodder there.
But nothing jelled. Yet.
Fortunately, a number of letters about last week’s column are worth passing on.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags:
24
Your average termite is a stupid creature. It's a whitish grub. It has only rudimentary senses; it can't really see where it is going. It can do only two things -- crawl and chew.
But put a number of termites together and they will immediately start to build a home for themselves.
The mound that emerges is astonishingly complex. And the termites do this with no direction. No blueprints. No planning.
No one termite – especially not even the queen, who is little more than a living ovary -- has the intelligence to direct this construction. None of the termites knew what they were doing when they created it. But it is unquestionably real.
Nancy Ellen Abrams calls this an "emergent" phenomenon. It derives from the collective activity of those termites. But it is not them. It is more than them.
Tags: God, Ants, termites, emergent, transcend
21
This column will get probably me into trouble. The subject has already cost several professional journalists their jobs.
The subject is cultural appropriation. A better term might be cultural looting. One culture (specifically, white North Americans) adopts and abuses elements of another culture (in this case, the indigenous peoples who were here l0,000 years before us). White children beat tom-toms or parade in feathered headdresses. Cities name their sports teams Redskins or Indians.
Appropriation means taking something that rightfully belongs to someone else. The principle is widely recognized in copyright or patent infringement cases. My words belong to me. You cannot “appropriate” them without my permission.
Now appropriation has made its way into social taboos.
Tags: Cultural appropriation, Jonathan Kay, Lionel Shriver, Hal Niedzviecki
17
Donald Rumsfeld made one memorable quotation during his tenure as G.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”
In The Book of Awesome, Neil Pasricha translated Rumsfeld’s abstract theorizing into an everyday context -- learning to drive a car.
First, we don't know what we don't know. We think that driving will be easy.
Second. we discover how much we don’t know. My first driving lesson, for example, was in an ancient Austin with barely 20 horsepower. But when I dropped the clutch, a ton of metal crow-hopped around a field. I had no idea power could be so uncontrollable....
Tags: Rumsfeld, knowledge, growth, learning