Richard Garfinkle

An evil semi-supernatural health insurance executive who relishes deciding who lives and who dies.

But for the methods that might work, you should use the ones that you have the easiest time adapting to your own ways of communication. Just because something didn't work for one person, doesn't mean you have to scrap it. /4

But don't forget different methods of communication work for different people. If you know the person you're talking to well then you can pick a method likely to work with them. But if you don't then any method will be guesswork. Some don't work for anybody. Don't use those. 3

Then see what answer you are given and go on from there with a combination of pointed interrogatives and historical clarifications. /2

If you're generally concerned about the proactive kind of approach you've used, I often find that a sharp incisive question can work well. I this case something like, "Could you clarify what you're referring to with 'driving out the Pharisees'? I don't recall such an incident in the gospels." /1

But for the methods that might work, you should use the ones that you have the easiest time adapting to your own ways of communication. Just because something didn't work for one person, doesn't mean you have to scrap it. /4

But don't forget different methods of communication work for different people. If you know the person you're talking to well then you can pick a method likely to work with them. But if you don't then any method will be guesswork. Some don't work for anybody. Don't use those. 3

Then see what answer you are given and go on from there with a combination of pointed interrogatives and historical clarifications. /2

If you're generally concerned about the proactive kind of approach you've used, I often find that a sharp incisive question can work well. I this case something like, "Could you clarify what you're referring to with 'driving out the Pharisees'? I don't recall such an incident in the gospels." /1

Pointing out that attacks on Jews are in the same category (bigotry) as attacks on other peoples is not aggressive. You are standing up to aggression which does not make you aggressive.

I think the post you're responding to is aggressive. It seems to be saying that Jesus doing harm to Pharisees (and therefore to Jews) is laudable, whereas all other harms done to other peoples are bad.

/1

An evil semi-supernatural health insurance executive who relishes deciding who lives and who dies.

It's pretty cute. Cough. Um. In a nightmare inducing kind of way. Very gloomy and foreboding. Yeah. So, really evil job.

Screen shot from Discord, the username and avatar blocked off: "I am always puzzled when people go to the chatbots for important information, rather than relying on more reliable methods like astrology or guessing."

Spotted on a Discord this morning

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These are the same vaporwere vendors who collect money but never provide real products. They're using plagiarism engines to create promises they will never fulfill. I assume this is also true for all the crap neo-neo-classical monuments Trump keeps lusting after.

Why do people boast about their failures of imagination?

Also, you know what helps imagination: learning. The more one knows about and understands, the more material imagination has to work with.

They reveal nothing of themselves and create nothing memorable. They are just this Fool in this Idiot Plot this time. /5

The characters in such farces never realize that they are clowns showing off the absurdities of their social structures. The joke on them is that the more they self praise and disdain others, the less they are personally present. Such fools reveal only the folly of their societies. /4

Writers of comedy have always known this. The fool in power who disdains all below him is a recurrent character in comedy as are the fools who grovel before him treating his nonsense as wisdom because of the place he holds in the rigid social structure. /3

The behaviors that are praised and glorified in rigid social structures are breeding grounds for the weakest forms of farce. Where people of high status behave more and more rigidly while life collapses around them because they won't converse with those without that status. /2

Rigid social structures (including bigotries) mandate who talks to whom about what.

From a writing perspective rigid social structures inevitably produce Idiot Plots where problems would be solved if people would only converse, listen honestly, and treat each other as human. /1

They reveal nothing of themselves and create nothing memorable. They are just this Fool in this Idiot Plot this time. /5

The characters in such farces never realize that they are clowns showing off the absurdities of their social structures. The joke on them is that the more they self praise and disdain others, the less they are personally present. Such fools reveal only the folly of their societies. /4

Writers of comedy have always known this. The fool in power who disdains all below him is a recurrent character in comedy as are the fools who grovel before him treating his nonsense as wisdom because of the place he holds in the rigid social structure. /3

The behaviors that are praised and glorified in rigid social structures are breeding grounds for the weakest forms of farce. Where people of high status behave more and more rigidly while life collapses around them because they won't converse with those without that status. /2

Rigid social structures (including bigotries) mandate who talks to whom about what.

From a writing perspective rigid social structures inevitably produce Idiot Plots where problems would be solved if people would only converse, listen honestly, and treat each other as human. /1

You argue well and you have a sense of humor. The rest is commentary.

You argue well and you have a sense of humor. The rest is commentary.

Transcript of the photo: Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening -- on a lucky day -- without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

A reminder from historian Barbara Tuchman, from the introduction to her luminous 1978 book, "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century", that recorded news and written records always make the times look doomier than they are in reality.

It's one of the musicals I was brought up on.