Stuff That Really 'Grinds My Gears...'

[Voynaimor]

It starts next Tuesday at 1:30PM UTC. Don’t be late.

But will it be televised?

[MarjaE]

Misuse of ethnonyms, such as:

“Philistine” for someone who doesn’t like the arts.

“Samaritan” for a charity.

“Vandal” for someone breaking stuff.

“Gothic language” not to refer to the Gothic language, but to the English language in that branch of English literature called Gothic.

It begins with someone using their knowledge to spread ignorance, and then it ends up with ignorance obscuring knowledge. People can’t imagine that the Philistines built cities, had art, and so on.

[chenille]

I wonder if the average Vandal might not have been entirely insulted that over a millennium later, the successors of Roman learning would still remember just how well they broke their things. Likewise I could imagine Byzantines taking it as an unintentional compliment that our language shows our ancestors never did quite understand them.

I’m sure the Spartans at least would have considered our adjectives a fitting memory. Philistine on the other hand is definitely a completely unfounded insult, and one never even suggested by their enemies at the time, at that. Samaritan is a strange compliment based on a story for people who otherwise hated them. There are still Samaritans today – I wonder if any have said anything about it?

[Voynaimor]

“Philistine” for someone who doesn’t like the arts.

Blame Carlyle.

Also J B Cabell, who in Jurgen refers to the United States as Philistia

It begins with someone using their knowledge to spread ignorance, and then it ends up with ignorance obscuring knowledge.

Ah! Philistinism. [ooops…]

[Donald_Petersen]

Samaritan is a strange compliment based on a story for people who otherwise hated them

Since Sunday school, I’ve always had the impression that the Good Samaritan was thus labeled to reflect he was a good guy who happened to be identifiably Samaritan. (Not, I hope, to distinguish him from all other Samaritans because they are not good.) At any rate, I don’t often run into usages without the “good” modifier. Even though that story is the only modern mention of Samaritans that gets much day-to-day usage, it seems awfully weird to imply that someone who does kindness to strangers would be some generic Samaritan, as opposed to being metaphorically comparable to the Good one.

[nimelennar]

Since Sunday school, I’ve always had the impression that the Good Samaritan was thus labeled to reflect he was a good guy who happened to be identifiably Samaritan. (Not, I hope, to distinguish him from all other Samaritans because they are not good.)

What I’ve always heard is this:

The parable starts with Jesus being asked “Who is my brother?” (i.e. “Who should I love as I love myself?”). The Israelite in the parable, who had been beaten and robbed and left for dead, was passed by a priest and a Levite, who should, as holy men, have been inclined to help a fallen countryman. And then the Good Samaritan came along. It was important that the person helping was Samaritan not because Samaritans are bad, but because a Samaritan in particular would have no reason to help an Israelite.

Isaac Asimov said that to interpret the parable correctly, you should imagine it happening in Alabama in the 1950s, where a white man lying wounded in the street is passed by a white minister, a white mayor, and then finally helped and taken in by a black sharecropper. It’s not that the Samaritans were bad people among themselves, but there wsa a lot of hate going both ways which makes it shocking that the Samaritan, of all people, would be the one to stop and help, and would be the one held up as an example of the brother you should love as you love yourself.

If Jesus were preaching today, I can only imagine that the robbery victim would be dressed up in Antifa gear, and the Samaritan would be wearing a MAGA hat — or vice-versa — and the ones passing by would be the assault victim’s supposed ideological allies. I have a hard time imagining, in either case, that the “Samaritan” would stop and help rather than taking the opportunity to kick their foe while they were down. But then, that seems to be the entire point being made.

I still think of my morals as being Christian ones, despite the underlying faith that inspired them no longer being there. And it pains me deeply to think that a nation which considers itself Christian would discard the message of that parable so thoroughly that any two groups would adopt the historical hatred between the Samaritans and the Israelites against each other, rather than treating each other as brothers as they were commanded to.

[Melizmatic]

Isaac Asimov said that to interpret the parable correctly, you should imagine it happening in Alabama in the 1950s, where a white man lying wounded in the street is passed by a white minister, a white mayor, and then finally helped and taken in by a black sharecropper. It’s not that the Samaritans were bad people among themselves, but there was a lot of hate going both ways which makes it shocking that the Samaritan, of all people, would be the one to stop and help, and would be the one held up as an example of the brother you should love as you love yourself.

Damn smart man, even though I’ve never really cared for his style of writing.

[Donald_Petersen]

I have a hard time imagining, in either case, that the “Samaritan” would stop and help rather than taking the opportunity to kick their foe while they were down.

I actually have a harder time imagining the kicking taking place. I was reading, earlier today, about bystander syndrome, and how we’re less likely to help somebody in need if there’s a crowd of bystanders, the “logic” more or less being an affirmative assumption in our minds in response to “won’t somebody help that poor man?” Sure, somebody will, so it doesn’t have to be me.

But on our own, isolated road to Jericho, without an audience to perform in front of, and without a crowd of others who could assume responsibility, I think it relatively (even surprisingly, to myself) easy to imagine the antifa dude helping out the guy in the MAGA hat, and vice versa. I’m not saying it would happen nearly often enough to be counted on, alas, but somehow I still kinda expect that behavior.

I don’t think we’ve completely murdered that part of the human condition yet.

[ChuckV]

Since Sunday school, I’ve always had the impression that the Good Samaritan was thus labeled to reflect he was a good guy who happened to be identifiably Samaritan. (Not, I hope, to distinguish him from all other Samaritans because they are not good.)

The Jews and Samaritans of the day hated each other. Or, perhaps only Jesus had issues with them…

[Donald_Petersen]

Sure, but his point was that just because someone is hated does not mean that they are actually bad. The two guys you’d expect to be helpful, because they are both pious and philosophically on the victim’s team, were not as helpful as the decent human being (the “Good” part) who happens to be on the wrong team (the “Samaritan” part). The takeaway is that even the people you think you have cause to hate may turn out to be better than you think, and that you really ought to strive to be a better person than the people who hate you think you are. Even (or especially) when you have them at a disadvantage. Loving one’s neighbor doesn’t have quite as much impact on improving the world when they’re easy to love.

[nimelennar]

Loving one’s neighbor doesn’t have quite as much impact on improving the world when they’re easy to love.

From the Sermon on the Mount:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

[Voynaimor]

My memory of Religious Education classes two decades ago is admittedly a little hazy but I thought that the parable is intended to be a criticism of piety, in contrast to the spirit of Christian fellowship embodied by the Samaritan; the people who passed the wounded man didn’t just ignore him because they didn’t want to get involved but because contact with blood would have made them ritually unclean and therefore unable to enter the temple.

That as well.

Incidentally, I heard a story yesterday from a local farmer about another farmer, some years ago. This guy was a Catholic. On Christmas Day he had a cow with milk fever, which is nasty. When the vet arrived, the cow was in a bad way. The vet said,
“How long has she been like this?”
“Oh, since first thing this morning.”
“Why didn’t you call me out earlier?”
“I had to go to mass”.
The vet said he was totally taken aback and then said “What kind of a farmer leaves a cow in agony to go to a church service?” - and proceeded to tell all the other farmers what had happened.

So the attitude of the priest and the Levite survives two thousand years of Christianity.

[Voynaimor]

I wonder if the average Vandal might not have been entirely insulted that over a millennium later, the successors of Roman learning would still remember just how well they broke their things.

The odd thing is that “Viking” hasn’t become a pejorative term, if anything the reverse.
Perhaps it was because they tended to stick to soft targets like monasteries rather than tough targets like Rome. When they got to this part of the world, my distant ancestors got their bottoms handed to them on a plate by Alfred at Edington and were Christianised, so perhaps they were just seen as warm and fuzzy tourists with funny hats. Whereas the Vandals (and the Goths, Ostrogoths, Vizigoths, and, as it says in Asterix, “tous les autres especes de Goth”) actually did bring down the Western empire.

[DaakSyde]

Today I got to watch an iPhone user try and fail to use Siri voice commands to send a message while GPS navigation was up. He had to exit out of the navigation to use it.

Android does allow you to use voice commands during navigation and Google chose today to highlight that feature for me. As I was looking up an ETA for a trip, it popped up a big message “Try saying ‘Call Mom’”. Google, who knows everything about all of us (it’s seen my emails about the funeral, it knows my call history), surely knows that this is the first holiday season that I can’t call my mom. And that the last time that I could was last holiday season. So thanks a lot for that reminder Google.

Found the setting to turn it off. Language and Input - Voice search - “Ok Google” detection. (It was all turned off previously until they added some new feature and turned it on.)

[Voynaimor]

it popped up a big message “Try saying ‘Call Mom’”.

When you make AI a key selling point for your platform, letting a 20 year old code a default message can make you look pretty bad. The worst of it is, it could have been set to suggest the person you call most often, so it was just laziness and lack of thought.

[gadgetgirl]

The worst of it is, it could have been set to suggest the person you call most often, so it was just laziness and lack of thought.

Don’t give them that much credit. My money’s on hard-coded text. I don’t have a “Mom” in my contacts because I spell it “Mum”, but I’ve got the same prompt.

So even lazier and even more lack of thought.

[Voynaimor]

Yes, that’s what I was saying. Hard coded. And by someone who thinks the entire world refers to its parent as “Mom”, which tends to provide geographical focus.

Edit - I’ve realised you misunderstood my post. I’m using “could” in English (i.e. “as an alternative to what actually happened”) while you’re using it in paraAtlantic as could as in “it is possible that”.
I’ve been caught by that one before drafting memos, I should have remembered.

It reminds me of how early “wait” icons were hourglasses until someone pointed out that most of the world has never seen them and they were replaced by a watch icon.And it was pointed out that much of the word didn’t tend to have watches and in those days most cheap watches were digital. And then finally we ended up with rotating dot icons, which are kind of an abstract dial clock.

Also, that Apple was supposed to have had a sales boost in the early days because a French Canadian senior manager made it easy to do basic accented characters. Bill Gates knew no French or German, and Windows is still utter crap at writing non-English languages on a standard keyboard.

[LearnedCoward]

Google, who knows everything about all of us (it’s seen my emails about the funeral, it knows my call history), surely knows that this is the first holiday season that I can’t call my mom.

Algorithmic cruelty.

My phone sometimes autocorrects common words to email addresses of dead people. First off, why would I want to type an email address, belonging to someone else, in something that’s not an address field? Also, I haven’t contacted these people in years, because they’re dead, so why would I want to type their email addresses anyway?

Rare words should be removed from the list of learned words anyway, because otherwise they just clutter up the autocorrect. Phone predictive text all looks like it was written by a 20-year-old comp sci student before he switched his major to construction management.

[Melizmatic]

Back to the actual topic, as opposed to smart-phone programming fails;

_{Having allergies simultaneously sucks and blows.}

That is all.

[infundibulum]

Ah the first “I’LL SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS IF I WANT NEENER NEENER NEENER” facebook posts of the year.

Enjoy it before darkness falls and there is nothing, I guess.