Tag Archives ⇒ sat

Regarding Pronouns

April 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

On Quak­erQuak­er, Kir­by Urn­er starts a dis­cus­sion on pro­nouns which is not the dis­cus­sion you might expect:

I pay a lot of atten­tion to pro­noun use. Peo­ple often say “our nuclear weapons” and/or “what we did in Viet­nam”. I don’t have any nuclear weapons, nor do my friends.

Kir­by’s lost reminds of the clas­sic “What do you mean we, white man” Lone Ranger / Ton­to joke.

Part of the deal of the mod­ern nation state and its trap­pings of democ­ra­cy is that we all own it togeth­er. The peas­antry could be lack­sidaisi­cal when they were jiat doing the bid­ding of whichev­er duke/warlord/king con­trolled the plot of land in which their ances­tral vil­lage now sat. But now we fight nation­al wars because the state is us. It’s most­ly a load of huey but it dis­arms what should be the nat­ur­al Chris­t­ian (and plain human) dis­taste for jin­go­is­tic tribalism.

http://www.quakerquaker.org/m/discussion?id=2360685%3ATopic%3A159446

Live Web Coverage from FGC (not)

July 3, 2005
· Martin Kelley

23028940_2a342308d2Over on Beppe­blog Joe dreams of dai­ly web cov­er­age of the FGC Gath­er­ing [Update: link long dead]. Well, FGC’s not pay­ing its web­mas­ter (me, for now) for such ser­vice but I’ll try to sneak in a few posts between book­store cus­tomers. The book­store set-up was remark­ably easy. There was no truck cri­sis, no com­put­er cri­sis, no get­ting lost on highways.

As reg­u­lar read­ers will know, I’m lead­ing a work­shop called “Strangers to the Covenant” with Zachary Moon and this morn­ing was the first work­shop. Although it was billed as a work­shop for high school stu­dents and adult young Friend (so 15 – 35 years old), though almost all of the par­tic­i­pants are high school­ers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fif­teen min­utes ear­ly to cen­ter in wor­ship; two of the atten­ders came in the room and sat with me and one by one every­one came in and joined the wor­ship. I had to won­der if a group of old­er Friends would have been able to resist the temp­ta­tion to ask about each oth­er’s jew­el­ry, com­plain about the air con­di­tion­ing, etc.

Julie reports that the cafe­te­ria food is good. We’ve also been hap­py patrons of Gillie’s and Bol­lo’s Cafe.