Sunday short takes

[cellio]

The snow on the dafodils yesterday morning was very pretty. I should have gone inside for the camera, but I didn't -- and it was gone when we got back later.

Sunday dinner was pleasant. We had corned beef and cabbage (delayed from St. Patrick's day). Also some very tasty potatoes and (later) wonderful if misspelled creme bruille. Yum!

After dinner some of us played Cosmic Wimpout. I'd heard of the game but never seen it before. I'd always assumed that it was some sort of knock-off or spoof of Cosmic Encounters, but it's unrelated. It's a dice game with a gambling element.

Dani took an early lead with a 180-point turn (most of us were getting about 30 points a turn, if we scored at all). When he topped 500 and we all got one final chance to beat him, I had a good turn and beat him by about 30 points. So then he got a final chance to go against me, but he didn't score. That was not how I expected that to turn out at all.

(The black die has a wild spot on it that isn't on the other dice. Belatedly I realized that I don't know which face it replaces. That would seem to matter to the odds.)

In other news... the Trib printed my letter on Sunday. The Sunday edition has higher circulation than any weekday, so that's nice.

This Shabbat I was once again reminded of how most people at my synagogue seem to assume that all liberal Jews are politically very liberal. It drives me nuts. I wonder if some of my fellow congregants would say some of the hateful things they say if they realized that there's someone in the room who actually holds the opinions they're deriding. (I see little interest in actual debate/discussion.) I have no problem with disagreement; my problem is with unnecessary snideness and rudeness in denegrating the other side of any conflict. In my experience, the ultra-liberals seem to be somewhat more prone to this sort of thing than are the ultra-conservatives, with the exception (from the latter camp) of the anti-abortionists.

Comments

[goljerp]

I think that the problem is that in America today, people tend to assume that a bunch of different beliefs go together. So if someone knows that you're, say, "pro-choice", the assumption often is that you're also for gun control. And the reverse, as well. (Although why those go together I have no idea.) Similarly I have a friend who is thinking seriously about home schooling. For some reason, people seem to assume that because of this she takes a right-wing conservative stance on other issues. (Not that I think that home schooling is, in and of itself, particularly right-wing)

Anyhow, my two cents.

[jducoeur]

No kidding. I get painted as everything from ultraliberal to arch-conservative, depending on the topic at hand. It's remarkable how devoutly people trying to lump the entire world into two camps, with a sharp Manichaean divide.

(I think of myself as "sensibly libertarian", which puts me at odds with pretty much all of the well-defined camps, including the Libertarian party...)

sensibly libertarian

[cellio]

Hello from another libertarian who gave up on the Libertarian Party. We cannot be tidily classified along the conventional left-right scale.