It might have been 22 Minutes instead of Air Farce, and it might have been Stockwell Day instead of Preston Manning. I couldn’t find a video clip using any combination of show and politician.
As I said, it’s deep memory from long ago. I mostly remember it for personal reasons and not the actual joke. But, you’ve reassured me that it wasn’t just a hallucination on my part.
There’s the Christian Heritage Party. I’ve known several people who have voted for them at one time or another.
Somewhere deep in my memories there is a Royal Canadian Air Farce skit about Preston Manning (I think) and how he “didn’t campaign on Sundays.” The joke is that him highlighting his supposed piety of respecting the Sabbath was, in and of itself, an act of campaigning. I did a quick search for the skit and couldn’t find it, unfortunately.
Now, decades later, we have a party leader not just campaigning on Sunday, but making political speeches from the pulpit. I can’t help but think this is a step backwards.
I will never again buy a Samsung product after they refused to honour the warranty claim on my dishwasher. It had a legitimate design defect, I alerted them well within the warranty period, and I provided all the appropriate receipts. They just plain ignored my complaint while putting on a contrite facade in every interaction.
I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.
At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate “do not use” by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn’t want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.
I see where the disconnect is now.
I, and presumably others, associate obsession with religious minutiae with religious fervour. I have a lot first hand experience with this, as some of the most ardent Christians I knew were also the ones who were eyeballs deep in apologetics and church history (and also adult converts). It makes a certain amount of logical sense too, as you wouldn’t expect a casual church-goer to care that much about all that.
With that in mind, it isn’t a big leap to connect the original post to the phenomenon of the zeal of the convert.
What it comes down to, then, is that the original post has more than one layer to it. Rather than focus on the difference between charity and dogmatism, I chose instead to highlight contrast between the simplicity [of charity] and the convolution [of dogmatism]. Once again, my personal experiences informed the way I approached this post.
I’m completely lost. How and when did this become about religious people behaving badly? I am 99.9% sure that the point of the original topic was a commentary on how recent converts tend to be more enthusiastic about their faith than people raised in the church, regardless of what the individual beliefs actually are. The example beliefs from the original post (“feed the poor” and “women shouldn’t drive”) are just examples to help characterize this dichotomy in an amusing way.
In fact, that second example, about women and driving, is almost certainly not an actual Catholic doctrine. Any search for the full phrase leads only to reposts of this image, and I’d wager it was made by just stringing together some Christian buzzwords for humorous effect. While I don’t doubt some Catholics do believe women shouldn’t drive, I also very much doubt they’d use the phrasing and justification found in the original post.
Why would I need to be more specific about the different branches of Catholicism? The author in the screenshot doesn’t do that either. They simply point out their observation that lifelong Catholics tend to value broad teachings that aren’t necessarily specific to Catholicism, while adult converts become fanatical about doctrinal minutiae. In other words, the former is relaxed about their faith, while the latter is zealous.
I then related that to my own experiences, where someone who is raised in a belief system tends to be less aggressive about those beliefs than someone who converts to later in life - i.e. the “zeal of the convert.” This observation isn’t exclusive to Catholicism, it’s just being made into relation to it in this instance. This phenomenon isn’t even exclusive to religion, as one can observe it with political beliefs as well.
I don’t think anything here requires a differentiation between branches of Catholicism, because the observations are about the act of converting, not about what specific belief system the converts moving to and from.
The “belief” in this case is Catholicism.
I’d say this is part of the “zeal of the convert” phenomenon, where someone who converts to a belief tends to be more fanatical than someone raised in that belief.
There’s probably bias in this observation, as a couple of very loud people can drown out dozens of others and make a trend seem more prevalent than it actually is, but I also have personal experience here.
I mean, I didn’t develop my own musical taste until my mid-20s. My parents only played Christian worship music, while all my friends in highschool and university were various flavours of music snob. I was literally convinced that no one actually liked pop music because everyone I knew seemed to hate it.
I don’t know if I was ever a “people pleaser,” in that I never pretended to like a band or song just because everyone else did. However, I definitely avoided saying anything negative about the music I was exposed to for fear that I’d be ostracized all the same.
It took me a long time to overcome all that, and it took even longer to admit my tastes publicly.
A quick rundown of the Ten Commandments, for those who never went to Sunday School:
In summary, not the best basis for a society.
You are welcome.
Pointers do make more sense to me now than two decades ago, mostly owing to me being married to a computer scientist. But I always go back the fact that for the purposes of my first year programming course, pointers were (probably) unnecessary and thus confusing. I have a hard time understanding things if not given an immediate and tangible use case, and pointers didn’t really help me when most of my programs used a bare few functions and some globally defined variables to solve simple physics problems.
EDIT: I’ll also say that pointers alone weren’t what sunk my interested in programming, they’re just an easily identifiable concept that sticks out as “not making sense.” At around the same time we had the lesson on pointers, our programs were also starting to reach a critical mass of complexity, and the amount of mental work I had to do to follow along became more than I was willing to put into it - it wasn’t “fun” anymore. I only did well on my final project because a friend patiently sat in my dorm room for a few hours and talked me through each step of the program, and then fed me enough vocabulary to convince the TA that I knew what I was doing.
I doubt that you’re missing anything about pointers themselves. I may not have done a good job articulating why non-programmers have a hard time understanding them.
I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.
Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.
Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I’m not sure if I completely understand.
Pointers also didn’t appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.
It also didn’t help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn’t seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn’t much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.
And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.
I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.
I’ve known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.
Part of it is the pendulum of Canadian politics. The Liberals have been in power for a long time and many people in the “great Canadian middle” have swung over to the Conservative side. That makes the prospects of another Liberal government forming in the next election slim.
But also, yes, there are some people who hate Trudeau on principle. My holidays this year were exhausting.
He sparked outrage by torching the GOP. You’ll never believe what happened next
I’ve been a Star Wars fan for almost three decades and I think almost all Disney Star Wars is “fine” at worst. Even most of the things I didn’t like had some sort of redeeming qualities, or I could recognize that I wasn’t the target audience. The only thing I truly hated was Rise of the Skywalker, which is quite possibly my least favourite Star Wars thing ever.
I realize this puts me in the very small minority among Star Wars fans, and it’s the reason I tend to avoid fan discussions these days - the relentless negativity is exhausting and leaves little room for discussing the things about Disney Star Wars I find good and/or interesting.