I’m not sure how I missed this. It’s so obvious when you think about it!

I chuckled a little.

I took it as her being aggressively kinky and provocative to tease and embarrass her uptight partner, nothing says one way or the other as to if she’s really into that sort of thing or just messing with him since he clearly wouldn’t go through with it, and the punchline being his flustered and mortified reaction rather than just the sexual innuendo.

But the artist wasn’t shy about playing up the horniness and titillation either.

However, that’s not the only way to look at it, and it’s not like we’re dealing with Shakespeare here.

It’s like an expansion pack for flat earthers.

Sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.

Neil Postman was right.

Our educational models and methods are changing for the worse.

TV and the internet are terrible mediums for public or political discourse and this has exacerbated many of our existing issues.

Our culture has become more shallow and has started to lack something profound because of how we utilize technology for education, business, and entertainment.

Things will not improve until we change our relationship with these technologies.

EDIT: several words.

They sell travel sized rolls of that gorilla tape.

It sticks to just about anything, pretty much forever, and is totally opaque.

Should work like a charm.

Precisely, but you’re giving them too much credit by expecting them to figure it out from reading the lyrics alone.

Prejudice tends to lack a capacity for self reflection and an understanding of irony.

It’s the same with nazi punks and MAGAs who like Rage Against The Machine, they just want something that sounds loud, aggressive, and violent and rarely understand what they’re listening to or how it came about until it’s shoved right in their face. Then they get all offended about it.

Most of the time, the best they can make themselves is a cheap, talent-less imitation that lacks any sense of authenticity, and to try and overcome that they’ve resorted to something that can produce a finely polished turd that still lacks any sense of authenticity.

Locksmithing/access control is an industry that is sorely lacking new people…

Interesting. I was considering locksmithing as a way to get some supplemental income later in life. I’ve done skilled labor and light IT work most of my life and it seemed like a good fit for my skill set. I’ll have to move that to the top of the pile of possibilities.

Absolutely intentionally designed to be that way by the GOP and blatantly obvious when you look at their voting records.

One of their main arguments against taxes is that government will always waste tax dollars due to corruption and incompetence… Which is a self fulfilling prophecy, as they’ve proven to be some of the most corrupt and incompetent political leaders in history.

If you want to get into how this happens, and the way it happens with other technologies, I’d suggest Neil Postman’s Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves To Death as a good start.

I’m not even certain that we even disagree on the fundamental principle, just the details of the example I gave.

Slightly off topic, but does anyone have experience with there being a tradition of researching family histories and genealogy among later generation immigrant families in nations outside the US?

I’ve had multiple friends and relations start researching their family history with the intent of finding the first ancestor to immigrate to the US and their country of origin. As some others have said, I don’t believe these people consider themselves to truly be a part of that culture, but it’s a fun bit of personal trivia and some fresh new traditions to explore, so it gets talked about.

I wonder if that’s universal, or if it could be more of a phenomenon in the US and contributing to what the OP is observing.

One more time: We aren’t examining how the average English speaker would interpret this, only the reasons why the priest’s answer might change.

This has been interesting. Good luck to you. =)

The question, in both cases, involves smoking while praying. The priest never looks at, or gives a judgement on smoking in general, there’s no reason to assume the priest would forbid smoking in other circumstances.

The question does change, but not as fundamentally as you’re claiming it does. The information presented in both questions remains the same, only the word order changes, which changes how the priest perceives that information.

Anyway, good luck out there. =)

Why would the answer be no? Who cares if you smoke while doing a cartwheel? Who said the priest would forbid such a thing?

In both situations, a man is asking about the propriety of praying while inhaling the smoke from a cigarette. That’s vital information.

The information does matter to the smoker and the priest. We’re not teasting these statements for validity and we’re not making our own judgements. We’re examining why the priest’s answer might have changed. That’s all.

Those aren’t the same questions from the original post. You’ve omitted half the information given to the priest in each question.

Both questions, in their entirety, deal with smoking and praying. The subject is smoking and praying. You’ve reframed this as a question about smoking and a separate question about praying. That was never the case.

EDIT: minor clarification.

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I didn’t strip all context from the scenario. I defined the context. It’s just not the context you believe I should be using. You keep adding something that was never in my original post, then arguing against what you yourself added to try invalidate the exercise on the basis of your personal interpretation. Sorry, but that’s missing the point by a wide margin and I feel it’s a waste of time.

Otherwise it becomes like the trolley problem.

Yes. That is exactly what it’s meant to be like and precisely what I’ve been saying.

Just like the trolley problem, it’s a self-contained thought exercise. But instead of illustrating a difficult ethical choice, it demonstrates a point about language shaping reasoning.

There’s nothing to be won or lost by including outside context or narrowly defining the meaning of each word to prove what is or isn’t contradictory. This isn’t an argument over what the language means. Your personal interpretation of the language is irrelevant, it’s the priest and/or the smoker’s interpretation that matters. The singular point is for you to consider how and why their answer changes.

If you believe their answer changes because they interpreted the meaning of those words differently due to the order in which they were given, that’s valid. If you believe, like I do, that the answer changes because their reasoning was shallow and contradictory, also valid. If you believe the answer didn’t change and the smoker misunderstood, once again, valid. What conclusion can we draw here, what’s common to all of these? They all show that changing the question changes our thought process and how we interpret meaning.

If you dislike my example this much, create your own. It makes no difference to me.

Just invent your own scenario where changes to the way a question is phrased leads a person to two different and contradictory conclusions, and use that example to briefly examine how language can shape our reasoning. That’s all we need here. Digressions on language, meaning, Boolean logic, and speaking to infants will only cloud the issue.