Two Poles in goal

Note: If you don't follow Arsenal FC, this post may not make much sense to you.

Wojciech Sczesny's father Maciej used to be a pretty successful goalkeeper himself back in the day. This means that whenever he feels like talking about his son's current situation at Arsenal, some Polish sports media outlet will print whatever he has to say, which means that soon enough it will be all over British sports tabloids. Here's what Wojciech had to say on his Facebook account about dad's latest outburst:

Really shouldn't be dealing with this one day before the cup final but my father leaves me no choice.
I have not spoken to him in more than 2 years and just like everybody else I have had enough of his idiotic comments about The Football Club and The Manager I owe so much to! Therefore please do not consider his comments as my shared view. Thank You for your understanding!

When I saw this I immediately thought, how incredibly Polish. How familiar. We're basically a nation of people who all have extremely dysfunctional relationships with their fathers. That's why we're all borderline. Borderline Personality Disorder was practically invented in Poland.

Thou shalt not let live

Heads LGBTs win, tails Christians lose:

Let’s understand what happened here. This Christian jeweler agreed to custom-make engagement rings for a lesbian couple, knowing that they were a couple, and treated them politely. But when they found out what he really believed about same-sex marriage, even though the man gave them polite service, and agreed to sell them what they asked for, the lesbian couple balked, and demanded their money back — and the mob threatened the business if they didn’t yield. Which, of course, he did.

Now I am not going to say that we are witnessing the final days of the classic liberal social contract, because I've always believed that "live and let live" is an unworkable illusion. It's simply impossible to have a working social contract that does not exclude anyone. But it is certainly the case that, until now, "live and let live" has been the first and most important article of the unofficial creed of the Western society, a Utopian idea that everyone had to if not believe, then at least pay lip service to.

We're now in the process of stripping this idea of its divine status. Our friends the lesbian couple are so clearly uninterested in the whole "let live" part that they are basically flaunting their contempt for this notion, and the flaunting is met with nothing but cheers of approval. (Sure, there were some boos, but those were few and far between, and issued mostly by social outcasts with not much to lose.) This contempt also comes through loud and clear in oft-heard slogans like "I can tolerate anything but intolerance" or "There's no freedom of speech for hate speech".

Given that, I wonder what's coming next. What will the next first commandment be?

(HT: Lamentably Sane.)

Fiat pax in virtute tua

I had no idea that a natural language could have an actual assignment operator (that is, something like e.g. "LET x = 10" or "x <- 10" in programming languages), until I've discovered than Latin does. It's done through the word fiat. So, for example, "Thy will be done" is fiat voluntas tua, and "let there be light" is fiat lux. I like that a lot.

(You might object that this isn't really assignment since it seems to be just saying "LET x" as opposed to "LET x = y". But it is; it's just that, as is usually the case with natural languages, a lot is left implicit. For example, what fiat lux is really saying is something like "LET new state of the world = old state of the world + light".)