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Vigilante ideological outrage needs its own "Peace of Westphalia"?
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinio...story.html

EXCERPT: The idea of free expression traces itself back to the Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to the continent-wide, tit-for-tat religious wars that wracked Europe for centuries. Simple exhaustion and the acceptance of "the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword," in the words of C.V. Wedgwood, led the West to grudgingly accept the right to be wrong.

Admittedly, the analogy is flawed in several ways. But the lessons for everyone are relevant. We live in a time when partisan affiliation and ideological worldviews serve as substitute religions. And if we've learned anything from the last few years, the capacity for outrage on the left and right is near infinite. There's nothing wrong with forcefully expressing disagreement, but the constant hunt for scalps will leave everyone bald and bloodied.

Newspapers, magazines, and other businesses have every right to hire and fire whomever they want, but if they do hire someone, they should stand by their decision until the new employee does something worthy of firing while employed by them, not because a mob chooses to weaponize something they said in the past. And even then, they should make the decision on the merits, not simply to appease jackals. Obviously this can't be an inflexible law, but it should be the rule of thumb.

At the same time, people shouldn't tweet - or say - indefensibly stupid, racist or dumb things on the assumption that only "their people" will see it, hear it or process it in precisely the way the author intended. The Internet has made it impossible for such "narrowcasting" to stay narrow. [...] And so is this: We should all save our outrage for when it's really needed.

MORE: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinio...story.html

RELATED: The Peace of Westphalia and Sovereignty; Treaty of Westphalia; What Was the Treaty of Westphalia? (youtube video)



Early pint: evidence of 'first British beer' found in Cambridgeshire
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019...ridgeshire

EXCERPT: Evidence of the first beer believed to have been brewed in the UK, dating back more than 2,000 years, has been uncovered by road workers. Signs of the iron age brew from about 400BC were identified in fragments of charred residues from the beer-making process found during the £1.5bn upgrade of the A14 in Cambridgeshire.

[...] Lara González Carretero, an archaeobotanist ... said the beer residues were found alongside those of bread and porridge. “​They look quite similar under a regular microscope, but I was able to do some analysis using a scanning electron microscope [SEM] and there are differences in the insides of the fragments to do with fermentation, which distinguishes them from bread and porridge. It’s quite unique. We didn’t have any evidence like this in the UK until now. Beer is very old but we didn’t have physical evidence of it.”

She said all the fragments contained barley, water and oats. “The thing that actually distinguishes [the fragments] is that bread is made of very fine flour. For beer and porridge they are cracked grains. They are bigger. When I looked under the SEM, you could see the starch granules from the beer grains have differences that show fermentation.”

MORE (details): https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019...ridgeshire
Religious/conservative people have long been acclimated to living with contrary views. Until leftists started looking to ruin lives, there was little outrage from the right, and the right still vastly lags the left in scalp-hunting. The right is only interested in doing enough to make the left rethink this strategy, but it doesn't look like they're going to understand mutually assured destruction any time soon. That's children for you.