Ingroup, Outgroup, Fargroup

I suspect that—to borrow a tripartite distinction from the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander—most people...are fine with their ingroup ("antiracist, anticolonial, anticapatalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people") and fine with the fargroup (pigeons), but the outgroup? The outgroup that lives in your city and votes in the same elections you do? Maybe not so much. Does the project of making kin extend to the couple down the street from you who have five kids, who attend a big-box evangelical church, and who voted for the wrong person in the last presidential election? And who, moveover, are a little more likely to talk back than pigeons are?

-Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 33.

Pigeons

It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn't that fine, either. White rabbits, yes, and Scotch terriers, and bluejays, and even hippopotamuses, but not pigeons. I happen to have have studied pigeons very closely and carefully, and I have studied the effect, or rather the lack of effect, of pigeons very carefully. A number of pigeons alight from time to time on the sill of my hotel window when I am eating breakfast and staring out the window. They never alas me, they never make me feel alas; they never make me feel anything.

-James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival, 116.