Lewis2
11d ago
You can drive a car on your own land without a driver’s license, vehicle license, seat belt, etc. By analogy, you should be able to use a gun on your own property without any licensing or training requirements.
Lewis2
10d ago
Only if the schools were subsidized by the parish. If a school had to stand on its own two feet, $3,000 per head wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries, staff salaries (janitor, cook, librarian, secretary, etc.), benefits, utilities, maintenance, insurance, books, supplies, equipment, furniture, and so on. You could probably get by with $3,000 a head if you were running some sort of homeschool co-op with no facility costs.
Lewis2
9d ago
If there are still enough nuns.
Therein lies the rub. Also, I’d argue that having a free teaching staff counts as a subsidy from the parish.
Lewis2
1mo ago
The total number of excess deaths is probably the best you can do, but even that isn’t perfect, since it also encompasses deaths from delayed medical treatment, deaths of despair, etc., due to the shutdowns.
Lewis2
15d ago
Did you somehow mark your comment as 18+, or did you trip some filter that added the tag automatically? I don’t recall ever seeing that on here before.
Lewis2
11d ago
Eh, I know a number of couples who ended up married because of a surprise pregnancy in the 80s and 90s, some of whom would admit that they probably wouldn’t have stayed together otherwise. Heck, it’s still not completely uncommon where I grew up. Getting pregnant and then not getting married is seen as pretty low-class. Some do it anyway, but they were usually trailer trash to begin with.
Lewis2
28d ago
The West stole everything from oppressed people, now the oppressed people finally get to enjoy it.
I keep seeing the vapid mantra, “No one is illegal on stolen land!” in discussions about the LA riots. It’s retarded, but it’s suddenly everywhere.
Lewis2
1mo ago
They work well in rural, tight-knit, high-trust environments where plenty of young to middle-aged men work on farms or in small factories or shops close to the station (that is, they don’t commute to the nearest city for a desk job). Which is to say, the system worked extremely well for over a century but is starting to fail now in many locations. In some cases, this is because the close-knit and high-trust part is less true than it once was, while in others, the population density has fallen to the point that there aren’t enough people to keep things going. On that note, though, it usually doesn’t take a huge number of volunteer firefighters per station, as multiple neighboring stations will be called out to fight larger blazes.
It’s also possibly worth noting that volunteer firefighters in some areas receive health benefits to compensate them for their work. That makes the position much more attractive for self-employed individuals, including farmers. It’s the same reason a lot of rural self-employed people also work as part-time school bus drivers. The pay and hours kind of suck, but the health insurance makes it worthwhile.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I’d start with a quick one, then alternate between quick and long. Ideally do a few quick ones in between each long one in order to help keep myself engaged. This method would give me a quick initial win, but also prevent me from bogging down at the end when I have multiple back-to-back long projects to do.
That’s in the perfect world, at least. In practice, I’d do a couple of quick ones, a couple of long ones, get distracted, then unexpectedly gain a burst of energy and tear through a number of longer projects at high speed, then procrastinate and possibly give up on the rest entirely.
Lewis2
1mo ago
@2rafa is correct. You can read Cole’s own description of his changing beliefs on the Holocaust here.
Here’s an excerpt relating to his current beliefs, which he has held since the mid-90s:
Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps, the Ostland ghettoes (which functioned as death camps), and by the Einsatzgruppen execution squads.
You’d think that Himmler’s official death census would be in every Holocaust book. But no. “Great” scholars like Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer rarely if ever cite it (in his 1982 magnum opus A History of the Holocaust, Bauer doesn’t cite Korherr once).
Deniers never cite Korherr either.
Amazing, huh? With the Mao and Stalin death toll, we’re forced to roughly calculate the figure via demographic extrapolation. But with the Holocaust, we have the main perpetrator, Himmler, commissioning a specific census of the murdered. A number. Everyone agrees it’s a legit document, yet few use it.
Why?
Because if you accept 2.4 million for the beginning of 1943, you cannot get to six million by April 1945. From ‘43 to ‘45, there would simply not be enough Jews subjected to “aktions” to get to 6 mil. Every mainstream scholar agrees that by the close of 1942, two-thirds of all Holocaust deaths had already occurred. So Korherr’s figure presents a problem.
That’s why I put my approximate figure of total Holocaust dead at 3.5 to 3.6 million. But not six. You simply cannot get to six in the two remaining years of the war.
Meanwhile, deniers won’t accept a figure above 271,000. Accepting 2.4 million by 1943? That blasphemes the tenets of their cult. It can’t be more than 300,000, period! Their pseudo-religion dictates it.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I’m pretty sure “caring more” explains the entire difference. Men’s handwriting a century or more ago was far neater than most women’s today, and was in many cases neater than women’s handwriting from that same period. But back in the day, having a strong secretarial hand was a common job requirement, so more men were incentivized to write better.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Years ago, a fire broke out in the next town over during their annual festival. Their own volunteer firefighters didn’t even leave the bar, even though it was directly across the street from the station. Instead, the fire departments from two neighboring towns showed up to douse the blaze.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I make less. But then, my annual expenses, including housing, come to around $20,000 per year. It helps living in a low cost of living area.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Lewis2
3mo ago
These charts of food prices per hour worked in England may be of interest. Along similar lines, I happened to be reading some 100+ year old newspapers about a month ago, when egg prices reached their zenith, and I was interested to see that, correcting for inflation, eggs regularly cost more than $6.00 per dozen c. 1910–1920, which is higher than any of the highly elevated prices I saw recently.
I also recall reading in an old book of etiquette from the late 1800s that a gentleman should look to spend 2–3 months’ income when purchasing a suit. I cannot fathom spending a sixth of my annual salary on a suit today.
Lewis2
4mo ago
Did he have to, or did he choose to? It’s pretty common for Midwestern students to prefer to go to college somewhat close to home. A lot of us form lifelong friendships in high school, and going to college far away from home would tend to destroy those relationships.
Lewis2
6mo ago
Yeah, if it weren’t for hairshirt environmentalists and watermelon Green Parties using climate change as an excuse to create a better world, conservatives would probably be more on board with conservation and more opposed to pollution.
Lewis2
4mo ago
I don’t think you’ve fully understood the objection. It’s not “somebody else would already be dealing with it.” It’s “Somebody else should now start dealing with it.”
A man jumped into a pond to save a drowning child. Halfway to shore, he stopped swimming and let the child go. From the shore, no one knows why—maybe he cramped up, maybe he decided he hated the kid, maybe there was some other reason—all the bystanders know is that he’s not going to keep helping the kid to safety. From that point on, it’s quite reasonable to ask why none of bystanders will jump in to take the man’s place instead of just standing around hurling abuse at him. If the kid’s safety is their true concern, they should do something to prove it. Otherwise their criticisms of the man ring hollow.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I’ve been to a few touristy locations with quiet, unassuming, empty, but gorgeous Orthodox churches. I’ve wondered for a while whether the placement of those beautiful churches was deliberate.
In the U.S., I would think that HBD has much more to do with civil rights precedent, disparate impact arguments, and accusations of racism than with immigration. Blacks make up a disproportionately large percentage of the prison population, do worse in school, and have worse job prospects than whites and Asians. Is that due to overt racial discrimination or hidden structural racism? If all races have the same IQ, that doesn’t seem like a bad explanation, but if blacks have a lower average IQ, then you can take racism out of the equation. Likewise, Jews are overrepresented in elite universities and positions of power. Is that the result of an insidious Semitic plot? Possibly, or it could just be that they have a higher average IQ than Gentiles.
Lewis2
3mo ago
Oh, give him a break. Most people are bad at math, especially when dealing with such large numbers.
Lewis2
3mo ago
The people who actively push for position A may be doing so for cynical status jockeying reasons, but I think the organizational response that enables their success is an understandable, if unfortunate, reaction to decades of people using position C to argue for no consequences for immoral behavior ever. When people hear that Comrade Bob was accused of sexual misconduct, they immediately think of Harvey Weinstein and Father Jim, panic, and do whatever they can to avoid accusations of conducting their own cover-up. In that context, arguing for nuance is typically going to fail. Now, as those scandals fade into the background, there may be a chance to successfully push for position B. It seems to me that this is starting to happen, though that is admittedly just a gut impression.
Lewis2
3mo ago
Stock market going down? Woke (((Financiers))) are manipulating prices to try to force a panic and foment opposition to Trump.
Comments like this don’t help dispel that impression:
With uncertainty emanating from DC, some on Wall Street say it’s time to send an unambiguous message to the president and his team: Don’t buy the dip.
Stocks are cheaper than they were a week ago, so it’s only natural investors may take a break from the sell-off and load up on some bargain assets. But going into dip-buying mode risks rewarding Trump for playing chicken with the global economy. Like training a puppy, you sometimes need a negative correction if you want it to stop peeing on the rug.
”We need this market to crash — to keep the pressure on the administration,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, told my colleague Matt Egan on Monday. That is a frankly shocking comment from an analyst as prominent as Yardeni, who also happens to have a Ph.D in economics from Yale.
Perhaps my experience was atypical, but in my neck of the woods, the neighbor’s cousin’s kid brought receipts. After high school students found that their complaints about their teachers were being ignored, one or two started secretly filming the offending remarks and sharing them on social media. A scandal ensued, the administration was livid (at the students, not the teachers), a few teachers lost their jobs, the community was in uproar, and so on. I thought the most unfortunate aspect of the debacle was that so many people took your position—“the kids can’t be trusted,” “they’re all just exaggerating,” “if this was true, the administration would be on it”—until some kid risked expulsion to provide proof. Notably, in neighboring school districts, kids complained about precisely the same issues and had many of the same stories, but no one was brave enough to secretly film the lectures and share them online, so a lot of people assumed the problems were restricted to the one bad school district. Given the circumstances, I find that unlikely.
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