Lewis2
6d ago
As did The Office. As of course did Chaplin himself.
Lewis2
7d ago
I think you’re both right but looking at different time periods. Two story houses built on deep, narrow lots were the rule throughout much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in what were often called the “streetcar suburbs.” As the name suggests, residents originally relied primarily on public transportation and so didn’t need lots large enough to accommodate stables, carriage houses, or garages. That changed during the post-war era, when modern suburban neighborhoods with their one story houses on relatively large lots became the norm. Most newer subdivisions these days seem to contain relatively large houses on lots that are smaller than those of the 1950s but wider than those of the 1910s (though not necessarily much larger in terms of total square footage).
Lewis2
8d ago
Where are you finding this information? CBS is still reporting, in an article updated 25 minutes ago, that everything will take place in the Rotunda and that Vance will be present.
Lewis2
9d ago
Can we just give the Europeans this one and go back to calling it a meat and cheese tray/platter? Simple, descriptive, unpretentious, and less French. What’s not to love?
At the risk of being satirical, can I nominate this?
You also can’t go wrong with Take Five or the Pink Panther theme song. Of course, none of these are from the ’80s.
Lewis2
10d ago
Oh, I agree. My point was that Biden didn’t make this decision out of nowhere. Influential members of his party were pushing him to make this announcement (and actually to go further, but it sounds like Biden isn’t planning to apply pressure to the archivist to certify the ratification).
Lewis2
10d ago
Oh, Jews definitely have much higher levels of in-group bias than most Gentile whites (and, along similar lines, Evangelical Christians’ positive views of Jews are definitely not reciprocated), but it seems to me that Jewish success in America has less to do with nepotism than with higher IQ. White Baptists have nearly the same level of in-group bias as Jews do, yet they don’t have the same level of success despite having had a significant head start in this country. It seems to me that differences in IQ likely explain the bulk of those disparate outcomes.
Likewise, some blacks definitely experience some racial discrimination, but that doesn’t mean racism is the primary reason they have worse life outcomes on average.
Lewis2
10d ago
This creates and purports to legitimize a blue-tribe consensus that there is a 28th Amendment and that it is the ERA
It helps to legitimize it, but it doesn’t create it. Just last month, 120 Democrats in the House and 46 in the Senate signed letters asking Biden to take this step, since, in their view, the amendment was already validly approved. Other blue tribe groups like the National Council of Negro Women and the New York City Bar Association also published similar letters in December. This move may have blindsided Republicans (myself included), but the Democrats were clearly preparing for it.
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
11d ago
In theory, one could test this in Germany, assuming that there weren’t large population shifts over the past 200 years (probably not a good bet), since some practiced primogeniture while others practiced partible inheritance. I believe some areas even practiced the opposite of primogeniture, where the youngest son received the bulk of the inheritance, though I’d need to do some rereading to make sure I’m not misremembering something before claiming that for certain.
Lewis2
11d ago
Isn’t it possible that different populations vary in creativity levels independently of IQ? If so, it could be that East Asians are just genetically less likely to be inventors and entrepreneurs, even as they are genetically more likely to have greater raw computational power.
Of course, their form of government, system of education, and various environmental pressures may also explain the difference. I think some IQ enthusiasts tend to give too much credit to IQ and not enough to other explanatory factors.
Lewis2
11d ago
Something that hadn’t occurred to me until reading this comment…
As I understand it, Ashkenazi Jews were a primarily urban population for the past 1,500+ years. Given that cities tend to be population shredders, does anyone have any idea how that may have impacted the Ashkenazim? Did they nevertheless have large families like the Haredim today, or did their birth rate remain pretty much at replacement after the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Or does that data just not exist? (A quick search failed to pull up anything, but I figure others here may have access to better sources than Google).
Lewis2
15d ago
The other way around. If it weren’t for the beatings, the average Russian would reach his natural IQ of 130.
Lewis2
15d ago
my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten
Was he a Mormon, by any chance? Back when they considered dark sin to be a curse from God, the LDS church officially taught that Native Americans’ skin would lighten if they became Mormon. I haven’t heard of any similar beliefs outside of that group.
Lewis2
17d ago
I, for one, hope you find the time to do a write-up and post or link it here.
Lewis2
25d ago
I think you misread whodatmiami’s comment. He said 50% left within a year, not that 50% left within six months and 100% within a year.
Lewis2
29d ago
But you don't go around telling people "don't fuck with me or you'll find out" before it looks like a fight, do you?
I’ve seen multiple lower-class, self-proclaimed trailer-trash people do exactly that. But that’s also precisely the same sort of person that would make a big scene about greeting his daughter’s date with a shotgun draped across his knee.
Lewis2
30d ago
That’s seriously a joke? What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.
Actually, in light of the discussion below, I have a different question to ask you: if you had a daughter, would you ever want her to have sex with anyone? It seems to me that a parent with a healthy relationship with his or her daughter would absolutely want her to have sex with her husband and then to bear children as the fruit of that union. Your recent comments, on the other hand, seem to imply that you believe anything other than perpetual virginity is a shameful thing in a daughter.
Lewis2
30d ago
I can’t offer any definitive proof that @coffee_enjoyer’s claim is correct, but as someone who spends a great deal of time dealing with 19th century American primary sources and who has read many autobiographies of men and women who grew up in that time, I’d say the lack of sports idols rings very true to me.
Newspapers were ubiquitous back then, serving not only as disseminators of news but also fulfilling the role that social media plays today. If you want to get a good sense of regular life during the 19th century, you can hardly do better than to just read 19th century newspapers. If you do, you’ll notice a striking absence of sports news. By the end of the century, a medium-sized newspaper might have a page or two per week devoted to their local sports teams’ games, but usually hardly more than that, while smaller papers didn’t even have that level of coverage. And if you read autobiographies of men and women who grew up in America in the early- to mid-19th centuries, you’ll typically find many references to playing sports, but few to no references to any sports idols.
This is in part because there weren’t any major sports leagues at that time. The first professional baseball team wasn’t founded until 1869, the first professional football players weren’t paid to play until 1892, and the first professional basketball league wasn’t founded until 1925.
All that said, while I think coffee_enjoyer is correct about the lack of sports heroes, I think he’s kind of wrong about young boys’ real heroes back in that day. Sure, they learned about great men of history and were taught to admire and emulate their virtues, but I don’t recall ever reading of a boy who had any real gripping, emotional connection to those men, as many boys do with sports superstars today. Instead, going by memoirs and autobiographies, most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town, etc.
Lewis2
1mo 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.
Historically, marriage has pretty much always been primarily about child-rearing, which of course requires both a man and a woman, rather than pair-bonding, as most people see it today. In any society with that view, gay marriage is a ridiculous notion.
For the ancient Greeks, the highest love was that between two men (or a man and a boy) of equally high virtue. Those friendships were committed, largely lifelong, and frequently sexual, but they existed alongside opposite-sex marriages. The Romans weren’t quite as gay as the Greeks, but they generally didn’t see anything wrong with a freeman having sex with another man as long as he was the active partner (nobody cared what slaves got up to). Nevertheless, when Nero married two men (in one case as the active, and in another as the passive partner), all of Rome was appalled. If memory serves, we have other surviving sources ridiculing other purported same-sex marriages from that time as well.
Christians of course inherited the Jews’ extremely negative views on homosexuality, but even they saw clear differences between (chaste) same-sex friendships and marriage, usually extolling friendship as being the higher love. I believe St. Jerome even once wrote that marriage was only good because it produced children for the next generation of friendships to form. But the ancient Christians never condemned same-sex marriage because it just wasn’t a thing.
My understanding is that most Asian societies also didn’t really care about what sexual practices people got up to outside of marriage, as long as they also did their duty and had children within marriage (monks were of course excluded and apparently had a reputation for same-sex behavior).
Moving to the Middle East, even today in Afghanistan, there’s a saying that “women are for children and boys are for fun” (or something along those lines), which further emphasizes the universality of that link.
It seems to have been only in the past 150 years or so (at least in the Anglo world) that marriage began to be seen as obviously higher than mere friendship, and that the bond between husband and wife was seen as so special. I don’t know why that trend started, but I wonder if it might have had something to do with Victorian England’s strict anti-homosexuality laws leading to a de-emphasis on same-sex friendships just to be safe. Whatever the reason, that special bond started to redefine marriage. Once the Sexual Revolution and the pill severed the link between marriage and sex, and between sex and procreation, the common perception of marriage changed finally and completely. Now marriage is all about “the love of my life” and “marrying my best friend,” and all the tangled emotions that come with it. No-fault divorce helped here too, since it meant that the only thing keeping a marriage together—the only thing that actually mattered—was the emotional high of “being in love” with another human being. Once the high goes away, the marriage is dead, since those two are seen as completely synonymous. (Kids in such marriages are like houses, an asset to be divided when the marriage inevitably fails.)
With that redefined understanding of marriage, it’s completely arbitrary to restrict it to heterosexual pairings only. Two men or two women can love each other just as deeply as a man and a woman, and since that’s all that matters in a marriage, there’s no reason to deny it to them.
Now, take that final product, export it with McDonald’s, Elvis, and Levi’s, and you eventually redefine marriage for the rest of the world.
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