Lewis2
3mo ago
As an aside, it will never cease to amaze me that some states require vehicle safety inspections. Coming from a state that never requires any inspections ever, it’s completely jarring to me that people find such an intrusive policy not only normal, but actually a positive good.
Lewis2
3mo ago
That video has been blocked in my country (the USA) on copyright grounds. I wonder if that’s why Google deindexed it.
Lewis2
3mo ago
The British knowledge of Roman culture and military techniques came from a careful and deliberate study of the few remaining Roman writings available to them (a process that only began during the Renaissance), not due to ancestral memories of a conquest that occurred 1,500 years prior.
Lewis2
3mo ago
Lewis2
3mo ago
If they do, this could be the perfect case to show off the next switch in time that saves nine. Thomas and Alito may suddenly find themselves without friends on the court.
Lewis2
3mo ago
The state is both heavily Scandinavian and heavily German.
Lewis2
3mo ago
Germans have their weird guilt thing, but German-Americans do not. German immigration almost entirely stopped before 1930, so virtually no German-Americans have any ancestral connections to the Nazi party. German-Americans still wouldn’t care, but that’s mostly because they’re completely assimilated.
Lewis2
3mo ago
A lot of students attend small, private religious colleges because they want to play a sport in college and aren’t good enough to make it on the team in a large school. Religious affiliation is a complete afterthought.
Lewis2
3mo ago
I wouldn’t say it’s any less likely, but rather that both are equally unlikely. Neither gesture admits of any reasonable interpretation other than the one that was intended, at least not to a British audience.
Lewis2
3mo ago
(choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has)
You’re aware that this is a rude gesture, right? If someone asked me that question, I’d likely respond with one finger, but it would be a horrible misinterpretation to assume that I meant I only had one brain cell.
Lewis2
3mo ago
I know it’s been a self-deprecating joke among Brits for a while, though I don’t know for how long. What drove it home for me was watching video interviews (that I unfortunately can’t find now) of a bunch of English pensioners during the 2009 financial crisis. They were calmly lining up to withdraw money from the bank, even though they all expressed concern that the bank was going to run out of money before it got to their turn. It was quite the contrast to the chaotic scenes occurring in other countries around that time.
Lewis2
3mo ago
That’s still the most hilariously polite looting I think I’ve ever seen. The only way it could be even more British would be if they were queuing.
Lewis2
3mo ago
You’ll basically end up with a society that looks like Atlas Shrugged, minus the fantasy mountain retreat of the hypercompetent.
Lewis2
3mo ago
When women’s suffrage was first passed, and for several decades after, women voted, on average, more conservatively than men. I don’t think anyone knows for sure why women are now much more liberal, but some have speculated that it has a lot to do with the rising number of unmarried, childless women. Women (and men) who are married with children tend to be much more conservative than their single, childless counterparts.
Lewis2
3mo ago
See also previous discussion of this phenomenon from last week.
I agree with Folamh3 that that seems to be a different phenomenon. Along those lines, though, author George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans Cross) is an older but more blatant example.
Edit: Of course, going the other direction, there’s Evelyn Waugh, who once made it onto a list of top female authors, even though he never pretended to be a woman. Joyce Kilmer is similarly often thought to be a woman.
Lewis2
3mo ago
If you’d like to read more, the study itself, which came out last year, can be found here. The authors are unsurprisingly considered by many to be scientific racist cranks, though I haven’t actually seen any thoughtful criticisms of their work (to be fair, I haven’t looked hard). Whatever you think of his views, Kirkegaard’s Substack is frequently interesting.
Lewis2
3mo ago
I give a shit, as do most people here. It’s perfectly possible to find both sets of behavior off-putting or immoral.
Lewis2
3mo ago
If you read the article, the dad just comes across as a bit of a skeeve. He gives off South Park police “Nice” vibes.
It got worse. One model was changing out of her suit behind a towel. When she kicked off her bikini bottom, it went flying in the air, did a 2 1/2 gainer and landed on Kel's shoulder. He grinned. She grinned. In many states she could do three to five for that. I was thinking that if she did it to me, I would gladly do the time.
Lewis2
3mo ago
He took his freshman son to at least two Sports Illustrated swimsuit photoshoots on a beach in Hawaii, after telling the boy’s mother that they were going to Hawaii to learn to surf. He then wrote an article about it.
Lewis2
3mo ago
The thinking is probably that if people donate, they’ll feel more invested in her campaign and will be more likely to keep supporting her in the future. It also just seems to be a Democrat thing. I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of ads featuring Harris, Biden, Stacy Abrams, and the parents of a child who was killed in a school shooting. Every single one was a plea for money. In contrast, almost all of the Republican ads I’ve seen have been the usual “vote for me” or “my opponent is bad” type of ads.
Lewis2
3mo ago
This is an area where I think the typical American approach to class distinctions—defining class solely by income—falls short. (Scott also talked about some of the shortcomings of our usual definitions several years ago.)
I don’t admittedly have as much experience with wealthy blue tribers as I do wealthy red tribers, but based on what experience I do have, I’d say the blue tribers would find it acceptable though perhaps mildly disappointing if one of their children became a schoolteacher, musician, or humanities professor, but they’d be confused and upset if one wanted to become a cop, soldier, or clergyman. Vice versa for the red tribers.
In theory, you could test this hypothesis by researching whether African Americans with a higher percentage of white ancestry have lower rates of criminal behavior than African Americans with a higher percentage of black ancestry. For added fun, you could see if it makes a difference whether that white ancestry is predominantly Puritan/Quaker or Borderer/Cavalier (to use the terminology from Albion’s Seed).
Given that black criminality rates have increased markedly since the 1950s, my guess is that you’d find the elevated rates are almost entirely culture-bound, for reasons that were laid out in the Moynihan Report sixty years ago. The fact that lower-class whites are now showing similar signs of social dysfunction where they didn’t before is further evidence that culture, not genes, is the primary factor involved.
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