Lewis
11mo ago
There’s even a conspiracy by some ultra right-wing Catholics that the US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki as a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Catholic Church in Japan. Apparently it (and maybe Hiroshima too? I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to look it up) had one of the largest Catholic populations in Japan.
Lewis
11mo ago
The unfortunate truth is that seemingly the only two ways to eliminate the problematic homeless are to forcibly institutionalize them or to make their lives so insufferably bad that they voluntarily choose to shape up. I suppose a third option would be to tacitly allow people to kill them with impunity, but that is obviously less realistic and more evil than the first two approaches. Most people are adamantly against involuntary institutionalization, and they’re too humane to allow cops or strangers to instill genuine fear in the hearts of the homeless. So they proliferate.
Lewis
11mo ago
Les Miserables is also considered one of the best novels ever written, but I don’t think the book would be materially harmed by removing the lengthy digressions on the Parisian sewer system and the Battle of Waterloo.
Lewis
11mo ago
To be fair, those American church bodies wouldn’t have accommodated themselves to modern secular morality nearly as quickly if they were shackled to their more conservative counterparts, as the European state churches are. The ACNA, Continuing Anglicans, REC, etc., all acted as lifeboats for unhappy traditional Episcopalians, which allowed them to give up their former church body with less of a fight. The only people who were left after that evaporative cooling process were old people who didn’t want to leave their home parish and increasingly-radical members of the clergy. The recent events of the UMC are a testament to that, and I fully expect the soon-to-be-“liberated” UMC to catch up very quickly to the ELCA in terms of secularism and political and theological liberalism.
Lewis
11mo ago
Just imagine the collective atheistic horror when they eventually prove that 3=1.
Lewis
11mo ago
China used to have high fertility, but when exposure after birth was the only method to cull female children it was much less common and the gender balance stayed pretty average. With early testing and abortion available, there are 120 male births for every 100 female births. That represents a society in a severe state of dysfunction, regardless of fertility levels.
I don’t think you can separate China’s possibly uniquely bad gender ratio at birth from its possibly uniquely bad One Child Policy. If that policy had never been implemented, I’m guessing you’d see a much smaller gender disparity. The problem is that they kept a patrilineal society but forbade parents from having multiple children, when if they wanted to adopt the latter policy, they needed to first take an axe to the former tradition. Of course Chinese parents want a boy; it’s how their family line is passed down! Sure, they’ll happily have a girl as a second or third child, but if that option is closed off to them, they’ll settle for just one boy. If anything, I’m surprised the ratio isn’t even more skewed.
Lewis
11mo ago
I work at a university, and not a particularly liberal one. I’ve heard multiple students not just describe that exact age gap as “creepy,” but also casually comment that the man is probably a pedophile.
Lewis
11mo ago
I don’t understand this. You seem to be saying that A) we have too few top-level posts; B) this one led to several “perfectly interesting discussions;” and C) this post should nevertheless have been deleted before those interesting discussions were allowed to happen.
If the OP led to an interesting discussion, who cares how insane it was? You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Lewis
11mo ago
I do not, hence why I’m not deeply wedded to my views. I’m not aware of any studies attempting to examine this question, and I’m highly doubtful that any study that came to the wrong conclusion could ever be published today. It matches some historical examples like Prohibition, and it also very closely matches my personal experiences. In almost every political discussion I’ve ever had, the men were, as a group, much better about governing their emotions and discussing an issue dispassionately than were the women. Differences like this obviously fall on overlapping bell curves, but the pattern is still clearly there. I could give dozens of examples, but they would just be anecdata. I’ll just say that I think Kipling was on to something when he wrote “The Female of the Species.”
Lewis
11mo ago
That’s absolutely fair. I have seen a few of those films as an adult and without kids in the room, but I think all but one of those occasions was when my younger sister put one of them on when we were back visiting my parents.
I will say that I got more enjoyment out of rewatching those old Disney classics than I get watching most new movies. But the same holds true for most older movies and TV shows. I probably just have old-fashioned tastes.
Lewis
11mo ago
The cousin marriage thing completely slipped my mind. I think you’re probably right that that plays a role, perhaps even a major one.
Lewis
11mo ago
I am not deeply wedded to this view, but I tend to think that women’s suffrage resulted in more moral crusades and emotional appeals in electoral politics, which I think is ultimately destabilizing. It’s obviously not something that will immediately destroy a county, but I think it probably weakens it over a long time scale. I think the same holds true for allowing non-property owners and, if they are a large enough portion of the population, non-parents the vote as well.
Lewis
11mo ago
You’ve mentioned this a few times, including the bit about HBD likely explaining the different outcomes between Arab Christians and Muslims. Do you have any idea how that could have come about historically? My possibly incorrect understanding is that Jews and Christians were ineligible for public service and positions of authority under the Ottomans and various previous Islamic states. They could remove this handicap, and many did, by converting to Islam; they’d also avoid additional taxes that way. Under those conditions, I would have expected the most ambitious (and therefore possibly more intelligent? I’m not sure how well correlated those two traits are) to have converted to Islam over the centuries, leading to a slightly dumber Christian population. Do you know of anything I’m missing?
an alleged call to genocide with a run-of-the-mill propaganda slogan like "Palestinians will be free in Palestine," when such slogans are common to every war in human history.
How else do you interpret “from the river to the sea”? That slogan clearly includes both Israel and Palestine, and Hamas’s original and 2017 charters both indicate that their ultimate goal is to wrest control of the entire area from Israel.
Look, I’m no fan of Israel’s actions, especially the settlements in the West Bank. I even argued here last week that we shouldn’t be supporting Israel in this conflict. But just because Israel isn’t a saint, it doesn’t mean Hamas is. Everyone who chants “from the river to the sea” while knowing what that means (most Americans don’t, including the ones chanting it) is mouthing support for genocide.
ETA: You can substitute “ethnic cleansing” for genocide if you prefer.
Lewis
11mo ago
You might disagree, but I’d consider lack of female suffrage to be a pretty heavy restriction on the franchise.
Lewis
11mo ago
Men remember it as a childhood thing they were never that into.
I think that depends on which movies they saw as a kid. All the princess movies? Yeah, they probably didn’t care too much about them. But The Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, The 101 Dalmatians, The Great Mouse Detective, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Fantasia—those were all great. I’ve noticed that, among my male friends with kids, the ones who are most positively-disposed toward Disney movies grew up with movies like those, while the ones who are completely indifferent to Disney movies only saw the princess ones.
Lewis
11mo ago
Seconding ArjinFerman.
However, I’d also like to push back against the idea that “subhuman” = “should be executed.” I’d say the connotation should instead be “subhuman” = “animalistic.” If I call someone an ass or a pig, I’m passing a negative judgment on them but not calling for their deaths. The same holds true if I use the broader category of sub-human.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter in this case, since it was all a joke anyway.
Lewis
11mo ago
here’s somebody marking me for execution over toothpaste. Do your share opinions about toothpaste with everybody in your so-called ingroup?
Unless I’m misreading the situation, you are massively overreacting to a joke. How do you even get “somebody’s marking me for execution” out of a sillily-worded statement that no toothpaste tastes good? Even taking f3zinker literally shouldn’t do it.
You may be right about most Baptists and non-denominational evangelicals, but I’d say you’re wrong about most Catholics and lectionary-following Protestants. Christmas is preceded by four weeks of preparation and followed by twelve days of celebration (and accompanied by a secular gift-giving celebration that happens at the same time). Easter is preceded by 40 days of preparation and followed by 40 days of celebration. There’s fasting, extra services, “giving up something for Lent….” The difference is that these are much less visible to the outside world, including to the aforementioned Baptists and evangelicals.
Lewis
11mo ago
That may be true in England, but in the United States, Christmas celebrations initially grew thanks to the massive waves of German immigrants, who had always considered Christmas very important. The commercialization of Christmas came later.
We use the Gregorian calendar now. To my knowledge, only Orthodox Christians still use the Julian.
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