Lewis2
9d 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
10d ago
I think that’s most of it, but I think Eddie Izard also had a good point that Pol Pot and Stalin “killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that.”
Lewis2
13d ago
Europeans absolutely have a shared history and culture, and, as with other racial groups, they form a distinct natural cluster. To take two obvious examples of shared culture, all European countries are historically Christian and trace their intellectual heritage back to Greece and Rome. That alone makes them more unified than “Native American” as a single ethnic category.
Lewis2
13d ago
But you do have to kill God to do it.
But we did that 140 years ago. Nothing else should stand in our way.
Lewis2
22d ago
there are too many people for the economy to sustain on its own
I’m struggling to understand why or how you think that is the case. Could you elaborate?
Lewis2
22d ago
Unless Trump also orders more departments to move to Kansas or other non-coastal states.
Lewis2
27d ago
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.
Lewis2
29d ago
If there’s really 96.6% public support, I’m just shocked it took this long.
Lewis2
1mo ago
As did The Office. As of course did Chaplin himself.
Lewis2
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
The other way around. If it weren’t for the beatings, the average Russian would reach his natural IQ of 130.
Lewis2
1mo 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.
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.
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