hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Americans do not think of Australians and New Zealanders as similar(New Zealand is stereotyped as some kind of quaint progressive ruritania, while we tend to see Australia as much more like a normal country).
I’m guessing seppo is a New Zealander?
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Social conservatives are Cassandra. But just like in Troy 1150 BC, nobody listens.
Seriously, go read bygone social conservatives. It’s hard to argue that thé women’s league against suffrage were wrong about their predictions.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
No, I live in one of the few bastions of actual homophobia in America- they’re seen as degenerate, disease ridden groomers who have government backing for their perversions and nudity on Main Street.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
HIV was well known when homosexuality was actually normalized though, right? It was still pretty deeply taboo in the 70s and 80s and by the 90s everyone knew about AIDS.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Mesoamerican human sacrifice ended because the region was conquered by the Spanish who outlawed the mesoamerican religion and imposed their own- very Chesterton’s fence for the Spanish.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Social conservatives have been Cassandra pretty consistently. Progressives simply declare it a good thing after the fact.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
This, in fairness, doesn’t necessarily represent a rapid demographic change- if Uk whites are like US whites, it’s probably mostly white baby names getting dumber more poorly spelled more creative.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Don't all three countries have very regular horror stories about well known conscientious objectors being euthanized?
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
New Zealanders are progressives who can't run an economy and have weird quasi-mid Atlantic accents. Australians have more British accents and could run an economy if they chose to, but they'd rather have short term money. They're both treehuggers in stupid and bureaucratic ways. Sheep joke about New Zealand, not as bad as Wales, and I think they have unusually hardcore parrots? Australia is our main rival for sports nobody cares about and a giant desert with interesting wildlife.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
You don't call them Canucks and tell jokes about them all being drunken lumberjack hockey fans who live off maple syrup and poutine and expect the government to pay for it all?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yes. Mormons love soda, own guns, SUV's are literally nicknamed 'Mormon Assault Vehicles', BYU has a strong football program, mormons marry early, American exceptionalism is literally part of their religion, they're officially creationist, etc, etc.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The red and blue tribes describe divisions in American into assimilative cultural identities and are at this point not fussier about precise religious identity than they are about direct descent from the border reavers- neither the blue or red tribe follows the religion that their British forebearers once followed(Presbyterianism is an old, shrinking denomination which like most such denominations has liberal clergy and Republican congregations). Mormons are comfortably red tribe and not even trinitarian. And the blue tribe may not even have a majority that believes in God at all, let alone hyperCalvinism.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Afghanistan is a medieval kingdom that happens to exist in the 21st century and not really a modern state; in fact ‘state’ is a word that doesn’t necessarily apply. The taliban can govern that state through handwritten notes and beatings. Israël cannot be.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Typo.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Traditional Catholics attempt to grow throughout the entire world. If I ever travel to Saudi Arabia, I have the number to call to find out where the underground Latin mass is.
And there is an interesting pattern- in the western hemisphere(including Latin America) and Europe(less ultraconservative parts of Ukraine and the Balkans), we're clearly a separate- even if only slightly- stratum from standard average novus ordo practicing Catholics. This includes Italy and Poland, where services are offered more conservatively. In Africa and India, we're not. Very hostile bishops in the western hemisphere will struggle to articulate doctrinal criticisms, often falling into vagueness. Meanwhile charismatic bishops in Africa can see no difference, or Maronite bishops(who love their 70's guitar hymns). I suppose it can be described as a tribal difference- namely, the difference of valuing high fertility and being more socially conservative than is accepted in the contemporary west. This is, in practice, a bigger deal than difference in beliefs around orthopraxis.
This is especially striking because we're... not shrinking. That kind of growth within a stagnant broader denomination attracts self comparison. And Africans who think the same way about the role of women, or the church's attitude towards contraception, and yet openly defend dancing on the altar during mass, feel more kinship than Italians who find Humanae Vitae deeply embarrassing but have very similar ideas about how the Catholic religion should be practiced.
Now of course in the USA there are many other tribes of practicing Catholic, because the collapse of universal Catholic K-12 education splintered the practicing Catholic world and only the Knights of Columbus have managed to somehow avoid this.
I don't know how, exactly, this slots in with your broader exploration of tribal loyalties. Unlike in your case, there are both red and blue tribe conservatives among the traditional Catholics worshipping and socializing with each other- with both represented in the clergy. But overcoming tribal differences comes only to a point, I suppose.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are not like Christian fundamentalists. Christian fundamentalists generally have the skills necessary to survive in industrial first world societies without outside support, because if they did not, there would not be Christian fundamentalists anymore. That means their leadership has the normal leadership abilities that would enable them to lead their societies overall- perhaps less well or more corruptly, but they could do it, whereas it's not clear that grand rebbes have any such ability, because they're hereditary cult leaders who trade votes for welfare fraud.
Instead, the religious Zionists will probably run Israel. They already kind of do, and sure they're more corrupt than the left would be, but Israel isn't falling apart. And they have a barely lower fertility rate than the haredim.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Nearly eight years? College only lasts four to five. Most people don't go to grad school.
I am pretty strongly in agreement that the expansion of higher education was mostly bad, that things like sending nursing students back to community college would be very good. But every first world society has near-universal high school education. I'm not sure about that chesterton's fence being avoidable.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
No, the old testament very explicitly condemns cross dressing- although from the perspective of believers who hold the prohibition still in force, the more common example is women in pants.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Abbott's have much more staying power, because he's doing this mostly by stacking admins at flagship universities with Abbott-aligned technocrats. Yes it works slower but it probably works better.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
College exists for a reason. We need higher educated people in order to run the society we choose to live in.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
If you don't like unions, credentialism, and regulatory capture now I have some bad news for you about guilds...
hydroacetylene
2d ago
From what I know most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact. We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.
Oh please. I've been IQ tested for jobs before in a field that everyone wants to get more blacks into and in which hiring managers will straight up tell people 'yeah, we'll give a black guy a chance, but they're lazy and don't learn, so we wind up having to fire them'.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Bill Gates is ugly for a famous person but attractive compared to the average person.
????
He is not attractive compared to the average person.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Is support for communism not stigmatized in Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, etc?
You’d be surprised- Texas does not have high voter turnout and the advantages of partisan Republican judges are pretty clear even to many moderate democrats.
More options
Context Copy link