Lewis2
3d ago
Jail them. Of course, that decision may redound to your detriment some seven years later.
Lewis2
3d ago
Projection. Jews have a net -40 favorability rating of Evangelical Protestants and a net -13 favorability rating of Mormons, against Evangelicals’ net +39 and Mormons’ net +58 favorability rating of Jews. Jews hate the two groups most closely associated with the Republican party and assume the latter must hate them back.
Lewis2
4d ago
Perhaps there are also individuals who do not experience a deep passion for life as such, and for these individuals it would be much easier to simply give the whole thing up over a minor inconvenience.
There’s no perhaps about it. I’m fairly indifferent to life, a state of mind that was driven home when I had a near-death experience and realized that I really wouldn’t have minded all that much if the incident had gone the other way. I’m not actually suicidal, but life oftentimes seems like more of a drudgery than anything else. Given the moderately high number of suicides in my extended family, I wonder if that might be partly a genetic trait.
This week I learned that the world’s most valuable piece of religious art is a solid gold statue of Buddha located in Thailand. The statue was covered in plaster to conceal its value during a war in the 1760s, and its true nature was only rediscovered in 1955 when workmen accidentally dropped it, causing some of the plaster to chip. It contains 5.5 tonnes (over 12,000 pounds) of gold. During the gold rally earlier this year, that would have given it a melt value of over $1 billion.
The statue’s history is pretty wild when you realize its worth. It sat in an abandoned temple in a ruined city for decades, then was moved to a new temple that had recently been built in Bangkok. When that temple fell into disrepair and was closed, it was moved to a small, insignificant temple in a nearby suburb. Since that temple didn’t have a tall enough building to house the statue, it sat for 20 years in an open shelter with a tin roof.
When reading about the above, I couldn’t help but be reminded of another famous solid gold statue—a 15.9 lb golden rooster that the federal government seized in 1960 as a violation of the Gold Reserve Act, which made it a criminal offense for Americans to own or trade gold, except in the case of collectibles. In its case, United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster the government argued that the statue shouldn’t be considered a work of art both because it contained too much gold and because it was being used to advertise a casino (and apparently ads can’t be art). After the jury ruled in favor of the rooster, the government’s appeal pointed out that the ruling might encourage Americans to produce 200 oz. golden steers. They apparently didn’t contemplate the production of 194,000 ounce statues.
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