Lewis
3mo ago
Thanks for the link! I’ll have to see if I can find anything on the monarchism. I’m sure it would make for a fascinating read.
Lewis
3mo ago
That is interesting. Do you know what group that was? I know there were a few… attempts, if you can call it that; it would probably be more accurate to say idle day-dreams… to create a new Germany in the Midwest (every one of which fizzled out almost immediately as the immigrants realized that the USA was actually pretty great). I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Texas, but then I’m only really familiar with a couple of German communities down there.
Lewis
3mo ago
It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.
Surely that’s true in America as well, right? Or is this an area where Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians have retained something of their ancestral culture? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of people serving dinner to their kids’ friends.
Lewis
5mo ago
If you’re religious, the old Sunday morning ceremony followed by potluck in the parish hall is pretty cheap too.
Lewis
5mo ago
Thanks for the reply. I’ve found my own personal experience a bit interesting, since if anything, I’d have expected the more pro-Marcos people to stay and the more anti-Marcos to emigrate. You’re probably right that the economic prospects of immigrating to the States likely outweighed everything else.
Lewis
5mo ago
Given your ancestry, you might be able to help answer a question that’s been at the back of my mind for awhile. All the Filipinos and half-Filipinos I know were and remain very pro-Marcos (the dictator, not the current president, though they like him too). Assuming you’re Filipino-American, do you have any sense as to how widespread that attitude is among Filipino immigrants? Was there some sort of selection effect, such that only the more pro-Marcos folks came to this country, or is my small sample size just not very representative?
Lewis
6mo ago
A mastectomy specifically? I assume there’s no medical benefit to doing it earlier (though maybe it heals better the younger you do it?). I imagine the proponents of that procedure are solely focused on the psychological benefits—reducing the “trauma” of seeing your body change in ways you don’t want it to. They probably also don’t consider detransitioning to be a real future concern, so why not just get it over with?
That’s the best I can come up with; I’m not actually in favor of such things myself.
Lewis
6mo ago
I don’t believe any state in the union involuntarily institutionalizes sex offenders, even for crimes against children. After being released from prison, such criminals are almost always put on a permanent, publicly-available sex offender registry; is that possibly what you’re thinking of?
Lewis
1yr ago
If qualified immunity protects government officials who knowingly break the law, but who do so in a way that hasn’t yet been ruled to clearly violate their victims’ constitutional rights (e.g., police who steal $225,000 while on the job), wouldn’t you agree that a sane legal system should likewise protect non-government officials in a similar way?
Lewis
3mo ago
I believe the Germans were mostly Democrats during the peak periods of German immigration. The liberal, largely atheistic Forty-Eighters were almost all Republicans, but they were, despite their outsized cultural influence, a tiny minority of German immigrants. The majority were conservative Catholics and Lutherans who had little use for the Republican party. The midwestern German-Americans began to warm up to the Republicans before WWI, but they didn’t switch en mass until after.
Lewis
4mo ago
If they skipped Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, you need a better classical music station.
Lewis
4mo ago
Sunday morning service, Christmas gathering with family, Christmas Eve Mass, and finally Lessons and Carols service with some friends. Having Christmas Eve on a Sunday this year really made it a church-heavy day.
Lewis
5mo 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
5mo ago
"Why should I care what God wants? Why is God's morality more important than any other?"
If an omnipotent, omniscient being thinks that A is good and B is bad, it would be an act of insane hubris to imagine that you could know better than him. The more so when this being has the power to sentence you to eternal suffering or bliss.
Lewis
5mo ago
Really? You find modern-day German unpleasant-sounding? I agree that old German accents were pretty harsh-sounding, but almost all of the Germans I’ve known have been so soft-spoken that their language sounded downright pretty.
French, on the other hand, is hideous. I don’t understand how it ever became “the language of love.”
Lewis
6mo ago
I believe the casualty level necessary to subdue Hamas and occupy Gaza would be unacceptable even to Israel’s closest ally. If Israel had gone in blasting in the first two days after the attack, they might have gotten away with it. By now, though, the moment has passed, and I don’t see any possible path toward occupation.
Lewis
6mo ago
How is it plausible that a mastectomy works better when you're 14 than when you're 18?
The idea is that it’s far easier for a person who transitions at 14 to pass as the gender of their choice than it is for a person who transitions at 18, especially for MTFs. I don’t think they’re actually wrong about this. At 14, most boys and girls are still fairly androgynous; by 18, most boys are clearly young men: tall, prominent jaw line, Adam’s apple, facial hair, muscular structure, etc. If a gender dysphoric boy wants to transition and pass as a girl, puberty blockers at as young an age as possible are his best shot. The same holds true for girls but in reverse.
Neither are countries restaurants. Between the two analogies, I believe mine is both superior and a better way of framing the question.
That said, I’m not sure you really understood my analogy correctly. Yes, if someone who lives in a different house has different rules and customs, that’s absolutely fine (barring a few exceptions). Under my analogy, those would be different countries. So if I move into a women-wear-veils house/country, it would be just as wrong for me to demand the homeowners make an exception for my wife/daughters as it would be for someone from a wear-shoes-indoors house/country to move into my house and demand I accommodate them.
Also, I don’t see how my analogy asserted that it was a positive good to deny immigrants for arbitrary reasons. I think you’ve misunderstood the analogy, and that’s causing you to overthink the details of the analogy without getting into the ideas the analogy represents.
For example, “taking off your shoes” could represent any number of customs/laws: anything from genital mutilation and honor killings to speaking English and using the correct finger to point with. That’s why I said it would be more enlightening if BurdensomeCount gave concrete examples.
Lewis
6mo ago
Isn’t the UK’s sinking of the French fleet pretty well-known in the UK (and presumably also France)? Not that the two situations are comparable anyway. Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was supposedly an accident; the UK’s attack on the French fleet was open and deliberate. The US, responding to the former, made diplomatic protests but otherwise did nothing. Vichy France, responding to the latter, broke diplomatic ties with the UK and bombed Gibraltar. In addition, my understanding is that the resulting rise in French Anglophobia lingered on for years.
Edit: If we had responded to the attack on the USS Liberty by breaking off diplomatic ties with Israel and bombing the Israeli coast, I don’t think anyone today would be complaining about a conspiracy to cover the whole thing up.
Lewis
3mo ago
If you don’t mind my asking, whereabouts did you grow up in the States? I’m a bit younger than you, but I also know that my parents never ate dinner at their friends’ houses growing up either. When my dad was young, one of my grandma’s neighbors would ring a farm bell when it was getting close to supper, which was the signal for all the kids in the neighborhood to go home.
Lewis
4mo ago
It was not a black station, which is why it surprised me so much. There is an actual Gospel station in town, which I assume also had Gospel Christmas music.
Lewis
4mo ago
I was referring to the minor brouhaha that developed earlier this summer when a prominent AfD leader was accused of referring to East Germany as “Central Germany,” thus implying that East Prussia was the real East Germany. As far as I can tell, this was a smear job, and she was actually using “Central Germany” in its usual, uncontroversial sense. Still, if they’re regularly accused of being revanchist Nazis anyway, why not lean to it and troll? Tacitly accept the revanchist accusation and use it to deflect the Nazi accusation.
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?
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