Lewis
1yr ago
Urbanization is huge, but it can’t be the whole picture, as even farm families typically don’t have eight kids anymore. Fertility in rural areas has been falling just as surely as in urban areas; it just hasn’t fallen as far (but then, it also started off higher).
As an illustration, my uncle is a semi-retired farmer. He had three kids. My grandparents had four (plus one stillbirth and one miscarriage); my great-grandparents, seven; and my great-great-grandparents, ten. Not counting the Amish, I think all the farmers I know have between two and five kids. Heck, even among the Amish it’s relatively rare to have 8–10 kids today.
Lewis
1yr ago
Some of this may be confounded by the fact that blacks marry at much lower rates than other races. If, on top of that, interracial couples are less likely to marry than intraracial couples (true in my anecdotal experience), the true interracial coupling rate could be quite a bit higher than the marriage rates you quoted would indicate.
Lewis
1yr ago
I think the geographical distribution of German-descended Americans does a lot to explain that.
The more conservative areas of the country are and have been the South and the Midwest, with the latter full of Germans and the former full of British Islanders. Southern conservatives were anxious to beat the Hun again, while Midwestern conservatives still had a lot of residual sympathy for the Fatherland.
Lewis
1yr ago
Not just the elders either. One of my parents’ next door neighbors was born in the mid-1930s; he didn’t speak a lick of English until he started the first grade. His family, neighbors, and fellow church members all spoke mostly German.
Lewis
10mo ago
the rednecks you describe are unlikely to provide a particularly warm welcome to even the most English speaking and talented Hindu(they'll resort to interpretive dance to befriend Jose the undocumented day laborer long before they offer to share their non-bud light beer with non-Christian H1Bs)
Have you ever met any rednecks? Because this sounds more like a San Franciscan or New Yorker’s extremely stereotyped mental image of a redneck than it does my many experiences with them.
If an Indian guy showed up to any of the gun clubs I’ve been to, brought some beer, and was happy to talk shit about Democrats, I’m willing to bet he’d be welcomed with open arms.
Lewis
10mo ago
I’ve had to put up with my share of snooty Brahmins before, so I definitely understand where you’re coming from. I just don’t get the sense that self_made_human would be nearly as insufferable and off-putting to the red tribe as some of his countrymen. In my experience, as long as a stranger makes a good-faith effort to fit in, most rednecks will welcome him no matter his color or nationality. Shooting, drinking, and badmouthing Biden are probably the quickest ways to gain acceptance in the red tribe. I don’t think self_made_human would have a problem with any of those three.
Lewis
9mo ago
Doesn’t anorexia also arise spontaneously in some people? All social contagions have to start somewhere.
Lewis
8mo ago
The journalist/author in this case might have assumed that many of his readers wouldn’t know that Jesuit=Catholic.
Lewis
8mo ago
Why do you see it as such a problem that you of all people had to bring it up? Every topic on this board was initially brought up by someone. Why is it bad that, in this case, that person happened to be you?
Lewis
8mo ago
While iPhones don’t autocorrect “i.e.” and “e.g.” on their own, you can set up text replacements for both if it’s something you care about (I use them often enough that it seemed worthwhile to me). Go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement, then enter whatever shortcut you like and the resulting phrase. I have it set up so that “ie” will autocorrect to “i.e.,” (including the comma), and likewise with “eg.” The whole thing takes about a minute for both.
Lewis
7mo ago
If beach front property assessments in Florida are anything like farmland assessments in the Midwest, such a valuation might not be completely ridiculous. Around me, pretty much all farmland is assessed at $1,500–$2,000 per acre, even though land hasn’t sold for that since the 1990s. One large farm near me recently sold for $20,000 an acre, but the assessed value is only $1,931 an acre. No farmer would (or should) get in trouble for valuing his land at 2023 rates, no matter what the assessor thinks. I’m not saying Trump’s properties are definitely the same, but it doesn’t seem immediately ridiculous to assume they might be.
Lewis
7mo ago
I’m typing this on my phone, so I’m not going to mess with links.
First, the county assessor lists Mar a Lago’s market value as $37 million. If it’s true that the judge valued it at $17–25 million, there’s already a major discrepancy. It’s worth noting that Trump paid $12 million for it in 1995, equivalent to $24.3 million today. For the property to be only worth $25 million, the judge has to assume that property values haven’t risen faster than inflation, which seems awfully dubious from where I sit. He also has to assume that the county assessor overvalued the property by 1.5–2.2 times its actual worth, which is interesting given his complaint that Trump has been overvaluing his property. Perhaps he felt the best way to compensate for Trump’s overvaluation was to opt for a noticeable undervaluation?
Secondly, some neighboring properties’ asking and sale prices are instructive. 168 King Rd. (4,874 sq. ft., not ocean-front) just sold for $14 million, against an assessed value of $4.1 million (and a market value of $8.4 million; I’m not clear what the difference between the two is). Another nearby property (500 Regents Park Rd—6,488 sq. ft., ocean-front) is listed for sale at $40 million, against an assessed value of $6.4 million ($12 million market value).
Mar-a-Lago’s main building, by contrast, is 37,414 sq. ft. The property also contains five more buildings, two pools, and five tennis courts, to say nothing of the land. That it’s all worth a measly $17–25 million doesn’t pass the smell test.
Lewis
7mo ago
It takes two to tango, but somehow only one side ever gets accused of dancing.
Lewis
7mo ago
Nazi Germany was not the only “specifically racist state.” At minimum, you need to add Rhodesia and South Africa, which both had successful white minority rule until international pressure forced them to change.
Lewis
7mo ago
Two reasons:
-
The Japanese were not displaced from their homeland and only temporarily lost control of Japan after their defeat. The Palestinians lost both their homes and control of Palestine permanently.
-
The emperor surrendered unilaterally against the wishes of his advisors. There is no god emperor in Gaza to make the Palestinians surrender against popular sentiment.
Lewis
6mo ago
I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them, but I also do not think that it is reasonable to expect black Americans to be ok with there being official statues of people who enslaved their ancestors just 150 years ago.
The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.
In your opinion, should Japanese Americans be allowed to destroy all statues of FDR?
Lewis
6mo ago
It may be worth noting that when the NAACP declared “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “Negro/black national anthem,” the US didn’t even have an official national anthem yet, as the Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t officially adopted until 1931. Since the US didn’t have a national anthem, it probably didn’t seem as anti-American to adopt a second, racial national anthem as it would today. That said, I still find it incredibly distasteful and divisive whenever I hear anyone refer to it as that today.
Lewis
6mo ago
It seems to me that today’s lack of racism could have some explanatory power. One hundred years ago, the smartest, hardest working, and most well-adjusted blacks were not allowed to join the dominant white society, instead becoming businessmen and leaders within their own parallel communities. They preached and modeled the sort of virtuous living that leads to better life outcomes—get an education, get and stay married, hold down a steady job, etc. Then once racial barriers were dismantled in the 1950s–60s, the most educated and high-performing blacks integrated into white society a la Cliff Huxtable, inadvertently leading their former communities to become dysfunctional, crime-ridden ghettos. It’s similar to the brain drain that’s happening in rural America and to the emigration conundrum facing many third world counties. The most capable leave, and the ones left behind aren’t the sort who make functional communities.
Lewis
6mo ago
Don’t forget 4. described slavery as a “moral and political evil.” Meanwhile Grant and his wife also owned slaves. Part of the problem is that modern people are allergic to nuance. Everyone must be either a hero or a villain. There’s no room in the modern imagination for anything in between.
Lewis
6mo ago
Have you ever read Eichmann in Jerusalem or Scott’s review of it? Both speak to this point.
In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.
The Romanians started their own concentration camps to supplement the Nazis’, “more elaborate and atrocious affairs than anything we know of in Germany”, but they didn’t always need them – “deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite followup to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops.” Things became so bad that the local Nazi representative, German noble Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to the Third Reich’s own efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.
Lewis
6mo ago
I’m puzzled; what’s the difference between a trans female who was socialized to be male and is therefore more violent, and a non-binary person who was socialized to be male and therefore mansplains and has a “male demeanor”? Doesn’t your sister’s argument in favor of trans people negate her complaints about her non-binary acquaintance?
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?
More options
Context Copy link