MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise)
My understanding of Catholic (and even more so Orthodox) teaching is that everyone is either called to marriage and family or to a religious life. "Religious life" includes lay and clerical members of religious orders (monks are only ordained if their work as a monk includes ministering the sacraments, and nuns are obviously never ordained) as well as the (for Catholics only) celibate parochial clergy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
Nobody has ever called a wanted 8 week old fetus anything other than a baby, unless it already had a nickname.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
Googling "American lawyer average IQ" gives various estimates in the 115-125 range, with comments that successful lawyers (white-shoe partners, lawprofs, federal judges) are mostly going to be 130+.
I am pretty confident Sotomayor is in the 115-130 range - above average for traffic court lawyers, but well below the average federal judge. KBJ is even dumber than her. Kagan, Alito, Roberts, Kav, Barrett and Gorsuch are all smart enough to be e.g. High Court judges in England. I don't have an estimate on Thomas because so much of what he writes is easy dissents (or increasingly, concurrences) where he applies his simple but wrong (at least according to the majority and stare decisiis) law to the facts.
I suspect Alito is the smartest justice, but it isn't obvious because he is also the most partisan of the smart justices and partisanship makes you act dumber that you are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
So what do you do? You target the unsympathetic leeches like single guys age 29 playing lots of COD, because those are the cuts you CAN make.
You are insufficiently cynical here. You target the unsympathetic leeches publicly in order to maintain support, and then cut Medicaid for everyone in a bill you don't give your own backbenchers time to read. 29yo single guys playing COD don't consume a lot of expensive healthcare (and when they do it is an ER visit after a car crash - which will end up as an uncollected bill for the hospital if Medicaid doesn't pay) - there is no way you are getting the size of Medicaid cuts the GOP are looking for without taking healthcare away from people who are actually sick, and the people writing the legislation know this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
It is partially a useful correction - the real cases which provoked the legislation involved illegal post-viability abortions (legal viability is 24 weeks in the UK, not 20) or reasonable suspicion thereof, so an analogous natural pregnancy loss would be a stillbirth.
But the version of the story being pushed by British feminists is that it is about women suspected of using grey-market online abortion pills (as opposed to abortion pills prescribed by a doctor), so as a description of what was being said in public "miscarriage" is correct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately, and having criminal investigations of miscarriages is worse than failing to prevent the vanishingly small numbers of abortions that (a) actually happen and (b) the British public want to ban.
The other argument being widely made by feminists is that medication abortion should be available to women who have a reason for avoiding the medical system.
What is really going on is that about 20 women got abortion pills by telemedicine during the pandemic in order to illegally abort post-viability fetuses and were prosecuted for it, and this made the issue salient to the abortion-up-to-birth-for-any-reason feminists but not to WTF-don't-kill-viable-babies normies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.
Israel is generally considered to be a US client state even more than Ukraine (which if it is a client state is a shared project of the EU and US). I am not sure if public opinion on this point is correct, but I am pretty certain the people fleeing Tehran see it that way, and would do even if it wasn't for pro-regime propaganda in Iran.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
I think this has been overtaken by events in Ukraine - also by the news about what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan. Actual drone warfare fought by people who know they are at war, hate the enemy, and want to win, is about as gentlemanly as WW1 era trench warfare.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
Assuming that the advertisers know what they are doing, the Economist readership is about as highbrow as you can get. If you ignore the filler (i.e. the articles) and focus on the paid-for content (i.e. the ads) there are far more yachts, Rolexes etc. in the Economist than in Tatler.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
It's worth noting that a 90th percentile liar can lie much more effectively in high-context communications than in text. I agree that people are more inclined to trust a notorious lying liar who is a familiar face and can perform authenticity on camera, but they shouldn't be.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
Just so I understand, are you saying that the Democratic Party of the United States is a criminal organisation which is sufficiently dangerous compared to, say, the Black Panthers or the Mafia that the US Department of Homeland Security (or Stasi, to use the original German) needs to break precedent and introduce the first secret police force in the history of the United States?
- Don't care - personally I tend to always signal except in low-traffic residential streets.
- No. 80% of STOP signs in the US should be replaced with yields, and I'm not going to object to rolling stops under those circumstances. Full stops at red lights please.
- No in the US. Depends on the reasonableness of the jurisdiction when setting speed limits. If the Germans slap a 120km/h on a section of autobahn I am going to assume they have a good reason and obey it. But most US freeway limits are far too low, as is 70mph on UK motorways. (Where the design speed is closer to 85). I do obey speed limits in residential areas, although given the relative deadliness of housefires and car crashes building a residential street with a 60 design speed just in case a fire truck needs to speed down it and then posting a 25 limit and expecting it to be obeyed is murderous negligence.
- Obviously yes. This is the law in most jurisdictions with safe, fast motorways.
- No. Don't risk accidents to make a point. If you regularly do this, please put the international symbol of the road hog (four linked circles in a horizontal line) on the back of your car so I know what to expect.
- Of course not. (Barring weird emergencies like taking a sick kid in the back of the car)
And the fun part. Some scissors...
- Mini-roundabouts are better than all-way stops for low-traffic neighbourhood intersections. (Yes - I'm British)
- Zipper merges are obviously correct. (Yes - I have an IQ above room termperature)
- You should reverse into driveways and drive out forwards. (Is the law in the UK, but nobody complies. No, in my view)
- Anything larger than an econobox should require at least $500k liability insurance. Driving uninsured or underinsured should be subject to corporal punishment. (My pet hobby horse - in the UK unlimited liability insurance is effectively compulsory and the system seems to work).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
If other low-wage employers are increasing wages to compete with the new high-wage farm jobs, then the total cost to consumers will be more than the $150/year/family.
We know how this works out, because the main feature of the Biden economy was higher low-end wages paid for out of higher consumer prices. The median voter hated it enough to vote for the crook.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
Because fit, healthy American citizens with good work ethics already have better jobs than picking fruit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
It is also probably the governing body whose leaders spend least time in the territory they govern. Your average tinpot dictator is most likely to be found in his Presidential Palace in his own country. Hamas leadership are most likely to be found in a luxury hotel in Qatar.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
Yes - that. We can argue about the ethics of a country defending its citizens' property rights by couping foreign governments till the cows come home, but if we are considering the practical wisdom of doing so then "The 1953 Iranian coup had long-term negative consequences for the West which vastly outweigh the potential impact of an oil company being nationalised" is simply true and needs to be taken into account. In the world of international politics, a mistake is worse than a crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China.
Checking the list, Romania is richer than all of those, and appears to still be a net exporter of migrant farm workers. But googling suggests that Romania is importing sub-Saharan African migrants to do the jobs Romanians will only do for western European wages.
Argentina has significant numbers of migrant farm workers from poorer South American countries.
I think that leaves China as the most likely answer - it is richer than Brazil or Mexico now.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
The whole point of the Iraq war from the PoV of the "realist" faction in the Bush Jr White House (I would guess particularly Cheyney and Rumsfeld) was to set up a US client state on Iran's border, ideally one that (unlike Saudi Arabia) was not funding Al-Quaeda. The project failed because the only Iraqi faction that was willing to collaborate with the American invaders was Badr/SCIRI, which was also the pro-Iranian faction.
There was a long period (roughly from 9-11 to the defeat of ISIS by Russian and Iranian forces in 2017) where a rapprochement between the US and Iran would have been possible, based on the shared enemy in Salafi Jihadism (including Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS), if both sides had been run by actual foreign policy realists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
Interesting question - what is the richest country (except city-states like Singapore with no agriculture) that doesn't make large-scale use of itinerant foreign farm workers? My initial guess was Japan, but they finally cracked and brought in an agricultural guest worker visa in 2019. South Korea and Taiwan also use guest workers on a large scale. Poland have scaled back their farm worker scheme because they can get Ukrainian refugees to do the work, but that isn't getting Poles to do it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
It is noteworthy that the well-run red states (Texas and Florida) don't have mandatory E-verify for private sector employers, and the badly-run red states do.
But then the GOPe never tried to conceal that they were using illegals to undermine worker protections. The main thing Bush Jr did to enforce the immigration laws was sending fake OHSA inspectors into workplaces and deporting any illegal who tried to report a safety violation.
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
The decision to treat never-married single mothers as deserving poor was, in the UK at least, both conceptually and temporally separate from the decision to bureaucratise poor relief. I agree with you that it hasn't produced good outcomes.
Under the Old Poor Law, the deserving poor were generally understood to be:
- People with a record of contributing to society who were now too old and frail to earn a living by manual labour.
- Cripples and lunatics (although in practice the resources simply weren't there to support them)
- Widows and orphans.
Wounded or disabled veterans were increasingly considered deserving poor over the course of the 18th century, although they were not legally treated as such by the Poor Law system so if they didn't qualify for the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea (for the Army) or Greenwich (for the Navy) then they often ended up on the streets or in the workhouse.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare.
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis. Coercively funded public welfare has been around since time immemorial, the consequences of abolishing it have been politically unacceptable even in poorer and harsher times, and members of the manual labour class who can no longer work hard enough to hold down a job due to old age have almost always been seen as the most deserving cases.
Poor relief through the Church in medieval Europe was not voluntary charity - it was institutionalised welfare funded by State-endorsed coercion. In England the system largely operated through the monasteries and there was a combination of real secular coercion (tithes were a compulsory levy which could ultimately be collected by force, and impropriation of rectories by monasteries basically meant that tithes beyond what was needed for the support of the parish priest were diverted to monastic "charity") and spiritual coercion (in a society where people actually believe in a religion which incorporates justification by works, "you will go to hell if you do not leave a reasonable percentage of your net worth to the local monastery" is coercive). In the middle of the 16th century the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation mean that this system stops working, and the resulting increase in visible destitution is as politically destabilising as the present-day street-shitting crisis in San Francisco. Eventually England gets a comprehensive system of tax-funded secular poor relief in 1601. The Malthusian turn in the 19th century doesn't change the principle - the workhouses were harsh but they weren't cheap. And "don't put the infirm elderly in the workhouse" was the first demand of left-populists and one of the top five demands of right-populists for most of the next century.
What did change, probably for the worse, was the shift from a poor relief system where who gets what was ultimately at the discretion of local elites who could rely on their own knowledge to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor to a bureaucratised system. And that change was made by the workhouse-mongers who thought that the local elites were too soft - something that is still an issue in the UK in the present day, where governments of all stripes keep trying to centralise eligibility assessment for disability benefits because patients' own NHS GPs (in the late 20th century, the archetypal local elite) are too soft, particularly in high-unemployment post-industrial areas like the Welsh valleys.
This is part of why I think no-fault divorce was the schwerpunkt of the culture war (or at least the sex and sexuality theatre thereof). If you look at cishajnal cultures before about 1800, shotgun weddings were the first line of defence against bastardy for the lower and middle classes (elite men could afford to support their bastards, and elite women could be kept chaperoned). The incentives created meant that pre-marital sex was common (the fraction of first children born less than 9 months after the wedding gets as high as one in three in some times and places) but it really is pre-marital - you only have sex with someone you are ready, willing and able to marry. But if "we aren't actually in love" is grounds for divorce, then there is no point in a shotgun wedding. The difference between a divorced single mum because the shotgun marriage to the slob was never going to work out and a never-married single mum who wasn't interested in marrying the slob is not one that matters in practice.
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