Our sizable underclass of drug-addled, criminally-inclined, antisocial losers, many of whom come from broken homes and shitty communities. As Europe imports the third world, I expect it to struggle with many of the same issues.
Lewis2
1d ago
hell-on-earth shelters
Are yours actually that bad, and not simply because the homeless people themselves are shitty? I ask because I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the ones in my area, but when I’ve asked what the specific problems are, they tend to boil down to
- They have strictly-enforced rules against bringing in drugs and alcohol.
- If residents behave erratically, they’re given drug tests and are expelled if they test positive.
- The residents are kicked out during the day (the place needs daily cleaning and the residents are supposed to be out working or looking for work).
- There aren’t enough beds.
And of course
- The shelters are all run by Christian organizations, and they strongly encourage (but don’t mandate) church attendance.
For most critics, this last-named is the greatest offense of them all. Of course, suggesting that the complainers considering funding a secular alternative just makes them irate.
Family stories? The school I attended had corporal punishment into the late 80s. The teachers who practiced it are still living, and the last cohort of students to experience it are only in their 40s.
ETA: I had those same teachers in later years. They found some creative alternatives to the paddle and the rod once those were banned. I think I might have preferred a quick paddling to the more protracted punishments they used instead.
Lewis2
9d ago
Not a direct response to your question, but Leo created a bit of a stir in traditional Roman Catholic circles last week when he celebrated Mass ad orientem. Read into that what you will.
Lewis2
9d ago
even a connection to wokeness-writ-large seems strained
No, I think it’s very easy to place the blame squarely on wokism, especially given this detail:
The museum to the accomplishments and hardships of my ancestors had been "renovated". It now celebrated the fictitious diversity my town has always had.
Museum curators are 94% Democratic, and the newer generation seems quite gung-ho on inserting racial diversity everywhere. The New York Tenement Museum made the news a few years ago when it altered its core principles to change its focus from the Italian and Jewish families who actually lived there to celebrate a black Black family who didn’t. The Art Institute of Chicago made headlines around the same time for firing its entire staff of unpaid, highly educated volunteer docents because they were too white and hiring (and paying) a younger, more diverse crowd in their place (something several other museums also did, but without the attendant fanfare). In the city closest to my own hometown, the history museum has started replacing its old displays on the history of the area. With the changes, a first time visitor could be forgiven for thinking that the area’s history went 1) Native Americans, 2) Genocide, 3) Civil Rights, and 4) Immigration (2000–present), without anything of note in between. It’s a deliberate assault on the heritage of the people who actually built the city and made the area what it is today, and it’s entirely due to the wokeness of the museum staff.
Lewis2
9d ago
there are a million struggling restaurants who will gladly buy your stolen product from you, no questions asked.
That seems unlikely to me. Do you have any evidence to back that up, either anecdotal or published?
Lewis2
19d ago
I’m curious what makes it so obvious. Is it just the greater fervency of the convert?
Lewis2
19d ago
It’s performative in that the #killallmen posters probably haven’t killen any men, but the disgust/hatred each group has for its target demographic is probably quite similar.
Lewis2
19d ago
@Clementine just described pretty much that exact view as Holocaust denial below, so yes, it’s controversial. Some people treat anything less than “the Nazis intentionally murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers” as Holocaust denial. Some also get upset if you go further and mention any of the other victims of the Nazi concentration camps in the same breath as the Jews, claiming that that’s also Holocaust denial.
Lewis2
19d ago
That depends a lot on the small town. I can only remember one set of divorced parents among my childhood classmates, and still today, the town is mostly populated with functional, intact families. Most people are either middle class or have the values and traits associated with the middle class.
A friend of mine teaches third grade in a different rural community. Most years, only one or two of her students have married parents. The bulk of the parents divorced when the kids were younger, though an increasing number never married at all. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, trailer trash behavior has long since spread outside the park, and the kids pretty much all suffer from emotional and behavioral issues, which then also negatively impacts their academic performance.
I don’t think I personally know anyone who went to jail on DV charges, real or fake. She could probably list two dozen off the top of her head.
Lewis2
19d ago
Is a kid at daycare really getting any less attention than the twelfth kid on the farm? At least in my experience, parents give up on providing much individualized attention after kid three.
Lewis2
19d ago
There are many, many, many instances of Hitler making terrible strategic decisions; I don't think this is one of them.
There was one aspect that was pretty terrible: the decision to invade Russia during winter. Hitler and his generals knew how that was likely to turn out thanks to Napoleon’s experience a century earlier, and IIRC they initially planned to invade in early summer. They were forced to delay the start of their campaign until fall, and instead of postponing the campaign until the following year, they decided to risk a winter invasion after all. It seems to me that that’s probably the stupidest decision he made during the war.
Lewis2
21d ago
I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid
Perhaps my experience was atypical, but in my neck of the woods, the neighbor’s cousin’s kid brought receipts. After high school students found that their complaints about their teachers were being ignored, one or two started secretly filming the offending remarks and sharing them on social media. A scandal ensued, the administration was livid (at the students, not the teachers), a few teachers lost their jobs, the community was in uproar, and so on. I thought the most unfortunate aspect of the debacle was that so many people took your position—“the kids can’t be trusted,” “they’re all just exaggerating,” “if this was true, the administration would be on it”—until some kid risked expulsion to provide proof. Notably, in neighboring school districts, kids complained about precisely the same issues and had many of the same stories, but no one was brave enough to secretly film the lectures and share them online, so a lot of people assumed the problems were restricted to the one bad school district. Given the circumstances, I find that unlikely.
Lewis2
30d ago
If there are still enough nuns.
Therein lies the rub. Also, I’d argue that having a free teaching staff counts as a subsidy from the parish.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Only if the schools were subsidized by the parish. If a school had to stand on its own two feet, $3,000 per head wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries, staff salaries (janitor, cook, librarian, secretary, etc.), benefits, utilities, maintenance, insurance, books, supplies, equipment, furniture, and so on. You could probably get by with $3,000 a head if you were running some sort of homeschool co-op with no facility costs.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Eh, I know a number of couples who ended up married because of a surprise pregnancy in the 80s and 90s, some of whom would admit that they probably wouldn’t have stayed together otherwise. Heck, it’s still not completely uncommon where I grew up. Getting pregnant and then not getting married is seen as pretty low-class. Some do it anyway, but they were usually trailer trash to begin with.
Lewis2
1mo ago
You can drive a car on your own land without a driver’s license, vehicle license, seat belt, etc. By analogy, you should be able to use a gun on your own property without any licensing or training requirements.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Did you somehow mark your comment as 18+, or did you trip some filter that added the tag automatically? I don’t recall ever seeing that on here before.
Lewis2
1mo ago
The West stole everything from oppressed people, now the oppressed people finally get to enjoy it.
I keep seeing the vapid mantra, “No one is illegal on stolen land!” in discussions about the LA riots. It’s retarded, but it’s suddenly everywhere.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Lewis2
2mo ago
@2rafa is correct. You can read Cole’s own description of his changing beliefs on the Holocaust here.
Here’s an excerpt relating to his current beliefs, which he has held since the mid-90s:
Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps, the Ostland ghettoes (which functioned as death camps), and by the Einsatzgruppen execution squads.
You’d think that Himmler’s official death census would be in every Holocaust book. But no. “Great” scholars like Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer rarely if ever cite it (in his 1982 magnum opus A History of the Holocaust, Bauer doesn’t cite Korherr once).
Deniers never cite Korherr either.
Amazing, huh? With the Mao and Stalin death toll, we’re forced to roughly calculate the figure via demographic extrapolation. But with the Holocaust, we have the main perpetrator, Himmler, commissioning a specific census of the murdered. A number. Everyone agrees it’s a legit document, yet few use it.
Why?
Because if you accept 2.4 million for the beginning of 1943, you cannot get to six million by April 1945. From ‘43 to ‘45, there would simply not be enough Jews subjected to “aktions” to get to 6 mil. Every mainstream scholar agrees that by the close of 1942, two-thirds of all Holocaust deaths had already occurred. So Korherr’s figure presents a problem.
That’s why I put my approximate figure of total Holocaust dead at 3.5 to 3.6 million. But not six. You simply cannot get to six in the two remaining years of the war.
Meanwhile, deniers won’t accept a figure above 271,000. Accepting 2.4 million by 1943? That blasphemes the tenets of their cult. It can’t be more than 300,000, period! Their pseudo-religion dictates it.
Lewis2
2mo ago
The total number of excess deaths is probably the best you can do, but even that isn’t perfect, since it also encompasses deaths from delayed medical treatment, deaths of despair, etc., due to the shutdowns.
That has been on my reading list for several years now, but I’ve never gotten around to picking it up. Would you still recommend it despite your somewhat tepid review?
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