domain:abc.net.au
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
2hr ago
Fuck it, we’ll do it live, then
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Yes. Groceries have a low elasticity of demand -- if food prices double, I might replace some brand items with knock-offs, but I still need to buy something to eat.
By contrast, restaurants have a high elasticity of demand. If restaurant prices double, people will just buy more microwave food instead.
In a way, a la carte restaurants a luxurious service: you order and someone needs to prepare your dish on demand, just for you. Sure, the specifics differ, adding toppings to a pizza or a crepe is much less labor-intensive than preparing a steak, but at the end of the day you do not benefit from the effects of scale which most industrial processes (including pre-cooked food) have.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...).
This is... tricky, I think, in terms of sensitivity.
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians. Or at least, they do not fall within any historical confession of Christian orthodoxy. They're probably best understood as a type of heretic; personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing. The point is that "Mormons aren't Christians", as a statement, is substantially true.
On the other, it is obviously breathtakingly insensitive to bring that up at this time. Mormons believe that they are Christians, even if they are, in my judgement, in error. (I realise that technically definitions can't be wrong; even so I can and do believe that they draw the line between Christianity and non-Christianity in an indefensible place.) More importantly, whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity or not is irrelevant to this particular issue. Murdering a group of Mormons at worship is obviously very, very bad. Christians ought to respond to that by condemning the crime while offering empathy, support, and compassion to those grieving. It is not the appropriate time to engage in a confessional dispute.
But to return to the first hand - a major public figure, the president of the United States, just responded to this by asserting that Mormons are Christians, and that this shooting is an attack on Christianity qua Christianity. Now I judge both of those statements to be untrue, and though many might argue the former, the latter seems pretty hard to dispute. It is not factually true that this shooting was "a targeted attack on Christians". If nothing else, ranting about the anti-Christ suggests that the shooter himself is a Christian, albeit a very delusional one. So it seems like there is value in clarifying in this moment that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong.
I suppose this is just another situation where Trump really needed to keep his mouth shut, because all his comments have done is make a tragic situation worse for everyone.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Lower-mid level clerics liked it- laypeople didn’t get a say under the old system or in the post Vatican II era. It didn’t matter what they thought either way.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Yes, they’re the same species but they’re different subspecies.
Ex-ante, one could argue assimilation into the US is easier now than ever, given everyone's Always Online, the dominance of US cultural influence, increased English adoption, and the general reduction of worldwide linguistic diversity.
However, I highly disagree that assimilation into the US (or any other country) should be the key metric for immigrants in and of itself, at least as commonly used.
Latinos (whether they be legal or illegal immigrants) are commonly proposed as a population group who assimilate well, yet they assimilate insofar as they assimilate into the bell-curve space between white and black Americans. "Not as disruptive and negative value-add as US blacks are to the rest of the US" should not be the litmus test for the immigration policy of any country.
For the modal white or Asian American, it'd be more than understandable if he or she prefers immigrants who assimilate well to the right-side of the bell-curve, as to not create more net-tax consumers, violent crime producers, or affirmative action claimants by way of the immigrants themselves and/or the immigrants’ descendants.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Pardon me if you've answered this question before somewhere else, but just for my own satisfaction:
What is the point of the euphemisms and fictionalised names? You're not writing a detailed fantasy story with its own history or anything. It is pretty clear what you're talking about - why not skip the fig leaves of Tidus, Hajnalis, and Tropicals, and just say Earth, whites, and blacks? I understand that there's dramatic utility sometimes in using different language and context to sneak past the prejudices of an audience, and invite us to consider an issue without all the baggage we currently attach to those terms, but you aren't being subtle enough for that to work. It is too blatant. All you have done is replace a handful of nouns. Why bother?
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States.
Revisiting Scott's review of Albion Seed, I agree that homogeneous Puritan and Quaker settlements were probably very high trust. But that was only two of the four groups. The Borderers were always low trust, and the Cavaliers were nominally Anglicans, which is what you get when you take Catholicism and substitute the pope with the king of England.
The Quakers were already not the dominant religion in Pennsylvania by 1750, hard to blame Irish Catholic immigrants for that. I assume that it was kinda similar for the Puritans? First you have the Mayflower generation from 1620 on: people who were willing to life a life of hardship for their religious beliefs. It is basically impossible not to get a high-trust society from that (apart from these unfortunate witch trials). But I would imagine that there is some regression to the mean over time, which is of course accelerated by religious heterogeneity, with John Adams seeming a lot less hardcore Puritan than his earlier ancestors.
I am not saying that Irish or Scottish Catholics arriving in 1860 did not lower the trust level, but simply that it would not have been so different if the US had only let in Protestant Germans of various sects. Once your neighbor goes to a different church than you, the common knowledge that you have identical moral beliefs pitilessly enforced by your community will disappear.
The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. [...] old WASP San Francisco,
Reading up on the history of SF, SF basically before the gold rush of 1849 was basically a village. Early SF was basically a hive of scum and villainy, not surprising if you select for "people who want to get rich finding gold" instead of "people who go to the New World to escape the godlessness of the Old World". Sure, things calmed down a bit, but I think SF was never high trust.
celluloid_dream
2hr ago
if I'm worried about being attacked by anything, it's wasps. Evil bastards. Can't see the nest until it's too late half the time, and even if someone else steps on it, they can just randomly decide it's your fault anyway
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2hr ago
I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think attempting to evangelize was part of the motivation, but an even bigger part just seems to be that this is what people liked back then, especially for poorly-catechized mid-century American Catholics who were living through a period where their religion seemed to be changing by the minute in ways that were unprecedented and unexpected. Catholics at the time didn't know how to deal with such radical change, so they defaulted to things that they knew from the outside or felt good to them. Happy clappy songs among them.
PyotrVerkhovensky
2hr ago
I'll admit to reading and enjoying these chapters. I do think you (probably intentionally) oversimplify and the conclusions to each chapter feel like a post-hoc "just so" story.
But I'll take the bait and riff on your story a bit.
Imagine there is another island that was populated by a number of different ethnic groups. These groups came to the island over different periods of time, sailing from other islands to escape famine or enemy attack. By happenstance, these groups had obvious physiological differences. By a similar process that you describe, one of these groups had better time management, better long-term planning, and greater self-control. Let's call them "Nahribs". The other groups had varying degrees of "capability", but the Nahribs had an absolute advantage in "civilization-building" capabilities.
While a similar process as you describe caused a "downward flow" of this Nahribs elite, the fact that there were distinct physiological differences meant that members of one group couldn't "accidentally" breed with a member of another group. And for religious and cultural reasons, such intentional inter-breeding was considered anathema and very little of it occurred.
Surrounded by their inferiors, the Nahribs gained expertise in coordination, administration, and (unfortunately) status games. Coordination was needed to ensure that the inferiors were working productively. Innovation was not selected for, since there were so many inferior groups who could provide manual labor. Over time, the populations grew large and administration was needed to run everything smoothly. With so much manual work performed by the inferior groups, the superior group had leisure time which they spent inventing various ways to "one-up" each other. And so society continued in relative stasis, with all the intellectual capacity focused on organization, political machinations, and navigating complex social relationships.
At some point, the Hajnalis came across this island and with their superior inventiveness quickly subdued it. However, it didn't take long (at least, not long in the way History is measured) for the Hajnalis to realize that this island had vast pools of moderately competent labor. The Nahribs didn't know how to labor, but that was ok: the few groups directly under them were not as talented as the typical Hajnali but were a tenth of the cost, and could perform repetitive, rote, tasks. Soon these workers were producing the bulk of physical goods. Not long after, they were producing much of the world's "simple" intellectual work as well.
As technology improved island navigation, more and more Nahribs were able to travel abroad. They soon discovered that the Hajnalis were living in a paradise compared to their native island. The Nahribs saw an opportunity: the productive structures of the Hajnalis were familiarly hierarchical and, as technology progressed, increasingly dependent on administrative work. This is the type of culture that the Nahribs' were bred to excel in! They quickly climbed the various bureaucratic ladders. Within decades they were highly overrepresented in leadership roles. In the new "information age", "leadership" was about spouting the right words, coordinating capital and human resources, and knowing when and who to back-stab. While much of their corporate climb was "deserved", much of it was also greased by their compatriots. Nahribs, naturally, felt closest kinship with other Nahribs. Unlike Hajnalis, Nahribs felt no ethical qualms with nepotism.
The Hajnali had laid the seeds for their own demise. The new Hajnali economy, flooded in abundant goods created by other islands, disfavored the types of capabilities that had once made their island so powerful. There no longer was the same need for innovation, industry, and individualism. In short, they became an economy eerily similar to the Nahribs' original island, and the Nahribs had many millennia of "management experience" on the Hajnalis. Elite Hajnalis, by participating in a labor arbitrage that forced their economies into rewarding "administration", had set the stage for their own replacement.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
Who cares? It's absolutely delicious, one of the all-time great dishes. I don't give a damn about the color.
5434a
2hr ago
White fish + white flour + white potatoes, all cooked in neutral flavour vegetable oil. If anything warrants the reputation for bland beige British food it's fish and chips. It's not even cheap, it's practically the same price as a takeaway chicken curry with rice.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3hr ago
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroup immediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.
(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
They also confirmed on Sunday that “Mr. Nigel Edge actually changed his name some years ago,” adding that they are working to identify “all of his past.”
One authority referred to him as “Sean,” and according to public records that Newsweek obtained, he previously identified as Sean DeBevoise.
...
According to a 2020 self-published book on Amazon, Headshot: Betrayal of a Nation (Truth Hurts), DeBevoise wrote that on tour, he took "four bullets including one to the head." He said from that moment on his "life would never be the same," adding that "all of this was at the hand of friendly fire that would provide the most crippling mental damage."
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
...Edge has been behind several bizarre lawsuits filed in North Carolina this year — including one accusing a Southport church of trying to kill him.
The suit, filed in May, claimed the Generations Church was behind a “civil conspiracy” masterminded by the LGBTQ community and white supremacist pedophiles to kill Edge because he’s “a straight man.”
In January, Edge filed a similar suit against the Brunswick Medical Center, accusing it of being part of a conspiracy launched by “LGBTQ White Supremacists” who were allegedly out to get him because he survived their attack in Iraq.
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
Problem one: Italy does not believe it exists to spread Italian influence and culture. There are no Italian missionaries spreading the message of Al dente pasta. Islam is a missionary religion with a strong cultural belief in forcing others to adapt to their religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
I think honestly it’s because it wasn’t authentic in a sense. They didn’t embrace the happy clappy because they thought it would make better Catholics, they kinda did it to appeal to outsiders.
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
I've found my recommendations to be often reasonably decent as long as I keep engaging in that heavy curation.
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
concerns about attacks by wildlife are usually the mark of a greenhorn
Except of course attacks by ticks, mosquitoes, horseflies, blackflies, deerflies and wasps (not to forget midges if you're in Scotland). And probably a bunch more that luckily don't live up here. Goddamned motherfuckers.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
I’m generally in favor of controlled legal immigration, but I just don’t understand the food and music angle. Those things frankly don’t matter at all. Like, okay, suppose I transport you to his nightmare alternative universe in which Americans have never tasted lasagna. Okay, so is it that bad? Is America truly worse off if we don’t have pasta?
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
The OP specifically mentioned they are not in "grizz country".
Also grizzlies are quite literally the same species. The Northern American subpopulation just hasn't developed as much fear of humans as the European one but similar differences exist even between local Eurasian brown bear populations depending on how remote the larger area is and has historically been.
Now polar bears, they are scary fuckers and will happily hunt a human.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
Luckily, it's the modern era now, and Italy has modern infrastructure. You can get pizza in Rome now, or risotto in Bologna, or really whatever you want in any major city. You can even get (gasp) non-Italian food! And sometimes (double gasp) it's actually better, because the local specialty places are just as likely to be cutting corners to save money.
But of course that's not what tourists want. They want to go to a very specific area, eat a very specific thing that got invented there 500 years ago, take a picture of themselves eating in front of a romantic backdrop, and then brag to there friends that it was just so much better than what you'd get back home, even if the restaurant back home is cooking the exact same food with better equipment and higher quality ingrediants. They'd lose massive hipster cred if they were seen eating the "wrong" food in Italy, even if they were eating it with actual Italian locals because locals also like to eat a variety of foods and they're not going to eat spaghetti bolognese every single day. They can appreciate a good kebab or chicken tikka massala just as much as anyone.
Lewis2
3hr ago
YouTube used to be very good at recommending interesting, relevant content. It still occasionally recommends a gem that I would never have known to search for otherwise.
cjet79
3hr ago
The lines are often blurred between state and non-state actors. That is usually part of the problem with corruption, that the state hasn't fully locked down a monopoly on violence.
I was mentally thinking of France and Scotland when I thought of corrupt state actors.
It's been the longest amount of time since they were bad about corruption, but they absolutely were not free of it in 17th and most of the 18th centuries. The king of France would sell these tax collector positions that were basically approved banditry. In England it was difficult to run anything larger than a family business without the backing and often bribing of a noble. These places were absolutely corrupt in a way that we would all call "third world".
I find the attempt to define what a Christian is to be rather impossible. Think of it this way. For example, you could say that Mormons are not Christians because they do not follow the Nicene Creed. But I would guess that the majority of 1st century Christians did not follow the Nicene Creed either. We cannot even be sure if Jesus or Paul believed in the tenets of the Nicene Creed. Yet surely if Jesus was not a Christian, then no-one ever has been.
More options
Context Copy link