domain:mattlakeman.org
hydroacetylene
4m ago
What are you on about? Pope Francis was known for disliking and distrusting conservative Americans regardless of other factors even as the USCCB became more close to the Republican Party, not less.
I don’t doubt that pope Leo XIV’s criticisms of the Trump admin are genuine, but his decision to emphasize them rather than issues with democrats(abortion, some stuff with religious freedom/antidiscrimination and education policy, LGBT+, etc) was probably contingent. He’s literally a registered republican.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5m ago
Berry isn't a marginal figure, certainly more influential at this point than, say, Jonah Goldberg.
This seems like a reasonable statement.
Maybe conservative Catholics should start asking themselves whether "separation of church and state" might be a good idea after all.
Why? I get your general thrust here: Reasonably-influential Protestant reminds us all of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. You appear to be basing this on the idea that inter-tribal conflict is a problem that is or should be taken seriously, and appear to be suggesting that the Catholic/Protestant split is one that deserves attention, and particularly that this fault and its consequences are significant enough that based whoevers should admit that the "libs" might have been right about something. Your framing of his statement about protestant and catholic conflict in terms of the worst possible example of that conflict seems notably disingenuous to me, but let's leave it be.
What sort of response are you hoping for here? As someone who disagrees with most of this, would you be interested my presenting some examples of what actual serious tribal splits with serious real-world consequences look like in our present context? If not that, then what's the proper way to continue this conversation, in your view?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
20m ago
Joel Berry, the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, wants you to know that "America has always been a protestant nation, and it must stay that way."
https://x.com/JoelWBerry/status/1920537379170877885
(Back in reality, America is down to 39% Protestant, not counting Mormons as Protestant: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/)
He also "jokes" that "We know the world is healing when Catholics and Protestants are fighting again." Ah, let's go back to the good old days when 1/3rd of the German population were killed in a horrific religiously-motivated war.
https://x.com/JoelWBerry/status/1920658687347089517
Berry isn't a marginal figure, certainly more influential at this point than, say, Jonah Goldberg.
Maybe conservative Catholics should start asking themselves whether "separation of church and state" might be a good idea after all. But I can't get my hopes up - even many "based" seculars would rather die in the mud than admit that the "libs" might have been right about something.
Felagund
30m ago
You can type them with the option key on a mac, or by holding down on the hyphen key on an iphone.
wsgy
42m ago
"In the interest of justice" is an idiomatic "term of art" in the US legal system. When you see it, the best way to think of it is dropping the case would create the most just outcome for all parties involved, including the wider population, but what exactly that means could be just about anything, including "prosecuting this may lead to right-wing racism against Somalian immigrants". It's my understanding that was more or less the idea with Rotherham, but we don't know if anything like that occurred here
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
43m ago
There are different ways people define what is an "institution", for example you'll find plenty of people here willing to defend the idea that marriage is an institution and if you're willing to be that broad then it easily wins over basically anything else as it goes back into prehistory. It all depends on how broadly you define "institution", and if your definition of one is narrow enough to not include the different, somewhat diffuse ideas that come under Theravada Buddhism then Christianity as an institution isn't 2000 years old either, it's more like 1700 years old and really came into being after the Council of Nicea when the Nicene Creed was affirmed and the Arians declared heretical. Before this point the Bishop of Rome wasn't even universally seen as being above the bishops of the other dioceses.
Sure, the current Catholic church may claim that the popes before the Council of Nicea were part of the exact same tradition to the extent that it all counts as one "institution" stretching back to the Pentecost but that doesn't mean the people who had lived back then would have seen things the same way. It's no different to how the current Japanese Monarchy may well claim it stretches back to the 7th Century BC but the rest of us don't have to take them at face value.
And if we take Christianity to only really be an institution since the Nicene creed then it gets handily beaten out by the White Horse Buddhist Temple in China which has been going strong since 68CE.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
46m ago
I don't think many people, even most of those donating to her, disagree in any fundamental way. If you treat this as an isolated, one-shot prisoner's dilemma, the obvious move is to condemn and deplore.
The problem is that this is not an isolated, one-shot prisoner's dilemma, and in fact is a really, really stark example of how the ability to arbitrarily turn people's memory on and off is not a power one should allow their enemies to control.
winedark
49m ago
I'm for strong free-speech protections, but calling a child that word is indefensible. I might be more sympathetic to the "small racial infraction" if she showed the slightest bit of embarrassment. Absolute trash behavior.
Corvos
53m ago
To sketch a very brief case:
Time is money, translators are money.
Therefore mistakes due to miscommunication are money, as are delays for ever more extensive paperwork in ever more languages to prevent those mistakes.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
There's a lot of stuff in the crunch like this that I really don't get.
I love the stuff in the lore that's canonically terrible. Like the Charger. I don't know how much the really old splat books described it as a total design failure but included it in the game anyways. But the recent printings of TROs shitting all over certain mech designs cracks me up.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Although I think at some point HBS Battletech let you fire your small weapons while you meleed? Was that a thing?
Yeah, that is how it works. Melee lets you fire your small weapons alongside the melee hit itself.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Small lasers are pretty weird. Every now and again you see some meme build in MWO that's a light mech going 200 kph spamming 10 small lasers that's just impossible to hit and cores you from behind. But mechs in MW5 tend to not have the sort of build flexibility to let you minmax that crazily. Or HBS Battletech for that matter. Although I think at some point HBS Battletech let you fire your small weapons while you meleed? Was that a thing? Man it's been a long time since I played that game.
But yeah, on most medium mechs and every heavy or assault, small lasers get stripped for more armor.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I was heavy into battletech as a kid, but lacking friends with similar interests I spent a lot more time reading the books and designing mechs than I did actually playing the game. There's a lot of stuff in the crunch like this that I really don't get.
...I guess the idea is that it's a cheap extra chance at a critical hit once you've stripped armor?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
1hr ago
I will do my best to lay out my thoughts on the topic:
Speed Read: Arguments that immigrant labor accepting lower wages and benefits makes costs lower are strictly first-order evaluations that neglect both actual second and third-order costs, as well as the native populations perceived costs. I consider those perceptions to be a valuable signal to decision-makers that the economic data they are using to justify their decisions is in someway misaligned, or more likely, completely cooked.
There are a couple of reasons for my assertion. First, a tremendous portion of healthcare costs are known to be a result of senior care costs; Western governments in general, especially the UK, fund these costs via taxation and massive debt spending, which is inflationary. Senior care is a low status job, as is every job that used to be primarily sourced internally from within the family. Therefore, a proportion of the workforce engaged in senior care has been brought in from outside in order to provide this care. This workforce does not perform as well at taking care of the local population’s elderly, because they lack kin-based or even ethnic motivations to care for them, and also because they are doing it just as a job. The government has to attempt in some fashion to maintain quality of care as the workforce degrades, so it implements a typical state strategy, which is to create massive amounts of bureaucracy in an attempt to replace internal motivation with checklists, paperwork, and agencies. Because this is a long-term losing battle, the quality of care continues to degrade, but because bureaucracies are almost impossible to destroy, the money continues to flow in increasing amounts over time. Lower quality of care, greater cost for less output.
I will tangent here to say that the total size of the proportion of non-native British workers in the healthcare workforce is impossibly muddied by very foolish (or malicious) bureaucratic decisions to declare as “British” all sorts of people who are not native British. And this matters very much in terms of both cultural and economic costs. My people have been in the Lower 48 for going on 300 years, and yet we will never, ever be “Native Americans” from the perspective of actual Native Americans. I am perfectly fine with this, but I use it as an example of how two ethnes can maintain de facto boundary lines for hundreds of years, even in the face of significant forced government assimilation attempts. Just because non-British nationals make up 12% of the healthcare workforce, doesn’t mean that the native British ethne makes up 88% of the healthcare workforce. I would wager it is actually much lower than that and that this has significant cultural damage effects that contribute to raised costs, because the ethnes are different and in low-grade conflict with each other, despite an attempt to deny this by calling them all “British.”
Second, mass immigration of any kind appears to drive down the fertility rates and reduce the status of the original population. We can see this in conquests, colonizations, and, uh…the non-colonization mass immigration occurring for the past 50-60 years across the West. When fertility rates are low, the elderly have, tautologically, fewer children and grandchildren willing to share the burden of caring for their elderly relatives. That means that if care is going to be provided at all, it has to be provided by the healthcare industry/bureaucracy. This also increases costs, as you have to pay someone to do something that children and grandchildren might otherwise have been willing to do for free. It also increases costs because, if children and grandchildren are the ones actually providing the labor, they would likely be more inclined to let their elderly relatives die earlier (potentially leading to Nights of the Pillow, but I mean this mostly in a gentler sense). That is, it is easy to demand heroic and eye-poppingly expensive interventions that are in no one’s interest when it’s government doctors doing the work. It’s easy to make huge demands in spending when it is someone else’s money and time. Much harder to demand that when you actually see and deal with Grandma’s condition every day.
Finally, I also think that perception matters. Yes, as people point out, it is true that in the 50’s, houses were smaller and everyone only had one car, but the dominant ethne was confident and happy and this results in a productive and happy population, which tends to drive down not just actual costs, but perceived costs as well. If I have to pay $20 more for an appointment with a doctor who is visibly and understandably of my culture and people, that might be worth a lot more in knock-on cost effects overall than is immediately apparent from arguments of “it costs more!” Maybe I see the doctor less because I feel better helped at the first appointment, driving down costs by removing that appointment from healthcare expenses altogether. I’ve been using senior care as the most salient example and probably lowest hanging fruit, but I think that there is a good reason to believe that a hypothetical NHS of 2050, staffed nearly entirely with native British, serving a population of nearly entirely native British and prioritizing attention to that population over attention to non-native concerns, would be overall cheaper than the 2050 equivalent of current NHS.
This is my NHS specific argument.
This is a total tangent, but additionally, I also think that modern style immigration is very much the camel’s nose. Once you let in a genius Indian doctor, no matter how great a guy that dude is, the inevitable slide is towards more and more costs as a result of letting in more and more unqualified immigrants for any of a variety of reasons. This is why my argument surrounding immigration is that the government, as such, should have no significant control over it except for the following two rules.
- The only acceptable way to immigrate is to be married to a current citizen.
- Citizen to immigrant marriages are not able to be legally dissolved in any way.
I think this far, far better reflects the slow churning of peoples at the edges of territory that has occurred across all of human history, and keeps the ethne from stagnating without creating all the sturm und drang of post-60’s mass immigration ideology.
TheBailey
soapy mop
1hr ago
I'm not objecting to the DMV asking for something to evidence the name change, like sworn witness statements; I'm objecting to them requiring, by policy, these particular evidence which includes getting sign-offs from a federal agency that has an axe to grind against common law name changes. That just seems to be laundering their noncompliance.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Imagine if Count of Monte Cristo had ended with a botched assassination and getting thrown back in prison. Then Dantes slums it for years before a Crime and Punishment finale. Sequel hook, maybe, but surely infuriating to readers.
striker
1hr ago
Schwartz (the guy who coined IFS) has some books. I didn’t read it all but liked “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For”.
Also pretty sure both Bessel Van Der Kolk (The Body Keeps The Score) and Gabor Mate have written about IFS positively in their books.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
I’ve never understood small lasers. They always felt like a terrible heat/damage ratio. And the range!
What’s the intended use? Or are they just there to fill slots for cheap?
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Oh yeah, the universal teaching of the historic Church has been all about anti-the Republican Party of the United States.
I'm being forcefully reminded why Americanism was declared a heresy.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Even in the 14th century such questions were live, and it's still open as to how to interpret the virtuous non-Christian and their ultimate fate. What we are to be concerned about is (1) preach the Gospel so that all will have the chance for salvation and (2) worry about the state of your own soul, not the non-believer:
For you would say: ‘A man is born along
the shoreline of the Indus River; none
is there to speak or teach or write of Christ.And he, as far as human reason sees,
in all he seeks and all he does is good:
there is no sin within his life or speech.And that man dies unbaptized, without faith.
Where is this justice then that would condemn him?
Where is his sin if he does not believe?’...After the Holy Ghost’s bright flames fell silent
while still within the sign that made the Romans
revered throughout the world, again the Eaglebegan: “No one without belief in Christ
has ever risen to this kingdom—either
before or after He was crucified.But there are many who now cry ‘Christ! Christ!’
who at the Final Judgment shall be far
less close to Him than one who knows not Christ;the Ethiopian will shame such Christians
when the two companies are separated,
the one forever rich, the other poor.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
Rap culture, basically. Rappers love flaunting what they percieve to be classical signals of old money, like gold jewelry, fur coats, european designer brands. Cognac is another one of those that they picked up. It being relatively rare in the US market until rap culture made it popular means to a lot of americans their exposure to cognac is almost exclusively mentions in rap music, making it seem like a Black-coded thing.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Apparently well known to the Vatican which investigated them and found nothing there. As to "Vatican watchers", I wish my fellow conservatives would stop looking for "the smoke of Satan, he's a liberal! he'll ban the Latin Mass for good and all! he'll force us all to allow married women priests and excommunicate us and burn us at the stake!" every time anyone who is not Archbishop Lefebvre is in the news. Some of them seem to yearn to be persecuted, as though the challenges of living the faith in the modern world were not enough. No, I'm not just cosplaying the old rites as part of a miniscule element of the universal Church, I'm so important that the College of Cardinals needs to oppress me specifically by who they elect as the new pope!
Do you think I liked the sweeping changes that threw the baby out with the bathwater? Do I approve of the lack of catechesis which means the vast majority of modern Catholics are more ignorant than the unchurched of their own faith? Was I happy with everything Francis did?
No, but he was the pope. And now Leo XIV is the pope, and I am not going to waste time and energy hoping for a "ah yes, the lavender mafia, he's secretly a flaming gay being blackmailed by them to cover up abuse scandals" Real True Truth revelation to blacken his name (particularly when one of those scandals seem to be heterosexual not homosexual).
It's just as defensible as calling a 14 year old a "child" is.
I'll also remind you of that thing in Covington; people don't have a problem with the accusations of racism when a young man of that age is white, and turnabout's fair play.
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