completely upending the view of homosexuality as a sin.

Nono you don’t get it that is how it always was. Something along the lines of “chem sex parties associated with so-called gay culture are a sin”, who said anything about actually loving relationships? Going back through all the official proclamations you probably won’t find anything that contradicts the new stance: They have a habit of writing in grand generalities that can be readily re-interpreted. The church doesn’t change it just forgets that it was different, that’s the only way a ratchet can even work on the conservative side. And yes they’ll never condone chem sex parties.

I suppose its plausible that a child abuser wouldnt go to confess that if they knew the priest had to pass that information along, however I think the logical inconsistency is that they would then be at risk of dying without having confessed such a grave sin. Which hypothetically if they were a true believer of what the church teaches would be worse than any earthly punishment imaginable.

If they believe to that kind of extent then they’d just turn themselves in, no priest necessary. Confession is something trained into people culturally, habituated from a young age, on the level of individual behaviour it doesn’t really have anything to do with Catholicism in particular, or theological doctrines, it just so happens that Catholicism is a culture which does that kind of training. So we’re not relying on paedophiles being faithful, but having a habit of spilling stuff every so often.

Lutherans, too, know confession but it’s not much of a cultural practice. I’m pretty sure there’s cultures that do practice regular confession but aren’t Catholic or even consider it part of a religious context, though granted the best I can come up with on the top of my head is sweat lodges which are not about confessing your wrongdoings, but giving thanks. Oh, Marxism-Leninism but there it functions as a humiliation ritual. It kind of shows how the whole thing becomes toxic AF when it’s public¹.

The other thing is that is must be psychologically tormenting to some degree for priests to know other people are heinous criminals and being powerless to stop them other than saying “turn yourself in”.

They’re supposed to have support networks for that, just as therapists etc. have.

I can’t give a solution here. There simply is none, there’s no avenue that would stop this kind of thing, at least not by tinkering with confessions. And either way the impact of a change would be marginal. Other practices such as backing up your kids when auntie wants to slobber them but they don’t want to be slobbered, teaching kids early on that they have a right to bodily autonomy, are way more impactful.

¹ Inb4 tankies come in here saying “ML isn’t a religion”: Yes it is, it’s speedballs for the masses. Get bent.

See the point about random companies selling it for profit. A patent license does not have to cost anything. Don’t know if AstraZeneca did give it away for free to poor countries which do happen to have the right kind of production capability under a “produce for yourself but don’t sell it” kind of deal, but it’s definitely a thing that you can do.

The patent itself isn’t evil, it’s all about how it’s used. And btw open source licenses rely on copyright law, especially anything GPL-like would not work without it.

Lifting the seal won’t help a thing, on the contrary it might make things worse because then paedophiles aren’t going to confess, any more, and priests can’t tell them that god wants them to go to the police.

It’s akin to requiring therapists to tip off the police when you confess that you consume illicit drugs: All you’re doing is stopping people from talking about it in the first place.

Are there therapists who are drug dealers and abuse that confidentiality for their own business interest? I’m reasonably sure. I mean there are a gazillion of therapists in the world, there has to be at least a couple of drug dealers among them. But that’s no excuse to make it worse for everyone else.

People like teachers and of course child care workers should be reporters regarding this kind of stuff, but on the flipside the reports should go to a place where the victim then can find confidentiality. And maybe that’s even what at least some priests are doing (afterwards confessing that they broke the seal), important bit being that the perpetrator can’t know that the tip came from confession, and the official doctrine, “confession doesn’t leak”, is still intact.

They’re a ratchet. Calling them progressive would be a straight lie but they do go with the times, maybe 100 years behind, picking up all stragglers that can reasonably be picked up.

In 50 years, mark my words, they will marry gay couples, or at least bless them before the congregation (without sacrament, or maybe they’ll invent a new, same-but-different, sacrament). Why? Because the Vatican recently gave priests authorisation to bless gay couples in private: Blessing the relationship, not just the individuals. Click.

I did try to find unit costs for Cuba’s vaccine but failed. While doing that I found a paper analysing distribution costs in Vietnam and long story short it can easily cost four bucks just to get the stuff from the plant into people’s arms.

Not patenting it would allow them to create their own

Patenting it and licensing it also allows them to create their own, but now they need a plant to do that, which requires things like reliable electricity, infrastructure to enable supply of raw materials, whatnot. It’s not like you can brew that kind of thing in a bathtub. What patenting also does is stop random Indian pharma producers from cooking it up and selling it to Botswana without giving you a cut, that is, the wrong private enterprise profiting off it. One that didn’t incur costs doing studies so that regulators would greenlight it.

From what I gather most of the doses used overall in the world were AstraZeneca, and much of it was given to countries for free, with western countries stemming the bill, not AstraZeneca. The EU apparently (it’s in your wiki link) brought the price down to €1.78 because the EU was supplying the production capacity, and €12 for Pfizer/Biontech, which was never in the race for distribution to poor countries in the first place because it requires a tight, and very cool, cooling chain. Forget about the four bucks per dose for distribution in that case.

Would this all have been better in a socialist world? Yes. But that’s not what the situation on the ground was during the pandemic so stop making the perfect the enemy of the good, western countries (excluding the US) were up to the task not getting fucked over by big pharma, and passed that on to other countries.

Not really any more, mostly though because other companies got into the business and aren’t charging an arm and a leg for carbon dioxide. Other manufacturers also aren’t pointlessly incompatible to each other.

Sparkling water, of course, is still ridiculously popular over here, and carbonating at home is convenient. Then, though: Tap water + soda stream co2 is more expensive than store-brand bottled water.

Back in the days the Spanish Inquisition would become suspicious of people who seemed to not eat pork.

In other words, yes, precisely, they’re trying to sus out heretics. Don’t want to be mistaken for one? Perform the rites publicly, then.

Legally, the only thing that happened is that the BfV can now use their whole toolbox of covert instruments against the AfD. The federal government, parliament, or a majority of states can always starts proceedings before the constitutional court to ban a party. Of course you don’t want to do that if you have a flimsy case, but in principle there’s no requirements at all.

Politically, it means that politicians have less of an excuse to not open proceedings.

Side note I doubt those 1100 pages are all the BfV has on the party: In their press release (the actual report is still classified) they only mentioned the AfD attacking human dignity, while for a court case you’d definitely also want to argue the wanting to dismantle democracy part, and if that was in the 1100 pages then the press release would’ve included language saying so (that’s just how bureaucracy works in Germany, summaries don’t randomly leave stuff out).

Yep on second thought I don’t think it’s so much stable career or the availability of childcare as security overall, any way to answer “We can do this for 18 years no matter what” in the positive. And yes that’s where capitalism and CDU bashing of “lazy moochers” strikes hard. Having a different job every six months and occasionally none would be right up many people’s alley if it didn’t put you into all sorts of economic trouble.

And the “we can do this for 18 years no matter what” thing was easy in the GDR: Don’t do things the Stasi doesn’t like, done. The SED went to great lengths ensuring that if you kept your head down, and push come to shove are willing to fill a hole another is digging (because duty to work), you really didn’t have to worry.

It’s been in place in more or less its current form since 1975, have a graph. Colours are generally for 1-4th child if there’s a fifth one then that’s a tax deduction. Before that there were schemes but they would not kick in for the first child and generally speaking it was even more of a pittance. In primary school, in the 80s, our maths teacher actually did a run-down of how much that money didn’t pay for our new shoes.

That’s West Germany in the east they spent a lot on free daycare which seems to have had much better results. Plenty of states nowadays do have free daycare at least for poor parents, and generally make the fees income-dependent, but the level of service still isn’t anywhere like it was in the GDR where you could also offload school-age kids to the state when they had holidays, summer camps and stuff, but you didn’t. Which isn’t exactly rare kids get more holidays than workers.

Overall, the reason our birthrate is only stabilised at a low level instead of at a reasonable level is because conservatives care more about supporting family models few people want than about solving the issue. Nah not even “conservatives”, it’s specifically Catholic conservatives.

And, no, I’m not advocating for re-introducing the FDJ, blue scarves and everything. How about handing organisations like the Scouts some money so they can offer summer camps for pretty much the cost of food. It’d be mostly money to allow adults to not work while running those camps (that is, extend their holidays) as well as some materiel costs. Increased tent wear.

Oh this is beautiful and reinforces the result that actual AGI will have to be able to develop its own encodings. In the sense of rather yellowstone relying on a fixed network creating a mapping, decide on a network to create mappings that make sense. Here’s the whole system-theoretical background, papers at the bottom.

I don’t believe there is no difference at all between men and women. I simply believe that a lot of the things we say are inherent differences are actually not as inherent as people tend to believe.

Depending on who you mean with “we” I definitely agree.

For example, I’ve seen no evidence that women are inherently more kind/caring/empathetic than men in any biological way, only that society socializes them to be so,

…and fails at doing so, if I may add. Male-pattern aggression is simply more obvious because it’s in your face physical while female-pattern is psychological, always ensuring plausible deniability.

Yet if you ask most people, they’ll assume there’s something biological that makes women more like that emotionally.

Women favour low-risk engagement, passive aggressiveness over overt aggressiveness. Thus you see emotional manipulation used way more often, one approach being self-victim-framing, and for that the narrative of “oh women are so delicate and emotional they have to be protected no matter what they do” fits the bill. Female viciousness is beautiful but I very much prefer it in the “never start a fight, but always finish it” version. Relevant symphonic metal. Also if you’re trying it with me you’re getting tickled into submission.

TBH, Silverbacks are actually good role models: Big, bulky, sit around grooming the troupe, know everyone, emotionally support everyone, when someone wants to start a fight, intervenes, “You wanna fight? Yeah, fight me! Both of you at once, if need be!” – and then suddenly the others lost interest in fighting.

Proverbial gymbro speaking softly and carrying a big stick, far from a tyrant, you know the type. Chimpanzees are the closest to us, with warfare and everything. Bonobos are… well, they are what biologists start talking about when they want to get into your pants. Let’s just say there’s a reason you don’t see them in zoos, parents don’t want to hear kids asking those kinds of questions.

Isn’t it weird that for humans, sex is a private matter? Completely singular among all the animals. And that’s independent of social status, like a smaller sea lion seducing a female one while the big hunk de jure leading the pack isn’t looking, it’s universal. Even if sex is a group activity, then that group itself is putting up layers of privateness and propriety. Swinger clubs with fancy dress codes, doesn’t matter if you end up naked but you have to start out in suit and tie.

If a scientist would, today, discover humanity and describe their behaviour they’d be laughed out of any conference, “did you get your notes mixed up”. “Next thing you want to tell us camelopards are real”.

You’re right after that comes the patriarchal, or just gendered, double-whammy: Women culturally do have more of a support network, even just in the “friends hanging out” way, as the male “do things together, chop wood, go fishing” is regarded as work, not leisure, and thus co-opted by capitalism: “What do you need to chop food and fish for, go buy fuel and food are you poor or something”. Thus all the productive time men have is spent in a hierarchical worker-boss environment, never “pals doing stuff”, cue loss of connection, alienation from broader society, loneliness. Going bowling? Time not spent hustling, you’re a loser. That’s your mind on patriarchal capitalism.

Thus, even if the starting conditions inflicted by capitalism are, for the sake of argument, completely even, it still hits men harder when it comes to loneliness. Women are more affected in other ways. This isn’t an olympics, it’s analysis of the material conditions we live under.

Alienation. Exploitation. Heard of it?

Capitalism has bereft men even of the patriarchal provider role as there’s no fucking time in the day to earn both rent and have any type of social interaction, much less time to reflect on your approach to life. Your position as a gear churning out profit for the bosses has been meticulously designed and drilled into you while you were a kid, blind obedience instilled by teachers and BS “zero tolerance punish the victim” rules. There is no use for you aside from that assigned role, happiness, connection, community, work//life balance? Don’t make a profit. Get out of here with that commie nonsense we have quarterly figures to hit.

Or, maybe, yes, you do have a point: I should have said late-stage capitalism. The internal contradictions are actively eroding it by now.

hooks suggests that men need to develop a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of masculinity, one that values emotions, relationships, and mutual respect.

Yep, written by a woman. Replace that with “value traversing rivers on couches strapped to floats and having a blast with the pals” and you’ll get somewhere.

Valuing something already is an emotion so you’re being emotional about being emotional about something so, yeah, no. Go climb a tree, create a tasty recipe, fix a shoe. Shave the soap.

Boys develop coarse motor skills first, then fine motor skills, for girls it’s the other way around. Which also means that girls are quite good at sitting still in primary school, boys, without getting tired out in recess, very much aren’t. Cue “behavioural issues”.

Lego did control for everything that could be controlled. They’re the OG “our toys are for everyone” company. They thought that their stuff was gender neutral, that stores and parents, society, were the problem, but had to admit that, no, kids actually do have, statistically speaking, different play preferences. Their female set designers didn’t catch it because they were not kids, any more.

And “no hormones to speak of” MF if there were no hormones involved male karyotypes would develop female.

they generally just go with what they prefer in the moment along lines that don’t match the gender binary

Nope. Lego did a large behavioural study on this because this was their assumption, they thought they were doing completely gender-neutral stuff, but even controlling for parents’s biases their stuff wasn’t gender-neutral when it came to actually be interesting to kids. I’m talking about stuff like the city series, here: A street, bunch of houses, bunch of minifigs. Figures that the girls by and large where looking at the inside of the buildings, finding them empty, and lost interest while boys where seeing the streets, found ample of detail and also a car to drive around, and created stories. There are, of course, as always exceptions to the binary but the overall trend was undeniable.

That (and the insistence of US stores on not having gender-neutral isles and putting Lego in the boy’s section) made them create the Friends series: Detailed house interiors, larger, more detailed minifigs. The pink is for the stores and parents, the interiors for the girls, the build-what-you-want flexibility for the humans.

Generally speaking, I think that difference feminism has been discarded prematurely. Sure, none of the normative BS that many of its proponents espoused should ever see the light of day, but denying difference is harmful in its own way, and the reason is the inevitability of essentialising: If you say “there is no difference at all between men and women” you’re bound to essentialise everyone towards your own gender. And it’s way better to be essentialised as an apple when you’re an apple than it is to be essentialised as a pear.

> capitalism
> self-inflicted

Sure, bud.