I see what you mean, but I disagree that this is a misfire or miscalculation on the church’s part. This latest development reads as another jab at gay people, from a familiar angle. It’s a reaffirmation by the church that same sex couples who love each other aren’t seen as equals in a congregation.
Nobody should be raping children. Roman Catholic priests have done this, are doing this, and the Roman Catholic church has a long and ongoing history of covering it up. If the head of the Roman Catholic church fails to stop it, they’re blameworthy.
Something a pope could easily promise, but never will:
“We acknowledge our church has a history of sexual assault against children. Our church has sought to obscure this history of abuse. This was wrong, is wrong, and needs to be corrected. Sexual assault and abuses of power in the church are unacceptable and will no longer be tolerated. The church commits to fully funding local law enforcement investigations into all allegations of sexual assault by church staff, and disclosing any information the church may have that is relevant to those investigations. All victims must be heard. With victim consent, their stories will be recorded in a centralized, public, transparent record not administrated or controlled by the church in any way.”
Any church that isn’t afraid of raking in money in envelopes, but is afraid of making a commitment like the above, is a problem, yep, I agree. There’s no excuse. Saying the pope doesn’t have the power to do this is mealymouthed and also, incorrect.
I don’t know if you’re a Catholic or not, I just want to say more generally - I don’t see how any Catholic, including the pope, has the right to opine on the finer points of official scriptures while priests are raping children and the church covers it up.
Church: since gay people should properly be seeking God’s mercy, we will now choose not to subject the gays to an exhaustive moral analysis, (that anyway if performed, would of course find them lacking). With that in mind, please feel free to approach your priest and request his blessing!
What a fucking insult.
I think this type of anthropocentrism extends to chess too actually. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve heard that chess AIs are finding success doing unintuitive things like pushing a and h file pawns in openings. If, 10 years ago, some chess grandmaster was doing the same thing and finding success, I imagine they would have been seen as creative, maybe even groundbreaking.
I think the average person under-rates the sophistication of AI. Maybe as a response to the AI hype. Maybe it’s because we’re scared of AI, and it’s comforting to believe that it’s operations are trivial. I see irrationality and anger cropping up in discussions of AI that I think stem from a fundamental fear of its transformative power.
This is interesting, and I didn’t think of it this way.
But, if the only way welfare administration can be streamlined is to give everyone money, I’d feel guilty about taking it. Wouldn’t be hard to find a way to spend $2k, sure, but knowing I didn’t truly need it to make ends meet, while other people did, & maybe would have been helped even more if they had some of my share? Ach, it wouldn’t feel right. It would be cool if the program was opt-out, and people who chose to opt out got a break in some other way, maybe on taxes that go to retirement savings. Maybe that’s a horrible idea, I don’t know.
Anyway cheers, thanks for explaining, I appreciate it.
I’m an idiot, so please jump in here if I’m getting this wrong.
Per the article, predicted program cost is $88 billion per year. Divide by Canada’s adult population of ~33 million, so, ~$2700 per person per year, minus administrative costs and bloat, so, say $2k per year.
Well, I definitely wouldn’t turn down a cheque if I qualified for it, and I don’t want to come off as complaining about a program that doesn’t even exist yet. But, $2k doesn’t sound like an amount that any person could function on. That’s less than one month’s rent almost everywhere in this country. It’s like, a 6" subway sandwich per day. Something something middle class, I seem to remember a certain federal party saying during election time. Why not simply lower taxes in a targeted way?
In what way is this amount ‘basic’? What’s the point of embarking on this whole investigative song & dance over a few extra bucks per day? What actually is the minimum amount necessary to function as an individual in this country? I think I know why the government isn’t investigating that question.
I’m not against UBI as a concept. This $88b program, if that number is correct, seems like it’s not even worth investigating. Am I crazy?
I see your point. On the other hand, chaos is a powerful terror tactic. If you’re a dissident, not knowing what angle you could be engaged from is stifling.
Also, people need to eat and drink daily. Poisoning is a horrible threat with multiple daily reminders.
To all the people in this thread saying this was probably an accident:
Imagine you’re an operator inside a totalitarian regime, and you want someone assassinated. Maybe this person isn’t themself a critical target, your objective is to instill fear in a particular department to increase compliance on a morally abhorrent skunkworks project. You already know everything about this person, of course including details of their personal life and hobbies. Hey they’re a mushroom hunter. Mycotoxins are readily available and can be lethal in small, undetectable doses. Not difficult to figure out what happens from there. Everyone who knows Vitaly knows, hey he wouldn’t pick and eat a poisonous mushroom. The message is sent to the people who you want to hear it.
I would visit but my waifu body pillow scolds me when I suggest we travel.
we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids
You allude to some of this, but in addition, and as a precondition, we need to make our society one that’s less hostile to the people that currently exist in it.
better tools for moderation
Where have I heard that before?
Just to add my experience to the mix, I bought a cheap Ender 3 to see if I liked the hobby. Didn’t want to go whole hog on kit until I had a sense of it. I’ve found tinkering with the printer and making improvements and adjustments to be rewarding and a great use of my free time.
I don’t know what the conventional wisdom is in the 3d printing community on buying used gear, but I’d bet you could find something used at a pretty good discount that might need just a little bit of love. & not sure about where you live, but here, some public libraries have printers and printing courses, could be a good way to get your feet wet & see what aspects of the tech are important to you.
Oh, your part cooling fan is making a loud whining noise? Have you tried leveling your bed?
For sure. Dark thought, but I wonder if gen xers and millennials on their death beds will experience a novel form of grief when effective therapies for terminal illnesses are cheap and available, but need to be administered before onset to be effective. Maybe there’s a word for it in German.
Interesting thoughts. I suppose Meta will collect what they want to collect, it’s what they do, and this is all public discussion, anyone can collect it for any reason. And I don’t doubt that their involvement in the fediverse is secretly nefarious in one way or another.
Where I think our current situation is different from the Google/XMPP thing, is that, a bunch of platforms are going down the tubes really quickly and lots of people are looking for the next thing all at the same time. It gives a lot of room for a good platform like this one to gain ground rapidly. As far as I’m concerned, if for example instagram federated, and I could browse some good feeds outside of meta’s app & privacy permissions hell, that would be a plus for me. If they subsequently pulled what Google did with XMPP and suddenly backed out, I wouldn’t react by moving to instagram exclusively and I can’t really see why any user would make such a move.
I take your anti-corporate point. However, I believe pro-doping would totally work if it was a gladiatorial bloodbath decathalon within the olympics itself. And if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers. Jousting, Barenuckle boxing, Pride rules MMA, Hell in a Cell, no rules water polo, shit like that.