requin246

This is a very poor article. Much better reporting can be found in the previously discussed article here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27902214) or at the original source (https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/pillar-investigates-usccb-g...).

The article frames this as a priest being outed for his sexual preferences but that is a terribly warped perspective.

This priest, as all Catholic priests do, _voluntarily_ took a life long vow to abstain from any sexual relations. He was wantonly breaking that while hiding it from his community. Worse, he was literally on the committee creating regulations to discipline other priests for violations against that very same vow he was breaking. It’s always sad to see a man not live up to his own convictions, but this was a particularly egregious case of hypocrisy as well. It would have been much better for him to withdraw from public life once he knew he couldn’t keep his vows.

This is not an instance of an innocent man being outed. It’s a case of a man committing canonical crimes who got caught via anonymized location data. I am worried about some of the future implications as the article states, but what happened in this instance is a good thing.

The issue with assigning guilt from the actions of ancestors is that not everyone is guilty.

I’m first generation Canadian. Is it fair that I should pay for the sins of your great grandfathers when mine weren’t even in the country? Canada accepts 300k immigrants per year. Since the closure of the residential schools, (very roughly speaking) 9m people have entered the country so it’s not a small number we’re talking about here.

There’s also the added issue that not everyone supported the residential schools. What if my ancestors protested the system? Should I still pay reparations?

I agree the quality of life on the reserves is a real problem that needs to be fixed but pushing the blame on the children of the settlers (or not even their children!) is not a good solution.

That’s not at all what the crusades were.

The crusades were armies raised in response to the Muslim invasions of Christian countries. Motivations varied between religious (defense of the Christians being oppressed) to political (I want a kingdom to rule over) [1].

[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/7915/are-there-a...

Your comparison is factually incorrect.

The documented death rate of the inquisitions is on the order of 4500 people over 400 years [1]. That’s a rate of 11 people per year.

Aztec sacrifice estimates are on the scale of 20,000 to 250,000 per year. [2]

In actual fact, the Aztecs are in a far worse light than the Dominicans and Franciscans. The Nazi comparison is valid. There’s no society on earth that would end innocent life on that scale for another 500 years.

[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...

Columbus’ poor treatment of the natives is a popular myth. He actually rigorously promoted their well-being (to the disappointment of his men), to the point where his soldiers chained him and sent him back to Spain on a boat to be rid of him.

This author (a practicing anthropologist) has a book going into more detail about his treatment of the natives.

There is an element of survivorship bias, but the rate of building beautiful buildings is not constant. There’s far fewer beautiful buildings built in the last 75 years than in the years preceding it (try walking into a church built after 1960 for example).

The article points to several casual ideologies in architecture which contribute to this.

The actions of parents are also a huge factor in the success of a school. If your parents make your students do their homework you can move forward with material in class quicker. They also will send children to after-school programs, which has a similar effect.

Parents are also somewhat a defense against bad teachers. There’s nothing quite like a parent hounding you and your principal about their child’s academic performance.

Yes, CBP classifies “work” as one of the reasons for essential travel. Work visa holders should be permitted to enter the country if it’s not for tourism.

This is a (very recent) anachronism.

Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing. The more children you had, the larger your bloodline would be. In fact, being unable to have children was a point of shame for a woman. It wasn’t until the rise of the modern era in the west that people started wanting small families or no children at all.

You can still see this idea of children as a blessing present in some communities that haven’t been westernized, e.g. some Mohawk communities in Canada.

The best information on this topic I’ve come across is contained in Mortimer Adler’s “How to read a book”.

Highly recommended if you’re doing any non-fiction reading.

Can someone with Blosc 2 experience tell me what are the proper conditions to use superchunks or frames? When does it become advantageous to use one over the other?

This is a really interesting library.

is that just culture?

Yes, I think that is the author’s point. The values and habits of the Cubans who fled Cuba and Ghanaians who left Ghana are ones which lend to successful lives. These values and habits, such as placing importance on higher education and academic achievement, are partly what culture consists of.

The alternative hypothesis, if one rejects the notion of value and habit transfer, is to claim that intelligence is genetically transmitted. That opens a very ugly can of worms and to my (limited) knowledge is unsupported by scientific evidence.

In either case though, I think it is clear that the Cuban and Ghanaian example precludes the possibility of racial discrimination.

It seems to me this has deep implications about effective and ineffective policies to raise the living standards of Mexican immigrants and African Americans. If we fail to address the root cause (poor cultural practices vs racial discrimination), the problem won’t get fixed.

In reality though protests are hardly like any other outdoor gathering. Thousands of people are crowded together for hours and shouting (which projects saliva). Anyone can clearly see it is a hotspot for coronavirus transmission. Authorities are allowing (peaceful) protest though because of free speech rights. The same freedoms are not extended to arguably lower risk religious gatherings.

Santa Clara county, which has had daily protests, just allowed outdoor-only religious gatherings of 25 people or less last week. They also opened indoor shopping malls in the same order. They’re clearly not treating religious expression like the fundamental constitutional right that it is. It is easy to find similar examples all over the state. When the coronavirus situation stabilizes, the lawyers are going to have a field day.

So many of these articles are a single person who succeeds and as a result declares racism must not exist.

That is not the evidence the author is submitting. His argument rests on the fact that Cuban immigrants outperform Mexican immigrants in many metrics, which thus disproves the racial discrimination hypothesis. He likewise cites the dramatically different performance of Ghanaian immigrants versus African Americans. These statistics are not subjective.

He then draws on his own experience in the Latino community and hypothesizes the disparity of performance in Mexican immigrant communities stems from a parental culture that encourages short term gains at the cost of long term reward.

There is more to the article but I’m going to butcher it by summarizing it. It is well worth reading and thought provoking.