Democrats: American Taliban

Amnesty International is now up in arms over the Taliban's recent passage of a law allowing child marriage. I have pointed out in previous essays that the Taliban law is not much different from late 19th century US law. In fact, it isn't much different than the current law in several US states. 

But, when you think about it more deeply, the Taliban law is actually not much different from current US federal law. 

All 50 states and Washington, D.C. (51 jurisdictions total) allow minors to consent to STI testing and treatment without parental consent. Meanwhile, 24 states + D.C. explicitly allow all minors to consent to contraceptive services: 

• 16 states allow it under specific circumstances (e.g., married, pregnant, parent, mature minor, or health risk).
• A few states have no explicit policy (providers may rely on general "mature minor" doctrines or other rules).
• 2 states (e.g., Texas in some contexts) have stricter rules, though federal programs can influence this.

Title X Family Planning Program (federal funding for clinics) requires providers to offer confidential services to minors without requiring parental consent or notification. Other federal rules like HIPAA generally treat minors who consent to their own care as having privacy rights over that information.

So, both the Taliban and American federal and state law allow minor children to engage in sex. In America, this is commonly protected activity, something a minor can engage in without parental permission or even parental knowledge. The government will actively work with the minor to make sure the parents never find out. In many cases, any attempt to notify the parents is actually a crime.

Meanwhile, the Taliban require that all sexual activity take place within the social construct of marriage, thereby providing at least a minimal structure of protection and care for the child engaging in sex.

So, explain how America, which allows minors to be used, abused and discarded, is morally superior to the Taliban, which requires minors at least be married and cared for within the confines of marriage.

Apart from the superior care for children expressed in the Taliban law, I honestly don't see that much difference between American practice and Taliban practice.

College as Social Club

All colleges teach the same facts. Course content is the same. There's only so many ways to teach someone how to calculate the area of a circle, then you're done. You can now learn most course content on Youtube. If you are going to college to learn content, you are mostly wasting your time and your money. For some things, like engineering, medicine, the law, you have to have a college degree to practice the profession. But for a lot of subjects, for example, history, English literature, philosophy, etc., college is simply unnecessary. All you need is a library card and interest in the field. 

HOWEVER...

The major advantage of college is the classmates. If you go to an "elite" college, your classmates will be children of Congressmen, your dorm roomate might be the child of a SCOTUS judge or a governor.

If you go to a "good" regional college, your classmates will be running companies or company technical departments, making hiring decisions, etc.

You go to college to make those social connections so your career advances. That's what the tuition pays for. College is a match-maker. It hooks you up with the people who will eventually be moving your industry in your area. 

You just have to realize that going in. When you take a class, you aren't trying to impress the professor. You're trying to impress your classmates, the people who will be important in your profession in ten years. You're making friends now so doors will be open for you later.

THAT is something you can't get through Youtube or Khan Academy. That's why you go to college. It is entirely about socialization now. 

Except as a way to virtue-signal to your colleagues, course content is kind of a side dish, not the centrepiece. College tuition is the annual dues at a country club. You don't go to country clubs for the meals or the golf, you go there to meet the other people in the club.

Teen Years are the Easiest

Everyone says say teen years are hard. That's bullshit. Homeschool and all these problems go away. I never had a dime's worth of trouble with any of my four children. They are all in their 20s now. 

When people complain about teen years, I have no idea what they are talking about. When your children are born, and for the next decade, point out to them continuously that for all of human history, a child was expected to be mature enough to marry and start a family by age 12. Up until the 1917 Code of Canon law, that was the law of the Church.

So, teach your children that they are adults by age 12 and you will treat them that way. You expect them to be ready to be married by age 12. Then, follow through. Treat everyone 12 years old or older as an adult, let them make adult choices, because they ARE adults. That's how civilization treated them for all of human history. It's only the last century that thinks they shouldn't be treated as adults. How's that working out for y'all?

Biological reality trumps modern civilizational bullshit. Once puberty hits, they CAN conceive children. Period. Doesn't matter if they are "ready" or "mature enough" for children (were YOU "ready" for children? The hell you were. So, that's a stupid argument).

They CAN conceive children. God doesn't give you more than you can handle, right? So, if God is willing to ensoul a child in a 12-year old's womb, then the 12-year old can handle it. Deal with the reality you claim to embrace. If you want to argue with this, then you don't actually believe about God what you say you believe. You don't believe what the Church taught for most of Christian history. 

12 year olds are adults. For most of human history, in every recorded culture, in every geographic region of the world, without any exception at all, 12-year olds could legally marry and start families. Get that through your thick head, build that expectation in them and then TREAT them as adults, and you will have zero problems with the teen years. 

Remember:

Amadeus Mozart wrote his first symphony at 8

Malala Yousafzai spoke out publicly for girls' education at 11 and survived an attack at 15.

Warren Buffett bought his first stock at age 11 and filed his first tax return at 13.

Age 12

• David Farragut was in command of a sailing ship by the age of 12.
• Stevie Wonder signed with Motown and began recording/performing professionally as "Little Stevie Wonder" at age 12.
• Mark Zuckerberg created a messaging program (ZuckNet) for his father's dental office at age 12.
• Mark Cuban started a business selling garbage bags and stamps door-to-door at age 12
• Alexander the Great began military training and leadership roles very young; tamed a legendary horse at age 12 and led campaigns as a teen.
• Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to God at age 12.

Age 13

• Alexander Hamilton was orphaned and working as a clerk in a merchant business, supporting himself and gaining attention for his writing/intellect that led to further opportunities.
• Bobby Fischer won the U.S. Open Chess Championship (after earlier standout games like the “Game of the Century”).
• William Kamkwamba built a windmill from scrap materials in Malawi to power his family’s home, teaching himself engineering.
• Jordan Romero climbed Mount Everest (youngest person at the time to do so).
• Landers Gaydosh won a world championship in ice climbing.
• Anne Frank began her famous diary while in hiding, documenting life under Nazi occupation (her writings became a profound historical document).
• Willie Johnston was the youngest recipient of the Medal of Honor (U.S. Civil War, as a drummer boy around 13).

Age 14

• Thomas Edison started his own newspaper at age 14.
• Nadia Comăneci: Scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics at age 14 (1976), winning multiple golds.
• Louis Braille: Invented the Braille reading/writing system at age 15 (tweaked from earlier work around 13–14), revolutionizing access for the blind
• Laura Dekker began her solo voyage around the world on August 21, 2010, at the age of 14, and completed the circumnavigation of the globe on January 21, 2012, at the age of 16, sailing a 40-foot ketch named Guppy.

Do you wonder why so many people find the teen years hard to deal with? That's easy. If you treated any other adult like you treat your children, how well would that go over? Would that adult punch you in the mouth? If so, then why wouldn't your kids fight the same urge? 

Yeah, THAT is why you have trouble in the teen years. Get this into your head. You have ten years from birth to get your child and yourself into the correct mindset. You gotta get your mind right.

If you don't, if you insist on treating a 12-year old like a 4-year old, you created for yourself and your child a runner and a rebel, which does nobody any good. You can try to be the Boss, but you just end up with Cool Hand Luke. Is that really what you want? 

You have to trust yourself and your child. Trust yourself, that you did the best you could. Then trust your child to be an adult. Yes, at age 12. Let them make their own mistakes. There's nothing wrong with mistakes. If you raised them right, they want to be like you. Most kids want to be like their parents. The best thing you can do for your child is let them be the adult they want to be. 

Sometimes that means they will make exactly the same mistakes you made. That is their choice, and you really cannot stop it.You are not in control of their life, THEY are in control of their life. Let them make mistakes, then point out that you did exactly the same dumb thing at roughly the same age, and apologize to them for that legacy. You owe them that much. 

Your mistakes were your responsibility.
Their mistakes are their responsibility.
Don't confuse the two. 
Let them own themselves.

On Lynchings

How common was lynching? In a country of 76 million people in 1900, there were about 4800 lynchings, total, for the whole of US history, and at least a quarter of them were of white folk. 

Total lynchings: Approximately 4,700–4,800 lynchings occurred between 1882 and 1968 (NAACP and Tuskegee Institute records), or about 55 deaths per year. 

• Black victims: ~3,446 (~73%)
• White victims: ~1,297 (~27%)

125 of the lynchings recorded between 1882 and 1903 (the period with the most available data) or roughly or roughly 3% overall, were black crowds lynching black prisoners.

Meanwhile, lightning strikes often caused 100–450+ deaths per year, peaking around 300–400 in some years. So, during peak lynching years, the annual risk of lynching for a black person was in the same ballpark as (or somewhat lower than) the lightning death risk for the general population. 

Lynching wasn't very common. 

Largest Single Lynching East of the Mississippi River: 
The 1891 New Orleans lynching (Louisiana) — 11 Italian immigrants were lynched by a mob after the murder of a police chief. This is frequently cited as one of the largest single mass lynchings in U.S. history, but that isn't accurate. That distinction belongs to LA.

Largest Single Lynching West of the Mississippi River:
The 1871 Los Angeles Chinese Massacre (California) — 18–19 Chinese men were lynched (hanged, shot, and beaten) in one of the deadliest attacks on Chinese immigrants in American history.

Pope Leo: Ignorant of Economics

Pope Leo XIV

@Pontifex

·

Jun 22

It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security.

Catholic bishops are supposed to care about the poor deeply, but none of them bother to study economics. This is as absurd as saying you care deeply about the sick, but you refuse to study medicine, anatomy, pharmacology.

Condemning commodification is identical to condemning doctors for performing triage. After all,  triage disfavors some of the sick in favor of others who are less sick, and all because doctors recognize they don't have enough supplies to treat everyone!

For shame!

By using triage, doctors commodify medicine!

The condemnation is stupid. It is true that the wealthy have a duty to the poor, but it is also true that no one person nor any group has enough resources to solve everyone's problems.

Thus, some method must be found of apportioning resources to need. The most efficient method we know to correctly apportion resources to needs is precisely commodification.

Just as we need to define terms before we have a conversation, so prices are part of the definition of  how resources should be apportioned to needs. We need definitions of terms, we need defined pricesto commune properly with each other. Price is a form of communication and definition, it is as absolutely critical to resource allocation as correct term definition and grammar is to language.

Literacy is Necromancy

 The Bible warns against necromancy. Necromancy is conjuring spirits of the dead, in order to gain hidden knowledge or foretell the future.

In nearly every book, the dead communicate with us.

When those books, written by the dead, describe mathematical formulas, especially statistical or other advanced maths, those formulas give us hidden knowledge which allow us to foretell the future. 

We predict the future (weather, baseball scores, etc.) by using formulas communicated to us by the dead via books.

Explain how reading books, especially science or math books, is not necromancy. 

Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that advocates for the use of advanced technologies to fundamentally enhance human physical and cognitive capabilities, eliminate disease, and significantly extend human life spans. Reading and writing are both technologies invented by men, they are advanced technologies compared to anything any other creature uses.

Explain how reading is not transhumanism.

A lot of the things Christians or the Bible says is evil are things the Bible or Christians do every day.

Some Cultures Are Simply Better

 This chart makes it clear that different cultures have fundamentally different ways of resolving problems.

Some cultures are pure shit. White, Asian, European cultures are simply better than tribal cultures. People have to decide how they want to live.

Everybody had the same 500 years. Japan went from society that literally used just swords, bows, and arrows in 1850 to building the finest fighter plane in the Pacific theater and start development on their own nuclear weapon in less than 90 years.

China went from being totally owned and oppressed by European powers during the 1830s Opium Wars to totally owning Europe and Canada today. It took less than two centuries.

Everybody had the same 500 years.

Not everyone made the same choices on how to use the time.

How Far Does Sub-Creation Go?

 Christians used to argue that babies conceived via IVF were not human and did not have souls.

When the Pope said they were wrong, the children WERE fully human, a lot of people felt this was some kind of tech delusion.

Either:

1. the human soul is actually just physics or
2. God creates and infuses a human soul.

If the former, then we can build an AI that has a living soul. Not necessarily a person, but certainly alive. 

If the something is alive because God creates and infuses a soul, then either God creates and infuses living souls into only carbon-based life forms (grass, trees, rabbits, people) or He infuses it into anything He wants.

Notice, human persons are persons because their souls are spirits (immortal). Everything else, according to Christian doctrine, has a living soul, but is not a person because those souls are not spirits.

If God is the one behind all this, then we don't know to what extent men can participate in creation.

We DO know that when you fully simulate a fruit fly's brain, with all neuronal connections in a simulation, the simulated fly ACTS like a fruit fly without any training at all. That is, we CAN create an artificial life at least as complex as a fruit fly. It has already been done. Artificial bacteria with fully artificial DNA have also been created.

So... that's food for thought.