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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.
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.
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...
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...
This author (a practicing anthropologist) has a book going into more detail about his treatment of the natives.
The article points to several casual ideologies in architecture which contribute to this.
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.
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.
Highly recommended if you’re doing any non-fiction reading.
This is a really interesting library.
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.
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.
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.