On 3/6/2024 8:27 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
>
> I recently went onto one of those contractor-consolidating web sites
> and copped to being interested in a new roof (the old one being nearly
> 25 years old and our roof guy saying it should be replaced soon), and
> now all those pesky geiger-counter ads (from a recent discussion here
> that included a link to Amazon for -- guess what?) and chess sets
> (another recent discussion here) have been replaced by -- roofing
> companies. Which, since I don't recall mentioning this here before,
> rather lets this group off the hook, as it were, for now, anyway.
>
> Still, there is a bright side to this clear surveillance-society
> behavior: it is unfocused and so unlikely to be governmental. No, it
> is simply Capitalism reduced to petty Hucksterism.

Wadda ya mean "reduced to petty Hucksterism"? You seem to be implying
that it ever rose above petty hucksterism. In some case I will grant it
is pretty sophisticated petty hucksterism but still.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On 04/03/2024 19:25, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On 22 Feb 2024 23:52:24 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>> Dunno, Hawaii is still reeling from the missionary influence, and plenty
>> of folks in Canada are discovering some of the things the Catholic Church
>> did in the 20th century were not so savory there.
>
> Well sort of. What's been "found" in Canada are the results of ground
> radars that MAY be human remains though no actual bones (except
> unmarked graves in known cemetary locations) have been found though
> mock funerals have been made in some places.
>
> 20th century in this case mostly refers to 1880-1940 which were
> supposedly intended to convert children of hunter-gatherer native
> people to farmers and other agriculturalists and fishermen.
>
> We have one of those schools in our commujnity which was built
> adjacent to a native community which morphed into a reservation. The
> only human remains found there were in the small graveyard that was
> part of the convent next door to the school they ran. This school is
> now a much larger Catholic high school which when they expanded it 2-3
> years ago the construction crews were given the exact location of the
> nuns' graveyard and told to build anywhere on the site except there.
>
> https://www.facebook.com/stanorthvan/

The problem isn't just secret burials -
those were in Ireland around the orphanages
for children born outside marriage, you
may have those but it's not the whole
purpose of the institution - but that
way fewer kids came out of those schools
alive than went in. Even when you count
the ones born there. So they buried
the dead, okay.

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
> Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> And many of the things that people talk about as cultural evils of
>> "Christianity" do not exist in many majority-Christian countries too.
>
>Could you give me some examples?

Oh, for example Millennialism. Or the whole lunatic anti-abortion thing that
is promoted by many Protestant organizations in the US. Europeans look at
this stuff and think we are all crazy, but it's not a Christian thing, it
is an American thing. But missionaries also spend a lot of time trying to
get people to put clothes on and not have random sex in piles and things like
that which are not really anything Jesus taught about.

>You seem to have very interesting thoughts on this topic. Do you have a
>background within this field or is it just a hobby of yours?

Much of my childhood was spent in Hawaii where the missionary influence left
both some very good things and some truly horrible things. In Hawaiiana
class in 8th grade we had to read a diary of a missionary named Jacobs from
the 1890s and it was pretty eye opening how they saw the locals. I am looking
for this book because I have a copy somewhere and will give you a proper
citation if I can find it.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."