ResurgetExFavilla

This is a problem with ELO in general. I don't mean to insult Mikal's debating skills or temperament by the comparison, but Mikal was at the top on DDO despite the vast majority of people not seeing him as the best debater, a mantle that many would give to Whiteflame or Bluesteel. Because of the way that ELO works, you can make it to the top relatively easily by just having a lot of time to waste and strategically picking debates that you know you will win. In a site with a small and largely inexperienced debating pool like this one, it's very easy to shoot enough fish in the barrel and rise to the top, provided you don't have much use for your free time in real life. Mikal was at least a skilled debater, if not the best, so he rose through the ranks of the leader boards of DDO while it was filled with competent debaters. I think that in these early stages of this site's development it would be even easier to do what he did, with a far more impoverished skillset.

"I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially HARD professions—the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, “What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?”
There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization OUGHT to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all REVENANTS; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life—it is not too much to say that it has had the JUMPS—ever since."

This Chesterton excerpt (who was himself an agnostic converted to Catholicism) sums up what I mean pretty well:

"And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and simply discover that they don’t. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another. These are the kind of thoughts which in combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the A FORTIORI. His “how much more” is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis."

Possibly, depending on how it's framed. I feel as if a blanket debate would be too broad. I would certainly debate the communion of saints or transubstantiation.

Honestly, your conceptions of Catholicism are similar to what I held most of my life, before I actually read anything written by Catholics or met many Catholics in any deep sense of the word. It's what we're taught in school, part of the historiographic 'Black Legend'. My conversion to Catholicism began with reading Catholics. I read the writings of everyone from the Church Fathers and Carthusian Monks to G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Day, and John Moriarty. I visited a very beautiful, quiet, out of the way island that was deeply Catholic. Far from being judgemental or rigid, the people were at once serious about their faith and attuned with the natural world, living simple lives rich in color and care for one another. In my readings, I came to the conclusion that I have been fed lies about this religion on a grand scale. That it offered a way of life and a way of interacting with people which were much more deeply and profoundly satisfying than anything else.

I already listed one of Protestantism's bad ideas: the idea that heaven and hell are a strict black and white dichotomy. Others include denying transubstantiation, holding that the dead are unaware of what happens on earth, and their opposition to monasticism. The idea that the Old Testament is a science textbook is another, and the borderline denigration of Mary is another. The abandonment of sexual morality is also rampant among Protestants. But by far the most offensive, imo, is the commercialization of spirituality which takes place within evangelical megachurches.

I think that Catholicism is like the tree grown by the seed planted by Christ, or the fire kept burning all of these years, originating in the spiritual conflagration of Pentecost. The Church is the body of Christ, and everything, from its spirituality to its art to its theology, reflects the truth existing at the root of the institution. I am certainly more drawn to traditional Catholicism, and think that the current Church is caught in a struggle against very dark forces which have infiltrated it. I align a lot more with the mystic side of the Catholic intellectual tradition, like Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Benedict, Saint Bruno, etc. I am a convert, and am not at all a fan of Protestantism. Their nonsensical theology was all that I knew for a long, long time, and it really pushed me away from God for a lot of my life (I was an atheist previously).

Thanks for that explanation. I don't want to derail your thread, I've just only really read the historical and doctrinal differences without really ever knowing an actual Orthodox person.

The Catholic and Orthodox stance on this are pretty different from the Protestant one, mostly because we share a belief in particular judgment which depends in nature on the godliness with which a person lived, a stance which dates back to Saint Augustine of Hippo and several early Church Fathers. Saints were famous for dispensing with earthly wealth. Elizaveta Feodorovna, a Russian saint, was one of the richest woman of Europe, Grand Duchess of the Russian Empire, and a German princess. She had huge collections of jewels, a palace, beautiful clothing. Her husband was assassinated by revolutionaries, and she went to his murderer's cell, gave him a bible, forgave him, and tried to plead for clemency for him. When she went unheard and he was executed, she sold off all of her great riches and became a nun, using the proceeds to found charitable organizations throughout the city, devoting the rest of her life to caring for the poor without her material comforts. She was martyred when the revolutionaries captured her and shipped her to Siberia as a precaution (as she was technically a Romanov heir), throwing her down a mine shaft along with a live grenade and several of her relatives. Villagers reported hearing hymns echoing from the damaged shaft, and when the White Army arrived later they found from the state of the bodies the Elizaveta had spent her last hours, grievously wounded, bandaging the wounds of others in the shaft and singing hymns. That complete giving of oneself over as a tool of God is the Christian ideal, and is very rare. A Catholic example would be Saint Catherine Drexel, one of the wealthiest heiresses in America who gave over her entire fortune, becoming a nun and devoting her life the the education of the poor, particularly Indian children, and founded the only historically Black Catholic college at the time (in the 1920s).

So Christ is very right in this passage. Most of us deserve additional perdition after death; we can't look on the face of God without painful shame at the ways in which we failed to live up to those expectations. Every comfort that we enjoyed while others suffered, every moment of unjust anger, every failure to forgive, is a weight on our soul after death. Because it's impossible to live a life which is worthy of God, though saved on the last day we are separated by God in the afterlife to the degree which we separated ourselves from him in life. The saints like Katherine and Elizaveta are much closer to him, most of us are further from the beatific vision. In Roman Catholicism this state is called purgatory, and is poetically symbolized by cleansing icy fire.

Most Protestant churches in America reject the idea of purgatory, holding instead that anyone who is saved is saved and that's that, they enjoy the full fruits of paradise. Obviously, I find this idea ludicrous.

I don't think this is the right approach. First of all, Mike owns the site, so the only way to protest him is to vote with your feet. Secondly, of all the assistant moderators are essentially cops to bsh's magistrate position, enforcing his moderation policy with their own flair, so there's no point in approving or disapproving of them because we have little idea what their personal moderation policy would be. Personally, I suspect that bsh's moderation philosophy might be far less onerous than Castin's, even though Castin may have a stronger 'social game' so to speak. Thirdly, I don't think that this should be made personal, and that we should stick to differences in moderation policy. While I originally had personal issues with bsh1 due to his stance on free speech, he hasn't really cracked down in the way that I was afraid of so it's not really a personal issue at this point. I do disagree with aspects of current moderation policy, but bsh is a human being capable of addressing those concerns and changing his moderation style. One of the ugliest aspects of current culture in the US is that people are treated like static entities incapable of reform or change, either starkly evil or good based on a laundry list of 'isms'. That's not how human beings work. It would be far more constructive to vote on specific decisions or general principles than on the moderators themselves. Personally, I strongly disagree with Wylted's most recent ban because the thread was a joke (though I could understand people taking it seriously from an outside perspective). I also don't think that people should be punished for doing anything to the mod team aside from threats or doxxing, because moderation should strenuously avoid any appearance of personal grievance. I agree with RM's banning, both in principle (because of his history of prolific threats and doxxings, on and off this site), and generally (because I think that he has a dampening effect on the willingness to debate on the site). Let' talk about policy, not people. Why do you disagree with bsh? Should the CoC be revised and how? How could moderation improve? I think that some of the personal problems with moderation are due to a perceived hesitancy to address their concerns: very well, critique moderation for being unresponsive then. Otherwise we're just slinging shit at each other.

No, more poking fun of the specific way that he was behaving (portraying himself as a tough rebel, but falling over backwards to suck up to moderation, going around threatening people and saying rude shit to them and then crying to moderation that he's being 'bullied' when someone gives him any flak in return).

analgesic, dylan, drafter, and Wylted

I teased RM for being a coward, sycophant (albeit an incompetent one), and crybully, after which he launched a long string of impotent personal attacks at me. I myself was pretty moderate on the moderation action in this particular case, and my little tiff with RM had little to do with his support of them. I teased you as well, but we didn't get into any sort of real fight because you didn't respond like an autistic nine year old.

Lol, apparently now it's anti-Semitic to even mention the historical fact that our 'Greatest Ally' attacked one of our ships, killing 34 and wounding 171 Navy personnel. At this rate, I suppose the King David Hotel bombing will be the next inconvenient fact that's hilariously deemed 'hate speech'.

Oh my God Thett, you can't just tell people that they're faggots.

I think voting standards should be looser by default, with the stricter standards an option which debaters must both opt into beforehand. The ones that you posted seem fine to me. I don't think that S&G or sources should be separate points, I think that conduct should be, as someone can lose a debate while still having better conduct on a fairly regular basis. I don't think that it's very common to see someone win a debate with terribly worse sources or S&G so bad that it impacts the readability of the debate.

How do you see Orthodoxy as 'very different' from Catholicism? The main differences seem, to me, to be filioque, Papal supremacy, the calendar, and separate cultural evolutions. There are especially a lot of parallels with Eastern Catholic rites imo. I'm genuinely curious.

I think that this is because stress is such a huge cause of many health problems, and optimism either in itself reduces stress, or is correllated with conditions which reduce stress.

That's like saying that nobody can call anything blue because #0000FF doesn't really exist as a natural pigment. Things aren't disqualified or made 'subjective' by being inexact; if that were the case we would have to scrap all of taxonomy.

Subjective means the quality is in the mind of the subject perceiving. Objective means that the quality is within the object itself. You seem to mean that 'subjective' means 'inexact', which is how the word is commonly misused, especially among the young. But color is100% objective. A leaf is green, I don't think that it is green. On the other hand, Doris being nice or mean completely depends on my perspective. Green being the best color depends on my perspective. Race is an easily measurable, real quality. We know this because if you lined up a bunch of people in front of me, had them guess their race, and then genetically tested them and compared the results, the guesses would be spot on 99% of the time. Subjective qualities don't do that.

Except race isn't just 'skin color', and includes just about every attribute of a person, including blood types, which vary pretty reliably depending on race. The 'more diversity within than between' mantra is just that: a tired old mantra which fundamentally misunderstands how genetics works. If you have the necessary technical understanding to parse it, this is a pretty good breakdown of why that's just a completely bad take on the issue which takes advantage of the general population's ignorance when it comes to the finer point of genetics: https://anthropology.net/2008/01/18/fighting-the-mantra-people-vary-more-within-the-groups-than-vary-between-groups/

Race is as objective as color itself, being a general descriptor of ethnic origin that operates on weighted gradients. The term 'subjective' doesn't apply to anything that exists on a gradient, it applies to something which depends on the subject rather than the object for value (exists in the mind of the subject rather than in the object itself). Which race isn't, it's literally a quality of the object being discussed. I can't say 'I'm an Australian Aborigine', or 'Denzel Washington is Chinese' and then claim that race is subjective so my personal opinion is valid. That's what the world 'subjective' means. Whether someone is nice or not is subjective. Weather they are Polynesian or not is objective. Sure, they may be half Polynesian, but they are objectively half Polynesian.

Widespread belief in the claim that human races don't exist will one day be looked upon as a weird mass insanity comparable to the Alsatian dancing sickness or Salem witch trials.

Consumerism is the privileging of material comfort and possessions over human concerns, to the point where those concerns bring real misery while reducing short term discomfort. To understand why it is bad requires second-order thinking which looks beyond immediate consequences to how it affects larger systems. Cars make it easier to move, but they also leads to cities which are designed with said movement in mind. Cities are no longer designed to be walkable, so cars become a necessity instead of a life-improving luxury. Social interaction becomes more voluntary, which reduces short-term anxiety but also leads to alienation and social breakdown. Kin groups don't live in the same area, so people lose built in safety nets that reduce the normal load that people place on society at large. You can't mistake consumerism for technology, that's why we have different words for them. Sardinia isn't in the stone age, but its much less consumerist than the rest of the world, and has very high longevity, health, and self-reported happiness.

Yeah, this is why true historians are pretty rare, and accurate historical study only really takes place when there is a stable, well-educated ruling class, because they have a vested interest in a realistic outlook on human nature. Mostly his little book is more of a cautionary tale: most histories, especially abridged ones, don't tell you what happened. They tell you what somebody wants to believe happened.

That doesn't make sense to me. If it's self-evidently sarcastic in the forums, then it's self-evidently sarcastic in a debate. And if it's thrown into the last part of the debate, then voters will punish him for it. That's why we have the conduct point, it exists so that when someone behaves badly, then they are punished by the voters by having that point taken away and given to their opponent. Regardless of whether the statement was false or not, it was clearly a debate etiquette violation that justifies taking the conduct point away. There's no need for the mods to come flying in and ban the person from debate for life, especially when the 'injured party' is the head mod himself, lol. You guys are kind of supposed to have thick skin, not respond with an insane level of aggression to something that you admit wouldn't even be an issue in the forums.

Plus it's not 'disgusting character assassination'; that generally has to be believable.

"Wylted, go fuck yourself. You suck at debating and it is a slap in the face to have to suffer through a debate with such a retard"

If someone claimed that I said this falsely, I would laugh, because it's ridiculous, and the balsyness of the false claim is pretty damn funny. As far as I know, the nastiest PM that bsh has ever sent is like 'go jump off a cliff' or something, which is like the most milquetoast white guy insult I can imagine. I'm pretty sure he would have to be close to black-out drunk to ever call someone a retard in a PM.

I honestly can't comprehend the mindset which sees this as some horrible, offensive action. And he certainly has recourse, he can post a comment on the debate saying 'I never said that'. And most people would believe the denial, because it's like claiming that Jimmy Carter was a necrophiliac KKK grand wizard in his spare time.

Most people want mod interaction that covers the basics, like doxxing or threats, without the nannying aspects. But that's not an option.

Lol wtf? Grovel and apologize and you will be spared? A lie = a personal attack? Sorry, I know you didn't make the promise, but this is hilarious in light of assurances that moderation would be laissez-faire. If someone insults their opponent during a debate without something serious like doxing or threats, or lies, the voters punish them with a loss. There's no need for moderation to get involved. And if such a line is crossed, it's absurd to give someone a chance to grovel in order to avoid punishment. Just administer the punishment prescribed for whatever infraction took place.

Imagine taking 24 hours to come up with this and type it out with your noodle arms, lmao

I'm sure that political considerations weigh on their conscience, but it's mostly structural limitations that they've imposed on themselves. In order to be defined as a subspecies under their current systems, animals normally have to be incapable of producing fertile offspring with one another. This is a dumb rule that ignores a lot of nuance, but zoologists like to stick to such dumb rules because they don't want to admit that botanists, mycologists, and microbiologists are literally right about everything.

Sorry to dox you, but photos of Mharman have been found:

Out of date mallrat.

Frustrated lumberjack.

Suicidal officeworker.

stop talking dirty to me, you little minx.

I think the scale of society and consumerism play an even bigger role and that the loss of values and principles are just symptoms. Human social ecosystems are delicate things, and Schumpeter's gale is wailing louder now than it ever has before.

That's the beauty of the Rorschach CoC: squint hard enough and you can find a justification for anything.

Humans are undeniably polytypic, thought the quibble over whether to call the infraspecific taxa 'subspecies' has more to do with the limits of the zoological classification system imo. Botany is way more permissive of 'splitter' taxonomists, who have three different taxa available to them beneath the level of species, whereas zoologists only have one and get terribly pernickety over its use. If we used the botanical system, human races and ethnicities certainly qualify, as we divide things up over much, much less severe levels of differentiation.

Natural immunity is seldom absolute though, it's a degree of susceptibility. And it is incredibly rare for an epidemic to wipe out any population (hell, even to infect an entire population), no matter how isolated it is. They usually recover within a few generations, with added resistance. Look at any diseases with a 100% fatality rate, and most them aren't easily communicable to being with, requiring vectors or specific means of infection.

I don't see a whole lot of merit in the disease angle, as disease resistance in a population is acquired due to people within that population dying from disease. The only reason that people outside of the islands have disease resistance is the fact that the exact thing happened to them millennia ago. While the loss of human life is certainly tragic, it's something that's going to inevitably happen unless there's a worldwide population crash.

I've always found the Sentinelese fascinating. Their language is completely unique, the only such surviving language with no data on it, to our knowledge. Their hostility stretches back centuries, and I think that it's a really good thought exercise to put yourself in their shoes, within their narrowly circumscribed world. To them, Sentinel Island is the entire universe. We are the equivalent of UFOs. It almost makes you a bit envious, and makes the death seem more tragic than anything else. We call them savages, but would we react very different to any sort of extraterrestrial presence which had begun with a few fatal abductions?

One of the most staggeringly false beliefs that any person could possible hold is the one that one's own age has hit on truth, and has an accurate assessment of the world. Most people in every age have thought that (including ours), and they have all been wrong (including ours). We even reinterpret history to suite our distorted perception, as Herbert Butterfield pointed out in his 'The Whig Interpretation of History', and police speech and thought to create conformity. However, reality is much messier. As Butterfield put it:

"Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own. It is not reached by assuming that our own age is the absolute to which Luther and Calvin and their generation are only relative; it is only reached by fully accepting the fact that their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us. The twentieth century which has its own hairs to split may have little patience with Arius and Athanasius who burdened the world with a quarrel about a diphthong, but the historian has not achieved historical understanding, has not reached that kind of understanding in which the mind can find rest, until he has seen that that diphthong was bound to be the most urgent matter in the universe to those people. It is when the emphasis is laid in this way upon the historian’s attempt to understand the past that it becomes clear how much he is concerned to elucidate the unlikeness between past and present. Instead of being moved to indignation by something in the past which at first seems alien and perhaps even wicked to our own day, instead of leaving it in the outer darkness, he makes the effort to bring this thing into the context where it is natural, and he elucidates the matter by showing its relation to other things which we do understand...

This is why I subscribe to judicial realism. Judges are just people with power, power which reflects what people believe about them. They aren't bound by words, or principles, or ideas, but by perception and obedience. The fact of the matter is that a Constitution which left it possible for Judges to do what they have done in the last 200-odd years is a badly designed constitution, because it has allowed limits to erode on the branches which it sought to counterbalance. Personally, I think that this is a result of us not having a true Monarch. Ages ago, there was a very simple solution to judicial overreach or corruption. When they Persian judge Sisamnes accepted a bribe, the king Cambyses skinned him and lined the throne from which he once passed judgement with his tanned hide. He then appointed the son as judge, and the son ruled justly for all his days, sitting on perhaps the sternest reminder possible of the consequences should he err. The closest that we ever got to that was Andrew Jackson telling the judges to go fuck themselves.

Going off Wylted's post, my grandfather talked about this, how a lot of local autobody shops owned by families closed down or sold out to big chains because they just couldn't manage with a bunch of the regulatory stuff that was coming down the pipes. The rags to stable middle-middle-class story that defined my family was only possible for that generation, all of the people who started their own businesses will tell you that it would be almost impossible to do what they did then, now. The combination of regulatory burden and competition with big chains would kill your business. He also talks about how much more trust-based everything was back then, and how, since there were no big chains, reputation was everything.

I know people who have worked in small body shops since then, and without fail the chains all pushed for profits. Mechanics were rewarded for marking up prices or selling repairs that customers didn't need, and met with an icy reception if they provided honest service. Most of them felt horrible working there, and a couple of guys that I knew left to work for a drone company instead. Just can't shake the feeling that in a saner world they would be doing body work and building a reputation with their skills, instead of squabling for other interns to design the most efficient means of delivering payloads to Yemeni weddings.

Truly, Thett3 is the Ibn Sina of DDO, and the Avicenna of DART.

God, we can hope!