The difference is that, in World War 2, Germany was reduced to rubble and a significant fraction of its population was killed off because of the direction that its society took. This forced it to take a really long and hard look at itself and figure out what it could do to make sure that this never happened again.

By contrast, the U.S. has never been put in an equivalent position. The bloodiest war in our history was actually the U.S. Civil War in the 1860’s over slavery (and some other things, but mostly slavery). Although the anti-slavery North in that war won and was able to successfully end slavery in the entire country, racism itself was a whole separate issue, and (simplifying the history a bit) it continued to exist formally as a less extreme government-backed institution until the mid-20th century. (An example of this were the “separate but equal” schools that segregated black children from white children and were very much not equal.)

Of course, this only changed the law of the land, not hearts and minds. Education is very local, so there is no central authority which makes decisions about these things, and people regardless have the option of sending their children to private (often religious) schools, or even to home-school them. Furthermore, unlike many countries, we take freedom of belief extremely seriously, and additionally we extend this to a near-absolute freedom for parents to teach whatever things they want to their children to believe. The U.S. stance is essentially that we might not like the values that our neighbor is teaching our children, but we like the idea of the government telling us what values we are required to teach to our children even less, and this is essentially because our country was founded on a fundamental distrust of government and this general attitude has propagated down the generations.

So, what would it take for the entire country–and remember that this is a huge and incredibly diverse country–to get together and decide that we really need to, collectively, put aside our own individual opinions of what our values should be and what we should be teaching our children and refashion our entire society around a new collectively held set of values? That is asking a lot of people, so probably the most likely way that would get done is if fascism takes over our country and drives us to start a war that results in the entire country being reduced to rubble and a significant fraction of our population being killed off. This would force us to really take a long and hard look at ourselves and figure out what we could do to make sure that this never happened again.

(Except that now that nuclear weapons exist, “rubble” takes on a new meaning, so that rebuilding part may not get a chance to happen…)

Sure, but in fairness I think that the intent of that saying is not to say that husbands should not be happy but to counterbalance the trend that used to be more historically prevalent in marriages for the wife to be treated as an appendage of the husband and taken for granted. If you view your partner as co-equal then arguably this saying simply does not apply to you at all.

I am sure he did, brother; I am sure he did!

I read it somewhere in a book I was reading on Buddhism and the nature of the mind; if I am able to find it I will let you know!

I think a simple “Thanks, everyone!” message posted sometime during the day at your convenience is sufficient; individual replies or replies to subsequent messages are not necessary.

It is amazing how much this kind of thing depends on conditioning; there is a culture I read about recently where if someone sees you drinking coffee then they would ask you how you were feeling because it is considered to be a gross drink that you would only have when you were sick; tea would be the beverage of choice at all other times.

I can’t say that my face-to-face interactions with people on contentious issues have been much better than my online ones, honestly, even when I am making a genuine effort to treat their concerns as reasonable and find common ground.

As an introvert, I find the idea of participating in a lot more community events to be exhausting.

NO! Don’t make it bad.

My taste buds disagree that this is “unfortunate”.

Personally, I like to plant gardens that help out natural pollinators in order to change the bees that I want to see in the world.

I think that sometimes what happens to people is that they build the life that they implicitly believe they are “supposed” to be living because that is what they see everyone else around them doing, rather than based on an honest self-assessment of whether this really is the what will make them happy. When they realize that this life is not actually making them very unhappy, they look for outside factors to blame because they did everything that they were “supposed” to be doing so it could not have been their own misinformed choices that led them to this point.

And in fairness, no one chooses where they are born and the cultural conditioning that we receive, so this is not entirely their fault. It is really a societal problem that we do not encourage enough people to engage in true self-introspection to figure out for themselves what is important to them and what they want to get out of life so that they make these kinds of decisions with great deliberation and personal self-insight rather than taking the default option.

Choosing to have a child later on generally has fewer negative consequences than unchoosing a child you have already had.

So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

The difference is that aether unraveled pretty quickly when we started seriously looking for it because experiments kept being outright inconsistent with what it was predicted we would see if it were there, whereas there are lots of independent lines of evidence that all point to the dark matter existing in the same page, so it really is not the same situation at all. The only problem with dark matter is that it doesn’t show up in our particle detectors (so far, at least), but there is no law of the universe that says that everything that exists has to.

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the “internal” energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being “internal” is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well.

The Bhagavad Gita spends a lot of time extolling the importance to spiritual life of controlling the senses with the goal of restraining them, and in particular this is a precept of the Krishna Consciousness cult.

Try reading before you down vote.

Speaking only for myself, what really threw me off was the following:

Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to restrain [emphasis mine] my olfactory system.

I think that if I’d realized that you meant to say “retrain” here instead of “restrain”, I would not have been so quick to initially dismiss it as obviously nonsense.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.