Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Links - 29th June 2022 (2)

Paul Romer: “I Figured Out How to Get Myself Fired From the World Bank.” - Freakonomics - "ROMER: It’s true that I was very focused on theory. It’s good when it can help us by encouraging abstraction — take away the distractions and focus on the things that really matter. But the main value is when it shows you something unexpected. You know, the connection that you didn’t anticipate, like when Newton sees that the falling of the apple is linked conceptually to the orbit of the moon around the Earth.  And I still believe in the value of good theory. But over time, I’ve come to have a much greater appreciation for the importance of evidence as well, so my new mantra is that a fact beats a theory every time. And if we keep reminding ourselves about that, it can avoid the hubris that can set in when we get very attached to our own theories."

Marina Nitze: “If You Googled ‘Business Efficiency Consultant,’ I Was the Only Result.” - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: Do you think we’re too quick to remove children from the home or too slow?
NITZE: We are generally too, well — it’s not so much that we’re too quick. It’s that we remove them for lots of unacceptable reasons. Even the federal government estimates that 60 percent of kids are in foster care because they’re poor. Poor children are disproportionately exposed to mandated reporters. So every time their parent takes them out of school to go get a housing voucher that they have to wait all day for in the office, that housing voucher representative is mandated to report that child is truant from school. Even though the parent had no other mechanism to safely get their child home from school and get the voucher. We will regularly remove children from homes because parents are leaving them home alone because they can’t afford daycare. And then we placed them in stranger foster care with a full daycare stipend. And those are the sorts of incentives that we really need to look at."

Pete Docter: “What If Monsters Really Do Exist?” - Freakonomics - "DOCTER on Toy Story: We purposely chose toys because whether we intended it or not, a lot of the early imagery tended to look like everything was made out of plastic. So we were like, “Let’s just embrace that. It’s a limitation we have at this point.” The subject matter was really chosen out of limitations of the technology."

Sal Khan: “If It Works for 15 Cousins, It Could Work for a Billion People.” - Freakonomics - "KHAN: Honestly, when I did it initially, it wasn’t out of any super deep, strategic-vision thing. We forget back in 2006 cell phones didn’t have particularly good cameras at the time. And with my family we were just figuring out ways to see each other’s writing. I was using Yahoo Doodle while they heard my voice over the phone. And it felt very intimate. It felt like we were sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, looking at the piece of paper together. In hindsight, I realized that it was probably a good move. There’s actually a lot of research that the human brain immediately fixates on human faces. If the human face is competing with math, the human face is going to win. And so when you focus on the math, or the science, or other subjects, and you’re able to use the visuals well, but you’re hearing the voice, then it’s easier to focus. There’s other random things that happened that ended up being really good from a neuroscience point of view. YouTube in 2006 had a 10-minute limit. And so we started making videos that are seven, eight, nine-minutes long. And there’s research: that’s about how long people can pay attention before they need a break."

Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.” - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: Have you thought at all about what we teach kids in school? I’ve begun to think we should be maybe teaching kids more life skills like, say, mindfulness, things they’ll actually use when they grow up.
HARRIS: Yeah, this does to some degree related to the degradation of philosophy. Somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, philosophy became almost entirely denuded of the traditional project of arriving at something like wisdom. It became a language game, largely"

Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: I was shocked when Danny mentioned offhandedly that he had actually just been reading Superfreakonomics. I asked him what he thought of it. He replied, “I think it will change the course of mankind.” I couldn’t believe it — one of the world’s greatest thinkers thought my work was changing the course of mankind? But Danny wasn’t finished. After a brief pause, he continued, “I think your book will change the course of mankind and not for the better.” Well, it turns out Danny didn’t much like our climate change chapter either, but I was still flattered that he thought my book might matter enough that it could cause the downfall of humanity."

Travis Tygart Is Coming for Cheaters — Just Ask Lance Armstrong - Freakonomics - "ARMSTRONG: I mean, I raced in a generation and on a team that was amongst 20 other teams that all did the same thing. Every single one of them did the same thing. I went to the team in ‘92. And the sport of cycling in the mid-‘90s, EPO was like wildfire. And we were holding out, holding out, holding out. Just assuming that, “Come on, there has to be a test for this,” and we got to this moment where we looked around and were like, “Oh my god. We don’t have a choice.” Or, well, we do have a choice. Our choice is to go home. We could just quit. Retire. But if we want to stay and fight — you know, we were all walking around with knives, because we were told we were going to a knife fight. And next thing you know, everybody had guns. And we said, “Oh sh*t, these boys are carrying guns.” And so in the spring of ‘95, we went to the gun store."

How Much of Your Life Do You Actually Control? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: ‘There's an idea in psychology she writes, first introduced by Julian Rotor in 1966, called the locus of control. When something happens in the external environment, is it due to our own actions, in other words, skill, or some outside factor - chance? People who have an internal locus of control tend to think that they affect outcomes, often more than they actually do. Whereas people who have an external locus of control think that what they do doesn't matter too much. Events will be what they will be. Typically, an internal locus will lead to greater success. People who think they control events are mentally healthier, and tend to take more control over their fate so to speak. Meanwhile, people with an external locus are more prone to depression, and when it comes to work, a more lackadaisical attitude...
The early 20th century was definitely behaviorism. And it was pretty dominant. And that’s why when you have a psychologist like Rotter and then, also Al Bandura, who is still with us — he’s in his 90s and at Stanford — he has a very similar idea called self-efficacy. They wanted to make the point that people are not just lab rats responding to rewards and punishments. They are thinking. And they’re projecting into the future and wondering, “If I do this, is it going to pay off?” It really was a conception of human nature which was much more agentic. Having agency, and having freewill, and having an influence on your future, as opposed to just, “Oh, when the environment does this, I do that.” That’s not just stimulus response.
DUBNER: May I once again express my surprise, and I would say borderline exasperation, at the idea that it wasn’t until the early or even mid-20th century that psychologists came to the conclusion that people, as you put it, make sense of their environment and forecast into the future...
DUCKWORTH: Sule Alan is a great economist and she did this random assignment study in Turkey, which is her native country. And what she taught kids was basically to have a growth mindset, to believe that their abilities could change, and to have grit. So, she did this week-long training for teachers. And the teachers had a curriculum and then they taught it to these kids. And the random assignment experiment was to ask: does that treatment actually change outcomes for the children? And in some of the ways that are very similar to what we were just talking about, yes. In fact, on standardized tests, even up to two years later, kids who are taught essentially to believe in their abilities, their destiny, they actually did better. So far it sounds like a fairy tale. So far it sounds like, “Yay, internal locus of control!”... well, here’s the subplot. So, these same children who now are working harder and then doing better academically, they’re asked in the study whether they want to share a toy that they’ve been given as a prize. Do they want to share it with other children? Now, if they are told that the other children were in schools where they weren’t part of the same contest, then the kids are just as generous as the kids in the control condition. So far, still a fairy tale. But if there’s some ambiguity about whether the kids that they would be gifting this to could have maybe earned it on their own, then the kids are more selfish. And one could imagine this at the policy level as a kind of insensitivity to circumstances that are beyond the individual’s control. When, for example, you’re living in poverty and someone says, “You know — ”
DUBNER: “If only you’d work a little bit harder.”
DUCKWORTH: Exactly. And it just suggests to me that we have to be very careful in how we encourage kids to think about their agency and their ability to make their lives better. Because while I do want everyone in the world to believe that there is something that they can do, I definitely don’t want anyone in the world to think that there aren’t real structural problems that you just don’t know about.
Victim culture is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since it leads to an external locus of control
This is an interesting thing to consider when thinking about the Myth of Meritocracy (though of course, the reverse also holds - most people aren't good at nuance)

Meme - "We never talk about how painful cheating is for the cheater too because can you imagine how hard it is to see someone you love in pain??"

killuas babysitter on Twitter - "my dad accidentally bought me a box of hentai thinking it was anime. there’s 55 dvds... merry christmas"

Meme - "HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED IF AN ELEPHANT COULD DO THIS? *auto-fellatio*
WHETHER YOU LIKE NOT, HERES THE ANSWER"

Meme - "Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions in life. Do I want to be a stepfather or a son-in-law? *2 women with nice asses*"

Mum horrified after daughter cuts the Queen out of £20 notes to stick on her dolls - "Victoria Ingham from Middlesborough, England, shared photos of her daughter Esme's creations on Facebook, writing: "So, comes upstairs to find our Esme has cut up 25 quid, absolutely gutted cos yano I am a skint student, anyways, look up to see that she's cut the queen's head out to stick on her dolls."  Luckily, she saw the funny side of the situation, adding: "Dunno whether to laugh or cry, all I know is I am absolutely skint so donations welcome."

ᶜᵘʳᶜᵘᵐᶜᶦˢᵉ on Twitter - "You could do anything on 2007-2012 twitter. I showed people how to cook crack in the microwave and nothing happened. Now I can’t even call a fat bitch fat."

Meme - "Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system.
FLUSHES 7 BILLIARD BALLS IN A SINGLE FLUSH"
So much for intuitive Imperial units

Meme - "IT'S OK TO LAUGH AT CHILDREN FALLING OVER (as long as they don't hurt themselves too badly)
"I'm a doctor, and laughing at children falling over is the only thing I still enjoy.""

Meme - BJ Smith @BJSmithArt: "Why are IT guys such dicks?"
Eric Chapman @eschapman: "Last week I drove two hours to push the power button on a server that three separate people assured me was already on."

Fake News: Cops Did NOT Beat Up Teen After Bank Teller Mistakes His Erection For A Pistol - "Did the police in Detroit, Michigan beat up 17-year-old Jamal Freeman after also shooting at him twelve times because a bank teller at the Detroit Liberty Bank mistook his erection for a gun? Nope, that's an old satirical story which recently went viral again, it is not true."

Meme "This guy is baree goodlooking, like if he sucked my dick i would run my fingers through his hair, no homo"
"You think no homo is that powerful??"

Meme - *Dolphin [?] with super long penis*

US' Nevada sex worker retires at 76 after 54 years of satisfying 500,000 clients including four American Presidents - "legendary prostitute Beatrice “3$” Thompson announced her retirement after a 54-year career that left 500,000 customers satisfied, including four American Presidents. Nicknamed “3$” for the price of a blowjob when she started working in the sex industry, Ms. Thompson rapidly became known as one of the best in the profession.  The Sex Workers’ Union of Nevada named her “Sex Worker of the Year” seventeen times between 1969 and 1992 and honored her contribution to the profession with a Lifetime Achievement award in 2011.  Beatrice Thompson says she could have retired years ago but had always loved her job and wanted to reach an objective she had set for herself decades ago. Her very last customer, a 34-year old man from Hamburg in Germany, says he made the 5400-miles trip specifically for Ms. Thompson... Ms. Thompson intends to contact the Guinness World Records organization to obtain the recognition she deserves for her accomplishment.  She has several documents to prove her claim, including employer records, tax records and even tens of thousands of customer reviews.  The actual record is held by Louise and Martine Fokkens, twins who were both prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red-light district for 50 years and had sex with 355,000 men combined in their run, or about 177,500 each."

Meme - "*Starbucks - woman with legs in air* You'll never see it the same again"

Meme - Megan Finger @meganfinger: "THANK YOU Central for my awesome email address and username...... Like really
fingerme
fingerme@cwu.edu"

How Do You Know When It’s Time to Quit? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: There was a study of gritty people. This was a study that was done in a lab. Participants came in and they took the grit scale. And so the scientists could, with some precision, say who was grittier and who was less gritty. And then they gave them a series of unsolvable anagrams.  And the trick in this study was that the unsolvable anagrams are mixed up with just really, really hard anagrams. And you could, in this experiment, pass and keep going, or you could stick with one puzzle and just work on it to your heart’s content. And the grittier people in this study tended to perseverate on the impossible anagrams far past the point where it was advantageous. Of course, it wasn’t advantageous. They were impossible...
DUBNER: We did a piece years and years ago called “The Folly of Prediction.” And we looked at experts in four different areas: stock markets, geopolitics, corn yields and prices, and the N.F.L. — football predictions. And it turned out that in each case, the people who are supposed to be the best were basically no better than chance."

How Much Do Your Friends Affect Your Future? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: One of the famous findings was the finding that obesity is contagious, in the sense that your weight and your weight change was predicted not only by the people you know, but the more startling finding is, it’s not even necessarily that they’re in your direct circle, but maybe the outer circle. If I influence you, Stephen, and you happen to know someone else, I don’t even have to know them, but my politics, or the way I eat, or anything else could “go viral,” as it were, in the same way that an actual virus goes viral...
There is a bright line between correlational data and experimental data. We can try to get the correlational data to be closer and closer to an experiment by controlling for lots of variables and doing fancy-schmancy acrobatic stuff, but it’ll never be an experiment.  So, the Framingham Heart Study never randomly assigned people to have friend A instead of friend B, and indeed, that is the major limitation. And there have been critiques of the social network analysis approach. For example, there was one paper that said if you use the same analyses, height is contagious too. So, I think it’s a limitation"

Is Empathy in Fact Immoral? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Stephen. I have an email here from a gentleman named Matt Wahl. Matt writes, “Is there a downside to empathy? For most of my life, I operated on the assumption that empathy was the most important thing for making the world better. If only people could understand other perspectives, everything would be fixed. But lately, I’ve read some pretty damning research that suggests that empathy actually can make people less fair, more irrational, more biased. A study by Paul Bloom involving fictional wait lists for medical treatment found that participants would move people up whose stories they knew at the expense of the strangers on the list. I also learned that the hormone oxytocin, which I associate with love, is involved in occurrences of xenophobia. So, it seems that maybe empathy can only be practically applied to an ingroup at the expense of the rest of the world.” That is a very sophisticated question...
A fictional child who has myasthenia gravis, which is a neuromuscular disease... How will this manipulation of empathy change decisions? I mean, they can, in this case, decide whether to change the place of the child on the list in a way that conflicts with principles of justice. And, in fact, after you are induced into this empathic state and you’re trying to really be sympathetic, then you are more likely to move this fictional child up the list, even if that’s actually displacing other children who have greater need, or shorter life expectancy, or are more likely to benefit. So, this is a case where empathy might make the ultimate choiceless moral."

How Much Better Do You Really Want to Be? - Freakonomics - "I know there is a linguist named Michael Erard who wrote a book called Um: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean, and he makes the interesting note that — here, I’ll read a bit, “With a few exceptions, people didn’t really start talking about ‘um,’ or complaining about it, until the advent of voice recording. It is likely they were using it all along, but either they didn’t notice it or didn’t deem it worthy of writing down. It wasn’t considered a word, but a noise like a cough.” And then he notes that all languages have their own version of “um.” I will say that, having interviewed a few thousand people over the last many years, especially when you interview people for audio, for podcasts, or radio, where the editing process really reveals the filler — I will say that very few people speak without filler."

Ancient Roman Prostitues – Women in Antiquity - "People may try to remove themselves from history. Assume humans only ever evolve and that we in modern times don’t share any similarities to those of the past. This can be unfortunate and perhaps create a bias in someones writing. This is why prostitution can be seen as very important. It can help show that no matter how much humans evolve and technology changes, modern humans can relate back to their ancient ancestors. Therefore prostitution is a very important subject to study and to understand... In ancient Rome, prostitutes were looked down on because they used their body to make money.  For the same reason, gladiators, actors and musicians were all viewed as shameful professions. One of the way men were able to tell a women was a prostitute was by her clothing. Prostitutes would be identified by only two forms of clothing they would wear. One was a special toga, and the other was to be completely naked. The toga the prostitutes were actually of a male design. In ancient Rome, women and men wore two different styles of togas. It was seen as disrespectful if a women wore a male toga. But, prostitutes were allowed to wear a male toga. This was because prostitutes were viewed as having a male sexual desire. Men were supposed to have strong sexual desires, which is part of the reason why prostitution was legal. Having or wanting to have lots of sex was viewed as a sign of a strong male. Therefore, a prostitute, whose job was to engage in sex, was allowed to wear a male toga."

How to access PC files on your Android Phone - "The first method requires both the Android device and the PC to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Here, we will be using an app that’s available on the Play Store, to access files from PC on your Android phone. You can even copy paste and delete files. The app that helps us do all of that, is called File Manager (yeah, it’s a common name, so know that this is from developer named ‘Flashlight + Clock’ — yes, that’s the name of the developer)."

What’s Wrong With Shortcuts? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Let me ask you about a very practical and policy-related category of shortcut. And that’s the one practiced by firms like Uber and Airbnb, who build businesses around models that are kind of illegal or quasi-legal at best. And there’s this old saying: “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission.” So what’s your assessment of the shortcuts used by firms like that?
DU SAUTOY: It was in some sense a shortcut that I recognize in mathematics as well, because sometimes the breakthroughs happen from breaking the rules, and you can get very stuck inside a particular system, a way of thinking, and in order to find the new path, the secret passage, sometimes you have to break the rules. And the one I rather like is when we came up with a new number, the square root of minus-one an imaginary number. At first sight, you say, well, there isn’t a number which when you square, it equals minus one. And for centuries, people just wouldn’t admit this number into the canon of mathematics. But we broke the rule and said, “Why don’t we try?” Let’s just try something, see if it works, and then maybe you can change the system.
DUBNER: What were the long-term benefits, then, of using imaginary numbers?
DU SAUTOY: One of the most extraordinary is that when we were trying to land planes using radar, it turned out the computers just weren’t fast enough to do the calculations if we just used normal numbers. But when we then exploited the power of imaginary numbers — which seemed sort of illegal because, you know, where are these numbers? — actually it allowed us to do the calculations much more quickly. And so we understood where the planes were, we were able to land them, whilst if you didn’t use imaginary numbers, the planes would have crashed."

She’s From the Government, and She’s Here to Help - Freakonomics - "ROUSE: So I got my Ph.D. at Harvard and I was very much trained to worry about disincentive effects and about inefficiency.
DUBNER: Like: if you pay people really big unemployment insurance, they may not want to come back to work when restaurants need employees?
ROUSE: For example. So worrying a lot about disincentive effects. Under Obama, when you think about the housing and the mortgage foreclosures, really we have to make this a very targeted intervention. And what I have really come to understand is that when you try to target so beautifully — so that the six people who are truly deserving in some definition of truly deserving get it — you’ve made it too complicated and it doesn’t help anybody. I think we’ve overemphasized efficiency over just helping people. That has actually been an evolution for me, that I would rather overshoot and be more generous with some people, that our notions of inefficiency I think are too narrow and that they end up not helping enough people...
The historically large spending proposals coming out of the Biden Administration have been met with cold stares by Republicans, not surprisingly. But the objections aren’t purely partisan. Larry Summers ran the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton and the National Economic Council under Barack Obama. Here he is, talking to Wall Street Week, about Biden’s first stimulus package.
Larry SUMMERS: I think this is the least responsible macroeconomic policies we’ve had in the last 40 years. I think fundamentally it’s driven by intransigence on the Democratic left and intransigence and completely unreasonable behavior in the whole of the Republican Party...  
DUBNER: As somebody put it to me once when I was going on about some big aggregate-data conclusion, they said, “Well, on average, everyone in the world has one breast and half a penis.”"
Many of the same people who bitch about how long government takes to help people also bitch that undeserving people get help

How Does New York City Keep Reinventing Itself? (Bonus) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "DYJA: There was a huge wave when New York was incredibly dangerous where people went on this kind of crazy urge to get dogs. And so the dog population in New York really skyrocketed and there was no law against just leaving it on the streets. So everyone did. And stepping in dog poop was just a part of life. There was this ongoing battle in the late ’70s about trying to pass laws to pick up dog poop. And the A.S.P.C.A. and other dog-owner organizations were really against the dog poop law, because they said “They’re going to kill their dogs. They’re going to let them free in the streets rather than pick up dog poop.”  Someone compared it to things that the Nazis did to the Jews, by making them pick up poop. So finally, Franz Leichter, who was a state senator from New York City whose mother had actually died in the Holocaust, who I think took that rather personally, pushed through the pooper scooper law"

Did William Phelps Eno, Father of Traffic Safety,' Never Learn to Drive? - "The man who penned some of the first traffic laws never drove a car himself...   It was William Phelps Eno who invented stop signs and who envisioned one-way streets, taxi stands, traffic circles, and pedestrian safety islands. He wrote the first manual of police traffic regulations, and it was he who designed the circular traffic pattern that courses around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris...   Eno was always a great fan of horseback riding but did not place all that much faith in the automobile, thinking it but a fad. He never learned to drive, and when events in his life necessitated car travel, he relied on a chauffeur. "
So much for the primacy of personal experience

Meme - "WORKERS PARTY 2015
"A co-driver is there to slap the driver when he drives off course or when he falls asleep or drives dangerouslyt" - LOW THIA KHIANG
Appeals to older voters. The hardworking workers and the people of Aljunied GRC and Hougang SMC
Fks the PAP fluently in English, Mandarin and even Teochew. Sometimes Hokkien
"Towards a first world parliament"
2020
Push for minimum wage and unemployment benefits.
Fall asleep in Parliment forgot now to Fuck the PAP on 6.9m / population
Appeals to angmoh kentangs who want to change the world but cannot change their own bedsheets.
Cannot swear and curse in mandarin, let alone debate. on TV. Give up before win election
Social Justice warriors. Pushing for fairness for minorities in SG
NO LONGER THE SAME"
And this was before Raeesah Khan

Girl, 16, who learnt to walk paralysed AGAIN in car crash on final day of physio - "  Former goalkeeper Jade Almond was originally hospitalised in July last year after falling back off a chair and smacking her head.  The accident left the 16-year-old struggling to concentrate properly, suffering from uncontrollable shakes, and unable to walk.  Doctors diagnosed her with functional neurological disorder (FND), which required intensive, privately-funded physio treatment.  And after seven gruelling months of £14,500 crowd-funded physio, Jade was incredibly able to walk, run and dance again."

Homeowner who fortified his mailbox with concrete after vandalism sued by paralyzed driver - "A homeowner who heavily fortified his mailbox with metal and concrete after it was repeatedly vandalized is being sued by a driver who was left paralyzed after he crashed his truck into it in Ohio."
Fortified mailbox owners not liable in paralyzing crash - "The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled a Huron County couple is not liable after a truck hit their fortified mailbox and flipped in 2016, leaving the motorist with paralyzing injuries. The issue at hand for the court was decide whether or not the homeowner is liable for the crash given that the driver alleges his pickup truck would not have flipped over had it not been for the fortified mailbox post.  The Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that landowners owe no duty to protect motorists who leave the regularly traveled portion of the road and strike an object in the right-of-way. In Ohio, the right-of-way is a general term used to describe property near the side of a public road. In December 2016, Cletus Snay crashed his pickup truck into Matthew Burr’s mailbox in Bellevue after hitting a patch of black ice. Snay and his wife filed a lawsuit in Huron County Common Pleas Court. Even though a state trooper determined that Burr's mailbox did not cause the truck to flip, an accident reconstructionist hired by the Snays determined “the unyielding heavy metal pipe mailbox support caused the truck to overturn and led to Snay’s injuries""

Meme - "This is not "stupid" design. It was a deliberate decision to make the mouse useless while charging. Why? Perhaps you're annoyed that you have to pause your work and let it charge, so you buy another one as a backup. Also, if you use it long enough, its internal battery will deteriorate, offering progressively shorter work time. If it had the charging port in the front, you could leave it always attached and still use it, just downgrading your wireless mouse to a cable mouse. It would be acceptable for some people. But this way you have to buy a new one Those are two potential chances for additional revenue with just one seemingly "stupid" design choice It's the same as putting critical components next to heat sources in their laptops. Apple doesn't do stupid things, it does asshole things"

Meme - "Northampton General Hospital
Family Planning Advice
Use Rear Entrance"

Victorian Pet Cemeteries | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘What was the church position if the church had a position on these on these cemeteries and burials? Because you said it was the generally accepted position, Christian position at the time that animals didn't have souls.’...
‘The church has always, or the various churches have always been vague on the matter. But what's clear is that society or that the prevailing society at the time was not very comfortable with the idea of giving the same Christian burial rights to animals as they were people. And you see this in the location of pet cemeteries in this country. The early ones especially, they are not located on consecrated grounds. They're located in public spaces, civic spaces or on private land...
Throughout the procession, apparently a large crowd had gathered, and were yelling at her and the cat about the decency of it all. And were really quite angry that this cat was receiving a burial in a, in a Christian graveyard. And after the cat was buried, the crowd gathered in the graveyard, excavated the cat smashed the coffin and removed it from the, from the, from the graveyard. And you can imagine how this would be quite a traumatic experience for the pet owners. And it's, it's therefore not surprising to see that people are actually quite hesitant at what they write on the gravestones of their animals. So the fact that many of these gravestones in the 19th century don't, don't mention a reunification in heaven is not necessarily a reflection of the belief of those individuals burying the cats but, of but more a reflection of where society is at the time and what people are comfortable saying publicly’"

blog comments powered by Disqus