I was thinking exactly this. Having just toured Rome, the Christian history is considerably easier to access than the older Roman history, even for prominent sites like the Forum, Palatine Hill, the Colosseum. The quality of the Christian work was also far inferior to the older layers underneath.
Darkly amusing is the Vatican.
Reading about piety, service, generosity and kindness while beggars suffer at the entrance queue. The contrast between words and actions couldn’t be more striking.
The beggars are professionals almost every single time. To the point where they have licenses from the state to beg (my friends were filming an amateur film in Rome and were stopped by the Guardia because they thought my friends were breaking the law by impersonating a Gypsy.)
> Several Italian judges, including the members of the Supreme Court, have defined begging with children as a "Roma cultural practice". In response, the Italian Parliament enacted law no. 94/2009, which severely represses the practice. The article contests that begging is a Roma cultural practice and claims, instead, that it is an economic practice which may sometimes connect to other elements of Roma culture. The article critiques both the cultural argument put forward by Italian judges, and Italian law no. 94/2009, neither of which serves to defend the rights of Roma children. It concludes by suggesting a different kind of legal approach to child begging, more respectful of the constitutional duty of solidarity and protection of the family, and based on social policies rather then criminal repression.
and references to Article 669-bis C.P. talking about this 2018 law "re-introducing" limits to begging, so I suspect that the "impersonating a gypsy" bit was a mis-understanding and it was really "impersonating a person in need".
> If I’m wrong, a sum that doesn’t matter to me was grifted.
"Give to anyone who asks" is a fine approach, one that I follow too.
Yes, my searching also found lots about the legal wrangling. It had been a long gap between visits and the way begging was done was quite different. Being harassed at train stations by (?)Roma was quite full on 15-20 years ago. Absent this time.
I’ve definitely been caught out by a fake, sad story before.
In Santiago a guy had a story. The next day I saw him in different clothes with a new story.
Cheap electronics are just the feed stock, the basis function for your new creation. Why start with raw matter when you can get fully formed matter for less.
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community", "folk community", "national community", or "racial community", depending on the translation of its component term Volk.
Your quote leaves out the most interesting part: the word is now associated with some particularly folksy folk who notoriously used it in their. genocidal ideology
> The concept was notoriously embraced by the newly founded Nazi Party in the 1920s, and eventually became strongly associated with Nazism after Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
Based on that link, I don’t think I want the jobs that were created.
It would also pay to keep in mind that the link claims that the preceding layoffs hit the same group. Ie, they were the ones there to be hired after losing their jobs.
It also says that people of colour are underrepresented in the job market (in the companies measured in your link) when compared to their overall makeup of the population.
Correcting that would take some years of imbalance in hiring.
Darkly amusing is the Vatican. Reading about piety, service, generosity and kindness while beggars suffer at the entrance queue. The contrast between words and actions couldn’t be more striking.
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