> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution
Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.
> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments
Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to
> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe
Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.
> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants
The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?
> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.
lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
> The same people who brought back witching burning
Seems like it was more complex than that :
> Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions; however, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism, as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions.
> The Witch Trials of Trier took place in the independent Catholic diocese of Trier in the Holy Roman Empire in present day Germany ... Between 1587 and 1593, 368 people were burned alive for sorcery in twenty-two villages, and in 1588, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant in each
> The son of a Puritan minister, Hopkins began his career as a witch-finder in March 1644 and lasted until his retirement in 1647. Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne sent more accused people to be hanged for witchcraft than all the other witch-hunters in England of the previous 160 years
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Hopkins
Note that in Scotland and England, witches were hanged, not burned.
Generally it seems it was mostly in areas where Catholicism and Protestantism were in close contact and had compete for believers or in protestant dominated areas.
The Spanish inquisition for the most pairt maintained the medieval view that witchcraft could not exist from a theological perspective and continued prosecuting belief in it as a heresy.
I'm not defending the church, though. They declared witchcraft to be an irrational superstition to delegitimize pagan beliefs a few centuries earlier yet had no qualms about embracing the same beliefs to gain a competitive edge when competing against protestants.
Isn't most (presumably the overwhelming majority) of opensource development is funded by for profit companies? That has been the case for quite a while too...
> Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.
There are countries in Europe that have done exactly that recently.
Besides Denmark which doesn't have employee contributions in the same way and is transparent about the full amount of taxes you are actually paying. Are you claiming that showing that on the payslip is somehow depressing wages in Denmark?
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,
How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.
> I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either
So you don't care about the size of your salary? Fair enough...
It's all the same to them, whether the social insurance contributions are shown on your payslip or not is just an accounting detail. It's still a tax on labour and no different that the share you are paying.
No, my employer's costs are not part of my salary. The proof of it being that employers have never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.
But I saw several people criticizing their relatively high position on this chart given high incompetence and losses.
EDIT: Apparently this website doesn't follow any rigorous methodology. So basically the only thing their army is 2nd in the world is the nominal number of nukes (hopefully most of them don't work).
Gold was worth about as much in nominal(!) terms ~2006 as it was in back in 1980 then doubled in a couple of years. Doesn't seem like a very good hedge but rather a very volatile speculatory asset...
Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.
> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments
Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to
> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe
Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.
> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants
The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?
> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.
lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
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