If BRTD lived in Northern Ireland...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Of those currently represented in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Things to consider:

• SDLP are the closet to being 'all liberal, all the time' but they're icky Catholics.
• Alliance are moderate heroes.
• PBP are Trotskyists.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'll also note that the very premise of "cultural Catholicism" and the idea that by simply of virtue of having been raised Catholic gives you a connection to everyone else who was is actually pretty similar to the fundamentals of Hindutva.

The problem with Hindutva is that it's exclusionary and totalizing, not that it acknowledges that religion and culture shape each other. The very premise of 'the destruction and annihilation of culture in the US' and the idea that progressive submersion of ethnocultural minorities into a generic American whiteness internally differentiated only by consumption habit-based subcultures and trends should be celebrated and even hastened is also similar to certain fundamentals of Hindutva, just not the same ones. And also to certain fundamentals of Maoism, which I'm never going to let go.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

And that's fine. But you've, in the past, heavily implied that it's somehow wrong or bad for people like SMilo or a number of other posters I can think of to maintain cultural and emotional links to Catholicism. Other than your preexisting anti-Catholicism--an extension of your odd reversal of what most people understand by 'mixing religion and politics', wherein your political views dictate your theology rather than the other way around--there's no good reason why you would think this, based on what you've just said here.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

...you didn't realize that Ulster Unionism was a form of nationalism before?!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm about as baffled that BRTD thinks it's uncomplicatedly a good thing for subcultures based on consumption habits to replace subcultures based on family ties as he is that people want the United States to be more like Northern Ireland. (I'm not one of these people, by the way, because Northern Ireland and the Upper Midwest aren't the only options here.)

I'm also perfectly aware that plenty of people develop their religious commitments around their preestablished political views; I just don't think that's somehow less tribal than doing it the other way around.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Of course it's best for a church to be oriented around what people actually believe, but it's sort of nice when both coincide. Note also that Paul never actually stops referring to himself as a Pharisee or as Jewish.

Still do you agree that any scene Italian-American has more in common with me than some stereotypical Staten Island

Yes. But--and I know this isn't really related to the point you're making--Staten Island is not (thank God) the sine qua non of Italian-American culture.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Well, yeah.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What I'm trying to impress upon you is that there aren't two binary 'sides', BRTD, where you can only understand yourself based on either where you come from or what kind of crap you're most liable to allow the culture industry to sell you. Do I strike you as someone who's entirely uninterested in anything and has no subcultural commitments other than being Italian-American? Does the Italian-American goth girl I'm friends with on tumblr who lovingly describes her family life as being like a sitcom directed by Francis Ford Coppola? Do the Jewish comp-sci/anime nerds I hung out with in undergrad?

And as I've told you multiple times before, wanting everybody to assimilate into a generic American whiteness is also similar to certain types of right-wing thinking, as you should have realized some time around the point in the other thread where you triumphantly used 'ethnically American' white conservadems in places like West Virginia voting for Bernie Sanders as an example of the 'completely assimilated, detached from their heritage and ancestries, white people' you love so dear. Ideally neither of us would be using 'is superficially similar to certain types of right-wing thinking' as a gotcha, because that's absolutely ridiculous, but you did first, so.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1. I'd really appreciate a source on that 40% statistic.
2. I'm just trying to get you to understand why somebody would trust their own family more than the culture industry.

Also, you and I know very different types of Jews, but we knew that already.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1. I'd really appreciate a source on that 40% statistic.
2. I'm just trying to get you to understand why somebody would trust their own family more than the culture industry.

Also, you and I know very different types of Jews, but we knew that already.

1. It's from a Pew Survey: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-2-religious-switching-and-intermarriage
According to it, 31.7% of Americans were raised Catholic, and 12.9% claim to have left Catholicism. 12.9/31.7 = 40.7%

I'm not convinced this demonstrates what you think it demonstrates, because of differences in what one might mean by 'leaving Catholicism'. A lot of formerly-Catholic atheists are dangerously obsessed with their upbringing--with elaborately rejecting it or with overtly trying to substitute other things for it or both--and the Episcopal Church is lousy with people who are there specifically and solely because it's the closest they can get to Catholicism while still having their political standpoints catered to (which is simultaneously the main reason why I'm still there and the main reason why I'm considering leaving). It's certainly true that cultural Catholicism as a strong identifying factor has declined precipitously in recent years but I still think you're reading into the statistic.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Everybody's family is different, BRTD. (Nice set of examples, by the way! Very well done, very nice spectrum. I'm not being sarcastic.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1. Formerly-Catholic Episcopalians are the group I'm most familiar with. I try to spend as little time thinking about the thought processes of people who convert from Catholicism to Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism as possible, although this might change because in the fall I'm taking a course on qualitative research methods with someone who specializes in this (in the context of Hispanic groups in Southern California). I'll probably have more to say about those people then.
2. I do in fact know young 'white ethnic' (qua 'white ethnic') Sanders supporters and Pokemon Go players. Mostly Jewish, some Irish--one of my best friends in all the world is a twenty-three-year-old culturally Catholic Irish-American woman! There are fewer of them than there would have been in previous generations, but they exist.
3. Nobody is saying you need to care about that, only understand why (some) other people do.
3a. For many people, people of the same or similar ethnic backgrounds will have grown up eating similar foods, hearing similar types of family stories and fairy tales and lullabies, going to similar types of cultural events--and, yes, churches--et cetera. This is weakening in most of the United States, but still present and still a going concern for many Millennials who are either nostalgic for those aspects of their childhoods, not interested in any of the various generically-white subcultures that are available, or simply not for whatever reason committed to entirely reinventing themselves according to the strictures of their chosen subculture. Would you honestly I rather be a weeaboo than an Italian-American who happens to be interested in Japan?
3b. In a lot of families, there's either a fairly distinct and robust blending of traditions from different sides of the family or a privileging of one side of the family's traditions over others. My maternal family privileges our Italian side because our Ashkenazi side had its cultural memory forcibly repressed by a rogues' gallery of tsars, Ellis Island agents, and early-twentieth-century Western Mass employers (and does that give you any indication of why I might be sensitive about this)? I privilege my maternal family over my Baltimore Irish paternal family because my father was absent for a lot of my childhood. Even if this weren't the case, there'd be a difference between a Northeastern family with a mix of Italian, Jewish, and Irish customs and sensibilities and one that was what a Midwesterner would view as 'generic white'.
4. To my knowledge, none of my friends have shared that video.
5. It occurred to me as I was thinking about this discussion earlier this evening that it's actually incredibly high schoolish to define yourself culturally exclusively or primarily based on what sort of poppular music you like or whatever. I'd say there's something very Frankie Avalon about it, but Frankie Avalon recently wrote something called Frankie Avalon's Italian Family Cookbook, so that doesn't really work. Does that never occur to you?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nuance

I'm too depressed to continue this right now, BRTD.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Btw, I meant 'popular music' as distinct from folk music and art music, not as in 'music that is popular'.

I can't think of any productive way to respond to the other points you were making, other than to point out that spending money on rare physical editions of art you could get digital copies of for free is by no means limited to 'the scene'. Neither is hosting live music in your house, believe it or not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, yeah, the idea that Catholicism is somehow limited to certain ethnicities is...odd. Was it smilo who was saying a while back that German Catholics aren't 'real Catholics' because you don't think 'Catholic culture' when you think 'Germany'? That was ridiculous.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

premise it's such a distinct identity that no one EVER really drops no matter what they believe

...but...I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that?