Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 March 31

= March 31 =

Eggshell skull
Does the eggshell skull rule apply in US criminal law? I'd expect such cases come up often enough that there would be a clear answer one way or the other, but the article is pretty vague. It mentions criminal law and it mentions some particular cases in the US, but those are civil cases. Asking because of the ongoing George Floyd trial which is bringing out the internet lawyers from 4chan and elsewhere. Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 02:30, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Celebrity love affairs in Pakistan
Greetings,

While Draft:Love in Pakistan is progressing inching forward to establish same Pakistan which indulges in highest number of honor killing of women for their free expression and choice has equally time immemorial tradition of love and romance too.

As this reference indicates there is long enough list of  Celebrity love affairs in Pakistan; I am looking for/ requesting assistance in finding reliable sources and validation of the information for sake of objectivity and reliability of information (and my general knowledge too).

Thanks and warm regards

Bookku (talk) 03:34, 31 March 2021 (UTC)


 * . The humanities reference desk is intended for general knowledge questions. It is not really a suitable place for requesting help with drafts, especially in such a niche area as it is unlikely that any of the regulars here have much knowledge on that subject. I suggest you approach people with more experience in this area such as Portal:Pakistan.--Shantavira|feed me 08:02, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I will reach out to individuals at later stage but 1) most of projects are effectively inactive. 2) While my experience has been good with this forum. 3) Consider for a while I am asking question is for my general knowledge just for your satisfaction. 4) Policy of this desk says "..We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.." I have done my home work and looking past stuck point since if I do not take adequate precaution it can cause BLP issues. Please avoid discussing further and discourage others in helping out. Thanks for not discussing further unless you want to help out. Bookku (talk) 08:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Unincorporated business
Suspend disbelief and imagine some kind of legislative divine intervention that eliminates Amazon's corporate charter tomorrow. That is, Amazon is overnight transmogrified into some kind of unincorporated joint venture between "El Jefé" (Jeff Bezos) and its other current shareholders. One consequence is that its corporate liability shield goes away, but we might say Amazon is not in much danger of bankruptcy anyway, so does this really matter? It still has as many lobbyists as before, who I'd expect are equally effective at greasing Congress to give the unincorporated Amazon mostly the same tax breaks the corporate version currently has. There might be some procedural and organizational changes like how the board of directors meetings are organized, but that stuff is relatively minor. Are there any really MAJOR consequences?

This is intended really as more of a political question than a legal one. I keep hearing that corporate personhood is at the root of many of society's evils, so I'm trying to understand what happens if we get rid of it, at least at the megacorp level. Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 18:16, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Corporate personhood is often wrongly conflated with limited liability, but they're different things. Corporate personhood means the corporation is legally treated as an artificial person, separate from any employee or owner. The corporation itself can own property, enter into contracts, etc. Limited liability means any claim against the company can only be assessed against the company's assets, not separate assets of its owners. Eliminating corporate personhood would mean legally that all the company's assets, contracts, etc. belong to/are done with all the owners jointly. This would be a nightmare for anything with more than a relatively small number of owners. Even if a decision didn't require unanimous consent among owners, you would need to ask a bunch of them, and any employee with decision-making authority would need power of attorney from all the owners. Essentially you're reinventing the corporation structure but with colossal impediment to any large company being able to function. You can imagine how this would make a stock market nearly impossible. You may note in the corporate personhood article that there's a big side issue particular to U.S. jurisprudence about what "rights" a "corporate person" has, but of course, that's specific to the U.S., and doesn't have anything to do with the notion of corporate personhood in and of itself. --47.155.96.47 (talk) 00:45, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that is very helpful and clarifying. Yes I remember now, I saw a proposed US constitutional amendment saying explicitly that the bill of rights only applied to natural persons and not to artificial constructs like corporations.  So under that amendment, if Congress saw fit, corporations could still own property and the other stuff you mention, but those would be privileges granted by legislation rather than rights recognized as inherently belonging to humans.  Particularly, corporations could be restricted from some activities like political campaigning that natural people are entitled by right to engage in.  So I wondered what would be the result of a big company simply deciding not to incorporate, and I think you've answered that.  Thanks again! 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 02:27, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Looking for a religious term
Is there an adjective referring to both Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, but excluding Protestants? The closest I can think is "apostolic", but that isn't quite right. L ANTZY T ALK 19:33, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't have a term, but the key difference IMO is the role of the priest / minister / reverend. In the two sects you mentioned first, the priesthood operates between the congregation and the deity; in Protestantism, people are considered capable of managing their own relations to the Almighty. ADD: Protestant ministers act as instructors, guides, or counselors. DOR (HK) (talk) 20:35, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Lots of Protestants have priests and the Apostolic succession. DuncanHill (talk) 20:40, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * "Protestant" is a tricky term to pin down; it means so many disparate things. Some Baptists don't even consider themselves Protestant (see Baptist perpetuity) because they claim to represent a line of thinking back to the time of Jesus, rather than to the Protestant Reformation.  At the other end of the spectrum, the Anglo-Catholics still claim to be Catholic, though currently not in communion with Rome (this is my somewhat vague understanding and I could be off on some details).
 * But the question was specifically about Roman Catholics and Orthodox (and I would guess also Eastern Catholics, who aren't technically Roman Catholics, and possibly also Copts?), and not so much about Protestants except by way of pointing out whom not to include. It would seem reasonable that there might be a word for that grouping but I don't know one. --Trovatore (talk) 21:16, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I think "non-Protestant" is a particularly poor formulation for Catholics+Orthodox. First because it's a definition by exclusion, whereas the question seems to be about commonalities between Catholics and Orthodox, and maybe more important, it pulls in all the problems with demarcating "Protestants" (are Mormons Protestant? What about Jehovah's Witnesses?) --Trovatore (talk) 00:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I had thought the difference between Catholics and Protestants was that Catholics believe in a Pope, the Bishop of Rome aka Roman Pontiff in the case of Roman Catholics, and the Archbishop of Constantinople in the case of Eastern Orthodox. But, the article about the latter says I'm somewhat wrong about how Orthodoxy works.  Come to think of it, Episcopalians don't have a Pope at all, but are Catholic-like in some other regards.  I don't know if they count as Protestant, and if so, according to who.  2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 23:10, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Hint, see The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Alansplodge (talk) 00:23, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I think you've got part of it sussed. You could call them principalian or hierarchist or something like that, if that's the part you mean to emphasize. Failing that, a phrase like "most non-Protestant Christians" might do. Temerarius (talk) 23:50, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * How about a phrase like "Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians"? DuncanHill (talk) 00:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * There are also denominations that are neither Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant but are grouped under restorationism. 24.76.103.169 (talk) 02:49, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The word "catholic" means "universal" - it is the entire Church.  The Roman Catholics and the Orthodox are the only churches who have an unbroken tradition dating back to the first seven ecumenical councils. 91.125.11.49 (talk) 12:18, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The term catholic derives from this phrase of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381: Πιστεύω [...] εἰς μίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ ἀποστολικὴν ἐκκλησίαν. (Pisteúō [...] eis míam, agían, katholikḕn kaì apostolikḕn ekklēsían.) "I believe [...] in one, holy, general and missionary church." I suppose that the intention of catholic, meaning "general", was in contrast to a notion of a church with regional coverage, and was, in this context, synonymous with ecumenic (οἰκουμενικός oikoumenikós), "pertaining to the whole world", the apostolic mission of the (then still unified, except for Arianism, mainly among Germanic tribes) Church being to bring the "good spell" to the whole world. In this sense the many churches that embrace the Nicene Creed and see the whole world as the area of their mission, which includes much of Protestantism, are also "catholic", If they do not actually use the term, it is to avoid misunderstanding, as the Church of Rome has effectively appropriated the epithet as their brand. --Lambiam 13:29, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
 * There's a difference between catholic and Catholic. Alansplodge (talk) 23:16, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
 * My main point was that "Catholic" in "Roman Catholic" does not refer to its being "the entire Church" or having "an unbroken tradition", but stems from its use – originally as a common adjective – in the Nicene Creed of 381. I think that other Churches than the Catholic Church do not often present themselves as being "catholic" because of the risk some people might misunderstand this as meaning "Catholic". Moreover, the standard orthography of some languages (including French, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian and Polish) does not spell the adjective in the equivalent of "Catholic Church" with a capital letter. --Lambiam 00:29, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Not all Christian churches actually see the need for there to be a single unified "catholic" church polity. See congregationalism and church invisible.  I was reading a WP article recently about a Christian denomination that proposes that God specifically wants different denominations and styles of worship in order to address the needs of different individuals; unfortunately I'm blanking on which one it was at the moment.  But it's probably not an uncommon line of thought. --Trovatore (talk) 05:10, 3 April 2021 (UTC)


 * The common factor that does not appear to have been mentioned so far is that the Roma Catholic and Orthodox churches are based on the Patriarchates of the early church - Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Jerusalem. As an ajective, patriarchal no longer conveys that meaning (though they are patriarchal churches in both senses of the word. Wymspen (talk) 14:49, 5 April 2021 (UTC)