FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
22d ago
Well I think OP means that the US have chosen to ally itself with Israel, a country that routinely does these kind of actions in other countries (including western allied ones).
Routinely? Name one time they shot up a western embassy.
Seems unlikely, he said it happened a few months ago.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
23d ago
Which embassy did they bomb? And when? I’ve just did some cursory Googling but I didn’t turn up anything.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
23d ago
Olive beat me to it! Here's the full quote, from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend in 1939:
What did you think of Snowwhite and the VII Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
24d ago
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
It's not that weird that they're partnering with Disney. When Walt pushed the company to develop animatronics in the 60s their work was groundbreaking. Making the animatronic Lincoln for the world's fair was extremely difficult. They kept running into new engineering problems and having to invent their way out of them. Since then they've sunk huge amounts of money and talent into improving animatronics further. Have you seen some of the most recent Disney animatronics? They're incredibly lifelike, and other companies just can't manage to imitate their quality.
So I figure Disney has a lot of experience, technology, and capital that would be useful for making lifelike robots that are aesthetically pleasing.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
24d ago
I don't know anyone who died of covid: my mother (in her 50s) got it and was hospitalized, but recovered. My grandmother (in her 90s) got it and didn't even end up in the hospital.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
29d ago
What would you call it? It seems to be a statement made to make a point of some sort, based on Walsh's reply I would assume it is coming from the political left.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
29d ago
Edit: Just a few days ago, Matt Walsh reposted a crypto-Swastika on X (if you don't see it at first, try squinting). I believe he knew what he was doing.
I doubt it. It's not at all easy to notice unless someone tells you it's there, and the guy Wash is replying to (the one who posted the picture, I assume) is making a leftist argument, which Matt is rebutting. There's no tongue in cheek winking or anything like that.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
It will be easier for them to salvage what they have if congress makes a strong statement that it intends to keep government working as it had been regardless of presidential caprice.
And they’ll do this by shutting down the government?
The main argument from the Democrat point of view against shutting down the government is that it will make it easier for Trump to dismantle it. In a shutdown he can pick and choose which agencies to furlough and which to keep open, he could wipe out whole departments for the duration of the shutdown. If you believe Trump is trying to dismantle the government and you think that’s a bad thing, why would you make it easier for him to do it?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Only 40% of adults in the US earn more than a bare minimum to survive.
Citation needed: last I checked there were not 204 million people dying of starvation and exposure each year. I assume you got that number from an NGO if you got it from anywhere, so why can you use NGO figures and I can’t?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Only 40% of adults make more than bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive.
That is simply untrue. 11% of Americans live under the poverty line, and even making less than the poverty line is a far cry from “The minimum of what it takes to stay alive.” About 2,000 people died of malnutrition (not even starvation, just malnutrition) in the US in 2022. That’s .0006% of the population who may have lacked the bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive. A far cry from 60%. You know the median American makes $40,000 a year, right?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Sorry, my friend, psychopathy has nothing to do with morality, except to moralizers.
You’re using it moralistically. Rights and concepts can’t be literally psychopathic, only people can be psychopaths. It’s a psychopathology characterized by, among many things, the congenital inability to empathize with others. Applying the idea to a legal right is like saying the first amendment has a fever.
So the only way your statement can have meaning is if you’re using the word metaphorically to make a point. The obvious interpretation is that you’re making a moral claim, that the right to deprive is the kind of thing someone without empathy would have come up with, and that’s bad because it’s wrong to lack empathy. You claim here that you mean to say the right is delusional, which is a terrible metaphor because psychopaths do not typically suffer from delusions.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty?
Yes, that is clearly the case. I’m not sure how you could think otherwise, the vast majority of people on planet Earth are not living in poverty. That’s even more so the case for developed countries. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Negatively impact me or mine to any serious degree, and I'll just shut you down.
How are you going to shut him down if you don’t have the legal right to deprive him?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
The surface is still going to be hit pretty hard with radiation if you don’t have a magnetosphere, atmosphere or no.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Is this the world you want to live in? Is this the world you want your loved ones and great- and great-great offspring to live in? Is this or something resembling it as good as you want it to get?
Unequivocally yes. In 1990 37.8% of the planet lived in extreme poverty. Now less than 9% do. From 1920-1970 about 110 million people died from famine. From 1970-2020 only 10 million did. In 1900 average global life expectancy was 32 years. Today it’s 71. Historically, 50% of kids died before the age of 15. In 1950 that was down to 25%. In 2020 it was 4%.
We’ve built a pretty great world, and it keeps getting better every decade. I sincerely doubt we could do much better.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Which needs do we have that our small circle can't provide?
My kid needs heart medication each month or she’ll die, nobody I know can make it. Similarly, she needed open heart surgery as a baby and I don’t know any pediatric heart surgeons. We had to fly over a thousand miles away just to find one, since there aren’t any in my state. Which reminds me, I don’t know anybody with a plane that can fly that far, nor anybody who can make a plane that can.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
How do you propose to “terraform” magnetospheres into the moon or Mars? Terraforming in general is extremely sci-fi on the tech tree: we might have the resources within the next half-millennium, but even that’s unsure. The most realistic terraforming proposal I’ve seen for Mars is to basically melt the entire surface to release gasses, and even then that won’t be enough by itself to get the job done.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
According to Pew, among American Christians in 2022 25% believed that the Bible is the "actual word of God, to be taken literally" and 58% believed that it was "inspired by God, not all to be taken literally".
They've also found that 20% of Christians believe that humans did not evolve, while 61% believe humans evolved under the direct guidance and intervention of God. 85% of Christians believe in Heaven, 72% believe in Hell, 95% believe in souls, and 97% believe God exists.
It seems to me that quite a few people take the Bible literally, and even more take it seriously, at least in terms of what they believe.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
"I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. " C. S. Lewis, "Religion Without Dogma?"
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
I don't really see how these pagan beliefs are more outlandish than anything in the Bible, if taken literally.
The trouble is that nobody does, including the neo-pagans. They mostly just get together and try to cast spells and protect the environment. You get lesbian Wiccans calling on the blessing of fertility goddesses, and not recognizing the irony of that one bit.
There really isn't a good way for someone to return to the "European traditions before Christianity". Modern neo-paganism has almost nothing in common with actual pre-Christian paganism. They share some of the same names for gods, and that's about it. 95% of their practices are things that were made up in the 1800s by the occultists and romanticists of the time.
As an example, how many practitioners of Asatru join the military in order that they may hopefully die gloriously in battle, so that they may be chosen by the Valkyrie to join Odin in Valhalla? How many of them respect the marriage oaths, since the souls of adulterers will be consigned to Nastrond to be devoured by wolves and poisoned by serpents? How many of them, when they have grown old or sick, will pick up a gun and attempt death by cop? After all, those who die of old age or sickness are consigned to Hel's cold halls. How many of them will even consider human sacrifice, as their ancestors did among the hanging trees of Uppsala? How many of them support slavery, as the three adulteries of Rigr clearly separated the races of thralls, churls, and jarls?
The fact is that we don't really know all that much about northern European paganism, and what we do know the neo-Pagans mostly don't do. They're cosplaying as pagans, making it up as they go.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
But...he wasn't Kamala's VP running mate? And it wouldn't have mattered even if he was. How does Shapiro have any impact whatsoever on the war in Gaza?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
It’s pretty crazy to firebomb Shapiro’s house over it, since he has pretty much 0 impact on US foreign policy. But he is a Jew, so…
I thought this was 70% likely to happen: which is why I bought the post-liberation day dip. I figured the courts would strike the tariffs down eventually.
It turned out I didn’t have to wait this long for my plan to pay off, since Trump backed down from the BigNum tariffs he announced that day and the market bounced back.
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