StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
You're absolutely right about survivorship bias, the vast majority of movies made in the "Golden Age of Hollywood" are tedious, boring kitsch. I would nonetheless wager that the average blockbuster big studio production of the 1920's-1950's was more artistically inclined, visually disciplined, and willing to take risks than their contemporary analogues. They are, on the whole, still substantially better and more interesting. Consider that Citizen Kane was a massive crowd pleasing box office sensation, directed by an unseasoned stage actor in his 20's endowed with a massive budget by a studio willing to take an enormous gamble - and is today considered a high watermark of American cinema to the point of being an elitist preference. We just don't see the stars align like this anymore in Hollywood, the corporate profit-incentive and the byzantine system of legally negotiated regulatory relationships between studios, the SAG, and unions has completely devoured the appetite for risk and exploration.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
If you’re referring to the Cold War propaganda angle of Queens Gambit, I didn’t miss it, it just isn’t interesting or notable. It’s there because the show needs an antagonist and a climactic showdown, and because it’s an obligatory period piece like so many uninspired productions nowadays. Had they placed the show in the 2000’s, the antagonist still would have been a Russian grandmaster, because Western audiences are familiar with that trope.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
My bad if I read your post wrong - I assumed it was a loaded question.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted?
Answering the question of what a faithful adaption of a Homeric Epic could even be would require an entire symposium of writers, historians, philosophers and artists - and I'm certain they wouldn't reach a consensus.
I think there's 2 paths for an adaption of the Odyssey that present themselves: one which seeks to closely express the narrative cycle of the story, in which case one could transfigure the story into any age or geographic setting, and one that delves more into the sense of distance and archaic strangeness of a world so removed from ours as the Homeric Age. The latter would essentially be an arthouse film, but what's the problem with that?
Fellini's Satyricon is usually held up as the premiere example of expressing how immeasurably far away we today are from Antiquity, its way of life, its expressions and conditions. https://youtube.com/watch?v=WrUpTliVq5c
The movie is strange, somewhat laborious to watch, but quite entrancing too. The people in it behave weirdly and the resulting sense of alienation highlights the distance between our world and theirs, which in an ironic roundabout way brings us closer to Antiquity than, say, Life of Brian ever could (since Life of Brian is really just a great comedy about religion overall, with very little actual historical interest).
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
I don't mean to be a snob, but what is your level of exposure to cinema? I have serious doubts that someone who name drops Wicked as an example of a visually qualitative piece of art can really meaningfully contribute to the discussion, as it's such an indisputably cheap, commercial money-grab project that looks and sounds horrible from start to finish.
I mean, just look at this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=amgPXKrFZVg&list=RDamgPXKrFZVg&start_radio=1
The colour grading and lighting is amateurish beyond belief, the camera does NOTHING to match the rising rhythm of the song, the editing is either bored or downright sloppy - I see nothing of quality here whatsoever.
To exemplify what we mean by "declining quality", we can stay within the Musical genre (not my favourite, but for the sake of argument) and just look back 10 years at the way La La Land looked and felt: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_8w9rOpV3gc
I'm not saying this clip is perfect beyond reproach, but look at how much they do with such a simple set-up! Great blocking, expressive colours, a smooth, sailing tracking shot that both drives home the intimacy of the moment and captures the rising, sweeping melody of the music. The visual humour of Gosling and Stone's characters going from tense and distant, to mocking each other's movements, to finally dancing together also feels effortless in its precision. Everything is in its right place.
Still staying within the Musical genre, we can go even further back and look at a scene from Singin' in the Rain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DPBKYwJo3nQ
Once again - look at how much the camera and actors can do with such a simple set-up! 3 men in a small, mundane rehearsal space, wearing normal clothing. The visual haptic quality of the colouring is impeccable, every surface feels graspable and delightful to the eye. The camera movement is disciplined and yet still feels free and light, the editing is dynamic and seamless, the actors positioning and motion makes every single frame look competently composed, there isn't a second of ugliness or excess to be found. And this is, once again, a scene of 2 guys singing and dancing while a third guy watches in a small, unremarkable interior. Massive Hollywood studios today shovel tens of millions of dollars into visual effects, luxurious costumes, huge set pieces, and yet the outcome still feels smaller and more constrained than extremely simple scenes from 50 years ago, because they simply do not know or do not care for using the capacities of the art form to their fullest extent. Great editing can make the most low-stakes situation seem gigantic. Likewise, bad editing can make a 1 million dollar set piece feel cheap and stuffy.
I know I'm being an arrogant prick - forgive me - but I desperately recommend expanding your horizon. There's so much great stuff out there in cinema, and none of it can be found in Wicked. I don't even really like Musicals as a genre! But even Musicals can be great examples of what moviemaking can accomplish.
As self-appointed judge, I sentence you to watch Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. You'll like it, I promise.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Counter examples: Dune, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Hunger Games prequel), Project Hail Mary, The Boys (TV) I haven't seen, Poor Things, Wicked (I believe Wicked fans loved it for how it's faithful and enhanced the stage play), Mickey 17, The Housemaid, Running Man, Slow Horses (TV), The Queen's Gambit, I never saw Bridgerton but I heard good things. And so on.
I don't know if this is a great list of counter-examples...
Out of the movies I've seen in that list, only Poor Things strikes me as exceptional and encouraging for the future of the art form. Most of the others you mention fall in the category of "acceptable/mediocre" or, in cases like Dune, "good enough/enjoyable". Wicked is an incredibly ugly movie, no idea why it made this list - all the garish, cheap kitsch of Broadway blown up to the scale of the large screen.
The Queens Gambit is actually a great example of the dumbing-down of Hollywood, as it is a show about a troubled child becoming a chess prodigy that virtually never manages to showcase the game of chess itself in any kind of substantive matter. Seriously, rewatch the show. They namedrop various chess moves yet virtually never actually show them or allow the structure and development of a game to speak for itself. The camera in the Queens Gambit is literally afraid of lingering on the chessboard, lest the viewer actually take an interest in what is happening there - why should we need to see the protagonist get better at the game when we can just have a voice tell us "checkmate" while the camera pans to her opponent making a sad face? The Queens Gambit is not about chess - it is, like every trite and tired prestige show of the last 10 years, solely about trauma and the emotional labour of processing it, with some gender war slop mixed into it. Terrible, deeply anti-intellectual show and I'm glad the actual real-life female chess prodigy Nona Gaprindashvili succesfully sued Netflix for the way it slandered her legacy by namedropping her as someone "who never faced male chess players" (an utter lie) so that the fictional female American chess prodigy's victory would have more narrative impact.
I do think there are interesting and promising things happening on the margins of Hollywood and in cinema broadly speaking - Kane Parson's "Backrooms" movie was a bit of a letdown for me, but the videos on his Youtube channel are still astoundingly impressive, considering they are made by a single teenage individual using a simple rendering tool. Rendering and Visual Effects programs (and yes, also AI) becoming more accessible means that the most expensive art form in human history is being heavily democratised - the monopoly of cinema will no longer rest in the hands of a handful of greedy studios. We are already witnessing the rise of high-quality, high-concept short videos being made with the help of AI that can easily compete with much of what Hollywood has to offer in terms of visual and narrative quality, such as this series of AI videos made by an Italian filmmaker about a young boy documenting his grandmother, the last Giant of her island: https://instagram.com/leo_cannone/reel/Db8IvzCs5Lz/
I welcome the decline of Hollywood. I hope the big studios bet on all the wrong horses and incur tremendous financial misfortune. The art form will continue whether Paramount exists or not.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Who is "they" here? Like two influencers posting rage bait?
I'm sure you're playing dumb on purpose to obfuscate the issue, but the recent vigil held for Arday in London included literal members of Parliament and the House of Lords as well as highly placed academics calling his death a lynching or the result of a witch hunt.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/diane-abbott-cambridge-mps-london-people-b1293737.html
As he addressed the crowd, Lord Woolley described the press coverage of Prof Arday as a “public execution” and a “lynching”, to cheers of approval.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
I don't understand how this add-on makes the statement you're replying to false. Rape gangs chose vulnerable targets who didn't have much parental oversight - kinda obvious that those targets would be mainly working class and from dysfunctional households.
Why does the fact that many of these girls had previously been abused conflict with or deny the claim that much of the scale, perseverance and overall modus operandi these rape gangs were operating under very obviously were tied to the tribalism and ethno-religious chauvinism of the Pakistani, specifically Miripuri, diaspora?
The fact is that countless WOMEN within these communities were fully aware of what their male kinsmen were up to, but condoned it due to - in their own words - the victimized girls being outside of their community and faith. The mental tradeoff these diasporas operate under is very simple - "would sending a member of my family/clan to prison be better than a faithless outsider experiencing suffering at their hand? It would not, therefore I won't take action against it." This is how these rape gangs are allowed to operate with impunity - since quasi-everyone in the diaspora has some knowledge or involvement in it, combatting it by means of law enforcement would effectively engender taking legal action against the vast majority of the entire localized diaspora, which police nor politics won't do for obvious reasons. It's the exact same issue Europe has been having with gypsies for decades - trying to combat their criminality essentially means criminalising the entire community since the vast majority of them are criminals, accessories to the crime, or at the very least highly aware, yet unbothered by it.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
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No European electorate has ever voted for mass immigration.
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European powerbrokers have systematically lied and deceived their populations about the nature and scale of immigration - for example, the wave of post-Soviet states joining the EU in 2003 with "guarantees" that it wouldn't disrupt local labour markets - which it of course did.
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All polling, in all EU nations, in every decade going back to the 1950s (Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech polled at around 75% popular agreement when he made it), has consistently shown a clear rejection of more immigration - even Germany in 2015, at the height of pro-refugee mania, had a consistent majority polled saying the country could not handle the influx of people and that it would harm the country in the long-term.
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Establishment parties ranging from Macron's centrist LREM/Renaissance all the way to Meloni's "neo-fascist" FdI consistently make reducing the most undesirable forms of immigration a centre-point of their political campaigning, only to drop it the moment they enter elected office.
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Even when elected leaders actually decide to push through popular anti-immigration reform, they instantly falter before supra-sovereign EU institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, which they could of course easily contest or ignore, like Poland and Hungary did without issue, but mysteriously always choose to give up without a fight.
The main thing holding European electorates back from going all-in on anti-immigration politics is our bourgeois chauvinism against the extremely prole-coded far-right, which is loathed and despised less because of their specific politics, but because they represent and proudly adhere to the trashy, unsophisticated, non-college educated Kevins of European working class society. Most bourgeois/college-educated Europeans would probably literally rather have more immigration which they increasingly openly hate than be ruled by a segment of European society they consider irredeemably beneath them.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
Europeans democratically vote for politicians who pursue pro-immigration policies.
Wrong, they vote for politicians who campaign on reducing or reforming immigration and then pursue pro-immigration policy once in office. There isn't a single EU country that doesn't have a clear majority of voters demanding less immigration.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
It’s good that public figures are calling for calm. That is the most important part of their jobs.
It's certainly not the most important part of their jobs, what a strange idea - the most imporant part of an elected official's job obviously would be representing the interests of the people that elected them.
I also wouldn't summarize their reaction as "calling for calm" - they're calling for you, the citizen, not to think about these things too much and to let those in power handle it, i.e. allow them to continue business as usual. If they were "calling for calm", why do they insistently reroute these tragedies into hit-pieces about how evil the reaction of right-wingers and protestors is? That is the opposite of calming the situation, it actually inflames it considerably. Manufacturing a new enemy to distract from the actual barbarism that occurred is pouring oil on the fire.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
You've said alot of interesting things that I largely agree with, so I just want to hone in on one element I take issue with :
you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either.
I disagree - in this specific scenario, my teenage self fantasising about having sex with a famous actress is not imagining fucking a lifeless ragdoll that just happens to look identical to Jennifer Lawrence. The fantasy obviously involves her being enthusiastic, willing, and desiring me during the encounter, which pretty explicitly means that her "opinions" or "rights" are comfortably sublimated in an affirmative manner into the fantasy itself. Furthermore, if I mention Jennifer Lawrence and not one of the million random porn stars or e-whores you can see naked on the internet, it's because wanting to fuck Jennifer Lawrence is bound to her personality, status, etc. making her more desirable than other women, which means that her physical attributes are only a minor part of the overall attraction.
I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet
This is true but it's a detail relative to the specific example I chose - I could just as easily have mentioned Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which case the non-consent angle vanishes.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
She said he told her that rape was about power.
Isnt this the bog-standard, completely expected feminist analysis of rape? Why is this being presented as something spooky or menacing when he's just repeating Dworkin takes?
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
Stop saying "women" when you mean "feminists".
I'll stop when self-proclaimed conservative women in positions of political power don't consistently fall back on feminist rhetoric the moment they feel cornered for their own actions.
As long as our conservative female defence minister here in Austria proudly asserts that mandatory military service should remain an exclusive male burden and that women can't be expected to share this obligation because "they still suffer from systemic injustice in other domains such as a housework or the gender pay gap" (her actual reasoning), I will continue to assume that feminism is mainly a in-group cudgel for women to wield against men and society for virtually any reason that they see fit in helping them get ahead.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
Also, isn't visually expressing sexual desire for the simple sake of showcasing how powerful, seductive and all-encompassing desire can be an artistic purpose in it's own right? We all feel it, we're all extremely affected by it, so shouldn't it naturally take up a prominent space in our artistic expressions even if it doesn't serve to advance a larger narrative or make a political statement?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xpef-FKYAf4
The opening scene of Godard's Contempt is literally Birgitte Bardot being reduced to her physical attributes, as Belmondo praises and declares his love for each of her individual body parts separately. But this "objectification" is so obviously an act of devotion - after all, how could you truly love a romantic partner without also loving their waist, their hands, their ankles, their genitals?
You could fully cut this scene from the movie, and the narrative would be unchanged. It exists entirely to showcase physical desire of an exceptionally beautiful woman. And it's absolutely wonderful.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
Perhaps my male brain is too compromised to process this, but I've never really understood why sexualising someone is an act of "objectification".
The Cambridge dictionary defines objectification as: "treating people like tools or toys, as if they had no feelings, opinions, or rights of their own"
To sexualise someone means to explicitly render someone as the target of sexual desire - putting an actress in a short skirt allows us to see more skin, which allows us to muse about what she would like naked, which we imagine we would be privy to in a fantasy scenario where we have sex with said actress. It has very little to do with denying someone's opinions or rights, but rather honing in on one specific part of their human existence, i.e. their potential as a sexual mate. Am I objectifying a waiter when I only consider him as someone who brings my drinks and my check when Im a customer at a café? Would I be morally wrong to be weirded out if said waiter suddenly started talking about his personal issues and opinions and I told him I really only want him to serve me my order and nothing else? According to the Cambridge dictionary, I would be "objectifying" him in that instance, which sounds blatantly absurd.
But most importantly - being the receiver of sexual desire is a foundationally humanising experience! People want to have sex with other people, not with objects - that's why most sex toys are shaped to resemble human genitalia or body parts. That's why high-end sex dolls are painstakingly manufactured to appear as human as possible. To want to have sex with someone is one of the bedrock human drives that will forever separate us from machines - and thus likewise, being the receiver of sexual desire equally represents a bedrock of the human condition, limited nigh-exclusively to humans (a fringe amount of people are sexual deviants who want to fuck toasters or animals, but they're irrelevant to the larger topic).
The issue seems to emerge from the fact that alot of people, notably feminist academics, endow words with moral weight they simply do not possess - since they consider most forms of sexual attention as bad, it MUST be described by a strictly pejorative term that also conveniently opens up the act to monumentally larger implications - suddendly, lusting after someone also must imply you want to treat them "like they have no rights of their own", i.e. perceive them as essentially unworthy of human dignity. This is such a massive jump from wanting to fuck someone that it feels essentially alien to how anyone actually experiences sexual desire. When I looked at Jennifer Lawrence's leaked nudes as a teen, that last thing I was thinking of was restricting her rights and opinions - I was thinking about how amazing it would feel to have sex with her and literally nothing else.
Of course, there's an obvious subtle truth hiding behind all this: the profile of the person doing the sexualisation is exponentially more significant than the sexualisation itself in evaluating if its "objectifying" or not. As a man, being told by an attractive woman that she only wants me for sex and nothing else is a mostly extremely rewarding experience that has given me lasting boosts in self-esteem. Similarly, a fat ugly girl hitting on me and drunkenly attempting to create a hookup situation with me left me feeling disgusted.
Objectification as a term only really makes sense if it leads you to dismiss the person's agency in a context where said agency is relevant - i.e., interrupting a woman speaking to tell her to take her top off, which would imply you aren't interested in her humanity beyond her sexual potential.
A glance at the roots and political development behind the term should immediately make it obvious that we are dealing with an ideological concept, not a neutral descriptor:
Rae Langton proposed three more properties to be added to Nussbaum's list:[2]
Reduction to body – the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts
How the FUCK does treating someone depending on their human body render the person an "object"? Humans ARE bodies, first and foremost. HOW you treat the body is what matters.
According to Martha Nussbaum, a person is objectified if one or more of the following properties are applied to them:[1]
Instrumentality – treating the person as a tool for another's purposes
So virtually any transactional relationship is an act of objectification - seems somewhat insane to simultaneously insist that the term describes an objectively negative quality when it also applies to me working a job or asking my roommate to get groceries for me. Either objectification is wholesale bad, in which case it's definition needs to be reworked from the ground up, or objectification describes an inevitable social process with no inherent moral weight, in which case feminists have to stop using it as a buzzword for negative behaviour.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
To that end, Ocasio-Cortez has levied a steady attack against Crowley, pointing out that he lives in a house just outside of Washington D.C. where he’s been raising his family and kids for the last several years.
Crowley did not directly answer a question about why his family does not live in the district, but said his presence in Queens remains a constant — a point the Ocasio-Cortez campaign disputes.
“If a person loves their community they would choose to raise their family here, they would choose to send their kids to our schools, they would chose to drink our water and breathe our air,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think that it takes away a fundamental interest and understanding of our communities when we raise our families somewhere else.”
We're comparing a Congressman who essentially had zero physical presence in his own district and didn't even possess a home there to the possibility of not returning to your constituency virtually every single weekend over the course of an entire term in Congress. I don't think it's quite the same.
Also, regarding Crowley, I would somewhat question the oft-repeated statement that the guy was some kind of grand figure in Democrat politics - he was a reliable party insider in one of the safest blue seats of the country, not an actual decision-maker or vital asset for the party. The fact that he vanished from politics the microsecond he lost a primary somewhat attests to the fact that he wasn't really a big deal or any kind of political talent, as the DNC would have tried to keep him on their roster or have him run elsewhere. AOC's win was well-earned and she ran a strong campaign, but it was very much a "right place, right time" scenario, as a progressive wave was descending upon the Democrats during Trump I and Crowley barely bothered to campaign since he wrongly assumed it was a done deal.
Fast forward 8 years and AOC is now a global celebrity - which I strongly assume is a much better guarantor of keeping her seat than anything Crowley had to offer.
Returning to the weekend-trip issue, it just feels forced and at best like a minor issue to me: France's Parliament also draws its members from geographic circonscriptions, and French legislative elections are famous for "parachutages" - essentially having candidates stand in regions they have literally zero associations with, but were selected to run in because they have a high national profile and/or the specific race is deemed critical. Everyone knows this and rolls their eyes about it, but in the end it doesn't make a difference - because the vast majority of voters rank it extremely low on their hierarchy of issues. A left-leaning voter is not going to support a conservative or right-wing candidate they hate because the Socialist party candidate has never lived in their region - it simply does not matter enough, and why would it? The vast majority of parliamentary decisions made and voted on do not concern specific regions, but national matters, so whether your candidate has lived in your area his whole life or not is meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is definitely an electoral impact when members of Congress make a point of being highly present in their district - like how AOC hosts a local town hall every single month without fail since her election. I just really don't think enough people are keeping constant track of the weekend returns of their Congressperson, nor do I think it matters enough overall to make or break a political career without other factors at play.
StJohnOfPatmos
4mo ago
Fong cited this paper which "find that gaining an airport that provides a round-trip direct flight to Washington, DC, is associated with an approximately 1.6 percentage point increase in the probability that a member runs for reelection." Or in other words if you need to have a layover, you'll less likely to run for re-election.
Doesn't this actually mean the exact opposite - i.e., that there is next to zero correlation between airport accessibility and running for reelection? A 1.6% difference is minuscule and essentially a rounding error.
I also must be honest and admit that I don't really understand this entire segment about Congresspeople returning to their constituency every weekend - as you say, it's "expected" of them, which means in practical terms that it's not mandatory nor enforced in any way. I heavily doubt that an otherwise popular Representative would suffer any kind of status loss or dip in support if he isn't physically present in his constituency every single weekend of the year. This only seems like it would be an "expectation" for retired cranks who spend their days harassing local council members and writing emails to Congress. Do you think AOC or Ilhan Omar would loose their seats if it came out that the spent every other weekend in DC instead of always returning to NYC or Minnesota? I doubt anyone cares.
At the end of the day, a lot of the complaining from Congresspeople about their job should be taken with a grain of salt - this is a pool of people largely self-selected for having huge egos, are in constant need for excuses when they inevitably fail to deliver their campaign promises, and are enmeshed in a mediatic/cultural zeitgeist in which being a snivelling victim is considered a valid defence for failure. They have EVERY incentive to bitch and whine about their job and portray themselves as more martyred by it than they actually are.
StJohnOfPatmos
4mo ago
Late answer but in Paris, where I lived during most of the pandemic, there was a curfew at 6 pm, after which you were not allowed to leave your house without a valid reason (medical emergency, work, etc.) Your daytime movement was also heavily restricted to 1 hour at a time, and within 1km radius of your apartment. You had to fill out and sign a specific form clarifying your reason for being outdoors every single time you left your home.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-france-requires-form-leave-house-walk-shopping-2020-3
I assume it maybe wasn't quite as extreme in Australia, but in Paris we most certainly could not leave home to go for walks at any time.
StJohnOfPatmos
4mo ago
During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on
Jesus Christ, this is the bar? You know there are people serving actual prison sentences that have that same amount of freedoms, i.e. brief leaves on weekends and access to commissary?
StJohnOfPatmos
4mo ago
did not get the credit they deserve for persisting with their non-woman-like behavior in public.
That's literally the main thing Sufragettes are credited for.
Also, aside from some rare exceptions like iconoclasm and bombings, I doubt the Sufragette's behaviour appeared "non woman-like" to most people at the turn of the Century: the resentful, nagging shrew who finds strength in numbers and acts as a buzzkill in a public setting is one of the most ancient and consistent tropes of womanhood. Add to that the fact that most Sufragette leaders were...shall we say...homely in physical appearance, and the stereotype of the "bitter spinster who wants to disrupt other people's happy marriages" essentially writes itself.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
I have absolutely no idea why you think the size of the local population has any bearing on the importance of Lampedusa when the island itself is considered a symbol of the Refugee/Migrant Crisis - which is of course a highly relevant issue for the West and the Third World. Furthermore, if big numbers are what determines relevancy to you in a symbolic gesture, consider that since 2023 alone, over 120.000 migrants have passed through Lampedusa on their way to Europe - it's literally the biggest migrant reception camp in Italy, a nation at the forefront of illegal migrant arrivals. As an individual migrant center, its quite literally the most relevant in Europe after Moria in Greece.
Yes, exactly what I said. African economic migrants, mostly Muslim, mostly military aged males. Great priority for a Pope, to promote the destruction of Europe even as Catholicism dies in Europe.
So is it an irrelevant island, or a springboard for the total destruction of Europe? It can't be both.
I agree with you that this immigration is bad and stopping it is an existential priority, but this kind of incoherence is pointless - either we are talking about the Papacy's stance on immigration, in which case we're probably on the same side, or we're talking about the implications of the Pope not attending America's 250th anniversary, but you can't just jump back and forth between two separate conversations.
You aren’t familiar with the history and practice of Catholic wordplay.
You literally said "we get the pun, Leo" - the only way to interpret this is that you mean the "pun" is Lampedusa including the letters "usa" in its spelling. I think sincerely believing that the Pope chose this location based on this "pun" is ridiculous and unserious, since once again, Lampedusa is infamous and has been a byword for mass migration since over 20 years.
Do you know the last time was 13 years ago?
Considering that the last time a Pope visited my hometown Vienna - a historic centre of Catholic Power and the symbolic seat of Christendom's victories against the islamic Turkish invasions - was 19 years ago, I don't consider 13 years long or rare by any means.
I still don't understand why you expect the Pope to appear at a state event commemorating a national independence day. Your entire argument hinges on Pope Leo slighting Trump by not attending - when Popes just simply do not do that in the modern age. John Paul the IInd was a proactive right-wing Pope, but even his role in world politics was organised under very clear theological lines: Communist states oppressed the Church and Christians as a matter of state policy, so obviously he was completely within reason to speak out against them as the Spiritual Leader of said Christians. Pope Leo being critical of Trumps immigration policy is easily defendable by Christian doctrine, even if I could maybe come up with better counter-arguments.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
I severely doubt any Popes in any historical Era would have approved of "extinguishing an entire civilisation", since it would condemn dozens of millions of souls to Hell or purgatory without having had a chance of conversion.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
This argument was already dumb propaganda back when it first emerged - historically, no one is more on bad terms with a Pope and tassels with him more predictably than a Catholic Monarch. The Pope is not Jesus Christ and papal infallibility is an extremely narrow domain with few actual applications. The entire institution of Gallicanism in France should be enough to prove that a Catholic head of State has enormous leeway in dealing with Papal authority.
Not if he's instantly replaced by even more dedicated hardliners who believe the exact same thing.
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