StJohnOfPatmos
15d 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
15d 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.
StJohnOfPatmos
15d ago
then there is absolutely no reason that "Eternal Rome" can't be located in Dillwyn Virginia.
Aside from basic decency and taste, perhaps.
StJohnOfPatmos
15d ago
This is a serious insult to an entire country over a political dispute involving a transient administration
The Pope has no allegiance to any specific country, since he's...the Pope. Why the fuck should he be present or make a formal appearance for America's birthday party? Do you understand what the Papacy is? I'm unsure, since you're literally expecting the Pope to express a national preference. Do you think Pope Benedict was hanging out in the German Reichstag to celebrate the anniversary of Reunification?
I'm assuming this is news to you, but Lampedusa is an infamous island since it's been a major receptacle for illegal migrant boat crossings long before the 2015 Refugee Crisis began. It was constantly in the news here in Europe for not having the logistical ability to properly house and feed the throngs of migrants arriving there. The word "Lampedusa" used to act as a byword for illegal immigration into Europe and still is an emblem of the migrant crisis, especially in Italy - leftists and the Papacy see it as an example of unjust human suffering and indignity, while right-wingers see it as a cautionary tale of mass migration. For you to call it a "completely irrelevant island" immediately classifies you as lacking the basic insight to have much of a meaningful opinion on this matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa_immigrant_reception_center
You heard that the Pope would be in Lampedusa and actually, sincerely thought he was doing so because the last three letters of the island's name spell out "usa"? This is something you actually think is true? Are you ok?
I actually agree - as a Catholic - that the Pope's knee-jerk defence of any and all immigration is wrong, misguided, and ultimately a very narrow reading of Christian doctrine on the matter. But this kind of completely braindead reasoning does us no favours.
StJohnOfPatmos
15d ago
They would likely be the first ones to confirm the story and so far, their stance is ‘thé meeting happened but nothing of note took place- no threats of Avignon’.
Without this, there essentially is no story - so the article OP posted appears to be a fabrication, which is unsurprising.
StJohnOfPatmos
15d ago
This doesn't confirm it as real, but that it wasn't immediately denied and dismissed like the typical M.O. is quite interesting.
It actually makes it exponentially more likely that it's fake in my view: if it actually happened and the administration knew, they would obviously just deny it. The fact that it seems to have caught the White House off guard, i.e. Vance not having heard of it previous to the story breaking, makes it more likely to be a fabrication since they didn't have a planned response for it.
The very interaction recounted in the article is somewhat hard to believe - why was this meeting necessary? The Pentagon wants to apply pressure on the Vatican to do what, exactly? Publicly proclaim they're abandoning the basic anti-war messaging they've held on to consistently for a century and will now be picking sides in armed conflicts? Really?
The Pentagon was issuing explicit threats of military violence against the Vatican, which is a tiny complex of buildings and gardens located inside Italy's capital, and was referencing the Avignon Papacy in doing so? Really?
This current administration is excellent at lastingly damaging relations with allies for little gain, but the idea that they would suggest using military force against a peaceful, greying religious order that both enjoys excellent standing amongst world leaders all while really not having any meaningful practical influence on world affairs seems laughable. I seriously doubt anyone in the Pentagon gives a fuck about what the Vatican says against their military operations, since they never gave a fuck in the past, nor ever felt a negative consequence coming from the Vatican for having done so.
This could help explain why Pope Leo has felt so emboldened to speak up against Trump's war efforts in Iran
Pope Leo has said the exact same things every Pope in recent history has said about non-defensive wars waged without a meaningful cassus belli - that they condemn them wholesale, call for ceasefires and diplomacy, and remind everyone that being a Christian means acting from love and forgiveness. Virtually nothing Pope Leo has said or done represents a shift or sharpening of that basic Church doctrine.
John Paul the IInd, essentially a proactive right-wing culture warrior Pope, immediately condemned the Iraq War and called it a crime. This is not special or particular, it's a basic requirement of being the Head of Christendom.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Yes, this is exactly what I expected. The very idea that a man could sue for legal discrimination is such an existential threat for feminism that it needs to be dismissed and restated through a lens in which it’s about women gaining rights instead of men alleviating discrimination against them.
The mere suggestion that men as a gender could gain something by equalizing the law is registered as innately dangerous by feminists - which is only coherent since feminism today is about harming men first and foremost.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Why even bother replying if you won't address the 2 direct questions asked for you to clarify your positions? We can all read, so your ignoring of the main substance of the message you're replying to isn't lost on anyone.
Again: what are some examples of men and women not enjoying legal equality in current-day America? These must exist, since according to you there are feminists who's sole goal is legal equality - hence these feminists can only exist if legal inequalities still persist, so what are they?
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
there are also kinds of feminism that just support legal equality between men and women
Where?
Here in Austria, we still have mandatory military/civil service for men only - literally defined as gender-based "forced labour" (Zwangsarbeit) in our constitution. Since our demographics are shrinking, this vital pool of manpower (these 18-year old boys drive most ambulances, do most dirty work in retirement homes, hospitals, integration homes, not to speak of yearly dangerous cleanup missions when our rural regions periodically get flooded) is shrinking too - begging the question if maybe women could also get conscripted to these tasks.
Our female defence minister - a self-proclaimed feminist from the CONSERVATIVE Party - immediately rejected the idea that women should also receive this legal obligation, called it sexist, and instead proposed extending the amount of time young men are conscripted into forced labour. This forced labour is also paid far below average wages (I believe its almost half of what the minimum wage for a full time job would be) and is routinely described as a "Hungerlohn" - a "starvation wage" that is by design not sufficient to survive off of.
This is a feminist from the f*cking Conservative party of Austria, openly saying she would rather exploit young men more and harder rather than simply enact gender equality and have this massive burden be shared equally by both genders.
In Germany, they abolished their mandatory conscription of males, but are now gradually phasing it back in again - do you want to guess which political groups where most vehemently opposed to the proposal of also having women added to conscription? Yes, it was feminist groups and political parties who self-define as feminist, obviously. OBVIOUSLY.
Sorry, I don't see any feminists who support legal equality between men and women - probably because said legal equality has already been achieved for women half a century ago and all remaining discrepancies (sentencing disparities, men not legally being able to be victims of rape by a woman, divorce court, conscription, etc.) benefit women and harm men indisputably. All said remaining discrepancies are actively supported by feminists across the spectrum, without exception. If any sincere feminist was only seeking legal equality, their unique remaining cause today would be erasing these remaining legal distinctions that harm men - but these feminists do not exist, because that's not what feminism is.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
You keep saying feminism is not a monolith, but any actual deviated positions that would exemplify this flourishing diversity of thought feminism harbours is notably absent from your comments. Can you maybe provide some specific examples of serious differences of thought that are accepted and openly fostered within feminist discourse?
Do you believe in "the Patriarchy" as an active force that permeates all levels of Western society and acts as a kind of Original Sin determining and undergirding all male-female relations, be they familial, professional, or personal?
If yes, then what exactly is your grand distinction from those who blindly cheer for feminism as a monolith? If no, then in what sense are you a feminist and not just a basic egalitarian who wants everyone to get a fair chance at a good life?
I know this questioning is suggestive and biased, but since you're repeatedly guaranteeing diversity of thought within feminism without providing any examples, I feel the need to accelerate the conversation to a point where we get actual information instead of evasions.
Virtually every ideological/social movement with enough support and adherence becomes "a lot of very different things"- this is nothing more than a cowardly evasion, sorry.
Humanity is not a hivemind and the crushing majority of supporters of any given movement have not read or studied literally every piece of associated literature or thinkpiece that their movement builds itself upon. Everyone has their bubble and everyone familiarises themselves with an ideology through specific filters and lenses through which an ideology is presented and mediated. Do you think a wealthy adventurist from the 19th Century like Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who's fervent communism took the shape of romantic banditry, had the same definition and personal beliefs around Communism as a 19th Century working-class single mother who's main anxiety was worrying about what might become of her orphaned children should she die in a workplace injury? Communism meant "a lot of very different things" for different supporters, i.e. bourgeois communists engaging with it as a kind of moral destiny leading towards an apocalyptic showdown between the historic forces of good and evil, while the working class itself mainly understood it as a pragmatic method to lastingly improve their standard of living (which is why they permanently abandoned it the microsecond it stopped improving their living standards, while the bourgeois romantics still cling to it today) - does that mean that one can't simply talk about Communism as an ideology because of these internal differences?
Furthermore, feminism is actually, despite its vast support across many societies and varying institutions, an incredibly rigid belief system with a massive amount of in-built and internally sacrosanct a priori beliefs, to the extent that you will get essentially identical responses about any given feminist topic from a 15 year old girl scrolling Tiktok as from a tenured Sociology department chair at a respected university. It's extreme conformism truly is one of it's defining characteristics - well exemplified, for example, by its incessant use of rehearsed slogans that are nothing more than in-group signifiers originating from group chants at protests, but are treated as if they are political/philosophical positions in their own right during political discussions.
Here in Austria, it's virtually impossible to have a discussion with a self-proclaimed politicised feminist without her inevitably using English terms in an otherwise German-language conversation - because her thoughts are simply not her own, they are just regurgitated formulas imported from elsewhere. Feminists here never say "Gemeinschaft", they always jarringly insist on the English word "Community" - same with "Race" instead of "Ethnie", "Gender" instead of "Geschlecht", "BIPOC" (a term that of course means virtually nothing in Europe, since WE whites are the "indigenous" people here) instead of "Minderheiten", all the way down to easily translate terms like "unpaid labour" or "weaponised incompetence"! They actively refuse to translate these terms into the language they are speaking in, despite there being zero linguistic difficulty in doing so, because even that minuscule act of deviation from the source would require a minimum of cognitive agency and intellectual independence - the only feminists I can think of that do sometimes translate US-imported terminology are the French, and that's really just because of their deeply ingrained cultural-linguistic chauvinism as francophones.
Feminism means a lot of very different things to the extent that any large enough ideology/Weltbild does - be it Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, UFOlogy, Fascism, Red Pill, whatever. Where Feminism does however stand out is that it manages to maintain a chilling level of conformism despite this variety of support - there is no feminist space that would ever dare profess a general inherent love for men as valuable beings both on the personal scale (friends, family, neighbours) and society at large (men who work dangerous and vital jobs, men as victims of war, etc.) - the baseline rapport is cruel apathy at best and foaming, fanatic hatred at worst.
Actually, I take that back - there is one notable feminist group that does have a positive view of men: Némésis, the French feminist group that focuses on resisting mass immigration from the Third World as a means of protecting women's rights and safety. They are very clear about wanting to curb mass immigration, but have an overall very sympathetic and conciliatory view of European men as mainly good people who want their female counterparts to be free and happy.
It it any surprise, then, that the virtual totality - without a single exception - of French left-wing and feminist groups call them Neonazis and demand they be legally banned and their leaders persecuted? Not really.
The most powerful figure of the current French Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, very recently went so far as to say that if the government didn't ban Némésis and the group showed up at one of their protests, they would "take care of it" - an explicit threat of violence, greeted by cheers and applause from his audience.
Is it any surprise that Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first and largest domestic abuse shelter system in the world and a true hero of the vulnerable and the oppressed, had to leave her native UK after receiving systematic death threats and aggressions from feminists for having dared to say that many men also face domestic abuse and that women have the capacity to be violent partners, too?
In 1981, Pizzey moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, while targeted by harassment, death threats, bomb threats[36] and defamation campaigns,[15] and dealing with overwork, near collapse, cardiac disease and mental strain.[23]: 275 In particular, according to Pizzey, the charity Scottish Women's Aid "made it their business to hand out leaflets claiming that [she] believed that women 'invited violence' and 'provoked male violence'".[15] She stated that the turning point was the intervention of the bomb squad, who required all of her mail to be processed by them before she could receive it, as a "controversial public figure".[23]: 282 [37]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey
Her complete blacklisting from all feminist organizations (all down to her own refuge shelter she founded, which kicked her out and banned her from even visiting), constant violent harassment campaigns forcing her to repeatedly move to new homes, coerced efforts to deprive her of sources of income to the point she was rendered homeless for a while, entirely and exclusively stemmed from her believing that helping abused men is good and in the interest of women for a better, more harmonious society.
So no, feminism does not mean "a lot of very different things" beyond any large movement's basic internal distinctions - it actually mainly only means one thing: resentment of the male gender and the desire to harm men. Any feminist who deviated from this ideological bedrock (be it Camille Paglia, Erin Pizzey, or Némésis) got threatened, harassed, brutalised and forced into flight by the crushing iron heel of feminist conformism.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
This is just a mirror image of annoying leftists being unable to entertain any rightwing belief or action without immediately comparing it to the Nazis. You've created a discursive padded cell in which kicking into a car's headlight and stepping between an ICE officer and a woman getting peppersprayed is morally indistinguishable or innately upstream of slaughtering people for wearing glasses.
I agree that there are plenty of leftists who can become ice cold killers in the proper context, but I would be ashamed of myself for judging a man by hypothetical actions he might do at some point in a certain situation rather than the things he actually did and that actually happened.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions.
I'm sure we could both hypothesise many situations in which direct action against federal law enforcement wouldn't suffice to call someone a bad person or might even be the morally good decision depending on the circumstance. That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves. They're more petulant and foolish - which is not to say I think they should be legal or that there shouldn't be consequences for that behaviour.
I do agree with you that I'm probably being a bit more charitable than I should - consider it as an avocatus diaboli response to your take, which maybe was a bit too lacking in charity.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials.
As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.
Looking at pictures of Pretti, he strikes me as one of those rather common male millennial leftists who feel a lot of inner resentment and bitterness towards their lives, yet are still to meek or calculating to express this inner rage on their own terms and must sublimate it through socially-approved political grievances. When I was a member of the Austrian Socialist Youth many moons ago, this type of male left-wing activist was already very commonplace: men that could not fit into any socially desirable mould of masculinity or youth and thus found a social space that not only allowed them to go on aggressive rants and lash out against property or people, but even lauded them for it and bestowed them with in-group status for their aggressive tendencies. Despite the explicit denial of meaningful same-sex difference within the Socialist Youth, this type of "male attack hound" was an unspoken model of traditional masculinity accessible for otherwise rather unmasculine men. (I might be totally off the mark here with my armchair analysis of Pretti, but everything I've seen so about him checks the list for this type of person. I'm also not saying "Pretti was ugly, therefore he was a self-loathing communist" - it's a more nuanced mix of physical, intellectual, and social factors.)
I very much doubt Pretti was a "bad man" to his colleagues, neighbours, or other people he interacted with regularly. Maybe he was easily irritable or smart-assed (would match the type), but I don't see someone like him, say, wantonly tossing trash onto his neighbour's lawn or stealing change from a colleague's purse. The actions you point at to designate him as such are both situations in which he probably felt that he could morally justify letting out his rage at a target that was anyway deserving of such. You say that "he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials", but within his media/social ecosystem, he was operating off of the impression that current ICE tactics were an illegal overreach (and why wouldn't he, if his news bubble consists of NPR, the NYT, an Antifa Telegram group or any other media outlet partaking in the effort to smear and denigrate ICE at any cost), or at the very least would be legally overturned and near-universally condemned in the near future, à la Jim Crow laws. We can and should point out that he was wrong to do what he did, that his belief system was based on fables, conformist meekness, and a need to sublimate his resentment at the world, without immediately resorting to a complete moral condemnation.
Maybe I'm being overly sentimental, but I can't bring myself to feel any condescension or Schadenfreude at his death. I find it a tragic waste of life and a pathetic, misguided attempt of a man desperate for self-respect. Of course he was looking for a fight. Of course bringing a gun was provocation of the highest degree. Of course I don't blame ICE officers for how this went down (although I would appreciate if the White House wouldn't so blatantly pursue a strategy of "deny and defend at all costs before there's even clear documentation available"). But Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veteran's hospital with a clean record - are we really going to reduce's a man's entire existence and character to the probably most irrational and emotionally charged moments of his life? There's alot of left-wing activists I have no trouble morally condemning rather fully (Hasan Piker comes to mind), but it feels unjust and shortsighted to do so here.
StJohnOfPatmos
7mo ago
He is by far the most intelligent and most original thinker.
Name one single original idea that was developed by Nick Fuentes - I'm extremely curious. Every time I see an extrait of his streams, he's just ranting in a vaguely comedic tone about jews.
StJohnOfPatmos
7mo ago
It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism.
Fuentes has nowhere near the scope of name recognition and credentials that Kirk did, and your refined analysis bears no relation to how a self-radicalized leftist distinguishes between a MAGA think tank guy and an actual Fascist, which is to say, not at all. You don't have a good theory of mind for the current generation of left-wingers, who aren't the theory-reading pedants of the last century, but more often than not are driven by an impulsive and anti-intellectual tendency to essentialise their entire political opposition into one monolithic force of evil. Kirk was literally speaking to a crowd of thousands - Fuentes sits alone in his room streaming. To someone who thinks virtually everyone even in proximity of Trump is just another tentacle of the Fascist Kraken, Kirk obviously is the more attractive target. (Besides the basic fact that Kirk's career and output is exponentially more public-facing than Fuentes', which makes his assassination an event one can plan and premeditate).
How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me.
Why are you accusing me of lowering the bar and level of quality around here if you're just going to then engage in completely absurd straw-manning? I said nothing of the sort, so why are you including it in your answer to my comment? Why don't you address the less low-hanging fruit of my reply to your original statement, i.e. the obvious political content inscribed on the bullet casings? Don't you see how transparent this cherry-picked and histrionic reaction is to everyone reading it?
I really don't think you're in any position to look down on others engaging with your arguments politely and offering fair rebuttals, even if some are less strong than others. Your tone and defensiveness is clearly coming from an emotional place and takes us away from getting anywhere in this discussion, which is a loss.
StJohnOfPatmos
7mo ago
Ok, so? The statement Kirk made immediately preceding his shooting still wasn't trans-related, if anything, it was a black-on-black crime dogwhistle.
I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group. You've been on the internet in the past 10 years, presumably - you should know what it sounds like when someone really wants to denigrate transgenderism and its acolytes, since it can get considerably more inflammatory than what Kirk said. He didn't even deny their "identity" or disagree with any of the fundamentals of trans ideology - just said too many of them had been school shooters.
I wanted to upvote this post, but you're making so many bad faith obfuscations and undue leaps in logic that, by the end, it barely reads as a coherent statement anymore - how you could possibly say "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, then Tyler may not have even shot at all" in regards to a clearly premeditated shooting is just beyond me. You actually mean to tell us the gunman brought a disassembled gun to the campus, painstakingly avoided cameras identifying his face on his way up to the roof, assembled the gun once there, scoped out Kirk, and then waited patiently just in case he would make a statement that concerned trans people, lest he pack up and go home peacefully? I'm quite certain you yourself don't actually believe that - because it's so obviously delusional. Furthermore, Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.
The "noble lover" angle you're trying to spin of course doesn't hold up to the evidence regarding the bullet casings being marked with discord memes and boilerplate far-left slogans - not a single mention of love or partnership, just sneering sarcasm and ideological self-righteousness, right down to the tired "bella ciao" song that self-styled antifascists have considered their own informal anthem since generations.
Why would he be the target of choice?
You're pretending like this is some weird mystery, when Charlie Kirk was one of the most visible and mainstreamed normie-facing avatars of the right-wing shift among young people/young men, and something of a herald of the inevitable backlash against the excesses of wokeness in campus life. He was an opportunist and a MAGA mouthpiece with little doctrine or taste-making of his own - he truly isn't a Bannon, nor a Yarvin, nor a Fuentes - but he was a famous and prolific Trump supporter for the past decade and had - at least based on MAGA propaganda - a close relationship to and influence on Trump himself (I personally doubt this heavily, but it's the way he styled himself and the way mainstream journalism covered him).
For a left-winger who truly, unironically believes that Trump is a capital F Fascist, Charlie Kirk becomes a Goebbels or Streicher-type, someone highly responsible for the rightward shift in society who furnishes a constant stream of rhetorical and mediatic ammo to be used against the opressed. Obviously he's a justified target if one thinks under those lines.
Also - Luigi wasn't apolitical in the slightest, his digital footprint shows a young man deeply invested in policy discussions and poli-sci/statecraft literature. He just, it would seem, happened to be more of an enlightened centrist wonk type than a clear blue tribe/red tribe partisan, which is indeed interesting and unexpected, but not apolitical.
StJohnOfPatmos
8mo ago
I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending.
This kind of intellectualised lack of care and concern for the world has the pretension of being a serious opinion with some form of philosophical caché, but can really only be understood as a spiteful lashing out at life itself by someone who feels slighted and betrayed by their own expectations at what human existence should be. It's juvenile, provincial, extremely transparent in its self-loathing origin, and can only stem from a position of weakness and defeat.
The inherent good of human civilisation goes without saying - we are the only species in the entire known world that does not solely operate around cruel instinct, we can peer beyond the vulgar material veil of constant frenzied self-preservation and extract beauty, love, and meaning from the violent chaos of the natural order - only in the world of Man can a living being pass away with a semblance of dignity and comfort. No animal in nature dies peacefully. We can create abstracted systems that bind otherwise distinct people and groups together, pool our labour and knowledge into cohesive willpower, and turn base matter into magic. Modern medicine, high-speed global transportation, satellites crowding the stratosphere, the welfare state, not to speak of the surplus of beauty and meaning we have added to the world by means of artistic endeavours. The pleasure of good food (not raw meat torn straight from the spine of a wailing animal), good company, lovely music, light-hearted conversation, a charming landscape, the sound of cicadas on a summer night, its all there for us to enjoy and cherish and compound our fates upon.
For 4 years, I lived in an apartment in Paris that shared a courtyard with an elementary school. Every day, I would hear children playing during their lunch break - laughing, shouting, exclaiming, crying, giggling and scheming in exactly the same way my childhood friends and I did when we were small, and doubtlessly in exactly the same way the children of the Persian Empire, the Neolithic, or the Early Modern period did in their times. I felt an endless cycle of joy and curiosity and willpower and ecstasy at the world and the gift of live we were given to be in it and a part of it, unchanged since the first day of Creation. To look over this vast and endless sea of human joy and pleasure at being in the world and to claim to see nothing inherently valuable in it one way or another is not an intellectual or philosophical position - on the contrary, it is the spiteful grumble of the slave who considers his own wretched existence to be the Alpha and Omega of all human experience. It is the position of a self-loathing man to cowardly for suicide, so he demands the entire world should commit suicide in his stead.
Remember Goethe - "the world a man sees around him is nothing else than the world he carries in his heart". The world I see around me is a big, flashing YES - YES to beauty, YES to pleasure, YES to friendship, YES to love, YES to the bountiful harvest of our labours, YES to the innocent sincerity of a child at play, YES to drunken dancing on summer nights, YES to music, to painting, to cathedrals and to operas, YES to the gift of life, so precious, so explosive, so free.
My cup runneth over - doth thine?
StJohnOfPatmos
8mo ago
Like somewhere between 20 and 40%
StJohnOfPatmos
8mo ago
They indicate a higher level of criminality proportional to how many visible tattoos they have, along with other negative associations like substance abuse, domestic violence, and general "roughness"
Anyone who gets a tattoo is comfortable with associating themselves in this way
Are you writing this post from within a time machine, beaming this message out to us from the 1950's? Tattoos as such haven't been signifiers of criminal association in literal decades - certain types of tattoos on certain parts of the body, sure, but just having a depiction etched onto your skin in ink doesn't say anything about your relationship to the rule of law in 2025.
Go to virtually any young, upper middle class, urban environment with connections to the arts or music, and a clear majority of women will have tattoos (as well as a plurality of the men). You can associate tattoos with a more liberal lifestyle (although soldiers and sailors might disagree with that), sure, but some 21 year old girl from a good suburban family studying at Vassar isn't suddenly a dangerous individual because she has a 1 inch wide rose motif tattooed on her forearm.
I think tattoos are trashy because the human body is a beautiful thing in its pure, unmodified state, and because I greatly appreciate our Greco-Roman heritage largely rejecting body modifications - which spared us (in Europe) from the horrors of circumcision, female genital mutilation, neck elongations, lip plates, foot bindings, head stretchings, and all the other grotesqueries the rest of the World routinely commits against their own bodies. It still doesn't mean I have to pretend tattoos mean something they simply no longer do in our current social spheres.
StJohnOfPatmos
9mo ago
What's funny is that this exact series of events (male founding figure of a Green party focused on environmental policy becomes ostracised and removed from power by the next generation of overwhelmingly female party apparatchiks who want the party to revolve mainly around woke identitarian politics) is now turning into a recurring trope across Western democracies, virtually always following the same beats.
The Austrian Greens sabotaged Peter Pilz, a founding figure of the party and a star investigative journalist who uncovered (and to this day still keeps uncovering) some of the biggest political scandals in modern Austrian history. After he was denied a safe seat for an upcoming election, despite being a senior leadership figure, he left the party to found his own movement, after which the vengeful Green party leaked years-old internal party protocols that revealed he had once called his secretary "Schatzi" (essentially the German form of calling someone "honey"), she had complained, and they had resolved the issue internally without further problem. This complete nothing-story was of course blown up to the scale of serial predation (this happened in MeToo years) and Pilz was pressured to resign all political functions and retire from politics.
An almost identical scandal happened in Germany in the run-up for this years election, Stefan Gelbhaar - an established, handsome, charming, popular male Green partisan - was slated to receive a safe seat for the Greens until one of the fattest, ugliest women in the Greens party structure started spreading anonymous false accusations against him that collapsed the second anyone tried to verify their legitimacy - but by then it was too late, as the Greens had already decided to remove Gelbhaar from his seat without even sharing the nature of the allegations with him. As the head of the Young Greens said, regarding the matter - "the presumption of innocence exists in the courts, not in the Green party".
I think there's a similar story within the French Greens, but I'm not that knowledgeable about them since they're a largely irrelevant presence in French politics.
StJohnOfPatmos
9mo ago
He didn't miss the shot though - Trump moved his head by happenstance at the exact same microsecond that the trigger was pulled, which I doubt even a veteran marksman can account for. But the shot itself very much did not miss its target - hence the blood on his face and all that.
StJohnOfPatmos
9mo ago
Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.
This is an absolutely idiotic example - Mozart constantly needed money because he lived lavishly beyond his means and spent so much time in aristocratic circles as a commoner that he was desperate to emulate them and would bankrupt himself for expensive clothes and horse carriages. His type of financial troubles are a well documented trope of the era, induced partly by more permissive social climbing between gentry and aristocracy. Since he was undoubtedly a musical genius, obviously he used his talents to make good money fast - it doesn't mean he put no artistic or musical considerations into what he composed!
Any Austin (or rather, his father) doesn't seem to understand that a court musician in the 18th Century was not receiving a pop-star salary, but would need other sources to income his expand his fortune to the point where it could even somewhat compete with an average city-dwelling aristocrat. Mozart wanted this badly - perhaps also because he saw how financially dependent his father had been on his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to the point where his freedom of movement was strictly dictated to him, and wanted to avoid the same fate. The best, fastest, most respectable and well paying manner for someone with Mozarts caché and skills to make money was to take musical commissions.
And guess what? Those "non-money motivated" symphonies and operas we love and cherish Mozart for - those were commissions too! Il Seraglio, the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni were all commissions, since that was how large-scale musical arrangements were made and paid for before the rise of radio and television. The musician didn't just sit around strumming his harpsichord waiting for a hit to happen - they were subjects of courtly and church patronage and composed music in return for goods and services.
So I disagree that "Mozart was largely motivated by money" - Mozart was using his incredible talents and social reputation to leverage the best possible sources of income to finance his extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't make his melodies any less charming, nor does it dilute any kind of authentic artistic process if he received payment for having written them.
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.
https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/62189/italy-more-than-120000-migrants-passed-through-lampedusa-since-2023#:~:text=From%20June%201%2C%202023%20until,Cross%2C%20who%20manage%20the%20center.
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 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.
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.
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