domain:epistle.us
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3m ago
I'm pretty sure the rules of the church are not doctrine; violating them isn't heresy, and their violation isn't indication of some fundamental flaw in Christianity or even Catholicism.
If there's a long-standing bureaucracy where the rules aren't often "more like suggestions" when those at the top want them to be, I haven't seen it.
Tenaz
14m ago
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense.
Well, no, you wish you thought it was true. It sounds like you can't even in theory imagine a world where it's actually true; such a world would not just give you a sense of purpose but an actual purpose!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16m ago
I agree, for me it's just an example of frustrating wording, in a situation where a considerably more concrete reason seems appropriate.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18m ago
I've been paying for Plus for about a year now. It is far better than it used to be, but really needs calibration. Talking to ScarJo was interesting while it lasted, but the voices now all annoy me and I never use them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19m ago
Do you have a go-to for a liquid diet?
Not at all. I typically just use ON protein powder and work from there. Idk if it still hurts to chew three days from now I don't know what I'll do.
jake
20m ago
John Paul II himself saw Cardinals in excess of the number. It wasn't a proclamation of God ordaining there be only 120 Cardinals, it was a matter of bureaucratic efficiency to "establish fitting norms to regulate the orderly election of their Successor." Sola Church has libraries of debate, and I would need to know your exact issues with Vatican II, but for the last I can at least point to—
Matthew 24:34
pigeonburger
22m ago
Of course, and the people advocating kids being thaught to use and encouraged to carry weapons also hope and believe that the kids would only ever use reasonable force, only in situations where it's reasonable to do so, and wouldn't use them for anything like griveously hurting a classmate due to some run-of-the-mill bullying.
The students in Harry Potter mostly use disarming or stunning spells in combat, but they do separarely also learn fire spells, explosion spells and a lot of other spells which would require only a tiny bit of imagination to turn lethal.
AlexScrivener
30m ago
If this is a topic in which you are actually interested, rather than simply a convenient opportunity to bemoan Christianity, here is a recent podcast of two canon lawyers discussing exactly this topic
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/ep-202-the-next-benevacantism
More or less, the rule was only put in place by Paul VI in 1975, and a Pope can't bind future Popes. The rule can be changed at any time by the Pope, and papal canon law cannot bind the Pope because it derives its authority directly from him.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
35m ago
Perhaps overly charitably: I wouldn't expect the DA to write "The victim recanted and we have no physical evidence", "We no longer believe the crime occurred", or even "We think the officer lied in their report" or anything like that which would disparage their case or work generally. I could imagine "In the interest of justice" could be a euphemism for cases that aren't exclusively covering up crimes that would raise a politically-charged rabble. But the less charitable reading seems viable as well.
zoink
37m ago
who was filming at least one otherwise-unsupervised child at a public park.
What's the evidence he was filming children or did he just pull out the phone to put Hendrix on blast?
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
39m ago
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier.
Personally I'd rank the chance of eternal salvation and neverending bliss somewhat higher than an easier dating life on this moral coil but I guess we all have our priorities.
hanikrummihundursvin
46m ago
I think, respectfully, that the time to take a principled stance against online crowdfunding was what, 10 years ago? The cat seems very much out of the bag on that one...
On top of that, this event as a whole, as @corman puts it, is part of an ongoing conflict. With a whole host of new technologies. For instance, having a camera shoved into your face by a brown person isn't as much of a neutral event as your child getting sick and dying. It's a deliberate act of hostility fueled and maintained by other people. Fighting against that is not the same as fighting against, say, cancer.
I don't think there is a conflict averse highroad for people to take here. The causal chain that drives white people towards group solidarity is initiated by hostile actors. White people organizing and rebelling against these emergent aggressors and using whatever tools they have at their disposal is noble, just and good. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to justify why and through what mechanism white people should fight against this unjust circumstance as an alternative.
Ambivalence is not a morally neutral act.
chooky
51m ago
The simple, textual answer is just that DoDA in general only worked against bad guys. Expecto Patronus only kills Dementors, just like holy water only kills vampires. Indeed, when Potter et al are in duels, they largely rely on a disarming spell, not the death or pain spells. (The limited dueling repertoire is definitely a weakness of Rowling's action scenes.)
Quantumfreakonomics
51m ago
In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
”In the present historical circumstances, the universality of the Church is sufficiently expressed by the College of one hundred and twenty electors, made up of Cardinals coming from all parts of the world and from very different cultures. I therefore confirm that this is to be the maximum number of Cardinal electors”
Seems simple enough right?
”On Wednesday afternoon, under the gaze of Michelangelo’s frescoes, the 133 cardinals taking part in the 2025 conclave entered the Sistine Chapel.”
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
56m ago
I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
Presumably I am one of the individuals you have in mind. I can understand why you find it baffling: your hatred of “the Blue Tribe” — a fictitious construct which, I maintain, exists more in your head than it does in the real world — verges at times on the atavistic. I don’t expect that a fully-committed partisan such as yourself will be able to put aside your grudges and live in comity with true-Blue progressives.
My perception is that the vast majority of Americans, though, are nowhere near as committed to hatred of those who vote for a different party, nor would they be so thoroughly filled with hatred and distrust of the other side in the event that the extremely live-wire issue of pervasive black criminality were removed from the everyday lifestyle calculations of so many people. In no way do I believe that issues related to crime and racial grievance are the sole motivating reason for political polarization in America; I simply believe that these issues have a far stronger valence than most others — at least for urban (and, increasingly, suburban) voters — given their intractability, the web of obfuscation and lies characterizing discourse about them, and the way that these issues reveal some vexing contradictions at the heart of the American individualist/liberal framework.
Perhaps I am the pot calling the kettle black, and that in fact it is I who am wildly overestimating the salience and centrality of my pet issue. No doubt I am, to some extent. But I truly do believe that most non-black Americans can return, with not insurmountable difficult, to the relative comity of the 90’s, if and only if there is a significant marginalization of blacks as a cultural and political entity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I guess the difference is that I'm skeptical that black victimhood really is a central plank to Blue ideology. My perception is that the central plank in Blue ideology is the belief that they are capable of an arbitrary level of control over material reality, that they have the power to make the world as they wish it to be. "We know how to solve all our problems; if a problem isn't solved, it's the fault of someone with a name and an address."
It seems to me that the American Blue Tribe has existed since the founding, and they coexisted with explicit, legally-codified racism for a very long time without much of an issue. It likewise seems to me that many of their foreign analogues coexisted with deep cultural racism for even longer, and in some cases continue to do so right down to the present day. Blue Tribe's commitment to the racial justice narrative seems just as contingent to me as their commitment to Christianity or Bodily Autonomy. Blue ideology is explicitly built around facilitating rapid, fundamental social change; appeals to history and tradition seem to me to be rather badly missing the point.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
Of course the culture war angles are attention-grabbing, and the toxoplasma of rage ever present. But at the risk of going full "boo outgroup," can I just say--I really, really hate crowdfunding? It seems like a horrible mistake, a metastasized version of the cancer of social media, virtue signaling with literal dollars that feed nothing but further grift. Regardless of their reasons, I'm thankful to the Somali family for shutting down the NAACP's grifting fundraiser as quickly as they did. I'm gobsmacked that Shiloh has managed to milk three quarters of a million dollars (and counting!) out of being accosted over a minor literal playground scuffle.
I think the dollars make crowdfunding less prone to cheap virtue signals as it requires more from the giver than a simple post. You have to put up cash to the cause. If I believe in something, that’s not a problem. If I believe in DEI, then giving $25 to support such causes or to someone wronged by the lack thereof is at least skin into the game. Simple posts are not the same and therefore people are probably signaling things that the person isn’t committed to but says because it’s “the right thing to say.” But would you be willing to actually donate to that cause?
I mean, I get it--the money is tempting, and if you aren't getting yours, someone else will be more than happy to scoop it up "on your behalf." Racism is big business, for which the demand vastly outstrips the supply, and overtly slur-slinging white moms are... well, usually they're rapping or something, not dropping the honest-to-God Hard R. And on a child!
And it’s a revealed preference. If people didn’t agree with the woman’s cause, nobody would give money to it. In that sense it’s like an opinion version of a prediction market — unlike polling or social media posts, you can’t just opine without putting some actual money down behind it. What meaning you take from this particular case, im not sure. Is it because this woman was threatened, because it’s expanded to her family? Because the thing was filmed? Because people want to say “nigger”? That’s a bit harder to gage. But there’s a signal there that doesn’t exist with mere posts. Every person who donated has has done so at cost to themselves.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
from my understanding via previous discussion here, "in the interest of justice" is stock language, and the dismissal of charges were announced by officials well before this viral incident occurred. I share concern that we're looking at the Rotherham pattern here, but if there's solid evidence for it, I haven't seen it yet.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
On the one hand, after they can agree that rules are rules, and it doesn't matter what "disproportionate" amount of blacks end up in jail, what is there left to argue about? The central plank of blue tribe ideology seems to be rooted in the inherent evil of western white civilization, and exhibit A is blacks as a permanent underclass globally.
On the one hand, yeah, old habits die hard. It is hard to imagine the average blue triber going "Ok, yeah, I admit it, more blacks are in jail because they commit more crime" but then being ok with gun ownership, recklessness towards the climate, or free speech. But I also, simply, have a very difficult time imagining the blue tribe mind without that aforementioned central plank of their ideology.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Yes. I clicked on the court documents and that's all the reason given: "In the interest of justice." No subject, no verb, just that phrase, which could mean anything.
Another way to frame this is from the Black perspective, as I understand it:
Blacks agreed to largely stop calling people racist, and whites agreed to end the legacy of racism. That is, Black Culture never understood the deal to be that the underclass was incorrigible and would be written off, but rather than education and social policy would dissolve the underclass and uplift all blacks together. They were willing to tolerate a considerable amount of write-off in the short term, but the public agreement (and it was a very public agreement in the late 90s - early 2000s) was that this uplift was happening and would continue until the problem went away.
From my own perspective, the fact that this agreement was based on a lie does not strike me as the fault of Black Culture; they mostly weren't the ones who built the ideological foundations of the Church of the Blank Slate. It's not their fault either for noticing that decade after decade, the results they were promised never materialize. They aren't the ones who bet the full faith and credit of our entire society on "social science" that turned out to be ideologically-motivated fictions. They are at fault, it seems to me, for many of their own pathologies; even accepting their framing that America as constituted was, is and likely will continue to be innately hostile to their culture, there's much better ways to handle such a reality than the strategies they've collectively defaulted to. But this doesn't change the fundamental nature of the situation: the problem isn't the blacks demanding impossible solutions, it's the whites who spent decades promising those impossible solutions, and are now desperate to skip out on the checks they've written and cannot cash. I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
I share your skepticism that any of this can be meaningfully rolled back to some more congenial prior state. We burned unbelievably vast and irreplaceable resources on a scam perpetrated by a specific band of ideologues, leaving us in a strictly-worse position.
TheDemonRazgriz
1hr ago
Yes, my initial skepticism was... well, not exactly unwarranted, but neither was it correct. French intelligence now confirms one Rafale was shot down (as well as at least one or two other Indian fighters), and the use of the PL-15 missiles (for the first time in combat, incidentally) is separately also confirmed -- I suspect those two things are connected. Pakistan's increasingly close relationship with China seems to be paying off for it (and China is surely getting some valuable combat performance data as well).
I would continue to emphasize caution when seeing the stream of wreckage photos (I recall in particular seeing one photo of a crashed Indian jet yesterday that was actually from a previous round of India-Pakistan fighting) but Pakistan does seem to be asserting a meaningful technological edge in the air, thanks to their Chinese purchases.
No_one
1hr ago
In general, I abhor rudeness.
I doubt this was just unprompted rudeness, unless it's some 5000 IQ daring scam she lost it after the twentieth repetition of something incredibly tiresome. Somalis are not the world's most charismatic and easy to get along with people.
e.g. this thread from reddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1e5last/a_somaliamerican_former_investigator_why_youre/
Somalis are not liked much in Minnesota. If, on a non-niche reddit someone saying "They won't behave better" gets +15 upvotes that's quite strange.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
Yep, there's no Hindu extremism in India. It's mostly anti Hindu and anti upper caste. Democracy smh.
There are about 25,000 GoFundMe fundraisers created per day. My best estimate from scraping GoFundMe is that about half of fundraisers earn exactly $0, and among the remaining half there's a very long tail - perhaps 2,000 fundraisers per year earning $100k+ and 300 per year earning $500k+. Most of those are "little 8 year old Timmy has cancer" not "CW grifting".
Do you also have a deep-rooted envy of lottery winners, because you do not have a gift for sheer dumb luck? Because I'd estimate about 10x as many people make $100k from lotteries than from GoFundMe virality.
It's on the news because it's rare.
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