Stellula
10d ago
As much as a lot of us complain about Pope Francis's progressivism, we can't deny that the Church has been seeing somewhat of a renaissance over the last few years: https://www.ncregister.com/news/easter-2025-new-catholics-by-the-numbers
The Pope Francis critics will say that this is despite him, but it's difficult not to see that his grace, and his kindness, likely also have an effect on the way that people view The Church.
Stellula
1mo ago
I'd be a tad bit concerned if my heart was, for example, a shade of blue.
I'm lost in the analogy now. What?
Stellula
1mo ago
Do people undergo experimental heart surgery because they don't like how their heart looks?
If there was an experimental heart surgery which changed the color of a patients heart from vaguely red to bright pink, I wouldn't support people doing it. I definitely wouldn't support impressionable teenagers who read about this on the internet doing it.
Stellula
1mo ago
Looks like Goldberg released the chats and, yeah, what Hegseth posted was inappropriate.
Stellula
1mo ago
Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.
So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.
Stellula
1mo ago
I don't think the Trump admin would trust using a secure message system developed by the NSA.
Stellula
1mo ago
But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
Stellula
1mo ago
The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?
“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.
Call me skeptical.
Stellula
1mo ago
It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.
Stellula
1mo ago
There’s a podcast called “Sold a Story” that’s worth listening to if you have a kid that age learning to read.
Basically the “sight reading” thing looks like students are progressing, but then soon hit a wall they can’t get past because they weren’t actually learning how to read just how to identify words.
Seriously check it out. Very well done, and also infuriating with regards to how education trends are pushed.
Stellula
1mo ago
The brief summary is that many of the people who run your government and dictate the shape of your life are very bad people who do not share your values or care about your life or the life of your children.
Stellula
1mo ago
I cannot recommend highly enough the very in depth podcast series that Darryl Cooper (aka Martyrmade) did on this topic a few years ago.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yrm8aOmQg-o
The only caution here is that this is a bit radicalizing, it seems very well sourced, and does not paint a pretty picture of the way that sex-blackmail has been used for the last 50 years in the west.
IANAL so this one seems really obvious to me. You aren't a citizen, you are here on a greencard. I would not expect to be able to go to Germany and stage a protest against their government, or "occupy" one of their schools and expect to be able to stay.
There's also something obvious here: you aren't a citizen. If you don't like what we're up to over here, then leave on your own.
I'm also getting a bit frustrated at the lengths to which the concept of "speech" has been stretched. It seems like there is a line somewhere between publishing a newspaper and "occupying" a public building where what you're doing stops being speech and starts being something else.
Also, to put some things together.
Khalil was an organizer of a protest at Columbia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Columbia_University_pro-Palestinian_campus_occupations
The protest was organized by a group called CUAD: https://instagram.com/cuapartheiddivest/
CUAD has called for, among other things, the "Eradication of Western Civilzation": https://nypost.com/2024/08/17/us-news/columbia-universitys-anti-israel-group-seeking-total-eradication-of-western-civilization/
America is my home. If you come here and want to protest to destroy or "eradicate" it, I think it's reasonable to deport you. You can keep calling to eradicate my home, but you can do it from your own country, and not by "occupying" any of my universities or public buildings.
Stellula
1mo ago
They're trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania
Stellula
2mo ago
it's not clear why Zelenskyy should give away so much without something -- anything at all -- in exchange, presumably a security guarantee.
How are you coming and taking about this at all when you haven’t read anything about it, or even listened to the interview that js the topic of discussion in this thread?
Seriously what motivates this?
Zelensky is not giving away so much without anything at all. Trump and his proxies explain that giving us access to these minerals (Trump mistakenly at the beginning of the interview calls them “raw earth minerals”) gives us “skin in the game” and an obvious strong financial incentive to protect Ukraine.
But I’m actually asking: what is the motivation to talk about this without knowing anything about it?
Stellula
2mo ago
Did you even watch the video? It’s 40 minutes long. Most of it is them talking about the diplomatic solution theh seem to have found, and Trump just keeps hammering that we need to find a peaceful end to the war.
Vance’s comment was a brief reiteration of this point, and Zelensky then escalated it into an argument by implying that he wanted to blow up the deal because he (a politician who has cancelled elections in his own country, btw) doesn’t believe in diplomacy.
England and Germany are also both authoritarian regimes that don’t respect secular liberal values. Australia locked people in quarantine camps against their will only FOUR years ago. Canada debanked a bunch of truckers because they were honking their horns. Various states in the US will de facto kidnap your children and castrate them.
At some point the west needs to remind itself what it means to be the west and what we’re supposed to be defending. Free speech, free expression, free association, parental rights, bodily autonomy; these are non-negotiable.
Russia doesn’t support these things either, and is clearly an authoritarian pseudo-democracy, but “the west” just keeps slipping, and the lack of contrast between us makes it harder to rile me into supporting a war to defend our values.
Stellula
2mo ago
That is not what happened though? I don’t mean as an interpretation, I mean that is very objectively just not the course of events.
Trump said something about the importance of diplomacy, and how tough words don’t mean anything.
Vance interjected basically just agreeing with him, but adding a jab at Joe Biden.
Zelensky then turns it into an argument by implying that you can’t be diplomatic with somebody like Putin. Zelensky points out that regardless of diplomacy, Putin has been slow invading Ukraine for 10 years now. Zelensky says “so what kind of diplomacy do you mean?”
Jd: “I mean the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country”, and then goes on to say he thinks it’s inappropriate to try and litigate this in front of the press (I think he’s right).
Stellula
2mo ago
Yeah I don’t think so. We’re telling the rest of the world that they don’t get everything for free anymore.
Ukraine can’t show up in our country, yell at our president, and try to shame us into giving them more money. JD rightly pointed out that Zelensky was in PA campaigning for KaHa in October. That kind of thing is not acceptably any longer.
This is an interesting one screens different show situation.
Some see: https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/303464?context=8#context
I see: Zelensky revealed as a child. Continues wearing his costume, refuses to negotiate, starts throwing a tantrum in from of the people funding his war, refuses to show any grace whatsoever. JD asking if he has said thank you was the perfect “out” for him to backtrack, explain how Ukraine is forever indebted to the American people, and how Ukraine owes us their existence and has a friend forever as a result of the help we’ve shown them (wether he actually thinks this or not).
But he doesn’t. He just keeps pushing, and Trump and JD, who hold ALL of the leverage in this situation, respond predictably.
The mineral deal is a deal that helps Ukraine, not the US. We don’t need their minerals. They need us to come and protect them from Russia.
My worry is: this pushes us closer to WW3. We need people building off-ramps (like what Trump is trying to do here), not entrenching themselves further (what Z is doing).
Stellula
2mo ago
That was a reference I gave to a story that has been in the news, and the one that I alluded to.
Don't let the people online and their questionable motives disuade you from attending a Cathlic church. My wife and I went through nearly the exact journey you did for the exact reasons. I am a "cradle catholic" (that is: I was raised catholic from the cradle), and my wife was part of a non denominational evengelical protestant christian church as a child.
We both left the church for different reasons during our teens, and were both extremely annoying internet atheists for 15+ years.
The things you are feeling about The Church being a stable force in an unstable world are correct. The Catholic Church has existed as an institution for between 1700 and 2000 years, and has been a background force keeping western civilization alive through every major war, every pandemic, every crisis, through the 'dark' ages, through everything.
The tradition is extremely alluring. There's something difficult to describe about participating in a ritual that has been practiced nearly without pause, for 2000 years. There is no other way to engage with your role as a member of western society than that, and there is nothing more long term stable than that.
If you want something even more traditional, find a Traditional Latin Mass. Despite what people online say, this is very much alive and well, and growing. Even my parish, in a very progressive part of a very progressive city, has a mass which is largely in latin, with very little singing, etc.
Something I think you'll find if you pursue this (I hope you do, like I said my wife and I did for the exact same reason you are and are now somewhat vocal about what a good choice it was) is the large gap between the internet, and The Church. This is a feature imo. Good luck.
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