thrawnimo @thrawnimo

This is the America I know and live in. The world needs to see more of this. Not our dysfunctional government that does not represent our hearts.

Katerina Dimitratos @KDimitratos

a week ago

World Cup tourists have discovered New Jersey deli:

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He was 'saved' on Endor, it just happens to be that the wages of sin when paid in full are death

Best of Star Wars @bestofstarwar

2 weeks ago

What if Vader was saved on Endor? Do you think he would have helped build the New Jedi Order?

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Platner: The national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us.

Platner: Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It's a journey. I've made mistakes in my life. Mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. And I'm still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was before. And if you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator

What those who are unhappy with the pope’s comments on war need to get into their heads is that his concern – and the concern of other churchmen and theologians who have argued for a more restrictive approach to war in modern times – is the protection of innocent lives. That’s it. It isn’t pacifism, or cowardice, or Neville Chamberlain style naiveté, or misplaced sympathy for evildoers, or any of the other straw men people keep attacking. It’s the enormous number of civilians who have done nothing deserving of harm and yet are killed, or have their homes destroyed, or whose society’s infrastructure is so devastated that anything like normal life becomes impossible for them. That some war aim is good in the abstract, or that some government has done evil, does not magically make it acceptable to inflict this sort of damage on huge populations of innocent people who simply get caught up in the middle of conflict between warring armies. That A has a legitimate reason to attack B does not somehow entail that he is at liberty to do things that inflict enormous harm on some third party C in the process. Everyone knows this in other contexts, but for some reason some people wrongly suppose that it doesn’t apply in war. And when they try to rationalize this attitude by appeal to the good consequences they claim war will bring about, their reasoning is no different from (and no less morally corrupt than) the similarly utilitarian arguments others use to justify abortion, euthanasia, and the like.

happy pride month

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.

Here is a view, occasioned by the papal encyclical, that I'm throwing out as a rough thought because it could be wrong. The default of papal rhetoric is to speak about global issues in terms of structures and systems rather than specific leaders or nation-states. In the new encyclical's call to gentle and restrain A.I., e.g., the consistent idea is always that we need "clear criteria and effective oversight" by some kind of neutral transnational authority, details TBD. There are reasons for this rhetorical mode beyond the Church's longstanding internationalist disposition: A rhetoric of structures and systems avoids a risky personalization of politics, where you seem to be "calling out" individual governments or actors. But it also comes with the risk of sounding utopian and irrelevant under 21st century conditions, where vis-a-vis Artificial Intelligence, in particular, a really narrow set of actors -- the governments of China and America, the leaders of the frontier companies -- are carrying almost all the decisionmaking weight. It seems like in this environment we are a bit closer to a medieval model where the Church is arguably the only transnational organization of great moment (certainly Pope Leo has demonstrated that many people are *very* interested in what Rome has to say about A.I. whereas no one would care if the UN dropped a big document on the subject), and the Vatican is in the position of arguing with and cajoling a set of princes, corporate and dictatorial and democratically elected, whose personal choices are likely to decide the direction that this tech takes. (As in, for instance, the ongoing argument inside the Trump White House about its un-issued A.I. executive order.) I wonder if papal rhetoric might usefully adapt to this reality -- not by calling out Trump or Xi or Sam Altman or Dario Amodei by name, or not necessarily, but by offering more explicit advice to today's leaders and their advisers about their unique power, the moral obligations that come with it, and the judgment of God that awaits if they get things badly wrong. You can draw some of that out of Vatican documents right now, but the balance always tilts toward hypothetical structural solutions. I think where we are, and where we might be going -- for instance, toward choices about A.I. made under conditions of greater acceleration and potential crisis -- there is a case for treating the actual deciders as the crucial actors rather than always imagining an entirely different world.

The document should put to rest any questions about how to interpret Leo's "plane remarks." He envisions revitalizing the Church by emphasizing its role as a counterweight to state and capitalist violence, while essentially tabling issues he views as threatening Church unity.

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn it for centuries. apnews.com/article/pope-a…

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. #MagnificaHumanitas vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

They want you to own nothing. They want you to rent your car, your house, your entire life from them, from a billionaire class that owns everything around you. That's their ideal future, and we can't let them have it.

People always say that they’re tired of WW2 movies but I feel the exact opposite. I will watch any and all movies about WW2. At least one WW2 movie should come out every month.

Film Updates @FilmUpdates

a month ago

The trailer for ‘LUCKY STRIKE’ has been released. Starring Scott Eastwood, Colin Hanks and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. In theaters June 26.

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Beautiful essay on adult friendship

Smita Barooah @smitabarooah

a month ago

The quiet grief of adult friendship: One of the most beautiful articles I've read in a while. Hits hard timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-ir…

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@crawlings13 Getting a headache trying to understand how 54% of Catholics believe in Heaven but only 42% believe in an afterlife

my most extreme non-ideological position? Supreme Court Justices should have to take a vow of celibacy. i just think it'd be funny, very game of thrones

CS Lewis wrote about a similar concept: “Most of us find it very difficult to want "Heaven" at all — except in so far as "Heaven" means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognise it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us. Now there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact, and one right one. (1) The Fool's Way. — He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after… (2) The Way of the Disillusioned "Sensible Man." — He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. "Of course," he says, "one feels like that when one's young. But by the time you get to my age you've given up chasing the rainbow's end." And so he setties down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, "to cry for the moon." This is, of course, a much better way than the first, and makes a man much happier, and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls "adolescents"), but, on the whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably... (3) The Christian Way. — The Christian says, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same." There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible.”

Thea @TheaEuryphaessa

a month ago

On eros as a path of fire.

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You are part of a story of love—that of the Lord for His people—which began before you and does not end with you. You are part of it as unique and necessary pieces. You are part of it so that you may kindle a light, even amid the dense patterns of darkness. #PastoralVisit #Naples vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

man down! i repeat, man down!

Streetcar @Streetcar89

a month ago

Gerrymandering a congressional district for sensitive Catholic homosexuals.

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