Hawks traded Trae Young just for McCollum to pick up the ‘NYC Villian’ mantle! This is restoring the feeling!

I recently read Lincoln at Gettysburg, small but full of gems! I came across the above passage in Lead Time.

But yeah, his prose always hits like “Buckley had to fashion a nine-foot pole for dealing with all those Agnew types a gentleman should not touch with a ten-foot pole” is devastating lol

Made me think of the Never Trump, Rubio fanboys

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Reagan's deepest appeal is to those who cheered George Wallace on but who felt a bit shabby and soiled after he worked them over, massaged their hate glands, made them queasy with acrid emotions sweated out of them. Reagan croons, in love accents, his permission to indulge a functional hatred of poor people and blacks. Nothing personal about it. It is really an act of patriotism not to let the hardworking middle class be dragged down to their level. Imagine what a godsend this is for right-wingers with some small claim left them to fastidiousness. Poor William Buckley had to fashion a nine-foot pole for dealing with all those Spiro Agnew types a gentleman should not touch with a ten-foot pole. But Ronnie he can walk right up to and hug. Even the caricaturists have a hard time putting Joe McCarthy's scowl or Agnew's dopey viciousness on Reagan's face. Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education (Garry Wills)

Garry Wills 💀💀💀

I grew up in churches that cheered on Iraq like it was a sports event (there were watch parties for the invasion…), so I spent my 20s retreating into full-blown pacifism but I’ve landed in a place similar to what you have articulated so well

“War… has always been rightly considered a calamity that clashes with God’s plan.”

Pope Benedict XVI

Sounds a lot like “God does not bless any conflict” (Leo)

It’s almost like these guys aren’t just caught up in the moment and riffing but may be thinking alongside a tradition

Quote: Newsmax chief Washington correspondent James Rosen wrote on X that Carlson responded to Trump's Truth Social post Thursday, saying, "I've always liked Trump and still feel sorry for him, as I do for all slaves." Asked to elaborate, Carlson added: "He's hemmed in by other forces. He can't make his own decisions. It's awful to watch."

Reminder that you never need to hand it to Tucker Carlson.

It’s so cool to live in a political environment where the Dems have to fret over fine-tuning their rhetoric, while the GOP finally wins a popular vote after Trump called cities dirty and horrible, simulated oral sex on a microphone, and swayed back and forth to Pavarotti for an hour

My contribution to the thread: “They should be.”

“Are Socialists a type of liberal?" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate

Jake Mangum spots kid in the crowd, tosses the ball, and her brother catches it and gives it to her. Dudes rock.

“You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that’s all for show goes up in flames
In 24 frames”

Geez! So messed up.

I’m book marking this! I haven’t read this piece but def will asap.

But yeah the fever is breaking for a few but it’s a cult so it’s going to take some time to deprogram many (esp when they have those anti-thought defenses, ie “its the fake news trying to take him down”)

If it has taken you 10 years to offer even the bare minimum of criticism of Trump, it follows that those who look to you for guidance will see Trump as infallible

Most of them even qualify their criticism with “I agree with a lot of his policies”, which I’m like those are antichrist too…

A phenomenon I’ve noticed on FB from evangelical pastors I grew up around (my father is a pastor himself) is them criticizing Trump for the first time and their followers/church members in the comments criticizing them for being critical of Trump and the pastors being surprised by the backlash

The Almost-Greatness of Donald Trump and Leo XIV "The conflict represents something else. We are not in an age of great leaders; instead we are being granted some tantalizing images of what great leadership might be." — Dan Hitchens https://firstthings. com/the-almost-greatness-of-donald-trump -and-leo-xiv|

Sorry, but JD Vance isn't wrong when he says that popes have some responsibility to be precise about these things. (In this case, rather enjoyably, the pope is correct on the specific policy issue whereas the vice president is right about the abstract theological question.) It's not necessary to relitigate the fascinating arguments about the Book of Joshua, the centurion in the Gospels, King Alfred, St. Louis IX, St. Joan of Arc, the Battle of Lepanto, the Siege of Vienna, the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, and any number of thought experiments regarding the tangled and bloody threads of the conflict in the Middle East to make the point that the Holy See is not currently the first place to look for theological rigor. It is only necessary to point out that, almost a year into this pontificate, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández is still in charge of the Vatican's doctrine department.

We’ve reached the pinnacle of bothsidesism

Shadow of Ezra @ ShadowofEzra 1h JD Vance says he is in the process of opening an investigation into the "Pizzagate conspiracy theory" after he read strange words involving pizza and grape soda in the Epstein files. Vance has now publicly pledged to follow up on this matter. "I remember it sounding like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory." "We should absolutely investigate."

This hasn’t made its way over her yet but… ummm… pizzagate is back apparently… and it’s not just your distant MAGA relative who spends all their time on chan boards talking about it… it’s the Vice President of the United States 🫩

"no, you see, it's just as in 'only' meaning that the only allowable state of things is war"

And unlike Vance who can rattle off a doctrine here and there out of context, I think Leo’s understanding of war is sensitive to the context of modern weaponry, meaning one should be even more hesitant to wage war than a medieval theologian was.

Oh definitely! The Catholic Church is far from pacifist; I just can’t believe the audacity of Vance speaking down to the 1st Augustinian Pope about just war theory lol

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Vance is actually doing it! He’s really going with the “Has the first Augustinian Pope even considered the just war tradition” argument…

I knew he wouldn’t be able to help himself but seeing it is still wild:

Literature and morality. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Therefore 'imaginative literature' is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art—and only genius can do that.

Reminds of this bit from Weil in Gravity and Grace:

“Lots of writers are fascinated by evil and write copiously about it, but they are bored by virtue; this not only limits their scope but prevents a satisfactory account of evil, which can no more be comprehended apart from good than light can be comprehended apart from darkness.” ― Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

Oh this post is inspired! LOL

I haven’t thought about him in forever but this felt like a core memory being unlocked

Maoist Sachin Jose be like “Nayef Hawatmeh, General Secretary of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is Catholic!”

Pope calls for patience and dialogue in Iran and Syria - Permanent Mission of the Holy See Geneva At the end of the Sunday Angelus, Pope Leo prays for peace in Iran, where protests continue, and Syria, where the army is battling Kurdish forces in the city of Aleppo. He also condemns the recent Rus...

I suppose this wasn’t enough for them (www.holyseegeneva.org/news/pope-ca...)

But yeah the Pope preaching about what the richest, most powerful country in the world is doing in God’s name is what a good Pope who takes Christ’s teaching seriously should be doing.

Pope derides Biden's abortion views, Catholic self-identity as 'incoherence' Pope Francis said the president should check his conscience and consult his bishop or parish priest. By Timothy Nerozzi • Fox News Published July 13, 2022 6:54pm EDT

Juxtaposed with Catholic Dems and the Catholic Dem President not going scorched earth on the papacy after this

All the whining from right-wingers about the Pope “singling-out conservatives” (a slanderous lie) is just more of the same “we should be able to say & do whatever we want without any resistance” BS

Can’t criticize him without hyperbolic praise (aka flattering lies)