Zeph Luc 🇻🇦🇹🇹

One of my classmates has been diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer, please donate to her treatment if you can: gofundme.com/f/help-a-young… Alternatively, if you are a Trinidadian, you may donate directly to: Name of bank: RBC Account number: 110000000931468

@kad27270 @sibaburck What is the difference in moral value (an objective quality not decided by custom) between a guinea pig and a pig?

@sibaburck That’s ridiculous.If you have or had a pet guinea pig this comes off as barbaric and disgusting.The US is supposed to be a melting pot.You melt in and adapt your culture to ours.You don’t cook animals we keep as pets in the street.

Only vegans have a right to be upset about this. Everyone else is just being racist.

“My true glory is not to have won forty battles… What nothing will destroy, what will live for ever, is my Civil Code.” -Napoleon on St. Helena

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives.

This is interesting. In The Scholars by Wu Jingzi we find this line:「三間東倒西歪屋，一個南腔北調人」. The fancy new AI translation gives: "A house of three rooms leaning east and west; A person with a southern accent speaking northern tones". Which is correct grammatically.

@hhhh94986893229 @ArdorNew Well it is true, Catholicism bears many similarities to Stoicism and Confucianism which both promote perfection of the individual self. Just not at the expense of the collective, which must also benefit from one's perfection.

@ArdorNew Nice cult pitch It’s not compelling at all, btw

For 17 years I taught an Introduction to Religion course. Each week we studied a new religion. Of each religion I asked the same 3 questions: How did it start? How would it have one live? What is the end-game? We learned there is only one religion in the world whose end-game is NOT the total dissolution of the individual self but its flourishing and perfection. All the rest either subsume the self into some bigger whole or condemn it to annihilation.

@Solzi_Sez Cicero would have probably enjoyed Confucianism, had he known about it. It does fit his MO a lot.

“Our ancestors” could instead be taken as world history and human thought.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero

meat eaters pay for the trigger to be pulled, the only difference between you and the millionaire trophy hunter is that you're not a millionaire

I am Mercy itself for the contrite soul. A soul’s most miserable wretchedness does not incense Me to anger, but My Heart is stirred with great mercy for that soul. ~ Jesus to St. Faustina, Diary Entry 1739

@inabsentia8 @uncle_deluge As someone who's dealt with Serbians before, it's funny. Doesn't make me hate them or see them as uneducated barbarians.

@uncle_deluge And what conclusion about a whole people are you hoping your followers will draw from this, or is it just about the likes from bigots?

One of my earliest mutuals on here was a Serbian guy who never once replied to a post but would send essay sized DMs in reference to anything I said assuring me the people or language I happened to be mentioning were Proto-Serbian no matter what

This morning @scratchyjohnson tweeted an important factoid. Squanto, the Indian who spoke English and helped the pilgrims survive, was sold by John Smith to a Spaniards and the deed exists in the city we're in for Excursion. Rather than rolling our eyes, Alan, Gavin & I went to the state archives in Málaga to see if we can find said recorded deed of 20 Indians sold by John Smith to Juan Bautista Reales. We get to the Archives (see Alan's picture below), and a small genial white lab coat wearing gentleman who speaks no English says this is impossible to find. His new boss, the head archivist, Carmen, comes in and says it certainly exists but may be difficult to find. If you only had the year. We tell her it was 1614. She pulls up a list of the books from 29 notaries whose work they have from 1614. She asks who the notary was. We have no idea. They say they can't go through 29 archives to look for it. Also it's all in old Spanish which nobody speaks and it'll be hard to locate even if they know the Notary. So Alan and Gavin get to work. Gavin finds an article in the internet archive that seems to have a partial picture of the document. Carmen and the other archivist decipher the name after 15 min. They find that name in their cross reference. Carmen goes to the vault to look while the lab coat gentleman asks for my life history, driver's licence number and a lien on my grandchildren. Totally worth it. Carmen comes back to say she found the volume. It is tremendously delicate. Opening it may break some pages. Does it have to be today because if so the answer will be no. We ask her if this is interesting to them. Both very seriously nod their heads. We tell them this is very important to the United States and many of our friends. Carmen tells us she will find it but that it takes time. White linen gloves and patience. We tell her to take her time. She says she will take a picture and email it to me. So here's why all this is important: after Squanto was sold by an Englishman to a Spaniard names Reales, said Spaniard brought Squanto and 19 other "inios" to Málaga. He recorded the deed in the state archives. Then a Franciscan priest ransomed Squanto. Squanto became Catholic. Was baptized and confirmed in Málaga. He then made his way to England where he worked and learned English. He paid his passage back across the ocean and found his Wampanoag tribesmen. Then when the Pilgrims landed they found a Catholic English-speaking native who helped them survive their first winter. It is entirely possible that but for a Franciscan priest who ransomed Squanto, the Pilgrims may not have survived their first winter in New England. That's history. American history. And the record of it is in Málaga. In a book. One of 29 books kept by notaries in Málaga in 1614. That are still searchable. This image, when it comes, belongs in the US National Archive. This is Cultural Debris. x.com/i/status/20349… cc: @alancornett @gwbled @Gonnassaurius_ @wrathofgnon

Never will forgive colonialism for absolutely eradicating most of the Javan rhinoceros population. To the extent that they can only be found in one national park :(

In my space game Hyperspeed (1991) I had a race of cute puppy aliens. Their starships were shaped like little butterflies. They were super-friendly and nice to you. They had the secret Philanthropy circuit that you could install in a robot brain to turn the robots good. I must have had at least 50 people boast to me at conventions and elsewhere that they had brutally exterminated the cute puppy aliens. I always pretended to be horrified. But the truth is, the purpose of the puppies was to entertain you the player. If you were entertained by killing them, that's okay with me. You clearly liked my game.

In nomine Christi vincas semper — “May you always triumph in the name of Christ.” (Diptych of Probus, 406 AD)

We don’t because we stopped treating art as something that forms the soul, and started treating it as content to be consumed. Edmund Burke warned that a civilization survives not by innovation alone, but by preserving what refines human taste, judgment, and imagination. Hand-drawn animation carried discipline, patience, and a sense of beauty shaped over generations. When that disappears, it’s not just a style that fades. It’s a way of seeing the world.

@oh_that_brad @VanDiemen_ I mean, they didn't do a very good job at that if we take Alonso de Zorita's word at that. Yes, they got rid of the religion which was good. But they also got rid of the native way of life, which was quite virtuous. Don't take my word for it, the primary sources attest to that.

@VanDiemen_ And their punishment was getting sent conquistadors to stamp out their demon worship.

The symbol of an eagle eating a snake on the Mexican flag is actually a Spanish mistranslation. What the Aztec's depicted in the eagle's mouth was actually an "atl", the glyph for Sacred War. The glyph is made up of an intertwined stream of blood and water. The Spanish who first saw it assumed it was a snake, and given that the eagle eating a snake is common in European and Christian symbolism as good triumphing over evil, it stuck. But the Aztec atl symbology is actually much more profound. It represents the Aztec belief that life requires death, and that blood is the fuel of existence. The gods sacrificed themselves to create the earth, and for the sun to continue to rise and for the rain to continue to fall, the earth must be continually replenished with the blood of warriors or the blood of sacrifices. The massive blood debt to the gods was a sacred duty and reciprocity. The stream of blood is depicted with flames, showing the violent manner in which it was taken. The water is the inverse, the new life that flows after death. Blood and water wrap around each other in eternal balance. There's some evidence that the original Aztec founding bird is not a Golden Eagle, but a caracara, which is found more commonly perched on cacti at ground level, and has the distinct feathered crest. The nopal cactus with its red, heart-shaped fruit is the Aztec Cosmic Tree, their Axis Mundi. It is commonly shown growing from a corpse or a heart. In the Mexican coat of arms it is rising from a stone, but not just any stone, the stone depicted is the island where the heart of a vanquished god was thrown by Huitzilopochtli, the Sun God. The island is Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, surrounded by the waters of Lake Texcoco. The roots extend to the underworld, the cactus is this earth, and the eagle connects it to the sky. The Aztec were fanatically devoted to their war god Huitzilopochtli and served him with fervor. They were the chosen ones with the duty to replenish the earth with blood. Wars were waged for victims. Warriors were promoted for capturing prisoners, not killing enemies. Thousands were sacrificed. Sometimes tens of thousands. Socially, the Aztecs were outcasts from a resplendent civilization of city states flourishing at the time around Lake Texcoco, a tribe of barbarians relagated to living on muddy islands, humiliated by stronger cities. Their religion gave them the energy to take their jihad to the ends of the earth, conquering their known world in less than 100 years. In some ways the rise of the Aztecs is a more incredible story than their downfall at the hands of the conquistadors. When you see the crest of the Mexican flag you're not just looking at a pleasant depiction of the Aztec founding myth where a tribe stopped and settled a place because they saw an omen, you're seeing an entire theology, pulled together by a set of symbols, which animated a small group of people to such a degree that they committed violence with a ferocity that is rarely matched in human history.

When Zi Lu learned anything, he was only afraid lest he should learn something else before he had succeeded in carrying it into practice. (An. 5.14)

A link to an article on Zhu Xi’s “serious reading” (jing 敬). This mindset is a prerequisite if one wishes to understand the Classics, and especially the Four Books…