Heurisko

Friends, I’m preparing for my annual Lenten break from this place. I wish all of you well while I’m gone.

@EduardHabsburg This is funny. I rewatched it with my son a few weeks ago and had the same experience. Of course, he loved it.

🔥CONTROVERSIAL TAKE🔥 Just rewatched HIGHLANDER after literally DECADES by proudly showing it to my son, and to my great embarrassment I found it was NOT the brilliant epic I remembered, but: Slow paced. Flashy. Clunky. Gaudy. Pedestrian sword fights. Barely noticed the Queen music. It is elevated a little when Sean Connery or Clancy Brown are on screen, but other than that, as Monty Python says in a sketch.... "whole thing's a bit silly." What, oh what was 1986 me thinking?? And what do you think?👇

@sobakaprod @HonorAndDaring Read the book.

@HonorAndDaring What police state lol

Reminder that pretty much everything wrong with the US is due to the legislation passed in the 1960s. Any political theorist that isn’t addressing this book isn’t worth your time. A must read.

"We don't hate religion. In fact, our pseudo-religion of man should replace all religion."

@ofreacharound @glukianoff @wesyang New group established and new “rights” carved out. On and on it goes.

@glukianoff @wesyang It’s fascinating that they accepted this one group suffering with mental illness (as they were seen immediately prior to the shift) into a “protected class” with immutable attributes Even disability rights have been unable to enact the same shift

In my career defending academic freedom and free speech, I never saw anything become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground. @hoovlet

@MillerDakotaJ That's a great point. What's interesting to me is that it was a gay/lesbian event that was then co-opted by everyone else on the left. It's probably because it is a “celebratory” event. Every left-wing holiday seems to belong to a specific “victim” group.

@Heurisk0 The closest I can think of is “Pride” But it’s promoting a sin within its own proclamation that they don’t recognize.

I cannot think of a positive affirmation such as “He is risen” within the progressive belief system. There's no triumph over evil, there's no joyful proclamations.

@glukianoff @ofreacharound @wesyang Does it seem inevitable with the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses that something like a politicized secular quasi-religion would develop? It's the only belief system that can skirt the law.

As my co-author Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, morality on the left became increasingly unipolar, with care for victim groups treated as perhaps the only important moral end. But once people on the left had defended other perceived victim groups, there seemed to be only one place left to go. The result was that the issue was pursued as a quasi-religious social movement rather than as a scientific or public policy question that needed to be carefully thought through and rigorously examined. Once people’s identities revolved around the idea that compassion and care were the highest moral ends, and therefore essentially sacred, hysteria was bound to follow. The Founders tried to guard against this kind of dynamic through things like the pairing of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, but those protections do not work as well when the ideology in question does not call itself a religion. This is a real problem. I have been thinking a great deal about how to address the problem of religious-like certainty attaching itself to beliefs that are not formally religious, and I still cannot see a solution that would not risk becoming a disaster itself. But I am still pondering it.

@zenahitz Congratulations! I'm going on two years.

This Easter Vigil marks twenty years since I came into the Church. I am grateful beyond words for every year in the life of grace.

@Alt_Azn @Vox_Oculi I saw a homeless teenager buying this a few months ago, and it was heartbreaking.

@Vox_Oculi Gets you drunk faster.

70% makes sense. But why in the world is it 91%? Why not 90%? Why the extra 1%?

@EduardHabsburg Incredibly based.

My son, eternal nerd, as usually overdoes it with the Easter Eggs🥚

I saw a post in English from someone who is trans and in Romania complaining about white people in space while “brown people suffer.” This is complete and utter cultural domination. You have the same beliefs as almost every college sophomore. It's astonishing and terrifying.

@dysangelistes @micsolana Fair.

@Heurisk0 @micsolana 'You people keep doing ...' Bro. I have been trying to avoid doing for so long. You need to understand: nobody with actual political agency in America gives a shit about Americans. They play their awful music, & our role is to dance.

@GoodAmericanMan A long time ago, my Dad did consulting work with Chinese and Japanese breweries. He said you could eat off the floor of the Japanese brewery, but rats would scurry by in the Chinese one.

Now compare this to a sloppy Chinese factory making matches. The Sino and the Nippo are different species.

There's an elite, religiously affiliated private school near me that has 30% international students. I would estimate that at most 5% of students are part of the denomination. The school was created to serve the local community, and now it does almost anything but that. Wealthy Chinese families send their daughters there. Meanwhile, middle-class Asian American families can't afford it. The campus is filled with every imaginable progressive shibboleth.

I talked to a Zoomer coworker from my part of LA. He went to a Catholic school I had friends at. He says it's now 50% international students, not even Catholic, just paying obscene tuition. Student visas need reform.

@WomanDefiner Moonifest destiny

I've been reasonably informed by people like you for 20 years the first group to walk on a terrestrial area are the native inhabitants of that the terrestrial body. That would make Americans the indigenous people of the moon.

@HonorAndDaring Hopefully, it's an isolated phenomenon. My kids ran home from school to watch the launch.

50 years of focus on building an egalitarian utopia and criticizing any great achievement has taken its toll on the American people. This is a serious illness.

@DutchRojas We’re all living on borrowed money and time.

If enrollment drops 50% over the next decade, revenue bond covenants trip. Pensions crater. University towns hollow out. And the states backstopping all of it, Illinois, California, New York, are already broke. There is no rescue coming.

@feelsdesperate 2008 accelerated all of this, and we simultaneously lost traditional religion while leaning into the explanatory power of economic and racial beliefs. I think this aligns with Del Noce’s ideas, but @_CLancellotti is the expert on that.

A reasonable take I heard (from a millennial) is that wokeness happened because millennials looked around and saw that they had no transcendent belief system to guide them and give their lives meaning and so they just turned up the volume on Boomer anti racism because that was on hand. I think that’s right. It doesn’t explain everything but it’s definitely it’s definitely psychology true in an important way.

@terrakei07 Reasons.

嫌味とかではなく本当に素朴な疑問なんだけど、アメリカ人の皆さんはなんでそこまでカリフォルニアを嫌っているんですか？