Golden Gotterdhammarung

Name a fat guy with aura:

I have no problem imposing a Biblical moral framework onto a pre-Christian epic, and had no problem with Elliot Page or Lupita Nyong'o or the multiracial crew. It just wasn't that good a movie! i expected more spectacle, more epic qualities. (Compare to, say, Lawrence of Arabia.) Actually seemed a bit cheaply made. Not once was it magical the way movies can be. OK maybe once. Or twice.. But a four card flush.

We need more photography on X. If you agree, quote post one of your photos.

I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy. It ranks, along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, as the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy. For Saad, empathy—in itself a perfectly decent trait—has become so grossly exaggerated that it threatens truth, reality, and justice. Cases in point abound: so they won’t feel bad about themselves, we’ll allow biological men to compete in women’s sports and crush the dreams of thousands of young women; so as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we will permit unqualified candidates to have positions in universities and the corporate world; so that everyone might feel included, we will characterize the meritocracy as “white privilege,” etc. As I was making my way through Saad’s book, I kept remarking the sharp distinction between empathy and love. To empathize is to enter profoundly into the experience of another and to endeavor not to hurt that person’s feelings. But to love is, as Thomas Aquinas taught, “to will the good of the other.” As I said, in itself and all things being equal, empathy is a good thing. But it is not the same as love, which, depending on circumstances, can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings. When a professor gives a student a “C” as an honest reflection of his work, he might well be insulting him, but he’s also telling him the truth and perhaps even urging him to try harder. When, in the Confessional, a priest tells a murderer to turn himself in to the police, he’s undoubtedly making that person’s life more uncomfortable, but he’s also willing the man’s good. Any decent parent knows that showing real love for her children means engendering all kinds of bad feelings in them. In light of this distinction, we can understand why Jesus didn’t say, “have empathy for one another,” but rather “love one another.” And why St. John the Evangelist didn’t say, “God is empathy,” but rather “God is love.” It occurred to me as I was reading Saad’s book that one reason Wokeism has seized the consciousness of so many in the West is that Christianity has faded as a cultural force and Christians themselves have forgotten what stands at the heart of their faith.

Vance told Bishop Barron that for his prayer life, he tries to say a decade of the Rosary in the morning and then another before bed. That's scary to me. Don't get me wrong, any prayer is good, and I can't judge his soul, but just objectively, you need more than 2 decades of the Rosary a day to even be a good Catholic janitor, hours more than that to be a truly Godlike father, to avoid regularly falling into mortal sin, let alone to be a good Catholic Vice President of the most powerful country in the world. Let no one say "I don't have enough time" - the wisdom of the saints is that the busier you are, the more pressure you are under, the more time you need to make for prayer. We all make this excuse and we are almost always wrong. The ones who became saints are the ones who didn't give themselves permission to keep an 8-year-old's prayer life (but without the innocence and simplicity). Imagine the blessing it would be for the country of JD Vance had a serious prayer life. I'm going to pray that he sees the need for it and commits to it. It's not about judgment. It's about how much we need God.

Clocking in 20 years later to wish CLERKS II a happy anniversary!

I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.

Can we please just have Bhaskar speak for the Left and make everyone else stfu?