Dan Yingst

@ArtyArtHistory @ReReadingWolfe That's not Austria, it's Ljubljana, unless they have identical door. My picture from last September

Church door near Graz, Austria

@ReReadingWolfe This is the background of R Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse series

🧵

@FlorianSta89701 @RichardJKimblee @EricRSammons Was Nebuchadnezzar needed? Antiochus? Diocletian?

@RichardJKimblee @EricRSammons Ok. That’s an altogether depressing view, Richard. The devil was needed to refine the priesthood?

I remember Catholics saying in the 1990's that the new priests would save us because they were more conservative. But that didn't happen. Now, however, it looks like the new priests really might save us.

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

@RefinedPopulist @WomanDefiner It's not though.

@WomanDefiner The problem is that such an attitude is heresy under Catholic dogma. How can one take religion seriously with such a view? How can the church survive if the only way to get through it is with a little light heresy?

Most American Catholics don't care about the Church leadership as they have no say in it and it has zero impact on their lives. You're mistaking an online bubble for reality.

@leominkus @JamesWHankins1 Would you rather have access to Harvard’s alumni network or Columbia’s?

@JamesWHankins1 Is it worth it to go Harvard instead of e.g. Columbia or NYU, when one takes into account city life?

Harvard students are highly intelligent and often brilliant but they have no common frame of reference, so that every class in humanities has to be for beginners. File under: Why humanities are increasingly held in contempt.

@big_buddy_dwyer @ousamawydferr @StevenWallaby And what happens at the end?

@ousamawydferr @StevenWallaby That's kinda true, but it's also very obvious that he is aware this is nothing but nostalgia. The opening of Blue Velvet literally pans down from a perfect Americana Heaven to show the crawling rot underneath.

"David Lynch is conservative because he shows the prettiness of americana before undercutting it" is like saying Scorsese is pro-mafia because he likes to immerse viewers in the world by initially showing the allure of wealth, freedom and control. Just harebrained binary thinking

@brian_jennx @jtalexander Same reason they didn't call Augustus "king"

@jtalexander I'm still puzzled by why the U.S. being an Empire is considered morally unacceptable.

I'm an American Imperialist by virtue of the fact I am a Civilizationalist, an American, a Nationalist, and a Realist. We have an Empire. Unless we are willing to surrender it to the Chinese Communist Party and plunge the world into widespread war and famine, the Empire must be maintained. We are the light in the darkness. Maintaining that Empire requires utilizing useful allies and destroying disruptive enemies. America and Israel are not BFFs. The idea that there's any religious connection between America and Israel is American Reformation drivel. Nation-states do not have friends; they have interests. We are two nation-states who happen to have very similar objectives and interests in the region—largely because of the fact we were both opposed to/by Iran. Our economy is based in the Middle East. Unless and until that changes, we're there to stay. If we're going to stay, then we need decent allies. The single reason I like having Israel as an ally is because they are extremely competent. Pound-for-pound, the IDF is the best military in the world; America just has a lot more pounds—that's our way. Their intelligence, targeteering, weaponeering, precision strike capability, its all just absolutely beautiful as a military man. Anyone who denies the efficacy of the IDF should be disregarded on all matters military. They are seriously a work of art in that arena. I completely understand people who get really annoyed with the fact it seems like you're not allowed to criticize Israel in most places or on most platforms. I think that's extremely stupid and needs to stop—if for no other reason than the fact that these policies generate more antisemites than they stop by probably a 20:1 ratio. I completely understand people who are sick of American politicians sucking up to Israel. Ted Cruz actually makes me want to throw up when he starts talking about having some duty to Israel. Anyone who attempts to clothe Israel in my Catholic Christian faith is immediately suspect to me as a likely enemy. But none of that changes the fact that our interests in the Middle East are deep, very hard (if not impossible) to remove, and that Israel is by a wide margin the most competent ally the United States has had since World War II. For those of y'all not really paying much attention—if we don't have Israel as our ally, we really don't have anybody. The GCC is militarily useless, Britain and Canada seem to actually be an enemy state at this point, the rest of Europe gobbles Russian balls/energy while simultaneously waging a proxy war against them, and Japan has no military. We may have other allies on paper, but in the field the vast majority of our allies are next to useless. There's a reason rival powers want the top two militaries in the world to be enemies and its not because they have an earnest desire to see America free of bankers and entertainment producers.

@MTClassical @BitPundit I think he's constructed them in the years he's spent meditating on the voyage prior to writing the book. Something like "imaginative recollections"

@BitPundit And the fact that Ishmael isn't an omniscient narrator makes it very interesting to consider what he had to do in order to hear the soliloquys of Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb in chapters 37, 38, and 39!

Here is the most controversial Moby-Dick interpretive move I am considering. Generally speaking, it is a grave error to identify the narrator with the author or to assume that the narrator and author are in full agreement. It is even a mistake to assume that Socrates is the mouthpiece of Plato. That is to say, an author can imagine how a different type of person from him would see, understand, and present the world. In the particular case of Moby-Dick, we should therefore be hesitant in identifying anything that Ishmael, the narrator says, with Melville's view on anything. However, I located a strange passage that might give us a non-arbitrary reason to collapse the view of the narrator with that of the author. Chapter 45, "The Affidavit," is Ishmael's attempt to vindicate the reasonableness of the quest for revenge against Moby-Dick announced by Ahab in "The Quarter-Deck." Ishmael shows that: 1) There are plenty of examples of sailors finding the same particular whale more than once--not even during the same season--and so Ahab is not crazy to think he can find Moby-Dick in particular among all the whales 2) There are several examples of whales who have conducted themselves in ways that are difficult to describe as anything other than malicious. This challenges Starbuck's contention that Moby-Dick, being a whale, is a "dumb brute," and is therefore not in the category of beings capable of maliciousness. In the midst of these arguments, Ishmael relates a story featuring a Captain D'Wolf, whom Ishmael claims that he has "the honour of being a nephew of his." This is very important! Herman Melville, in his life, has the honor of being the actual nephew of Captain D'Wolf... In the opening of the novel proper, after the Etymology and Extracts, we know that our narrator famously says, "Call me Ishmael." Many scholars take the "Call me" as an indication that Ishmael is not the narrator's real name, and that he is using a pseudonym for his own reasons. Since Ishmael claims to be related to someone that Melville is related, are we in a position to tentatively claim that our pseudonymous narrator is identical to our author??? I stress the word "tentatively" because this is a risky interpretive move to make. But in light of the circumstances, I propose that it is at least worthy of our consideration, in light of this hint from Melville (an author who loves to tell that certain things have been hinted...)

@linus_303 @FGSixtensson The famously untraditional, matriarchal Romans

@FGSixtensson The splendid Athens also crumbled and slided into irrelevancy. Sparta had a good run, but it was pretty much over for them when the Romans took over. Wouldn’t say this proves that a traditional, patriarchal and generally ballsy way of managing a state leads to disaster.

This is not really (or not only) because it "failed so hard", which it arguably did. Here is Thucydides writing about it when Lacedaemon (i.e. Sparta) was still going strong.

@DanielWHouck algorithm doesn't reward thoughtful, serious posts. Even among users who aren't that concerned with wide reach, this has knock-on effects.

Anyone else feel like there is less theology being discussed on X than there was on Twitter?

@drmikeDO1943 @McBragg1868 @walterkirn I don't think Foote is especially harsh on Grant

@McBragg1868 @walterkirn Yes. Shelby Foote might be a prime example.

Reading the memoirs of US Grant after shamefully neglecting to read them, possibly because literary types didn't push them on me early in life. 1st impression: No one ever told me he was funny. Some of the driest wit I've encountered in all American prose. The book is grand.

@owenbroadcast this seems entirely correct to me

i know a guy whose theory is that the angels were permitted some discretion in how to implement creation - this is why there is such variation: one tree like this, one tree like that: that's the range of their personal take on things while manifesting God's design for "tree".

@hog_run @aaronpolis29 @barstoolsports "Joe Gibbs and Bill Parcells are the only coaches who deserve to be first ballot HoFers"

@aaronpolis29 @barstoolsports You know you could say this for about 85% of the coaches who has won 1-2 sb with same qb I get it and without him he couldn’t get it done but nobody has done more

Bill Belichick will NOT be a first ballot Hall of Famer Wow

@upstatefederlst The idea that people making almost a million dollars a year can't go on vacation or eat at fancy restaurants after they have kids is so silly

At that income level, they don't even have to reduce their lifestyle. They maybe have to move out of Manhattan. x.com/FascistPlatano…

This is just NYC people rationalizing not having kids. If we made this much we'd still be there because the primary motivator for leaving was that we couldn't afford to buy a house. The cheapest detached homes in Bay Ridge with private driveways were $1.5M.

@AustinRiediger @memeticsisyphus The eternal “daddy, I drew a picture of you as a unicorn because I love you so much!” and “THE CHICKEN NUGGETS ARE ON THE WRONG PLATE, I HOPE YOU DIE!” dynamic

@yingstdan @memeticsisyphus watching them learn new things every week is very fun though, and they really do say the cutest stuff

@rabbit_marble @memeticsisyphus Was it the same mac and cheese they told you was their favorite thing in the whole world two days earlier? Because that's on you

@memeticsisyphus Mine had a melt down yesterday because we made the "wrong" kind of mac & cheese

I love the non-parent posts about how they’ll reason with their hypothetical toddler mid-tantrum. Meanwhile mine had a total breakdown when mom said she couldn’t make her braid as long as Rapunzel’s

@DanielWHouck Or his youtube

@yingstdan Is his Bible podcast the place to check his stuff out?

Who are the best *online* Bible preachers / teachers, i.e., who is doing interesting biblical teaching that is adapted to an online medium?