By David Futrelle
Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a couple of days; I’ve been taking care of some personal stuff (nothing dramatic, just very time-consuming). But there’s so much going on in the world I thought I’d put up an open thread.
Talk about Trump’s shittiness, the shutdown, the dueling Fyre Festival documentaries, the blizzard here in the US, or maybe those snot-nosed racist high school students harassing Native American elder Nathan Phillips, a veteran conducting a ceremony to honor the war dead in DC
On that last point, here are some videos; watch only if you are ready to be enraged. The students, from a Catholic high school, were in DC for the “March for Life,” evidently ran into Phillips by chance, and decided to harass him for being Native American, I guess.
On a somewhat lighter note, there was the whole Ben Shapiro/Baby Hitler thing. Here are several , er, enhanced versions of his remarks at the March for Life on the classic time-travel quandary — “would you kill Hitler when he was a baby?”
Despite Ben’s qualms about killing baby Hitler, he doesn’t actually give a shit about babies and other civilians from enemy countries killed in wars.
In other news:
Speaking of crappy food:
@Hexum, SPLC says only a fringe of the Black Israelites is a hate group. But I am not sure it matters. Mr. Phillips, sensing trouble, put himself in between the two groups to keep peace and he was treated with contempt and derision.
Okay, anyways, done some reading. Hiya @Desperate Ambrose.
re: The Last Conversation: Ehh. Whatever. I have absolutely no desire to go back into that. We’ve pressed our marks into the clay, let it dry. The audience that follows will determine the right of it.
(Twenny bucks on me)
re: Catholicism: I frankly don’t see all that much that’s contentious in what you’ve said here. You’ve said you don’t like the Official Catholic Stance on a lot of stuff, which I’m down with. I know plenty of Christians who are also progressive, caring, pro-choice, feminist, etc. After the past few years I’m happy to let that sleep. Good on you for seeing the wickedness inherent in the traditionalist positions.
I do have to suggest to you that you’re being pretty myopic on that though. The Catholic Church wields enormous power throughout the world, and it’s very much of the traditionalist, oppressive, scandalous variety. While I won’t argue whether your slice of it is nicer (I have no idea), this is called selection bias. Your opinion is based on a small, biased group, the people around you; it’s not based on the global stage.
I guess my question on that is – why do you come here to defend Catholicism, when so many of its adherents – the majority – are out there doing the things that you’re saying are awful? Shouldn’t you be on Catholic forums telling them that they’ve got it all wrong?
Your silence is assent to their position, regardless of your personal beliefs. Don’t you feel a moral pull to do something about that?
“No, you got your ass kicked. Publicly and repeatedly.” And you need to believe that in order to feel good about yourself, apparently. C’est la vie.
“We were discussing toxic masculinity.” No we were “discussing” nothing. You were attacking me, it was getting late, and I was getting tired of your irrelevant shit.
This is another thread entirely, and I am asking you to please leave off your carry-over abuse.
Because you’re entitled to a clean slate with each new thread? Not the way it works, asshole.
Alan/
You can hear one of the kids chatixing the Black Israeli for being homophobic right during the part where he states ranking in f**s
What I meant to convey is that even if they were only reacting that way in order to put down the BI, it’s encouraing that they, catholic school boys can even conceive of homophobia as being something to criticize. It may represent only slight progress in their worldview, but progress nevertheless
“Good on you for seeing the wickedness inherent in the traditionalist positions.” I prefer to think of it as “misguidedness”; although I’m sure there’s hidebound number in the Curia in which it DOES descend into wickedness.
“While I won’t argue whether your slice of it is nicer (I have no idea), this is called selection bias.” Be that as it may, my “slice”, as you call it, is my understanding of what it means to be Catholic. Conservatives like to call my kind “cafeteria Catholics”, which might be a clever little bit of alliteration, but it ignores the reality that EVERY Catholic is a “cafeteria Catholic”. Even them.
“why do you come here to defend Catholicism…?” I come here to provide perspective.
“Don’t you feel a moral pull to do something about that?” In my little corner of the world, yes. I am more Candide than Sisyphus.
Oh, I think I get it. That is the thread where Ambrose got to be super terrible to everyone, this is the thread where everyone has to listen to Ambrose and pretend he wasn’t super terrible at all, and some other, mythical, yet-to-be revealed thread is the one where the Catholic church’s tolerance/cover up of CSA can be discussed.
“Because you’re entitled to a clean slate with each new thread? Not the way it works, asshole.”
Oh, goody! My very own stalker!
@DesparateAmbrose
“Be that as it may, while the commanders might well have been the equivalent of Waffen-SS, my guess is that the soldiers were more akin to the Wehrmacht.”
Are you alluding here to the notion (once believed and still regrettably popular among non-academic World War II history buffs, and others) that, supposedly, the bulk of the Wehrmacht weren’t substantially motivated by Nazi ideology?
I’m not sure that was what you were referring but it seems so from the context of your comment. I hope not, because that notion is NOT supported by evidence and is known in World War II historiography as “the Wehrmacht myth” or, “Clean Wehrmacht myth” .
Omar Bartov’s Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) is the core text and best scholarly source for the fundamental disproving and dispelling of the “Clean Wehrmacht”myth.
@desperate ambrose:
You know, they said the same thing in the Magdalene laundries. You may also think that
but no, that’s this discussion. The church defended pedophiles and hid evidence of the sexual abuse of children specifically because they thought saving children from abuse would be a worse outcome than the inevitable future abuse because they believed that if saving children from abuse would require disclosing who was doing that abuse -and thus that these were (in these instances) catholic priests and other church employees- saving children’s bodies from sexual abuse would require risk to the church’s soul-saving mission.
And that’s not all. The church is anti-condom in africa despite the fact that condoms prevent AIDS specifically because they believe that the suffering of the body is a lesser problem than the sins that risk the souls of African people.
And that’s not even all: multiple Catholic church officials thought that the death of Savita Halappanavar was a tragedy, but a justifiable one. Some of those thought that permitting easier access to abortion in Ireland would result in a “culture of death” that would spread more human suffering. But they also made the argument that their anti-abortion position saved souls.
When the Amendment 8 repeal measure was on the ballot, they again argued that souls needed the protection of the anti-abortion provision.
The Catholic church – on AIDS in Africa, on sexual abuse of the children of parishioners, on abortion and on other topics – have repeatedly emphasized that the fate of the soul is more important than the fate of the body.
Don’t know what planet you’ve been on this millennium, but if you think that the Catholic church no longer argues souls are more important than bodies it hasn’t been this one.
PS. You didn’t lose the argument over the definition of toxic masculinity because we were closed minded. You did it because you never presented your own definition, you never identified specific weaknesses in the definitions provided, and the only definition that you did present was nothing more than “some people misuse it”.
Yeah, well some people are going to call sunset orange a kind of red, but just because people are misusing the word red in that case doesn’t mean that the definition of red is wrong.
Pro tip: if you want to win an argument, you have to make one.
Valentin, I don’t know if the Black Israeli’s claim that some of the kids looked high is “real” evidence or not- but it’s some kinfd of evidence.
I’ve seen these guys many times- and they generally don’t say things that they don’t believe are true. Being adamantly and aggressively sincere about their proclamations is more their style. Being sardonic, not so much
Still, if you held my feet to a fire and demanded that I prove the boy was high, there’s obviously no smoking gun . no smoking gun. So, you win. That thing that I said I thought might be true cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be true.
“Why… is Ambrose… still… here………”
Because… Mr. Futrelle… hasn’t… Banned me………
@DesparateAmbrose
“Be that as it may, while the commanders might well have been the equivalent of Waffen-SS, my guess is that the soldiers were more akin to the Wehrmacht.”
Are you alluding here to the notion (once believed and still regrettably popular among non-academic World War II history buffs, and others) that, supposedly, the bulk of the Wehrmacht weren’t substantially motivated by Nazi ideology?
I’m not sure that was what you were referring but it seems so from the context of your comment. I hope not, because that notion is NOT supported by evidence and is known in World War II historiography as “the Wehrmacht myth” or, “Clean Wehrmacht myth” .
hippo- thanks for the advice I see now that on my iPhone, I can edite comments.
As for defending racists, that wasn’t my
Intention. Just being racist is damning enough, we don’t have to manufacture incidents to make them worse.
I just watched a video by dusty of “cult of dusty” and he after doing research, also questions the narrative being pushed.
For one thing, on the videos, it appears that Nathan walked into the crowd of boys. They didn’t approach or surround him
Anyway, It’s not about excusing racism. It’s about not slandering some kids. Any racism they hold is not excused
I have never been banned by Rebel Media, but I don’t, like, hang out there. So this isn’t much of an explanation.
I do like that you used the same number of words and periods, so thanks for that bit.
@DesparateAmbrose
“Without doing any research on the subject….”
“Again, without researching it, I’m willing to speculate….”
If this is your approach your comments about anything historical are already invalid.
To borrow from Scildfreja Unnyðnes’s frequent comment to trolls, you need to “hit the literature” (in this case the fucking BASIC historiography, dude)
I mean, good grief, it’s not like the Iberian conquest of the New World in the sixteenth-century isn’t well documented.
Read the first two chapters of Burkholder’s and Johnson’s Colonial Latin America, look at the bibliography of each and read on the conquistadors and their motivations. Heck, I am sitting here with my 3rd ed. of Burkholder and Johnson (it’s a common textbook for upper level Colonial Latin America classes) for which I paid $0.99 USD. It’s commonly available.
If you’re going to talk history inform yourself.
Crip Dyke ~ Your bitterness and rage wear thin. Court is where people win and lose, not on-line message boards.
They reported her as Israeli because that was her passport. In fairness to the random man on Twitter (who probably doesn’t deserve such concern) I did see a few people who didn’t realize that ‘Aiia Maasarwe’ isn’t a Jewish name in Israel jump onto threads to make comments about people caring about this instead of Gaza, apparently unaware that the young woman was herself Palestinian as well as Israeli.
I feel like hell for her family. That the sister was on the phone with her when the attack happened…goddamnit.
Which must be very disappointing for you, since that’s obviously what you’re here for. Poor troll, we’re not taking you seriously.
Hexum, please read the statement from the student and point out where he’s denouncing homophobia.
Pavlovs House ~ Oh, I’m sure there were devoted Nazis in the Wehrmacht as well. Damn few things in history are black/white clean/dirty.
Any books you’d recommend?
@DesparateAmbrose
As for the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth, the core secondary source for revealing what a myth it is and where one can find an authoritative dismantling of the myth is:
Bartov, Omar. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
@ambrose aka SEAGULL BOY
you cant claim stalking when you come into OUR house and shit on the carpet
Re: catholicsm
Dont care about your fucking perspective that defends a pedo ring
USE BLOCKQUOTES YOU STUPID SACK OF SHIT
Any more handholding you require? I’d think someone as knowledgable as you claim to be might just be capable of doing his own research.
But, of course, you couldn’t come up with a definition for toxic masculinity either.
“Bartov, Omar. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.”
Thank you, P.H.
Burkholder’s and Johnson’s “Colonial Latin America”, eh? Hafta see if I can find one. Again, thanx!
Hexum7, you missed my point, it sounds like you are looking for excuses to defend these kids which is really not what you should be doing right now. it is not what any of us should be doing. what we should do is listen to native voices, share what they have to say and uplift their voices. this kind if racism and aggression is *every day* life for natives, and that you look like you are trying to defend these kids suggest that you don’t know that and generally don’t listen to native Americans very often. otherwise you probably will find it a lot easier to believe nate.