• 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      17 days ago

      since the church has no military/economic power, his influence is purely cultural so yes the pope is basically a celebrity.

      • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        15 days ago

        Wouldn’t the Catholic Church be closer to a corporation in that sense? With all the churches they own and the land those churches take up. Granted, even within that framing, the pope is arguably still more celebrity than CEO, if only because there is such contention with the Catholic Church and trying to make any sort of decisions that have broad impact on Catholic practice risks another schism.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    17 days ago

    If England will win the Euro’s I’ll stop watching football. Seeing Harry Mouthbreather Kane lift the trophy will be my death.

  • Cadendee [they/them]@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    19 days ago

    Reading Liberalism: A Counter-History and I finally feel like I’m getting to the really juicy bits (2/3 through the book. The earlier half was good and probably a necessary foundation, but got a bit repetitive-feeling).

    My thoughts (spoilered because long):

    first off if any motherfucker invokes divine providence to justify inequality: gulag

    second: liberal theorists love to draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say that their principles and reasoning only apply to one side. The distinction they drew between “civil” and “political” laws, or the “totally good and normal laws that help the rich” vs the “impermissible welfare laws interfering with the divine will of providence that the poor stay in poverty”, the exclusion of labour relations as an inherently non-political question, etc. Often these seeming contradictions and their unconvincing justifications follow from unquestioned beliefs like the inferiority of “other races”, the belief that the poor deserve to be poor, and simple self-centeredness (only considering the freedoms of people like them, typically upper-class, of the dominant racial group, etc. and disregarding the lack of freedoms accorded to other groups)

    third: The quote about anti-semites and ridiculous arguments applies. They will in one breath condemn you as backwards and wishing to bring back absolute monarchism by expanding the state, bring back medieval forms like the guild in the form of unions, or take on the pre-modern role of the established church (providing welfare is equated with the church’s organized charity), and in the next breath glorify the past as a simpler time when people (serfs) weren’t so uppity, but also a golden age of individualism (for Great Men, anyhow, entirely disregarding the lack of autonomy of the serfs, and of course disregarding great/influential individuals leading uprisings against them, e.g. Toussaint L’Ouverture.) Much of this is echoed in modern discourse. Using necessary force to implement the will of the people against the formerly powerful, is condemned as authoritarian, while using more distributed power structures to confine the majority of the population in effective servitude is totally fine and normal and Democratic even.

    fourth: We should be mindful of those we ally with and their reasonings. The christian abolitionists in the US were on the right side of history when condemning and fighting the chattel slavery practiced in the south, but their reasons for hating it were not necessarily aligned with a purely socialist perspective. They tended to see it more in terms of the sinfulness it enabled on the part of slaveholders(sexual assault was pervasive, among other things), of not allowing slaves to be converted to christianity, and of forcing them to be complicit in the above sin, so when slavery was officially abolished (outside of prisons, anyhow), the christian-fueled radicalism of the abolitionists crumbled, despite the persistence of incredible levels of oppression against the freed slaves in the south, both politically and economically, not to mention the blind spot many had for the oppression of Black people in the north. For many, their conviction against slavery came more from the sin aspect than from a genuine belief in equality, or even in simply improving the lives of the enslaved.

    I could probably write more but I don’t have the time. The book is good.

  • ashinadash [she/her]@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Just got done writing a short essay that sums up a bit about Zionism, the short history of Israel, pinkwashing and western imperialism. I did not say “another kkkracka down” or “death to america”, I did not say “workers of the world unite” or yell about pro-Hamas stuff, I basically kept it to the most digestible facts about the atrocities the Zionist entity has inflicted upon the people of Palestine and why all violence against Israel is self defense.

    My dad asked me “now why would gays support gaza? can you tell me that?” He has fucked around and is going to learn about finding out.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Great news for me: I’m going to have a shorter life.

    Everybody is too busy to talk to me, finding clubs within walking distance is impossible, I can’t just knock on a neighbor’s door to ask if they want to talk, and I can speak from experience that attempting to befriend service workers is never a good idea. I’m all set!

  • Darkerseid@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    16 days ago

    can someone nuke orange site? there are people there arguing about nordstream 2 blowing up is russian plot. 🤣

  • bloubz@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    15 days ago

    Thank you everyone who participated on the Lemmy Canvas Palestine flag I started this morning

    The red arrow isn’t quite right (I’ll put the template settings under this comment) but that’s completely fine for now

    • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      16 days ago

      That’s not much space to move around in. I could see how it would be much more fast paced.

  • ashinadash [she/her]@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    0·
    19 days ago

    Great news: the soviet union never fell! Russia is a communist country! Or at least that’s what my dad said to me when I told him that the soviet union fell in 1991 and it was a huge TV event. He just said “no it didn’t”, lol. The man is 60. He’s a regular “left” leaning liberal, so this confuses me. Does he think the fall of the soviet union was some sort of false flag op or some shit???

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    16 days ago

    Today I had a funeral of someone on my gf’s family side. The deceased was a very active Christian Evangelical believer and the funeral was in an Evangelical Church. I was raised a Catholic but haven’t been to church for a long time.

    The funeral consisted of Christian songs, prayers and bible readings. There were a lot of younger people (13-15 year olds) there. It surprised me that they all knew every prayer, reading and song front to back. Like, I couldn’t imagine any Dutch youth still so active in the church. But they exist, I guess. It’s the Bible Belt for a reason. Big cultural surprise, in my own country.