imagine you had a friend who constantly made jokes at the expense of something you loved. they're never funny, but they seem to expect you to laugh even though the punchline is just, "this thing you love sucks ass". it's not even really a joke, there's nothing funny about it, you can tell that they genuinely actually believe it. but they insist it's just a joke!
no matter what the situation is, they're always bringing the social interaction to a screeching halt with these jokes. nobody ever wants to participate in this joke with them. nobody agrees with the premise. nobody ever knows what to say afterwards, it's just an awkward moment and a subject change. but they just keep doing it.
you have to stop with the self-deprecatory "humor", it's not fun for anyone including you.
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
And here is the resulting image. There is at least Someone in the U.K. government who is actually doing their job, and it is Chief Mouser to the Cabinet, Larry the Cat.
This what I mean when I say science writing is terrible and you need to actually go back to the academic publications themselves to get what’s going on
was outside earlier and a bird Came Up, squatted down, fluttered it’s wings at me and opened its mouth like a hatchling begging for food (it was a grown female) so I went and checked the seed cube in the feeder and the thing was completely covered in mold. this is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. how did she know im the one in charge of the birdseed. How Did She Know To Pantomime Hunger At Me. Hello.
i have spent my afternoon confusedly getting dressed, driving to the store, purchasing a new seed block, driving home, washing the cage, and getting the feeder set back up. i don’t take this much care for my Own nutrition. ive been bullied into a grocery store run by a tufted titmouse. i feel so loved
Late for an appointment this morning because my beautiful son child stole a wrapped and bagged bologna sandwich containing roughly 300% his maximum safe sodium intake out of the lunch box in my backpack while I was on the shitter and refused to spit it out
in hindsight, growing up as an aromantic person who didn't know aromanticism was a thing...it woulda been really easy for me to assume that something was wrong with me, that I was "broken" or "missing" some piece of humanity.
luckily I was autistic, oblivious, and had a huge ego. it literally never occurred to me to frame it as a "me" problem. i just thought every single person i knew was a dumbass
If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules
Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u
I watched the live action version of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" on Youtube and I was not ready for the utter lack of emotions from the CGI animals.
Nala looking concerned about Simba hiding something about his past, a comparison:
Also, in CGI this song called "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" does not take place at night.
Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.
During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.
The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors.
The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general!
Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.
