The Republic of Heaven

"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." 29

[vlicamothr]

The Asymmetry of Revolution

[allbluesanji]

[amiyayuri]

[amarguerite]

Person who has burned too much midnight oil: Hunh I wonder why I am out of oil at noon on a Wednesday. It surely cannot be the consequences of my actions from the past month

[inthefallofasparrow]

Person who has been burning their candle at both ends: Why does my candle keep falling over?

[ellipsus-writes]

Pope Leo XIV wrote 42.3K words on human dignity in the age of AI. (But Ellipsus has written over 65K words on the topic since 2023. 💪)

Solidarity is a weird thing… all of a sudden you’re seeing the Pope on your dash and the tea is… piping hot? (To offset the Vatican.va link, here's a tl;dr from The Onion.) ... Look at him go!

(Disagreements with his Holiness aside, it’s great to see a powerful figure power taking the side of the people.) ... EDIT: Wake up babe, a new Inquisition just dropped - apparently, not even the Pope can escape being wrongly accused by AI "verifiers."

[fus-mar-hoz]

the catholic church covers up child sexual abuse, lobbies for clemency toward abusive priests, bans gender-affirming care in its hospitals, blocks divorce access across entire countries, and tightens its position on abortion while hundreds of thousands of people are affected by those positions in ways that are immediate and material. these translate into denied healthcare, into legal systems shaped by ecclesiastical lobbying, into abuse survivors who were systematically failed and then watched their institution ask for mercy on behalf of the people who harmed them.

filing all of that under mere "disagreements" signals how unprincipled this reaction you perform is. this framing only holds if you've already decided that opposition to AI is the only relevant axis, and the actual politics, the actual institutional record, the actual people on the receiving end of church policy, gets brushed aside because it's inconvenient to the posts you want to make.

a position that evaluates institutions by whether they've said something useful about your issue, and brackets everything else as secondary, has no mechanism for discerning if praising what is among the most reactionary institution of our time making one statement that aligns with your interests while continuing to cause serious harm in every direction its power reaches is a good choice. the reflex of single-issue politics ends up celebrating an institution with a documented record of what it does with the dignity of people actually vulnerable to it, on the basis that it produced however many words useful to the discourse.

the only progressive thing a pope can do is resign, and that holds regardless of who occupies the position, because the institution is what causes the harm. no encyclical changes what the institution does with its hospitals, its political influence, or its internal handling of abuse. celebrating it because it produced 42,000 words that give the anti-AI discourse more ammunition treats the people harmed by church policy as acceptable collateral in a masturbatory culture war about technology.

[princess-of-phyresis]

they're selling anti-ai slogans on sweatshop-produced t-shirts. i don't need to write the poem for you to get it do i

[w0nderland42]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

[rabbiteclair]

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

[f4therlesssss]

fool me once that’s not very nice why would you do that to me

[northern-punk-lad]

No one talks about extermination they just do it

[pansy2025]

goo goo dolls if they were in dune: and i don’t want the worm to see me

[theconcealedweapon]

A teenager cannot get reconstructive surgery. But a parent can circumcise a baby.

A teenager cannot get body modifications. But a parent can pierce a baby's ears.

A teenager (or even a 20 year old) cannot buy cigarettes. But a parent can smoke in places where their toddler is forced to be.

What a teenager chooses is met with stricter scrutiny than what's forced on a very young child.

[depsidase]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the thing about the You Don't Have To Hand It To The Pope situation that makes me really insane is the sheer number of people going "oh okay so now the pope is responsible for everything bad the catholic church has ever done? all of that is his fault?🙄🙄🙄" as if we're talking about some random schmuck with a rosary and not the world's #1 head catholic bitch in charge in his fancy little dipshit hat sitting on a throne made of pilfered riches and the bones of people who were killed for his god. like yeah actually that guy kind of does need to be held accountable for the past and present crimes of the organization he's in charge of actually. that's sort of what being the boss entails.

[dragongirlbunny]

you do not under any circumstances gotta hand it to the supreme patriarch of the roman catholic church

[twotheleft]

[facts-i-just-made-up]

What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is the opiate of the very, very few.