a man who has never denied himself anything meets a man who denies himself everything and the hedonist tries to lure the self-abnegator into succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh and succeeds but their rendezvous makes accidentally clear that true pleasure is derived from the perilous destructive nature of intimate connection and eventually true actual love and so we come to conclude that in fact the hedonist is the one who has never allowed himself anything true while the self-abnegator has never strayed from the path of his want and then they put them on ice skates and gave them sticks
people DESPERATE in the notes to explain why the way THEY engage with harry potter is morally pure. It's like white people talking about rap music in there! Libraries buy the books! Fanfiction maintains a conversation around the IP! There is NO WAY to enjoy harry potter in 2025 without publicly supporting JK Rowling!
Please stop fucking reading it so the library doesn't have to pay her money. I am a transgender librarian and I am not allowed to not replace old damaged HP books, people read them so we need to have them on our shelves, and what she does with the money doesn't factor into it.
STOP READING HARRY FUCKING POTTER.
I used to be into it! In-depth character analysis, wizard rock, irl quidditch, but when she outed herself as a piece of shit, I couldn't support it anymore!
ASK YOUR LIBRARY FOR OTHER BOOKS TO READ AND STOP READING HARRY FUCKING POTTER.
there's a family of local sandhill cranes that adopted an abandoned goose last summer and they're STILL together today even after migration.... i love them + they're local celebrities + nature is beautiful
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.
(7/30/26) The Red Cross just declared the second US blood crisis in its history.
Summer sees both a drop off in donations and, at least for our trauma center, a spike in traumas. Trauma centers across the US are in danger of running out of blood for our trauma patients TODAY, which is very scary but, unlike much of the other scary national news coming across our screens these days, is something you can help fix immediately and directly.
We need ASAP donations of blood, for people to spread the word, and for manager types to help facilitate others' donations. All blood types are needed, but universal donor blood (type O) is especially dire.
Many things that previously made people ineligible have been rolled back. If you previously thought you were ineligible, please consider checking current guidelines!
While O- is the most dire need as it can be safely given to anyone in an emergency, all types are needed! Our emergent release blood is being pulled for patients who have a high chance of death if they don't get blood within the hour. Once they're stabilized, they can have their type confirmed and get blood of a specific, matching type released to them so that O- can go to the patients who need it most.
Canada is also in a blood shortage, not just the US. Even if you're not in the USA or Canada, maybe check locally, especially if it's summer where you are.
Starting in 2023, the US switched to Individual Risk Assessment for determining donor eligibility. Prior to that, queer people were banned for life. Now, you just have to be monogamous for 90+ days. Polyamorous people can go fuck ourselves, I guess.
(I dunno how they even determine monogamy? Because you say so?)
imagine going to your first rehearsal for a musical and the first words your characters say to each other are “come home with me” “who are you” “the man who’s gonna marry you” and your first duet is a song about a wedding and you get to fall in love doing a show about The Tragic Greek Lovers Ever and then years later you get married to each other and you become the version of the lovers who get a happy ending and get to go home together and you get to do the show again together and now the characters have a different meaning
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