Wow. I knew the current administration was bad but this is something extra.
It also shows the short-sightedness of the "scholars" in the administration. Sure, the Avignon Papacy did occur, that's historical fact.
It's also a historical fact that the Catholic Church is an actually ancient power broker in the world still and they have been around for much, much longer than the United States. The Church is actually quite good at playing the long game (and I say that as someone raised firmly Protestant).
I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment. Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this. I don't feel the pinch will come in the next few years but by 2036 I think the US will wonder what happened.
Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
> Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
I was watching a video by Man carrying thing about Iran war, (he makes skit about things which are still good) and he mentioned the Cuba thing.
I am being 100% serious right now, I thought that it was just a joke of the skit. Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.
As Non-American, where is my say in all of this, heck, where is the say of every american in all of this. Nearly all the americans I know/talk to is disappointed themselves in all of this. You have got to be joking about yet another conflict.
Of course they look like fools, war has changed very quickly in last few years since their friend Putin fully attacked Ukraine but they’re arrogant enough to not notice. Super-sophisticated ultra-expensive weapons are really nice to have but not that useful against swarms of cheap drones.
Even if war hadn't changed, the US would still fail.
I asked someone after the 9/11 attacks about the possibility of the USA invading Iran and even back then I got a "lol no that's nuts the USA would have its arse handed to it" kind of answer. Better phrased, but basically that.
Not the military, they largely did is they were instructed and mostly backed off much of the suggested full on war crimes.
The US administration and the parachuted in TV host head of Crusades that pushed out all the thinky cautious types .. they look like prize idiots, as they always have.
America has been in an ongoing conflict with Cuba since 1959. Trust me, American insanity know absolutely no bounds, the rest of the world needs to wake up and do something about it
> Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
Sadly, I think the answer is yes. Iran might put a brief damper / brake on the timeline but the current US administration seems intent on seizing the moment and pushing out the Castro government once and for all. It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba, even how Fidel Castro first came to power was under the banner of pushing out that era's US-backed administration. And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
EDIT: you mentioned you're a non-American and the Americans you talk to are all upset/disappointed. If you're European especially, the Americans you're most likely to interact with are well-educated and liberal. There are parts of the country that are firmly pro-Trump, where it's completely out of the norm to have liberal / European-style values.
> It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba [...] And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
This is Mark Rubio*, and only Rubio. This admin is all about letting the people who helped put it together each have their turn at using the US as the vehicle for their personal grievances and profits. No part of this admin cares about the United States of America or its history. It's simply a tool for them, they won't have to deal with the fallout from trading it in for generational wealth that puts them above it.
I think you are ignoring the present, and this administrations alternative timeline. If this, and the related Venezuela, happened during the Biden admin, then yes, history would be the factor. This is not that.
AI, Politics, Social Media, and indifference have all played their part. It’s not just the administration. The administration just knows how to manipulate those things.
I'd say closer to 90-100. At least since the New Deal, but probably since the times leading up to it. The America First movement in the lead up to WW2 who thought we should side with the Nazis is indistinguishable from the America First movement today, which is comprised of Nazis.
It's a sombering thought that Germans were not all nazis, their government was. Right now USA has a lot of (semi)closet nazis both in economic and political positions of power.
Bluntly, the alternative to recovery is failure to recover. America being the sole superpower in a mono-polar world until the end of time is hardly pre-ordained
Not sure if you'll find it useful, but this is a prompt I fire when looking at an article. I plug it into all the three main LLM providers, turn on web search (or deep research on occasion) and then see what comes up.
focus: {url}
Analyze the article and provide a brief summary. Then analyze the topic across the political spectrum, from The Nation to National Review. Bring in Financial Times and WSJ coverage as well, include The Economist also.
Analyze coverage of the topic from domestic US news sources and then international news sources.
Consider finally what is outside the Overton window on the topic.
Trump did not rename DoD to DoW like you confidently state to GPT. DoW is a secondary title bestowed to the DoD (as that is all the power the President has). It would take an act of congress to rename the DoD to the DoW.
Your chatgpt results are so much different than mine. Are you using thinking on the newest model on a paid account? Do you have a strong personalization prompt enabled?
Idk which is more impressive that someone referenced the Avignon Papacy in a heat of the moment argument or that the same person who could reference that thought it was a good idea. (Not Catholic...but like...why?)
There is a lot to source from Christian ideals, many of which are the foundations of Western culture: human dignity, moral equality, conscience, limits on power and care for those less fortunate and weaker. Much of what is happening in the world today feels like a stark reversal of those ideals: selfishness and divisiveness manufactured to promote a narrow segment of society.
Recent news articles have indicated an increase in church attendance. This makes sense: we have lost our moral compass... Specifically in the USA... And people are searching for a new direction.
I have recently deepened my search in Christianity which started with the Catholic Church, one of few points I struggle with when it comes to Catholicism is the papacy, and the Avignon Papacy debacle and the events that followed (a la Western Schism) has quite a bit to do with that. I was a little confused by what they meant here by “threatening with the Avignon Papacy.” If anyone else is curious, I think the phrase “Babylonian Captivity” will provide better context, as it is what some contemporaries and later historians called it as it appeared that the Church had been “captured” by French political interests, with the popes being seen as too cozy to the French king and less focused on their universal spiritual role.
Threatening the holy father is not something I entirely expected, but when you couple that with statements like "We have the military power to do what we want" it becomes rather terrifying.
WW3 is shaping up to be a theocratic holy war struggle between Christianity, Judaism, Islam ... and all of us secular folks have to suffer for their ignorance and intolerance.
> a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force
The history of American diplomacy is mostly of an iron fist wearing a thin glove. This administration removes the glove. It is in line with the transparency of the Department of War v. Defense. Consensus is the label they put on the package of sausages to save face.
I know that Hacker News can be for anything "hackers find interesting," but I really hope it doesn't become yet another political doomland. There are so many other places to go to raise your anxiety - I'd rather this remain a space for things that are positively interesting.
Worth noting: the source of this claim is anonymous, and so far the framing of the statement feels a little more radical than maybe what was said in the meeting.
I can't speak my mind openly because it would be fedposting. However, something must be done about this group of outlaws that has assumed power in the US.
What is tiresome is how sincerely these people insist on being able to make everyone act according to their will, while simultaneously displaying weakness, incompetence, and extreme pettiness. Trying to threaten people into respecting them. The lack of class is just so unsightly.
>According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at the administration.
>What enraged them most was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
I would care more about the plight of the pope if it the church was not still covering for nonces and other malfeasance. I do not view them as arbiters of morality.
If the people ruling the US nowadays ever read the Bible they would likely reject the word of Jesus as woke bullshit. And if they do read the book, they likely only care about the bits related to the end of the world, and are hellbent (hah) in speeding it up.
This is similar to Joseph Stalin who famously asked, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" to dismiss the Vatican's political and military influence.
Time in minutes after which christian nationalists will form a circular firing squad once they've cemented their grip on the US government: 2
The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The colony of Maryland was originally intended to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.
I guess this is what happens when you get a government composed of ignorant assholes. These times are challenging for those of us who believe in democracy.
Catholics now have to decide if they will continue to support the pro-life party even as the Trump administration demands the pope redefine the catechism of the Catholic Church at Trump's whim.
Non Christian here, I feel like How I feel can be accurately summarized by this poem
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist ...[0]
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
What this feels is just an escalation. There are some devout catholics who might've voted for Trump and his antics, perhaps feeling for a christian identity.
I definitely feel like there was something similar to that poem where they first came for W,X and Y people and people didn't speak out now its Z people and no one is left to speak.
It's easy within humanity to hate a particular outside group and sometimes that becomes the basis of the inside group. I wish to say that Humanity has multiple problems, we can try to make a better world by co-operation and hope that we learn from this dark chapter in history from the last year or two.
I don't wish to blame anyone because blaming leads to nowhere, Sadly, we haven't learn from the past atrocities thus we are within the present but I just hope that with open-ness we can learn from the past, we can learn from the present and I hope that we can only leave a better future for the next generation to come.
It's hard to give hope right now in reality but I hope to give others what I am lacking right now myself at times. all these things are truly for petty reasons. I expect better from humanity but perhaps this is an weird form of equilibrium but we are humans and we can think for ourselves and change things and build a better future for all of us hopefully.
We can do better, and I hope so that we will. Have a nice day to all.
309 comments
It also shows the short-sightedness of the "scholars" in the administration. Sure, the Avignon Papacy did occur, that's historical fact.
It's also a historical fact that the Catholic Church is an actually ancient power broker in the world still and they have been around for much, much longer than the United States. The Church is actually quite good at playing the long game (and I say that as someone raised firmly Protestant).
I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment. Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this. I don't feel the pinch will come in the next few years but by 2036 I think the US will wonder what happened.
Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
> Also...I don't think a fast-follow conflict in Cuba right after this Iran affair is going to do much good, but that seems like where their appetite is going next.
I was watching a video by Man carrying thing about Iran war, (he makes skit about things which are still good) and he mentioned the Cuba thing.
I am being 100% serious right now, I thought that it was just a joke of the skit. Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.
As Non-American, where is my say in all of this, heck, where is the say of every american in all of this. Nearly all the americans I know/talk to is disappointed themselves in all of this. You have got to be joking about yet another conflict.
> After the Iran war where now Iran gets to tax the Strait of Hormuz, something it previously didn't do.
I find it hilarious that one of the conditions of the ceasefire is that the straight opens. It was open prior to the war. Great negotiation. Wow.
The US administration and military look like fools.
I asked someone after the 9/11 attacks about the possibility of the USA invading Iran and even back then I got a "lol no that's nuts the USA would have its arse handed to it" kind of answer. Better phrased, but basically that.
The US administration and the parachuted in TV host head of Crusades that pushed out all the thinky cautious types .. they look like prize idiots, as they always have.
China behaves quite responsibly outside of their borders (which are a bit fluid with regards to Taiwan and the seas, but still).
Sadly, I think the answer is yes. Iran might put a brief damper / brake on the timeline but the current US administration seems intent on seizing the moment and pushing out the Castro government once and for all. It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba, even how Fidel Castro first came to power was under the banner of pushing out that era's US-backed administration. And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
EDIT: you mentioned you're a non-American and the Americans you talk to are all upset/disappointed. If you're European especially, the Americans you're most likely to interact with are well-educated and liberal. There are parts of the country that are firmly pro-Trump, where it's completely out of the norm to have liberal / European-style values.
> It's "beef" that goes a long way back, if you look up the history of Cuba [...] And Cuba had been a point of major US economic interests as well so the USA was not happy to see the rise of the Communists in their backyard.
This is Mark Rubio*, and only Rubio. This admin is all about letting the people who helped put it together each have their turn at using the US as the vehicle for their personal grievances and profits. No part of this admin cares about the United States of America or its history. It's simply a tool for them, they won't have to deal with the fallout from trading it in for generational wealth that puts them above it.
*The NYT has many pieces on this
I think you don't know your US history.
> Are we actually being serious right now of America doing a conflict with Cuba?
Trump says 'Cuba is next' in speech touting US military successes - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-says-cuba-is-ne...
:shrug:
Putin has been working on this since he came to power, ~30 some years
Israel has been trying to make the US do its dirty work since the first oil crisis in the 70s too / Yom Kippur War.
> I saw a headline in NYT today saying this current historical situation is the United States "Suez Crisis" moment.
From the get go it looked like an engineered "Suez Crisis", on the inside and out. Nobody with real power is that dumb.
> Hard to disagree and hard to see how America recovers from this.
Hard or not, there's no alternative to recovery.
focus: {url}
Analyze the article and provide a brief summary. Then analyze the topic across the political spectrum, from The Nation to National Review. Bring in Financial Times and WSJ coverage as well, include The Economist also.
Analyze coverage of the topic from domestic US news sources and then international news sources.
Consider finally what is outside the Overton window on the topic.
Your chatgpt results are so much different than mine. Are you using thinking on the newest model on a paid account? Do you have a strong personalization prompt enabled?
Just another day.
Recent news articles have indicated an increase in church attendance. This makes sense: we have lost our moral compass... Specifically in the USA... And people are searching for a new direction.
> America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
Yeah, well. That aged like raw milk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Expedit
> a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force
The history of American diplomacy is mostly of an iron fist wearing a thin glove. This administration removes the glove. It is in line with the transparency of the Department of War v. Defense. Consensus is the label they put on the package of sausages to save face.
> Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned the Holy See’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to the Pentagon.
Can the DOD do this? This seems more like the purview of State.
Other news publications are trying to get the full story: https://x.com/jdflynn/status/2042076430406672829?s=46&t=u6IW...
I wouldn't put anything past the current admin, but I don't know what the US could stand to gain from directly antagonizing the Vatican.
In any case, perhaps we will soon see the return of Catholic persecution in the U.S. due to "conflicting" loyalties between Pope and country...
>According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at the administration.
>What enraged them most was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
they then proceed to insinuate use of force.
How does this land with them?
> America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
I‘m pretty sure the god they often mentioned would see that differently.
Not that anybody really believed they are true believers and just hypocrites.
https://xcancel.com/BrianBurchUSA/status/2042307511504519366
I'm going to put this in the "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" bin.
If the people ruling the US nowadays ever read the Bible they would likely reject the word of Jesus as woke bullshit. And if they do read the book, they likely only care about the bits related to the end of the world, and are hellbent (hah) in speeding it up.
Now we're fast tracking the Rapture.
Assuming that doesn't work out for them, who are they going to follow when the Chosen One doesn't get a 3rd term?
The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.
The colony of Maryland was originally intended to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist ...[0]
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
What this feels is just an escalation. There are some devout catholics who might've voted for Trump and his antics, perhaps feeling for a christian identity.
I definitely feel like there was something similar to that poem where they first came for W,X and Y people and people didn't speak out now its Z people and no one is left to speak.
It's easy within humanity to hate a particular outside group and sometimes that becomes the basis of the inside group. I wish to say that Humanity has multiple problems, we can try to make a better world by co-operation and hope that we learn from this dark chapter in history from the last year or two.
I don't wish to blame anyone because blaming leads to nowhere, Sadly, we haven't learn from the past atrocities thus we are within the present but I just hope that with open-ness we can learn from the past, we can learn from the present and I hope that we can only leave a better future for the next generation to come.
It's hard to give hope right now in reality but I hope to give others what I am lacking right now myself at times. all these things are truly for petty reasons. I expect better from humanity but perhaps this is an weird form of equilibrium but we are humans and we can think for ourselves and change things and build a better future for all of us hopefully.
We can do better, and I hope so that we will. Have a nice day to all.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came (The poem continues but I am trimming it for context of this message)