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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 though
by Avicebron 7mo ago
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?)
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoIt doesn't sound like a heat-of-the-moment reference, but a very calculated one based on this line from the article: > 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.
- colechristensen 7mo agoIt sounds like some hothead idiot driven by the big orange hothead idiot prompted Claude about how to threaten the Vatican and then used its talking points on the ambassador. So "calculated" maybe, but only because AI could come up with the answer, I have serious doubts that many of these people possess more than basic literacy much less the ability to come up with something like this. Or some CIA analyst who hates their job came up with this to mock their bosses.
- ecshafer 7mo ago[flagged]
- triceratops 7mo agoDespite being a middle schooler with more than a passing interest in history I only learned about it when I started playing Crusader Kings in my adulthood.
- knowaveragejoe 7mo agoNo, they really aren't. But I wouldn't put it past "trad" types.
- Arodex 7mo ago[flagged]
- Tossrock 7mo agoThis is hilarious. You think middle school students know about the Avignon papacy? They don't even know about the Ford presidency.
- dekhn 7mo agoThis was definitely covered in my middle school classes (although those were 40 years ago). Standard US public school. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the Antipope, it always sounded like such a cool job name. We also read Genesis in English classes (from a literary perspective).
- ecshafer 7mo agoI think you are missing the key qualifier with a passing interest in history. I absolutely knew of the avignon papacy in middle school.
- hamdingers 7mo agoThe average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.
- littlestymaar 7mo agoAnd quartz of course!
- littlestymaar 7mo ago(Reference for those wondering: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/)
- littlestymaar 7mo agoEven in France I'm willing to bet the majority of people outside of Avignon have no idea about it. Any history major with interest in medieval Europe, yes, any middle schooler? No way.
- jltsiren 7mo agoIt was part of the elementary school curriculum in Finland in the 90s, and it sounds like something that would have been in the traditional curriculum for earlier generations. The Finnish term translates as "Avignon captivity" rather than the more neutral "Avignon Papacy", which could be a clue. It's easy to imagine that a traditional Protestant society would use a debacle like that to illustrate how silly those Catholics and their power struggles are and why the Reformation was necessary.
- tallanvor 7mo agoYeah, no, that's an insane claim to make. Obviously American education covers some information about religion in history classes, but that level of detail about catholic history is not normal curriculum for elementary, middle, or high school.
- xp84 7mo agoCan confirm - I had an excellent, Christian School education through Middle School, and even we didn't hear about that.
- littlestymaar 7mo agoIn France History is a very big part of the curriculum (almost a quarter of the time until you get to high school) and this episode is barely mentioned despite happening in our very country.
- ecshafer 7mo agoI am not talking about what American education covers nor the average American. But what people with an interest in History, who are reading history books, watching history documentaries, etc. would know. Avignon is not that deep.
- ncr100 7mo agoNo - I had a bunch of history and did not encounter that.
- snayan 7mo agoWhere did you go to middle school lol
- triceratops 7mo agoAvignon probably.
- lostlogin 7mo ago> Jumping to “AI” is a bit much. Do you remember the tariffs list debacle? One line of thought is that AI generated that fiasco. https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/did-donald-trump-use-chatgpt-to-create-liberation-day-tariffs-plan-heres-what-reports-state-as-many-say-ai-is-running-the-country/articleshow/119986834.cms https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/did-donald...
- toyg 7mo agoNot taking these people seriously is how we got here. Please stop making that mistake. These people are insane.
- colechristensen 7mo agoThe president can threaten to wipe out a civilization without any meaningful repercussions. I'm calling them idiots, which they are. No doubt if they thought it wouldn't cause excessive embarrassment anxiety in the president they'd try to murder the pope.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoThey are idiots with nuclear weapons and a complete lock on all three branches of government. They are also immune to embarrassment.
- colechristensen 7mo ago>They are also immune to embarrassment. No, they, especially one of them has EXTREME anxiety about his image, just not in the way that normal people do. He's got the psychology of an anxious child wanting to please a neglectful father. This is why TACO. And why every third word is some ridiculous boast about something nonsensical. This is insecurity driven politics and its WHY HE GOT ELECTED. Fear and insecurity electing what they imagine strength to be. What would the stupidest, most insecure, adult child think is the pinnacle of strength? ... yup. And the attention economy is being set up to exploit this demographic because it's the lowest common denominator and it WORKS. Evolutionarily it's some kind of mechanism to weed out the weaknesses in a population by exaggerating them so it's easier for natural selection to weed them out? Or punishing the rest of us for not doing enough about it before it got so bad... something like that.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoTrump is susceptible to narcissistic injury, but I don't know if you could call it 'embarrassment.' The latter implies some sense of regret or shame, and he appears incapable of either. You might as well expect Alex Honnold to exhibit a fear of heights. Since whatever happens to Trump is always somebody else's fault, why should embarrassment come into the picture? They're the ones who should be embarrassed! And so on. Trump's followers are also utterly shameless, and they're the ones that matter since they vote in such large numbers. Just like their leader, if they could be embarrassed, they would be, but they're not.
- Teever 7mo agoYou’d be surprised. A lot of religious people are extremely knowledgeable about historical stuff related to their religions. They might draw the absolutely worst conclusions from their historical knowledge and have incredibly biased takes but they’ve actually read and discussed these things which is more than you can say for your average person. It ultimately comes from their personal identify being so intricately tied to the religious organization that they are a part of — on some level they view these historical events as their own personal history as they identify as a ‘evangelical Christian’ or ‘orthodox Jew’ more than they view themselves as a person named Dave who has a family and stuff. At the end of the day it’s all just more Hatfield and McCoys or tribal warfare over a goat that was killed centuries ago bullshit.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoBest analogy for religion I've ever heard: "A D&D game that went too far." If you've seen diehard gamers go on for hours about the minutiae of various editions of countless rulebooks, you can imagine what it's like when devout Catholics get together to talk shop. There are subtleties to this particular pissing match that aren't immediately obvious. The Vatican is starting to rein in the Opus Dei cult-within-a-cult. After John Paul II canonized its founder in 2002 on shaky grounds, later Popes have started to think that maybe they went a little too far. Meanwhile, Opus Dei has focused on gaining more secular influence in government (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevin-roberts-project-2025-opus-dei https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevi...).
- fhdkweig 7mo agoCollegeHumor (now Dropout) made a sketch covering this "Religious People are Nerds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucHxl9QwbX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucHxl9QwbX8
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoFunny, that's how I tend to view my religious Jewish friends. I have a few Catholic friends, and I feel like I never have conversations about the technicalities of their religious views, but it comes up more with my Jewish friends, and it's always basically as much fun to chat about that with them as it is to chat about D&D with my D&D friends (which is a lot!)
- newer_vienna 7mo agoEh I'd expect any diplomat to have the historical knowledge to reference important Church events, especially if there's time to prepare before speaking with church representatives. It was a very significant political period in Catholic history!
- benzible 7mo agoIf you would expect a typical Trump political appointee, as Colby is, to have even basic historical knowledge, then you may not be paying close attention.
- newer_vienna 7mo agoColby went to Harvard and Yale, and worked at State. Of course he knows history. Would be like claiming a Stanford guy doesn't know programming
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- benzible 7mo agoLike maybe this guy? https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-technical-coding https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-tech... Or this guy? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/18/jared-kushner-harvard-donald-trump-son-in-law https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/18/jared-...
- lostlogin 7mo agoYou expect this administration to rely on domain experts? Can you give some examples of this?
- newer_vienna 7mo agoAnyone in a diplomatic role is briefed and trained by domain experts. I know many of these staff assistants in DC myself. But my point is that even a novice diplomat has historical knowledge to know about Avignon
- giraffe_lady 7mo agoIt is literally this tweet from a few years ago: > Every lifelong Catholic I've ever met is like "I think we're supposed to give this food to poor people" and every adult convert is like "the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have driver's licenses."
- CobrastanJorji 7mo agoYou get three kinds of adult converts. The first kind of convert wants to marry somebody Catholic. They're joining because they love somebody. The second kind of convert was approached by missionaries that built their community a school or a well or something, and they're grateful that somebody clearly cares about them and their community. The third type of convert, though, joins because they like the structure. They like the gravitas. They like the moral absolutes. They like the patriarchal hierarchy that doesn't let women lead. They sign up and immediately declare that Vatican 2 was a terrible mistake and that all of the popes since then have been illegitimate. JD Vance didn't join because he loved their soup kitchens.
- axus 7mo agoThe third group ends up joining the Russian Orthodox church.
- giraffe_lady 7mo agoI'm actually eastern orthodox and we do get a lot of this type, but plenty of them convert to catholicism as well. It seems to mostly be a matter of aesthetic preference. Not many convert to actual russian orthodox the way orthodox people mean it, because there simply are not very many ROCOR parishes in the US compared to other options.
- selectodude 7mo agoI imagine that's the case in a lot of Europe but the Russian Orthodox Church doesn't really exist in the US, especially post-Ukraine war.
- mapotofu 7mo ago> the same person who could reference that Let’s not give that same person more credit than they deserve. I’m sure they came preprepared with some LLM derived threats for when they didn’t get what they wanted from the Vatican.
- uxp100 7mo agoNah, I’m sure Elbridge Colby knew about this. His political views may be unpleasant (I mean, I think there is far worse in the Trump administration, but I’m not a supporter of any of them) but he’s definitely in the well read in history section of maga.
- rhcom2 7mo agoHe is also Catholic himself.
- anigbrowl 7mo agoAgreed. He is imho a very smart guy, just one who holds radically different values. It seems to me an awful lot of people get stuck in the trap of believing everyone else is fundamentally like them, and differences of opinion are based soly on differences in information or intelligence. The reality is that people can be smart and have fundamentally different views about what what constitutes fair, reasonable, decent, etc.
- mapotofu 7mo agoI wouldn’t say it’s a difference in views. It sounds quixotic in the face of embarrassing defeats of US military in the last few decades. One can read a lot of books and still be an idiot.
- flohofwoe 7mo agoSounds like a Europa Universalis player tbh ;)
- red-iron-pine 7mo agotiming means crusader kings
- drumhead 7mo agoFun Fact - Elbridge Colby is a Catholic, maybe time for excommunication?
- rawgabbit 7mo agoThere are Catholics who argue that Francis and Leo are not real Catholics and will argue Trump is the chosen one. Some are my family members. I am as always speechless.
- hydrogen7800 7mo agoI hear similar from my own Mother. I don't know the extent of what she believes, because I don't want to ask, but there is a strong rejection of Leo among the American right. It seems as simple as challenging Trump to a degree, and retroactively finding justification for invalidating the pope. I suppose I could dip into her media diet and find out myself.
- rawgabbit 7mo agoWith my family members, it is useless for me to bring up the fact that Ratzinger/Benedict supervised the revised Catechism. They don’t believe in that categorically.
- Arodex 7mo agoYeah. Trump fits the definition of "the whore of Babylon" to a T (a sex maniac coming from New York) and not only they are unable to even imagine it, they think the exact opposite.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agorubes gonna rube. what's the robert frost quote, something like "if you could reason with religious people we wouldn't have religious people"
- MSFT_Edging 7mo agoThere's this weird affect of modern "trad" catholic converts. Not everyone who's an adult convert acts this way, but most converts obsessed with "trad" aesthetics seem to be. They obsess over the law, doctrine, and history of the Catholic church. Invoking events from millennia prior, and despite converting to Catholicism by choice, will denounce the Pope for being woke or what have you, insisting it's not the true Catholic church. It's extremely bizarre and counterintuitive. Why convert to the branch of Christianity with the elected god-king if you don't want to listen to the elected god-king?
- lostlogin 7mo agoReligious sects that have branched off is sort of an American thing from its very founding. Not sure if the New World was attractive or the Old Wold needed to rid itself of the chaos. The effect was the same.
- IAmBroom 7mo agoA Brit once told me (jokingly) that they celebrate Thanksgiving, too - it was when they got rid of the Puritans.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago> Why convert to the branch of Christianity with the elected god-king if you don't want to listen to the elected god-king? Maybe they just want to indulge in eating human flesh and blood? (AFAIK, Catholicism includes the belief that during Communion, the bread and wine literally transform into the flesh and blood of Jesus).
- MSFT_Edging 7mo agoLots of folks say it's just their desire for a highly organized and patriarchal structure which they would like to co-op for their own purposes, and get mad when it doesn't move to their favor.
- dragonwriter 7mo agoI mean, summoning a diplomat to issue threats is usually the opposite of “heat of the moment”, but...