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It 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 p
by pavel_lishin 7mo ago
It 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!)