Answer: JD Vance and Mel Gibson both believed Pope Francis didn’t think or act the way a pope should. I just included the Hulk to throw you off. Let that be a lesson to you all: You can’t trust a riddler.
For some reason, Mel Gibson doesn’t think English is a proper language to say a Catholic Mass in. It should be said in Latin, the language of the people who came up with crucifixion.
I don’t know what problem JD Vance has with the recent pope. How could he have a problem? Pope Francis was already the pope before Vance converted. If he didn’t like the pope who came with the religion, why didn’t he pick another religion?
No, actually, the problem — as Vance and Trump see it — is that Pope Francis called Trump’s immigrant policy a disgrace. So he needed to be corrected face to face, mano-a-mano, by the converted and more correctly Catholic Vance.
Now, I’m not saying that being a Catholic convert makes you less Catholic than the pope, but I think it takes a huge ego to criticize a pope for not being papal enough.
I mean, tell him he’s being immoral, un-Christlike, un-empathic, sure, but leave his Holiness’ popeness out of it.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy.
Personally, I’ve never had a problem with all the empathy Western civilization throws at me. They say that empathy is a cheap substitute for compassion, but I’ll take what I can get.
My usual argument with Western civilization concerns its obsession with objectivity and ultimate truth and reality. Why do people argue whether Platonic idealism is true or not? Or which frequency is best for middle A?
Or was OJ Simpson a really good football player or not? Who was the better Darrin on “Bewitched”: Dick York or Dick Sargent? Bach, Mozart or Beethoven? There can only be one true answer. (Says the riddler. There’s always a riddler behind these questions telling you what the choices must be. In other civilizations, the riddler gets named and called out, just so you know.)
But anyway, what does Musk think of empathy? Well, he says it can be good, but it can be used to persuade people to support bad ideas. Wow. Words from the master himself! Who wants to go to Mars and die there for the good of all humankind? Show of hands? Come on. It’s for the future of the species. Have you no care for the children to come?
Or, yeah, heh, heh, buy these electric cars and save the planet. For the children to come!
If you won’t have empathy for all the children yet unborn, at least bleed in your heart for the human species and buy the cars. Do what empathy tells you to do.
Then there’s RFK Jr. What is wrong with this guy? He said this about autistic children: “They’ll never pay taxes; they’ll never hold a job; they’ll never play baseball; they’ll never write a poem; they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
Yikes. He claims the brain worm is dead, but this quote makes me think it was just sleeping.
Autistic people and their family and friends can’t recognize Kennedy’s description of them.
At least he said “many,” so at the end he belatedly caught himself in the act of egregious over-generalization. If only he had spotted the signs before getting there.
But “they’ll never pay taxes; they’ll never hold a job” wasn’t qualified with “many” — just a flat-out generalization, and a really poor one.
The man wants to claim, with zero evidence before us, that no basketball player, no poet and in fact nobody who has ever dated has been autistic. Please, pull the other leg.
Kennedy says autism is currently as common as one out of 31 children, but he apparently can’t be bothered to know more than a handful who might fit his description. If he did, he’d know how wildly wrong he is. And according to the riddler, if he knew just how wrong he was to say these things, he wouldn’t say them, because no one would want to be so untruthful. It’s contrary to the spirit of Western civilization, you know.
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