Bee7884

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy.

It ranks, along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, as the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy.

For Saad, empathy—in itself a perfectly decent trait—has become so grossly exaggerated that it threatens truth, reality, and justice.

Cases in point abound: so they won’t feel bad about themselves, we’ll allow biological men to compete in women’s sports and crush the dreams of thousands of young women; so as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we will permit unqualified candidates to have positions in universities and the corporate world; so that everyone might feel included, we will characterize the meritocracy as “white privilege,” etc.

As I was making my way through Saad’s book, I kept remarking the sharp distinction between empathy and love.

To empathize is to enter profoundly into the experience of another and to endeavor not to hurt that person’s feelings. But to love is, as Thomas Aquinas taught, “to will the good of the other.”

As I said, in itself and all things being equal, empathy is a good thing. But it is not the same as love, which, depending on circumstances, can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings.

When a professor gives a student a “C” as an honest reflection of his work, he might well be insulting him, but he’s also telling him the truth and perhaps even urging him to try harder.

When, in the Confessional, a priest tells a murderer to turn himself in to the police, he’s undoubtedly making that person’s life more uncomfortable, but he’s also willing the man’s good.

Any decent parent knows that showing real love for her children means engendering all kinds of bad feelings in them.

In light of this distinction, we can understand why Jesus didn’t say, “have empathy for one another,” but rather “love one another.” And why St. John the Evangelist didn’t say, “God is empathy,” but rather “God is love.”

It occurred to me as I was reading Saad’s book that one reason Wokeism has seized the consciousness of so many in the West is that Christianity has faded as a cultural force and Christians themselves have forgotten what stands at the heart of their faith.

[Those Who Speak Podcast @ThoseWhoSpeakCC]

Rogers v Wittaker in 1992 established the precedent of Informed Consent by law across all of Australian medicine.

Is this robust standard - which minimizes risk and enforces safeguards - being applied to Australian Gender Medicine (especially pediatric)? Kat explains..
@KatKarena @A_W_W_ANZ @RCHMelbourne @Jilliantweeting

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

The swab test is not for testosterone levels. It's for the sex marker 'SRY' gene. As you all know.

The ignorance of commentators like @TunedIntoTennis on this (who has turned off replies, of course) combined with the willingness to display that ignorance, is quite remarkable.

[David Collier @mishtal]

In a matter of days, Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of people.

In three years, Israel could have wiped out Gaza’s population. Instead, it sent aid, warned civilians, and risked its own soldiers.

The claim that Gaza is a genocide is a deliberately vindictive libel.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

Literally the only reason why trans activists are against sex testing in women’s sport is because they are fully aware that it will confirm men claiming to be women are not women.

[Shannon 🇺🇸I stand with America @thewriterme]

Short clip. This is why we love Rubio!!

[Baba Banaras™ @RealBababanaras]

She got justice
The devil is dead

Taher Ahmad Salem Abd al-Wahed, an Islamic Jihad terrorist, infiltrated the Nova music festival on October 7 and orchestrated the abduction of Inbar Haiman. She was later raped and murdered. He has now been eliminated by the IDF.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

What exactly are people afraid of when they stay silent about what they really think of the Gaza war? No secret police is going to drag them out of bed in the middle of the night, and no one is going to slip polonium into their tea. I myself have never felt physically threatened because of my strong views on the conflict, with one or two exceptions (it's much worse for Jews, as well as for Muslim/Arab dissidents).

But that doesn't mean speaking out is free of consequences. To give you an idea, here's a sample of what I've experienced personally over the past two and a half years:

· A friend of mine, whom I once helped with one of his own books, now writes a steady stream of public posts about what a far-right, xenophobic, Arab-hating, Nazi-adjacent bigot I am.
· An academic colleague who kindly blurbed one of my earlier books emailed my rector behind my back to demand that disciplinary action be taken against me for my "zionist-tinged views".
· A friend whose book I once blurbed has successfully got me cancelled at an organization we're both associated with, and has also tried to get me fired at UGent because I'm the equivalent of a "Holocaust denialist" (no worries — I'd already left of my own accord).
· Someone I'd been close with for about two decades became a father without my knowing, because he had cut off all contact.
· Someone called my mother (!) to sternly demand an explanation for her son's behavior.
· A cordial colleague I'd had dinner with kicked me out of their philosophical discussion group, blocked me on every social media platform, and ignored my polite emails asking for a clarification.
· I've been deplatformed twice in academia — a talk and a debate — over my "Zionist views."
· The president of an organization I worked with smeared me as being "paid by the Zionist lobby", then blocked my Facebook accounts and email when I asked for a retraction.
· I've had to promise my girlfriend I won't talk about Israel on public television anymore, as she's afraid for my physical safety (she needn't worry: no TV program would be insane enough to invite me on that topic anyway).
· My closest friends stay loyal, but are under pressure from their own friends to disown me and break off contact.
· This is not even counting the long list of friends and colleagues I haven't heard from in a long while, or who have ignored my messages, where I only suspect—but can't prove—that my political views have something to do with it. It has made me slightly paranoid!

Yes, some of this stings. But don't worry — I still have plenty of good friends left. And perhaps I should be grateful to have discovered that these "friends" were never really friends in the first place.

I've also made plenty of new ones over the past two years, often people with similar (or much worse) stories of social ostracism.

Needless to say, I've also pretty much ruined my career prospects in academia. But that's fine — I still write the occasional academic paper as a self-employed writer, and at least I don't have to put up with the bureaucratic bullshit and the daily hostility.😉

[Lior 🪬 @ChaiLife613]

The reason this video of a family being murdered in their own living room exists is because Palestinians used the victims’ phones to live stream their deaths to their families and friends.

I saw an original video a day or two after October 7, when the swathe of video evidences was being poured online and the platforms hadn’t yet caught up with flagging and blocking them for violence and gore violations. I think it was this family’s video.

The daughter is shot in the head as she sits next to her little brother, who completely loses it.

As the mother struggles to calm her son, fearful they will tire of his screaming and kill him too, the captors start negotiating with the father to kill him out of sight of his family, in a macabre gesture of mercy.

Told that they will shoot him now, in front of his wife and son, ultimately he yields. He is taken outside and shot.

That video and the 12 year old girl paraded through cheering Palestinian crowds as blood soaks the crotch of her shorts from her repeated rapes…those are seared into my brain.

Fvck the Islamic regime and anytime who supports their mass-murdering cult.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

If there were more than two sexes, we’d know about it. Nobel prizes would be given for discovering it (assuming it hadn’t been “discovered” a million years ago). Society would be structured around it. And it still wouldn’t mean that men can go into women’s spaces or sport.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

There are only two sexes, and when anyone tries to deny this they literally only list the two sexes - male & female - never a third or fourth, exactly as you have done. Seyer Syndrome, for example, is not a third sex. It’s a condition within the female sex.

There really is no need to beclown yourself to get men into women’s sport, because even if there was a third sex, it would just create a new sport category, not put men in women’s sport.

[Donovan Bond @DonovanBond]

@babybeginner The incongruence of it being such a tiny portion of the population that people should be obsessed about them, but we also must upend the whole of society, change our language and compel speech and thought for them.

Make up your confused mind.

[THEEE Deplorabelle @Deplorabelle]

Funny, “identifies as “ is something that was promoted by the US governement and civil rights activists because anything that is a social construct (like race) is up to the individual - they were trying to move away from the “one drop rule” and things of that nature. So, where is the blood test or DNA test for ‘transgender’? Or for a male woman for that matter. The guy in the upper right has a “drivers license, birth certificate, etc”. Those are IDENTITY DOCUMENTS and the government is currently allowing and endorsing his FALSE identity. But he won’t pass any kind of biological test for woman.

[MJ Murphy @hothingsgirlsay]

@babybeginner This is literally The Language Trap (name of my latest book) in action. When definitions and preferred language change faster than ordinary people can keep up, the result is confusion, self-censorship, and dependence on authorities to tell you what you’re allowed to say.

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

@swiateksg1rl WTA supports all women. As in females. There is no such thing as an invasive transphobic test- just a once in a lifetime cheek swab- takes all of three seconds. Got it?
Males are free to play in the men’s tournaments however they might identify.
Simple.

[Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs]

No one had a problem with drag queens… until they started after going after kids.

No one had a problem with trans people… until they started going after kids.

When will our “community” realize that people are not “anti-LGBTQ+,” but rather PRO-child protection?

The radicals pushing this in our name are the ones doing damage to all of us, not those trying to safeguard children.

#GaysAgainstGroomers

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

Ten more Iranian protesters scheduled to be executed tomorrow. Two protesters were hanged in Iran today.

You all watching war headlines but no one talks about the war being imposed on us Iranians by our own regime that hanging its own people in silence.

They are people who said: we want freedom.

If no one speaks, they kill more people.

Share this. Scream.

#StopExecutionsInIran

[Dennis Prager @DennisPrager]

Ireland and Spain are the two largest Israel-hating countries in Europe. Here is what Douglas Murray said about Ireland:

As for the Irish obsession with Israel . . , I want to hear Ireland talk about Israel probably Last among all things in this life. Ireland, Never forget, decided that in the 20th century, that in the war against Nazi fascism it should be neutral and it forbade its ports even being used by the Royal Navy in its fight against Adolf Hitler, and many thousands of British servicemen went to the bottom of the ocean because of the Irish people and Irish governments obscene love of Adolf Hitler.

I will not hear in the 21st century, the descendants of Hitler-Lovers in Ireland telling me about the Jewish state’s right to exist. I would rather hear Hamas sing than hear Irish politicians talking about Jews. They have no damn right. They've done nothing in their history that gives them the right to tell the Jewish people what they should do in their historic homeland.

[latsot @latsot]

"How will you enforce single-sex toilets and changing rooms?????"

Well I'm glad you asked. The same way we've enforced them all along.

First, the women using those spaces will protect each other and tell any men to get out.

Second, if men won't get out, those women will complain to the service provider. If the service provider can't or won't do anything about it, the police will be contacted.

Exactly as it has always been done.

But nobody ever needed to ask before because everyone used to know that men have to respect women's boundaries.

Until very recently, nobody had been hoodwinked into thinking that women having boundaries that exclude men is bad.

It will be enforced by women not taking this shit any more.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Over 350 Christians, including up to 60 children, were massacred and burned alive by Islamists in Nigeria between the 5th and 6th of July. Entire communities were slaughtered, churches burned and destroyed.

And yet complete silence from the world, and no word from the UN.