Thomas P. Harmon

Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas (Houston). Augustinian; Thomist Ally; Straussian Ally.

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

We should all just quit messing around and replace Captcha with the gom jabbar

[Paul Anleitner @PaulAnleitner]

For those asking if the Star Wars sequels will ever be appreciated in the future like the prequels eventually did…

The answer is a definitive NO.

While the prequels often suffered from wooden dialogue and over reliance on green screen, the structure of the story is timeless.

It is essentially a Greco-Roman classic set in space— an epic in the vein of Homer and a tragedy cut from the mold of Seneca.

The sequels are not mythic in any way.

The are self-aware, reflexive commentaries about the Star Wars franchise itself as its object, a film-to-film argument about how the IP should be processed through the lens of the ideology and concerns of 2015–2019.

I have never met someone who was kid or a young teen when the sequels came out that feels any sense of nostalgia for those films.

I’d be far more likely to wager that it gets officially “retconned” somehow by Lucasfilm than it becomes a nostalgic cult classic.

[Jake 🇺🇸 @omni_american]

Woke progressivism is a form of gnosticism (and, as such, is a distinctively *American* religion, which Harold Bloom noted was essentially gnostic). How so? (1) It posits endemic ignorance of reality: you may *think* the last 70 years were marked by civil rights victories, the spread of democracy, rising standards of living, and an unprecedented decline in global poverty...but you don't realize (2) the Truth, i.e., the material order is evil, a product of "late capitalism," which masks racial oppression, patriarchy, fascism, and various phobias that are all worse now than ever before! (3) A divine revelator is required for gnosis: not Jesus, but hieratic figures like Kendi, DiAngelo, and, yes, Arday, who come to wake us from our ignorance, apprise us of this world's evil, inform us of our own implication in its evil (through our "implicit bias" or our "internalized -ism"), and guide us to (4) true self-knowledge and transcendence, whereby we recognize the Rousseauean purity of our innate self, before society has infected it with"toxic masculinity" and other corruptions, and we envision the heavenly Utopia, straight out of a DEI training manual, to which our souls may aspire to ascend, as soon as we've "canceled" the reprobates among us, whose heavy ignorance, grounded in empiricism and too much reliance on flawed reason over perfect revelation, pulls us all earthward, trapping us and society in webs of settler colonialism, stereotype threat, and a gendered pay gap.

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@JonahDispatch Freshwater Pearl Jam

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

Foo Bombers

[James M. Patterson @McGillPatterson]

The Sex Cannons

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

Red Hot Poblano Peppers

[James M. Patterson @McGillPatterson]

The Sex Cannons

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@eigenrobot (A) don’t be so weird; (B) make the slightest effort to convince normies that AI will also make their lives better. Too hard?

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

You don't bring them together, because they're incompatible. "That is why you fail."

[Star Wars Holocron @sw_holocron]

Dave Filoni explains his strategy for the future of Star Wars.

“We have several different generations of Star Wars fans, right? There’s original trilogy fans, prequel fans, sequel trilogy fans, Clone Wars fans, expanded universe fans. They all have different interests. And I always look at how we’re going to serve all these different interests. And most importantly, how do we bring them all together because they have this common love of Star Wars.”

(Via Disney Worldbuilders panel at D23)

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@IVMiles Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@RedemTheTimes Oof

[Jimmy G @jimmygards]

The 90s were awesome.

“John, we need a theme song for NBA basketball.”

“Got it. How big?”

“Full orchestra. French horns. Strings. Timpani. The fate of Western civilization hangs in the balance.”

“Say no more.”

[Titus Techera @titusfilm]

British media is in a full-on struggle session to teach journalists to stop doing journalism.
Covering the biggest academic/literary fraud in Britain in a decade or more was apparently bad.

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@second_sailing NYT too right wing for bluesky

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

The proper object of Aristotle's Poetics is not poetry but man

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@dlendman2 Lord, have mercy. Praying for you.

[Geoff Shullenberger @g_shullenberger]

Here was an actual victim of a media "witch hunt":

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

Look how happy she is. Maybe the rest of us have missed something

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@eigenrobot Check out the anthropomorphites. So much wild stuff in the early centuries.

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@eigenrobot Heh. The weirdness is actually already there in the Latin. Venerari and Venereus

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

@wdwpro1 If I am remembering right, Zahn has Thrawn call the New Republic “Rebels” as a way of denying their legitimacy

[Thomas P. Harmon @Tomberly530]

Fun announcement time. My friend Mary Keys (from Notre Dame) and I have signed a contract to co-edit the Cambridge Companion to the Seven Deadly Sins. We’re scheduled to deliver the final version of the volume to Cambridge University Press in November 2028. I’ll be able to share the list of contributors and chapter titles not too long from now.

Also, you can tell Mary is wiser than I am because she’s not on social media.