Ben Dover

[EternalFaithEO ☦︎ @EternalFaithEO]

“There are three traps of Satan that steal joy and peace:

Regretting about the past, fear for the future, and ingratitude for the present.”

- Saint Anthony the Great

[EternalFaithEO ☦︎ @EternalFaithEO]

“You put your plans ahead of God’s plans for you. That is why you have anxiety and fear.”

- St. Paisios of Mount Athos

[EternalFaithEO ☦︎ @EternalFaithEO]

“Live simply, and without thinking too much, like a child with his father, faith without too much thinking works wonders, the logical mind hinders the grace of God and miracles.

practice patience without judging with the logical mind”

- Saint Paisos of Mount Athos

[Ben Dover @actualBenDover]

@Mangan150 @DiligentPlane Why not just buy bitcoin

[The Knowledge Archivist @KnowledgeArchiv]

“The heart of a woman should be so well hidden in God,
that a man, to find it, would need to seek God first.”

C. S. Lewis

[Jason Wilde @JasonWilde108]

Forget Plato's Cave

The learned helplessness experiment bothers me more.

In 1967, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier ran experiments where dogs were exposed to shocks they could not control. Nothing they did stopped what was happening.

Later, the dogs were put into a situation where they actually could escape. They just had to cross a small barrier. They didn't.

They had already learned that trying was pointless. The door was basically open and they still stayed there. Some pretty ugly implications for humans.

Keep someone in a system long enough where working harder changes nothing. Complaining changes nothing and following the rules changes nothing. Trying again changes nothing.

Eventually they might stop trying. Then one day an opportunity appears and everyone looking from the outside says, “Why don't they just do something?”

They already did.
A hundred times.

People don't rebel when conditions get bad. Not always.

People will shut down and withdraw. They distract themselves and accept shit they once would have fought against. They have learned that fighting changes nothing.

Who has to convince people that the cage is good? You don't.

You need to convince them the door doesn't open.

Eventually you can unlock it and they will never even check.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Precisely C.S. Lewis's point in The Screwtape Letters: the enemy doesn't need to ruin you, he only needs to distract you.

Screwtape finds that a reliable way to lead a patient to hell is to distract him with jargon, for instance. Have the patient evaluate ideas not by their content but by their labels ensures that he never engages meaningfully with their content.

Another method is to fix his attention on the "stream of immediate sense experiences," so that his mind is drawn away from universal issues and he no longer thoughtfully engages with things that matter.

The path to hell is not so much paved by grand sins than it is by small, constant distractions from what really matters. The path to goodness begins with reclaiming your attention, and turning your eyes from the endless stream.

Wasting time "doomscrolling" is not neutral. It distracts you from doing good in the world.

[Ben Dover @actualBenDover]

@Not_the_Bee The Israeli Bee is going to be happy

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

On the night of 3 August 1944, retreating German soldiers blew up every bridge in Florence except one.

It had been standing since 1345...

The bridge is called the Ponte Vecchio, the Old Bridge. It is the oldest surviving crossing of the Arno River, on a site that has carried bridges since Roman times.

The Romans built the first. The medieval Florentines rebuilt it twice, after floods in 1117 and 1333 swept the previous versions away. The third attempt — the one still standing today — was completed in 1345.

It was one of the first segmental arch bridges ever built in the West. Three low, wide arches replaced the heavy semicircular spans of Roman engineering. The new design needed fewer piers in the river, offered less resistance to floodwater, and allowed boats to pass underneath. Six hundred and eighty years later, the engineering still holds.

Shops have lined the bridge since the 13th century. The first tenants were butchers, fishmongers, and tanners, who used the river below as an open drain.

In 1565, Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari to build a covered passageway above the shops, connecting his official residence at Palazzo Vecchio to his private home at Palazzo Pitti, so that he and his family could move through the city in private, away from the public eye. The passage is called the Vasari Corridor, and it still runs above the bridge today.

In the late 16th century, the smell of the butchers' waste reached the corridor windows. By decree, every butcher was expelled from the bridge and replaced with goldsmiths and jewellers. The rule has never been repealed. To this day, the shops on the Ponte Vecchio are required, by law, to sell only gold, silver, and jewels. The same shopfronts that hung over the Arno four hundred years ago are still selling the same trade.

Then came the war...

By August 1944, the Allies were closing in on Florence.

The retreating German forces, under orders from Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, prepared to destroy every bridge over the Arno to slow the advance. On the night of 3 August, the operation was carried out. The Ponte alle Grazie, the Ponte alla Carraia, the Ponte Santa Trinita, the Ponte San Niccolò — all were detonated. The Ponte Santa Trinita, considered one of the most beautiful bridges in the world, had to be blown up three times before it finally collapsed.

Only Ponte Vecchio was spared.

The reason is still debated. Some credit Hitler, who had visited Florence in 1938 and reportedly admired the city. Some credit Gerhard Wolf, the German consul to Florence, who is honored by a plaque on the bridge for his role in saving it. Some credit a Florentine shop assistant who is said to have disabled the mines placed beneath the arches.

I have walked across it more times than I can count. And every time, I find myself thinking that the people who built this could not have known we would still be crossing it. As John Ruskin wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them: ‘See! This our fathers did for us.’"

-- -- --

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[Ramez Naam @ramez]

Requiring you to show ID to use a computer or other device at all is about the most dystopian thing I've heard all day. What is this, China?

[THE ORTHOCHAT @THEORTHOCHAT]

St. John Chrysostom: On Christian Marriage 👩‍❤️‍👨☦️🙏🏽

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

Sen. Rand Paul voted against cutting aid to the genocidal Israeli apartheid state twice this week:

[The Babylon Bibi @TheBabylonBibi]

@LindseyGrahamSC

[Brandon Weichert @WeTheBrandon]

This used to be us.

[Anthony @Catholicizm1]

The irony of a supposed Catholic woman teaming up with a gay man who purchased a child and robbed it of its mother, to promote feminism while criticizing liberals is insane. This is the Kosher Catholicism being presented by the Daily wire. It’s more insidious than actual liberalism because it paints it with a veneer of “conservative catholic”

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Why do you think Elon Musk deleted this tweet?

Let's make sure people never forget.

[Orthodox Christianity @Orthodoxy2019]

“There’s no authentic Christianity without asceticism,”—Romanian Archbishop of Great Britain
https://t.co/KS3xhvHhaF

Turning to the broader meaning of fasting, the Archbishop called Great Lent a universal invitation to holiness.

[Scott Horton @scotthortonshow]

Why does Washington hate Hezbollah more than al Qaeda?

Because that’s what Israel wants.

[Ben Dover @actualBenDover]

Zuck is literally the one lobbying to put age verification at the OS level. Imagine falling for this.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Thread of links about Facebook’s/Meta’s Great Pivot to Privacy: ⤵️