steve mcandrew

[Benedikt Brechtken @ben_brechtken]

Warum werden die Kreuzzüge als grundsätzlicher Makel der christlichen Geschichte gesehen, wohingegen die Jahrhunderte vorher beginnende islamische Invasion Europas (und Afrikas, Asiens...) überhaupt nicht problematisiert wird?

[James Dueck🇻🇦 @JamesDueck]

Turns out, leaving the Church en masse means a few generations later you no longer have a nation either.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

Ronaldo, taking the field now for Portugal, had two games of his red card suspension removed by FIFA on appeal. If it hadn’t been, he would have missed the first two games of the World Cup. Zero outrage from anyone over this appeal being granted. Explain the difference. Thanks.

[Chad Prather @WatchChad]

And still no advances in dentistry.

[steve mcandrew @mcandst]

@HelloBenWhite @UEFA But it’s ok for Ronaldo? And it’s ok for Messi to have no foul for a worse transgression?

[Apple Lamps @lamps_apple]

I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington...

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve?

You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction.

Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it.

I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it.

I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Go: Washington

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Mamdani got the whole American dream in eight years. Came here as a kid, got citizenship in 2018, now he runs the biggest city in the country.

And on America's 250th birthday he sat down at George Washington's desk and told us everything wrong with the place.

I'm not even angry. I'm disappointed.

Here's the picture he painted:

He mocked the people who supposedly think America "becomes less the more people it welcomes."

Said it belongs "only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin."

Called our streets a place where "masked agents" are "terrorizing" people.

Said the country's wealth was built by "calloused, dirt-streaked hands" and then left to rot.

Looked out from Washington's desk and called the Americans who built this economy "small" and "weak."

Okay Mamdani. You hate it so much, why'd you come here?

Let's put that picture up against the actual country.

He's a Muslim kid born in Uganda and he's the mayor of New York. A guy back in his own birthplace said it plainly: over there he'd have had to claw his way in. Here we held the door open.

We've got the most diverse Congress in our history. It was never about skin color, no matter how many years the left spent forcing that story onto a country that kept proving them wrong.

A machine that grinds immigrants down? Nearly half the Fortune 500 was started by immigrants or their kids. 231 companies.

Apple, son of a Syrian.

Google, a kid who came over from the Soviet Union.

Amazon, son of a Cuban.

Put them together and they out-earn Japan, out-earn Germany. That's not a country grinding people into the dirt. That's a country handing them the keys.

It's been and always will be the land of opportunity.

And more people want in here than anywhere else alive. 53 million immigrants live here, the most of any nation on earth. We're 4% of the world's people and we hold 17% of the world's migrants.

Every year since 2007 you ask the whole planet where it'd go if it could go anywhere, the answer comes back the same. America. Number one. The line to get in wraps around the globe.

Here's the line he won't draw. I will.

Legal immigration built this country. The strivers. That's the front door working the way it's supposed to, and I'll defend it all day. You need to earn your spot, respect our laws and customs.

But that's not what we're running anymore.

Four years of Biden's open border blew the doors off. The foreign-born share of this country just hit 15.8%. An all-time high. Higher than Ellis Island, more than triple what it was in 1970.

The Census Bureau didn't expect that number until 2042 and we smashed past it. And on top of it, a record 14 million people here illegally, who cut in front of every single person who did it the right way.

The front door built America from Ellis Island to today. The fence is a different thing. Pretending they're the same is how you end up calling every American who wants a secure border a bigot.

And we've earned the right to standards. This is the most wanted country on the planet. We get to choose who walks in. You want in? Build something. Contribute. Earn it. Nobody's owed anything.

You come illegally, you commit crimes, you steal from taxpayers, you should get deported. That's not terrorizing the streets.

Mamdani walked through that front door in 2018. He of all people should be defending it. Instead he stood at Washington's desk and spent his speech blurring the line between the people who came the right way and the ones who broke in.

The man even admitted out loud that America is exceptional. Then spent the rest explaining why it isn't. On the one day the whole country stops to celebrate itself, he reached for the darkest story he could find.

That's not a man who's lost about America. That's a man who's angry at the country that gave him everything he has.

You don't like it here? Nobody made you come.

Nobody's stopping you from leaving. But you won't. They never do. Because there's nowhere else on earth that hands a person this much of a shot.

This country took him in and made him a mayor. He owes it. It doesn't owe him a thing.

We're not perfect. We're the best odds a human being has ever been handed. 250 years old, the richest and freest country alive, and the whole world is still clawing to get in while nobody's trying to leave.

They hold America to a standard they'd never hold anyone else to, then act shocked it falls short.

It's nonsense.

Respect the country. Especially when it's the reason you're standing at that desk at all.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Friends, Abraham Lincoln added the words “under God” to the Gettysburg Address as he delivered it. What prompted him to do this at so decisive a moment?

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

What an appalling speech the Mayor of New York delivered for the 250th anniversary of the nation.

Sadly, it reflects the view of America propagated for years by Howard Zinn and his like-minded colleagues in the universities and believed by armies of the young: a dark, oppressive country where common people are denigrated by tyrants and oligarchs, where immigrants are treated with contempt, where those with “soft hands” hold the wealth created by those with dirty hands.

No sensible person would claim that our country is without flaws, but the relentlessly negative picture painted by Mayor Mamdani is just absurd.

And it is the fruit of the Marxism that, sadly, is all the rage today.

[Fr. Joseph Krupp @Joeinblack]

On one level, this person spelled every word right and got the punctuation correct more or less.
Yep, on another level, the comparison and the question are so earth shatteringly stupid that it leaves one with a kind of disconnect.
In the end, you are left with three choices:
1. The man who made this post is so intellectually disabled that engaging him in debate is a form of cruelty.

2. You explain the difference: a nun volunteers to wear a habit. She can take it off at any time. No one will kill her for it and no one is required herto wear it. A Hijab is something that men force women to wear because they have the sexual control of a 14-year-old on meth.

3. You assume that the person who posted this is so devoid of a healthy sense of his own dignity that he will act like an idiot to get a few dollars.

Poll on next post

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Both Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer reveal that they have no idea how to read the Bible.

First, they fail to make the elementary distinction that Biblical theologian William Placher insisted upon, namely, that not everything that is in the Bible is what the Bible teaches ...

It is a commonplace of Biblical interpretation that there are elements in Scripture that reflect cultural practices of the time but are not the stuff of revelation.

Secondly, they neglect the fundamental moral framework that emerges from attending, not to features of particular narratives taken out of context, but rather to the overarching patterns, themes, and trajectories of the Bible as a whole.

Who can seriously doubt that the exhortations to worship God, to respect parents and authorities, not to kill, steal, or commit adultery, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, to care for the weakest and most forgotten, to sympathize with the victim, to turn the other cheek, to respect the dignity and freedom of the individual, etc., have been bequeathed to us from the Bible?

It is simply the case that we cannot understand Western morality apart from the Scriptures.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

In a recent interview, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, former grand chancellor of the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life, confirmed the worst suspicions that many of us had.

He admitted that the changes he made at the Institute during the Pope Francis years were designed to initiate a "very profound" reform of the idea of the natural law.

Instead of absolute moral norms grounded in a keen understanding of the basic goods, he and his colleagues were proposing a moral theory rooted in historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience--not an "armchair theology" but one operating "within history and within people's lives."

This, of course, is the language of trendy postmodernism, and it is dangerous indeed.

Allow me to illustrate the principle with one example. Is slavery wrong?

Intrinsically wrong? Wrong no matter what public opinion polls say about it, no matter what the current consensus on it might be? I imagine any decent person would say yes.

But that yes is predicated upon precisely what the tradition calls the natural law and the basic goods. There are some values so fundamental that acts repugnant to them are by their very nature wicked.

If you want a highly articulate presentation of this idea, go to St. John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor.

If we say that this is just "armchair theologizing" and that morality is a function of ever-shifting cultural and experiential data, then why couldn't slavery be justified?

One of the very smartest persons that ever lived, the philosopher Aristotle, thought it was; extremely bright and morally upright persons in our country, well into the 19th century, thought it was permissible.

Who is to say whether the consensus might shift back again? Who is to say that "lived experience" might come to justify it?

What any truly coherent moral program requires is the very thing that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were endeavoring to eliminate, namely, absolute moral norms.

Ridding ourselves of these in the name of freedom or pastoral sensitivity actually renders moral discourse dysfunctional, just as relativizing the basic principle of logic would render any rational conversation impossible.

The Archbishop's interview, frankly, reminded me of the discussions I had at the Synod on Synodality with some of my German colleagues. Under the rubric of the development of doctrine, they were eager to relativize or radically change the principles undergirding classical morality. If this was and is truly the game, we have ventured onto perilous seas.

Link to the article below.

[steve mcandrew @mcandst]

@dragodimitrov Love this until the very end. Nominalism actually guts Christianity at its core. It’s a core Christological tenet that Jesus is one person with two natures, human and divine. But if human nature doesn’t exist, what are you left with? Luther et al abandon the person of Christ.

[DRAGO @dragodimitrov]

Every argument between Catholics and Protestants is secretly about something neither side ever brings up.

Not the Bible. Not the Church. Not the pope.

A 700-year-old metaphysical dispute you were never told you inherited.

Here's the fight underneath the fight. 🧵

[John Grant 🇺🇦 @JGrant5291453]

#Turkey

[steve mcandrew @mcandst]

@Kristinartz Absolutely

[steve mcandrew @mcandst]

@shaunvlog_ San Antonio!

[Chris @Chris_ApTx]

They didn't give Wemby a flagrant because then they would've had to give 2 to Josh Hart for kicking at Kornet's knees while also suspending OG, Alvarado, and Clarkson for leaving the bench this was the NBA being fair