Shelly Penton

@plaidsilk

Religious Studies, ABD. Vanderbilt–>UChicago–>University of Virginia. Skeets my own.

619 Folgt812 Follower1.520 Posts

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Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· 16d

Nothing like Fox News accidentally running campaign ads for progressive politicians to perk me up in the morning.

Screenshot of Fox News Opinion post with pictures of Mamdani, AOC, and other leftist politicians with the first reading: "Progressives want to tax billionairs first, and *you're next* [in big bull-fighting flag red letters] on the list"

Post text begins: "OPINION: You may not care about a wealth tax, but the wealth tax cares about you..."

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· 21d

I can't believe as a society we are putting up with stock market mass delusion and the impending economic fallout, accompanying climate-change expediting water-polluting monstrosities, and the most annoying elite class in history for this – what they've Orwellianly dubbed "search assist."

Screenshot of a search result with AI "search assist" stating facts pulled from wikipedia, which is first organic search result.

Text from "search assist": A gleysol is a hydric soil that becomes saturated with groundwater long enough to develop a characteristic color pattern, with reddish, brownish, or yellowish colors at the surface and greyish or bluish colors deeper in the soil due to reduced iron. They are commonly found in low-lying areas with shallow groundwater and are used for rice cultivation in the tropics or drained for arable farming elsewhere.

Text pull from Wikipedia: Gleysol is a type of hydric soil that has a characteristic gleyic colour pattern due to anaerobic conditions. Learn about the causes, effects and examples of gleysol formation, and how they are classified and used in different climates.

[Put for real, who asked for this? Willy Wonka's dumbest failson?]

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· 25d

I'm in a group chat with a working class individual (because apparently we are quibbling about that now?), and this was their comment about coverage of Mamdani's visit to Rikers:

Screenshot of two group chat text messages, both from the same person.

First text: "did you see that Mamdani watched a World Cup game with a bunch of men being held at Rikers and referred to them as "New Yorkers," and not as inmates, prisoners, etc?"

Second text: "Right wing coverage used a variety of descriptors of the act, but the one they were looking for was "Christlike" and they never quite got there."

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· 27d

Me this weekend

"Boyfriend meme" layout:

Boyfriend: Me
Girlfriend: Alamo Drafthouse
The Woman in the Red Dress: The Only IMAX Theater in 60 Miles

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Jun 8

What a surprising statement from the editorial board of a news organization owned by *checks notes* Jeff Bezos.

post by the WP editorial board with the quote "The 'buy, borrow, die' myth is part of the overarching fallacy that wealthy Americans are nothing but tax cheats. The United States already has a very progressive income tax, and the share of revenue paid by the top 1 percent has been increasing over time. Pretending that's not true won't make anyone better off"

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 30

All I was doing was idly looking for pictures of James Talarico's hot girlfriend and I hit paydirt.

Screenshot of a Talarico quote ifrom an msn article with the clickbait title "Dem Senate Candidate James Talarico Mysterious Girlfriend Revealed – And She's Vegan"

Quote text: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan,” he has said. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

Link to article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/dem-senate-candidate-james-talarico-s-mysterious-girlfriend-revealed-and-she-s-vegan/ar-AA24nTRs

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 28

Cf: _Democracy & Tradition_ by Jeffrey Stout press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

screenshot of the cover of the Jeffrey Stout's book _Democracy & Tradition_

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 27

Etc.

Extended ranking:
Simone Weil
John B Cobb Jr.
Karl Barth
Stanly Hauerwas
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Jürgen Moltmann
Jaques Ellul
Herbert McCabe
Karl Rahner

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 27

I'm not mad about it.

Result of quiz (i.e., theologian you most closely align with): Simone Weil.

Blurb: In Assisi in the spring of 1937, in the small Romanesque chapel where Francis had prayed at San Damiano, a twenty-eight-year-old Simone Weil—Parisian philosophy agrégée, factory worker, briefly a Spanish Civil War combatant in the anarchist Durruti column—was driven for the first time in her life to her knees. A year later at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, reciting George Herbert's “Love (III)” through a migraine, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” She refused baptism in solidarity with the unbaptized. Born February 3, 1909 to agnostic Jewish parents in Paris and trained under Alain at the Lycée Henri-IV, sister of the great mathematician André Weil, she had taken the agrégation at twenty-two and then spent her twenties trying to do philosophy with her hands—a year on the Renault assembly line in 1934, the brief Spanish front, manual labor as spiritual practice. She crossed to London in 1942 to work for the Free French and died at Ashford, Kent, in August 1943 of tuberculosis aggravated by refusing to eat more than the rations of occupied France. You think attention is prayer, affliction is the place God touches, and the unbaptized belong at the table too.

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 27

And y'all thought mainstream news couldn't be hard-hitting and relevant.

Fox news post with two photos of rosie o'donnell looking absolutely the same as "before" and "after" with the caption: "Rosie O'Donnell Admits She Got A Secret Facelift After Years of Calling It A 'Betrayal of Feminism'"

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 27

Thinking of starting a series called, "Parent of a Tiny Human, aka...." First entry: Book (Re)Binder

_Never Touch A Porcupine_ boardbook with clear tape around the spine, partially covering a toddler-chewed top corner

A page of the _Never Touch A Porcupine_ boardbook, inside, with clear tape holding the pages together

A page of _Little Lion Shares_ boardbook with clear tape and wood glue holding it together for dear life

A page of one of the children's book series featuring Otis, a sentient tractor with the title _Otis and the Kittens_, with more clear tape for the second round of repairs. (author is Loren Long)

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 23

FUCK.

Quiz results page with "your closest neighborhood" as "The Episcopal Church (TEC)" with a graphic I don't quite understand and am too lazy to read in more detail, so please don't make me explain it.

Text underneath result: Your taste lives in the tradition that has become, more than any other in America, the home of inclusive orthodoxy: ancient liturgy, sacramental theology, openly LGBTQ+ clergy and laity, a strong literary culture, smaller but stable. Episcopalians skew educated, urban, and politically progressive, but the deep aesthetic is older than any of that: incense, choral evensong, the Book of Common Prayer, gardens, gin. Your neighbors are people who think hymns from the 1700s and same‐sex weddings belong in the same building.

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 2

Yo, anybody looking for a good band name?

Screenshot of Fox News oped post with the title "DAVID MARCUS: rise of Marxism is a hydra Democrats created but can't control"

Post text: MARXIST HYDRA: Democrats created a far-left monster they can no longer control, Marcus argues

Picture include in post is a May Day (?) protest crowd with a banner that reads: "The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go! NOW"

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· May 1

Did Marlboro bankroll this ad?

Screenshot of post from New York Magazine with a picture of a young Winona Ryder in a minimalist, strappy gray gown glancing coyly to the side as she holds a cigarette in her hand with the caption: "I mean, why shouldn't we all smoke cigarettes again?"
NY Magazine post text reads:
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time,” writes author Xochitl Gonzalez. “With each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.”
Part of this smoking thing is a yearning for the past, admits Gonzalez. Not in an effort to recapture her youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life.
“I can’t personally slow down technology or fix media or the demands of capitalism or any of the other existential things that have crept into our lives,” she writes. “But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion.”
Read Gonzalez’s full essay: https://nymag.visitlink.me/ICiRLY

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 27

I think we're going to have to deal with this question a lot more, and I would say, especially from the right, given both the pattern of rightwing political association's link to terrorism in the US, as well as the evangelical studio system manufacturing stuff like this movie qua propaganda:

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 27

I don't know, seems bad.

Screenshot of Scientific American post of an article titled "'Staggering' number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk [no Oxford comma boo] and more" by Helen Pearson and Nature Magazine.

Scientific American post text:
More than two-thirds of the public believe at least one false or unproven health claim — such as the idea that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism — a new survey finds. The results hint that a large, and potentially growing, number of people are questioning scientific evidence.
The survey, of more than 16,000 people across 16 countries, asked whether they believed claims that are not supported by research, including that the ‘risk of childhood vaccinations outweighs benefits’, ‘fluoride in water is harmful’ and ‘raw milk is healthier than pasteurized.’
http://spklr.io/6045EKdpN

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 27

Me to my family every spring when the mosquitos start to come out:

Peaky Binders "No fighting" meme edited to say "No standing water in the yard"

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 25

Screencap from an NYT movie review of Michael.

It reads:
"The movie itself becomes a tale of triumph and glory for someone everyone admired, rather than an estate’s attempt to scrub clean the life story of a star who has been multiply accused, in harrowing terms, of child sexual abuse. That same estate is the reason that an HBO documentary that gives space for two men who have accused Jackson to tell their story has been deleted from its streaming platform; you can’t watch it, because it might as well not exist.
The three-ring media circus that surrounds every celebrity gives us versions of them we can choose to believe in. “Michael” aims to deliver a version of Michael Jackson that, strangely enough, conforms to what the movie’s version of Joe Jackson wanted all along: a perfect child, a top-notch performer and certainly nothing more than that. In this business, you can make up just about anything."

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 25

Reading an elegiac oped in NYT about how nostalgia and long-time fandom are both a burden and a blessing, and the entire reason MJ was produced was just to make money off a new generation of children by hooking them on the music of a pedophile. I really need smart people to stop being so stupid.

Screenshot from an NYT article titled "Michael Jackson's Music Was Too Big to Be Canceled".

The paragraph reads: "When asked about the continued popularity of Jackson’s music, the estate said in a statement that “each project, including the two shows with Cirque du Soleil to ‘MJ the Musical’ to the biopic, offers another generation an opportunity to experience the joy of the discovery of Michael’s music and reinforces the connection with Michael’s legacy for longtime fans.”"

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 23

Yeah, this sums up my experience when I bring the topic up with....literally anyone.

Screencap of an Hollywood Reporter interview question to documentary director Dan Reed, along with his response:

"What about this notion that after your movie came out, if one thought logically, the movie should have taken Jackson down. But in fact his popularity rose after your movie, and streaming numbers on Jackson’s music rose and they only continue to grow. Since then, we’ve had the MJ Broadway musical, which is a huge hit and tours. So what does that say?"

"It says that people don’t care that he was a child molester. Literally, people just don’t care."

Shelly Penton@plaidsilk· Apr 23

This is one of the most bonkers arguments from pro-AI tech education advocates – and it's constant. Even though the obvious solution is not a cognitive-offloading, learning-murderbot but in fact just hiring more teachers and paying them more.