A trainwreck beauty queen

ID credit: 666433588 on 小红书

what i learned from 8 hours of shirtless men competing to star in a hallmark movie, december 13, 2025, in the washington post

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:

Absolutely not

You know who would try that shit?

Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?

You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?

Video: it starts with the ideas of the Christian philosopher --

Me: DON'T SAY IT DON'T FUCKING SAY IT

Video: -- John Calvin

Me:

In short: John Calvin was a French theologian during the Protestant Reformation. He was a philosopher in the same way that ebola is a living thing, or the same way that C4 on a bridge revitalizes a riverfront. If you're familiar with the way that many people say that Reagan is to blame for everything shitty about modern American politics, well, they're half right.

Anglicanism's major tenets were formed largely by Thomas Cranmer attempting to negotiate a "middle way" between Lutheranism & Calvinism. Many aspects of Calvinism were adopted into the Reformed traditions central to Anglican theology & the via media, or middle way, is unfortunately basically just two shitty people playing tug-of-war over the exact way in which Anglicanism would be terrible. This is so foundational to the Church of England that it is addressed in the 3rd paragraph of the opening section of the Wikipedia page on Anglicanism.

Free will isn't real. God makes literally everything happen, and if you complain about it you're complaining about God.

Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Fuck you, that's why. Are you questioning God?

God already decided if you're going to Heaven or Hell, probably before you were born. There's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't matter if you try to be a good person, or if you accept Jesus, or if you go to confession, or if you saved five thousand orphans from a burning building. If God ~mysteriously~ decides "fuck you, burn forever", that's your fate.

However, God likes to show little signs of who he likes. Say, having lots of money, or being hot, or not having horrible illnesses. Good things happen to "the elect", who are people God likes. Bad things happen to everyone else.

Rich people are probably going to Heaven, and they're just better than you, because that's God's secret sign that he likes them more than you. Why? Because fuck you.

If bad things happen to you, it's probably because you deserve it and you're going to Hell. Likewise, if you're poor, ugly, or disabled, you're probably going to Hell.

All of this bullshit has of course had a heavy influence on:

Capitalism, because having money isn't a sign that you're exploiting people, it's a sign that God mysteriously wants you to have nice things. Nothing you can do about it, free will isn't real!

Imperialism, because if you succeed in taking over a place and stealing all their stuff, that's a sign that God likes you. If God liked them, it wouldn't have happened, so you're really following God's plan. And torturing people who are already going to Hell barely even counts, they probably deserve it!

American exceptionalism specifically. Consider the above, and mysteriously, all the native people start dying, leaving vast tracts of land for your people to settle. Well, gosh! God genocided a continent to show that it was secretly always ours! He must really like us!

Witch trials, debtors prisons, insane asylums, &c. They aren't hot or rich, so by definition, they're probably evil and deserve for bad things to happen to them!

... and half of the other shitty things that happen in our society, basically. Calvinism is horrific and it underlies a lot - especially in the US and UK, because the Puritans and Roundheads were mostly Calvinists.

Hobbes in a nutshell: "People are inherently brutal and animalistic and hungry for power and lazy, and it is only through Civilization (read: submitting to the will of Leaders) that we can suppress the violence of human nature and have Order. Our natural state of being is 'a war of all against all'" (Like, you know the Purge? That's what Hobbes thinks is the real way that humans would behave without Rules and Laws and Civilization keeping them in line. Or you know how journalists love to wring their hands about "oooh after this natural disaster everyone just went wild and started murdering each other and LOOTING everything" -- that's the Hobbesian perspective, and it is so pervasive that people are CONVINCED that's what really happens after a natural disaster. But in actuality people in disasters tend to show their best selves and start helping each other out and banding together and showing amazing solidarity.

and being as Scotland and Northern Ireland are just designed for suffering anything that says suffering has to do with god took off, and whilst England fucked the calvinists off into America and Australia after the collapse of the new model army [judging by the english reaction to them leaving was the restoration they clearly didnt think they were fun] but scotland went on to make it pretty much the national religion.

so yes, Calvin is important to British history

Poleaxes, also known in French as great arming axes, were a man-sized late evolution of fighting axes that appeared in the 14th century and were used for a little bit more than a hundred years, up to and including the War of the Roses. They were primarily used by knights and armored men-at-arms on foot against other armored foes. Unlike other polearms like halberds, they were used in very close quarters.

A poleaxe is divided in three parts, named the tête/head or gros bout/big bit, the demy-hache/half-axe and queue/tail. They roughly correspond to one third of the weapon each, and are defined by where they sit in relation to the user’s hands. The tête is composed of the croix/cross, which is the axe head. It can be made of any two of a taillant/axe, a mail/hammer or a becq de faulcon/spike. A dague/dagger, basically a spear of ahlspiess head, is fitted over the croix with attelles/languettes that run down the haft. A rouelle is sometimes present to protect the hand at the top third mark of the haft, and very rarely a second one can be present at the bottom third mark to protect the other hand. The queue ends with a talon/heel, which can be a ferrule or a spike used to buttstroke your foe.

Poleaxes were later phased out by the longer Lucerne hammers and halberds as warfare evolved into the early Renaissance. A general trick to distinguish a poleaxe from other similar weapons is to look for its two-part head, made of croix and the dague.

Not people, the same morons believe....