Onwards and Sideways

May I present the best apple:

I know “thought” and “Catholic” kinda destroy each other like matter and anti-matter, but what the heck, I will give it a go anyway.  Just remember, denying and/or ignoring these facts does not make them less true.

2. Hitler was never excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

No, he wasn’t.  Excommunication is the Church form of a wake-up call that desires to bring the person back to their senses.  It was aptly judged that this would have no bearing on someone who had already left the Faith by his adulthood.

 In fact, NO Catholic Nazi war criminals were excommunicated, not even the SS death camp commanders.

Given Pius XII’s support for the Nuremburg trials, again, what was the point?  Excommunication is not a punishment.  Identifying the person’s in question during the war would have taken a robust intelligence capability that none of the Allied powers possessed, much less the Vatican.

  Seems that mass murder was not sufficient cause for excommunication.  There is ONE exception to my previous statement:

No, not when it is judged as not being useful in actually reforming the individual in question.  Again, it is not a punishment.

3.  Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was excommunicated, and for a crime MUCH WORSE than mass murder:  He married a protestant!  You see? The Catholic Church DOES have values, after all.

Given Goebbels had explicitly left the Faith by the time of World War II, I am very curious how you propose such events would have gone.  We don’t excommunicate those who convert away from the Faith.

4.  Hitler’s birthday was celebrated in Catholic mass every year, right up to the end.

Hitler’s 50th birthday was celebrated by having Catholic masses pray for the good of Germany.  It’s a pretty common occurrence in countries where a national event/holiday (which is what his birthday was in the Third Reich) takes place.  There were German bishops who supported Hitler, just as there were German bishops who opposed him.

5.  Nazi SS troopers had “death’s head” skulls on their uniforms and “GOTT MITT UNS” (“God is With Us”) on their belt buckles.

I fail to see what this has to do with Catholicism.  Muslims and Hindus believe in God too.

6.  In the confusion and chaos after Germany’s surrender, many Nazi war criminals escaped detection by the Allies, made their way out of Germany, and avoided war crimes trials.  Many were AIDED IN THEIR ESCAPE BY THE VATICAN.

No, they were aided by Tiso, Hudal, and certain people in Vichy France.  You are, of course, welcome to find evidence of the Vatican having complicity in the ratlines, but you won’t find much.

 They were sheltered by high ranking Vatican officials who provided them with new identities and false documents and made travel arrangements for them to escape, mainly to South America.

 Joseph Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death,” and Adolf Eichmann were among them.

Mengele got his passport and identity from the Red Cross, actually.  Eichmann was sponsored by a Bishop named Hudal, who had been removed from all offices and responsibilities and pretty much imprisoned in the Vatican by Pius XII.

I can hear you Catholic excuse-makers saying, “But that was so long ago! Stop dwelling in the past!”

No, I hope was able to give you an adequate historical overview of the times.

 I have heard that before, in objection to discussing the “Holy” Inquisition and its torture and murder of innocents in pursuit of imaginary crimes such as “witchcraft” and “heresy.”

Given that the Inquisition had no mechanism by which to murder people (they served as investigators, not executioners), all punishments were actually carried out by secular governments over and against the Inquisition.  Furthermore, an Inquisition was usually called by a Pope to stop the local governments from indiscriminately murdering people.

 I guess we just forget and ignore crimes of the church after so many years have passed.  OK, so here is what the Catholic Church is doing TODAY:

Your rhetorical genius is as graceful as my artistic genius.

Mind you, I have trouble drawing stick figures. 

Make of it what you will.

In African nations where the Catholic Church is dominant and AIDS is rampant, literally MILLIONS have died of the disease.  Meanwhile, Catholic priests tell ignorant believers that while AIDS is indeed very, very bad, using a CONDOM IS MUCH WORSE!  In the apt words of Sam Harris, this is GENOCIDAL STUPIDITY!

You will find that the Catholic Church is the greatest supplier of medical aid to those with the disease.  Furthermore, the effectiveness of abstinence vs. condom distribution is rather murkily known, so to declare one way or another like you are doing is a bit premature.

And yes, I thought you might be reading the New Atheists

But that has always been the greatest strength of the church:  The propagation of BLOODY, DANGEROUS STUPIDITY!

As to whether Hitler was Catholic:

We have these lovely quotes:

Goebbels wrote in 1941 that Hitler “hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.”

Fred Taylor Translation; The Goebbels Diaries 1939-41; Hamish Hamilton Ltd; London; 1982; ISBN 0-241-10893-4; pp.304-305

“Hitler repeatedly stated that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on science.”

Richard J. Evans; The Third Reich at War; Penguin Press; New York 2009, p. 547

“In Hitler’s scheme for the Germanization of the East, “There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches”.

Ian Kershaw; Hitler a Biography; 2008 Edn; WW Norton & Company; London p.661”

As for Goebbel’s:

“It’s a dirty, low thing to do for the Catholic Church to continue its subversive activity in every way possible and now even to extend its propaganda to Protestant children evacuated from the regions threatened by air raids. Next to the Jews these politico-divines are about the most loathsome riffraff that we are still sheltering in the Reich. The time will come after the war for an over-all solution of this problem.”

Joseph Goebbels’s diary, 26 March 1942 (Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, p. 146)

Doesn’t sound like the words of a devout Catholic to me.

And let’s not forget about Pope Pius XI who wrote an encyclical in German, smuggled it into Germany, and had it read from every pulpit in Germany, criticizing Nazism and condemning “the so-called myth of race and blood” and the idolization of the state.

“And when Hitler showed increasing belligerence toward the Church, Pius met the challenge with a decisiveness that astonished the world. His encyclical Mit brennender Sorge was the ‘first great official public document to dare to confront and criticize Nazism’ and ‘one of the greatest such condemnations ever issued by the Vatican.’ … It exposed the fallacy and denounced the Nazi myth of blood and soil; it decried its neopaganism, its war of annihilation against the Church, and even described the Führer himself as a ‘mad prophet possessed of repulsive arrogance.’”Bokenkotter, pp. 389–392

Oh, and Pope Pius XII,

He facilitated communications between the German resistance and the allies.  NBD, just the Vatican handling espionage against Hitler. 

Peter Hoffmann; The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945; 3rd Edn (First English Edn); McDonald & Jane’s; London; 1977; p.160

He also ordered priests and religious to do everything possible to shelter Jews and help them escape.Ewers, Justin (November 17–24, 2008). Sainthood on Hold. U.S. News and World Report.

And what did the Jews themselves say of his and Vatican efforts during the war?

“The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world.” - Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog

“It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews… . The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance.”- Rabbi Safran of Bucharest,

“What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts. … Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.” - Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli

“Catholics were instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” - Jewish theologian and Israeli diplomat to Milan, Pinchas Lapide.

But is this all, no, let’s keep looking. 

Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, ordered in 1940, that the yellow armbands with the Jewish star be placed on all the statues of Jesus and Mary in the city showing solidarity with Jewish brethren.  (Btw, just an interesting historical fact, guess what interesting historical figure this guy ordained?  Just some guy named Joseph Ratzinger.)

And let’s talk laity?  Were the Catholic faithful supportive of the Nazis?  Well, if only we could compare a map of Catholics living in Germany in the between-World Wars era and a map of the election of 1932…

Oh hey, looks like we can!  The black in this map shows where Nazi support was strongest:

And the black in this map shows more concentrated Catholic populations:

Wow, it’s almost like looking at a photo negative.  As in, a negative correlation between Catholicism and Nazi support.

Finally, let’s have one more quote by a prominent Jew telling it like it is.

“Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty.”

During this time, my closest friend was extremely busy with work, I couldn't afford therapy because I was struggling to even make rent, and I didn't have someone I could talk to.

I have OCD. One of my compulsions is "checking" and it often takes the form of googling. Googling a word I know just to check that the definition hasn't changed. Googling whether xyz is normal. Googling how to choose some relatively unimportant things.

I googled all kinds of things. I googled to find out if there's a word for intentionally letting someone hear you cry in hopes that they'll comfort you. (Not because I was doing that, but because I had an overwhelming urge to.) I googled odds of relationship survival after addiction. I googled how to tell if your partner has stopped loving you.

And Google ai overview answered every single question. And on mobile, when I was curled up in the dark at 4am, there's a convenient text box to ask the AI a follow-up question. And the AI says things like "that's a hard situation to be in" and "that must be painful to hear"

And I'm not a fucking idiot. I know perfectly well that AI is trained to be sycophantic and that talking to a fucking LLM about my relationship fears was a massive mistake.

I was also terrified, alone, heartbroken, and desperate.

I spent literally hours of time googling questions on AI mode. Holding conversations with the AI. I have stickers on my laptop and water bottle that say "AI Hater Club" and "generative AI? Nein danke" and I wish Sam altman would fall off the face off the earth.

And none of that mattered. I was desperate. I recognized that, and once things began to calm down (my doctor took me off of the narcolepsy med and put me on a medication for addiction called Naltrexone, I was able to start therapy again, my partner and I worked together and took steps to repair what was damaged) I stopped turning to it for an open shoulder.

But I realized a few days ago that I hadn't stopped using the ai entirely. I would Google "best [item] on a budget" and instead of reading a cnet link that reviewed multiple brands, instead of checking consumer reports, I expanded the AI overview and asked follow-up questions.

I'm currently finishing up an astrophysics internship for the summer. Usually when I don't know how to code something, I look at the documentation or find a post on Reddit or stack overflow to explain. Instead, I was asking Google overview for instructions on how to use sys.argv. At no point was I vibe coding, but I was basically asking Google ai to walk me through it like a tutor.

And then, last week, I realized that I no longer Google things the same way. I used to search like "pokemon sun and moon original release date" but lately I've been searching "what year did pokemon sun and moon come out?" Even my checking OCD has changed. I used to Google "n30i mask cleaning +seal +oily" and now I Google "I use a resmed n30i CPAP mask and it keeps losing its seal when I'm trying to sleep. My face gets kind of greasy when I have it on. I already clean it with CPAP wipes every day and run it under water to rinse, do I need a different kind of mask?"

A few days ago, the news about Hank Green using LLMs to find research papers dropped, and I saw his response on Reddit. I saw the way he talked about the dopamine hit he got from it. And something clicked.

I had to install a different OS launcher on my phone so I could change the search bar widget to Firefox search instead of Google, because that's the only way to ensure I don't get the ai overview when I Google something. It's actually really frustrating because I instinctively search in long rambling questions, which does not work well. But I'm having a hard time going back to how I was.

#thank you OP for sharing this story #i have been really bothered by some of the ways people are talking about hank green and this sums it up well #there's a lot of talk about how 'being busy / stressed / neurodivergent isn't an excuse' #but he's not using it as one #he's not like. expecting immediate forgiveness #he's saying that he's realized his relationship to AI tools and his work in general is unhealthy and he's going to rethink it #and it really bothers me how little sympathy i've seen some people have for that #you can absolutely be disappointed—we expect better from a public figure with his values #(and as he's said his loved ones also expect better from him and so does he) #but we can't treat people who confess to having an unhealthy relationship with AI the same as AI sycophants #those are not even slightly the same thing #OP i'm sorry you've dealt with addictive AI behavior and i'm glad you're doing better now #and that Hank Green's situation has helped you recognize and mitigate the patterns you were still stuck in #i'm sorry for how the rhetoric about him must feel like it reflects on how people think of you #as a fellow AI hater we AI haters need to get rid of this idea that using AI ever makes you tainted and morally suspect forever #it helps no one and does so much harm

Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.

[…]

One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.

[…]

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”