Cultural literacy pop quiz: who’s the quote from?

This Comment of the Day by Benjamin, a relatively recent recruit to the discussions here, typifies the thoughtfulness and seriousness that distinguishes the commentariat at Ethics Alarms. Ann Althouse, a blogger (whose work  Facebook doesn’t block) with a much larger readership whose topics often mirror mine, just announced that she is considering changing “the commenting experience”:

I’ll regard the comments submitted to moderation as private messages to me, and I’ll only publish comments I think readers would generally enjoy reading — comments that are interesting, original, well-written, and responsive to the post.

I consider most of the comments here interesting, original, well-written, and responsive to the posts. The kind of comment that Benjamin registered is rare on Althouse, or any blog, really, though not rare here. (The exceptions would be PopeHat, whose progenitor has, at least for now, apparently abandoned for greener pastures, and the original Volokh Conspiracy, before it moved to the Washington Post, and then Reason). Why is that? One reason is the subject matter; another is that commenters who can’t express themselves, issue uninformed opinions or who just aren’t too bright don’t do well on Ethics Alarms. Another reason is that, as I have probably complained about too much, the mass exodus here of the Trump Deranged and knee-jerk progressives has eliminated most of the “You’re an idiot!” “No, you’re an idiot!” exchanges that pollute most blogs, as well as comment sections everywhere.

Here is Benjamin’s Comment of the Day on Item #2 in the post, Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/15/2019: Fevered Ethics Musings, and More:

My efforts at suppressing the sin of schadenfreude are becoming futile. The things festering behind fiercely-reinforced masks are starting to spill putrid materials out of the eye and nose holes nearly everywhere and all at once. I believe I’m addicted to two “drugs.": watching good men hoisting the black flag and destroying evil with relish in the name of a good end, e.g. Liam Neeson’s Taken is dangerous for me to watch – I start getting ideas – so I’ve placed an embargo for myself on such plotlines; and watching evil destroy itself. I don’t think I’ll need to embargo the latter, though. There’s nothing more instructive of the fact that difficult-but-correct choices ought to always be chosen over immediately convenient wrong ones than watching the effects of a century or so of those wrong choices.

Pope Leo XIII had a vision in 1884 in which God gave Satan 100 years to attempt to destroy Christendom without resistance. The beginning of that time is debated, but many settle on 1917 – Fatima’s Miracle of the Sun, 33 years to the day hence from the vision, and two days prior to the commencement of the Russian Revolution (among many other “."coincidental."." things). I have my own probably errant thoughts about this. Imagine if God and the Devil were playing chess, and God, so certain of his ultimate victory, permitted the Devil to make 100 moves in succession. Suppose that the Devil’s position was so terrible at the end of those moves that God can actually claim that giving him only a few more would cement God’s victory without Him having to act any further. The Devil may actually be begging God to move. One might think that I’m giving the fallout of an American election too much cosmic significance. But one would miss the point that a universal, cosmic law of laws is incontrovertible, and the fallout on display here and everywhere else in concert are symptomatic of a now-more-than-ever undeniable meta-reality.

I used to resent being born in this nihilist wasteland, but I might be the only one with a twisted-enough sense of humor to laugh myself to tears as it burns itself to the ground and tells me at the point of a gun that I’m not permitted to do anything to stop it. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

I know my moral theological/philosophical approach isn’t quite your style, but the ethical perspective hardly differs. How much are you enjoying this? Was the grueling second act worth the still-impending-but-inevitable third-act vindication? I know things will get much worse pragmatically in the near future, but you have to be getting some consolation from the moral victory falling unexpectedly into your lap while groggy, eating breakfast, and not even paying attention (your momentary state may have differed from mine, of course) because the nature of your enemies – the collection of qualities they embrace in defining themselves as your enemies per se – is such that they can’t keep it in their pants long enough to maintain the façade, right? It has to look to you like decades were spent setting up dominoes, and the people who set them are watching in horror as they fall down to spell “Be ethical, or waste a few decades setting up dominoes to spell it out against your will!." I’ll never get tired of making these analogies. The End.