Classics & Virtues

Thinking about how Rubio is the promised one for the never Trumpers who still think the GOP is salvageable 🤡

I wish Karnes was on here for this lol

“These mean-kid progressives. What is this high school?”

*Brags about another man making bank on substack in an attempt to own Bouie*

…Sounds real loser-like to me ngl

One of my favorites:

bsky.app/profile/clas...

It’s been pointed out a thousand times but people who vote for Democrats never get the “we need to hear their concerns” articles that GOP voters endlessly get

“When Trump and his voters express that the Dems are crazy and the enemy from within, they reveal their contempt for the Americans who put them there”

If you want to move past the sort of abstraction that leads to this kind of callousness and move towards seeing the human face and soul of the Iranian people, I recommend watching an Abbas Kiarostami film.

A good place to start: “Where is the Friend’s House?”

The message of the film seems to be about forgiveness, and about finding empathy even for your oppressor. At the same time, the message that I've been hearing from so many Iranians right now, as Trump threatens to bomb Iran, is that they want war —people who never believed in foreign intervention before are now desperate for something that will break the cycle of violence. What do you think about that? As someone who has value for human life, I cannot defend war in any way, under any circumstance. I do not consider war to be to the advantage of people. I also believe that war will not bring anything other than the massacre of civilians and absolute destruction. But what the people of Iran might want or might not want, I think, will not change what the United States is going to do. What determines what happens with war is what advantages there will be for the party that's going to attack. I can at the very least hope that there will be no war, and that the Islamic Republic will fall by the power of the people of Iran. And I can also hope that if there happens to be a war, what benefits the United States overlaps with what benefits the people of Iran. Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-mehdi-mahmoudian-saw-inside-the-iranian-prison-system

This is a quote about US intervention from the screenwriter, Mehdi Mahmoudian, who was arrested earlier this year and released in mid-February:

Adding “It Was Just An Accident” (2025) to my Iranian film recommendations thread, which has left a lasting impression after watching it a couple months ago:

Ofc, the irony is Orwell was a journalist himself, a reminder that despite the deluge of BS, there are those out there who are speaking with integrity and clarity about current events.

If you are looking for a “the press sucks and they really suck during times of war” book, pick up Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

Douthat painting over all the left-lib options with Curtis Yarvin’s imaginary category to make himself feel better about his complicity

Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris, quia non est alius qui pugnet pro nobis, nisi tu Deus noster.

All the MAGA (and their allies in the media) concern trolling over American boots on the ground in Ukraine only for Trump to end up killing innocent Iranian civilians and saying American lives may also need to be sacrificed 🤬

“Will God Forgive Us?” church sign in First Reformed movie

Maybe the defining film image of our current moment:

The Catholic Church quoting the word of the Pope as a legal argument to the Supreme Court like it’s 1178 is kind of funny ngl.

Yeah the question with the gender much more how we manage to divert people from ending up where the x poster is rather than engaging with people there already. It’s much more important (or at least easier) to break the pipeline than to undo its effects.

Exactly! So well-put.

One of the things that makes the partisan gender gap convo so frustrating is centrists giving preference to men by talking about how we need to listen to their “very real concerns” when the concerns (driven by a bad media diet) are women have rights, can vote however they want, & can say no to sex

“Radical empath”*

*Hates the Jews

Had his image in my mind too!

By the end of his term, he’s going to look like Viserys, isn’t he?

Andrew T. Walker @ AndrewTWalker I'm a State of the Union-respecter. Love the pageantry. Always. predsfan1956 @predsfan1956 So only when it's a Republican president right? Check your post from last year: @AndrewTWalker - 3/7/24 State of the Union speeches are nearly always a massive waste of time. The pageantry isn't even worth it. Especially true with this stupidly political hack job of a speech that doubles as an angry geriatric shouting session about killing unborn humans.

I’m not a professional ethicist but I think this guy may be a liar

In 2024 Rufo offered $5000 to anyone who could prove Haitian migrants were eating pets.

Then he turns around and wonders why the brains of so many people on the right have melted into conspiracy slop

“Why the Mar-A-Lago shooter is forcing a conversation on the cost of oppressing conservative artists”

By Bari Weiss

Median Voter strikes again

Hannah Arendt on why social media is not “the commons”:

That would require more intellectual integrity of him than a drive-by Fox News article…

I was esp struck by the gall to put “democratic form of government” on the list of things that someone in the Trump admin defends. Egregious!

Yeah, I don’t understand him going all-in on MAGA like this either, especially at a time when the administration is as unpopular as ever. The short-term benefits can’t be that great

a man in a suit is talking to a football player who is wearing a green and white jersey . ALT: a man in a suit is talking to a football player who is wearing a green and white jersey .

If she somehow makes the ticket in 28, we are going to see some all time crash outs from these guys