Classics & Virtues

@classicvirtues.bsky.social

1428 Followers 346 Following

Left-Lib w/ White Guelph characteristics || Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Film, and Politics.

Let's not kid ourselves, guys. The Odyssey is a success. Frankly, all it needed to do was not flop. Thus, it paves the way for a Great Leap Forward in media, where the bedrock of western storytelling is fundamentally remade to suit modern sensibilities. End of an era.
Still from Nickel Boys: one boy looking up, one boy looking ahead with his arm around the other
Picture of Robert Pattinson
Opened to Dante picture and title page of the Cary translated/Dore illustrated Dante’s Inferno
Rick as played by Humphrey Bogart in front of his cafe
And he said to me, "Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel." 2 So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. 3 Then he said to me, "Son of man, eat this scroll 1 am giving you and fill your stomach with it." So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth. Ezekiel 3:1-3
Actor Matt Smith in long blonde hair next to a lion’s head on a pike in House of the Dragon
@jamellebouie.net let this be a lesson to deal with your feelings of gender anxiety and masculine inadequacy with a hobby or therapy or something and not a high stakes senate election 5:11 PM • Jul 6, 2026 8: Some people can reply 29 saves 632 reposts 3.6K likes 29 saves 70 632 3.6K jamelle •@jamellebouie.net • 17m (this is less about the candidate than some of his most vocal advocates)
Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news The Moral Majority lives Flying Squid is always ve... @flyingsq... • 1d I'd say at least part of the scandal is: if he can't be honest with his own wife, why should we expect him to be honest with anything he claims he'll do in the senate?
Claudia Sheinbaum on a phone call
Belgium’s Away Kits The middle guy has an apple in front of the guy wearing the jersey’s face, a staple of Magritte’s paintings On the left shows the back of the jersey with Ceci n’est pas un maillot (“This is not a jersey”) written on the back, inspired by his treachery of images painting of a pipe with Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”) beneath it
MLK and the Montgomery to Selma March
Still of Do the Right Thing with Spike Lee looking at the audience
What about all the children born here who, by now, have been raised to believe they are citizens? The Fourteenth Amendment creates a floor, not a ceiling. Recall that Congress changed the status of Native tribes, as it had the right to do under law. Morally speaking, it would be wrong to kick out people who have regarded themselves as citizens and who have been treated by our governments as citizens. Fortunately, as public reaction to President Trump's actions suggests (support for ending illegal immigration, and for kicking out illegal immigrants who have committed felonies, but anger at actions beyond that), the American people, being a generous people, are likely to support, even demand, that Congress create a legal mechanism to ensure that we do the right thing by them.
But that does not mean the American people would not support an effort to change the rule moving forward, nor does it necessarily mean that the Fourteenth Amendment, as understood by the men who wrote and ratified it, would prohibit such a change. To that end, and to truly reopen debate on this issue, it is important to recognize that neither "birthright citizenship" nor "jus soli" was part of the legal world that gave rise to the Fourteenth Amendment. Given the strong presumption that "birthright citizenship" exists, the Trump Administration's move to limit the scope of soil as the basis of citizenship is likely to fail. Had the administration only begun small, perhaps only raised the issue with regard to the children of tourists on a short stay, then the discussion might have been "how far does birthright citizenship extend," rather than "does birthright citizenship exist." In other words, the executive order is too broad in scope, and too little legal and historical legwork has been done to carry a majority on the Court against a strong consensus at the bar.
@Willchamberlain 0 ... We're getting the enriched uranium. We're getting a stop to enrichment. We're getting an end to the funding of proxies. We destroyed their Air Force, navy, air defenses, defense industrial base, and senior leadership. All done in 6 weeks. Geopolitical masterstroke
Nikita Khrushchev
Spike Lee writing at a table with notebooks
Your Honors, this process has meant, for those of us who have had the painful privilege of knowing it intimately, a sort of descent into dark areas of the human soul, where misery, abjection, and horror register profundities difficult to imagine before and to understand afterwards. In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri reserved the seventh circle of hell for the violent: for all those who harm others using force. And within that same enclosure, he submerged in a river of boiling and nauseating blood a certain genre of condemned, thus described by the poet: "These are the tyrants who lived on blood and robbery. Here their merciless faults are mourned." I do not come now to promote such a tremendous sentence for the defendants, although I cannot rule out that another court, of even higher rank than the present one, will take care of it in due course. I will limit myself to briefly substantiating the human convenience and necessity of punishment. I follow Oliver Wendell Holmes when he states: "The law threatens certain pains if one does certain things. If one persists in doing them, the law must inflict these pains in order that its threats will continue to be believed."
For the French Jansenists as for Hobbes, when men traded services and civilities with one another, it was not due to any innate capacity to practice liberality, but always out of self-interest. Curiously, however, the Jansenists did not deny the importance of liberality. What they did instead was to describe liberality as a false but nevertheless necessary virtue. In their minds, it was something akin to politeness, a way that men hid their natural sinfulness. In his Falsity of Human Virtues of 1678, Jacques Esprit summed up the Jansenists' way of thinking when he said that the most human beings could ever do was to "pass themselves off as liberal."33 It is noteworthy, however, that several of these Jansenist thinkers, and Nicole in particu-lar, came to the conclusion that even such hypocrisy was necessary for human society to function. Liberality need not be sincere for society to cohere. The Lost History of Liberalism, Helen Rosenblatt
Pinkish Red and Light Blue sour gummy worms
All pictures are stills from the movie Birdman
@AGHamilton29 12m I am someone who has spent a lot of time debunking and pushing back on false fraud claims, but there is just no reasonable explanation for the way and speed at which California counts ballots. Rob Pyers @rpyers 42m JUST IN: Los Angeles County has processed ~1.4 million ballots and estimates it has around 713, 180 ballots left to count.
Maurice by EM Forster Bookcover
Still from A Special Day
Trump’s MSG campaign rally in 2024
When You are Old (Yeats) When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty will love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. And bending down beside the glowing bars Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Isaiah 32: 5 The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. 6 For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. 7 The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right. 8 But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.
In fine, virtue itself, which is not among the primary objects of nature, but succeeds to them as the result of learning, though it holds the highest place among human good things, what is its occupation save to wage perpetual war with vices, —not those that are outside of us, but within; not other men's, but our own, —a war which is waged especially by that virtue which the Greeks call owppoourn, and we temperance,' and which bridles carnal lusts, and prevents them from winning the consent of the spirit to wicked deeds? For we must not fancy that there is no vice in us, when, as the apostle says, " The flesh lusteth against the spirit; " a for to this vice there is a contrary virtue, when, as the same writer says, " The spirit lusteth against the flesh." " For these two," he says, "are contrary one to the other, so that you cannot do the things which you would." But what is it we wish to do when we seek to attain the supreme good, unless that the flesh should cease to lust against the spirit, and that there be no vice in us against which the spirit may lust? And as we cannot attain to this in the present lite, however ardently we desire it, let us by God's help accomplish at least this, to preserve the soul from succumbing and yielding to the flesh that lusts against it, and to refuse our consent to the perpetration of sin. far be it from us, then, to fancy that while we are still engaged in this intestine war, we have already found the happiness which we seek to reach by victory. And who is there so wise that he has no conflict at all to maintain against his vices? Augustine, City of God Book 19
Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news The Moral Majority lives @flyingsq... • 1d I'd say at least part of the scandal is: if he can't be honest with his own wife, why should we expect him to be honest with anything he claims he'll do in the senate?
Out of the Past still (man and woman talking to each other with lake and mountains in the background)
From my Letterboxd review of The Leopard: Things will have to change in order that they remain the same."-Prince Don Fabrizio Salina As both an aristocrat and a man of the left, Visconti offers a unique perspective on modernity in The Leopard: he neither clings to the passing old world nor uncritically embraces the in-breaking new one. Visconti simply understands the transitory nature of things: wealth is fleeting, power is fleeting, beauty is fleeting, and passions are fleeting. There is no resisting it, so why be bitter and resentful, when perspicacious memory and cautious hope provide a way for us to love our ephemeral existence?
“We still talk about you” meme with SharonK’s Bluesky profile picture/username
Amazon Info about “Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1878-1923” by Joan Richardson but the cover photo is for “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth”
Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFIC...• @Esoteri... 5h I am reminded of all the people who told me that if I didn't like Trump I had to act like Kamala Harris was a saviour, when in fact she sat at the head of a truly insane army of progressive activists eager to directly attack our structure of government in a much more methodical way than Trump has.
Erick Erickson • @EWErickson 26m When Edwin Edwards ran against David Duke, his campaign had a bumper sticker that read "vote for the crook, it's important." Ken Paxton could have the same sticker against the trans weirdo.
409 They dropped like Flakes - They dropped like Stars-Like Petals from a Rose- When suddenly across the June A Wind with fingers-goes - They perished in the Seamless Grass- No eye could find the place- But God can summon every face On his Repealless - List.
Various stills from Tree of Life in a collage
DANCE OF THE MACABRE MICE In the land of turkeys in turkey weather At the base of the statue, we go round and round. What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise! Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice. This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance. We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur's sword, Reading the lordly language of the inscription, Which is like zithers and tambourines combined: The Founder of the State. Whoever founded A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice? What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering, The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!
@JoelWBerry X.com I'd like to go back to when there were no wars and I could afford groceries plz 1:56 PM • 8/1/24
A state agency responsible for overseeing complaints of judicial misconduct says that two Democratic-backed candidates seeking to oust Republican-appointed state Supreme Court justices violated judicial ethics rules during their campaigns. A special committee within the state Judicial Qualifications Commission released two public statements Sunday, just days before the election, declaring that it "reasonably believes" former Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan and personal injury attorney Miracle Rankin defied Georgia's Code of Judicial Conduct by publicly endorsing each other.
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural MLK
Ross Barkan @RossBarkan AOC, at Munich, was asked about what she would do if China invaded Taiwan. She didn't have much of an answer. It was a rough moment that deserved scrutiny. Either she thinks American troops *should* show up to fight China, or she doesn't. AOC's Munich Stumble Is a Warning to the Left
Top: Paris Texas phone booth scene Bottom: Winter Sleep still with the brother at his desk typing on his laptop and the sister in the back on couch
A google search showing “how to delete someone else's bluesky account”
NYC in 1944
Elon Musk ( X @elonmusk Can't recommend The Iliad enough! Best as Penguin audiobook at 1.25 speed. With a link to The Odyssey
Using concepts from modern meteoritics, Burbery suggests that Dante portrayed Satan as a massive high-speed impactor striking the Southern Hemisphere and driving straight toward Earth's core. According to this interpretation, the force of the collision pushed land outward into the Northern Hemisphere, creating Hell as a giant crater reaching upward from below. At the same time, displaced material from the impact formed Mount Purgatory as a towering central peak on the opposite side of the planet. Comparing Inferno to Dinosaur-Killing Asteroids Burbery compares the scale of Dante's imagined catastrophe to the Chicxulub (K-Pg) impact linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs. In this reading, Satan resembles an elongated asteroid-sized object similar to the interstellar body Oumuamua, arriving with enough force to trigger a planetwide geological event. Like the asteroid associated with the K-Pg extinc-tion, the impact described in Inferno is portrayed as powerful enough to penetrate
@classicvirtues.bsky.social By the end of his term, he's going to look like Viserys, isn't he? With a picture of Viserys from House of the Dragon with a mask over half his face to disguise the damage that a leprosy-like disease is doing to his body
Some 44% of U.S. adults believe they have the available tools to become billionaires, largely fueled by speculative investments such as cryptocurrencies, according to the Harris Poll's recent Americans 2022 study cited on CNBC
Sam Haselby: The MSNBC historians got MAGA wrong too. The Resistance Historians took a prominent role "explaining" MAGA. Their theory, racism is its distinguishing feature, is at odds with Tramp '24 putting together the most multiracial GOP coalition in at least 60 years.
Still of Juliette Binoche with her head on the shoulder of William Shimell from Abbas Kiarostami’s film ‘Certified Copy’
A.E. Stallings Argos, Odysseus's Dog (See The Odyssey 17.290-327) Another hunting dog poem, i.m. Timothy Murphy Argos, with your mange-scabbed coat, Shipwreck of ribs, washed up among The midden's refuse, the mules' dung, Do you still track the wild goat Through dreams of oregano and thyme? You lift your head and prick your ears. Voice that marooned you twenty years Ago, sails back, still in its prime To ask the swincherd why you sleep Outside the walls, seething with fleas; He speaks of breeding, pedigrees. The ordure shifts, piled soft and deep. Remember black ships rigged for Troy? Quayside, just weaned, you whimpered. Stay, He anchored you. And you obey: You stay still. No-one croons "Good boy."
Argos as a puppy
Still from Sound of Falling
My Father’s Shadow still
Top left: Simone Weil Top right: Dorothy Day Bottom left: Walter Benjamin Bottom right: MLK
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, o knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?