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justuswallen.bsky.social
@justuswallen.bsky.social
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emilynussbaum.bsky.social
Virginia Heffernan wrote this shortly after the 2016 election and it still holds true
THIS is what makes my head spin: The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I'm not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn't care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There's nothing he would die for - not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He's not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, "the common man"" veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn't care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he's not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn't - in a more secular key - even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel's hand. Doesn't even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn't live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he's very ugly and barely mammalian. Am I missing an obscure moral system to which he so much as nods? Also are there other people, living or dead, like him?
December 16, 2025 at 4:21 AM
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stephenjudkins.bsky.social
It is so incredibly fucked up that we're living through this travesty and an entire political party, a good portion of another, most of the mainstream media, and our business elites are pretending everything is business as usual
newsguy.bsky.social Steve Herman @newsguy.bsky.social · Jun 18
President Trump announces he is gifting two new flag poles to be immediately erected on the the White House lawns that are "tall, tapered, rust proof, rope inside the pole, and of the highest quality."
June 18, 2025 at 12:56 AM
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lottelydia.bsky.social
Posting this extract from a lecture by John Maynard Keynes, speaking on the BBC in the middle of the Second World War, to every Labour cabinet minister
Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford… We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life? …
August 15, 2024 at 11:37 AM
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sethcotlar.bsky.social
I find myself thinking about historian Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition of fascism far too often than I’d like these days.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legalrestraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
April 2, 2025 at 2:54 PM
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jamellebouie.net
get every single one of these people out of leadership and put them on a farm somewhere i don’t give a shit www.msnbc.com/jonathan-cap...
Clyburn urges Biden to pardon Trump 'so we can clean the slate'
After convincing President Biden to pardon his son Hunter, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn is now calling for clemency for Donald Trump. "If we keep digging at things in the past, I'm not too sure the...
www.msnbc.com
December 9, 2024 at 3:36 AM