Emperor Justinian’s Ghost

Hoppe is right. Casualty of the Twitter purge of 2020. Rome is inevitable.

[Emperor Justinian’s Ghost @EJustinian1308]

This is my political ideology.

[Daily Roman Updates @UpdatingOnRome]

If it works.

[Empire-Builders @EmpiresPod]

Who’s pretending?

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I went to In-N-Out and ordered a cheeseburger. The cashier, a calm young woman named Destiny, asked me a question I did not expect.

"You want that Animal Style?"

I paused.

I did not know what this meant. But a samurai does not admit he does not know. So I answered with weight.

"...Animal Style."

"Cool. So that's mustard-grilled, extra spread, grilled onions, pickles. Yeah?"

I understood now. This was a sacred permission. For one meal, I was being told to put down my manners at the door. To eat the way a beast eats, without shame. I had waited my whole life for someone to give me this order.

"Yes," I said. "I will become the animal."

Destiny did not blink. "...Okay. You want your fries Animal Style too?"

I stopped. Even the potatoes?

"The potatoes also become animals?"

"I mean, they get cheese and sauce and grilled onions, so..."

"Then yes. Let the potatoes abandon their restraint as well."

"...Got it." She was the calmest woman I have ever met. "3x3, 4x4, or just the one?"

I did not know these numbers, but I knew a challenge when I heard one. "How many must I face?"

"It's, like, how many patties you want."

"How many is the most honorable?"

"...Four is a lot."

"Then four. A warrior does not ask for fewer."

She wrote it down without argument. A 4x4, Animal Style, with animal fries. She warned me once, kindly. "That's gonna be huge." I told her I was counting on it.

It arrived. It was a tower. Cheese and sauce ran down my hands the moment I lifted it. There was no clean way to eat it. There was no dignified way. That was the entire point.

I ate it like a beast. Both hands, no honor, grilled onion on my chin, and I have to be honest with you, it was the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.

For thirty years I have kept my manners at every table in the world.

They handed me a burger and told me to be an animal, and I have never felt so free.

So tell me, America.

The whole country knows the secret menu. What else are you hiding in plain sight?

And "Animal Style." Was I eating the animal, or finally becoming one?

[Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando]

If the west is going to survive, its people are going to have to rediscover a brutality they haven’t known for generations.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Having attended our inquiry hearings, spoken with so many survivors, read our report?

I have never been more convinced that the very worst rape gang offenders should not be deported.

A Restore British Government, with the British people’s approval, will put them to death.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

God honors his favorites by crushing them, drops the whole insufferable wretched weight of purpose on their spines until they either snap into shape or snap entirely. the unburdened, those buoyant grinning vapid little phantoms drifting through their own lives without a single crushing thing to carry, they are forgotten

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

🇺🇸⚡️🦅

[Walker Boh @OneArmedBoh]

Octavian.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[J Stewart @triffic_stuff_]

Iain Dale left stunned by calm caller on LBC

A composed caller named Mike told Iain Dale on LBC that Britain “will remain almost ungovernable until we have mass deportations”.

The exchange was striking because the caller spoke in measured tones, clearly articulating a view held by millions of people across the country. Yet Iain struggled to process it, repeatedly falling back on “you can’t do that”.

Mike highlighted the obvious disconnect: the British public have consistently voted for lower immigration, only for politicians to deliver record levels instead.

“There’s a massive disconnect between the political class and the people of this country,” he said. “We never gave any consent to this and there’s certainly no mandate for the scale of immigration we’ve seen.”

When Iain pushed back, saying you can’t deport people here perfectly legally, the caller was unflinching:

Caller: “You mean end indefinite leave to remain?”

Iain: “You can do that for future people but you can’t do that for people who have already got it. That would be outrageous.”

Caller: “Yeah you can. Of course you can.”

Iain: “From a fairness point of view, you can’t suddenly tell people who’ve got a perfect legal right to be here that we’re changing the rules now…”

Caller: “You can, Iain.”

Iain: “Well you can do that but is that really the kind of country you want to live in?”

Caller: “Yes!”

Iain continued to argue that you can’t “take it out on perfectly legal, law-abiding people”, clearly unable to grasp how widespread this frustration has become.

The public didn’t always feel this way. Years of politicians ignoring the public on immigration have shifted attitudes dramatically. As the caller made clear, people never voted for this transformation and the consequences of fixing it now rest with those who created the problem.

Well worth a listen. The gap between Westminster and the rest of the country has rarely been clearer.

[One Proud Bavarian @ProudBavaria]

You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

[ShitpostGateway @ShitpostGate]

Counter point

[Southampton Times @sotontimes]

Hampshire Police have released the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak being arrested.

*Warning the video is very distressing*

[Herald of Rome @HeraldOfRome]

Why is the conquest of Constantinople so important to Turks? What made Constantinople so great? Who made Constantinople so great that Turks still celebrate to this day about conquering it?

The only reason 1453 matters so much to Turkish nationalism is that Constantinople was already one of the greatest cities in history long before it was ever taken. The people who made it great were the Orthodox Christian Graeco-Romans whose living continuation is the modern Greeks, and they were the ones who raised its walls and churches and palaces and filled it with learning and wealth and gave it the prestige that made it worth conquering in the first place.

No other nation builds so much of its national identity around the capture of a single city it did not even build, which tells you that what is really being celebrated is stealing something good they couldn't make.

So when the conquest gets celebrated, what is really being celebrated has nothing to do with creating anything good or with defending anything from something evil, because the city was already built and it was good. All that happened in 1453 was that someone else's masterpiece changed hands while the people who stole it started talking as if its greatness had always been theirs. It is like a man who steals the most beautiful house in the world while despising the person who built it, and then spends the rest of his life inventing reasons for why he supposedly improved the place, as if repainting the front door makes him the architect.

And the copes only get more desperate from there, because the people they despise never actually disappeared. The Orthodox Christian Graeco-Romans carried the same faith and the same Greek language and the same culture straight through the medieval and Ottoman centuries and became the modern Greeks, and that unbroken continuity drives Turkish nationalism crazy and makes Turks insecure. So Turks keep inventing stories about how the modern Greeks are some brand new people who popped into existence out of nowhere in 1821 with no real link to the medieval and Ottoman era Greeks who shared their exact language, religion, and culture. They brag about stealing the city, they hate the people who built it, and then they pretend those same people's living continuation are total strangers to them.

Their favorite excuse is that the city was in decline by the time they took it and that they were the ones who saved it, which conveniently skips over the fact that the Turks were the reason it declined in the first place. It was the Seljuks and then the Ottomans who tore Anatolia away from the empire, and Anatolia was the heartland that fed Constantinople its people and its soldiers and its food and its wealth, so once that was gone the city was cut off from the very thing that had kept it alive for a thousand years. They strangled it slowly over centuries and then stood over the body claiming they were the ones who brought it back.

There is another cope sitting underneath all of it, which is the idea that Greece had nothing to do with Anatolia, as if the two were always separate worlds. The truth is that the people of Greece and Anatolia and Cyprus were one and the same in the medieval period. They were Greeks in the Hellenistic age and Greeks again in the early Roman empire, and they were all Romanized together until they became the Graeco-Romans of the medieval world, one people sharing one language, one culture, one identity and one faith across. Greece and Cyprus today simply happen to be the last of that Graeco-Roman people still standing, after the ones in Anatolia were converted, mixed with alien Turks and killed and finally 99% expelled in the 20th century. The east Romans never saw any of these lands as separate nations in the first place, because they had a single name for the whole thing, Rhomania (Ρωμανία), meaning the land of the Romans.

Make that make sense.

Anatolia, Greece and Cyprus were equally Rhomania when the Turks arrived.

[IMPERATOR @IMPERATORAUS]

In October 1912, the First Balkan War erupted when the Balkan League – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria – launched a coordinated assault against the Ottoman Empire.

The conflict, which lasted until May 1913, dealt the Ottomans a series of rapid and humiliating defeats, stripping them of most of their remaining European territories.

At sea, the Greek navy proved decisive. Command of the Aegean allowed Greece to liberate a chain of islands long under Ottoman rule.

Among the first to fall was Lemnos, a strategically vital outpost at the mouth of the Dardanelles, soon transformed into a forward base for Greek operations.

On that island lived a young boy named Panagiotis Charanis – later known to the scholarly world as Peter Charanis, one of the twentieth century's most distinguished historians of Byzantium.

Born in 1908, Charanis was only four years old when Lemnos was freed, and decades later, he recalled a scene from those first days of liberation.

As Greek soldiers disembarked and took up positions in the village squares, the island's children gathered around them in excitement, creating a lively commotion.

Eventually, one soldier, amused by the crowd of wide‑eyed children, asked, "What are you looking at?"

"We came to see Hellenes", one of the boys replied.

Startled, the soldier pressed him: "Are you not also Hellenes?"

"No", the boy answered without hesitation. "We are not Hellenes. We are Romans".

[stubborn octopus 🦑✨ @AtlasNarratives]

Greeks honor the King who never surrendered…

•Today: 573 years since the Fall of Constantinople and the death of Constantine Palaiologos

[Daily Roman Updates @UpdatingOnRome]

🫡