The Cynical Optimist

Head in the clouds, but feet on the ground. Golden rule/NAP fan. Your beliefs don’t make you a better person, your behavior does.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The House is scheduled to vote this week on a National Defense Authorization that would integrate our military tech & supply chains with Israel’s.

Today, the Rules Committee will decide whether my amendment to strip section 219 will get a vote.

RT to support the Massie amdt.!

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

LMAO how is this not satire?

[T. Bernadetti @MrsRoyKeaneo]

Thr most accurate video you'll see on the internet! #israel

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

No they did not die for their country. The Iranians are dying for their country. The Americans are dying for Israel, for the military-industrial complex, and for imperialist agendas of planetary hegemony. This isn't worthy of praise, it's worthy of anger and outrage.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

Footage by a US soldier at the Muwafaq Salti Airbase in Jordan, where the US military is defending apartheid Israel from the consequences of wars it starts

At least two soldiers were killed in this retaliatory Iranian attack, many are injured, and several among them aren't expected to make it

These US service members were sent to die for Israel. There's no way around that fact.

[Dvorstone @dvorstone]

Most people complaining about the casting in Nolan’s Odyssey don’t fully understand what they’re objecting to because it's deeper than they realize: As such, I'll explain.

The unease they feel runs deeper than superficial complaints about “realism” or skin tone. What they can't articulate is their objection to universalizing the particular; an error characteristic of philosophical liberalism.

The Odyssey is not a universal story. It is not a detachable “hero’s journey” that can be stripped of its cultural origins and modernized for contemporary audiences. Its power lies in its particularity. The audience must do the work of closing the gap; the text does not come to us.

The values that animate it, xenia (reciprocal guest-friendship), oikos (the household and its obligations), mētis (cunning intelligence), kleos (glory), and timē (honor), are not interchangeable with modern liberal abstractions. They are embedded in a specific ancient Greek moral and social world. They are not timeless “human themes” floating free of context.

This is why the Odyssey functions today primarily as an educational text rather than popular entertainment, as it once did. It belonged to the moral universe of ancient Greece. It does not belong to ours. Its value lies precisely in its alienness: it forces us to encounter a distinct way of thinking about justice, loyalty, hospitality, and human excellence.

When critics complain that an adaptation “isn’t realistic,” they are grasping for the most accessible language to express a deeper discomfort. What actually bothers them is the erosion of cultural fidelity; the required deracination for modern audiences stripping it of its required context, which in turn strips it of all of the value that it contains. A universal Odyssey has no value.

In attempting to globalize the Odyssey, they erase what remains of an already dead culture; killing even its ghost. Ancient Greece is gone, yet we have preserved its artifacts and stories not because they resemble us, but because they are different. The point of engaging with them is to contend with what is foreign, not to replace it with comforting modernity.

Ancient Greece is remarkable, horrifying, marvelous, repulsive, and admirable all at once. It is not a culture we would want to inhabit, but it is one from which we still benefit by struggling to understand it on its own terms. Turning it into a generic vehicle for contemporary sensibilities performs a kind of reverse alchemy: it transforms something rare and demanding into something familiar and undemanding, thus making gold into lead.

[Herod Priovolos @herodpriovolos]

I just watched Christopher Nolan’s #TheOdyssey and I left the cinema with a deep sense of disappointment.
I entered expecting Homer’s world to breathe: salt in the air, darkness over the sea, gods watching from a distance, and a wounded man struggling to return home. Instead, ancient Greece vanished beneath a cold and generic Hollywood spectacle.
The characters felt like modern actors wearing ancient costumes. The dialogue had no poetry, the casting carried none of the story’s identity, and the deepest themes of exile, loyalty, grief and homecoming were buried beneath noise and expensive images.
Because The Odyssey is not really about monsters. The Cyclops, the Sirens and the storms are only the visible dangers. The true journey takes place within Odysseus himself. It asks whether a man can lose his companions, his youth, his name and twenty years of his life, yet still return without losing the person he once was.
That is why the story has survived for almost 3,000 years. Every human being is trying to return to something: a home, a love, an identity, or the self they were before life changed them.
A $250 million production somehow made one of humanity’s greatest meditations on memory, mortality and belonging feel empty. Hollywood borrowed Homer’s name and prestige, but abandoned the soul that made his story immortal.
This was not The Odyssey. It was a monument to money, arrogance and the belief that spectacle can replace meaning.

[The Cynical Optimist @Quixxxotic]

@AlinStLouis @jameszimmermann Because politics now trump policy.

[slimzim @jameszimmermann]

I still talk about DEI destroying symphonies because I’m still stuck on the sidelines. Music isn’t some “hobby” I do for fun (though it is), playing clarinet is (was) my livelihood, the thing I spent my best years mastering, my calling in life.

There’s no “just move on” for me: The hole in my social circle, the savings I spent, the old house I live in – all of it revolves around the hysteria of 2020 which is still going strong in the orchestra world. It’s pretty clear I’ll never be allowed back in the game but that doesn’t mean I can’t fight for what’s right – especially after going balls to the wall for Knoxville last year only to have them pull the rug after I won their blind audition for Principal Clarinet. Just brutal what they did.

@katrosenfield is right, we cannot memory hole this.

[Morgoth @MorgothsReview]

They had to destroy the Odyssey because they didn’t want European men identifying with a man who gets lost then overcomes adversity and slaughters the raping tricksters and parasites who took over his home.

[Mandy Arthur @mandyarthur]

China is the GOP scapegoat, Russia is the Dem scapegoat.

In reality, it’s always ISRAEL.

[Adam @adamemedia1]

Americans realising their president is so corrupt he publicly announces his insider trading schemes.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

TRUMP ON HIS POINTLESS WAR: “We’re making a lot of money. The defense companies are doing great.”🤔

Unreal. There you have it, folks.

[Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕 @jeremykauffman]

@christopherrufo i'm editing a video with claude right now and once it learned I oppose African immigration it refused to work on it

if this isn't communism it's pretty close

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

HOW THEY ENGINEERED THE FAKE PANDEMIC

1. China released staged footage of people “dropping dead” in the streets; scenes never witnessed anywhere else in the world before or after December 2019.

2. A PCR test was rolled out that could not determine whether someone was actually sick. The vast majority of results were false positives.

3. The claim of asymptomatic transmission was heavily promoted to justify restrictions on healthy people and to force mass testing on the entire population; which led to tens of millions of false positive test results.

4. Tech companies and media outlets were mobilized to censor dissent and rebrand inconvenient truths as “misinformation.”

5. Behavioral psychologists were brought in to design fear-based messaging specifically intended to secure public compliance.

6. To keep the illusion of a deadly pandemic alive, they required excess mortality data.

7. Ordinary mild respiratory symptoms alone could not produce those numbers, so the population was subjected to sustained psychological pressure capable of triggering mass psychogenic illness.

8. Relentless fear messaging kept cortisol levels chronically elevated, weakening immune function, particularly among the elderly.

9. Social isolation, delayed medical care, and lockdown policies then generated the excess deaths needed to prop up the narrative.

10. Cloth and surgical masks were suddenly declared effective, something no serious public-health authority had previously recommended for ordinary respiratory pathogens, turning every face into a walking advertisement for fear.

11. People were conditioned to remain isolated “until the vaccine was ready,” buying authorities additional time to expand control.

12. Billions were injected with an experimental product that was claimed to stop both infection and transmission.

13. When those claims collapsed, the goalposts were moved: “Your shot won’t work unless the unvaccinated also take it.”

14. New “variants” were announced every few months to justify an endless series of booster campaigns.

15. A new condition - “long COVID” - was introduced to reframe mounting vaccine side effects.

16. Pharmaceutical companies recorded unprecedented profits, shielded by government contracts and complete legal immunity.

17. Anyone who raised objections was silenced, deplatformed, investigated, or publicly discredited.

18. Once the story became too strained to maintain, the pandemic was abruptly declared over, and the entire episode was treated as if it had never happened.

NEVER FORGET AND PROSECUTE FAUCI!

[Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff]

In the latest Trump grift, Truth Social will now sell faster access to Trump’s market-moving posts to institutional investors willing to pay for it. This is yet another example of Trump's unprecedented exploitation of the presidency for personal financial gain.

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Helen Andrews drops a provocative thesis: Feminization = wokeness.

Everything we call "woke"—empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition, inclusion over free speech—is just the natural outcome of institutions becoming majority-female since the 1970s.

She points to surveys: ~2/3 men prioritize free speech, ~2/3 women prioritize inclusive society. Men lean "ethics of justice" (rules/facts), women "ethics of caring" (context/relationships/emotions).

Examples: James Damore fired not for facts but because it made women "feel bad." Kavanaugh hearings: masculine side demanded evidence, feminine side focused on "she's crying."

Her take: When women predominate, politics/institutions tilt toward subjective feelings over objective rules—even if many women reject it (e.g., best Kavanaugh books by women critics).

This 2:46 clip is bold, polarizing, and ties demographic shifts to cultural ones.

Agree it's a key driver of wokeness? Or overreach? What's your read on the gender gaps in free speech/inclusion polls?

[Done with the Current Thing @MakeOrwellFic]

@TPV_John @ky_statesman A perfect face to represent the fall of our republic

[Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 @mtgreenee]

Every Republican Senator voted to merge our military with Israel’s military.

The most America LAST thing they could possibly do, selling our military out to a foreign country.

It’s absolute treason and betrayal.