crip2

Truth is beauty, beauty truth

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.

1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?”
Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.

2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.

3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.

4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?

5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.

6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.

7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them.

[crip2 @crip218]

@dpletka @nytimes Please, the @nytimes stopped being a credible outlet 10 years ago

[crip2 @crip218]

@KFCBarstool Yes

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

"I love America, which is why I reserve the right to criticize her, which is why I constantly screech that she is an evil empire born out of racism and genocide who is ruining the world"

[crip2 @crip218]

@caroljsroth 👏👏👏

[Carol Roth @caroljsroth]

America isn’t exceptional because we’re richer, stronger and powerful- we are richer, stronger and powerful because we are exceptional.

And we are exceptional because of our foundational values that are, in fact, fixed into place.

[crip2 @crip218]

@mattyglesias From which politicians and party is this relentless negativity coming?

[crip2 @crip218]

@Noahpinion @robustus Just a thought, maybe Democrat leaders and liberal “journalists” shouldn’t trash America, its founders, and its values every second of every day. You know, maybe start there

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@spencerpratt Not merely “ok”.

Anyone who doesn’t love America is a traitor and beneath contempt.

Those who don’t love America, those who are disloyal should be exiled immediately.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

God Bless America

[MintyHawk @minty_hawk]

The angriest Fourth of July speech in American history is also, if you read it to the end, one of the most patriotic. It's been a while since I have read the whole thing. Let's revisit it in honor of the 250th, shall we? /1

[MintyHawk @minty_hawk]

About 100 years ago, on July 5, 1926, the least talkative president in American history stood up in Philadelphia and gave what I'd argue is the best speech anyone has ever given about the Declaration of Independence. Not many read it anymore. The 250th seems like a good time to fix that. /1

[Orson Scott Card @orsonscottcard]

Our current Civil War:

I must point out that in 2016 a President was elected who was immediately rejected by a certain portion of the population and by state and local governments. They brought criminal legal action against Trump and impeached him before he'd even had a chance to do anything, and accused him of being a dictator and the death of democracy — though it was they who rejected a lawful election and threw the Constitution out the window. Sanctuary laws in defiance of federal authority are in every case the equivalent of besieging and firing on Ft. Sumter. 

When Trump won reelection in 2024, the rebels doubled down on their secession from the Union by passing laws against federal officers enforcing federal law within their sanctuary purview, all the time claiming that Trump was oppressing THEM by taking completely proper actions. So by rejecting the results of the election, they are in open rebellion.

And if you say “Trump is no Lincoln” you'd be right. Trump has not arrested and charged with treason the deniers and rejectors of federal authority, including mayors and governors who threaten to prosecute federal officers for enforcing the law. Trump has been far more restrained than Lincoln ever was — though the defiance of the Constitution is no less egregious. Sanctuary laws are exactly the same as secession — a declaration that the federal government has no authority here. They have declared war against the President and openly abused him as has not been done to a President since Lincoln. But the President has not sent federal troops to arrest those publicly guilty of sedition and treason, and take over the defiant government bodies and throw them in jail. They claim to fear Trump's officers — while they are the ones who suppress free speech and try to adjust campaign laws so as to prevent the candidates they oppose from being on the ballot. California doesn't even pretend to be a democracy anymore … but Trump stays his hand.

So, true — he is no Lincoln. He has been infinitely lenient in dealing with people and governments that are in open rebellion against the federal government because the wrong guy made it into the White House.

[Alexi Lalas @AlexiLalas]

‘Sup.

[Taylor Twellman @TaylorTwellman]

Red card for that means you’ve lost the plot. Completely lost the plot. #USMNT

[crip2 @crip218]

@ellonico It’s to spare the innocent. Remove criminals and psychopaths from society. Allow women and children to flourish. It’s pro woman and pro human

[Viet Q Nguyen @VietQNguyen]

https://t.co/ROqWFv7BC8

[crip2 @crip218]

@elonmusk Communists: rules for thee, not for me. Every single time

[crip2 @crip218]

@JamesSurowiecki @Cernovich Why are you killing so many Africans? Murderer

[crip2 @crip218]

@BarbMcQuade MSNOW saying this proves we have a Communist Deep State