Hadrian Bagration

Minor author. Avid reader on a re-reading stint. Classical music enthusiast. Art lover. Gym buff on an unending cut. Military history obsessed. Bon vivant.

[Tanvi Ratna @tanvi_ratna]

Enter the Iran strikes of Feb 2026. In a blog mere days after, I'd said the Iran war was the catalyst to push through the unfinished global reordering Trump had initiated, not just in the Middle East, but globally.

Because Iran cut through every lever of the reordering.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

“Donald Trump” the buffalo has been spared from sacrifice in Bangladesh after going viral.

“Donald Trump,” the rare albino buffalo named for its blond tuft of hair, was hours away from being sacrificed for Eid al-Adha… until the government stepped in.

It had already been sold for ritual slaughter when viral videos turned it into a national attraction.

Crowds started flooding the farm to see the nearly 1,500-pound animal in person, forcing officials to intervene due to security concerns.

Now the buffalo is headed to the national zoo in Dhaka instead.

[Hadrian Bagration @HBagration]

Rosas was derogatorily nicknamed "el Calígula del Plata", so the Elagabalus moniker may be in order with the Argentinian slanderous tradition, but I never expected dear Doctor to look down on precisely Artaud's Varius Avitus Bassianus.

[LDF @Doctorluisdiego]

El mileísmo fue una piedra de toque respecto de los "republicanos moderados de centroderecha y sarasa" cuya mayoría abrumadora apoyó y apoya a un gobierno populista de derecha reaccionario antirrepublicano e iliberal. Fue, usando palabras de Milei, un "principio de revelación" que desocultó las verdaderas ideas (el "ello" inconfesable, la "parte maldita") de este sector político que se hace el fino y se abraza a nuestro Heliogábalo cutre.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

literally EVERY communist revolution was followed by catastrophic famines, gulags and economic collapse that killed more than 100 million people, but i'm sure that it's because real communism has never been tried or something

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

That liberals conflate understanding someone (empathy) with agreeing with or feeling sorry for them (sympathy) probably explains why they have such an abysmally bad understanding of conservatives. In their minds, understanding us on our own terms would be to agree with us.

[KvotheElBlanco @Kvothe_ElBlanco]

La experiencia académica me demuestra que los que más ostentan bibliotecas llenas, son los que menos se esfuerzan en comprender a los demás, o en cuestionar la veracidad de sus preceptos.

La élite académica suele ser un rejunte de mediocres con más ego que decencia.

[Timur Kuran @timurkuran]

The humanities were meant to illuminate the human condition and to participate in teaching how to think. They were popular when they delivered. Once they pivoted to social-justice activism, they became useless. Their existential crisis is entirely self-inflicted.

[British Phantom Aviation Group @BPAGofficial]

😉

[Following Hadrian @carolemadge]

#ReliefWednesday - Marble stele with a tauroctony relief in a carved out square, dedicated by Galerios, son of Proteos. Dated to the end of the 2nd – beginning of the 3rd century AD.

The dedication reads:
Κυρίō (!) Μίθρ��� εὐχ[ὴ]ν̣
Γαλέριος Προτέως (!) ἐπιγναφ{α}εύς

“To Lord Mithras,
Galerius Proteos, engraver, fulfilled a vow.”

The second long Greek inscription is not contemporary and was added later. It records that Aurelius Marcus, at his own expense, adorned this same small stele with paint and dedicated it to the god Helios-Mithras.

National Historical Museum, Sofia, Bulgaria.

[Joseph 🕊️ @CaudilloXIV]

Imagine you’re tripping on acid and all of the sudden you see Nixon standing next to you

[Brandan P. Buck @brandan_buck]

MAGA Inc.’s obsession with airpower and emerging technologies as substitutes for traditional military risk is reminiscent of Cold War liberalism’s "best and brightest"—just with less impressive people.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

Communism is the utopian delusion of the proletariat. Libertarianism is the utopian delusion of the bourgeoisie.

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

I suggest for everyone to take 5 minutes, google Israeli Agritech, the wonders that Israel’s startups have done to revive the desert & help communities feel for the first time what it means to have food security.

This benefits everyone in the region.

[Luke Weinhagen @LukeWeinhagen]

No one is stopping socialists from doing socialism.

We’re stopping socialists from forcing others to do socialism.

Socialists don’t like this, because socialists don’t produce enough positive effects to support socialism.

You want to pat yourself on the back for all your kindness-at-any-cost? Pay the costs man.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

This is her dumbest take. Monopolies form naturally. Monopolies are much more profitable than competitive industries. So if you find yourself in a competitive industry, it makes sense to buy out or collude with all your competitors, or to temporarily take a loss in order to drive them out of business. The government itself is a naturally-forming monopoly on violence. Ayn Rand is frequently guilty of this kind of magical thinking in which everything would be perfect if the government just disappeared. Well, there are still large parts of Africa today in which there is effectively no government. Is it utopia? Meanwhile the Industrial Revolution could not have taken place without the financial incentives put in place by intellectual property law such as patents, which require an incredibly strong government to enforce. The right really needs to get away from this whole “everything the government does is bad” loser mindset.

[Ben Landau-Taylor @benlandautaylor]

Reading another "Why don't rich guys build libraries like Carnegie anymore" article.
It's because that's illegal now. In most cities you can barely even build an apartment. Never mind the psychoanalysis, it's just against the law.

[AssociationOfFreePeople @AssociationOfF2]

@romanhelmetguy @JackPosobiec Mary Beard is a pop-historian. She is to history what Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are to science. They’re ideologues pretending to be serious people.

[Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen]

It is rather extreme to have such an inept ideologue as Justice Jackson on the Supreme Court. The Democrats should be embarrassed.

Here is another clear example:

How is it possible to believe (as Justice Jackson does) that talk therapy can be banned, but puberty blockers and hormone treatment cannot? (As she opined in United States v. Skrmetti.)

Puberty blockers and hormone treatment are a far more invasive treatment than talk therapy. So if talk therapy can be banned, puberty blockers can too.

There is even a further free speech argument in the case for not being able to ban talk therapy.

It is quite clear that she makes her rulings not based on the law, or on logical consistency, but on her personal ideological alignment. The use of puberty blockers is viewed favorably by many progressive, while conversion talk therapy is not. That is why she makes logically inconsistent rulings.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

@MaxNordau The "IDF snipers murder children for sport" libel is interesting methodologically because blind empiricists struggle to get past "there's no reliable evidence of that" while rational people who critically seek explanations arrive quickly at "that doesn't happen, period."

[Fox News @FoxNews]

BREAKING: Secretary of State Marco Rubio hits back at claims of a U.S. oil blockade on Cuba:

"Here's what's happening with Cuba, okay? Cuba used to get free oil from Venezuela. They would take like 60% of that oil and resell it for cash. It wouldn't even go to benefit the people. So the only blockade that's happened is ... the Venezuelans have decided we're not giving you free oil anymore."

"The reason that I can't fix it is not just because they're communist. That's bad enough, but they're incompetent communists."