arete

All things in exchange for fire and fire for all things.

[arete @serenearete]

'For these people I set no limits, of neither space nor time, but I give to them an empire without end.' - Vergil, The Aeneid

[Leo Caesaris @leo_caesaris]

Do I need to add anything else?

Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum.

[Octavian 🇪🇺 @posta_octavian]

Fuck off.

[Niccolo Soldo (Fisted By Foucault) @FistedFoucault]

Note that Morocco's role in facilitating/organizing this invasion is left out of the statement

As Erik Prince pointed out last night, this comes only days after the new Donald Trump highway was opened up in Morocco

[Wally Rashid @wallyrashid]

No joke this is the actual guy who spent the last several months pressuring the State Department to work with Morocco to create this invasion of Ceuta.

Michael Rubin is the fellow at the DC Think Tank American Enterprise Institute who’s been pushing this.

What the actual f.

[Niccolo Soldo (Fisted By Foucault) @FistedFoucault]

That's what Rubio wants and it's why the USA is the enemy of Europe.

"Give us Greenland"
"Give Morocco Ceuta and Melilla (so that we can use it ourselves")

[Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled]

Great analysis on Ukraine’s decision to enter the Iran war, as a NATO/US proxy opening a northern front & possibility that SBU stokes ethnic conflict within Iran to destabilize. Iran’s options to establish deterrence against Ukrainian aggression aren’t good.

[Russians With Attitude @RWApodcast]

And if you put it in context, --

[Bronze Age Pervert @bronzeagemantis]

Nolan Odyssey suck and so do most who complain about it; they claim they want faithful retelling but complain on “nonlinear” narrative because they didn’t read it and think nonlinear is “leftist newfangled hipster bullshit.” They didn’t read it because they only care about it as a political symbol and museum piece devoid of any direct content or meaning for them beyond its social utility. They see religion the same way btw

[arete @serenearete]

Herman Melville

[Plough Quarterly @Plough]

Who Is America’s Homer?

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity? We asked for contributions from ‍@fxxfy, @DanaGioiaPoet, @zenahitz, Emily Wilson, @ae_stallings, @_Zeets, @JcScharl, @amjuster, @RossBarkan, Christian Wiman.

https://t.co/o7J1tcN6rV

[Big Serge @witte_sergei]

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.

[HowlingMutant @Howlingmutant0]

I think The Odyssey is about the idea that if your guests are disruptive and overstay their welcome you’re allowed to slaughter them en masse

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

This is sort of funny, and Brazil have definitely got worse, but it misdiagnoses the problem. In fact, this is a story of what has happened to society and with our economies, and the ideology of our ruling elites.

The first point to accept is that *all* football nations have lost their particular style: there has been a flattening of the way in which teams play. I first started watching football as a very young boy in the late eighties, and through until the early 2000s, most of the big nations maintained a distinct way of playing. The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Brazil and England all spring to mind. But two things have happened -- the first connected to the latter.

First, the Champions League (and later the Europa League) means that the best teams in Europe play each other almost every week during the season. That provides a consistently present interface for an accelerated exchange of ideas, formations, and tactics. But it also acts as a kind of gain of function research for football: there is now an extremely rapid cycle of tactical, transfer policy/player selection, and fitness innovation, response and counter response. The football OODA loop has never been tighter.

Second, and connected to this, there has been an extreme version of the Pareto Principle income inequality that has happened among western societies as a whole. Wealth, partly due to the Champions League, and partly due to the Premier League, has accrued to a smaller and smaller number of teams, even as the size of the pie, due to the massive increase in TV revenue in Europe, has expanded beyond all recognition. This means that all the best players in the world end up in the same handful of clubs. We can name them: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona. Furthermore, with the advent of global scouting networks and post-Moneyball databases, this means the best players from anywhere in the world, often at young ages. Remember when an unknown player would have a great World Cup and find himself playing for, say, Tottenham or Monaco or wherever? Those days are gone. We know about every player in the most minute detail. There is no mystery. The good players are already in Europe.

The first time I noticed this process of wealth accumulation was with the great Ajax team of 1995. I was only just a teenager, and that team was like a revelation for me in terms of the way football could be played. All of them (bar Danny Blind and Frank Rijkaard, who were an earlier generation) came up through the Ajax academy system and blossomed at the same time. They played in the Ajax/Dutch style (4-3-3, with two wingers that stayed very wide, and a centre back pushing into midfield when they had the ball, holding possession playing in the opponent's final third). But within two seasons, the entire team was broken up: Davids, Seedorf, Klijvert, Ovremars, Rijzeger, Kanu, Litmanen, even Van Gaal, the young manager -- they'd all gone to richer clubs elsewhere. In the 1960s or 70s, they'd have stayed together and won multiple European trophies. In England, we saw a similar thing with Southampton. Newcastle are suffering the same now.

All this means that players don't stay in their home environments and countries, with their clubs, and the process of mimesis breaks down. Add that to the first point, related to the way intra-European football forces a flattening through various mechanisms, and you have what we see now.

A couple of World Cups ago, the Netherlands played a 3-5-2, to my absolute horror. The Netherlands playing without proper wingers! Now we have a Brazilian team that has two Arsenal players, two Man U players, one Newcastle player -- even a Bournemouth player, for goodness sake. And they'll all have had the majority of their careers outside Brazil. Some will have left when they were 15 or 16, scouted by Shaktar Donetsk (famous for bringing in young Brazilian players) or Real Madrid. Why are we therefore surprised that they play like any other European team?

The Netherlands style lives on -- but through Barcelona and therefore the Spain national team (via Cruyff, and thence Guardiola), not in the Netherlands national team. But the Brazil style (a languid slow, slow, slow, punctuated by sudden bursts of incredible skill, raking passes, speed, and crackerjack long shots) is dead. When better Brazilian players emerge in future, and maybe they return to winning World Cups, they'll do so as Europeans would, not Brazilians. The German and Italian styles are also dead. The English style is also pretty much dead, although that was an evolutionary dead end in terms of International Football, so we do not lament it.

This, rather than boozing or religion, is the reason for what we see with the Brazil national team. I find it deeply sad. But no doubt the neoliberal progressives who run our countries will view it as a great success.

@AaronBastani @WilliamClouston @georgegalloway @jj_bull

[Wandervogel @wandervog]

Enter the realm of the "Den Mother"...!

We see many theories of chthonic/matriarchal culture today, but the first, found in Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht, is substantially different—even with some praise for the "night side" of ancient societies.

A free 2hr radiocast on Bachofen

[Joseph 🕊️ @CaudilloXIV]

Swiss coach looks like a cocaine dealer from the 70s

[Erling Haaland @Erling]

Well well well 😂

[Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou]

Haaland follows Sol Brah

[that one wasian whose lowkey snatched @osamabishounen]

i am israeli moderate and this is my platform:

- dont siege leningrad take it immediately