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A new book on Dante

I read Italian military historian Alessandro Barbero’s book on the lead-up to the battle of Adrianople, The Day of the Barbarian, and it was a fair, but eye-opening explication on the insanity of civic nationalism and the insidious danger of pro-immigrant elites. He has a new book out on Dante that I’ve been reading; unfortunately, it’s newly released in Italian so you’ll have to wait for it. 

I don’t have the time to translate this interview with the author in La Republicca, but the Google translator actually did a pretty good job translating it, at least well enough to understand most of it.

FLORENCE. It is only a little less mysterious than Cleopatra’s: but in short, Professor, did Dante have a hooked nose or not? “And who knows? All the portraits we have of him were made by people who had never seen him” smiles the historian Alessandro Barbero in the cloister of Santa Croce. We talk a stone’s throw from Alighieri’s cenotaph: that empty tomb that for centuries has been claiming the mortal remains of the Supreme unheeded, tenaciously guarded in Ravenna. In the statue that surmounts the Florentine sarcophagus, Dante has the usual frowning air. What made him so grim were the torments of exile or a temper enhanced by the proverbial Tuscan irascibility? “When I think of Dante, sympathy is not the first thing that comes to mind” admits Barbero. “But if they invited me to have a coffee with him, I would rush. A historian always falls in love with the subject he studies. Passion is to discover. Like a cop trying to catch a criminal. “

And in fact the Dante by Barbero, published by Laterza, is a 360-page stalking following a genius who remains elusive seven centuries after his death. Otherwise what genius would that be? Starting the book is enthralling. Also because the two great passions of Alessandro Barbero get married there: the Middle Ages and military history.

Saturday 11 June 1289: the Florentine troops move towards the clash with the Aretini in what will be remembered as the Battle of Campaldino. Dante is 24 years old. It is in the front row. He throws himself into the fray, but during the slaughter – he himself tells it – he is assailed by fear and runs away. A behavior that at the time was not necessarily considered dishonorable.

Was the principle that “soldier running away is good for another time” already valid?

“In a certain sense, yes. Let’s be clear: even in the Middle Ages the brave were appreciated and cowards were despised. But it was not thought that if you are brave you will not run away. Above all, the competence, the professionalism of those who understand what during the battle counted. is happening around. We are talking about people who knew wars well, who really waged them. We invented the knights without blemish and without fear much later. “

Dante belonged to the Florentine elite. His ancestors had made money by lending money. But even on the sinfulness of usury, the medieval people had elastic opinions. If you lent to a poor man you were a loan shark. While if you lent to a rich man you moved capitalism, you made GDP grow, you were a respectable businessman.

“Dante’s ancestors lent to everyone. But at the time a usurer was the one who lived only on loans. If he also did other activities, the matter changed. Both on the theological and on the social level, Dante’s world wonders about the problem of wear always looking for a balance, pragmatic solutions “.

Florence is the Wall Street of the time.

“More than Wall Street, a city-bank. In Italy in general and in Florence in particular, more cash circulated than in any other place in Europe. By itself, Florence had revenues comparable to those of a kingdom. Not even the comparison with New York gives an idea of ​​what its economic and financial power was then “.

Until he abandons it, Dante lives as a rentier in Florence .

“Yes, the income field. And its condition already refers to what will be the dramatic crisis of Italian capitalism in the Middle Ages”.

Crisis triggered by what?

“From the idea that once you become rich you no longer continue to invest, but you buy land and become lords. Dante belongs to the generation of those who stop working to sit down on income”.

He too is borrowing money.

“In those days, those who ask for it are not necessarily in economic difficulties. Usually, those who make large debts are because they can afford them. Even today, a poor person does not get loans of five hundred thousand euros”.

How to comport yourself

I remember this championship fight. I was deeply disappointed that Leon Spinks defeated The Greatest, Muhammed Ali. I still remember the 45 that the older neighbor kid down the street who years later drove me to school used to play.

Muhammed… Muhammed Ali

He floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

What I found fascinating about this article from the Sports Illustrated vault is the way the two boxing champions absolutely refused to engage in all the posturing and nonsense invited by their entourages, and instead insisted on exhibiting respect for their opponent.

Ali accepted the decision without complaint. Around him rose anguished cries of robbery, of a fix, of being had. Ali, now the ex-champion, walked to his dressing room. He was crying, but his head was held high. He ignored the madness all about him.

He sat down and sipped a glass of carrot juice. Sarrea, his face emotionless, kneeled and began to remove Ali’s shoes. Someone shouted, “It was robbery.”

Ali’s head came up. “Shut up. Nobody got robbed. I lost the fight.”

The door burst open, and Michael Dokes, one of Ali’s sparring partners, flew into the room. He was furious. Indicating Ali’s associates, he said to Ali, “They fed you a lot of crap. They told you you were in shape and you weren’t. You listened to all the wrong people.”

“That’s right, not in shape,” someone said, grabbing the excuse from the air.

“Oh, man,” Ali said in disgust. “First I was robbed and now I’m not in shape. Why don’t you listen? I was beaten. I lost. He won. Can’t you understand that?”

Even after beating Ali, Spinks refused to accept the idea that Ali’s mantle had been passed on to him.

“I’ll fight Ali just like I’d fight any other guy who challenged me in the street. But I’ll never say anything against him. I’m not going against the man, I’m just trying to beat him. He was my idol, he still is my idol—and when the fight is over he still will be.”

In his dressing room Spinks quieted a small gathering. “Celebrate later,” he said, “but now, first things first. Before anyone starts jiving we must give our thanks to the Lord.” The new heavyweight champion of the world led the prayer: “Dear God, thank you for answering my prayers. Thank you for my not getting hurt, and for my man not getting hurt. Thank you for the miracle. All praise sweet Jesus.”

Late Friday night, two days after the fight, Leon Spinks stood at his hotel room window, staring out at the lights of Las Vegas.

“The thing I don’t like,” he said, “is people calling me the greatest. I am not the greatest. I may be the best young heavyweight, but he was the greatest. And he is still the greatest.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you should do it.

Why is ANY conservative still on Twitter?

Cuck as hard as you like, submit as slavishly as you can, sooner or later, the Sostapo are still going to come for you.

The founder and editor of the right-wing Gateway Pundit website has been permanently banned from Twitter, leaving the liberal left “thrilled” and conservatives wondering who will be silenced next.

The @gatewaypundit Twitter handle belonging to Jim Hoft with more than 375,000 followers was abruptly banned on Saturday night. “The account was permanently suspended for repeated violations of our civic integrity policy,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed in a brief statement.

Twitter did not clarify which violation was the last straw, as the account seemed to be not very active recently. The conservative publication itself has long faced criticism from the left for pushing “lies” and “conspiracies.” 

Twitter’s recently updated civic integrity policy introduces a system of strikes and increasingly severe punishments, among other things, for pushing “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.”

“Oh s**t they got my boss,” journalist and Pundit contributor Cassandra Fairbanks tweeted. In response to ‘you’re next!’ threats, she quipped that from now on she will be careful not to wrongthink and will only tweet the opposite of what she believes.

This is not exactly new. Instapundit was first suspended back in 2016. It’s remarkable, and more than a little bit contemptible, to see how desperate conservatives are to maintain even the barest modicum of tolerance from the people who make it very clear how much they hate them.

Why are there still 375,000 self-professed conservatives on Twitter in the first place? The best and most useful thing conservatives can do is to turn their back on all left-wing social media and entertainment. And yet, most of them simply refuse to do so, presumably for fear that someone, somewhere, might call them racist or anti-semitic.

Then they mock you

It’s amusing to see how the gammas in the media are resentful of the fact that people are beginning to understand what sigma males are:

This unresolvable friction — you have to realize your place on the ladder, but you are delusional if you put yourself outside and above it — is probably why the sigma offshoot has not achieved saturation. By providing an asterisk to the core dogma of dominance, it allows men to reframe antisocial tendencies as power rather than weakness. Texts like The Sigma Male Codex: Rules for the Sigma Male are ultra-flattering to the presumably sigma reader, telling him that he’s a deeply intelligent and effortlessly attractive guy… because he’s “the quietest man in the room,” “keeps a wall built up around him to keep certain people out and “would never dream of hanging out with a large group of males.”

It’s introversion and inaction rebranded as mysterious cool — the rōnin forging his path alone — whereas the rest of us see a loser who should get a life. Comparing yourself to John Wick, an action-movie assassin with a dead wife and the entire underworld trying to murder him for the full length of the franchise, shows a warped perspective at minimum.

In his heart of hearts, the red-pilled man doesn’t actually want to be an alpha. It’s too much bro performance, too many hours in the gym and at the office, too basic a profile. Therefore, he creates the inner world of the sigma — he is a unique and fearless Übermensch in his mind, and whether reality conforms to this projection is immaterial, as he can always convince himself it does.

You’d think that a sigma, allegedly uninterested in social class and convention, wouldn’t be this consumed with proving his freedom from these limitations; indeed, you might say that a true sigma is the man who has never heard of any of this cringe bullshit, as he’s happily off hiking in the desert or making experimental art or straight up fucking, and couldn’t possibly care besides. To judge by the internet, however, a sigma is a guy who huffs his own farts until they start to smell like transcendent wisdom, then tries to market this narcissism to the same pretentious twerps who were calling themselves “sapiosexuals” not long ago.

As should be more than obvious by my literally shutting down the blog that discussed these things and complete lack of effort to push anything related to the socio-sexual hierarchy on anyone, I wasn’t trying to market anything, let alone narcissism, when I categorized observable male behavior patterns. The SSH is nothing more than an organized set of observations that happens to permit one to usefully understand and anticipate the behavior of a wide variety of men. If one finds it useful, use it. If not, then don’t.

Furthermore, the point of defining the sigma male behavioral pattern was to highlight the obvious differences between two very different patterns that were both being identified as alpha by the more basic sexual hierarchy. It certainly wasn’t to give gammas, much less omegas, yet another avenue to indulge their delusional self-redefinitions.

And yes, getting one’s panties in a bunch over other people’s observations is quintessential gamma behavior. But then, if you’ve been reading here a while, you already knew that.

Don’t rely on surrender monkeys

Lawyers love to talk tough about how they’ll fight to death for their clients, in much the same way that journalists love to talk tough about their commitment to free speech. But both groups are not only made up of paper tigers, on average, both tend to have commitments that are best described as transient and mercenary, as this account of President Trump’s legal team demonstrates in an account that rings disturbingly true.

After some time (20-30 minutes), three lawyers appeared together. They did not introduce themselves, and stood huddling in the back of the Oval Office, listening. In addition, Mark Meadows and someone else joined us by speaker phone. Eventually the lawyers in the back began muttering things to make their displeasure and disagreement evident. Finally President Trump said something indicating this was new to him, wondering why no one had shown him this route through the impasse. I said again, “Sir, again, CEO to CEO, you are not being served well by those around you in the White House. I’ve gotten to know staffers in your White House, and they tell me they are being told that leadership here is telling them to get you to concede.”

Trump started to say something to Mike and Sidney, but he stopped himself and turned back towards me. “Who?” He asked angrily, “Who wants me to concede?”

I was taken aback by his anger, because I thought what I was telling him was common knowledge. I thought it was generally understood that about half the White House was in on the program of getting him to concede, for that was the estimate I was repeatedly told. “Sir, I am surprised you’re surprised…. In your White House leadership is telling junior staff this everywhere. I am told that this fellow Pat Cipollone [indicating the lawyers behind me as I spoke, not knowing which was Cipollone] has been telling people since November 4, ‘Just help us get the President to concede.’ And for the last couple of weeks, Mark Meadows has been telling staff, ‘Help get the President into transition mode.’”

Trump turned to White House General Counsel Pat Cipollone, who began sputtering. “Mr. President, you know how hard I work, you know how many hours I have been putting in…” Both of which were mealy-mouthed, and neither of which was a direct denial, as was obvious to everyone in the room.  Trump faced him, his face darkening in anger.

“Sir,” I continued, “in 30 minutes I can have a number of staffers from within your White House  here to tell you that those are quotes from Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows. This guy is lying to you through his teeth. They want you to lose.”

Trump turned, knowing I was correct. He indicated one of the other lawyers, said, “Did you know that this is his last day? He has a job starting Monday at a law firm up the street, getting paid 10 times what I can pay him here.” He continued wistfully, “Pat, can you imagine what I could have gotten done here, if I had not been fighting my own people?”

Cipollone and the other two lawyers scurried out the back door of the Oval Office. I heard them stay out in the ante room, caucusing. Meanwhile, the President, Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and myself continued for a while walking through more of the details, reviewing some of what we had said earlier. At some point Allyssa, that quiet but razor-sharp female lawyer assisting Sidney, took over for a few points, and concisely explained aspects of the executive order, always clarifying with great precision whatever needed to be clarified.

After 10 minutes the three lawyers walked back into the room and stood, this time not in the back, but abreast and to the left of we four visitors: Alyssa, myself, Mike, and Sidney, sitting in chairs in a half-moon in front of the Resolute desk. Mike continued taking operational questions that arose, while Sidney and Alyssa handled the legal questions that arose. The three male lawyers edged closer to the front, and then as though as some hidden signal, they all started being bitches.

First was some comment about it not being right to use the National Guard. “The optics are terrible, Mr. President,” said one. “It would have to be the DHS.”  I liked the National Guard idea because we needed to reestablish trust of the American people in the electoral process, and the US institution with the most trust is the one where people dress in military uniforms. Yet the National Guard is local, they are all around us, our colleagues at work, our “Citizen Soldiers”. But perhaps in a sign of flexibility, Flynn and Sidney allowed as how one could use the DHS instead of the National Guard.

“The press would tear your apart,” predicted Pat Cipollone at one turn in the conversation. Sidney said what Mike and I were both thinking: The press is going to tear him apart? Really? What are they doing now?

At some point Cipollone objected, “Never in American history has there been this kind of a challenge to an election!” Flynn responded, “Never in American history has there been a situation like this, with counting being shut down for hours, foreigners connecting to our equipment, …..” and so on.

“He does not have the authority to do this!” Cipollone thundered eventually. Sidney rejoined, “Of course he does,” citing EO 13848 (and something else signed by Obama). “Without question he has the authority.” Alyssa whipped out EO 13848 again and showed the relevant language that we had just covered. Trump looked at Cipollone with an expression that said, You never even brought this to my attention, Pat. He said to Cipolloner, “You know Pat, at least they want to fight for me. You don’t even fight for me. You just tell me everything I can’t do.”

Fortunately, you can reliably tell when a lawyer is BS’ing you, as they transition from discussing the genuine legal issues to the practical implications without even noticing that they have done so. Once they do that, you know you can safely disregard everything they are saying, since lawyers tend to know considerably less about the practical realities than their clients who actually work in the real world. 

The mistake most people make is allowing their lawyers to make strategic decisions for them, which usually doesn’t work out well for the obvious reason that lawyers are trained to think in a purely tactical manner. My advice is that if you have a lawyer who prefers telling you what you can’t do instead of helping you figuring out what you can do, don’t hesitate to get rid of him.

A Throne of Bones graphic novel

I’m not saying that the graphic novel of A THRONE OF BONES will be Arkhaven’s best work to date when it launches. If nothing else, I suspect that MIDNIGHT’S WAR and SILENZIOSA will give it a run for its money. But I think you can agree that a) Arkhaven has upped its graphic game, and b) it is coming along rather well.

Color revolution in Russia

In case it wasn’t already completely apparent, Alexey Navalny is supposed to be the Juan Guiado or Joe Biden of Russia, but Putin and the Russian government aren’t foolish enough to provide la squadra satana the opportunity to build him up as a serious national figure:

Surveillance footage, recorded in the early 2010s, appears to show a close associate of Alexey Navalny seeking cash and intelligence from an alleged British spy and suggesting his anti-corruption work may benefit firms in London.

The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.

The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.

Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.

“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said.

The FBK’s stated goal is to expose alleged cases of corruption in Russia. While it is essentially a type of journalistic organisation, its work is ultimately tied to Navalny’s aims gaining political power. Ashurkov outlined the organization’s activities as “mass protests, civil initiatives, propaganda, establishing contacts with the elite and explain to them that we are reasonable people and we are not going to demolish everything and take away their assets.”

These foreign-funded “popular” figureheads who suddenly appear at the forefront of various liberalization and anti-corruption movements are nothing of the sort. They’re just meat puppets for the global Demon State. 

Torba saw it too

The Mercers tried to kill Gab early too:

Now that John Matze has been ousted by the Mercers, perhaps it’s time to speak a little more freely about Parler.

Was Parler a GOP establishment attempt to subvert the work Gab has been doing for 5+ years and data mine conservatives? Good question!

When Gab first launched let’s just say we were approached by some “hedge fund people” on the right who wanted to invest on one condition: stop talking about certain topics and people, change the branding, and give up control.

Obviously we didn’t take the deal with the devil.

What happened to John Matze is partially why.

The CEO and Founder ousted from his own company. Should never happen, especially not in an early stage startup.

Castalia got one of those super early offers in its second year of existence. Not only were we not at all interested, we couldn’t understand what their interest could possibly be. It makes considerably more sense now. There might be an amusing business there, selling “dangerous” startups to conservative gatekeepers.

Never forget that the love of money is the root of all evil.

They “saved” the election

Translation: how the bipartisan ruling party tried to hide their steal of the 2020 election for the Deep State:

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

This is an outright confession spun for the suckers.