Mr Hootington posted:

Just seeing a woman sends a lot of "people" into a frothing rage.

KirbyKhan posted:

Never ask a man their salary
Never ask a lady their age
Never as a European their opinion on the roma

Mr Hootington posted:

My wife sent me that ai enhanced rear end fallout picture and an angry message so I had to explain rage bait to her.

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

frosted flakes writing a lot of words about the emperor in 40K cspam and getting promoted to commissar

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

I was probed when Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean came up, but you just jogged my memory that Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity, and Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Education: The Oxford Classical Curriculum really tie everything together.

Americans take note: the key to an empire on which the sun never sets is channeling the power of barely repressed homosexuality.

The problem is that Matt Schlapp, Marcus Bachmann, and Lindsey Graham don't have the right stuff. They had potential, sure, but it was misused and they were miseducated. First, Bachmann and Graham studied psychology (I wonder why...) instead of something that would invigorate them. For Schlapp, it was just about impossible to find out what his BA from Notre Dame was in, but it appears to have been "History and Government". That's a boilerplate Young Republican education. The folly of misspent youth! These men could have been your American Gordons.

Schlapp went to graduate school for Public Policy, Bachmann for "Community Counseling", and then a PhD with "a concentration in clinical psychology." Graham got a JD. They are, in other words, boring conservatives with a dull as dishwater education, that tamps down their queenish tendencies instead of bringing them to the fore.

To really get an empire builder, a Rhodes, a Gordon, a James Brooke, you need something more theatrical,







They didn't have the proper education to cultivate the qualities that could make them great men, and they didn't have a queen they could use as a socially acceptable substitute for love for a woman, so it all falls so flat. Observe:








Now, suppose that these Americans, instead of studying psychology and "history and government", had to put on a "theatrical production in the Grecian style" their freshmen year for the upperclassmen? Might that have pushed them further along the path to greatness? Suppose that instead of reading some boring bullshit policy whatever, or law, or, in Bachmann's case,

"his thesis at CBN University was titled 'Child Care Dilemma,' and concluded that full-time, nonparental day care 'may increase the insecurity' of children younger than 18 months. It incorporated a biblical perspective and included quotations from Scripture."

They had instead studied, real literature, like Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology:

"Elegiac lyrics celebrating the love of boys, which the translator terms Puerilities , comprise most of the twelfth book of The Greek Anthology . That book, the so-called Musa Puerilis, is brilliantly translated in this, the first complete verse version in English. It is a delightful eroticopia of short poems by great and lesser-known Greek poets, spanning hundreds of years, from ancient times to the late Christian era."

Which, if it wasn't clear, could have sparked an ambition for something greater than tax cuts and utility privatization in these men:

XLIII CALLIMACHUS
Little I care for your popular cyclical poem:
Such thoroughfares I thoroughly despise.
So I detest a boy who makes himself common,
Nor do I drink from public water supplies.
Yes, you are handsome, Lysanias, terribly handsome.
“And someone else’s!” instantly Echo replies.

Would Lindsey Graham think only of giving Republican donors public utilities if he had read this instead of law? Or, when hearing "public water supplies", would he sink away into sweet reverie, returning determined to win the love of some Lysanias or Ganymede by serving the American empire in the burning sands?

Conversely, would Schlapp be so desirous for wars in the Middle East, that separate men from their young companions, had he been versed in the Illiad?:

Return to me directly you have swept the Trojans from the ships.
Even if thundering Zeus offers an opportunity of winning glory for
yourself, you mustn’t take it. You must not make war without me
against these warlike Trojans—you will only reduce my glory . . . Ah
Father Zeus, Athena and Apollo, I pray that not one Trojan may get
away alive, not one, and not a Greek either, but we two [dual]
survive the massacre and unfasten Troy’s holy battlements alone.

Finally, would Bachmann devote all of his effort to the study of suppressed urges, if, say, he was familiar with the story of Achilles and Troilus?

From Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love,

"The basic story is a simple one, but very neat and tidy. Troilus is an underage Boy. He takes a horse and goes to fetch water at a fountain house outside the city walls. Achilles is waiting for him... Although the details of where and how he actually kills the boy are variable, one feature is fixed: Troilus is on horseback and Achilles runs him down on foot... Indeed it seems from one image that he cut the boy’s head off and waved it in the face of his brothers... Out of all Achilles’ exploits at Troy, Clitias has chosen to picture this one, not glorious at all, but a feat that has the advantage of showing to a viewer the unique quality the poets never tire of celebrating: Achilles’ phenomenal speed... It is also the feat that will lead to his death, for Clitias has shown Apollo watching in some agitation... Either the crime itself, or the fact that Achilles took the boy to the sanctuary of Apollo, or even killed him on Apollo’s altar is what finally led to Achilles’ death, according to one prominent tradition... And it was an outraged Apollo who guided the arrow that would kill him... All terribly neat... Achilles’ most amazing ability, his speed, is precisely what undoes him, and when Apollo shoots him, where does the arrow pierce him? In the foot... This is a detail well established at an early date... Later mythographers did not really grasp its significance and told stories about the ankle as Achilles’ only point of vulnerability, something that Homer and the earlier poets do not mention... Achilles is certainly not invulnerable—that’s why his mother goes to so much trouble to get him a piece of armor—but the symbolic significance of Achilles, “swift in foot,” being fatally wounded in the foot needs no further explanation... The arrow guided by Apollo quite literally pins the fastest man on the planet to the ground, it stops him dead... "



"There is irony then in the fact that on each handle of the Francois Vase Achilles’ corpse is carried from the battlefield at a run... His own legs quite useless to him now, he depends on those of Ajax, the Quick and the Dead... The story that Achilles was in love with Troilus is told first in the second century sc in the impossibly obscure and allegorical prophetic “monodrama” of Cassandra (Alexandra), “quite the most repellent poem to survive from antiquity,” composed in iambic trimeters and ascribed to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron... The prophetess is apostrophizing, addressing now her little brother, young Troilus, whom she sees in strange visions of the future: “Lion-cub you, who shot the wild dragon with fire-bearing love-charm of arrows, and wouldn’t let go of smitten him, holding him in snares inescapable, for a scant loveless time, yourself untouched by the man you had subjected, you will bloody your father’s altar cut off at the head.” “Untouched,” literally “unwounded,” i.e., unattracted to Achilles, is a play on the paradox of the “captor” “captivated”; it could easily be read more graphically, “unpenetrated.”... An ancient reader offered some helpful notes in the margin of the text: Troilus had taken refuge in the sanctuary to escape Achilles’ advances... Unable to get him to come out, Achilles goes in and kills him... A commentator on Virgil’s Aeneid adds more detail: “Led on by his love for Troilus, Achilles held out to him some doves, of which the boy was very fond, but as he reached out to take them, he was captured by Achilles and died in his arms.” This is all very late, but the abduction, the doves, and hence probably the love motif appear in paintings of the scene as early as the sixth century... I think it would be impossible for a Greek, knowing Achilles’ tendencies and seeing an image of him as a Stripling chasing down a Boy, not to adduce an erdtikos motivation... "



My belief, I hope you agree, is that we cannot make the American less warlike. As with Achilles, these urges are deeply rooted. We can, however, direct those urges (and others) to some higher purpose. We can use our Schlapps, Grahams, and Bachmanns as arrows in our quiver. Rather than directing their energy towards banal projects, like Quiverfull, given the right education, we can point them in the right direction and let them loose. As Davidson says,

"It is this duality that makes Achilles the Greekest of heroes, loving his own side as much as he hates the enemy, a perfect inspiration for all Greek hoplite warriors, lovingly devoted to those alongside and nursing equal hate for those ranged opposite: the enemy, the Other, the Barbarian. Perhaps when they thought of Achilles it would not seem as strange to the Spartans and the Cretans as it does to us to offer sacrifice to Eros before going into battle."

Make America Grecian Again.

lobster shirt posted:

check this out

lobster shirt posted:

check this out

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

too long

lobster shirt posted:

check this out

lobster shirt posted:

check this out

Mr Hootington posted:

The guy who can't stop posting about how he hates Muslims, wants them dead, and loves war only ate a ban lol

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

too long

Mr Hootington posted:

The tldr is "if gay men buttfuck they only produce art, but if gay men don't buttfuck an empire is built."

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

Americans take note: the key to an empire on which the sun never sets is channeling the power of barely repressed homosexuality.

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

in the grim darkness of the far future there is no buttfucking

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

balder's gate

DaysBefore posted:

Spotify owns me every day because every 'For You' type list is an endless procession of white guys with acoustic guitars. It's like battle of the bands for Plain White Tees copycats

SMEGMA_MAIL posted:

I only listen to bad music

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

Everyone thinks they have good taste in music and that they're a good driver

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

Everyone thinks they have good taste in music and that they're a good driver

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

been thinking about WH40K and frosted flakes a lot recently

Al! posted:

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

wasn't oscar wilde a pederast

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

is Civil War stupid

why do CA and TX rebel

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

wasn't oscar wilde a pederast

quote:

Charles Gill (prosecuting): What is "the love that dare not speak its name"?

Wilde: "The love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dare not speak its name", and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

Majorian posted:

I don't think there's any real evidence of this. He seemed to speak approvingly of ancient Greek pederasty during his indecency trial, but that quote has been taken and used out of context:

So I think he was trying to say, "gay people have existed throughout the history of Western civilization, it's totally normal for dudes to gently caress dudes," not that pederasty is good.