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Notes -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
Yes, you do understand this goes both ways? You understand democrats come off as Halloween villains to much of the country?
Trump is an aesthetician. He governs on a platform of, essentially, ‘I’m the tsar and I’m gonna look like it’. Yeah, aesthetics. And he baits democrats into the vanguard party damn-fool aesthetics.
I'd go with actual living demons over Halloween villains, but to each their own.
In light of the over the top evil of the opposition, I'm fine with my chosen champion acting like a Crusader King.
I don't think Trump acts remotely like a crusader king.
Granted, my model of an idealised crusader king is probably Louis IX of France, or the other obvious candidates are Richard I of England, Philip II of France, or Frederick Barbarossa. I do not imagine any of them acting like Trump. I'm curious where you see the similarity?
Unless your capitalisation is meant to imply that you think Trump acts like a Crusader Kings (the video game) character, in which case... um, sure, but those are video games that are substantially treachery-and-murder-and-adultery-and-corruption simulators, so, okay, that sure sounds like Trump, but that's not exactly a defence of him.
>names four crusaders
>all their crusades were failures
>no Bohemond of Taranto
>no Baldwin of Edessa
>no Frederick II Stupor Mundi Hohenstaufen
You're not beating the beautiful loser allegations there, I'm afraid.
The criterion was 'Crusader Kings'.
Of your three, Bohemond was not a king of any sort, Baldwin became a king only after the crusade's success, and I think Frederick II is not particularly known for being a crusader. Frederick II's 'crusade' was mostly a diplomatic coup, and I think pretty far from most people's mental picture of a crusader.
I would comfortably assert that the most famous 'Crusader Kings', by which I mean kings (or European monarchs of similar standing) who set out on a crusade, i.e. a military expedition to secure the Holy Land, are Richard the Lionheart and St. Louis.
Nor was Godfrey of Bouillon, by that standard. In fact, none of the figures of the First Crusade, by far the most successful and glorious, count. Incidentally, good call to drop Philip II from your list - he was one of the all-time-great sneaky bastards of the Middle Ages, and left the Crusade partly so he could break his Crusader oath and attack Richard's territory before he returned. Also the most successful king of the three monarchs you mention, though St. Louis had a good run of it. Barbarossa, I'd say, is probably the most Trumpian - or, more accurately, closest to Trump's enemies' depiction of him as a would-be tyrant trampling over "norms" - of your list, and the only Crusade he actually made it to was the perfidious shambles of the Siege of Damascus.
At this point, I think we've left whatever WhiningCoil's point was far behind and are engaging in mutually sperging out over medieval history which, as much as I enjoy it, probably isn't particularly productive.
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