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peripateticxander.bsky.social
Philosopher—Lifter of weights—Aristotelian—Developmentalist—Bibliophile. “A gentleman is never rude except on purpose.” - Christopher Hitchens
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Please read this:

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Republics don’t become tyrannies because of strong men. They become tyrannies because of weak men. Weak, pathetic, spineless men.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Wow.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Call me crazy, but I think the people running the FBI should be emotionally stable.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

That pain in your heart is what Francis Fukuyama called “political decay”.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

It is beneath you to be governed by someone this emotionally and intellectually disordered.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Take a man and extinguish from his soul all greatness and nobility, and what you have left is Donald J. Trump.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

The worst possible form of government is to be ruled by small men.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

While we’re renaming things, we might as well acknowledge what’s happening and rename Great Britain to “Airstrip One”.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

When did the American ideal of a man switch from the “strong and silent type” to the “thin-skinned and whiny type?”

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

*Evil* is a charismatic concept that keeps people from seeing that *smallness* is the true enemy of everything great and noble. It’s *small* men—petty, depraved, and pathetic men wriggling about like frightened worms—who extinguish goodness from the earth. It’s *small* men who destroy the world.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

As a man who likes men and who is attracted to masculine energy, it’s trivially easy for me to generate a list of unmasculine traits: Vanity Pettiness Lack of equanimity Whininess Loudness Childishness Blaming others Etc. Notice that Donald Trump possesses all of these unmasculine traits.

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Very dangerous to give big jobs to small men.

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

What goes wrong with a person, developmentally speaking, that they turn into someone so empty and depraved that you would hesitate to even call them a human being?

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Why does “Make America Great Again” always end up meaning “Make America More Like North Korea”? tenney.house.gov/media/press-...

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

We live with a narrative that says that adversity builds character. That’s probably only true in situations where the person already possesses the strength of character (from loving support) to confront adversity nobly. Just as often, adversity ruins a person. J.D. Vance is proof of the second.

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

People aren’t born good or bad. They become good or bad as a result of complex developmental factors. Some of these factors are beyond a person’s control. Others are not. Keeping these points in mind, it’s important to view bad people with a degree of equanimity. But also, keep your distance.

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

One wonders why it took two men to write such rubbish. Presumably this kind of obsequious drivel could have been written by half a man or less. www.axios.com/2025/02/13/t...

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

I’m toying with rebranding myself a “bio-Aristotelian” Bio-Aristotelianism = Aristotelian ethical theory • neurobiology • evolutionary biology

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

What we call “history” is the disequilibrium in the lifeway (βίος) of the species caused by the transition away from foraging to farming and nomadism to sedantism. Eventually, human beings will settle into a new equilibrium and what we call “history” will come to an end.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

It’s possible to view Aristotle’s levels of friendship as a phylogenetic-ontogenetic sequence. First, there are friendships of utility. Two people are friends simply because the partnership is mutually beneficial. This kind of “friendship” is found in nonhuman animals and especially among primates.

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

The megalopsuchos only derives validation from people he respects.

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Things are going what I’m gonna call “Gilead fast”.

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

DESIDERATIVE SYLLOGISM minor premise: x desires^β y^κ major premise: y^κ → z conclusion: x desires^π z Where x desires y, such that the desire is of type β for object-y and object-y is κ, and z is a necessary condition for y^κ, then x desires z, such that the desire is of type π for object-z

submitted 37 days ago • 0 comments

Real love isn’t a feeling. It’s a practice.

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

指鹿為馬 A useful saying. In Ancient Chinese, it means “point to a deer, call it a horse.” As a test of loyalty, an evil chancellor had a deer presented at a banquet. He pointed to it and called it a horse. Lie, you live. Tell the truth, you die. You’re gonna see a lot of this in the next 4 years.

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

It’s beneath the dignity of a free person to care too much about what other people do in their private lives.

submitted 44 days ago • 0 comments

Much of our evaluative language about a person’s character fails to identify primary defects. Consider the word “vindictive”. It doesn’t simply suggest that a person is vengeful. It suggests that a person is petty—and it’s the pettiness, not the vengefulness, that makes the vindictive person bad.

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

One of the more interesting things about “pagan” ethics, whether you’re talking about the Greco-Roman or Chinese variety, is that their philosophers don’t seem particularly concerned with the body of prohibitions that we nowadays tend to think of as constituting “morality”.

submitted 51 days ago • 0 comments

Along with others, I’ve been reading, writing, and posting a lot lately about friendship and the epidemic of loneliness and friendlessness in modern American society. It’s worth noting also that Aristotle thought that an absence of close male friendships is a sign that you are living under tyranny.

submitted 57 days ago • 0 comments

At a certain level of analysis, becoming what you are and fulfilling your destiny turn out to be the same thing.

submitted 64 days ago • 0 comments

Sometimes when you break something and you put it back together again, it’s stronger than it was before.

submitted 91 days ago • 0 comments

You can’t be a friend to someone who isn’t a friend to themselves.

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

People are unhappy—lonely, bored, aimless—because they lack a theory of how to live. They lead their lives in a haphazard way, guided more by impulse than any reasoned conception of a good life. Instead, they turn to the internet for answers, falling into black holes that lead them nowhere.

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

You’ll never learn to master your emotions if you don’t give yourself permission to feel them.

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

Friendship is the most quintessentially human expression of your sociality.

submitted 96 days ago • 0 comments