A failure in clarity for conveying your thoughts, not in our reading of your words.
The Greek political system, with its in and out door for tyrants interspersed with elite men voting is not really a model for emulation.
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Ah, thanks for the clarification. I won’t assume as much intelligence on the reader’s part in parsing out intended meaning going forward. . . because based on my previous replies, it’s easy to see how I would approve of such tyranny.
Ad hominem already? I didn’t insult your intelligence. I just pointed out that if people misread what you write, it isn’t necessarily their fault. You wrote it.
Also, in a 280+ message thread, you shouldn’t assume anyone read what you wrote before or remembered it was you who wrote it.
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The democracy of Greece was deeply flawed, was @enso’s point here, which is something I agree with. The slavery of Greece was central to it’s standing as a power, not it’s democracy.
Pretty much ever civilization is built on the backs of some group or another. The trick moving forward will be to end that practice and find something new that elevates us all. The past is cautionary tale more often than not.
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Hell, look at the Sparatans, who were actually the dominant power for a very long time. A whole society built on caste and slaves to power a war machine. The Greek tradition is much wider than cherry picking parts of Athens that we liked in some eras.
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Indeed. But cherry picking tends to be at the heart of this sort of nostalgia, right? Like white, middle class people who want to go back to the 1950s, even though it was not a “better time” for many groups of people today. And it’s not like we can’t learn from the past and figure out a better way forward, but ignoring the very real brutality of the past doesn’t get us there.
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I’m not stupid, actually. Just because I disagree with you doesn’t make me stupid. I don’t assume you’re not smart just because we disagree. I assume that we disagree.
But if you can’t respect me as a person with intelligence, then we’re clearly done. I have better things to do with my time than be insulted. Have a good day.
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This I agree with, unfortunately. Civilization seems less “civilized” than many of those cultures branded as “savages”. Maybe the whole concept needs to be questioned.
I don’t think you’re stupid, maybe unnecessarily argumentative because I believe you knew I wasn’t meaning to imply the whole of Greek culture is worth modeling. Have a good day, too. I’m getting back to work.
Maybe but do you think more than eight billion humans are going to be hunter gatherers?
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Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
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No. But if Einstein was right, there might not be a choice…
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. Albert Einstein”
Could we combine the wisdom of living more at one with nature with the benefits of technology? I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure of the solution to the problem of technology being leveraged by the powerful to oppress others.
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If human society ever reverts to anarcho-communism—itself not a bad thing—it will be because something really, really f—king bad happened to civilization. Like eight billion to eighty million over the course of a decade bad. With a proportionate amount of infrastructure still standing and low-level means of production completely obliterated, causing every downstream industry to come to a grinding halt. Mercantilism emerging from the ashes of the world’s calibrated fiat currencies albeit only for those regions with sufficient population and connections to restore trade. In many areas, the notion of a nation-state wouldn’t be feasible for at least another generation.
In such a world, there would be freedoms lost and freedoms gained. Those who don’t believe in such a thing as human progress (*raises hand*) would probably fare better than others, if only psychologically.
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Is there a name for the fallacy that people who invented something (representative government, democracy etc.) must have known what they were doing better than the people who continued to develop and refine that idea? I hear this kind of thing all the time with people pining for a return to the original vision of the Founding Fathers, conveniently overlooking the major flaws in their original version of the Constitution.
We’ve had centuries to improve on the original versions of democratic government, and by most measures it works better now than it did in any past era. Suggesting that the ancient Greeks knew more about democracy than we do is like suggesting the Wright Brothers could build a better airplane than modern-day aerospace engineers.
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(and Walter Benjamin, too)
Like slavery, among other things? The document was meant to bend and resshape to future needs, so it was written to do so.
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And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.
[…]
If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.
—Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah (1933)
Damn, this thread has taken an existential turn.
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I didn’t mean to suggest that she didn’t need to be educated in reality or that she was otherwise harmed.
A 10 year old needs to be educated in the reality of Santa Claus, but that doesn’t make it fun to watch.
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I ain’t reading that.
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At least half of the very short list of cases in the article you cited resulted in prosecution. In several, the home country of the “diplomat” waived immunity, and in others, the “diplomat” was repatriated and faced discipline at home.
The immunity in “diplomatic immunity” is from prosecution or civil suit, not from enforcement. In the example of the video in the original post, everything that went down would have gone down even if she had waved a diplomatic ID. It’s just that she probably would have been deposited at the embassy/consulate and told to go home rather than being deposited in a jail cell.
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I figured that it meant whoever was in charge of purchasing at the courthouse thought the gold fringe looked nicer, so why not purchase that flag?
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