Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
28d ago
For sure. I wanted to raise the point because it's generally undervalued in regular (non-Straussian) academic discussions of Plato. And reading the other dialogues will greatly help your reading of Symposium/Republic/etc. Good luck!
Bartender_Venator
29d ago
No idea on YouTube. Friends talk highly of Alex Priou. But, a word of advice, look up every (named) character in the dialogues. They don't all matter, but in some cases who they are definitely matters to the meaning of the dialogue. For example, Meno comes across as a clever young gentleman, but he's meant to be hiding that he's an arrogant little shit - Xenophon, another student of Plato's, has him as the worst man among the Greek generals of the Persian Expedition (that is, before he betrays them to the Persians). So to read the Meno you need the context that Socrates completely failed to teach Meno virtue! And then to read the Gorgias, it helps to know that Meno was a student of Gorgias (mentioned in the dialogue), so you have a good sense of the kind of men Plato thinks Gorgias educates. The dialogues are literary philosophy, not just treatises; the characters, setting (e.g. in both the Republic and the Phaedrus, it means something that the discussion is held outside the city), historical context. Imagine someone in the 20th Century writing philosophy as dialogues between well-known political and cultural figures, if that helps.
This is probably overkill, but if you have points in the dialogues that you find confusing or want to deep dive into, you can search an archive of Leo Strauss's courses here, including close readings of several of the dialogues.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Except in super-hot industries like AI, VC checks are too small for a lot of world-of-atoms stuff.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
All the guys I hung out with morphed into generic stereotypes in many ways, happy but just very bland.
That's what people generally use Instagram for, to project an image of bland, legible, public happiness. Who knows what they're like behind the veil.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Felt the same about CKII. CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton, at least at the start (I only played at release), no horse popes or magical satanists, but it seems like the current issue is, like most PDX games, it's extremely easy to become overpowered with even a modicum of game sense.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The author is Alexander Luria (easy to remember if you're an Infinite Jest fan, sort of). Didn't see it on google scholar with a cursory search, but I'm sure it's out there since I've also seen the pdf.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I've told an anecdote on themotte before from someone who worked under him during his presidency - apparently in private he was eloquent, but had a different accent, posh and WASPy like his dad. It was putting on and maintaining that folksy manner of speaking that tripped him up.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
If you run into any docs fleeing the South African medical system, it's an interesting topic to ask about. Wikipedia claims there may be some psychoactive effects, but I've never heard of that, what I hear from SA medical types is that the binding agent in the antiretrovirals is thought to help hold whatever chemicals they put in it together (plus, most likely, superstitions of various sorts).
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Yes, that's what I mean by clearing the roads in general - banning alcohol probably had an additional synergistic effect on top of that. Also, in addition to clearing cars off roads, a lot of road deaths in SA are pedestrians walking along the shoulder (poor folks will walk very long distances by the highway), who were probably also cleared out somewhat by lockdown. They also wouldn't have the uh, inexplicable uptick in road deaths in the US from the summer of 2020.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I’m wondering if similar social forces are at play in South Africa now.
Though the wider point is a great one, it's not really applicable to SA. The prohibitions were just covid measures - they're seen in retrospect as weird/funny, and there's no appetite to bring them back. More generally, SA politics is not very grassroots, things like that are largely determined in smoke-filled rooms by party elites rather than by social coalitions.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I've gotten emails like that about brothers leaving pots and pans in the sink, so partly there's a difference in communication style. One thing that happens reasonably often with frats/sororities is that an officer in one of the more socially neck-stuck-out positions (rush chair, social chair, VP alumni (god forbid)) will lose their shit because they're feeling hung out to dry by the rest of the brother/sisterhood. These positions fundamentally suck because there's an expectation in Greek life to be way more sociable than almost any person would want to be - with the idea that different people will come in and out but the group as an aggregate will fill out events and provide good vibes - but there's always a danger you'll hit a collective slump in energy/interest/whatever among the group and then it's you getting humiliated in front of the world and your brothers/sisters. Obviously, it's women at UA, and she seems high-strung even by those standards, so a long way from a chill fraternity, but her email basically seems plausible for a social chair or similar officer facing public underperformance to have a performative freakout in the hope the cats she's herding will do their part.
If the sender was the President, that's, uh, very much another story, but the prez of a frat/sorority has a unique role as the university/legal relations face of the frat.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I find it hard to believe that just banning alcohol caused that much of a drop in murders in SA. For one thing, the liquor stores had block-long lines the days before lockdowns, both for personal stashes and for reselling. As for murders, there is a huge domestic violence problem, which prohibition would probably address, but the vast majority of murders in the townships are either for money or gang reasons. The thing is that there are key confounders: lockdowns made it far more difficult to supply illegal drugs like tik (meth and god knows what) and whoonga (heroin and god knows what, sometimes HIV meds), which are also a massive contributor to violent crime, lockdowns make gang activity more difficult and less lucrative, and the additional welfare passed out during lockdown periods probably dissuaded some marginal criminals from killing someone over fifty rand.
I would say that, given the study apparently counts car accidents, a huge chunk is probably coming from that. Driving drunk is totally normal in South Africa, from the richest to the poorest, and the general standard of driving is pretty dangerous (the common estimate is that 1/3rd of licences on the road are fake). Clearing the roads in general with lockdown and in particular eliminating drunk driving probably has some major effect as well.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
I wonder, with some affection, how The New Atlantis is doing. They seem to have revamped the website and have articles more suited to internet virality - I remember them as a slightly stuffy, but high-quality resource, essentially the place to find conservative American academics writing on philosophy of technology.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Good post. A few clarifications for people making points elsewhere in the thread as to whether the analogy holds:
- The Crusader States were defeated by external armies specifically because the surrounding Muslim states were unified into a single empire (first under Zengi, then under Saladin). Pan-Arabism tried this, but failed largely because of rivalry between Egypt and Syria - basically, this project is infinitely more difficult in the present day, when e.g. Syria can't simply conquer Egypt with a couple thousand cavalry and have Egypt be happy with their new Sultan. The United Arab States lasted three years, and the Arab Federation six months, and that was an easier project in the 50s, so Arab countries would need a better coordination mechanism.
- On the point of internal Israeli/Crusader disunity, Saladin was given his casus belli for the campaign that captured Jerusalem because Reynald of Chatillion (an eternal loose cannon) violated the truce and raided pilgrim caravans. Contra what some people here are assuming, the Crusader leadership were far more disunified than the Israelis have ever been (also, contra the OP, the Crusaders engaged in extensive diplomacy, they just lacked the control to stop guys like Reynald ruining it). It's very possible that Israeli unity could splinter, but again in the modern world demographic splintering looks very different from personalist feudal politics.
- The Crusader States did not have to disappear when they did. Hattin was a completely unforced error from Guy de Lusignan (a weak king in power due to dynastic bad luck and the aforesaid noble disunity). Without that, you probably don't get the mass capitulations when Baibars storms in. The Crusader States were only 100% doomed when gunpowder entered the conversation, and it became possible for larger states to systematically destroy castles. The lesson for Israel is to be very wary of technological shifts in warfighting, particularly if they represents shifts in power from demographically smaller states to larger populations - but I don't see any coming down the pike in the 21st Century.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
I seem to recommend a lot of history podcasts here, but I'll plug When Diplomacy Fails's current series on the July Crisis. Covers a lot that popular accounts don't, including the historiography around the run-up to war.
Having had a British education, I mostly found it surprising how much British diplomacy appears to have been done by a small cabal acting behind the backs of the public, who intended to manipulate the country into a largely unnecessary rivalry with Germany. However, this seems to have been a general trend - the high diplomats of many of the Great Powers were effectively off the leash and playing all kinds of too-clever-by-half schemes which then blew up in their faces (and Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this).
My historical understanding is stronger on colonial politics than internal European diplomacy, but I will point out that the continuity of England's balance-of-power politics is generally overplayed (because her balance-of-power diplomacy in 1914 looks superficially similar to 1815). In reality, much of the century before Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 was based on colonial rivalries, in particular with Russia in Asia and France in Africa - it was only when Russia was revealed as a paper tiger that British policymakers began to look around and realize that Britain's worldwide imperial politics may have been coming at the cost of security in her backyard. My reading is that the British mistakenly believed that aligning with France and Russia would provide a stable balance of power instead of creating two evenly matched blocs ready for war, and totally missed that, in trading off imperial security for European security, she would lose both to long-term rising powers on the periphery (the US and a revitalized Russia). The breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund/Reinsurance Treaty was also a symptom of myopia, with the Great Powers focusing on short-term concerns rather than the greater long-term dangers of revolution and irredentist nationalism.
So, I guess the takeaway is that policymakers have to think long-term. Which, uh, good luck.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
None unusual on their own, but what about a gazpacho mix? Onion and garlic powder, bell pepper powder, chives, salt and pepper.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
William Zinnser's On Writing Well is by far the best book on concise writing. You end up learning to edit as you write.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Caught up to the present episode on the History of the Germans podcast. I like to think I know a lot about Carolingian/Medieval history, and this is easily the best podcast I've found on that period. He's good with the sources, presents historiographical debates where they're important, and, as a banker-turned-lawyer, brings real expertise to describing economic and legal matters in particular. A must-listen if you like history podcasts and are interested in finding one on the Middle Ages (Germany is also the best place to cover most of Europe, because their central location and the Imperial crown means that they get involved basically everywhere except Iberia and Russia).
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2
The diplomatic history doesn't really bear this out, at least for WWII, given how many small nations were thrown into Stalin's lap before he even had to ask. A more accurate take, I think, would be that moral feelings, such as the "rights of small nations", end up being outraged when and only when a violation of such moral feelings is also a violation of the prevailing international order. Moral feelings towards small nations act as a defense of geopolitical order, and are stirred up more by threat than by empathy. Hitler was violating the international order more gravely than Stalin in the run-up to war, by taking more critical states in a more flagrant manner, and by 1945 there was no international order at all save for what the Allies were constructing. This theory also has the benefit of continuity to the present day.
The revisionist take errs in a more simple way, by ascribing to malice what was actually incompetence.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
As one Ceuta-based army corporal, Roberto Perdigones, explained in El Español: ‘For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother.’
Ex-Dudes Rock. Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Italy, has an unusual combination of bureaucracy gone mad and extremely ineffective architects of bureaucracy. I hope the entire Spanish Army catches on to this grift.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
South Africa even has separate executive, legislative, and judicial (until 2013) capitals - Joburg, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein respectively.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Specifically, it's a term originating in the 70s, used to obscure the fact that the idea was coined by James Burnham, a former Marxist-turned-anti-Communist, in the 40s - thereby making the idea safe for Leftist intellectuals to discuss. Burnham simply called them the Managerial Class.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Second the recommendation of the trial and death sequence. The Republic is a very daunting text, whereas those are more engaging and comprehensible. I'd suggest, if that frees up space, to add Xenophon's Apology alongside Plato's. That can start a discussion about how to read Plato's portrayal of Socrates critically - e.g. Xenophon's Socrates is much funnier, explicitly making jokes. A couple possible questions that could get students reading critically, particularly regarding the dramatic framing of the dialogues (which often goes unquestioned, but is extremely important):
- Why does Socrates decide, right before his trial for impiety, to publicly play games with a priest?
- Did Socrates want to die, and if so, why? (This connects to the themes of glory in the Iliad, if you raise the explanation that perhaps Socrates wanted a death that was glorious in its own way, which would ensure the immortality of his legend and of philosophy itself. Also to the Job/Antigone question of bad things happening to good people, if Socrates has found a way to turn the bad to his good)
- How serious is Socrates? Is it different from the way we would think of a philosopher or teacher as serious? Can joking or even trolling be a way to be serious about something higher?
- Plato was the founder of the Academy (and, in some ways, closer to a startup founder than the dean of a modern university), whereas Xenophon was a military man who lived outside Athens and had little fear of their authorities. Does that show up in the way they write their Apologies? E.g. Plato provides a magnificent speech showing off his rhetoric (which could be yours, for a small fee), whereas Xenophon makes Socrates more relatable.
- Were the authorities right, from their perspective, to execute Socrates? Was philosophy destabilizing to Athens? Is youthful ambition inherently dangerous to the powerful? (connects to Iliad and to some extent Antigone)
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Song of Roland is an excellent companion to the Iliad. The parallels are strong enough that it can be a great set-up for a discussion on the differences between ancient and medieval warrior culture - roles of kingship, religion, loyalty, violence, etc.
Young men, particularly the Rogan type, don't turn out to vote. If Trump can actually get a decent fraction of Trump-leaning Rogan fans to vote, it could make a huge difference - I don't think the timing within most states' early voting period is coincidental.
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