Achaemenid

Because tyrants are the people most lost and in need of wisdom, but also we don't really know very much historically about what he did with Dionysius of Syracuse. Most of the letters are probably forgeries, but we don't really know. His known works are very revealing about his true thoughts imo

People just come to worship the biggest bully of them all as an outward expression of their own need to be a bully to defend themselves because they can't conceive of a higher moral order.

This is why Republic is so important to read, it will totally reshape your appraisal of him with respect to this. He hated tyranny and saw it as the inevitable outgrowth of societies that don't cultivate public virtue and are based on an "anything goes", dog-eat-dog kind of attitude (feels familiar)

Also IMO Plato basically has all the good bits from Aristotle with a lot less of the bad, and in beautiful literary form at that. Like it's really kind of an eye opening moment in Republic when Socrates all the sudden stops and is like "btw guys women are just as capable of being rulers as men"

The appeal is that you get to watch a weird old man with a giant nose drive himself insane with the rapturous beauty of the visions he can see with his inner sight, and watch as he drives everyone else insane trying to help them see by showing them why they ought to take their own lives seriously

I'm calling Meno, symposium and gorgias advanced but they're not really, compared to like Timaeus, Parmeneides, Theatetus, etc. You can read them before Republic, I just love Republic so I want to encourage people to get to it quickly.

The thing I have to do is not that important compared to spreading the good word - you should basically just read them in the order that schools teach them, the death of Socrates Saga, then Republic, then more advanced dialogues (Gorgias, Meno, Symposium), then the more obscure or abstract stuff

oh no not more Plato slander on my timeline, I technically have something I'm supposed to do tonight

It's a reference to Jesus saying that infidelity is the only OK reason to divorce, so that's the allegation that's being made

I don’t really recall the details of these arguments but they would probably have to do with something about the parliament that passed the enabling act being illegitimate because of voter fraud/intimidation in the March 1933 election, but yeah I agree

I agree with you but every time someone says this a lot of people really like to start quibbling over how the Nazi takeover was illegal under Weimar law and so technically etc etc etc, missing the point

This literally sounds like something a demon would say

Ok it’s true though, generally speaking prices don’t go down except in a recession. What you want is real wages to rise to catch up with inflation.

Local wizard predict 99% of objects on his table could vanish by the time he removes the magic blanket

Years ago I would hear people say stuff like “man do you think in centuries after all the historical memory is gone people will treat Hitler as casually as they do Genghis khan”, I didn’t expect that process to happen so quickly, literally a handful of years after the critical mass of veterans die

View of north pierhead light in South Haven from the south pier lighthouse. // Image captured at: 2025-11-29 00:33:01 UTC (about 5 min. prior to this post) // Current Temp in South Haven: 31.72 F | -.16 C // Precip: overcast clouds // Wind: WNW at 8.053 mph | 12.9 kph // Humidity: 62%

Current* conditions near South Haven, MI:

i think that we should charge even people who have been pardoned, because there is no conceivable way the founders intended the pardon power to permit the executive to order people to commit crimes and then pardon them for them

Yeah Graeber’s more speculative theory about all of that is that it relates to all of those groups shared experience with the Mississippi mound builder culture and its collapse IIRC

A just after 7:30 thanksgiving shower is so nice

the part about the oral history of the iroquois was especially fascinating wrt this - how when you look at the ancient tales of "yeah once we were ruled by evil cannibal witches but we rose up and killed them all" they start to look at lot like the political history of other parts of north america.

For its flaws this is something that I do like about Graebers Dawn of Everything book, how he breaks down the idea that pre-modern societies are just stuck in some passive instinctual natural state - they always have some complex political dynamics going on papered over as "ancient tradition" 1/2

The only way I can see it not being safe is if someone slipped poison or razor blades into it like the urban myth with Halloween candy, so watch out for that

Ok I may be wrong but I honestly don’t think they can use this so do anything if they couldn’t really get any juice out of the Charlie Kirk shooting

I understand the idea that court systems generally are super backed up all over the world but the solution can’t be to take away people’s rights to streamline things. This goes together with so many issues in the US that could be solved with “hire a trillion more judges”. It’s a form of austerity.

Also fully aware that I’m just doing “when prophecy fails” on “when prophecy fails” right now

I am not well read on this subject, but I looked at the paper when it was released and it doesn’t really seem to undermine the key idea of the study. The subjects all still went around believing in psychic messages and reinterpreting the prophecy, it just shows scientific standards were very lax

High income renters rent the new apartments and don't have to compete with low income renters for the rest of the housing stock (I am not saying this always happens or is an efficient mechanism for bringing rents down, but that's the explanation)

In case it makes news: there was a World Zionist Org aliyah fair at a London synagogue today and Jewish pro-Palestine groups protested against it. Various right wing or pro-Israel groups are pretending they were just protesting a synagogue for the sake of it and that the protestors were not Jews.

Greenlandic families fight to get children back after parenting tests banned The Danish government has banned the use of parental competency tests, known as FKUs, on Greenlandic families after decades of criticism.

Greenlandic families fight to get children back after parenting tests banned