Standards are high here; this is a place for scholarly discussion among men of letters. Quality is preferable to quantity; quantity would signal that something has gone horrendously wrong. 7 high quality participants is preferable to 7,000 low quality ones.

“Then do you see, Socrates,” he said, “how great the difficulty is if one marks things off as forms, themselves by themselves?”

“Quite clearly.”

“I assure you,” he said, “that you do not yet, if I may put it so, have an inkling of how great the difficulty is if you are going to posit one form in each case every time you make a distinction among things.”

“How so?” he asked.

“There are many other reasons,” Parmenides said, “but the main one is this: suppose someone were to say that if the forms are such as we claim they must be, they cannot even be known. If anyone should raise that objection, you wouldn’t be able to show him that he is wrong, unless the objector happened to be widely experienced and not ungifted, and consented to pay attention while in your effort to show him you dealt with many distant considerations. Otherwise, the person who insists that they are necessarily unknowable would remain unconvinced.”

“Why is that, Parmenides?” Socrates asked.

“Because I think that you, Socrates, and anyone else who posits that there is for each thing some being, itself by itself, would agree, to begin with, that none of those beings is in us.”

“Yes – how could it still be itself by itself?” replied Socrates.

“Very good,” said Parmenides. “And so all the characters that are what they are in relation to each other have their being in relation to themselves but not in relation to things that belong to us. And whether one posits the latter as likenesses or in some other way, it is by partaking of them that we come to be called by their various names. These things that belong to us, although they have the same names as the forms, are in their turn what they are in relation to themselves but not in relation to the forms; and all the things named in this way are of themselves but not of the forms.”

“What do you mean?” Socrates asked.

“Take an example,” said Parmenides. “If one of us is somebody’s master or somebody’s slave, he is surely not a slave of master itself – of what a master is – nor is the master a master of slave itself – of what a slave is. On the contrary, being a human being, he is a master or slave of a human being. Mastery itself, on the other hand, is what it is of slavery itself; and, in the same way, slavery itself is slavery of mastery itself. Things in us do not have their power in relation to forms, nor do they have theirs in relation to us; but, I repeat, forms are what they are of themselves and in relation to themselves, and things that belong to us are, in the same way, what they are in relation to themselves. You do understand what I mean?”

“Certainly,” Socrates said, “I understand.”

“So too,” he said, “knowledge itself, what knowledge is, would be knowledge of that truth itself, which is what truth is?”

“Certainly.”

“Furthermore, each particular knowledge, what it is, would be knowledge of some particular thing, of what that thing is. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“But wouldn’t knowledge that belongs to us be of the truth that belongs to our world? And wouldn’t it follow that each particular knowledge that belongs to us is in turn knowledge of some particular thing in our world?”

“Necessarily.”

“But, as you agree, we neither have the forms themselves nor can they belong to us.”

“Yes, you’re quite right.”

“And surely the kinds themselves, what each of them is, are known by the form of knowledge itself?”

“Yes.”

“The very thing that we don’t have.”

“No, we don’t.”

“So none of the forms is known by us, because we don’t partake of knowledge itself.”

“It seems not.”

“Then the beautiful itself, what it is, cannot be known by us, nor can the good, nor, indeed, can any of the things we take to be characters themselves.”

“It looks that way.”

“Here’s something even more shocking than that.”

“What’s that?”

“Surely you would say that if in fact there is knowledge – a kind itself – it is much more precise than is knowledge that belongs to us. And the same goes for beauty and all the others.”

“Yes.”

(Continued below.)

(Continuing from above.)

“Well, whatever else partakes of knowledge itself, wouldn’t you say that god more than anyone else has this most precise knowledge?”

“Necessarily.”

“Tell me, will god, having knowledge itself, then be able to know things that belong to our world?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Because we have agreed, Socrates,” Parmenides said, “that those forms do not have their power in relation to things in our world, and things in our world do not have theirs in relation to forms, but that things in each group have their power in relation to themselves.”

“Yes, we did agree on that.”

“Well then, if this most precise mastery and this most precise knowledge belong to the divine, the gods’ mastery could never master us, nor could their knowledge know us or anything that belongs to us. No, just as we do not govern them by our governance and know nothing of the divine by our knowledge, so they in their turn are, for the same reason, neither our masters nor, being gods, do they know human affairs.”

“If god is to be stripped of knowing,” he said, “our argument may be getting too bizarre.”

“And yet, Socrates,” said Parmenides, “the forms inevitably involve these objections and a host of others besides – if there are those characters for things, and a person is to mark off each form as ‘something itself.’ As a result, whoever hears about them is doubtful and objects that they do not exist, and that, even if they do, they must by strict necessity be unknowable to human nature; and in saying this he seems to have a point; and, as we said, he is extraordinarily hard to win over. Only a very gifted man can come to know that for each thing there is some kind, a being itself by itself; but only a prodigy more remarkable still will discover that and be able to teach someone else who has sifted all these difficulties thoroughly and critically for himself.”

“I agree with you, Parmenides,” Socrates said. “That’s very much what I think too.”

— Plato, Parmenides

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Li'l buddy wants a hug

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"Be a part of the bubble," they said

I’m not afraid to calmly assert today, at 60 years of age, after all my experiences with men and books, with speeches and situations, that the great speech by Donoso on dictatorship on January 4th, 1849 is the greatest speech in world literature. And with that I make no exceptions to Pericles and Demosthenes, nor for Cicero or Mirabeau or Burke.

— Carl Schmitt, writing to Ernst Jünger.

Juan Donoso Cortés' masterfully describes the origin of revolution:

No, gentlemen, it is not in slavery, it is not in misery that the germ of revolutions lies, the germ of revolutions lies in the overexcited desires of the masses, caused by the politicians who exploit and benefit from them:

‘And you shall be like the rich.’ That is the formula of the socialist revolutions against the middle classes.

‘And you shall be like the nobles.’ That is the formula of the revolutions of the middle classes against the noble classes.

‘And you will be like kings.’ That is the formula of the revolutions of the noble classes against the kings.

Finally, gentlemen, ‘and you will be like Gods.’ That is the formula of the first rebellion of the first man against God. From Adam, the first rebel, to Proudhon, the last impious, that is the formula of all revolutions.

Throughout his masterful speech, Cortés builds an understanding of the modern choice between the revolution and the dictatorship; he works through historical examples of both, outlines the roles of countries like England and France within the modern stream of revolutions that has carried us to our present location, describes the relationship between religion and political repression, and argues that liberty came into the world with Jesus Christ, and as religious faith declines, despotism becomes inevitable. The speech ends with a choice not between dictatorship and liberty, which no longer exists in Europe, but "between the dictatorship of insurrection and the dictatorship of the Government, ... the dictatorship that comes from below and the dictatorship that comes from above." He favors the latter because it comes from a cleaner, more serene place; in short, he chooses order over chaos, finding that the dictatorship of the sword is more noble than the dictatorship of the dagger.

If the above interested you, check out the full speech:

https://t.me/PoorReads/31

I have decided to make some high schoolers read this in its entirety.

Who's ready for some good old fashioned American-born communist propaganda?

The question asked of Communists more frequently than any other, if we can judge from the Hearst newspapers, is this:

“If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back where you came from?”

The truth is, if you insist on knowing, Mr. Hearst, we Communists like this country very much. We cannot think of any other spot on the globe where we would rather be than exactly this one. We love our country.

Hmmmm.

Another communist who loves Lincoln. Color me surprised.

Portraits of Lincoln, Lenin and Stalin displayed at the tenth convention of the Communist Party USA in Chicago, 1938.

Witness Earl Browder, a heritage American and Anglo-Saxon whose ancestors fought against the British both during the Revolution and the War of 1812 and who at one point had his criminal sentence commuted by fellow heritage American Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speak on the nature of America, revealing that communism is as American as apple pie:

The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says—slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses.

We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today.

We are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.

...

This is how we American Communists read the history of our country. This is what we mean by Americanism. This is how we love our country, with the same burning love which Lenin bore for Russia, his native land. Like Lenin, we will fight to free our land from the blood-sucking reactionaries, place it in the hands of the masses, bring it into the international brotherhood of a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and realize the prophetic lines of Walt Whitman :

“We have adhered too long to petty limits ... the time has come to enfold the world.“

Is this commie tripe, or does he have a reasonable argument backing up his claim? Read the whole essay if you find yourself curious:

https://t.me/PoorReads/44

The origins of woke (1547). The radical regime of Edward VI. The Archbishop of Canterbury eats meat during Lent.

As many then foresaw, in a few hundred years this would lead to child sex changes

If I discovered a beloved family member owned one of these, I would disown them.

Bok Van Blerk - De La Rey

PragerU fails at applying 4th grade math