Notice how it never breaks the other way? You never see guys coming in saying “well, I’m certainly not a liberal at all but here’s this great Mother Jones thinkpiece on raising the minimum wage you need to read.” It’s always rightwingers who play this dumb game of disguising their views.

Is Taibbi a right winger?
Like how dishonest can you possibly be?
Is McWhorter a right winger?

Trolly,
What was the bullshit?

It's not a strawman if you know what's going on here. Plato talks about democracy, but Greek society was not an egalitarian one. It had slavery, regressive roles for women, etc and Plato's text is in that paradigm. There's a lot of talk about people doing their assigned roles and by doing so promote harmony, and when people don't do their assigned roles their is disharmony and "tyrants" promote disharmony. Which makes a kind of sense, tyrants are usually bad news

But by this definition MLK was a tyrant and so was Eisenhower for sending in troops to enforce desegregation.

Which is why reactionary conservatives like to make a jump directly from Plato to the current day, because they don't have to deal with response from the Enlightenment and French Revolution that says sometimes disharmony is good if it removes unsupported or illogical impediments to true equality.

This lets the writer get to bash BLK for wanting to remove monuments to actual tyrants because doing so disrupts the harmony of the status quo.

*Sexual liberation doesn't fit anywhere in article. It's thrown in because Plato talked about how part of social disharmony is promoting sexual deviancy and the reactionaries at the Clarmont just think anything other than chastity before marriage punishable by something is extreme lasciviousness. The article itself just throws it in there and never explains how sexual liberation or anything sexual is related to Social Justice Warriors or whatever

You incessantly lying about your right-wing political views.

So when I post a person like Taibbi what is that? Do you consider him a conservative or right winger?
McWhorter? And if so, why?
When I reference individuals like that, do they not count?

you dont have to disguise your fondness for good policy. its why current republicans run on vague racism and fear mongering(mostly about people of color)rather than any policies. they dont have any policies that anyone likes.

but yeah you are right.. it's always the "well, i'm the least racist person ever, but it sure looks like there might be something to this skull measuring stuff.."

Man

Go **** yourself

I mean people can say what they want but don't lie about me. I voted one time in my life and it was Gore, and I take in information from across the political spectrum.
Not agreeing with your race-based views does not make me a racist nor a conservative.
People who have no intention of discussing things honestly like Trolly and Slighted should go back to posting in the Trump thread.

what about any part of this discussion has been honest?

There has been lots of legitimate discussion in this thread from a number of people. Is this something that you deny or are you just attempting to be hyperbolic for reasons unknown?

My understanding is that what Plato's 'democracy' mean and what our version of democracy mean are two very things-- the Platonic version is a democracy of the mind and society only mirrors that-- there still are in fact oligarchs running the show in both the Platonic version and in reality. So the fact that Greek society was not democratic in Plato's day seems completely irrelevant.
When Plato talks about assigned roles, he's referring to his own idyllic city ruled by philosopher-kings and based on the very common sense notions that the average person is ruled by the passions and not reason.
How you then jump though from saying that MLK and Eisenhower would be tyrants too under Plato seems to miss the mark a great deal
You're taking normative conceptions from Plato's imaginary city-- which was a pure thought experiment of Socrates, and making leaps about how this means that the argument is that "everyone should stay in their place".

I had never seen any arguments attempting to think anything modern day to Plato before this one. If it's a trend then I have missed it, but a google search would show the argument that it's primarily conservatives who are doing this to be false

2,400 years ago, Plato saw democracy would give rise to a tyrannical leader filled with “false and braggart words”
They're talking about Trump there.
The people’s tyrant: what Plato can teach us about Donald Trump
Here’s what Plato had to say about someone like Donald Trump

Political theorists have been worrying about mob rule for 2,000 years
This economist article looks like it's a "right" article although I'd hardly call the Economist reactionary...but it's behind a paywall.

“I voted Democratic once 20 years ago, so clearly I can’t possibly be conservative!”

Trolly,
Is Taibbi is a conservative?

Can you back up why I'm a conservative without resorting to lying and making yourself look stupid?
Every instance where I agree with a liberal position is ignored, and every instance where I agree with a conservative one is amplified? You admit to doing this, right?
Like are people like Taibbi and McWhorter conservatives?
The issue is that your literally pathetic conception of politics forces you to put people onto teams, because you have no conception of politics outside of liberal and conservative and have no way of framing things outside of this context. And because you know I despise thinking like this, you attempt to vilify me by lumping me in with conservatives.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w28572

Not familiar with his work. Your guy McWhorter worked for a conservative think-tank and seems to have views that would fit right in with Fox and Friends, from what you and iHIV have posted.

Neither of which takes away or adds to the fact that you’re in here every day carrying water for bog-standard right-wing grievances about “wokenesss” and “cancel culture.”


OTOH, you did vote D 20 years ago. So there’s that.

I'm not saying this. I'm saying that's what the writer of the article is saying. He's saying that Plato says that BLM are tyrannical. Ok how? Well he spends 3/4th of the article just talking about Plato so it's not very well fleshed out because the summary is exactly what I quoted. Trump just talks like a tyrant but BLM is promoting bad feelings, riling up the rubes, attacking and burning things and promoting non monogamous sex or trans rights or whatever.

Ok next question, do I even care about Plato in this situation? The answer is no. His philosophy about the political good, while interesting yahda, yahda, yahda isn't that applicable to the present moment & BLM movement.

It is interesting to bow tied reactionaries tweebs do who went to private school and learned the classics as the greatest thing ever so if Plato says BLM's bad, check mate libs got to go home.

And reactionaries do this all the time. They take some Greek classic philosophy and try to judo it into telling everyone that reactionary bullsh*t is the only philosophically right thing to do.

Same goes with the founders and the modern day too by the way. Federalist 134232423 says "Whilt that the Senate be strong". Checkmate libs can't have equal representation.

A nice short hand if is the author starts with ancient Greece (or the Founding) and immediately jumps to the present to make a point, they're doing it on purpose to ignore all the stuff that came between.

The article never once mentions BLM. It's hard to take you seriously here when you so clearly don't understand what it's even about and seem to just be looking to smear it onto some previously unknown (to me) right wing tradition of linking things to the classics.
I mean this is not from the article that I linked.
This is:
He is saying that Plato's description of a tyrant matches Trump's opposition and not him.

You don’t think the “woke mobs” tearing down statues might reasonably be understood to be an allusion to BLM and similar groups?

I think Hue is using BLM there as a rhetorical tactic. Painting all critics of 'wokeism' as opponents of BLM (and possibly white supremacists) is cheap.

This is correct

Saying all lives matter isn't problematic on its own. I believe those who say it really do believe all lives matter equally. However saying it really just takes the focus off individually marginalized communities and races. We all already know white lives matter; it's been proven everyday for the past thousands of years

I see the CRT proponents showed up...