2,142 words
Christ, you know it ain’t easy
So, the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland staggers through another year of our Lord, although that’s not a much-used phrase just at the moment. (more…)
2,142 words
Christ, you know it ain’t easy
So, the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland staggers through another year of our Lord, although that’s not a much-used phrase just at the moment. (more…)
Greg Johnson is teaching a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on Counter-Currents Radio, which will continue on three Saturdays later this month (July 15, 22, and 29). The second lecture, which dealt with Socrates’ discussion with Polus from 461b to 481b, can be heard below. A visual aid that accompanies the lecture is here.
The theme of the course is “Might vs. Right.” Dr. Johnson is using Donald J. Zeyl’s translation of the Gorgias published by Hackett as both a separate book and as part of their Plato Complete Works volume. (more…)
In Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the sophists were highly-prized teachers of the art or craft (techne) of rhetoric. (The Greek word techne is the root of our words technique and technology.)
Socrates was widely seen as a sophist, for instance in Aristophanes’ Clouds. To a naïve bystander, Socrates certainly looked like a sophist. Like the sophists, Socrates spent a great deal of time arguing about ideas. Moreover, Socrates was seen arguing with known sophists, including the greatest sophists of them all, Gorgias and Protagoras, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues which bear their names. (more…)
3,535 words
Part 5 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 4 Part 1 here, Chapter 5 Part 1 here)
Whereas liberal elites had always harbored a cynical and technocratic rejection of the fundamental premises of popular government, after the Second World War “the highly educated [also began] to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity,” and their apparent instinctual tendency towards nationalism and authoritarian leaders. They became openly and dogmatically hostile towards all forms of “collectivism” and solidaristic political movements because they identified popular social organization as fundamentally incompatible with liberalism’s hallowed individual rights and liberties. Post-war elites embraced anti-fascism and anti-populism as two necessary tenets of contemporary liberalism. (more…)
Adam Curtis has been compiling and documenting the nature of power in the world for over two decades now for the BBC. Those of us who reside in the UK and are required by law to pay a yearly sum of £157.50 ($218.35) for a television license, and for many native British people, paying this sum has been increasingly feeling like a spit in the face. Adam Curtis’ documentaries have been the one reprieve from the stream of abuse and guilt-tripping amongst the state-sponsored news media and junk celebrity TV. (more…)