socrates
Norm If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.

-Socrates
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lio_knows_who My friend Lio likes Aristotle a bit better, to be quite honest. Isn't that weird? 020403
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User24 I like that quote, Norm. 030506
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jane the best way to learn
is to ask questions
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User24 is it? 030706
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mon the best way to ask questions is to live and learn
isn't it?
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User24 was forced to commit suicide because he asked questions, asked people to prove their beliefs to him, which of course they couldn't - he was trying to inspire thought, turns out the human race wasn't, isn't and perhaps never will be ready to forget everything it thinks it knows, and accept that nothing is true. 031013
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oldephebe this is a pretty cool page 031013
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girl_jane I'd like to take some space on this page to thank my philosophy professor, Dr. Ballard. He's so amazingly intelligent, and I wish I could sit down with him sometime and pick every bit of information out of his brain and place it into mine.

In some odd way...I almost find him attractive.

Yikes.

crushes_on_professors
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oE socrates was a genious of the negative dialectic argumentative tactic - involutions upon involutions of casting the interlocutors position back into his teeth..how to achieve an exacerbating impasse w/o asserting an original argument of your own..and even re-define the parameters of the argument

still though dying for ones own convictions..can't negate the authenticity of his dedication to an ethos..
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oldephebe Okay so here's my take on blathers allure..We all know of Socatates and his questing, withering, indefagitable peripatetic perambulations right?
Although by his very LIFE he was dedicated to teaching and deconstruction
or discombobulating his interlocutors. The record shows that he never did any other work. Sages and scribes have sifted through and assembled the detritus of antiquity to conclude that he lived on a penurious income from an inheritance left to him by his father who was either a stone-cutter or sculptor..Unfortunately the distinction between the aesthete and craftsman..has been blurred in the heap of history..so much deteritus gathered upon the original record..archeological forensics has at least yeilded that artifact obfuscated though it may be..so the distinction is blurred by/in antiquity.

So yeah Socrates was an itinerate teacher as well as one who learned to ostensibly keep his darker appetites in abeyancewell into his old age..his life basically mirrored the Sophists who he mercilessly defamed..the Sophists who he was constantly scathing with his skillful sandpaper tongue..a veritable scapel of the negative dialectic..until his advesary was mired in the inertia of his ellipsis. Okay, so the Sophists traveled throghout the city-states of Greece and the venerable Socrates expectorated in the collonades and gymnasiums of Athens discussing (and by sheer proximity inculcating) philosophy with anyone who had ears to hear.

In modern parlance he was the modern equivalent of something between this eccentric fixture in the town square and someone of whom you feel a grudging respect for beause of his transcsendant genious of argumentation..his ethos..the whole virtue is knowledge and knowledge cannot be learned it must be divinely imparted and he, although he had this obvious craft of argumentation, actually knew nothing himself..so his ethos which began pollinating future princes who would one day sit at the helm of despotic oligarchies gestated in the seething heart of ambition.

Comic poets penned derisive plays satirizing his perceived eccentricities as a teacher. The most saliently surviving exemplar is something entitled "Clouds of Aristophanese" in it Socrates is skewered as the principal or headmaster of a school devoted to his teachings..Aristophanes coined a new word for school he termed it a "thinkery" rendered in Greek a "phrontisterion" from the Greek verb phrontizein, to think - and what we call in modern parlance those edifices rected to egg-heads and the mastabatory mastication of ideology "thinktanks"

So yeah many are the streams that fed his ego and reputation..an ideological pollination and permutations upon which many schools in greek antiquity claimed to be his rightful progeny and inheritors of the Socratic mantle of authority. So i see Blather as a kind of thinktank..just look at some of the learned spumes and reams arduously crafted into these blue-pages..
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marked . 031028
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oldephebe Because of the tireless efforts inaugerated by the abolitionist movement and out of that emerged the architects of the 19th century womens movement..women who had this sense of historical timing..the call unto destiny. This tenacity of conviction emerged out of the bonds that were forged in those crucibles. They could bide their time any longer. Thier hunger for change could no longer be ameliorated by effusive and disingenuous male or even female condesension and professed fealty to accept societal norms..as if the mere existence of unenlightened and inequitable roles thefore lends some extenuating exculpability to said subserviant, inescapable societally and sometimes statutorially and municipally imposed roles role. The same conviction and psychological dynamics can be attributed to all or most of the egalitarian aspirations burning in the embered heart of the true believer. He/she stands on a hill and lifts the gleaming golden horn of liberty and self-determination..seldom or never falling prey to dissent and the demagogue dishonestly characterizing thier noble aims as the histrionics of heresy..the gyrations of of a volatile gender, or an inadequacy bred of ethnic extract,the fevered fulminations of unschooled minds, but gnawing at the edge of every syllable was thier fear.

Yes they said we have come to usurp the prerogatives of exploitation, misogyny, racsism, and yes even those of the god that you erect to sanction your lies. Your status, your power, and position is in imminent danger. These true believers said by there lives and words. It is not your right, your entitlement to command of conscience, my heart, my actions. That is the province my soul soul and an impartial God whose love and favor are indescriminate. Posing a verisimilitude of political equality does not begin to approach setting the societal and economically ordained by an encrusted orthodoxy. From Ceaser Chavez to Martin Luther King to the martyrs of Tianamen Square..and countless other struggles. The union movement that braved threats and assinations and jurisprudential corruption to elevate the working men/women of America to a position of protected rights and job stability..no longer subject to the caprice and tyranny of unregulated capitalist juggernauts. The promise, the yearning for equality is heard from the first epochs of civilization. Lift your heads from the deep furrows of your despair and imagine a better way, a dream. Set on fire all the images and traditions of subjugation. Socraties would howl down from the parthenon burning ashes upon my head if he were witness to my words. Sure, arguments appealing to relative equality, and against the acute astringency of reflexive animus will be met with sneers. Given that, let nothing encroach upon the frontiers of freedom, egalitarianism and informed, democratic dissnet. Socrates preffered death over consensus, over democrasy, over equality (yes that is relative to the inequity of women, slaves and the indigent) Perhaps he knew that his martydom would catapult his views beyond the scope and breadth of antiquity. He perhaps hoped to be apotheosized by subsequent generations as the first generation of his apprentices. We need no longer to endear ourselves to the arrogant or peremptory or delusional. Those who greatly overestimate the esteem with wich they are regarded with. Those who vastly overestimate with admirable tenacity the depth and scope of their cognitive, cultural and ethnic place in the hierarchy of man. Sure the use of hierarchy is an inconsistant term given the gestalt of this rumination. Let's substitute hierarchy with House.

Scorn, disdain, an imperially glowering brow do not constitute informed and substantive argumentation or debate. How many of us like Socrates disdain the perieved caste they born born into? How many of us become reflexively belligerant when the other dissents. How many of us lock our minds our hearts in unqualified prejudice, bias or recalcitrance as a matter of principle when we hear an articulate, assertive voice grating against the grain of our supposedly inviolable contentions? When that happens, when every thing is locked down nothing gets in, nothing is let out. While I can admire Socrates for the construction of some of his most seminal arguments (especially the platonic Socrates) his unqualified disdain of democrasy sowed the fireseed of his eventual martydom and cautions us all against the fallacy, and dishonor of scorn and disdain utilized as an adjunct of argumentation. When will we pull these rotting planks out of the house of Reason?

later...
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oldephebe should have said "propogating a verisimilitude of political equality does not even begin to set aright the societal ship woefully askew by a statutorially imposed..." I'm sure there a few other omissions and or spelling errors. I'll get to them later

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hsg sometimes jumps on rooftops.

cooking up something lovely... sauteed confusion of, "some mystery school in zha pan."
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h|s|g you_know_nothing 110412
what's it to you?
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