Marco Rubio, student of Wikipedia lol, suddenly warms to Platonist philosopher and biographer Plutarch

 But what about the welders, Marco?

And even today's Greeks know that Western law is far more Roman than it is Greek. 

Marco is what the Athenians would have called a spermologos:

Some also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers met Paul. And some said, "What would this babbler say?"

-- Acts 17:18

The MAGA boobeoisie is taking Marco seriously, which is even funnier than Marco himself, but he's still trending way behind International Lesbian Day. 

 

 Rubio Urges Defense Of Western Civilization At Acropolis: "We Choose The Unapologetic Pursuit Of National Power"

... "Many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch," Rubio said. "Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship and republic and government were shaped in the Greek city-states." ... 

 

Jonah is still ticked off that the Jews were expelled from ancient Rome three times

Meanwhile, there are about 100 towns named Troy in America, and the Christian American heartland had no problem loving Rome and Athens and hating slavery at the same time.

 

Since it's not about Homer let me fix that for ya

 Somebody should make a movie about the actual Odyssey, instead of a movie about the West's Achilles heel, its introspective conscience since the defeat of Athens in 404 BC, the volume on which was turned up to 11 by Christianity.

Nothing defines the West like its failure of nerve. 

 

Nolan’s “Odyssey” Is a Defense of Western Christian Civilization

Garrett Exner, Providence

 

... [Christopher Nolan] never sought to make a film straightforwardly depicting Odysseus’s Late Bronze Age journey around the Mediterranean.

 

... In the Homeric epic, Odysseus is not troubled by the sack of Troy. He understands it as a glorious victory. Yet Nolan chooses to show the sack of Troy as a descent into violence and hate, culminating in the desecration of Athena’s temple and even the beheading of Athena herself. Instead of being proud of sacking Troy, these acts inspire severe post-traumatic stress and moral injury in Odysseus. This is not a bastardization of The Odyssey, but a thoughtful update in light of the Christian morality that has come to define the West.  

 

Through the film Nolan clarifies this through the use of Christian themes . . .. 

There is almost nothing Athenian about China, nor Spartan about the United States

But here we are.

Does THE GRAUNIAD even know that Sparta won that war?

Does Xi? 

Meanwhile "Make America Great Again" handed our adversaries the rhetorical cudgel of decline wielded by Xi against Trump. 

America is great when it stands for human freedom, something Trump is too shallow to grasp. The very word strikes terror into the hearts of the Chicoms, and is our greatest weapon against them.

But under Trump America has betrayed freedom in Ukraine, and acted more like imperial Athens in the Persian Gulf than like Sparta.

The attack on Iran is looking more and more like the failed Sicilian Expedition every day. 

Aftermath: Trump Is Wrecking the U.S. Military

If Xi wants to win, he'll act more like Sparta and let the real Athens destroy itself. 

 

 

 

Taki, who thinks it's 431 BC, takes time out from his debaucheries to scold The Donald that Iranians are going to experience terrible suffering, and Americans eventual defeat

Arrogance led to the Athenian demise, no doubt about it.  

But like the good Spartan that he is, he doesn't consider that it might be 490 BC instead, seeing how he and his European friends are too busy with feasting to come to the aid of our age's Athens at Marathon.

Here.

 

CNN story reporting dozens arrested for arson fires in Greece says fires were caused by climate change

 

Greek police arrest dozens for arson as EU’s largest-ever wildfires rage

CNN NewsourceAugust 29, 2023

Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters
Destroyed corral where eighteen bodies were found following a wildfire near the village of Avantas.

By Eleni Giokos, Xiaofei Xu and Niamh Kennedy, CNN

(CNN) — Greek authorities have arrested dozens of people on arson-related charges as deadly wildfires – the largest ever recorded in the European Union – rage across the country. 

Wildfires in Mount Parnitha, north of the Greek capital Athens, are still out of control Friday, with more forest destroyed overnight.

The biggest fire front line in Greece remains near the northeastern town of Alexandroupolis, in the Evros region.

The burned body of a man was found on a rural road near Dadia national park, near the border with Turkey, state media AMNA reported Friday.

Earlier this week, 18 people were found dead near a village in northern Greece. The fire brigade said Tuesday they may have been migrants. Another person was killed in a fire northwest of the capital Athens on Monday.

Greek police have made 79 arson related arrests, Greek government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis told public broadcaster EPT Friday. 

“What is happening is not just impermissible, but obscene and criminal,” Greek Climate Crisis Minister Vassilis Kikilias said in a statement.

“You are committing a crime against the country. You will not be spared. We will find you and you will be held accountable in Justice,” Kikilas added. 

With more than 73,000 hectares burned, the fires in Alexandroupolis are officially the largest wildfires ever recorded in the European Union, according to EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarčič. 

Wildfires have intensified around the globe, providing a stark reminder of how the climate crisis is upending lives and inflicting billions of dollars a year in damage.

While wildfires are often ignited by lightning strikes or human activity, they are becoming more frequent because of human-caused climate change. Scientists found, for instance, that climate change made the extreme weather conditions that fueled the 2019-2020 destructive fire seasons in Australia 30% more likely to occur.

More.

Greece can't get a break: First financial meltdown, then overrun by refugees, now swept by wildfires

Greeks describe harrowing escapes from deadly fires:

"A pair of wildfires have [sic] left at least 79 people dead, and CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports dozens are still believed to be missing. In some places around the Greek capital the fires were still burning. Elsewhere people began returning to neighborhoods left unrecognizable."

Lawyers on strike over new taxes in Greece push backlog of cases to the year 2032

Reported here:

Athens lawyer Thanos Koussoulos says self-employed professionals like him will feel the most pain, as the new measures will increase monthly pension contributions, taxable income, and levies on services. "An average lawyer will lose half his income and won't be able to survive," he said, speaking in an empty courtroom. "Every part of society has been affected by these measures, including groups once considered to be privileged. I think it's a good thing they are demonstrating." ... Ironically, the lawyers' strike has added pressure on the government to seek a quick way to raise revenue, as tax cases challenged in court have been held up.

EuroGroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem gets a new name: Lightweight Weaselbloom

Yanis Varoufakis, quoted here:

'In the full transcript published on his blog, Varoufakis also laid into the Eurogroup president, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, saying he was key to the Greek deal “not just because he is so intellectually lightweight but, primarily, because he is untrustworthy. For example, he chose to lie to me in my first Eurogroup about procedure. It is one thing to disagree with the Eurogroup president. It is quite another thing to have him lie to you about gravely important procedures.”'

Victor Davis Hanson's loyalty is to a part of antiquity about free speech admired by the Enlightenment, not to all of it

Here, idealizing the record of the ancient world on freedom of speech, which is much more complicated than he lets on:

Western civilization’s creed is free thought and expression, the lubricant of everything from democracy to human rights. Even a simpleton in the West accepts that protecting free expression is not the easy task of ensuring the right to read Homer’s Iliad or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It entails instead the unpleasant duty of allowing offensive expression. ...

Westerners cannot return to the Middle Ages to murder those whose ideas they don’t like. “Parody” and “satire” are, respectively, Greek and Latin words. In antiquity the non-Western tradition simply did not produce authors quite like the vicious Aristophanes, Petronius, and Juvenal, who unapologetically trashed the society around them. If the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo loses the millennia-old right to ridicule Islam from within a democracy, then there is no longer a West, at least as we know it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do we really need to remind a classicist that Socrates was put to death for expressing ideas the Athenians didn't like, long before "the West" even got going?

Or that Solon's reforms of the Draconian laws were approved of in the time of Plutarch precisely for the way they restricted impious and intemperate speech?

"Praise is given also to that law of Solon which forbids speaking ill of the dead. For it is piety to regard the deceased as sacred, justice to spare the absent, and good policy to rob hatred of its perpetuity. He also forbade speaking ill of the living in temples, court-of‑law, public offices, and at festivals; the transgressor must pay three drachmas to the person injured, and two more into the public treasury. For never to master one's anger is a mark of intemperance and lack of training; but always to do so is difficult, and for some, impossible." -- Life of Solon 21.1

Or that the Bible has a venerable tradition advocating self-censorship, arguably with a greater claim to forming the basis of Western experience among more people than Petronius or Juvenal could ever make?

"A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards." -- Proverbs 29:11

"I will guard my ways, Lest I sin with my tongue; I will restrain my mouth with a muzzle, While the wicked are before me." -- Psalm 39:1

"If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain." -- James 1:26

"And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell." -- James 3:6

Or that certain forms of self-censorship could get a person killed under the Romans?

'And the Irenarch Herod, accompanied by his father Nicetes (both riding in a chariot), met him, and taking him up into the chariot, they seated themselves beside him, and endeavoured to persuade him, saying, "What harm is there in saying, Lord Cæsar, and in sacrificing, with the other ceremonies observed on such occasions, and so make sure of safety?" But he at first gave them no answer; and when they continued to urge him, he said, "I shall not do as you advise me." So they, having no hope of persuading him, began to speak bitter words unto him, and cast him with violence out of the chariot, insomuch that, in getting down from the carriage, he dislocated his leg [by the fall]. But without being disturbed, and as if suffering nothing, he went eagerly forward with all haste, and was conducted to the stadium, where the tumult was so great, that there was no possibility of being heard.' -- Martyrdom of Polycarp 8

All of these "speech codes" and more existed in the West long before the West became the West, right alongside the traditions challenging them which Hanson mentions. And speech codes also still exist in our own time, as the anti-Semitic laws of France and a few other countries demonstrate.

Arguably there should be more such laws punishing defamation of more religions if we are going to permit laws benefiting one religion in this respect, if, that is, we are going to continue to emphasize the Western principle of equality before the law. Otherwise the "duty of allowing offensive expression" must also apply to all, including Jews.

Obama and Romney Defend Progressive Taxation, But It's an Attack on Property and Justice

So says John Chapman, here:

To prove the moral case for progressivity — that, in President Obama’s exact words, the rich should pay “their fair share”, it would have to be shown that the marginal utility of the last $100,000 of income for the millionaire was providing less satisfaction than the last $1,000 for the worker making $10,000 in income.

To say this colloquially, Messrs. Obama and Romney feel that the millionaire should feel as much pain from losing his last 10% of income — should bear as much burden from this loss — as does the worker who loses his last 10%.  President Obama and evidently Governor Romney both posit that this is not the case with flat-rate taxation; they believe that the loss of the last 10% is not equiproportional for both without progressive rates.  But there is of course no way to know that empirically, and indeed, there are sound reasons to think the opposite is true — that progressive taxation is “unfair” to the higher-income earners by taking an “unjust” amount of their property from them, that ultimately harms the economy as a whole. ...

For steep progressivity is, at root, an attack on both property and blindness in the application of law.  Marginal rates of taxation now approach 60% in states like New York, and “the rich”, rather than acquiesce to Mr. Obama’s concept of paying their “fair share”, are simply vacating the state and/or ceasing in the taxable production of goods and services: chronic deficits leading to fiscal collapse then appear on the horizon in such cases.  Greece is a current exemplar of the extreme end to which this situation leads, and no amount of moralizing about “fairness” is relevant on the streets of Athens today.

Our Liberty Is Not Abstract, But Sensible

Tony Blankley zeroes in here on the distinctive American attachment to the tangible, a disposition we inherited more from Rome than from Athens, from Antiquity not Modernity, from tradition not innovation, from Burke not Johnson:

March 10, 2010

An American Obsession with Freedom

By Tony Blankley

The publishing of the Declaration of Independence 233 years ago by our Founders was responded to in London by two of the 18th century's greatest minds: Dr. Samuel Johnson (after whom a literary age was named) and Edmund Burke (the intellectual father of modern Anglo-American conservatism).

Dr. Johnson made the harsh assertion that our Declaration was "the delirious dream of republican fanaticism" that, if sincere, would "put the axe to the roots of all government." Moreover, he went on, it was the rankest hypocrisy for owners of slaves to shout for freedom, or, as Johnson put it: "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?"

But it was Edmund Burke who had the more profound insight. He recognized that it wasn't despite being slaveholders that American Colonists felt so powerfully about liberty. Rather, being in the midst of the obvious evils of slavery, those men who were free more fully appreciated their freedom. "Those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of rank and privilege," Burke argued. Or, as Jedediah Purdy (from whose historically rich and ingenious book "A Tolerable Anarchy" I have abstracted these observations) put it: "Slavery made masters uniquely sensitive to any invasion of their independence."

These sensitivities -- sensibilities -- that Burke so shrewdly observed in 1775 continue to manifest themselves in American politics today as we fight over socializing health care, nationalizing industries, indebting our grandchildren, regulating and taxing energy creation and the other intrusions into what Americans have long considered not to be the government's business.

Burke would understand what Europeans (and many European-influenced Americans) in 2010 continue to scoff at as America's obsession with the slogan of freedom. Because although we Americans may talk about freedom as an abstraction -- and believe in freedom as an abstraction -- our politics come alive when we experience an intrusion into what John Adams called "the sensations of freedom."

As Burke explained: "Abstract liberty, like other abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point which ... becomes the criterion of their happiness."

I believe that the rise of the Tea Party movement and the impassioned nature of American politics in 2009-10 is the result of the Obama administration's having, probably inadvertently, intruded into "some favorite points which becomes the criterion of (our) happiness."

That is to say, though the Democrats see their health care proposal as merely another step along a continuum of government action, a strong majority of the American people sense that the "quantity" of the intrusion has changed the "quality" of the intrusion.

What is seen, currently, as a basically private-sector health process with some government intervention has crossed over, in the Democrats' plans, into basically a government system. And, by being seen to have so crossed over, it is an attack on "some sensible object" (i.e. private-sector health care) in which our "Liberty inheres."

Similarly, the shift from less than $500 billion of annual deficit in the last George W. Bush year to a $1.5 trillion deficit in each of the first and second Obama years (and the proposed addition of almost $10 trillion of new public debt over the next decade) has -- by the increase in quantity -- changed the nature of public debt in such a way as to intrude into our sense of our fundamental liberty.

If the Chinese, by selling off our debt notes, can destroy our economy and way of life at a whim -- as the accumulating debt suggests is possible -- then what had been merely irresponsible, self-indulgent deficit spending by both Republicans and Democrats in the recent past has transformed into a fundamental threat to our liberty and our grandchildren's future.

The Obama administration and the Democrats crossed a line and touched a nerve in America's body politic. We sense our fundamental freedom endangered. And the response will be as remorseless as was our revolution against the British. Against all odds, the intrusion on those things around which our "liberty inheres" will be driven from our political midst. (It is not Waterloo, but Yorktown, that is likely to be the terminal point.)

The first hard step in that defense will be the election in November. The second, even harder step will be the rollback of already enacted debt and damage to our freedom. Defining the extent and detail of the rollback must be the agenda for the government's loyal opposition in this year's election. And the things to which we are loyal are our Constitution, our founding principles and the good institutions and social contrivances brought into being by those principles over our providential history.