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Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana Show.
I'm here with Thomas seven seven seven. How are you doing, Thomas,
I'm doing well.
Speaker 2: Thanks for hosting me. There's kind of a lot to
address today, but that's my fault, going to how I
organize my outlines in my mind and things. So I'm
gonna try not to make the skater shot. If it
ends up that way, police, I'm gonna ask I'm gonna
apologize in advance. There's a feting things going on here,
because I want to tie together how kindIn philosophy relates
to the present, and anything that relates to the present
obviously relates to the twentieth century. And we're in the
counter Enlightenment, reached the diseith in terms of these grand
postulates and ethical imperatives that we're presenting a challenge to
what had been the consensus really since the Westphalian peace
to greater less your degree, okay. And these thinkers were
drawing upon the pre Socratics for a reason, okay, particularly
if we're talking about you know, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Chopenhauer, id
include ficta in there two, you know. And today the
kind of re emergence of stuff like virtue ethics that
a lot of the a lot of the Rowan Catholic
comrades will will know what I'm talking about there. All right,
that's very Aristotilian. But Aristotle represents a complicated paradigm. Okay,
but political theory starts with thucidities. Okay, But the way
through Cities is presented, it's it's misunderstood. And this I'm
not I don't just mean by like I mean there's
the basic intellectual dishonesty among ideologues to ascribe to Enlightenment
truisms and things. They kind of deliberately misconstrue stuff because
you know, they practice their own sort of dishonest for
visionism with respect to the intellectual heritage of Western civilization.
But there's military science types as well as a lot
of people who kind of came out of Cold War
academ they just don't understand Through Cities and the way
they present it is this is the first example of
you know, military science and political realism, because through Cities
is saying that, you know, falling back upon you know,
the pre eminence of Athenian virtue and this integral philosophy
that there toford be there afore had been kind of
the the conceptual framing device if any philosophical treatment of
war in peace. He's doing away with that. That's not
what he's doing. What he's saying is that he's saying
Athenian civilization has fallen, and so as Sparta, but obviously
is concerned as Athens, and he's saying it's fallen because
this is what we abandoned. I'd go as far to
say that he blames things like the plague which hit accident,
which hit Athens, concomitant with the Peloponnesian War which went
on for decades, the war I mean, and the catastrophic
defeat at Sicily, the Sicily expedition was was Athens Stalingrad? Okay,
Like history doesn't repeat itself, but there are patterns and
there are data points that we can extrapolate from politics
and political configurations that particularly states at war. Okay, the
Sicilian expedition destroyed Athens and reticent as thucidities is he
clearly thinks that Athens, that's like the wrath of the
gods that like Athens, abandoned virtue and this was their punishment.
They were destroyed like we were destroyed, and Thucydides was spared,
you know, And it's clear to me, I think if
you I'm not like a classics guy, I don't I
don't read Greek or anything. You know, I'm a twentieth
century political theory guy. But it doesn't take like even
a layman like me can discern thucydities is conveying like
I was spared because you know, it was ordained for
me to you know, to to ah tell his story
for posterity, you know, and for the bete of it
of future generations. This is how our civilization fell, That's
what he's saying. Okay. And there's also blind spots in
you know, I the Athenian uh military like Pericles Athens.
You know, there's some confusion, especially among people who aren't
classics types. We're we're not talking about the Athens of
of of the Iliad, We're talking about Pericles Athens. Okay,
that that was probably the peak of civilization, you know,
like that's not some romantic mythos. I mean that I
think that's basically an arguable Okay. These people, it's not
like they didn't have any understanding of military science. And
it's not like they're a understanding of like physical science.
It's not like any understanding of you know the realities
of of uh, you know, cold the cold calculus of
of military tactics and grant strategy. They weren't a bunch
of like, they weren't a much like airy romantics sitting
around saying, oh, we disdain rational understandings of of military processes.
I mean, that's that's preposterous. Okay, if they if they
were like that, they I mean, nobody's like that. Okay,
Like even the Commandchees weren't like that. I'm not I'm
not bring shade the command Cheese, but they were obviously
a comparatively primitive warrior pride, you know, who prized individual
valor over you know, complex infantry maneuvers and things. But
you know, so I want to talk about Thucidities and
going to continue that, you know, through Cidities thinks that
it's through the lens of Sorel Garde Sorell and uh prod.
Whom I'm probably biased, but they're clearly making the case
that Socrates deserve to be executed, and and they're getting
that through through from the Thucidities account, even though Thucidities
doesn't say that. So there's like a lot here, Okay,
this is the fact that moderns don't present throcidities correctly.
There's the fact that the ideological right is very much
drawing upon classical integral ethics to assert its legitimacy and
to present uh, you know, its values in a way
that is not just precedented historically, but that can be
said to represent an ideal it actually was extant and
that was the progenitor of, you know, in the European civilization.
And also this is the starting point of political philosophy,
which to me take it takes precedent because that I mean,
that's that's what my wheelhouses. I'm not really qualified to
talk about other aspects the Cononell tradition. I mean I could,
but I I there's there's better, there's more knowledgeable guys
that can do that. But that's that's a starting point,
you know. And like I said, if if this becomes scattershot,
forgive me the basic the only The Peloponnesian War is
the only book through Syndes ever wrote. And yeah, I mean,
obviously it's a book about warfare and a war and
a political paradigm that was theretofore unprecedented. But what you
can extrapolate from it generally is that, uh, to understand
the nature of a man, you can only understand humans,
you have to understand human societies. And the only way
you can really understand human societies is by studying their
behavior and war. Okay, but that's that's not not not
that's not some callo romanticization of war. But as pro
June pointed out later, as that Surrell which is a
peculiar relevance to us for reasons I just explicated, warfare
is bound up with Man's if we're talking about, you know,
people capable of high culture, warfare is bound up with
Man's concept of beauty. It's bound up with his conceptions
of honor. It's bound up with his understanding or immedial justice.
You know, his his entire kind of the prime symbols
of the culture that he that he that that has
nurtured him, you know, all these things. You know. That's
why I'm always making the point that really the Germans
only contribution into enlightenment thought was Clousowitz, and Klaus was
a great battlefield commander, and there's some truth in what
he wrote, but it's it's abject nonsense that is postulate that,
you know, warfare is this rational process that is just
you know, diplomacy, but by violence like that's that's nonsense.
That's enlightenment nonsense, you know. And it's not an accident
that the German contribution to uh, that rationalist paradigm, we
don't derived from military science. But you know that the
cinity is obviously coming from a totally different place it, uh,
the sinity is really in the opening paragraph of the
Peloponnesian War, he tells his readers that, you know, he
documented it from the beginning. He began commanding forces during
the doomed Sicilian expedition, but he began writing from the
yonset of hostilities because he said that this was this
is a war unlike any that there has ever been. Okay,
he referred to it as the greatest motion that ever
afflicted or ever impacted, like the Peloponneses. Like well, that
translates as in real terms, is the this is the
most significant catalyst or historical variable or like prime constellation
of causes that constantly like a prime move agent or
agent of motion that never occurred at least something of
the Greeks. And you know that was that's that's not
just his reference point, but this was really the center
of this was really the center of civilization you know,
it's not like there was a consolation of civilizations all
over the planet that were you know, on the on
the order of the Greeks. I know people would posit
the Chinese, but they they were very different and obviously
there wasn't contact, you know, in in any meaningful way.
The uh, there's three critical variables in the Peloponnesian War
that for purposes of historicism, and again my and I
stand by this assertion. Thucydides was a proto historicist in
a real sense. You know, that's that that's not just
you know, extrapolating twentieth century conceits to like spangal Arian
paradigms to cities. The only way to understand people like
Spangler is that this is what they were drawing upon.
This is the intellectual heritage, the most significant data points
as we think of them today, or you know, critical
battlefield events which as through Cynity's next bolicates, these battlefield
events were indistinguishable from political ones. I mean, part of
that is a function of the Greek mind, but part
of that is because this war was nakedly political. You know.
That's why, like I compare it to uh, you know,
the conflict cycle of twentieth century Europe. You know, again
not history does not repeat itself, but that should be
familiar to the Spanglarians among the subs. You know, you
can extrapolate paradigms because we're talking about a limited number
of variables and outcomes. Because we're talking about human beings
organized politically at scale, and we're talking about armed conflict.
There's not infinite permutations there. Okay. But the three the
three critical variables we can extrapolate from the cdity's account
of Pelponnesian War is a siege of Milos and the
destruction of the millions as a people, Okay, and the
Melian dialogues, which but the Milion dialogue, which I'm sure
is familiar to people who know the source material. Okay.
That's that's the reason why it looms so large in
the book. It's not just because obviously it's it's it's
incredibly it's incredibly severe, But it it was, it was
a it was a critical event. I'd say that it
uh I, I'd say it's not unlike a lot of
the excess is perpetuated by the Third Reich. Although the
causal uh nexus obviously was distinguishable, but in terms of
the political significance of it and some of the repercussions,
it's that there is there is some common there is
there is some common uh proverbial territory there the to
day after the assault in Sicily, which as I said,
in my opinion, can be thought of as as the
Athenians stealingrad in some ways and concombinant with both of
these things and the entire kind of raison deetra as
the Athenians themselves presented it, what presented the causes of
belie and how they rationalized their actions. This destroyed Athenian
moral legitimacy. They sacrificed their core virtues in an effort
to secure and consolidate power, political credibility, you know, which
is key here. They didn't take to undertake these extreme
measures and kind of openly issue what was purportably their
own core values. And they did this in the Spartan Assembly,
you know, when they were during when Athenians, some of
whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went
before the Spartan Assembly and they were nakedly uh hostile
in their apologia, which was unprecedented, you know. And this
wasn't just a flex to try and deter you know,
Spartan aggression and kind. The conditions were way beyond that.
This represented a real breakdown in the internal constitution of
the Athenian cultural mind. Okay, and again, uh, these dramatic,
these dramatic and uh, almost unfathomably, unfathomably brutal decisions that
they rendered. These weren't difficult decisions in the heat of
military crises. These were very calculated and the end result
wasn't to capture immediate battlefield advantage. It was quite literally
to not sacrifice credibility moving forward. And what was viewed
as is then approximately permanent conflict paradigm, you know, And
the Spartans fell on their own sword and kind. It's
in response to that when the Spartans directly intervened. Finally,
the Spartans allied, they cultivated alliance with Persia, and for
centuries afterwards, speaking of the Spartans was to utter an
obscenity because they allied with, you know, a racial enemy
of all Greeks. You just don't do that, you know.
And here's another parallel, in my opinion, to the European
conflict paradigm of the twentieth century. That's why it's ironic
to me that people act like I mean, I guess
it's because of that silly movie about Thermophyla or whatever,
like people have like Sparta, Is this like incredible utopia?
Like Sparta was a mess, you know, and it uh,
it was authoritarian, it was short sighted, it was anti philosophical,
and you know, they they became traitors of their own kind,
you know, like this this isn't this isn't some This
isn't some model for high culture or or good statesmanship
or anything. But that's that's kind of a digression. But
short story long, and I I don't want to derail
us to a blow by blow of the pelop an
Asian War, but some kind of some kind of context
is appropriate, Like essentially the speaker, the Peloponnesian War basically
began as like a war of proxies, and the the
intrigues around these initial decisions were a murky and I mean,
as is pretty much always the case within complex and
highly scaled conflict paradigms. The Athenians were subjected to an
accusation by Corinth, which was a rival naval power, and
they were an important member that the pelop Anesian Alliance,
which is like the Spartan alliance. Okay, the Corinthians charged
that Athens was assisting colony revote A Corkira in a
sea battle against them. I'm in a been furnishing with
technology and weapons and uh know how in order to
wage the war. The Corinthian diplomats, they're big concerns that
this is inevitbly going to provoke a general war, which
they believed was coming in any event, owing to ah
what amount to do an arms or race throughout the Peloponnesees.
That's why these alliances had emerged to begin with. It's
not exactly clear why the Athenians felt specifically threatened by
corinth but something through Citides explicates and statements by the
Athenian diplomatic cadre in Sparta, as they stated their position
before the Spartan Assembly, was that the only way that
Athens can truly thrive and be secure is if it
has an absolute advantage in the ability to deploy and
apply force. And even if that makes slaves of all
other Greeks. All men covet power because all goods, tangible
and metaphysical derived from power. So that means that fallen,
as the Athenians may seem, this is an inevitability, and
to say otherwise is to lie. And it's better to
admit that you wish to make slaves of other Greeks
than to lie before your equals. That's tatological, and it's
very tortured, and it was very on Greek at the time.
It's a you know, but reading between the lines, and
Thucydides subtly makes this point too, although he doesn't break
his reticent narrative voice. Well, the Athenians are really saying
is that there's some sort of crisis afoot that can't
really be explicated, you know, and wars and rumors of
war are you know, being whispered by the gods and
mental like you know, war arise like the seasons. Something
apocalyptic is before us. And you know, Fortune is a
fickle mistress and she only grants her affections to you know,
the men who are most willing to to dare to
take what they must in order to you know, guarantee
their continued dominance. I I'm say there's some classics types
who would think I'm over simplifying things, and they're probably right.
But again I really stipulated or not any kind of classics,
professor as ah. As things deteriorated in theater and threats
translated into active warring. You know, the Spartans UH, through
secret diplomacy, you know, made it clear to their league
Peloponnesian League partners that they would intervene at the opportune moment,
which ultimately came during the ill fate of assault on Sicily.
But before that, the slaughter of the millions happened. And
for contexts, and we'll move ahead from this historical backdrop
in a minute or background, the Millians occupied an island
in the A, G and C, which was actually neutral.
It was UH the one island uh in UH accounting
for the technology at the time in UH operational striking
distance of the enemy heartland that the Athenians UH didn't
directly controlled. They demanded UH that the Milians UH surrender
or face devastation. And again these were fellow Greeks. The
uh Milians refused to capitulate, probably because they realized that
they were doomed anyway and they want to do, you know,
die as men. The Athenians slaughtered all of them and
sold the women and children into slavery. They shocked the
conscience even of the Spartans, you know, because again, treating
people within the culture that way, we're talking about an
equivalent of the Westphalian consensus. There's certain li mind you
didn't cross, you know, and that Thucydides uh is clear
subtle as it maybe conveyed that this is what doomed
the Athenians as a race, as a as a people,
you know, this is what brought the plague upon them,
literally the plague under their house when they assaulted Sicily.
The the the the inhabitants of Sicily were a warrior race,
you know, they were into European. They weren't Greeks, but
they were very closely related. Syracuse was a the Athene
were very gravely concerned they were going to pivot to Sparta.
They preemptively assaulted. Their assault caused them to pivot towards Sparta.
The Athenians laid siege to Syracuse. This lasted for months.
When the Athenians set about to reconstitute, owing to this
quagmire they'd found themselves in, the Spartans assaulted in a
coordination with the Sicilian natives. They slaughtered the Athenians. They
chased them literally back to the sea. During the Athenian retreat,
the Athenians are trampled by their own men. Athenians began
slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to
the sea. It was it was a massacre that destroyed them.
The which brings us to the case of Socrates, because again,
there's nothing so simple minded as a suggestion from Thucydides
like ironic, subtle, direct or indirect, that Socrates somehow caused
this sort of malaise and moral depravity that led to
the destruction of Athenian civilization like Nor would Pradhun or
Currell suggest that what Socrates was was he was the
standard bearer of a way of being, you know, and
he was a bad man, okay, But more than that,
he was a standard bearer of this way of being
that was nakedly and catastrophically deleterious to the Athenian way
of life. So by executing him, the Athenians were repudiating
their own corruption as a race. Okay. Yes, the trial
of Socrates was beset by bad procedure and probably by
perjured testimony, and Sodrates wasn't all probability not afforded a
proper defense according to the strictures that of justice. Remedial justice,
you know, are universally accepted by men capable of higher reason,
and the Athenians certainly qualified. But that isn't really the point.
The issue with the trial and execution of Socrates isn't,
you know, was Saari's given a fair trial? As if
we're talking about some hapless poor man or something accuse
of an infamous crime. Like the question is that sareis
deserved to die or not? And where you follow that
question essentially tells us where you fall politically. The process
is incidental in this case. The way to understand the
significance of a Socrates and what he was doing violence too,
by way of his intellect and his discourses. The way
to understand what the Cidity is suggesting constituted the Athenian
ethical soul. The way I understand what people like cREL
and Pradune and Schopenhauer and Niche and Heidiger and all
of these counter Enlightenment thinkers like, the essence of what
they're talking about is really ontological. You know. That's why
I like, in the first episode, I think I just
talked about like the values, like this being an issue
of values, not not in the way that's just talking
about cloak we elite in like American media politics or something,
or not not in terms of practical reason a that's
part of it. You know, it's a whole kind of
way of life and way of being and conceptual structuring
of the world, you know, the classical Athenian view. The
common threat that we're talking about is that in this
way of life I just mentioned the household, the police,
communitarian life, integral conceptual paradigms of justice and beauty and
honor both you know, masculine honor as well as you
know what constitutes you know, honor and a woman. This
is all tied together, okay. And the household is basically
the kind of training ground for how to be a
good citizen of the Poulas. But to be clear, the
Athenians had no concept of a state. That's a modern contrivance.
Like the police isn't the state. It's not like the
government of Athens. It's not even the city or the town.
It The only really way to think about it in
modern terms that approaches the conceptual depth of it in
any way is it think it is like the nation
or like the race or the country, if you will. Okay,
and the kind of core tenants of it are instinctive
prejudices and judgments. Okay, you know what is just, what
is beautiful and most significantly like what constant duty like
obviously the Athenians and in the Romans, you know, inherited
this from them. They believe very strongly in a concept
of the pat They're familiars, you know, so, I mean
the father, the patriarch is the absolute lord of the household.
But that doesn't give him carte blange to bully his
wife or treat his kids like their slaves or something.
You know, he has a he has a reciprocal duty
to his wife and children, just as they have a
duty to obey him, you know. And from there, you know,
men and women and and the and the children, and
that of their progeny. You know, they they learn how
to they learn what their duties are and what constitutes
a noble life as as part of the paulas you know,
this stuff is instinctive, This stuff is transcendent. These things
are can be recognized by a resort to practical reason.
You know, they're not the it's not the it's not
the result of some elaborate discourse, and this isn't something
we debate about. But we don't debate about whether, you know,
a patriarch would be happier, like you know, running around
with his friends and hunting pigs, or you know, having
a having a bunch of different women that he gets
pregnant and he treats like a harem. You know, we
don't argue about like whether women would be happier, you know,
like not not being subjected to the authority of the household,
because that's against reason and contradicting things derived from reason.
It does violence to the concept of the good and
and and cuts us off from it. Okay, so, oh,
anybody who attacks these institutions is basically attacking the good,
and that means that he's a man who either can't
live among civilized people because he's a miscreant and he's
just trying to cause difficulties, or you know, he's something
of a degenerate personality who recognizes certain frailties in the
constitution of the police at the epoch in which he lives,
and he's decided to exploit those things owing to his
need to be a contrarian, or maybe it's stordained by
God that he do this, but that doesn't have any
bearing on whether or not he should be executed as
a remedial measure because the honor of the polists, you know.
And this because undoubtedly the question will be raised. And
also this is part of the purpose of this series.
What relevance is, it's head of the present day. I
just told you people like Sorel were the standard bearers
of this notion, you know, and trod Hun interestingly, he
coined the term anarchism, and he was the first political
theorist to call himself an anarchist. And he was a socialist,
but he held out what I just described as the ideal,
you know, And this is important. This is a bit
of a digression. I mean, we're gonna get to socialism
as an ethical postulate later in this series. But this
idea that socialism is axiomatically some sort of paradigm of
class warfare or you know, materialist reductionism, or that it
or that it's woke like that, that's not the case
at all. The reason why it became so inextricably bound
up with the continental political consciousness is because you know,
the alienation really the post Wasphalian order. I mean it
reached an intensity during the Second Industrial Age, obviously where
class war became a reality. But the enterprise was the
philosophical and political enterprise was to repair the social fabric
that have been torn asunder by the modern age. And
most most modern continental philosophers had considered, you know, the
kind of high medieval era to be the ideal. But
these these radical socialists and anarchists, these guys like Currell,
these guys like Werner, Sombart, these guys like Pradune. They
were saying no, no, no, no, no, it's Athens. And the
trial of Socrates was an example of you know, essential
them to violence. And that's critical. You know, Marx didn't
invent socialism. Marx and Lenin were social or Marx and
Engels rather forgive them, forgive me Marx and Engels were socialist,
because that was really the only animating paradigm that had
any momentum. You know, like, don't get me wrong, like
dos capital it's incredibly uh internally consistent, but a lot
of it is derivative. And I mean, any any playable
theory that is anything other than you know, a pure
thought experiment, the practice of it as postulated is going
to be like derivative, okay, because it's gonna partake on
the zeitgeist and it's gonna build on a discursive foundation.
You know. And I've noticed, even among educated people in America,
there's this idea that there was no concept of state socialism.
But then Marx and Engels wrote a book. I mean,
I'm I'm being liberally obtuse for the sake of brevity,
but you know, I think everybody understand what I mean.
And I'm not sitting here like stumming for socialism. I'm
I'm very much I'm very much an American, and I'm
kind of reddeck Is, okay, I mean kidding aside. You know,
I'm the kind of person Russell Kirk was talking about,
you know, in Roots of American Order. You know, I'm
the last person who's gonna sit here and say that,
you know, yeah, we we really need to we we
really need to abide state socialism to write the ship.
You know, let me go vote for Bernie fucking Sanders.
I mean, anybody reads my content knows that's not the
way I think. But the European situation is very very different,
you know. And even if it wasn't, you know, these
these thinkers that we're talking about who represented the counter
Enlightenment in the twentieth century, you know, which I think
is the twentieth century was the Enlightenment enterprise at its zenith,
at reaching its conclusion. That's why, you know, the end
of history became the rallying cry both of of you know,
angle American progressives and of and of communists, you know,
because like their goal is to end history, and the
reaction and the revolt against that wasn't some sort of
reactionary conservatism that was dead. It was people like Currel,
you know. And and the progeny of Cerell was Mussolini
and Adolf Hitler and and and the Falange and the
Iron Guard. The Iron Guard is more complicated. But these
these these these thinkers and these partisans who whose conceptual
horizon derived from these thinkers. They wanted they wanted to
create an alternative modernity, you know, not they didn't. They
didn't want to turn the clock back to to you know,
seventeen hundred or something. I mean, there were people like that,
but they but they were irrelevant by nineteen eighteen. You
know that that tendency died on Europe's battlefields with you know,
ten million, ten million European youths, you know, and that's important,
you know, because like I said, I REALI wasn't hopping
around a lot, but uh, it's essential to tie this
stuff together. And if we don't, kind of as we
go along and it just becomes so much trivia or
or some or you know, maybe an interesting discussion, but
you know, nevertheless that we're notwithstanding you know, the the
fascinations of it. It's it's just a discussion about, you know,
what people thought in some ancient, dead civilization. But moving on,
key to this kind of paradigm of Athenian virtue was
a certain anti intellectualism. Now what we mean by that
is just that, you know, we don't mean some hostility
to learning about the world or some hostility to a
moral education, but intellectualism is a discreete tendency that again
avails you know, the subject matter of practical reason to
some punitive cross examination. You know that it can't withstand
owing to the fact that you know, these things are
pre rational judgments. And the rallying cry, particularly of social
democrats and Weimar, was you know, fascists or pigs, and
they're they're anti intellectual, you know, horror of horrors. They
burned books, and that's very very specious, and as presented,
especially in the present, it's intellectually dishonest. But it's not
entirely incorrect. You know. That's not to say that, uh,
that's not to say that people should embrace some sort
of Jacobinism of the right, or is it to say
again that you know, Pericles Athens was some kind of
combination of of a weight Rome and and their Spartan
racial cousins. You know. Obviously, like the strength of Athens
was that it was a very complete cultural form, and
they had a remarkably vigorous philosophical heritage. You know. But
this tendency to intellectualize things, as a matter of course,
is as bad as it's sentimentalizing them. You know, both
do violence to the practical reason, you know, and reason
logos isn't isn't rationality or rationalism in some ways it's
the opposite of that. That doesn't mean it's irrational, but rationalism, okay,
and the way that we think of it, and this
plays under the idea of justice as well, and this
is critical justice and the classical conception. It's not it
doesn't derive from social conditions or like material circumstances. It's
not an ideology or either it's not, it's not some
mechanism of social planning. You know. In fact, this is
a concept that Nietzsche came back to a lot, is
that you can't put justice in the hands of some
bureaucracy because that's crude, that's anti human. But also a
state apparatus isn't capable of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanguinary.
You know, if somebody kills your brother or your comrade,
you don't have you don't you don't have some judge
who doesn't know you, doesn't know your family, doesn't know
your comrade, doesn't know your enemies may not even speak
your language in a real sense, sometimes in a literal
sense anymore, you know, because that's not a subject matter
he can apprehend. And that's also not what justice is.
You know, we don't we don't. We don't execute men
because according to according to some modeling paradigm where we
develop the right inputs, you know, if you execute men,
then that people are such and such percentage less likely
to do bad things. That's not what justice is. That's
some sort of social planning that partakes of some like
loose concept of remedial measures for the sake of, you know,
sustaining some sort of base stability in a highly scaled
political order, where the moral consensus is abstracted from concrete things,
either owing to historical accident or ideological imperative, or the
sheer scale of government and the primet of it's authority,
or some conspiracy evolve three. But it's not it's not
justice in the way that it's traditionally thought of. Like
what the what the Athenians would have thought of as
sort of a model of criminal justice would be the
kind of stuff that vigilantes do in Northern Ireland, or
that they did in the American South, or that you
know in in medieval Europe or uh Or or or
early show A Japan. You know, the kind of privilege
that nobleman had to demand satisfaction from somebody who offends
against him or his family or you know, the order
that he belongs to. That's a totally different thing for
from you know, punishing a helot to who steals something,
or you know, healing somebody in the court doesn't pay
their taxes or you know, in the case of something
that's actuematically literally sanguinary, you know, again, like it can't
be said to be justice if there's some impersonal bureacracy,
the purpose of which is that it's blind to the circumstances,
you know, devising some sort of remedial measure to assuage
the likelihood of violent retribution outside of a legal code
that itself is devised to guarantee predictability of outcomes, you know,
And they're a buddle of that would be like, well,
look at somebody like King David. Okay, but King David
was just that he was a king, and he was
a king of a discreet population of people who was
bound to by things like tribal allegiance. And that's also
like the ultimate and noblest oblige, you know. So it's
not it's not actually the rebuttal if anything, it substantiates
the claim about you know, classical uh conceptions of justice.
I only got we're like four minutes of the hour, man,
Like I'm gonna stop now because I get I've got
to get in the trialiscratehes itself, and that's gonna take
a long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah sounds good. Sounds good. Tell people now where they
can they can find you since you've been banished off
of X for the twenty fifth time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, X is shitty. Man. Then it's stupid and.
Speaker 1: It's it's not even what I mean, it's slop. Now,
it's a bunch of to make money, you know, by
posting questions, Oh what do you think about? What do
you think about the picture of this thing and everything,
and they're just trying to make money with engagement and
it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 2: No, so we're gonna have and moving forward. I don't
I want to go off on a big tangent about
the current situation with censorship and things, but I it's
not it's not a good platform aside from the I mean,
they always terrorize me, but on this, aside from notwithstanding that,
but the best place to find me my my home
online is substack, which I think substack really is a
good platform. I actually don't ever violate to os any
of these platforms, So I mean it's not but they
never threatened me or try and take away my ability
to reach you know, my friends and stuff on substick.
But that that's where my that's where a lot of
my longer form stuff is. That's what the podcast is.
That's where like all kinds of ship is. And I
got pretty active, so it's real Thomas seven seven seven
at subsect dot com. I set up a Discord server,
and the fellas and and females they they've made it
like really pop. So that's that's going really well. I mean,
like I said, not because I'm mean, it's because of
the people who joined it. It's behind a paywall by necessity,
otherwise we would have been gone already. The cheapest you
can say to that is two ninety nine a month. Okay,
so I said it to ninety nine a month. I'm
sorry about that. I'm not trying to like make money
off people, and if I was, I wouldn't be doing
it a time. But the discord server, you can you
can get a link on the substack and uh we
got that's been very active. I'm gonna start this past week.
I had some of our comrades in town and I
was just very busy. But this week I'm gonna I'm
gonna I'm gonna get more active im discord and start
experimenting with live streams and stuff. But we got a
t gram channel. It's Thomas Graham seven seven seven number
seven h A. S. Graham seven seven seven. You're gonna
get the link there through the substick as well, but
it's it's easy to find if you just search for it.
I'm also on Instagram, you know. With that, that's I'm
changing by necessity kind of the way i can figure
my content. So just like, bear with me, but you'll
always be able to find me on substack. I do
have a website, but it needs to be updated and
I'm I'm gonna try and get that done after I
get back from OGC in make. But yeah, that's that's
where you can find me, all.
Speaker 1: Right, Thomas, I can say for myself, and I'm sure
I speak for everyone listening. Can't wait till part three.
Speaker 2: Thank you, that's great. Thank you,