181–190 of 224 posts
An awful lot of those sayings are extolling "willingness to commit violence" as a virtue. That's not the sort of society I think we should emulate.
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I read the entire series and can't agree with your assessment at all. Yes he was very critical of Spartan society, but I feel he very clearly demonstrates through various sources why he has these views, e.g. highlighting that most of what we hear, see and might admire about Sparta is true only for 3% of the population (spartiates), while the vast majority are lower classes and in particular slaves (helots). And even…
Note that this is from memory but, for example, the author of the linked blog posts makes an outrageous distinction between the free people of "Sparta", which he calls "Spartiates" and all "Spartans" which includes the helots. This is were your expression "3% of the population (spartiates)" comes from. That is an outrageous distinction that is not found in any ancient or modern source. It appears to be something that…
The author addresses this VERY directly and at length in a "Conclusions: Who Matters?" section of one of the posts. For example (though the whole section is worth a read):
> All too often, I see students read the Greek contempt for the poor man, the non-citizen, or the slave with horror but then immediately turn around and replicate those patterns of thought in their own thinking about these societies (well of course the ‘mob’ cannot be trusted to rule – Thucydides and Xenophon said so – to which I am endlessly responding, ‘yes, but should you believe them?‘).
> Indeed, this credulous approach to the source tradition – accepting not only the facts they give, but also their guesses about what is to them the distant past and their judgments about the moral worth of a Sparta that probably never existed – is so common that it has had a name since the 1933, le mirage spartiate, coined by Francois Ollier. Rousseau and Jefferson had an excuse for their gullibility – we do not.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
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I had been thinking about fantasy stories and what the maximumly evil evil empire you could write in a story and still have it somewhat believable. After reading that, I think Sparta is probably it, if not a little beyond it.
SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire, borrowed quite a lot from the Spartans, presumably for this reason. Though they were a lot more competent, which was always one of Sparta's major failings.
I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)
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> Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations What?
Roman slaves at least had a path to freedom. Or a good portion of them did. Many (not majority) became citizens eventually (or their children did) and many in fact became quite prosperous. Their slavery wasn't based on racial status, but on class, and slavery wasn't considered genetically predetermined, but a product of status and conquest. "Graduation" out of slavery was actually possible. American slavery being bui…
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> Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations What?
Roman slaves at least had a path to freedom. Or a good portion of them did. Many (not majority) became citizens eventually (or their children did) and many in fact became quite prosperous. Their slavery wasn't based on racial status, but on class, and slavery wasn't considered genetically predetermined, but a product of status and conquest. "Graduation" out of slavery was actually possible. American slavery being bui…
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What about the people that are violent, not because of mental illness, but because well, they want to cause others pain?
Many of these people are heavily traumatized. Charles Manson for example was mistreated by his mother and in prison. If there were better child protective services and a more humane prison system in place, he might never have done what he did. Most people doing evil things are in part doing these evil things as a result of their circumstances. By changing their circumstances through social programs you reduce violenc…
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Iirc that series addresses this critique in some depth, pointing out that sparta was particularly awful even by the standards of other greek states. Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved. Since sparta was closer to 80% enslaved people, they relied on particularly brutal methods to keep down the regular slave revolts, making…
The idea that "Sparta" was close to "80% enslaved people" is confused and I hold the author of the linked article responsible for not clarifying the confusion. "Sparta" is the name of the principal city of the city-state of Lacedaemon, which comprised the regions of Laconia and Messinia in the Peloponnese. The inhabitants of the city of Sparta are in ancient sources referred to as Lacedaemones ("Λακεδαίμονες") and ar…
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> Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations What?
Roman slaves at least had a path to freedom. Or a good portion of them did. Many (not majority) became citizens eventually (or their children did) and many in fact became quite prosperous. Their slavery wasn't based on racial status, but on class, and slavery wasn't considered genetically predetermined, but a product of status and conquest. "Graduation" out of slavery was actually possible. American slavery being bui…
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Schopenhauer is one of history's biggest assholes, it's like his whole thing. No one liked him even when he was alive.
Not sure where to start with this ludicrous comment. It seems to break many of the In Comments guidelines, e.g. in every one of their first 6 paragraphs. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://genius.com/Arthur-schopenhauer-on-noise-annotated