The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1204: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 2 - Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

62 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. He speaks about Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, and begins a conversation about the death of Socrates and its current relevance.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana show. I'm here with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm knowing well. Thanks for hosting me. There's kind of a lot to address today. Part of that's my fault,

knowing to how I organized my outlines in my mind and things. So I'm going to try not to make this scatter shot. If it ends up that way, please, I'm going to ask, I'm going to apologize in advance. There's a few other things going on here because I want to tie together how kind of philosophy relates to the,

present and anything that relates to the present obviously relates to the 20th century and we're in the counter enlightenment reached a dezenith in terms of these grand postulates and ethical imperatives that were presenting a challenge to what had been the census really since the Westphalian peace to a greater lesser degree okay and these thinkers were drawing upon the pre-Socratics for a reason okay particularly if we're talking about you know Nietzsche Heger Schopenhauer I think we'd fit in there too you know and today the kind of reemergence of stuff like

virtue ethics that a lot of the a lot of the Cat Roman Catholic like comrades will know what I'm talking about there. All right, that's really Aristotelian, but Aristotle represents a complicated, um, paradigm, okay? But political theory starts with Ducydides, okay? But the way Thucydides is presented,

it's misunderstood. And I'm not, I don't just mean by like, I mean, there's a basic intellectual dishonesty among, ideologues who ascribed to enlightenment truisms and things they kind of deliberately misconstrued stuff because you know they they practice their own sort of dishonest revisionism 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 academic they just don't understand through cities and the way they presented is this is the first example of you know military science and political realism

because Thucydides is saying that you know falling back upon you know the preeminence of Athenian virtue and this integral philosophy that there before had been kind of the framing the conceptual framing device of any philosophical treatment, a war and 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 is Sparta, but obviously he's concerned as Athens. And he's saying it's fallen because this is what we abandoned. I go as far to say that he blames things like the plague, 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 Athens-Stalinbred, 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, particularly states at war. Okay, the Sicilian expedition destroyed Athens, and reticent as Thucydides is,

he clearly thinks that Athens, that's like the wrath of the gods. They're 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 read Greek or anything. You know, I'm a 20th century political theory guy. But it doesn't take, like even a layman like me can discern Ducydides is conveying, like I was spared because

you know, it was ordained for me to you know, to tell his story for posterity you know, and for the benefit 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 military like Pericles Athens

you know there's some confusion especially among people who aren't classics types we're not talking about the Athens of the Iliad we're talking about Pericles Evans okay 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 it's not like they didn't have understanding of like physical science it's not like they didn't have any understanding

of you know the realities of of uh you know cold the cold calculus of of military tactics and grand strategy there weren't a bunch of like they weren't a bunch of like airy romantics sitting around saying, oh, we disdain rational understandings of military processes.

I mean, that's preposterous. Okay, if they were like that, they, I mean, nobody's like that. Okay, like even the Comanches weren't like that. I'm not the wrong shade of the Comanches, but they were obviously a comparatively primitive warrior tribe, you know, who prized individual valor over, you know, complex, infantry maneuvers and things. But, you know, so I want to talk about Thucydides and going to continue that. You know, Thucydides thinks that it's, through the lens of Sorrell, Dorel, and Pratun, I'm probably biased,

but they're clearly making the case that Socrates deserved to be executed. And they're getting that through from Thucydides account, even though Thucydides doesn't say that. So there's like a lot here, okay? There's the fact that moderns don't present Thucydides correctly. There's the fact that the ideological right is very much drawing upon classical, upon classical, integral ethics to assert its legitimacy. and to present, 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,

Indo-European civilization. And also, this is the starting point of political philosophy, which to me, it takes preceding. because that I mean that's that's what my wheelhouse is I'm not really qualified to talk about um other aspects of the continental tradition I mean I could but I I there's better there's more knowledgeable guys that could do that um but that's that's a stirring point um you know and like I said if this becomes scattershot forgive me um The basic, the only, the Peloponnesian War is the only book Thucydides ever wrote.

And yeah, I mean, obviously it's a book about warfare and a war and a political paradigm. That was there before unprecedented. But what you can extrapolate from it generally is that, uh, to understand the nature of man, you have to understand human societies. And the only way you can really understand human societies is by studying their behavior at war. Okay. That's not some callow romanticization of war.

But as Prothun pointed out later, as it's Sorrell, which is a peculiar relevance to us for reasons I just explicated, warfare is bound up with man's if we're talking about people capable of high culture but warfare is bound up with man's concept of beauty it's found

up with his conceptions of honor it's bound up with his understanding remedial justice his entire kind of the prime symbols of the culture that he that he that has nurtured him

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terms apply for more infoes he's skydada e slash speeds you know that's why i'm always making the point that really the the the germans only contribution to enlightenment thought was klausowitz and klausowitz was a great battlefield commander and there's some truth in what he wrote but it's it's abject nonsense that his postulate that you know warfare is this rational process that is just you know diplomacy but by violence like that's that's That's nonsense. That's enlightenment nonsense. And it's not an accident that the German contribution to that rationalist paradigm, we don't derive from military science.

But, you know, that Dyscities is obviously coming from a totally different place. that the city 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 onset of hostilities

because he said that this was this is a war unlike any that there has ever been okay um he referred to it as the greatest emotion that ever afflicted or ever impacted like the peloponesis like what that translates as in real terms is the this is the most significant catalyst or historical um variable or like prime constellation of causes that constituted like a prime move on agent or agent of motion that never occurred

at least some of the Greeks and you know that was that's not just a 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 any meaningful way. The, there was 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-historist and a real sense you know that's that's not just you know extrapolating 20th century conceits to like Spanglerian paradigms to Thucydides. They only would understand people like

Spangler is that this is what they were drawing upon this is the intellectual heritage um the most significant data points as we'd think of them today or you know

critical battlefield events which as Thucydides explocates 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. That's why like I compare it to, you know, the conflict cycle of 20th century Europe. You know, again, history does not repeat itself, but it should be familiar to the Spanglerians 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 critical variables we can extrapolate from Cucydides' kind of Peloponnesian War is the siege of Millos and the destruction of the millions as a people. okay and um the melian dialogues with the melian dialogue which i'm sure is familiar to people who know the source material

okay that's that's the reason why it loom is so large in the bug it's not just because obviously it's it's it's incredibly um it's incredibly severe but it it was it was a it was a critical event i'd say that it uh I'd say it's not unlike a lot of the excesses perpetuated by the Third Reich. Although the causal nexus, obviously, was distinguishable. But in terms of the political significance of it and some of the repercussions, there is some common proverbial. There was some common proverbial territory there. The disaster's assault on Sicily, which as I said, in my opinion, can be thought of as the Athenian Stalingrad in some ways.

And concomitant with both of these things and the entire kind of gray zone detra as the Athenians themselves presented it, what presented the cause of ability 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, which is key here. They didn't undertake these extreme measures and kind of openly eschew what was purportedly their own core values. And they did this in the Spartan assembly.

You know, when they were during, when, when Athenians, some of whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went before the Spartan assembly, and they were nakedly hostile in their, Apologia, which was impressive in it. 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, these dramatic, these dramatic and, uh, these dramatic and, uh, almost 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 a then, approximately permanent conflict paradigm, you know, and the Spartans fell on their own sword in kind. It was in response to that when the Spartans directly intervened, finally, the Spartans

allied, they cultivated an 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 20th 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 Thermopylae or whatever. Like people have like Sparta is this, like, incredible utopia. like sparta was a mess you know it it uh it was authoritarian it was short-sighted it was anti-philosophical and um you know they they became traders to their own kind you know like this this isn't

this isn't some this isn't some model for high culture or for good uh statesmanship or anything That's kind of a digression. But short story long, and I don't want to derail us with a blow-by-blow of the Peloponnesian War, but some kind of context is appropriate. Like, essentially, the Peloponnesian War basically began as, like, a war of proxies. And the intrigues around these. initial decisions were 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. and the Peloponnesian alliance, which was like the Spartan alliance. Okay. The Corinthians charged that Athens was assisting a colony and revolt, Corcorah in a sea battle against them. I mean, I've been furnishing him with technology and weapons and know-how in order to wage the war. air grid operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest we're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans our consultation closes on the 25th of november have your say online or in person so together we can create a more reliable sustainable electricity supply for your community find out more at airgrid.i.4th North West. Employers, did you know you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1500 Euro and gift cards annually completely tax-free and even better.

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The Corinthian diplomats, their big concerns that this is inevitably going to provoke a general war, which they believed was coming in any event, owing to what amounted to an arms or ace, throughout the Peloponesis. 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 Thucydides explocates 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 derive 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 tautological and it's very tortured and it was very on Greek at the time. You know, but reading between the lines and

Thucydides subtly makes this point too, although he doesn't break his reticent narrative voice. What 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, you know, being whispered by the gods and men alike. 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'm sure there's some classics types who would think I'm over simplifying things and they're probably right. But again, I already stipulated or not any kind of classics professor. As things deteriorated in theater and threats translated into active warning, you know the Spartans 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-fated assault on Sicily but before that the slaughter of the Millions happened and for context and we'll move ahead from this historical backdrop in a minute or background the Millions

occupied an island in the Aegean Sea which was actually neutral it was the one island in accounting for the technology of the time, in operational striking distance of the enemy heartland that the Athenians didn't directly control.

They demanded that the Malians surrender or face devastation. and again these were fellow Greeks the Malians refused to capitulate probably because they realized

that they were doomed anyway and they wanted to 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 lines you didn't cross

you know and that lucidies is clear subtle as it may be conveyed that this is what doomed the Athenians as a race, as a people.

You know, this is what brought the plague upon them, literally, the plague under their house. When they assaulted Sicily, the inhabitants of Sicily were a warrior race. You know, they were Indo-European. They weren't Greeks, but they were. were very closely related. Syracuse was a a the Athenians were

very gravely concerned they were going to pivot to Sparta. They preemptively assaulted their assault cause and 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 coordination with the Sicilian natives they slaughtered the Athenians they chased them literally back to the sea

during the Athenian retreats the Athenians were trampled by their own men. Athenians began slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to the sea. It was a massacre that destroyed them. 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 Prudorun or Sorrel 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 yes the trial of Socrates was beset by

bad procedure and probably by perjured testimony and Sadrathis was in all probability not afforded a proper defense according to the strictures of justice, remedial justice,

that are universally accepted by men capable of a higher reason. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th. 5th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.n. Northwest. Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards

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And watch unmissable shows like all her fault on Sky. These nice people killing you, John. And Ballad of a Small Player starring Colin Farrell on Netflix. I've made some mistakes. Right, who hasn't? Get one gig Sky broadband, essential TV and Netflix, all for just 44 euro a month for 12 months. Our lowest ever price.

Availability subject location, new customers only, 12 month minimum terms, standard pricing thereafter, TV and broadband sold separately. Terms apply for more info as sky.a slash beads. 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 Socrates given a fair trial,

as if we're talking about some hapless poor man or something accused of an infamous crime. The question is, did Socrates deserve to die or not? And were you falling that question essentially tells us where you fall poetically. The process is incidental

in this case. The way to understand the significance of Socrates and what he was doing violence to, by way of his intellect and his discourses. The way to understand what Thucydides was suggesting constituted the Athenian ethical soul. The way to understand what people like Sorrell and Pradun

and Schopenhauer and Nisha and Heidegger and all of these counter-enlightenment thinkers, like the essence of what they're talking about is really ontological. You know, that's why, like, in the first episode, I think I just talked about, like, values, like this being an issue of values, not in the way that's talking about colloquially in, like, American media politics or something, or not in terms of practical reason, and all that's part of it. You know, it's a whole kind of way of,

life and a way of being and conceptual structuring of the world. You know, the classical Athenian view, the common thread we're talking about is that in this way of life, I just mentioned, the household, the Paulus, communityitarian 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 Paulus. But to be clear,

the Athenians had no concept of a state. That's a modern contrivance. Like, the Paulus 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 to think of it as, like, the nation. or like the race or the country, if you will, okay?

And the kind of core tenets of it are instinctive prejudices and judgments, okay? You know, what is just, what is beautiful, and most significantly, like, what constitutes duty? like obviously um the athenians and the romans you know inherited this from them they believe very strongly in a concept of the path they were familias you know so i mean the father the patriarch is the absolute lord of the household but that doesn't give him per blanche to bully his wife or treat his kids like they're slaves or something you know um he has a he has a reciprocal to his wife and children and just as they have a duty to obey him you know and from

there you know men and women and the and the children and that other progeny you know they learn how to they learn what their duties are and what constitutes a noble life as as part of the Paulus you know this stuff is instinctive this stuff is transcendent these things are can be recognized by 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 bunch of different women that he gets pregnant and he treats like a herald. You know, we don't argue about like whether women would be happier, you know, like 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 cuts us off from it. Okay, so 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 frail. in the Constitution of the Pallas at the epoch in which he lives and he's decided to exploit those things owingtoes need to be a contrarian or maybe it's ordained 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 Paulus demands it.

You know, and this, because undoubtedly the question will be raised, and also this is part of the purpose of this series, what relevance does this have of the President's Day? I just told you. People like Sorrell were the standard bearers of this notion, you know, and Prud 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 going to 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'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 was Phelian 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 had been torn asunder by the modern age. And most modern continental philosophers had considered, you know, the kind of high medieval era to be the ideal. But these radical socialists and anarchists, these guys like Sorrell, these guys like Werner Sombart, these guys like Trin, they were saying, no, no, no, no, no, it's Athens. and the trial of Socrates was an example of, you know, essential redemptive 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,

Mars 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, Das Kapital, it's incredibly internally consistent. But a lot of it is derivative. And I mean, any any pliable theory that is anything other than, you know, a pure thought experiment, the praxis

of it as postulated is going to be like derivative, okay, because it's going to partake on the zeitgeist and it's going to 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 being globally obtuse for the sake of brevity, but, you know, I think everybody understands what I mean. And I'm not sitting here like stumbling for socialism. I'm very much, I'm very much an American and I'm kind of redneckish, 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 going to sit here and say that, you know, yeah, 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 were talking about who represented um the counter enlightenment in the 20th century you know which i think is the 20th century was the enlightenment enterprise um at it zenith at reaching its conclusion that's why you know the end of history because became the rally and cried both of, you know, Angler American progressives and of communists, you know, because like their goal was 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 Sorrell, you know, and the progeny of Sorrel was, Mussolini and Edolf Hitler and and the flange and the Iron Guard the Iron Guard is more complicated but

these thinkers and these partisans who whose conceptual horizon derived from these thinkers they wanted to create an alternative modernity you know not um they didn't want to turn the clock back to to you know 1700 or something

I mean there were people like that but they but they were irrelevant in by 1918 you know that that tenancy died um on Europe's battlefields with you know 10 million um 10 million um European youths, you know. And that's important, you know, because like I said, I realize I'm hopping around a lot, but it's essential to tie this stuff together. And if we don't, kind of as we go along, it just becomes so much trivia or some, or, you know,

maybe an interesting discussion, but, you know, nevertheless, we're notwithstanding, you know, the fascinations of it, it's, it's just a discussion about, you know, what people thought and some ancient dead civilization but um moving on key to uh this kind of paradigm of athenian virtue um was a certain anti-intellectualism now what we mean by that is just that you know um we don't mean some hostility to to learning about the world or some hostility to a moral education um but intellectualism is a discreet tendency that again avails

you know the subject matter of practical reason to some punitive cross-examination you know um that it can't withstand owing to the fact that you know these things are pre-rational judgments um And the rallying cry, particularly of Social Democrats in Weimar, was, you know, fascists are pigs and they're anti-intellectual. You know, horror of horrors, they burn books. And that's very, very specious. and as presented, especially in the present,

it's intellectually dishonest, but it's not entirely incorrect. That's not to say that that's not to say that people should embrace some sort of Jacobism of the right, nor is it to say again that, you know, Pericles Athens was some kind of combination

of elite 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 intellectual things as a matter of course is as bad as it's sentimentalizing them you know both through violence to the practical reason you know and a reason Logos isn't rationality or rationalism in some ways it's the opposite of that doesn't mean it's irrational but rationalism okay And the way that we think of it.

And this plays into 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 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 is incapable of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanguinary. You know, if somebody kills your brother or your comrade, 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 execute men because according to, according to some modeling of paradigm where we develop the right inputs, you know, if you execute men, then the 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 premise of its authority or some conspiracy of all three but it's not

justice in the way that it's traditionally thought of like 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 medieval Europe or early short 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. there's a totally even thing from from you know punishing a a healer

to who steals something or you know healing somebody into court doesn't pay their taxes or you know in the case of something

that's axiomatically literally sanguinary you know again like it can't be said to be justice if there's some

impersonal bureaucracy 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 legal code that itself is devised to guarantee predictability of outcomes. You know, and the rebuttal 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 discrete population of people who he 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 a rebuttal if anything it substantiates a claim about

you know classical conceptions of justice I've only got we're like four minutes the hour man I'm going to stop now because I get I was going to get into

the trial of socrates itself and that's going to a long time. 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 25th time.

Yeah. X is shitty, man, and it's stupid. And I... It's not even... I mean, it's slop now. It's a bunch of people trying 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 no so we're going to have and moving forward uh i don't i want to go off on a big tangent about the current situation with censorship and things but um i it's not it's not a good platform aside from i mean they always terrorize me but i'm this aside from notwithstanding that um 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 TOS any of these

platforms. So, I mean, it's not, but they never threaten me or try and take away my ability to reach, you know, my friends and stuff on substack. But that's where my, that's where a lot of my longer form stuff is.

That's where the podcast is. That's where, like, all kinds of shit is. And we got a pretty active So it's real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I set up a Discord server, and the fellas and females, they've made it, like, really pop. So that's going really well. I mean, like I said, not because of me, 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 set it at is $2.99 a month. Okay. at $2.99 a month. I'm sorry about that. I'm not trying to make money off people. And if I was, I wouldn't be doing it $2.99 at a time. But the Discord server, you can get a link on the substack. And we got, that's been very active. I'm going to start, this past week, I had some of our comrades in town, and I was just really busy. But this week, I'm going to, I'm going to get more active on Discord and start

experimenting with live streams and stuff. But we got a T-Gram channel. Thomas Graham 7777. Number 7, HMAS Graham, 777. You can get the link there

through the substack as well, but it's easy to find if you just search for it. I'm also on Instagram, you know, but that that's I'm 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. I'm going to try and get that done after I get back from OGC and me. But yeah, that's where you can find me. All right, Thomas, I can say for myself, and I'm sure I speak for everyone listening. Can't wait until part three. Thank you.

That's great. Thank you.