Politics

[lotesse]

So I missed the debate. Of course, this could have something to do with the fact that I am a cloistered college student with no tv and that I spent all night last night in class discussing whether Socrates is Plato or himself, and if we should punish people regardless of who the hell the philosophers are.

And you know what? I can't really bring myself to care. Because I know what happened. Bush was stupid. Kerry was uninspiring. In fact, the only reason I've got right now for paying attention to the electoral politics in any way is to give myself conversational ammunition, more ways to convert the Republicans, more ways to defend the Democratic candidate that even I don't like.

I'm voting for Kerry, becasue there's nothing else to do. I wouldn't vote for Bush if he was suddenly revealed to be a slasher poly swinger hippie, and Nader is, for the moment at least, too much of a lost cause for me to throw my vote like that. So it's Kerry. But I still don't like the guy. Kerry is like a vacuum, man. There's just not that much there.

So maybe I download the debates from NPR. But it's much more likely that I'll spend my evening getting drunk and talking about Socrates. At least he was smart.

Comments

[hyel.livejournal.com]

How does the identity of philosophers relate to punishment? Or did the conversation just amble that way through Socrates's (claimed) execution?

[lotesse]

No, we were examining the dialogue with Gorgias, which talks for a bit about doing just, and basically says that if a man should be punished, then to punish him is to do a just thing and to be punished is a just thing, adn that any man who does not live justly is unhappy. A just slave is happier than a wicked tyrant. So we talked about that, and then a few people made some general complaints about the way Plato was running the dialogues. Don't see what's wrong with them, myself.

[hyel.livejournal.com]

I couldn't say, never having read the dialogues as Plato wrote them; I only heard of them second-hand.

But the Greek philosophers seem to have been a bit too simple. Annoying, but then they didn't have as much to build their philosophies on.