The Last Post Game!!!!

[Sibling DavidH]

I learned a lot from the chicken paper but I still don't get this wizzo-wobbulist stuff.
Last post

[Aggie]

The short and dirty version: all these philosophies are essentially anti-body and elitist (sex is bad, let there be strict hierarchies, higher rank = higher moral value).

Have to leave now, more detailed rant to-morrow if desired.

Please rant away, when time allows.

I confess mainly ignorance with respect to stoicism and gnosticism (have looked a bit at Plotinus' version of neoplatonism thanks to Zono), but with respect to mystic traditions, anti-sex and anti-body themes are common.  However, these are usually presented in the context of mystical practice, for mystics, and IMHO should never be scaled up to society in general (in most mystic traditions, society-in-general is likewise something to be abandoned).  I read it as distractions which must be removed in order to make individual progress, and not as "sex is bad / the body is dirty, m'kay?" Puritanical body-horror that must be imposed on the rest of the world.

I agree that hierarchies in philosophical and religious thought are all too common, elitist and odious.

Last _{chicken, chicken chicken chicken} Post

[youtube=425,350]Ild0oMbtewQ[/youtube]

[Pachyderm]

OOOooo, lookit that!

*points out window*

sneaks off with the Last Post...

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Both eastern and western traditions make a lot of ruckus about sex, mainly because natural pulsions can easily transform in attachment and that is supposed to prevent transcendence or enlightenment. The problem is usually with patriarch societies which equate the attachment to sex to the evil of women: ie, I can't control myself therefore women are witches, etc, etc.

Platonism, gnosticism, and neo-platonism conceptually use things like the allegory of the cave to enunciate an intuitive ethos that only the initiated can comprehend therefore making it elitist, but those problems don't make some of the concepts inherently invalid or without merit.

The fact that those philosophies have been used to discriminate against women and the poor doesn't make them inherently evil (at least from my POV); in an analog way you could say that the sermon of the mount lays down some revolutionary concepts for the time but it's mainly used to motivate the equivalent of western dalits in a quest for religious and political domination. That doesn't make it inherently evil even if death and destruction followed it for more than fifteen hundred years.

Last _{oops, wordy, sorry} Post

[Sibling DavidH]

Yes, but you have to concentrate if you want to keep it.

Last _gottim! post.

[Aggie]

Wot Zono said ^^  


_{does giving up sex help you keep the} Last Post _?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I'll keep having both.

Last _{for as long as I can} Post

[Aggie]

I'm currently cultivating non-attachment to both, so you can take the

Last Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I don't know if pity you or congratulate you , but I will definitively take the

Last Post

[Aggie]

You can congratulate me if you like, there's no point taking pity on a voluntary action.


Last _{perhaps spare a little pity for my SO, patient soul that she is} Post

[Swatopluk]

I'd be willing to part with the Last Post in exchange for some tolerable sex.
---

One of the few positive things I can say about Platon is that he (in high contrast to Athenian society) proposed what is essentially equal rights for women in his 'ideal' state. In his POLITEIA (his main work on state philosophy) he says that women are only inferior with regard to bodily strength and thus, at least in the upper 'guardian' class, there was no reason to treat them different from men.
Otherwise the 'ideal state' is, as a professor of mine used to say, a well-managed Zuchthaus. Platon went so far as banning most (musical) keys because he considered them to be character-deforming. All instruments able to play those keys would aso be banned.
Most Greek philosophers hated democracy but Platon probably took it furthest.
Ironically when he tried to persuade the tyrant of Syracuse to erect the ideal state starting with selling critical intellectuals into slavery, it was him that got sold. And to his ultimate embarassment he was bought and set free by the Athenians he so despised

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[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

According to that, plus the legend of Socrates' demise you would think he failed miserably with his best pupil...

Last _{democracy? I don't want no stinkin' democracy!} Post

[Swatopluk]

We actually know very little about the 'real' Socrates. Platon uses him simply as a proxy (the APOLOGIA is probably closest to the 'real' person). Xenophon's writings give quite a different picture (he is not necessarily more reliable though). Aristoteles iirc says exactly nothing. And we have iirc nothing from Arsitoteles directly, just the elaborate notes by students that attended his lectures.

Last ^{did he have a teaching licence an did the students violate copyright?} Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

It's a conspiracy!

Last _{BTW, are you in LPWB denial*?} Post

*clue

[Swatopluk]

A river in Egypt, I know

It was time to ask for a clue rehash anyway.

Last _{anything to do with the love life of Cleopatra?} Post