7 ms·

I'm pretty sure this pattern was also common in Ancient Greece. Diogenes was exceptional.

musage 8y ago
They didn't say all Greek intellectuals were that way, it's qualified with "those". They also aren't saying that all intellectuals today are cowards, it's qualified with "some of". And you know, rolling our eyes at Trump while not talking about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, sweeping the fact that the grass roots support for Sanders was unprecedented under the rug, not even attempting to see where one might "go from there"... just being constantly amazed and upset at Trump's antics, without using those 4 years for anything good or honest at all, is exactly as good as outright hopping into his lap. Like Bill Hicks said about Basic Instinct, he's a piece of shit, walk away... but no. Let's instead do anything but that, that's the ticket. > Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature" This happened, this is the situation. Posts pointing it out get consistently punished instead of engaged with (and replying to what the comment doesn't even say is another form of that) because it is the situation.

They didn't say all Greek intellectuals were that way, it's qualified with "those". They also aren't saying that all intellectuals today are cowards, it's qualified with "some of". And you know, rolling our eyes at Trump while not talking about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, sweeping the fact that the grass roots support for Sanders was unprecedented under the rug, not even attempting to see where one might "go from there"... just being constantly amazed and upset at Trump's antics, without using those 4 years for anything good or honest at all, is exactly as good as outright hopping into his lap. Like Bill Hicks said about Basic Instinct, he's a piece of shit, walk away... but no. Let's instead do anything but that, that's the ticket. > Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature" This happened, this is the situation. Posts pointing it out get consistently punished instead of engaged with (and replying to what the comment doesn't even say is another form of that) because it is the situation.