http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=152347

(Maybe this is what Bush/Cheney/Rummy meant when they said we would be greeted by flowers. It reminds me of the stories NYC children told of the birds flying out of the towers on September 11th. Under questioning, the children admitted that they knew the birds were really people. Will the child Bush ever admit the flowers we were greeted with were funeral arrangements?)

And to be clear, I’m not saying that Strauss was correct in all of his thinking — but I do find it beneficial to look at an issue or a theory from a myriad of sides. And I occasionally do pull out a Straussian text to counterbalance something I’m reading and can find it very useful. The point being that everyone has to work toward their own truth — really work — and not just use the information in front of them as a series of props that can be picked through at random to prop up the play scenery. That gets us right back to the cave allegory in The Republic, which is where I sometimes feel far too many folks get mired and never bother to emerge.

yeah, you are sooo right. nobody has it all down. like science itself, seeking something which is more true than what we think we know now. meanwhile, we keep kicking fuckwad’s arse!

Actually, using the US and World population clocks at http://www.census.gov I find that we are 4.58% of the world’s population. And we use 25% of the world’s resources. This is grotesque, and the ultimate source of our wars–to maintain this hoggish lifestyle. We need to join the rest of the world in finding a way to right life on our only planet.

looseheadprop @ 11

3,000. Wasn’t that the estimate of how many we lost on 9-11? So now Bush has killed more Americans than Osama?

I think we really passed 3,000 some time ago. As others have noted, this toll doesn’t include all “out of theater” deaths. It doesn’t include the deaths of contract personnel, many of whom are Americans. It also doesn’t include “non-combat” deaths, accidents, disease, that sort of thing, which are more numerous because when you’re in a dangerous environment already these things happen more often.

Do you remember one of the first curious deaths when (MS)NBC’s David Bloom died as he was reporting on extremely toxic chemical levels in either the Tigris or Euphrates?

Which is to say, again, they lie to themselves as much as they lie to the rest of us.

But the professor that I had was very much the Socratic method sort of prof — and demanded that we rigorously be able to not only pick through all sides of an argument, but that we be prepared to stand up for our end of things as well and to look at its weaknesses from all sides. He and Alan Bloom had regular phone calls wherein they haggled various philosophical bits and pieces, and he never stopped asking questions which, to me, is the point of philosophical examination.

Stephen Parrish — good question, to which I honestly don’t know the answer. I suspect you do…? I think that John Kennedy absolutely did have a tremendous role in writing his own speeches, and his brother surely wrote most of his own. MLK certainly wrote his. Of FDR I am uncertain — but I am confident that all of these figures KNEW, fully grasped the content of their speeches.

I don’t know about Carter, but I suspect he would never read anything out loud to which he could not subscribe. Ditto Johnson, just because he was an ornery cuss who would not be caught dead in a situation where he could not back what came out of his mouth (hence his response to feedback from the infamous Daisy ad).

Kathryn in MA — that’s an unsolicited recommendation if both Trials and Earth in Balance never returned. Heh.

fahrender — I think the other point we are missing about fascist/not fascist is that the governments of the Mediterranean were hardly what we Americans would recognize as democratic today, as evidenced by the lack of an appeals process and the immediacy of punishment following Socrates’ sentencing.

rayne,

agreed. ironic how this description echoes that of what happened last weekend.