Team Yankee or how point of view changes through the last 26 years

[Captain_Colossus]

It's fiction and there is always the danger of authors injecting themselves into their own works; for patriotic officers, this is no different and may be especially true.

 

I watched a movie clip the other day of a Russian made film of WW2, and the particular tank battle showed this scenario in the reverse: the Germans were caricatures of any sort of opponent incapable of inflicting any casualties on the Russians, who were mowing them down with no effort. You tended to see this sort of thing in a lot of Hollywood fare during the Golden Age.

 

I'll point out also here why Plato is in my view the biggest sham in Western canon for this reason, and the Socratic method is a farce, it's strange to me why hardly anyone ever points this out, that is to say, the Socrates character in Plato's dialogues wins debates because Plato sets up the debates with obvious cardboard opponents who put up token resistance, Socrates simply wins because Plato writes the dialogues that way so that he wins, whoever he's 'debating' looks like this: "Yes Socrates, I see Socrates, you certainly are right, Socrates." It's a ridiculous exchange, obviously Plato is advancing his own agenda by inserting words in the mouths of all the characters to achieve the outcome Plato wants his audience to believe.

[Ssnake]

Well, Plato was raised by Socrates and apparently saw him as a model character. Also, the "cardboard characters" aren't really out to win the debate (if they would, you would accuse Plato of letting THEM win), but to present a question/challenge, a talking point essentially to write up the philosophical tenets. Modern day teaching books are often an extremely tiring study. During Plato's time, all that stuff had essentially to be memorized by students, and I don't blame him for presenting the material in a way that is easier to memorize. Written materials were the rare exception; in fact, Plato argued that reading and writing would weaken a student's memory (and thus would bring the world to an end, yadda yadda).

[Captain_Colossus]

Socrates according to Plato (for all we know Socrates may have never actually existed, there's no direct evidence of him, only what Plato said he said) 'didn't know anything' and was out to prove no one else knew as much as they did, their precepts and prejudices blinded them. This would be an ok basis to teach people, except that it comes off extremely pretentious and dishonest- Socrates already has the answers in mind, his claims to not know anything contradict himself when he just leads his opponents into the conclusions he wants them to have. In other words, this is what's known as a straw man: Plato designs these characters in the way he wants them to be debunked. The actual sophists that Socrates debates aren't nearly as stupid as Plato makes them to be (they've gotten a bad rap because of Plato), it's just that Plato has his own agenda to advance, so of course the story turns out the way he wants it.

 

If anyone doubts that Plato is incapable of being a fraud, the dialogue Crito puts Socrates in prison with one other person, who is begging Socrates to leave and escape, and that the authorities would let him if he would never return again. Here of course we get Socrates' theory on justice and the state's ownership of its citizens, which is hardly watertight, but here is the strange thing about all of this: Plato was never actually there in prison with Socrates, yet he recalls this entire, complex, detailed debate verbatim as if by telepathy. The obvious inference is he made the whole thing up. Socrates himself, if he existed, wrote nothing, so Plato could in no way have cribbed it from Socrates or anything Socrates left behind. The character known as 'Socrates' is just the medium that Plato injects himself and transmits his own views.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Captain_Colossus

[Ssnake]

This diversion was brought to you by ThreadJacker 2000. ThreadJacker. Accept no substitutes!

[Captain_Colossus]

The point I'm making is how stuff like this gets passed off- it all looks the same to me in different forms. The real world usually just doesn't work this way, whether Coyle's version or Plato's version of it; people grow up with these notions precisely because there's all this material out there in all cultures which do this; so the point I was making with Plato is the same thing, Plato is famous because of his supposed clarity and poetic ability in writing, I don't see it; people susceptible to grandiosity, and who have unshakeable faith in ideals, well, I suppose that's why it happens because it tends to work on them, but only disillusionment can follow if we are supposed to believe this is how the world actually behaves.

 

Here's a clip of that movie I was talking about: