Latin, Ovine Democracy, inter alia: Nullian excursions in the Gangs thread
That is worse than dog Latin: It is bitch Latin. It exemplifies the folly of mashing together words found in an English-Latin dictionary, without having even the slightest clue about Latin grammar.
| testimonium | nominative, accusative, or vocative singular of second declension neuter noun testimonium. |
| libertatum | genitive plural of third declension feminine noun libertas. No other options than of liberties or liberties. |
| iustitia | nominative, ablative, or vocative singular of first declension feminine noun iustitia. Well, I suppose that I could perhaps imagine a way that maybe the ablative could be applied in its instrumental sense to make the whole phrase just a tiny bit less asinine. (For the beavises and buttheads in the audience, I must clarify that asinine evokes an ass in the sense of a donkey, not in the American sense of an arse.) |
I am curious about whether my extensive and eminently quotable criticisms have been quoted by anybody who is actually following TEχSHAREs asinine thread, which I myself cant be arsed with.
Define "true democracy".
Two lions and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.
Hey, I like lions; and moreover, I disagree:
Democracy is not three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner: It is the flock obediently voting on the shepherds opinion of wolves. Wherefore wolves are an endangered species.
pix pls, copy & share @ hi res, #tweet #tweet. Let me write no more! Too many people are reading: Ich will nicht gelesen.
Credit for public domain sheep cartoons: 0, 1.
I care about credit, not copyright!
Internal quotations: Left as an exercise to the reader.
Learning should be dear and not cheap.
So as for cats and lone wolves.
Learning should be dear and not cheap.
* nullius oft enjoys weaving enigmatic little puzzles and/or their solutions into his postshidden in plain sight.
Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive... is what I was taught not to be by my mother, and my kindergarten teacher,* and the finger-wagging Sunday-school teacher who told me that the meek shall inherit the Earth, by the mass-media culture, the movies, the teevee, and the beauty-pageant winner who said that all she wants is world peace and to meet a nice guy. Sounds great in a swimsuit. To stand up and face someone down is to be a jerk: Cruel, contemptuous, forceful, domineering, heartless, as if Im some aristocrat who looks down his nose at everybody. It is indubitably unkind and unsympathetic. Why cant I at least be nice to somebody who tells me that the sky is green?
Philological protip: Compare the etymological development of the word nice with the proposition, ...der ungefährliche Mensch sein muss: er ist gutmüthig, leicht zu betrügen, ein bischen dumm vielleicht, un bonhomme. Überall, wo die Sklaven-Moral zum Übergewicht kommt, zeigt die Sprache eine Neigung, die Worte gut und dumm einander anzunähern.
Philological protip: Compare the etymological development of the word nice with the proposition, ...der ungefährliche Mensch sein muss: er ist gutmüthig, leicht zu betrügen, ein bischen dumm vielleicht, un bonhomme. Überall, wo die Sklaven-Moral zum Übergewicht kommt, zeigt die Sprache eine Neigung, die Worte gut und dumm einander anzunähern.
True Democracy
- Communists: True Communism has never been tried.
- Ayn Rand: True Capitalism has never been tried. (Yes, I read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, replete with Alan Greenspans old essays condemning the Federal Reserve and calling for a return to the gold standard. LOL!)
- Angus is not a true Scotsman: He puts sugar on his porridge.
Name one true democracy.
Actually, Athens was a true democracy. Indeed, the Athenians invented the concept τῆς δημoκρᾰτῐᾱς as it is known to history; it is otiose and obfuscatory to argue that they werent a true democracy. Make up your own word, if you wish to describe some even more extreme Utopian fantasy concept that is fallacious in theory and impossible in practice. My point was not that Athens was not a true democracy, but rather, that democracy does not and cannot work as advertised. That is a matter of design bugs, not bugs in the implementation.
doubts that this democracy thing ever really worked as advertised,
What does? Bleach, maybe.
Whereas I can point to other political or political-economic systems that did exactly what they said on the tin. Imperfectly so, as all works of mere mortals, but more or less consistently for long periods of timeand, unlike democracy, not in flat contradiction of their purported ends. Inter alia, e.g., the Roman Republic...
[ snip ]
Oops, I was supposed to stop writing so that people would stop reading.
Latest edit (February 29th, 2020): I updated the description of The Flat Earth Believers,
Oh, my. Dont get me started... Writing and thus reading may happen, alas.
My response will be evil in its virtù.