Alex Leone

'Il conflitto Callicle-Socrate nel Gorgia, non è il conflitto tra due individui, ma è un conflitto che si presenta nell’interno di una stessa anima (Callicle e Socrate, cioè, sono due tendenze o visuali del medesimo spirito); ed è un conflitto insolubile e ineliminabile.' G Rensi

@Lucian_Caracy @cokevas @Isabelletkrause I don't care about Tolkien - but Christianity I know. It's main purpose is the redemption and salvation of the sinner. You kill all the sinners, then there are no humans anymore, since man is a sinner by nature.

@AlexToropoc @cokevas @Isabelletkrause So, you don't understand Christianity or Tolkien.

Ah yes, Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, which has sold over 150 million copies, and The Hobbit which has sold another 100 million (ranking them 2nd and 3rd respectively in top-selling novels of all time), who created over 14 distinct languages and alphabets for Middle-earth before writing his novels, who was fluent in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Latin, Lombardic, Middle/Old English, Old Norse, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh, who, while serving in WWI, developed a secret code to update his wife about his location to bypass British army mail censorship, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature….. Yes, surely, he is a weak thinker.

@cokevas @Isabelletkrause It should be a teaching - what do you learn from it? In Tolkien Gollum dies (no redemption) Boromir dies, he redeems himself but dies - if every sinner dies then Christianity can't exist. The redeemed sinner must live so he can spread his experience to the people.

@AlexToropoc @Isabelletkrause So, for you to deem something intelligent, said something should be from a certain religion?

@Isabelletkrause What do you mean by ''classic''?

@AlexToropoc I’ll say it again - classic

Not all are meant to understand the depth of the LOTR and that’s alright.

@TheaEuryphaessa Yeah, I checked it and Jung uses spirit as a part of mind, intuition. I operated on a Platonic framework where spirit is thymos (located in the chest) the place of anger and martial virtue. I find it strange that Jung differs from Plato on this. They're pretty close otherwise.

@AlexToropoc It depends on your definition of instinct, Alex. Per my understanding, instinct here is related to the fleshy and embodied [manifesting as physical sensation], and spirit to the subtle and ethereal realm.

One of Jung's basic beliefs . . . is that the purpose of human life is to become conscious. Part and parcel of this is achieving a balance between spirit and instinct. Go too far one way or the other and we get into trouble. — Daryl Sharp, Getting to Know You

@thewaronbeauty especially after god died, faith was lost, and these big churches acted somewhat like the tomb of god, just like Nietzsche says. Because Christianity has become a marketing affair, a profane run for money and power, a business like New Balance.

@thewaronbeauty Do you know what Plato says? Beauty is not to be found in external things, especially in those made by humans. They're all imitations. True beauty only exists as an ideal form that can be philosophically contemplated. Early Christianity kept this Platonic feature, but lost it,

The de-sacralization of spaces is one of the most depressing contemporary trends. Our secular, consumerist world loves the beauty & aesthetic of the past but rejects the faith and values that birthed it. These pictures are worth a thousand words (a New Balance branded altar!)—money and the accumulation of stuff is our new religion (or anti-religion). Humans are inclined to worship something and when we drop one way of worship, it is always replaced by another. As Thomas Carlyle said, we now go by the Gospel of Mammonism and Dilettanteism. We will never get back to the true beauty of the past which we so admire unless we turn from these things back to Christ.

@Isabelletkrause Tolkien is a weak thinker because he doesn't make room for redemption, thus, he is not a Christian. Look at Gollum - he sins, destroys his life, but where is the redemption, the need for god's absolution? None. A great thinker would've made Gollum the hero, to redeem himself.

What blew my mind most about the Lord of the Rings was how perfectly a fantasy story represented evil & temptation and how it works in each of our lives. The Ring doesn't make you evil overnight. But it whispers in your ear, it makes the wrong decision feel so incredibly reasonable, it tells you that this time will be different. How many times in our life do we have this conversation in our head? I’ve had it, many times. And the longer you hold onto it, the harder it becomes to let go. Which is just crazy. The things we know are destroying us are often the things we can’t put down. Frodo didn't fail because he was weak. He failed because no one is strong enough to carry sin alone forever. We are all Frodo, that's kind of the whole point.

@michaelshermer The number of troops doesn't count, training and technology does. When Xenophon fought with his ten thousand against the Persians at Cunaxa (who were a few hundred thousands) the Greeks only had a casualty, A Greek who got scared by a runaway chariot. The Persians lost thousands.

Answer: regime change + 10 possible nukes 1. Last year Trump says they "obliterated" Iran's nuke power, so that's a lie. 2. Regime was evil & Iranians deserve freedom, but why us? + why not N. Korea, China, et al.? (Everyone knows why) 3. New Iran regime is even worse. 4. After 100s more Americans die, US will have "sunk cost fallacy": We can't let our troops to have died in vein, so we need to keep fighting. 5. Many years later death toll will be in the 1000s or 10,000s, oil will be $200+/barrel, our economy will be in the toilet, and Iran will still exist as it is. Solution: Declare victory next week and get out.

@varien Streamers are not really addicted to that medication, but to the ''medium'' - all that attention, fame and power they get from it. It is the feeling of a god like creature having power over mortal plebs. Those meds fuel the grit for the real addiction.

a lot of these guys survive terrible stacks because they're in their early 20s and their entire lifestyle is subsidized by streaming revenue youth is doing the most important part in this "stack" and the audience paying for this content will never have to bear the consequences on this lost young man's life

@LisaBritton You're so wrong. Any human (man or woman), given the freedom, will choose glory, honor and power over anything else. Feminism (the right one, namely Platonic) gave political freedom to women in order to pursue their passions - so their city can become rich and great.

Choice was never the goal. Direction was. The architects of second-wave feminism understood something about female nature: that given genuine freedom, a huge percentage of us would choose relationships, babies, and the domestic arts over climbing corporate hierarchies. So they set out to close that door. Sandberg’s Lean In was the corporate-friendly sequel. It dressed up the same ideology in PowerPoint slides and TED Talks. “You can have it all,” it whispered, “just lean in harder.” What it really meant was: You must want what we tell you to want. New from me for Evie: eviemagazine.com/post/sheryl-sa…

@Isabelletkrause LOTR is the limey version of the volkisch ideology, the return to the agrarian feudalism of the middle ages, stupid peasants being ruled by higher specimens like priestly boyars. The volkisch ideology brought back the old Germanic pagan motifs, LOTR being filled with them

The funny thing about this take is that many watch LOTR and probably think the same. You have to have a level of intellectual depth to understand the movies, you can’t take them at face value, you must look beyond.

@Isabelletkrause Try to read Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and come back after singing the praise of the Catholic god.

God is so good. This means so much to me. But I have to say… none of this is mine. Not this platform, not my platform on Instagram, not any of it. It’s all God’s. I really believe He gives us these gifts…the ability to build something, to reach people…not for ourselves, but to lead people back to Him. To help people come home. And I’ve realized that’s the common thread behind everything I’m doing, whether it’s on here or on Instagram. None of it is for me, or for a business, or for anything I can gain from it. It’s for Him. It’s for the people on the other side of the screen. It’s for building His kingdom. If this account never makes a dollar but helps someone find God, then I’ve succeeded. I just feel so honored and grateful that He would use me in that way at all. He is so good.

@romanhelmetguy False. Thucydides has Pericles changing the mind of the Athenians (the plebs) all the time. Why? Because of his intelligence and reputation. So, people change their minds when they trust a man with a reputation for intelligence and fairness.

People don’t change their mind when confronted with the truth, they change their mind when presented with something they want to believe more.

@thewaronbeauty Beauty has been destroyed by aesthetics. Plato developed the philosophy of beauty as justice and the good. It is the romantics that transformed it into the nihilism of aesthetics - as art and abstract crap. Dostoevsky revived the Platonism of Beauty as psychology in The Idiot.

I have been looking for this passage for so long. Since starting the War on Beauty, I often thought of this reading, but for the life of me, I could not remember who wrote it and how to find it. But yesterday, searching my camera roll, I found a picture of the text I took when I read it in college. It was one of the moments that was so important in my awakening that beauty was an actual thing. It was an assigned reading by Ananda Coomaraswamy, an Indian art philosopher, for a seminar during the final semester of my senior year of my Art History undergrad. It took four years of Art History to get to a reading that not only mentioned beauty, but God, and that these two things are intertwined. I just re-read the essay, and although I now disagree with some of what he says, at the time I was so struck because beauty was never ever talked about. In fact, I think this reading was paired with one by Winckelmann and meant to underline the relativity of beauty and that European art & beauty standards are not superior. When we opened the class discussing the readings, no one had anything to say about this text, except that I chimed in to say I really enjoyed it, especially the idea that beauty was something spiritual. The professor basically said she was glad someone got something from it, and we moved on. In contemporary art history education, discussing beauty is not only incredibly sidelined but, in some cases, outright prohibited. Beauty is seen as relative, and if that is your first reaction to an artwork, think harder, look harder, and find a “real” or “objective” way of describing it. But the fact of the matter is that beauty is more real and objective than anything because it is from God, who is the ultimate truth and Solid Reality. To omit the fact that there is a real thing and value called Beauty in education is not really an education at all. Beauty is not only real, but its realness, objectivity, and the fact that some things are more beautiful than others, actually cannot be argued. I am very grateful to have found this again!

@somewheresy It is the same recycled snakeoil crap that existed for thousands of years - science that can make man better, but that it's also a danger for civilization. But you drink your Kool-Aid if it makes you feel better.

I hate to break it to everyone on here who isn’t paying attention to AI, but we are absolutely doing Westworld in the middle of the rest of this geopolitical stuff. And also, the hosts wake up outside the park first

@stephwakefield_ @titusfilm must become moderate, thus ruled by philosophy. So, Callicles and Socrates must become united - just like the city and philosophy.

@stephwakefield_ @titusfilm Plato's Gorgias, especially the Callicles section. Callicles plays the Imperialist city (a Thucydidean character), Socrates plays philosophy. This looks like the Athenians at Melos, the weak get smoked. That's why philosophy must acquire political power, and the Imperialist city

Oh my god I finally just read Strauss Persecution and the Art of Writing