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Periclean Athens Was a Massive Welfare State

Periclean Athens Was a Welfare State

Gary North – October 21, 2015

Periclean Athens was a massive welfare state. Scholars of the era have long known this. The public is never told, however.

The state built huge public works projects, organized public assistance, offered pensions to the disabled, subsidized bread purchases, established price controls on bread, imposed export controls, established free theater programs for the poor, and regulated corn merchants [G. Glotz, The Greek City and Its Institutions (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1929] 1969), pp. 131-32.]

The “bread and circuses” political religion of Athens ended in an enforced inter-city alliance, war with Sparta, defeat, tyranny, and finally the loss to Macedon. That is the fate of all bread and circus religions.

Athens worshipped politics with all its being, on a scale barely understood by most historians. It was understood by Glotz:

Five hundred citizens were to sit in the Boule for a whole year. The heliasts, whose functions were originally confined to hearing appeals against awards made by the magistrates, were now to judge in first instance and without appeal the increasingly numerous cases in which citizens of Athens and the confederate towns were involved: they formed a body of six thousand members of which half on an average were in session every working day. There were ten thousand officials within the country or outside, five hundred wardens of arsenals, etc. Thus public affairs did not merely demand the intermittent presence of all the citizens of the Assembly; they required besides the constant exertions of more than a third of them [Glotz, p. 126].

Consider this: one-third of all the estimated 35,000 to 44,000 resident male citizens of Athens in the year 431 B.C. were in State service. [Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 172.] At least 20,000 were “eating public bread,” meaning that they were either on the payroll or on the dole [Zimmern, pp. 172-73].

This is not the standard textbook view of classical Greece.

From Ron Paul Curriculum, here.

Revanchism: Victory Must Include Reabsorbing Aza

Defeating an enemy that doesn’t care about dying

Jews should not have qualms about taking land from an enemy that tried to conquer and destroy our country. Opinion.

Abraham Shusteris
Many have wondered, how can Israel possibly force a military defeat on a brutal enemy that cares neither about the death nor for the life and welfare of its own civilians. While Israel has flattened half of Gaza and created a considerable death toll, the spirit in Gaza and around the Arab world remains fairly euphoric after the Oct 7th Massacre.

The Palestinian Arabs and their cause has never been as popular throughout the world. As nations push for a permanent ceasefire, the Palestinian Arabs are poised to claim victory no matter how many Gazan buildings are flattened, and how many terrorists killed. Unless the Palestinian Arabs feel defeated after this war, Israel will not have gained any deterrence value, and all of its soldiers and civilians will have died in vain. Given these circumstances, how can Israel possibly win? The answer lies in understanding how the Arabs perceive victory and loss.

Unlike Westerners, Arabs don’t care much about lives or buildings, if they did Hamas would not use its civilians as human shields. If they cared, they would provide their civilians with shelters or at least protect them in their tunnels. They did neither.

From the Arab perspective, the most important commodity is honor, and the Arab’s land is their honor. By conquering an Arab’s land, you rob him of his honor, which is more precious than life itself. This is why the 1948 War was called “The Nakhba” or the “the catastrophe” since Arabs were displaced from their land. While Arabs lost many lives and buildings in many of the future wars and conflicts with Israel, none of them were a true catastrophe for the Arab, only the conflict in which they saw “their land” conquered and taken by the Jewish state.

Israel cannot win this war unless the Palestinian Arabs lose land. Only then will they feel defeated and deterred. Only then will they bow their heads in defeat. Until that point, even if Israel wipes out a million Gazans and flattens all of the buildings in Gaza, it won’t deflate the Arab, it will only galvanize and embolden them to plan further massacres until they achieve their ultimate goal of the complete destruction of the Jewish state. Only defeat on their own terms will put an end to their national aspirations of liberating the entire land between river to the sea.

But what will the Americans say?

It’s a fair question, so lets give it some thought. Israel is not in its nature a warrior nation. Despite its small size, it isn’t interested in conquering its neighbors or expanding its boundaries. Israel is simply a nation that wants to be left alone to live in peace. That is why the concept of conquering land provokes an innate repulsive response for most Jews, and rightly so. It’s not Israel’s business conquering the land of other nations. However, in this case, we are not talking about conquering foreign land.

The Bible clearly states (Genesis 15:18) that G-d has given the entire land between the Euphrates and the Nile to the Jewish people. This isn’t a right wing conspiracy theory, its written in black and white in the Bible. The entire land between Euphrates and the Nile is promised to the Jewish people, those are the boundaries of the true Jewish state. The Jewish people have no right or authority to renounce this claim.

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From Arutz Sheva, here.

Death-Dealer Kissinger Dead

HENRY KISSINGER, TOP U.S. DIPLOMAT RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS, DIES AT 100

“Few people … have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger.”

HENRY KISSINGER, national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.

Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

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From The Intercept, here.

יום העיון “לשון ותורה בחנוכה” – תשפ”ד

תוכנית יום העיון “לשון ותורה בחנוכה” – תשפ”ד

יום חמישי, ב’ בטבת, נר 7 של חנוכה:

1100הסופר הרב יוסף אליהו

יו”ר ארגון ‘עין טובה’  

“דבש תחת לשונך” – חידושי לשון בתנ”ך ובמשנה
1120ד”ר משה קהן

 

שירי יין ושמחה בתור הזהב
1140אליהוא שנון

חבר קבוץ סעד, גולה בים המלח

משמעות סדר המילים במקרא

בעברית החדשה אומצו שינויים רבים בסדר המילים לעומת העברית המקראית. לא תמיד אנחנו מבינים פסוקים בגלל הזרוּת. נביא ששה מיני שינוי ודוגמות, עם פיענוח פסוקים אחדים.

1200אוריאל פרנקשלום עם נאצים?!

מיהו נאצי? ומהו שלום? נדבר על שני שינויים לשוניים מבורכים בעקבות “מלחמת שמחת תורה”: גאולתה של המילה “שלום”, והחזרת ה”עטרה” (המפוקפקת) של התואר “נאצי” ליושנה.

1220משה אוסיאסלאם – זה לא סלאם – לעולם עם סקירה על ארגוני הטרור

מאתר מענה לשון, כאן.

There Is a Universal ‘Language of Thought’ – Like the Rishonim Say in Berachos

You Don’t Think In Any Language

POSTED ON  BY DAVID J. LOBINA

by David J. Lobina

(This is Part 2 of a brand new series of post, this time about the relationship between language and thought; Part 1 is here)

A provocative title, perhaps, and perhaps also counterintuitive. One thinks in the language one speaks, everybody knows that. Why would anyone ask bilingual speakers which language they think in (or dream in) otherwise?

I suspect that what people usually have in mind when they ask such questions is related to the phenomenon of inner speech, the experience of internally speaking to ourselves, which may well be ubiquitous in adults (but probably not in children), though not entirely universal. I certainly think that inner speech plays a role in thinking, but not as central a role as most people seem to think (I will come back to this on a later post, probably in Part 4 of this series, where I will also discuss how writers of fiction use the narrative technique of “interior monologue” to outline some of the mental processes of a given character (thinking, feeling, etc.) – but mostly to argue that authors generally go about it the wrong way!).

The point I want to make in this post is that no-one thinks in any natural language; not in English, or Italian, or whatever, but in a language of thought, an abstract, unconscious and moreover inaccessible, conceptual representational system of the mind. Or at least I intend to provide some of the evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, that suggests that this is indeed the state of affairs.

The idea of a language of thought is in fact a rather old one. It effectively refers to the old doctrine that we think in a mental language that is not a spoken language. Traceable back to Aristotle, Boethius and William of Ockham (among others), the doctrine is to a large extent premised on the general observation that speakers of different languages can refer to the very same “things”, though they may employ different words to talk about them. As the French philosopher Claude Panaccio has aptly put it in a recent historical overview of the mental language, the French can talk about un homme whereas the English would say a man and the ancient Romans homo, but they all would have had the same “idea” in mind – the same concept, as cognitive scientists call such things, and as I myself mentioned last time around. Crucially, the same logic applies to the sentences in which the mentioned words can appear: homo currit, un homme court and a man is running simply describe the same event – the same thought – in different languages.

This, at the very least, suggests a general intertranslatability among different languages, what the philosopher Jerry Katz once called the “effability principle” – namely, the intertranslatibility of whatever thought one might be able entertain in one language into another language (in rough outline, of course, not in precise, linguistic detail, and certainly not in terms of a one-to-one correspondence between words or phrases).

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From 3 Quarks Daily, here.