

An Independent Journalist solves a 2400-year-old Mystery - byrneseyeview
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/ifstoneinterview.html
I. F. Stone was an amazing guy.
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gibsonf1
Ok, I am fully sold on the new format for Hacker News.

This is a truly enlightening article. I've never liked Plato (I am a big
Aristotle fan), and this article shows in a convincing way how Plato used his
communicative gifts to "corrupt" the historic record to make Plato's very bad
political ideas more palatable to the public. Socrates was killed for
repeatedly advocating the violent overthrow of the Athenian Democracy in favor
of a brutal oligarchy. Was this punishment warranted? I think so. In the same
way that the identical punishment is warranted for those who convince their
followers to blow up others.

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byrneseyeview
Glad you liked it, although I thought the point I. F. Stone missed was that
democracy is a terrible idea (and a dangerous intellectual fad). Progress
happens when new ideas contradict established ideas -- it is, in other words,
intrinsically undemocratic (Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein all spent
time as constituencies of one).

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gibsonf1
I would definitely take the Athenian Democracy over the brutal dictatorship. I
think Aristotle did a great job of pointing out the problems with a pure
democracy, and John Adams did a great job of helping invent the best solution
to those problems - a constitutional republic.

But as far as talking about scientific progress in political terms, I guess I
don't follow your reasoning there. Apparently, one of the virtues of the
Athenian Democracy was free speech, one of the key ingredients enabling great
thinkers to thrive.

