This special episode, Caribbean Rhythms 190, I do special Men of Power in Antiquity episode, except this bit different is on one Dion of Syracuse who died around 353-354 BC. Reason it's different, this not extreme flashy Men of Power like Alcibiades or Achilles or Mike Whore, the mad mercenary in Africa in 1960s, instead very austere man who Plutarch pairs in his lives of the eminent Greeks and Romans. He pairs Dion with Brutus, the assassin of Caesar. Both of them, the connection between them is they were disciples of the academy of Platonic philosophy and in the case of Dion, very much so directly Plato himself, maybe Plato's most eminent student, at least during Plato's life. But there is something severe and forbidding in Dion's life and character, Dion of Syracuse,

hopeless in his adventures. He attempted, briefly succeeded in doing what I exhort all men of ambition today to attempt. He took over his state. But anyway, look, I talk that later in episode and I will, although I lose direct comparisons between modernity and antiquity, there's always a relationship, of course, because human nature is more or less in its essential ways a constant, but it's never a direct relationship. So I don't really like direct comparisons. For example, when people between America and Rome, that's often made, or Victor Davis Hanson, others do invoke Greek history to make the case for the Iraq war or whatever. And then at that same time, their opponents made equally facile comparisons to Athenian

misadventure in Sicily and compared that to America's misadventure in Iraq. I think that's useless mostly, but nevertheless in this case, when I was rereading the life of Dion now, a very strong feel connection came to me to the neo-cons. the general feel, where I'll try to discuss as clearly and as reserved a manner as I can. And maybe also maybe to clarify for you what Neocons actually are and what this word Neocon, neoconservative lost almost any meaning now. It's used only as a slur. I've attacked the Neocons many times over the years, but I think many of the slurs against them at the moment are unfounded, they're used as a cover by other kinds of conservatives who were basically indistinguishable from the Neocons at that time, and somewhat used

their name to sweep under the rug their complicity in the same kind of stupidities, besides being actually far more vulgar. But look, well anyway, this is for later in the episode, for now I want to talk this week's news, which is that I watched Elegant Movie to Live and Die in L.A. from 1985. I love 1980s feel, you know, William Defoe and some of other famous actors in this movie to live and die in L.A., John Turturro when he was young. But feel is pure evil insanity. Friedkin, the director also of Sorcerer and the French Connection. But in this pure evil, great electric energy in this film about Secret Service in Los Angeles hunting a brutal but stylish counterfeiter of currency, played by Willem Defoe, who's

also an artist in the movie, he's both an artist and a counterfeiter of dollars, and the Secret Service agent himself is played by William Peterson, maybe you don't recognize the name, but if you look up you will see his relative famous actor, and he's shown in this as a thrill-seeking, base-jumping super alpha, unironic, shown unironically in a way that would not really be acceptable in movies now. Friedkin shows him in a good light and he's not caring about women, exploiting and discarding women, not caring much when they complain, when they demand, he kicks them out titillating explicit sex scenes. You don't see that so much in movies now anymore. People were amazed that this recent Oscar winner, Anora, that it had sex scenes, again

those have disappeared largely from movies in the last 10 years. This is basically a hardcore almost pornography in this movie with William Peterson doing the sex swords with a female informant. I highly recommend for crazy vicious 1980's stylish feel, I watched it with my friend and Yama Payne who remarked, it hit the spot in this sense if you look for that feeling of crime rush in a way that another movie I had high hopes for from the similar time, it's called Subway, French movie Subway, from the same year actually, 1985, a movie by Luc Besson starring Christopher Lambert and Isabella Gianni and also features a charismatic criminal on the run, I think a safe cracker or something like, it's hard to remember, it's not memorable, It doesn't quite work, this movie.

It's a kind, it's an unfortunate miss. I had high hopes for this Luc Besson movie because it's part of the so-called Cinema du Luc movement. That's right, it's a Cinema du, and then the American word, look, you know, that includes one of my favorite directors, Léos Carax, whose movie Mauvais Sang, Bad Blood, also from the 1980s. I covered it on a previous episode. I think actually episode 90, exactly 100 episodes ago. It's extreme, stylish, exciting movie centering on a new disease that kills people who have sex without being in love. So you know this is 1980s and AIDS and I think AIDS just becoming known so this is a nice French romantic joke at the expense of cold homosexuals who have – that doesn't figure in the movie, it's just the disease is presented that way.

And that's such a beautiful movie to me, Mauve Sang. It yanks you out of yourself into a complete different feel world of excitement and longing. So when I found out that it was maybe not a standalone movie that critics had grouped Leos Carax in the 1980s with Luc Besson and I think one other director and called them together something, the Cinema du Look movement, I had high hopes I'd find new excite movies to inspire me. And the reason it was called cinema du look, by the way, supposedly because these movies price style and feel over plot. And that's an approach I agree with, except, but it can become, agree with, it's only good when it works. If it's forced and self-conscious, which I think unfortunately, Luc Besson's Subway tries too hard, ends up being boring.

There's no immersive touch and it feels like art house, a graduate art house student contrived feel. Leos Carax, like David Lynch, to me at least, always has the touch, in the sense, enchant you. One complete nonsense movie, Pola X by Leos Carax, I've been trying to find it to watch it again, maybe you can torrent it, I don't know where to find a copy of this movie. I saw it in Cinema Art House thing, it came out in 1999, and it makes no sense, the plot, silliness it's about a man who has an affair with an elusive woman who might be his sister is based loosely on Herman Melville novel Pierre or the ambiguities about yes a man and his half-sister kind of gothic horror affair do you like this sister theme but this is what I mean about the weak news

it's movies I liked would you like to to see a horror movie made by by me and friends the more movies I watched the more convinced I am I could make a great on myself. We will see. I rewatch Twin Peaks The Return. This is the latest David Lynch Twin Peaks series from the 2010s. I think 2014 he made it. It was a great joke played on unsuspecting audiences when it was, I think it was on Showtime, and they thought it to be a crime drama and they tuned in for 18 episodes of complete weirdest trip thing you can watch, but it may be David Lynch's lifetime masterpiece. It's about the entry of evil, of interdimensional evil, entry into our world. But its achievement is against this ineffable feel of sustained mood. Somehow it can manage that without a plot, but very few directors

can do this convincingly. Lynch is one, Léos Carax is another, and the more I watch movies without a plot, it's very rare. But this is what I mean about David Lynch's touch, I'm sad he died, apparently it was Los Angeles fires this January, it caused his death, not directly but the stress of being evacuated in his condition, where I think that the Ismaili conspiracy had poisoned his lungs and so it greatly weakened him and Los Angeles fires that was also set by Ismaili terrorists, it completely finished him off. But it makes me sad, I think he was working on a mini-series at the time of his death, the scripts are already written, so hopefully a worthy director can make it come about as a posthumous project. But listen, the beauty

of it, Twin Peaks The Return, it's in the sudden outbursts of evil humor, and then the slow sections where the everyday life of the main character is shown as he's transported from limbo in another dimension back into our world, but he's basically amnesiac, catatonically autistic, but graced with certain supernatural powers and the gift of second sight. And one of my favorite scenes is very subdued, but he's investigating insurance fraud and filling out paperwork at home, but he's assisted in this by otherworldly powers with kind of New age music in the background. There's something so uncanny in particular moments in Lynch like that forgotten dream memories But always good to watch it as comedy. Don't take too seriously the midget mass murder assassination scene

This is another and you will not forget for weeks. I still laugh Randomly in public when I remember midget possessed by frenzied spirit kill all people in an office gratuitously Seriously, such many good scenes of otherworldly evil, reminding you of that spirit in yourself, Caroline. It's a frightening episode, if you want a complete trip, you watch, I think, episode eight of Twin Peaks, The Return. Complete surreal, the emergence of demon entities into our world as a result of nuclear tests in the 1940s. Lynch is the only movie maker I know who tried to capture the spirit of painter Francis Bacon, who along with Giorgio de Chirico, my favorite mood painter, and his trans-dimensional male-volant entities, done very competently in some episodes of this Twin Peaks.

Just watch, look, just watch the first episode, see if you like, and a kind of Francis Bacon entity appears out of a box, and malls, these teenage, I don't know, look, I try to use movies to escape. I've been having retarded episodes, you know, I'm talking about affective retardation, retarded affects, where my emotions are... I'm trying to see how to snap out of these retarded emotions with much coffee and nicotine pouches and unusual escape movies and books. Something that doesn't work is champagne. I've tried bottle of champagne. The next day it's true alcohol will raise cortisol or something. The next day you feel even more spent. But I watched, I tried to snap out with escape movies. I watched a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo. That's always a great escapist fairy tale.

I think I've watched all the movie versions. I just love this story. This is a French version from last year. I think it was made last year. And its best parts are the very beautiful sights of southern France and the Mediterranean. And for a historical film, it's refreshing because it relishes in bright colors. It avoids the kind of dull yellow or the grey-blue filters that are used on almost all historical dramas now. But the downside of this movie, Count of Monte Cristo, loses focus by the middle. It tries to show you too many events, I think. Too many characters are introduced without development. You end up with a kind of superficial feel where it's almost like the director wanted to check off events from the book and it left me with empty feeling by the end, almost like

I had watched made for TV special. Complete fails to transport you, I think. I would still say watch it, but misses the point because The Count of Monte Cristo is not just a revenge story where you can ploddingly show how the protagonist tries to set up people who harmed him. I don't know, it just lacks the ability to draw you in and enchant you. For a French movie, it feels socially dry. You'd think that the French are masters of social intrigue, but very often when they try to depict that in movies, it just fails. There's this other movie, Ridicule, again a failure. The French can actually be a very dour, plodding people sometimes, and it doesn't capture that social intrigue that you get maybe from a few episodes of Gossip Girl even.

But The Count of Monte Cristo, I'm telling you, is not just a social intrigue revenge movie. You can't remake it and just base it on that. It's fundamentally an education story. It's like a Bildungsroman about a promising young sailor whose life is sabotaged and then his redemption story about how he's basically initiated into the last of the Templar order And furthermore, closely connected to this, the book is an attack on, as much as 19th century great artists, an attack on the so-called bourgeois, but really what that means, an attack on the tawdry, low nature of post-Napoleonic society in France, of the kind of very low people who came to the fore in this new reactionary bourgeois society, the fake conservatism,

the grasping materialism, the hypocrisy, the vulgarity, the death of all ambition and spiritual and it's same kind of story kind of like in Bella Meade where to give you just one very clear parallel the press in both these books which is supposed to be the refuge supposedly supposed to be the freedom of speech and the place for the speaking of truth and the press is instead shown primarily as a vehicle for corruption and stock market manipulation and so I think they are very relevant stories for our low times too. They feel, some things feel quite on the nose. How to escape from a low time, a time not only of corruption but actually of the feeling of the lack of energy, a feeling of lack of exciting possibilities. Otherwise the kinds of escapist

movies that are, again I've been trying to find refuge, a feeling of untrammelled, elegant, stylish, vicious, fast evil, speed, the feeling of dextrudine speed, to which to live and die in a movie full of this in form of Willem Dafoe, again as artist, side job counterfeiter and his low-life artist criminal friends. In other words, a great job showing 1980s Los Angeles underworld and art feel. But at least vivacious evil is a break from the types of boredom and embellished slavery that are sold as ideals among the wankers of our, and you expect the left, of course the left is the party of depressing dead end and ultimately civilizational, personal, tranny suicide of course, but the new right which was supposed to be an alternative and the

new conservative, the people who feel ascended in our day, they are wankers to and sell the same kind of lightly ornamented slavery. Let me give you a couple of examples in the continuing degeneration of the conservative vision and that of all times this should go on when the left has totally discredited itself in the last few years and this would allow the broader anti-left possibilities to deal a death blow to what was the sclerotic establishment of geriatrics and communists and to place itself as the defender of freedom and the vanguard of youthful energies that are unchained but instead some of the most prominent conservative voices, don't count me as a prominent voice, I'm a tiny podcast, I'm not Joe Rogan or Charlie Kirk or the people who have huge megaphones,

huge platforms and they want to take this opportunity to sell their own maybe even worse kind of slavery than the left. Like Charlie Kirk, he's come a far way the last two years on various things like immigration, that's to be welcomed, but he says nonsense like that a man's life should be to serve a woman. I quote for you, it's your duty as a man to sacrifice everything for a woman. He says something like that. Actually he said it even more absolutely and stupidly than just that, while also telling people to drop out of college and learn a trade. There's nothing wrong with being in a trade, but he didn't do that. He's basically Trump's college Republican outreach, and he's telling impressionable people to do something like that, and imagine the bleakness.

By the way, when you tell a limited audience, he may be big compared to me, but his audience is still relatively limited, and he should be concerned with forming political cadres, And you cannot tell people that you hope to be the leaders of your party who are in his audience to drop out of college, which unfortunately, yes, of course, college education is pointless. Let me not go over this in detail again, but you do need the degree if you want to be in, let's say, federal law enforcement or many such. So he's telling all of these people to not go into the judiciary, not go into federal law enforcement, to become essentially politically castrated demis living somewhere to become a plumber to handle other people's feces and go home and pray with your fat wife. And who is she?

She's supposed to be your everything, your fat hog praying wife. So let me give you another example. Same thing the other day, this guy, I think Lyman Stone, I don't know what his name is or who he is. Again, he's got a big platform. He's some other religion cuck. No doubt he has a college degree, but he plays the virtuous working class man online, and he's telling men not to have hobbies, that spending even one hour a day on your own hobby or interest is unacceptable, that all of your hobbies must instead be something in service of your wife. And if you think I'm exaggerating, actually, the way I put it is, again, less extreme than what he did. If you want to see it, go search. Go search for yourself. It's some long post. I can't read it here. But I'm not picking at random post or thing.

I'm picking on huge platform people who are making what looks to be a coordinated messaging on this insane point. It's something that gets broad agreement on the emerging demi-sudo-amish-sudo-haredi-right. There are also Instagram and TikTok trends, same idiotic traditionalist role-playing. And then there's this maniacal woman in the same vein who says that she questions her daughter's boyfriends or dates on whether they watch pornography and how much they jerk off. And again, she gets massive engagement. I'm not talking about some random, I've heard these things happening in real life too. Internet-brained people asking random women in airports, hey, why haven't you had children yet? And this kind of thing.

I'm saying this is not anomaly, this is part of the course in these conservative circles including among evangelicals whose societies are dominated by bossy wives, you know, hey you're dating my daughter, how many times did you wank it this week. I cannot tell if this plus also Jordan Peterson embracing religiosity suddenly because that's the thing now, that's the latest pharisaic marketing scam for online influencers. Again, I can't tell if it's something coordinated by maybe an ad agency or if it's just mental lameness being contagious among moronic people who want to be on TV and they think they can corner a market or an audience. But look, I mean, this last bit about the woman checking masturbation habits of a daughter's dates, I must tell you, this is madness.

And I don't see it's a fake misdirection by the left. But it might as well be, who knows if it's coordinated but it doesn't need to be, retardation and subversion at some point appear to be the same. You must understand the Conservatives though are plenty retarded by themselves and not just these people. The internet is abuzz again because I dare to say that you need a slave class if you hope to fix the birth rate problem among upper middle class people in the West, which is common sense, and it's not even advice, it's merely an observation I make, born of the fact that I don't really care to preach morally to people, and if you actually want to see why there is depressed fertility among a certain class in Western Europe and United

States, it has everything to do with this, if you think it through for a moment. I'll be right back to discuss this, and yes, on the second half of this episode later, The longer half, I will talk briefly about the life of this man, Dion of Syracuse, such a different life from the bleak tawdry modern possibilities I am attacking now, but I will be right back. Problem of fertility collapse, so-called that Elon and others, again, is highly not across all demographics and subgroups, it's not equal. Some have very high fertility, others abnormally low. You can point all you want to low birth rates among ancient Roman elites or Indian upper caste supposedly or Latin American upper class, although for the latter, I don't think anyone has reliable information.

But the fact is that you are not comparing like to like. And in fact, leaving young middle and upper middle class people of chores in America and in West Europe, plus addressing the housing problem, and I see these two things as connected, that would in fact lead to an increase in fertility. If that's what you want, whether or not the costs are worth it is a different question. But nothing else besides what I just said now would work for this demographic in the conceivable universe of options. Now, taking the vote away from women, or making them be traditional domestics or whatever, has as much prospect in our time as setting up a god emperor with a scribe class and calling him pharaohs something like that. When you compare like to like

for example in Hong Kong people with more servants do have more kids and by servant I don't mean a couple of hours au pair in the afternoon or I mean ability around the clock multiple servants which is another name for slavery no matter how you dress it up or about employment and wages and other words that he uses. The reason Elon is able to have so many kids and the reason the very upper class in America is they have very high fertility by the way when you get beyond the 1 million per year in income level. Fertility goes above replacement again but only there and that's because only at that and not even at 1 million in a year wouldn't be quite enough in the big cities. It would be in other parts of the country. But only at that level do they have,

yes, first of all, financial security, et cetera. But they can outsource, especially the caretaking for the very earliest years of the kids. When there's a crying infant, especially, and such, which is extremely disruptive in the life of a man, especially, but not only, they can outsource that. So then they're willing to have more children. It's as simple as that. I know at least two such who are able to do this beyond two children only because their wife can have multiple 24-hour basically servants who can relieve her. She can, she's still with her crying infant but only when she wants to be. Now we're here and now we're there. And the stress of child raising is to, you know, the man has the resources at that level

to isolate himself from raising of infants which traditionally men actually did not have to care for. And for those who claim instead that the solution is some kind of patriarchy in a closed community, that solution of getting people to become like the Amish or that the solution is Haredi Jews is as fantastical as the left-wing delusion that you can provide cheap or free childcare in the form of communal kindergartens, that these things would solve this problem, as if any intelligent or aware mother from the demographic I'm talking about would want to give her child over to such institutions, to attack my tongue. In today's world, of all times, to put children in the mercy of who knows what, shibun, gentel, or what, you can't do that to a kid, you know, especially a sensitive young boy.

I remember, even when that was not an issue with, let's say, bad caretakers, I remember with dread my own time in a communist kindergarten. They did not abuse at all. They were very nice. I was sent to a very good one. But you know, they had free childcare, free kindergartens in the communist world. But my parents noticed I became very silent and depressed. I didn't do well in a communal environment as a small boy. I hated every moment of being there. So when they saw me get depressed, they hired a nanny, who I may have talked about before, she was a real character from a pre-war aristocratic family who had tremendous contempt for anyone working a paid job, contempt for my parents that they had paying jobs, and she referred to them by an old word,

professional, carrying negative connotations. She taught me well. She was relatively strict with me, But I did well with her, I have very good memories and we remained friends. After the communist regime fell, she ran the pensioner's union for the monarchist party. But I did well with her, but not so much with kindergarten. But nannies in New York now, they go for $70,000 per year at least. And the reason for that is the difficulty in finding reliable, safe, private nanny. stops to think for a moment about why it would cost that much. If the solution really was child care facilities, see, the demographic I'm talking about now is rightly, justifiably not wanting to send their kids to those kind of kindergartens.

It's as if none of you who talk about this have ever really stopped to think at all about it. I'm sorry to say, but traffic and fantasy delusions about reintroducing patriarchy or or whatever, which is inconceivable minus an apocalyptic reset. Now if an asteroid falls, maybe you can do that. I'm not sure you can, maybe. And I know it would also be insanely difficult to reach a situation like Dubai, which is what I'm talking about when I say introducing a slave class, which by the way does have a high birth rate of about three or so. Servants do work in other words. A birth rate of three in Dubai is at the moment higher than Egypt's, which has fallen from 3.5 to 2.5 over the last decade. I was watching this thing about Egyptian overpopulation, and yes, there is overpopulation in much

of the world in a measurable sense. The Egyptian government is desperately trying to push a two-children policy there, a two-children is enough propaganda program. They were showing Egyptian government officials trying to teach their babushka women with the thing on the head not to make inordinate number of children. Why? Because Egypt imports most of its food and even so they will run out of water by mid-century or so if the population keeps growing at the rate it is now. So overpopulation is real in much of the world. Everyone knows there is no fertility crisis as such. It's very different from group to group. and what there is is a fertility crisis among the kinds of people, let's say engineers and the like people like that. You need to keep technological civilization operating.

And in this sense, although aware of the general problem of birth rate differentials versus the global south, the online right or the new media, call it what you want, is actually unaware of the latest trends in the third world, which I discussed briefly a few episodes back. In many other things, by the way, the online right, unlike the left, is at least aware of the problems, but it often has outdated factual base. The left, of course, does too. I'm not picking on the right, but the right is in this strange position where it has kind of the right approach, but it's not aware of what the latest trends are on almost anything. So by the way, the falling birth rates in those parts of the world, the global south,

third world does not mean that people from there will not want to continue coming over in very great numbers if you don't stop them. There is no automatic solution. This is what you don't get. It's not automatic anything, high or low birth rate in Iraq or Afghanistan or Niger. High or low, they'll try to keep coming in big numbers and it's all dependent on whether or not Western governments are stupid enough to invite them in and then to give them benefits. That's it. It's a political decision. It's not an invasion and it cannot be solved by these focusing on broader trends and thinking they will outbreed you or you will outbreed them or look it's good that their birth rates falling. It's all irrelevant. It's a government decision.

You have to persuade people in government to make this decision. But yes, their birth rates are falling. It was funny to watch this program on French news. I think it was about Egypt's demographic problems, in this case with overpopulation. And they were trying to attribute the fall in birth rates in the last 10 years, again from 3.5 to 2.5, so still over replacement rate. But they were trying to attribute that to this government program, which is a relatively recent program, when obviously the birth rates have been falling over the last 10 years because of smartphones. That's when they were introduced in social media, and Egyptian men like to see hot blonde women daily dancing on their pocket phones. And then that has a castrating effect on them because they don't want...

I don't mean it literally, actually it's probably good for the men to wank it, to pornography on their phone, then to plant more and more kids in their fat babushka moustachioed wives who needs really another hundred million Egyptians or what. But what made their birthrate high and what makes their birthrate fall, this is what I I started this segment on is what I'm telling you. It's not directly relevant to what would make rise and fall birth rates among the demographic I speak of in the West. It's different strokes for different folks. So anyway, my point in bringing up the possibility of a slave or servant class was, okay, you don't want to be Brazilified, but guess what? You mostly already are Brazilified, except you don't actually see the benefits of a slave class

sort of cheap labor like the people in the Gulf states do. I'm very much aware that more immigrants to the West at this point won't bring those benefits of a slave class, but even realizing this much would be a great step for most people just acknowledging what I said just now. My commentary, as always it's interpreted, absurdly misinterpreted, as a dictatorial decree as if I'm actually in control of a country and I'm saying I want things to to be this way. I'm merely saying this about slavery. It explodes multiple pieces of encrusted conventional wisdom aside, because in fact, for all the talk about migration and cheap labor, I see the migration, it's already there, but not the cheap labor that does not exist in the West. There's no cheap labor.

Some industries pay less for labor than they would otherwise that is true, but that labor is not cheap. It is very steeply bought in the West, because of the benefits the families of those labourers receive, which is not the case in a work barrack state like Dubai, United Arab Emirates or other Gulf states. Well, why is that? What does that say about the causes of immigration so far? What would be necessary to stop it? And for all the talk about birth rates and TFR, this and that, nobody has stopped to look at, again, which demographics actually are breeding and which are not within the West. And precisely why? For example, there are many non-identity subgroups. Usually people focus, because it's sexier, on the race thing or the religion thing. But there are non-identity subgroups.

Those are principally the ones that have higher than normal replacement, excuse me, higher than replacement rate fertility, abnormally high fertility among, for example, I think the obese, among certain mental illnesses but not others. personality traits that, whatever, borderline personality versus bipolar disease and so on, that's what I'm talking about. Some have higher than replacement TFR, others are very low. And it's not random. And in fact, the people who want to be able to have kids, the ones who can pay taxes, who function well, who can maybe, if you believe in the heritability of IQ, who can provide, as I say, the basis for the continuation of technological civilization, they are not having children.

the problem. I don't know if Mr. Elon can acknowledge this openly. But yes, I know about the religion thing, by the way. That's not the most relevant subgroup that has higher than average fertility. And it's not even always true. By the way, in Europe, it is not true. For example, Romania has a high degree of religiosity in Europe, but a low birth rate. Also, it has outmigration of youth. Iran is a theocratic government. It's a low low birth rate and so forth. In Israel, it's true that even women with PhDs have a higher than replacement TFR, and when they're secular, I don't think these statistics are outdated, but last I knew that was true. But how much of that is reproducible? Because it's not due just to the feeling of nationalism or to pro-natal policies on

the part of the government, because Hungary has that, and Russia too, and they have below replacement TFR among exactly the populations you'd want to have at least replacement level. It's more I think in the case of Israel that it's a small country which feels that it's in a state of war, feels in a state of siege, feels assailed. And I don't know how you can reproduce that in the West or Japan or if you'd even want to. But I mean there must be some other way to increase birth rate among again the kinds of people you'd want to. And I don't know another way of doing that besides servants, which again don't work maybe for Latin American upper class, again if the statistics I've seen are right, a big if. Sometimes when people invoke statistics, the studies they rely on are very low quality,

very vague, but let's say that's true, it's not applicable to an upper middle class person, Let's say in Sweden or somewhere, they're a nice part of Alabama, they're trying to have career, they feel they cannot have children for all kinds of legitimate reasons, and Elon with a retinue of slaves for all of his many wives, not to speak of many others who are not even aware of the problem, are not really in a place to tell such a person, oh no, you You must have children and you are terribly selfish if you pay attention to the reduction in quality of life and the break that might be put on your career if you do that. But even in the United States, I tell you, the religious are not the most relevant subgroup with high TFR, just to go back to the religion thing.

So a lot of conservative or right-wing hopes that you are outbreeding the libtards. That's a huge cope, I think. The people who are religious and high quality are themselves, I think, being bred out by the stupid many who are not religious. Anyway, I don't know what you think you've heard from studies, but political views are not heritable. A large number of Libtards come from conservative families. They are reacting against conservative fathers, and I've seen people switch views quite a lot during their lifetime, switch cities, switch locations. That was also the case in German society, by the way, in the earlier 20th century. There was a huge reaction, I was speaking with a very smart German friend recently,

he was pointing this out, his very conservative German friend, who pointed out that the authoritarian German father, Pater Familias, from the late 19th, early 20th century, a huge reaction against that in Weimar and so on and after and of course, this is another piece of crusty new dissident or whatever you want to call it, conventional wisdom, it's that children reacting is a myth, it's a liberal recent myth and that if you exercise complete control over them and slam your cane on the floor and scream at them and control every aspect of what they see on the internet or TV, there'll be copies of you intellectually. It's huge delusion incredibly vain Liberalism can't be bred out of existence. Sorry, you have to come up with arguments in a different vision of life to challenge it

So anyway to repeat to you the reasons Let's say that a middle class engineer or upper middle class prospective lawyer or finance girl or finance, bro But even though they are not having the number of kids you'd want them to They're not the same reasons that others around the world are or are not having kids And I'll have to write on this as there is much confusion on it in the same way there's confusion Again on the religious and the woman education issue in so far as birth rates are concerned Let me at risk of repeating myself from past episodes explain this briefly again. The truth has to be repeated very often religious people Miss the point that it isn't religion and certainly not state-supported religion as such

but actually female education that seems to correlate negatively with TFR. So, for example, again Iran, it's a theocratic state, it has a religious morality police, but the problem there would seem to be women are actually highly educated. They get graduate degrees, maybe at a higher rate than in the West, and this is said to account for their lower fertility. Well, I've said this myself, but when others repeat it, as usual, when they repeat part of a story I or others give, They miss the context, they miss other relevant facts, and they repeat things as if it's automatic that going to college will somehow lower fertility in a woman. That's not how it works. They never stop to question why or the psychology of that.

At worst, they assume it's a liberal indoctrination, which that's not the reason at all. College students come in already leftist, by the way, when they do. They learn that not even from high school teachers, they learn in high school from other students and from the internet especially and so on. I've never heard of a conservative or century student come in college and become a leftist there. I've never seen that, not once. What's going on in Iran where college education is not leftist at all is in fact has nothing to do with education as such or college as if it's an automatic magical transformation that kills your fertility. It has to do with aspiration and education is related to that. It's a pathway or a proxy for the feeling of aspiration or wanting a better life.

So if you look at this very interesting fact on the fall in birth rates in rural Brazil, and it happened a while ago and not with the coming of education, not even especially with female liberation, which in a rural setting in the middle of nowhere city or town in a Savannah like I think like Palmas or take some random sitting in the middle of Brazil or something. It's not even applicable What does that mean female liberation there? What would that even mean? It's it's very it's known what happened in that area It happened with the arrival of TV, especially with telenovelas soap operas And this was also not because that the soap operas had some devious secret liberal programming or such It is because they showed in a daily way, in a way these women felt intimate, the lives

of the rich and the beautiful. They saw this every day, they planted in them the seed of aspiration. It's a psychological process that once it's activated, women will delay fertility. Men also will delay fertility for analogous aspiration views, which may include just not Not pornography in the sense of just a magazine in a store, but TikTok, that kind of thing. It does something to the brain. As I've said, let's not call it castration because I think actually it's a good process for these men. They shouldn't want to have six children in a Jakarta slum. A lot of what gets written on this by the right at the moment is a lot of delusion, that you're going to make people be like the Amish, or be like the Jews with the dreadlocks. They're not called dreadlocks. What are they called?

The hundredy tribes with the sideburns, or that you will kill inside women's breasts, inside women's chests, the desire, that you will kill their desire for better things, their aspirations, that you'll get them to accept that Matt Walsh, with his perfectly manicured gay beard is going to convince women to give up everything, to give up their careers or aspirations to be baby factories or this kind, you know, while he smokes a cigar or whatever. It's not a kind of gay form actually of aspiration, the whole trad thing, except that it's completely mendacious aspiration. It's completely based on gay imagery on the internet. The only way this is maintained as a pretense is on X or on Instagram where you have actually

the wives of exurban computer programmers, mostly, to be frank, that's what they are. The wives of computer programmers who live, let's say, two, three hours outside major urban centers, and they can maybe afford barely to live on one salary, and they put on a skirt, they make a swastika-shaped cheesecake on Instagram or TikTok, they say they're a trad wife. It's no longer a swastika cheesecake, now it's a cross, they'll make a Byzantine cross spy that pretend they're a trad wife except actually they're not a trad wife okay except actually nothing has changed and it's a make pretend because the the marriage contract still allows her to leave you with no cost and to take half your things or more and to also alienate you from your kids and pay no

legal penalty or otherwise so the decision to play act as a trad couple is actually a pretense that the woman will stay home and be a housewife which Which besides the fact that most modern women are actually totally untrained for such a role, it has its own problems financially and otherwise. In fact, most modern couples cannot live well on one salary. The economic unfortunate reality of modern life in the West has not changed either. And when they can live on one salary and the woman basically then has to give up all life dreams and aspirations in favor of being a housewife, and I'm sorry but no matter how much other housewife she knows and praise she gets from online and her husband, there's going to be, I think, simmering resentment there if the woman was at all smart or ambitious.

Unless you're talking about the situation where it's actually a very rich husband and the woman will sit on the board of art NGOs and such or have a business that loses $10,000 a month or, you know, but otherwise what happens is the woman's world collapses to the caretaking of kids or whatever, and she will feel slighted if she has grown up with aspirations of her own that's inevitable. And I'm aware most modern jobs are bullshite, they will not offer real advancement. Most careers today are dead-end for men and for women. But there's another thing altogether to acknowledge that explicitly and essentially for a couple or a woman to agree for her to give up, for which the husband is then subtly no doubt blamed as well as pressured in various ways.

This is not even covering the cases where, now assuming you can deal with all of that and find the right woman who sees reason as you believe it to be, but I'm not even covering the more frequent cases, the real danger in this lie actually, cases where as in Silicon Valley, you have enterprising women who are simply looking for a free ride, they actually in Silicon Valley they convinced these poor men to accept polyamory, which is really just a cuckold relationship because of course the husband is a nerdoid and has nothing to offer women aside from his salary and the wife can sleep around and the husband can't. But quite aside from that where similar naive men, Silicon Valley less likely but otherwise they're made to accept the trad thing and with this fake trad language to essentially

become a slave is what the deal is for the men in that case. to become a workhorse for a so-called stay-at-home housewife who's not even especially good at her job, and who can frankly stop doing her job any time she wishes. I mean, what will you do if she decides to watch TV instead or go out for half the day? Will you beat her up? What can you do exactly? She can call the cops on you regardless. This society does not, in fact, acknowledge your role as a paterfamili, as you can pretend all you want, but that's up to her, not up to you. I know men who work hard, then they come home and they have to cook dinner because their so-called stay-at-home trad wife is no good. She's a cunt, and they're essentially stuck with a retarded bitch, and their careers

and their lives suffer because their wives are essentially another extra big child, or in some cases they have to go to a mental asylum or a halfway house or such. The wife I'm saying, they have nervous breakdowns. It's an extra burden, but they selectively use fake traditionalist language to hide an avaricious and enterprising female strategy, I mean. So then this becomes another way to drain and to take advantage of trusting and delusional men. And the idea that trade can be something purely voluntary is just frankly absurd. The true traditional, if there was anything worthwhile in traditional ways of thinking, It's distrust of human nature, a distrust born from long experience with the lying, cheating, wicked animal that is man.

And the idea that you can rely on the goodwill of another, especially a woman, to form a thread or anything is a stupid lie. In a traditional society, a real traditional society, there are numerous legal tools to keep women from adultery, for example, including in many cases the absolute right of the husband to kill his wife if he finds her in the act. other such things, without even in cases where it doesn't go that far. It would mean social deaths for the woman, a financial ruination for a woman to be divorced in a traditional society. And today instead a woman whose play Acting a Trad Wife doesn't face any of those penalties. In an Amish situation or the other things you have in mind, these closed communities,

the haredi or whatever, even there in a modern society they have the ability simply to leave actually to move to another city, to start a new life without too much of a problem. But the reason they are somewhat more constrained in those cases is the world they've known since birth, their whole social milieu, all of their social relations, their relations with their parents and so forth, they're all dependent on their good standing and that would be hurt by divorce or by frivolous divorce. They'd have to give up the only social world, the only world they've ever known. That's a real disincentive. But one of these women who didn't grow up that way, who's not part of that society, who's play-acting the trad wife, puts on a flower skirt on Instagram or whatever, that's

not the same situation at all. She would have to give up nothing if she left you. And in fact, you would be the one who's blamed, called the good-for-nothing video game player or whatever. That's what goes on in these evangelical conservative societies run by women, by the way. So actually, the man has no leverage on the woman whatsoever in these cases. It's also the reason, by the way, that shaming so-called sluts online, the so-called referring to the shaming part, not to the sluts. Of course, the world is full of sluts, but trying to shame them online is stupid. You're not actually shaming them. The role of shaming is to have the shame bear real social costs in their lives. That happens in real traditional societies.

But when one of you misguided chimps out about some woman being a slut online, she's not actually shamed by that at all. Actually she gets accolades from her social circles for your seething at her. She gets to feel edgy or whatever. And you getting retweets or whatever from others like you does not in fact mean that you've shamed her or that you've made other girls who witnessed that change their behaviors. In fact, as I tell you, it adds a special spice to their behavior to know they're getting on your nerves. That's what you're missing. And, by the way, even in extremely strict societies, in ancient Greece and such, women still found ways to cheat. So what I mean is that it's very hard to control human behavior.

It requires a whole social legal edifice that has not existed for a long time. And it's unbelievable to me that knowing all this about people, that knowing the incredible social and legal constraints that had to be placed on medieval people, medieval people for example, and they still found ways to cheat. Today, it's conceivable to a conservative of all people who should have a more realistic view of human nature, that it's conceivable to him that a trad wife arrangement can be purely voluntary. I think that sheer lunacy, at most it's material for cynical media entrepreneurs that are trying to sell a branded image. I have tortilla, here's my trad wife, she has a pestle, a mortar and pestle, and she She grinds the garlic and she's grinding the blue corn just for you.

She doesn't work where a trad is this guy. I just can't take these smug lies anymore. Excuse, they attack my throat. And even the fact that I have to argue against the so-called trad family and trad wife delusion is embarrassing. These are things that haven't existed for well over a hundred years. We live in an apocalypse. You have to acknowledge, you have to acknowledge the fallenness of our situation and the pretense that you're going to reverse well over a century or actually 150 years of social and spiritual decay that you will pretend to reverse it with assertion and voluntary avowals of what is essentially a gay identity, a trans identity, that's what the trad identity is. And all this speaks to a pollution of discourse from the same usual pathic and kosher quarters

of the Daily Wire and the other right-wing religion cucks and the religion cuck think tanks and magazines. So from one side, you have the delusion, supposedly patriarchal, but because of its lack of factual and legal basis, it's actually a type of bandacious feminism that you can take women's rights away, supposedly, that you can confine them to domestic existence and have them play act a traditional wife, which almost no modern girl will actually accept, and she will rightly bristle against the majority of intelligent women will not accept this, and almost any woman who pretends to accept it is, in my view, a devious manipulator of naive men. On the other hand, you have Charlie Kirk, Lyman, whatever, and a horde of other influencers

on the right at the moment, especially, and it appears coordinated, just last night, Tommy Larren, some internet mud shark slut, Tommy Larren appeared on Laura Ingraham's show to say the same thing, that young men are worthless because they don't want hard jobs, they want to play computer games, they don't want to serve women. And that if you have any intellectual interests or if you own hobbies or relationships with male friends, that you are a betrayer of women and of your race. And so tell me who wants this. First of all, you wonder why this is actually not propaganda against having a family. How can you disincentivize young men not only from having a family but from having anything to do with the disaster that is the religious conservative movement?

That's what all these things I'm saying. They function that way, but more so, it continues the Left's war on intelligent men by another means. And again, whether it's coordinated or not, it's a sabotage, maybe even a self-sabotage, but it's something stupid and self-infectious on the Right at the moment, when in fact the Right could grasp the mantle of freedom and progress for itself from the Left. But it's the stupid party. It's always been the stupid party, always will be the party of stupid losers. Because of the degraded vision of life they own. Because it's the biotype of the old man who slams his cane on the floor screaming. And so you get the old man in the form of Tomi Lahren and these other people I've mentioned,

lecturing men to man up, you're not a real man unless you give up everything and become your wife's hero slave essentially. So their inability to speak to the desire of human greatness and longing for better things makes this whole thing dead on arrival. The left is bankrupt, but was fundamentally right about the conservative, unfortunately. And unless an alternative is offered, the left will be moribund only temporarily and will return soon enough as the party of youth if this is allowed to persist unchallenged. I think a lot of you feel flattered by hearing things you agree with. You don't see what a disaster someone like Matt Walsh, for example, is and the image he's promoting. The reason for their special hatred of me, the conservatives, half the conservative intellectual

biome populated by anger against Bronze Age pervert. I'm not talking about young people who are interested in conservatism or are anti-left, of course. I'm talking about the people in media and the think tanks and so on. The reason they hate me is despite my silly name and humorous disposition, I'm one of the sole voices of the progressive right that were suppressed after World War II. And I showed the lives of the Philistines and the Pharisees that populate the right, not only in America but now actually most of Europe and Japan as well, I think, because they're the influencers, so-called, and the political luminaries of those places are also chasing an American audience of clapping seals and they were invited to conferences and continue

to be the prostitutes of just different kinds of donors this time. So anyway, this was the context of my remarks on slavery. You need slavery, and by that, yes, I mean low-wage labor that someone cannot escape. For example, a Filipino low-wage laborer in Dubai, not to speak of Kuwait, is a slave. Anyone who denies that is another type of mendacious idiot. But if you want this particular type of person, the middle and upper classes, to have more more kids. The number one disincentive they rightly feel is that they would have to give up time, convenience, the few pleasures and entertainments they have still available in a quite constrained urban existence now, and also sabotage many of their career prospects.

And no, you're not going to get rid of that and talk them out of it among highly capable people. And yes, like it or not, a slave or servant class would work for this, but a Dubai My model may not be at all possible or desirable for other reasons. But don't fool yourself on what the alternatives are and what the options are that you have and don't have. Anyway, I will be right back. Dion of Syracuse, I will now only give you brief introduction, hope of whetting your appetite for unusual type of man, type you rarely saw even in antiquity. When I say Dion, that today is a black man's name, but it's not D-E-O-N, it's Dion, Dion like Dionysus, and he was born about 408 BC, so think about twenty years or so younger than Plato, born around the end of the Peloponnesian War.

The outlines of his life are simple, but many twists and happenings. Basically he was the brother-in-law of the tyrant of Syracuse, he ended up eventually overthrowing the tyrant's son, took control of Syracuse, but only for about a year. After this, he was himself assassinated in a conspiracy by one of his lieutenants in about 354 B.C., so at the age of whatever, 50-something. In the meantime, in exile, before he came back to take over Syracuse, he was associated Plato's school, the Academy, and while living abroad he maintained because of his estates in Sicily that he was allowed to keep the revenue from his holdings, his property in Sicily even while in exile. He was one of the richest men in the world, basically kept a princely court, kingly way of life while in exile.

And aside from this, his life was entirely occupied by court intrigue, scheming for revolution and finally civil war and assassination, it all sounds rousing, but actually so convoluted in a way it's uniform, it's just decades in and out of this, twists and turns, that for me to recount all the events ploddingly would be very boring. If you're interested in all the details, read Plutarch's own account of it, it will take you one afternoon, but his character is unusual. He lived at momentous time, Plutarch tells his tale and that of Brutus, the killer of Caesar together, he compares them because of their connection to Platonism. And in the case of Dion, he was Plato's actual student. And this episode is remembered central to Plato's own life, his famous misadventure in Sicily.

I will try now to refresh you some general history about this time. Dion being born in about 408 BC makes him about same age as Timoleon of Corinth. If you go back some episodes, I think episode 31 of Caribbean Rhythms, you can consider what I will talk now in this episode as the prequel of the Timoleon adventure. When Timoleon, a statesman from Corinth, he was sent by Greece to be the savior of Sicily, to save Sicily for the Greeks, to save it from utter destruction, basically from being overrun by the Carthaginians. And this time, let's say 410 BC to about 310 BC and a bit after, about 100 years or so when I think you can claim the future of the West stood in balance. But for two or three men, Alexander of course lived during this time, but I'm saying in

the West, in the Italian peninsula and Sicily, two or three men, Timoleon being the most important and the men leading Rome of course during this time but it's conceivable that Greek civilization could have been exterminated from southern Italy and it would have been replaced by Punic or Carthaginian civilization and if Rome had not survived the Celtic occupation that happened under Brennus I think that would have been it I mean there would have been maybe a modern world who knows but it would have been a Carthaginian or Phoenician in character Or entirely north european by a different route of events I don't know but the mole on in his campaign or crusade to revitalize sicily for the greeks in the

340s BC he brought with him tens of thousands of new settlers from the greek mother cities because of the destruction and depopulation That will follow the events that I'm about to talk to you now that Happened during the life of Dion and some years after and so to remind you in let's say 345 BC and after 343 BC, so maybe about a decade before the career of Alexander the Great and his conquests in the other direction began, Timoleon of Corinth basically did a blitzkrieg and a settlement of Sicily that had this island Sicily had fallen a complete ruin by that time. And why did Sicily get to that condition here again try give some background by about 405 BC or so so again think that's around the date of the end of the Peloponnesian War the

execution of Socrates and so on for a 404 BC I think the Greeks in southern Italy and Sicily were a very much real trouble they had been settling that area hundreds of years since the 700 BC it was called megalohalas magna greccia by the Romans, Greater Greece, not only because it represented a big territorial expansion of the Greek race, but especially great wealth. The earliest settlements were around the modern-day Naples. Of course, that's a Greek city, Neapolis, the new city. But Sicily soon after was settled by various Greek cities from the Greek mainland. Their colonies very soon became independent states in their own rights and hugely prosperous. Also a location of philosophy, the home of the Pythagoreans and the Iliatic school and of great athletic success too.

Many Olympic victors just from the city of Croton alone. This is a city in present-day Calabria, I think, like the bottom of the tip of the Italian boot. And this was also, I think, a home city of Pythagoras. Not like home birth city, but the place where he started his Pythagorean mission, his Pythagorean society of philosophers, his secret society. But it was, yes, it was not the only such center. It was a huge region, very rich cities, you know, the city Sybaris gave us words, Sybarite luxurious place. Southern Italy and Sicily, I mean, ruled generally by aristocratic arrangements, full of great wealth, a hope for, yes, again, philosophy, athletic achievements, and also military prowess. And some of the personages I will discuss made great advancements,

for example, in siege warfare and so on, that were later copied by others. But by 405 BC or so, So it was in very steep decline. On one hand, the Greeks had considerable pressure from the Lucanians. What are these? These are native Italians in southern Italy, speaking the Italian-Oscan language, the present-day inhabitants of Basilicata. This is like the soul of the Italian boot. They're still called Lucanians. So think like dirty, smelly, Tony Soprano-type apes squatting on Greek cities, and in many cases the Greek settlers by this time in that area had been harried and harassed to where they lived only in the Acropolis. In many cases even just they evacuated the cities and the cities they had founded centuries

before and they left and they had been taken over by now by Lucanian introgressors who spoke by this time both Lucanian and Greek. Meanwhile an even bigger and existential danger, Hannibal, the Carthaginian commander, not the Hannibal you know from later Roman campaigns and Roman times, but another one, Hannibal Mago, this time around 406 BC or so, but in revenge for the Greek victory over the Carthaginians some 70 years before at the Battle of Himera, this general now, due to the weakened state of the Greeks. He was able to go on a genocidal war of conquest in western Sicily and managed to capture, massacre several Greek cities, including Akragas, now it's known as Agrigento, which okay, look, just so you understand the scale, these were big commercial cities. Don't

think like, oh, cute, small Mediterranean sleepy fishing village. Syracuse in particular, which is center of the story in episode tonight, is not just a city, it's a mega city, megalopolis, like New York, I think, with five boroughs, or Tokyo, a collection of cities, with multiple huge extensions, and each having its own character and special history. And reading about this, even from Plutarch's brief accounts in, yes, the life of Dion and elsewhere, it's like reading about Rome or Constantinople. Each neighborhood is huge and a world in itself. Each has its own lore and history. The modern Agrigento, this is a city like southwest Italy, you can think, it's a small town, but ancient Acragas was maybe close to a million people and Syracuse was even bigger.

So okay, so the Carthaginians making huge gains, actually massacring or evicting depopulating Greek cities in the west of Sicily, and the refugees are streaming into Syracuse now, the main Greek city, which is located on the east coast of the island, and the Greeks in southern Italy are then pressed by the natives there. So in this situation there arises one Dionysus of Syracuse, Dionysus I, or the elder so-called military commander, seized the tyranny of Syracuse around 405 BC. So typical thing where he raised himself up from being chief military commander to tyrant of the city. He did it with the help of certain, I think, intellectuals. Philistus is actually a relatively famous historian who helped Dionysius I set up his rule over the city. And the reason

he was able to do this, according to Plutarch's account, or rather a reproach that was later given by his friend Dion, which I'll get to in a moment, his friend Dion, but it's because Because actually the Syracusans had had a very good experience with tyranny some decades before during the reign of one Gelon. This is the problem, by the way, if you sit down, read even Plutarch's story without context. There are a lot of names that seem to come out of nowhere and it confuses maybe even people who read ancient history. But the reign of Gelon, this is a tyrant of Syracuse some decades before, he's the one who had won the Battle of Himera in 480 BC against the Carthaginians, and that secured Greek dominance, so you can say, or safety in Sicily for the next few decades.

But they declined during those decades. But it was because of this emergency existential situation that the people of Syracuse raised up Dionysus the Elder, they had again a previous good experience with a dictatorial rule, they said we are in huge danger, they allowed him to become the looming threat of Carthaginian conquest is what allowed him to become supreme leader. And overall Dionysus reign which lasted from about 405 BC to 367 BC, it was very horrible reign. Burkhard mentions the only thing that can be said good for it was that without it Greek Greek and European civilization in Sicily would surely have been extinguished. So that's something, it's something very important indeed. But even so, it was dysfunctional in the sense that he had many chances during his rule to

deal a death blow to the Carthaginians on the island, and he purposefully did not want to do that. It would have meant the end of his state of emergency that gave legitimacy to his rule. And the other good or notable things you can maybe say he did, he invited philosophers and intellectuals, there's a funny footnote about this, he was an incredibly vain man himself, he wanted to be respected as a poet and as an intellectual in his own right, I'll talk about that later, but some of the intellectuals he invited, among one of them was Plato, on which, yes, more in the moment, but also Pythagoreans, historians and others, he was also an aggressive expansionist. So you think Syracuse, and you think, oh, it's a tyrant of just this small city Syracuse

with its local despot, but he was imperial and aggressive. In fact, he founded colonies, expanded all over the Adriatic Sea especially. For example, Ancona in Italy and Greece and Hvar in Croatia, these were founded by Dionysius the Elder. But in his rule at home, okay, it's here that things are quite interesting because his rule Paul is maybe the first tyranny I know of to have many features of modern totalitarianism. He was not the ancient type of kind of super charismatic democratic tyrant and lover of pleasure. He was a paranoid, suspicious, scheming man. And later when the tyranny in Syracuse briefly fell, Plutarch mentions that the people fell upon the agents of the tyrant. He had agents, it was basically a Stasi system, a broad network of other, not citizens, but

subjects, other inhabitants of the city of Syracuse who in secret informed on the rest of the population on what their neighbors said and thought. So there was basically speech and thought police in the modern totalitarian sense. He also made everyone, including his family members, get naked in front of his guards and be closed every time they came to see him and talk. It was seen as a special honor when he allowed his friend Dion, or later he allowed Plato I think, not to have to go through this, you know, getting nude in front, maybe not in front of him, but in front of his guards, you know, he was so paranoid, he basically even cloistered his own son, Dionysus II, also named Dionysus, kept him uneducated and

hidden in a palace because he did not want any hint of possible challenge, possible competition. So he's much less like a charming mafia don type, which was the usual type of the ancient tyrant, flashy type, man of the people, and more like what we are familiar with, more like a Stalin or such, or a North Korean tyrant, more like that. And it's interesting that this state, Syracuse, and this man of all men of that time, who Plato chose to associate with. Plato made no less than three attempts to transplant himself to Syracuse. And just so you understand the magnitude of the stakes involved in the story I'm telling you, I'm going to read for you a very beautiful passage from Nietzsche on Plato's Sicilian adventures.

And what this meant, I'm reading for you this, I think, very important passage from Nietzsche. The evil principle. Plato describes splendidly how, in the midst of every existing society, the philosophical thinker has to be considered the paragon of all infamy. For as critic of all morals, he is the antithesis of the moral person, and if he doesn't manage to become the legislator of new morals, he remains in the memory of the people as the evil principle. From this perspective we may gather why the rather liberal and reform-minded city of Athens played rough with Plato's reputation during his lifetime. Is it any wonder that he, who as he himself says, had the political drive in his blood, made three attempts to settle in Sicily at precisely the time when a Pan-Hellenic Mediterranean

city appeared to be in the offing? In this city and with its help, Plato hoped to do for the Greeks what Mohammed later did for the Arabs, to lay down the large and small customs and especially the daily way of life for everyone. These ideas were possible, just as surely as Mohammed's were possible. After all, much more unbelievable ideas, those of Christianity, have been proven possible. A couple of accidents fewer, a couple of different accidents more, and the world would have lived through the platonization of the European South. And supposing this state were still in place, then we would presumably revere Plato as the good principle. But success eluded him, and he was left with the reputation of being a fantasist and utopian.

The more severe names were destroyed along with ancient Athens. So yes, you like this. Syracuse, basically like America being a pan-European project, was a pan-Hellenic Mediterranean city. Look, I need to take a break for Cohiber Smoke. You think about me doing Cohiber Smoke. I'll be right back. Yes, I'm back and I was wearing a short bathrobe on balcony and nothing underneath and as I live on a party street I think maybe the people at bars other such downstairs Could look up my bathrobe. How do you think they feel about that? And what do you think their experience was? Anyway, yes Greater Greece a pan-hellenic project as America pan-european project and And Plato sought it out as the fertile ground of his new religion, a new order.

Which is, I do think if he had succeeded, the world might look quite different to date. But he did not for reasons Nietzsche elsewhere also explains in a beautiful way. Neither he nor the Pythagoreans, who had similar ambitions, neither could impose themselves as prophets united Greek race under a united religion, or united customs, because simply the Greek race was not united. It was too diverse in the types of individuals it encompassed. Each of these individuals was too egotistical to tolerate the foundation of such a monolithic religious structure. Same as the Renaissance Italians after them, their main strength and also their weakness was their enormous egoism and individualism, where in the life of Dion, which I'm about

briefly recount for you, as a prototype for what the Greek character was, it's everyone betraying everyone. It's just constant political pummels, constant revolutions, wars, every prominent man basically who thought that he could get away with it vying for preeminence, for actually seizing power in his state, or even finding other states for adventures when he couldn't at home. And by that you understand the low nature of modern men who can't, who don't have these lives of freedom and power, who are forced to lie about what they want, even to themselves, who are, don't get this wrong, there's a lot of talk now about slave morality and being altruistic or turning the other cheek, that's not what, the point is not that the slave is self-effacing

out of altruism, but that he has a circuitous and subterranean mendacious root of pursuing his self-interest, and the low self-interest of moderns, where they seek mere comfort, as in the Lockean English style, or whereas the men and women of our time, who are backstabbing wretches, who, you know, I'll try backstab him for an academic position, or for an interior design position, or for a couple of styles, you know, this is the horizon of their ambitions, such low people, Anthony Wiener or Chuck Schumer or such, who they would consider the healthy instincts of ancient Greek youth seeking to overtake his state. They would consider that delusional or megalomaniacal or pathological, or take any of the sub-humans

who are in charge of the bureaucracy of the EU – I'm sorry, but they are this kind of dead-eyed, smug – and I mean that their drives are no less selfish, but the limits of their self and their vision is much more constrained, and it's all second-rate desires. You should seek, of course, to overtake your state or have equivalent desires and greatness to that. But anyway, yes, that's Nietzsche's passage on the Platonic venture to Sicily. But for Plato's own words, let me read briefly from his famous seventh letter, and this letter we more or less know the exact year it was written because it happened right after his His friend Dion was assassinated, and while his successor, Callippus, Dion's successor, I mean, who was also a student and friend of Plato's, but a huge traitor, while he was

still in power in Syracuse, and that only lasted a very brief while. So this letter is from like 354, 353 BC, okay? And I'll read you only the most famous parts, and also the ones that kind of refer to his relationship to Dion, the origin of the relationship and his assessment of Dion. And I'm not reading the whole letter, you can find that yourself online, but just again some notable relevant passages and I'll jump around a bit. I'm reading this is from Plato now. In the days of my youth, and by the way, by the way, just quickly, this letter is sometimes said by pedantic scholars like his other letters to not be real, to be spurious. I think it's real and it has advantage, it's only you hear Plato talk in his own voice here. Elsewhere he's not talking in his own voice anywhere.

It's only in the matter of a stage play through he speaks through characters. So you have to figure out his meaning. But here it's in his own voice, you know, as himself. I read now. In the days of my youth, my experience was the same as that of many others. I thought that as soon as I should become my own master, I would immediately enter into political life. But it so happened I found that the following changes occurred in the political situation. In the government then existing, reviled as it was by many, a revolution took place. And the revolution was headed by fifty-one leaders, of whom eleven were in the city and ten in the Piraeus, each of these sections dealing with the market and with all the municipal

matters requiring management, and thirty were established as irresponsible rulers of all. He means the thirty tyrants, and by irresponsible he means, well, what we mean, but also that they were responsible to no one and beyond the law, the thirty tyrants. I keep on reading now. Now of these some were actually connections and acquaintances of mine. Indeed some were his close friends, others were his relatives. I keep going. Of these some were actually connections and acquaintances of mine. And indeed they invited me at once to join their administration, thinking it would be congenial. The feelings I then experienced owing to my youth were in no way surprising. For I imagined that they would administer the state by leading it out of an unjust way of life into a just way.

And consequently I gave my mind to them very diligently to see what they would do. And indeed I saw how these men within a short time caused men to look back on the former government as a golden age. That's, I interject again, that's a very famous passage in any letter, in any literature. When he's saying he was interested in this government that was overturning the democracy that everyone had recognized was a miserable form of government, it had brought disaster to Athens and defeat, and he had high hopes that these men, his friends would pursue justice, But what happened was they made the previous very bad government seem to be a golden age. Does this sound familiar? Anyway, I keep going. And above all, how they treated my good friend, my aged friend, Socrates, consequently, although

at first I was filled with an ardent desire to engage in public affairs, when I considered all this and I saw how things were shifting about anyhow in all directions, I finally became busy. I jumped a little bit in the letter from the Socrates. So he's saying how he became disillusioned with public life. And although I continued to consider by what means some betterment could be brought about not only in these matters, but also in the government as a whole, yet as regards political action I kept constantly waiting for an opportune moment, until finally, looking at all the states which now exist, I perceived that one and all they are badly governed, for the state of their laws is such as to be almost incurable without some marvellous overhauling and good luck to boot.

So in my praise of the right philosophy I was compelled to declare that by it one is enabled to discern all forms of justice both political and individual. Wherefore the classes of mankind I said will have no cessation from evils until either the class of those who are right and true philosophers attains political supremacy or Or else the class of those who hold power in the state becomes, by some dispensation of heaven, really philosophic. This was the view I held when I came to Italy and Sicily at the time of my first arrival. And when I came I was in no wise pleased at all with the blissful life, in quotation mark. He's using a phrase common in Sicily at the time to refer, the aristocrats used this phrase to refer to their life, the good life, the blissful life.

And when I came to Sicily I was not at all pleased with the Blissful Life, as it was there called, full as it is with Italian and Syracusan banqueting, for thus one existence is spent engorging food twice a day and never sleeping alone at night, and all the practices which accompany this mode of living. For not a single man of all who lived beneath the heavens could ever become wise if these These were his practices from his youth, since none will be found to possess a nature so admirably compounded, nor would he ever be likely to become temperate, and the same may truly be said of all other forms of virtue. And no State would remain stable under laws of any kind if its citizens, while supposing that they ought to spend everywhere to excess, yet believe that they ought to cease from

all exertion, except feasting and drinking, and the vigorous pursuit of their amours." He's talking about the typical Sicilian, not just aristocrat but mainly then, interested only in partying and chasing girls and sex and so on. And anyway, he keeps going this way in the letter and he also tries to justify why he came to Sicily the first time he did. When Dion was actually only 20 years old and then also a second time implying quite clearly that he knew other men, Plato says he knew other men attributed bad reasons for his going to Sicily, calling him a tyrant's flatterer and many other such things. He doesn't say this outright in the letter, but it's implied. And if you go back to ancient slanders on Plato, you find very funny things regarding

this, coming not only from Epicurus and Epicureans, which I may have mentioned before, he called Plato Dionysio Colax, Dionysus the Tyrant's flatterer, but also, as Nietzsche reminds, an actor, a faker, a role player, a mise en scene master charlatan. But there were other words in the sense of coarser insults. For example, I'm reading now from an article called Plato's detractors in antiquity. I'm reading, apparently some of Plato's detractors had charged him with going to Syracuse only for the purpose of enjoying the advantages of living in luxurious surroundings, collecting munificent presents from the tyrant, and reveling in the sensuous pleasures of lavish entertainments. Diogenes of Sinope, for instance, is said to have observed Plato at a costly banquet eating olives.

How is it, he said, that you, the philosopher, who journeyed all the way to Sicily for the sake of these dishes, now when they are before you here in Athens, you do not enjoy them? According to Onetor, the author of an essay of whether a wise man should make money, Plato, who was generally said to be avaricious and extremely fond of money, received from Dionysus the fantastic sum of 80 talents. End quote. So you know, right, Thiel funded Plato, you know, same shite, nothing ever changes. The Victor Hansons in this case and the Neocons and the Straussians are right, in this regard, none of these things ever change. It's the same kind of rumor and this bullshite slander that even humble online humorists and posters like me get, you know, he got funded, Teal is secretly funded, 80 talents,

you know. As you can see from the part of the letter that I read for you from Plato, he was aware of such slander. He tried to go out of his way to condemn the loose living, the partying, and luxury of the Sicilian Greek way of life. And probably the truth was neither what he claimed, that he was merely out of duty to a friend and to give good laws to a state in trouble. Because let's face it, he got a letter from a 20-year-old inviting you across the sea in some random state. You know, no, he came because it was the most important state maybe of the time, you can say besides Athens, but maybe it was more important than Athens, an international panhellenic megalopolis. And probably he had prophetic ambitions such as Nietzsche describes, which the Pythagoreans

in the area who were somewhat allied to him, they also had similar ambitions and they probably invited him to come there also with some similar aspirations in mind of collaboration. But anyway, there's one interesting short paragraph in his letter where Plato talks about Dion's character and abilities, and I'll read that for you now. What then do I mean by saying that my arrival in Sicily on that occasion was the foundation of everything? When I associated with Dion, who was then a youth, instructing him verbally in what I believed was best for mankind, and counseling him to realize it in action, it seems that I was not aware that I was, in a way, unwittingly contriving for the future overthrow of the tyranny.

For Dion, in truth, being quick-witted, both in other respects and in grasping the arguments I then put forward, harken to me with a keenness and ardor that I have never yet found in any of the youth whom I have met." So now think about this for a moment. This letter is written in 353 BC, I think, right? So Plato saying Dion was the smartest, most devoted student he's ever had. I'm exaggerating a little. If you parse the words, you can claim he's saying Dion was especially quick-witted and understood everything Plato said, and he became maybe not the most smart, but the most devoted of any student he's ever had. But remember that by this time, Plato had met Aristotle and other such famous students, but he says this of Dion.

But that's for the overthrow of the tyranny in Syracuse, and it's the liberation of the city from dictatorship. It is, as Borchardt says in his book on the Greeks, it's a joke. It's a joke of an event, and it only exposed the Greeks' weakness on the island. Let me take another short break. I need more kohiba, more nicotine, more coffee, and I'll be right back. I'm back again, hello. But Jacob Borchardt has a very low opinion of Plato's misadventures with Dion. The liberation from tyranny was kind of a parody, a cruel joke. in trying to overthrow Dionysus the Younger and temporarily succeeding, Dion and Plato only managed to make a Greek situation in Sicily even worse. If it hadn't been for Timoleone's Crusades some ten years later, the course of history

could very well have been different in the West, with Greek presence disappearing around this time, the Carthaginians taking over, and who knows what would have happened with Rome. in the Italian peninsula now, regarding Plato's trips through Sicily. I forgot to mention one thing about Dionysus, the elder, okay? He was very fond of his own poetry. This is the tyrant, again, at the time when Plato first arrived in Sicily, he was exceedingly proud of his poetry, he wanted to be admired as a writer, as a great mind, so he not only patronized historians like Philistus, Dionysus the tyrant of Syracuse now, but himself there are amusing anecdotes. He invited the famous composer of Dithy Rams at his court to admire

his verses. And when this famous poet refused to say that he likes Dionysus' poetry, he chimped, and he threw in labor camp of the mines, you see. And then the story goes that the famous poet's friends, you know, this guy Dionysus invited and threw in jail, right? They interceded on his behalf, asked forgiveness, so he gave a pardon. Next night, he had to come to party time and the tyrant again began to present his verses, drunk. And when the famous poet asked, you know, was asked what he thought this time, he said nothing. He just told the guards to take him back to the mines. It's a famous kind of funny anecdote, so you know it was this kind of guy, this guy dying nicest elder. And now just to transpose this for a moment to the modern world, think Kim

Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, or the Kims in North Korea, right? And one of them, like the current one, Jong-un, I think, he wants to make movies, okay? And they invite an intellectual writer from America. I mean, that might be fun, okay? Maybe you would do that. But okay, and also Also North Korea is an outcast small state, who cares now? Syracuse was not an outcast small state, it was the America of its time. Okay, so let's go with that. Suppose Trump become tyrant and it becomes what the left fears and so strong that he's able to install his son as a successor. And like sometime in the future, Wellerbeck gets an invitation from Trump brother-in-law or son-in-law, whatever, Kushner, right? Kushner invites, well, we love your writing and Trump is very interested in your thought,

come to America. And by the way, Trump has been writing movie scripts for the last 10 years and jailing the directors who didn't agree that he was a genius. And you're well back and you know these things and you come to America for what exactly is what I'm asking. And then Trump's son, when you get there, reveals that he has a crush on you and he tries to have a gay love affair with Wellerbeck because Dionysus the Younger, when he was a tyrant, he fell in love with Plato, according to Plutarch. Now, I know the analogy, it's comic because modern life is comic and pathetic and ancient men were surely better, they were more dignified or whatever this and that. I've said as much myself in the past, but they weren't that different in this sense

where if you're Plato and you know all these things about Dionysus and you go to Syracuse because his 20-year-old brother-in-law wrote you a letter, what exactly do you expect there? And all this nonsense that you're going to make the state better and you're going to teach this guy I've just been talking about, you're going to teach him philosophy, when you know that he's mentally ill and he runs basically a totalitarian state. I'm just saying this by way of elucidating the conceit of Plato's trips to Sicily and why he actually decided to go there in the first place. I think in fact Nietzsche has the most charitable interpretation. Of course it's also true and thankfully it's also interesting and exciting.

Now on this episode I haven't actually, you may have noticed, talked a lot about the details of the subject's life, of Dion's life, and that's because on one hand it's a very rousing story if it was shown to you in a miniseries on TV like Game of Thrones, but to actually list the events of it would be tedious because it's a rather uniform story of, yes, he happens to be the tyrant's young brother-in-law. He does well at court because of his intellect and advice. He's given special privileges by the tyrant. This is the origin of where Dion comes from. So he's given special privileges by the tyrant, his brother-in-law. And from then on, his whole life is just various types of court intrigue, betrayals, counter-traitors,

counter-conspiracies, finally exile and then at the return at the head of an army of exiles and Greek mercenaries, a year-long civil war. And that civil war is also characterized by factional intrigues, conspiracies, betrayals, Now you're in. Now you're out. So you know, if you watch Game of Normies, it's not bad TV, but if you had to list the events in Game of Thrones with all the names in a short essay or something, think how that would look. It would be insanely confusing and even boring. It's one of these things about, it's an unusual thing about human life that to be in the middle yourself to be in the middle of social and romance gossip and affairs for example that's the world of women and romance or to see it fleshed out in a

in a series like Gossip Girl or such that can be charming and insanely captivating some people would say there's nothing more captivating for for human beings than to be in the middle of that yourself or the male equivalent Game of Thrones or such which is modeled I think on court and war intrigues from medieval France but to read about it that when it's listed like a series of events and names without the full fleshing of the characters to read about these things the intrigues the betrayals of love and war and politics is is both confusing and boring so I highly recommend if you want that you read only Plutarch's account and even that's very dry for the reasons I just named but you certainly don't bother with something like Wikipedia that's

That's even more confusing than Plutarch on this. I mean, Dion's life, because again, it's all like, oh, suddenly there's this faction, this mercenary leader appears out of nowhere, and these mishaps happen during this battle, then he gets betrayed by this other faction you've never heard of, and this other leader appears. So with often people doing, you feel in Plutarch's account of Dion's life, also at other times in ancient Greek history, you've read it when just read someone like Diodorus Siculus or other historians telling similar tales you often feel this someone is suddenly described as doing you know evacuating a fortress in the middle of the night with no context it's kind of why did they do that it's not explained now if you had

an eight season miniseries about these happenings and you you you filled in the gaps and deduced why something historically happened. It would be interesting, it would be rousing even. The story is absolutely everything from social intrigues, romance, betrayal in love affairs, war, crazy philosophers and tyrants, betrayals right and left which are always fascinating, right, okay, now so that's the Greek way. By this time they're basically in the last period of their independence, the end of the classical era, and wasting each other in insane, selfish, internecine struggles. To summarize Dion's end, not his life, but just his end, I will read from Machiavelli about him. Machiavelli in his Discourses has this, actually it's an amazing chapter, book three, chapter six of the Discourses.

The Straussians make a lot of this chapter, I mean the best ones do. Anton loves it, Mansfield has some deep thoughts on this chapter, in fact it's the longest chapter I think in the discourses on conspiracies, and it ends with the example of Dion as something not to do. And here I will read, and here's the context. It's a very long chapter, I can't read all of it, but after recounting various things about conspiracies and that, toward the end of the chapter, Machiavelli is telling you about the dangers in trying to oppose a conspiracy if you're the leader of a state, let's say, and you uncover a conspiracy against yourself. that the conspiracy is strong, or you don't know if it's strong or not. One of the worst things you can do to preempt a conspiracy or a coup when you discover it

is to expose it by arresting one of its members without gauging its strength first, right? So is that how you pronounce gauging or gauging? I don't know. You put a gun to my head and I don't know, but that's one of the worst things you can do, right, what I just said now. I'm paraphrasing here, but obviously when you do that, it just precipitates the others to act quickly against you. And if you are not ready, you're dead. So having made roughly this point, now, Machiavelli continues to write, and I'm reading now from the discourses. When Guglielmo was commissioner in Val di Chiana in 1501 and had learned that there was a conspiracy in Arezzo in favor of the Vitelli to take that town away from the Florentines, he went at once to that city

and without thinking about the strength of the conspirators or about his own, and without preparing himself any force. With the counsel of his son, the bishop, he had one of the conspirators taken. After his taking, the others at once took arms and took away the town from the Florentines, and from commissioner Guglielmo became prisoner. But when conspiracies are weak, they can and should be crushed without hesitation. Nor also to be annotated in any mode are two means that are used almost contrary to one another. The one by the Duke of Athens, staying before, who had one individual killed who made a conspiracy manifest to him to show that he believed he had the benevolence of Florentine citizens. The other, and here's where he talks about Dion, recommending you do not do this.

The other was used by Dion the Syracusan to try out the intent of anyone whom he had under suspicion. He consented that Callippus, in whom he trusted, make a show of making a conspiracy against him. these turned out badly, for the one took away spirit from the accusers and gave it to whoever wished to conspire. The other, in Dion's case, gave an easy way to his own death. Indeed, he was his own head of his conspiracy, as came to him by experience, because Callippus, being able to deal against Dion without hesitation, dealt so much that he took from him his state and his life." So basically, Dion had his friend Kallipus make a fake conspiracy every time he suspected someone like it was a white hat psychological operation, right, to uncover who his opponents were.

But his friend just used this opportunity, his friend Kallipus, to actually do a real conspiracy against him and depose him and assassinate. So if you also want to find Athenaeus' book, The Dape of Sophists, you look in Book 11 where he emphasizes that this usurper who himself became tyrant, Callippus, the assassin of Dione, Callippus was himself a student of Plato's and he's numbered in this book I just mentioned, the Dapenosophist, Callippus is numbered among a bunch of similarly criminal men of that time who followed Plato. Some of them tried to do very insane things, take over states, redistribute masters' wives to slaves and many such things. Well look, that's a topic for its own thing, for the future maybe.

But for Dion himself, his assassination in a conspiracy is entirely to be expected. Burkhart just casually remarks like, yes, of course, everything about Dion and the time he lived, it's entirely casual and by nature, right, it's just of course he was going to get assassinated in a conspiracy sooner or later. It's just interesting that he got assassinated essentially by himself, you know, his own as Machiavelli said, he ended up being the leader of his own conspiracy against him, you know, like a fake conspiracy that became a real one, you know, false flag that became a real one, you know, that was just in his case, he was also again, Plutarch is polite, and doesn't really put it this way. But Dion seems to have been actually extremely unpleasant men, at least to the people.

He was ostentatiously aristocratic, anti-democratic, because although he deposed what was then very unpopular tyranny of Dionysus' dynasty in Syracuse, in the convoluted story that Plutarch then tells during the Civil War, Dion gets sent off a number of times. This is during the Revolutionary Civil War that he himself starts. that he gets pushed out, ostracized, exiled a number of times, even during the middle of hostilities, by the popular faction of the Syracusans, who then end up calling him back again and again out of necessity. But he must have been seriously an unpleasant man in some ways for that to keep happening over and over. And there's this remark, I forget now if it's in Plutarch or in Plato's seventh letter,

Excuse me, but I'm so spacey lately, they are using the machine under the Federal Reserve in New York that I have mentioned a long time ago on this show and I don't think Trump has stopped the evil demonic engines that are being used to corrupt my mind. But anyway, in one of those texts, there's this bizarre remark either Plutarch or Plato make. Dion was apparently regularly writing to the Academy, to Plato's school in Greece, to explain how he did not like luxury and he didn't put value in great achievements like war, conquests, exploration or other such, but that he only put value in the modesty and purity of his personal private life, in his moderation, his abstentions from parties or whatever. And it's just, if you remember my episode on Phocion, I said then and I repeat now,

This is what is a very late civilization thing. You don't see Homeric heroes do that. In fact, they love partying. It's this kind of performative showy moralism to show you're a tough guy and you're not seduced by luxury like your peers and many other such. I think that just flies by many academic readers, especially heads, who don't see how bizarre that attitude is compared to the unassuming but more solid virtue of healthier, more primitive times. But it was a time of decline and corruption, and relatively speaking, I mean, look, compared to us, the 300s BC in ancient Greece was still the top, intellectually, artistically in terms of bare human quality, the biological and spiritual quality of these men and women too,

as also just their experiences of their own lives, the freedom they had, the excitement of a capable individual's life during even this time of Greek decline, our own time is is so far beneath theirs in every way. So I'm wary of making direct comparisons between different times and cultures for all kinds of reasons, such as these and others. I don't like at all when Victor Hansen, as I said, or others make comparison between the stories in Thucydides and political events in our own time. Not that I think it's impossible to do this, but you have to be very careful in how you make parallels. A very spurious comparison, for example, was made by people who many now call neo-cons. When Trump came about, they confused him for the ancient description of the tyrant.

There's basically nothing in common. And all they went with was a feeling they had, vibrations they felt based on a kind of New York Review of Books understanding of the text in question, a very cartoonish understanding of the tyrant figure to call Trump, of all people, a tyrant, and many such things. I think there may be functional similarities, fair to point out, between the Neocons and the episode of Dion and Plato, only in the following way. I have a suspicion, it's only a suspicion, I can't back it up with any articles or anything from that time, but I have a suspicion that the Neocons modeled themselves, whether consciously or not, as political actors in the world at large in roughly the same way that Plato related to Dion and Dionysus in Syracuse.

Now from the time, I mean, the early 2000s, you can find plenty of other comparisons. For example, the Sicilian expedition of Athens against Syracuse, which led to Athens losing the Peloponnesian War, and then many other historical analogies to antiquity were drawn in the early 2000s, not only by Victor Hansen, other two. I don't think Dion was ever really mentioned at all at that time. But I get a strong whiff of similarity in the following way, that such men imagined themselves as philosophers, I know that they do, they call themselves that, it's absurd, or possessing the drive to philosophy or something, or possessing at least the political moderation that comes from a philosophical education that supposedly equips them to be advisors

to states, advisor to the prince and this kind of thing is, I find it very pretentious but whatever. Second, they set themselves to fight against tyrants and tyranny. That was a very big thing among them, at least this is how they understand themselves. Liberate mankind from tyrants, they don't say dictator, they say tyrant. This is also heavily emphasized in Plutarch's Life of Dion, Dion as a liberator from tyranny. I referred also in Plato's seventh letter elsewhere in a similar way. Then there's another kind of similarity that these men chose all the time a proxy, one of their friends in foreign nations who they see as their man, their friend abroad, often their genuine friend, through who tyranny is to be overturned in such and such a country.

And you can think, for example, of Chalabi in Iraq in the case. If any of you remember him, look up Cholabi and his background and he is a kind of intellectual or others equivalent in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They have many other such proxies in mind in Iran. They call them philosophers, too. Quite a few other places, you know, where they're philosophers like us, you know, this kind of, Dion and Plato actually were philosophers. I don't want to, whereas these men today are just play acting and, you know, Cholabi, well, you know what he was. If you don't you can look him up, but it doesn't matter. I'm saying there's a functional similarity even if the actual content today's is living parodies of the ancient versions and in fact

I think kind of the consequences of this delusion were a little similar to the consequences of Plato and Dion's failed attempted liberation of Syracuse which again even a moderate conservative historian like Borchardt recognizes total joke actually their Their intervention in Sicily ended up making things much, much worse for the Greeks there. And in that case, I would only say with slight exaggeration that it put the future of Western civilization in question. Because if it had not been for the efforts of Timo Leon, who was himself a lucky, lucky accident of a man 10 years later, it's very possible that Greek civilization in Italy, southern Sicily and southern Italy would have been genocided by the Carthaginians.

And I'm not sure how history would have turned out after that, regarding Rome picking up the Greek cause and so on. Maybe it would have been the same or similar, maybe not. I don't know. Regardless, obviously Dionysus and his son were retarded tyrants. They actually fit the modern definition, whereas maybe you've been told by historians tyrants originally were not seen necessarily as bad things by the Greeks. They were often champions of the people and fondly remembered and good rulers. Galon in Syracuse itself some hundred years before and then others in mainland Greece and so on, Periander of Corinth, some were well-remembered. Even Peisistratus in Athens was relatively well-remembered by the people.

But these ones, the Dionysus dynasty in Sicily, were retarded tyrants, hated eventually by all of them. But retarded tyrants may be appropriate for a corrupt people, and it was obvious that as retarded and vicious as they were, them being in rule in Syracuse was preventing possibly much worse things, which actually did happen as a result of Dion's civil war and thereafter. And it's again a real almost divine accident that this man from Corinth appeared ten years later or so, as I tell you, I think a goddess sent him. The matter herself appeared to him in a dream, and he began his crusade to be the savior of the Greeks. But in all my criticism here, and by the way, I do think there's a man who wrote about Syracuse in the early 2000s.

I don't know if he wrote or understood about Dion himself, but Mark Lilla, if you look of Mark Lila, public intellectual, he has this phrase that he's famous for penning, the lure of Syracuse, which I have to say I haven't read Mark Lila on this, I have no interest in reading, he's just a pedestrian libtard, but you can guess what he meant. He meant the lure or temptation for intellectuals to meddle in politics, often with bad results, due maybe to retard application of autistic ideas or ideology, trying to misapply theoretical knowledge and practical life, which is a common thing in the 20th century, of course. I didn't read him on this, I don't know the details. My point about this is slightly different, it's not about the entry of intellectuals

into politics as such or theory into practice, but that this episode of Dion and his friendship with Plato I think was maybe unspoken model even in its particulars, I mean, for some of the people now called neo-cons. So I don't mean, you know, you shouldn't see this, by the way, only as criticism of the neo-cons. I've attacked them for many years and so on. Maybe you should even see what I'm saying now as some level of praise, because to have set yourself such a model as Dion and his friendship with Plato, and this thing of we will overthrow tyranny and so on, or vice versa, having Plato in mind and his friendship with Dion, as absurd a conceit as that may be, call it vain, call it what you want. At least it's something. It's a bit interesting.

It's a bit of an exciting vision that stands out, I think, head and shoulders above what passes for the right wing or conservatism now. And I'm not talking about just online what are called engagement farming, slop account, posting retard version of what my friends and I used to post in forums years ago. But even especially the so-called mainstream right is what I mean at the moment, the solitary names of Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein, Darryl Martyrmaid or whatever, Banania, all these other names I wish I didn't know. Why do I have to know them and their disputes with each other over complete stupid – I used to think the weekly standard and such things were shallow, that the Neocons had only a smattering joke of classical knowledge.

But to see their successors now, they are vulgar three times over and it's always the same one or two ideas every day turned about the same way. Every day, day in, day out, nothing changes. How can you not get sick of their commentary? And then the idiotic telephone game they've used to take good points sometimes from 2015 turned them into ignorant self-parodies in 2025. So I'm sorry. It used to be that our advantage, the online ride, the frogs, we were much smarter, better read, well-read in science also. We could talk about more things at a higher cultural level than the mainstream of conservatism. But now the supposed dissident right, at least what the first visitor to X or Twitter actually meets is actually far beneath someone like Bill Kristol even, I'm sorry to say.

And on this note, I'd like to emphasize the tawdry lie involved in trying to blame the neo-cons of this type for the Iraq war when I remember quite well that many of the so-called The populist stars now supported that war, you know, and other bad things as well. Ann Coulter, for example, quite late, a cheerleader I think even in 2008, 2009 for the Iraq war. Let's not get into her dinners with Mitch McConnell and other such into the first Trump administration. I am just tired of this fraud where conservatives and so-called populists now try to sweep under the rug their complicity in all the imbecile actions of that era, and to blame it exclusively on others, the things that happened under Bush, to try to pretend that they were hoodwinked

by Straussian neo-con Jedi mind tricks, it was not their fault, you know, tricknology, to blame it on these others only. So let me be polite and not name names beyond Ann Coulter, you know, but if you change their mind then in the meantime because you realize the folly of those ideas on your own or in response to events since or the disaster of the Abongo administration, that's fine if you actually change their mind but I get a strong feel that a lot of these people never had a mind to begin with. They're chasing a media market and an audience and then they're trying to play the sycophant and blame the mistakes that they shared exclusively on others. And this is the same shtetl behavior that you claim to dislike.

This is also where the Palestinians learn their lies and their wailing from, by the way, from the shtetl press. Anyway, that's just me. You see, I'm making friends every day. I make new friends on all sides. Let me not close this episode on that. I don't want to talk about current things. As a result of his Sicilian misadventure, Plato was later remembered as idealist and utopian, blamed for those things in a light way, but Nietzsche points out that there were much harsher names used against him at the time in Athens and elsewhere and that these have been forgotten. And I think what these harsher names, what he's referring to, it's not only coarse accusations that oh, he was going to Syracuse for the money or to enjoy luxury and parties or whatever,

but in particular two things, most directly, Plato as the emblem of the philosopher as as evil, the philosopher as the underminer of public morality and order, the questioner of morality, the philosopher as the ultimate criminal then, and therefore in league with the other ultimate criminal type, the tyrant who actually put criminal ideas into action, them being the only two men who live, you could call, the questioners of public morality. And then secondly and closely related, Nietzsche maybe later has in mind a peculiar swity insult of Plato, Dionysio Colax, meaning again two things, the flatterer of Dionysus, the tyrant of Syracuse, his courtier, but also an actor, an initiate of the stage, of drama, a drama queen faggot, in other words.

And in that insult, combined with the abortive attempt mentioned before, the attempt to be a prophet, I mean, the desire to found a new religion in the fundamental sense of a unity of custom, of law and belief for the people, to be a Mohammed for the Greeks, indeed a new international cosmopolitan religion for a Panhellenic world power. You have, I think here, in a nut, in a nut case, you have the germ of, in a nut case, the germ of an entirely new kind of history, of something that hadn't really been seen at all before. It's a prototype that the continuity of Judean religions followed very closely this prototype varying only through its inversion and bastardization of the bastardization of Platonism as a world religion I mean because here for the

first time at least in known history now look maybe around the same time as Buddha in the East in a different way but here for the first time the question becomes on future of mankind itself not just this or that people and so on but arguably you can say something like that existed before Zarathustra, Zoroaster Maybe it was this before, but regardless, here, historically clear and indisputable, it's a new level on which the spiritual struggle for the future takes place, where mankind becomes visible for first time as an object of political moral contention and ambition. And we live today in the embers of this project, started 2300 plus years ago by Plato and Sicily, I believe this. Even if it was an abortive start, but it's easier to see its meaning

in this attempt and in just the Platonic texts themselves. I don't know what will come out of the ashes of all this, there is still much possibility I think and remember Nietzsche who has come as our saviour and he died only 125 years ago and there are still interesting centuries ahead to see how the dynamite that he introduced into the human spirit, how this will evolve, what nuclear hydro explosions are going to come. Interesting, very interesting centuries I think, but very good. Until next time, BAP out.