I don't know where this idea that Strauss was someone whose influence was central to the neoconservative movement came from, but it is wrong. He wasn't even a big fan of liberal democracy. His main project was the study and analysis of political philosophy; it was as scholarly as it could get. Most of neoconservative foreign policy is either rooted in Israeli political realism or in the belief that liberalism represents the "end of history" and that any system opposed to liberalism is wrong and should therefore be removed.>Noble lieStrauss didn't invent this. The idea originated with Plato. Although Strauss was highly interested in Plato, he didn't invent the concept of the noble lie. Anyone can see the idea in the Republic itself without relying on any Straussian interpretation.>They were students of StraussNot all neoconservatives were students of Strauss, and they came from diverse intellectual backgrounds. Just because some of them attended some of his seminars doesn't mean Strauss was the main influence on neoconservatism. His influence on neoconservatism was small to nonexistent.Strauss was used as a scapegoat.
I know what Strauss is. And I know him the same way I know Adorno:He's a Jew terrified of annihiliation.The entire last 80 years of the behavior of Jews is the long shadow of the Holocaust. They have tried to engineer a world, a planet, that will never try to kill them again the way the Nazis tried to kill them in the 1940s.This explains everything about their behavior across all their industries.In film and television? Demonize the white man, make people of European descent look inferior and needing the help of other races, including black people.In politics? Support Israel at all costs, and support the destruction of majority-white countries in Europe and the Americas, through the importation of millions of non-white, non-European folk.In religion? Neuter all critics of the Jews, most especially the Catholic Church.In philosophy? Discredit all consequentialist thought, which could lead to the most destructive of actions. Hence the poststructuralists.I SEE THEM. I see it all for what it is. It's Jews terrified they'll be butchered again, so they have to destroy their would-be butchers at all costs through their methods of thought, cunning, guile, and deceit.And all well and good for them. But I'm not a Jew, so I don't take kindly to it.
>>25527366Back to pol
>>25527357>I don't know where this idea that Strauss was someone whose influence was central to the neoconservative movement came frohes jewish and neo-conservatism is jewish and Israel coded from its beginning.Thats it.Same reason Bob Dylan got a nobel prize is because jews pretend mediocre jews are worth putting on a pedestal. They are like blacks in that way
>>25527357The whole post 911 spread liberal capitalism to all corners of the globe drive under the Bush admin and neocons was entirely Kojevian.
>>25527366You havent read a single word of Strauss, you typical illiterate troll. Strauss was a Greekophile, a champion of the Western classics and critic of modernity for what it changed in the mind, philosophy, and culture of civilization.
>>25527366This is wrong as I'm sure some /lit/troons will point out, but it's important that you and many others believe this because it advances our cause. Keep spreading the word!
Is every philosophy thread just people making shit up or just regurgitating a secondary source without engaging with the original text and hoping that no one knows what they're talking about and won't call them out on it
>>25527357>I don't know where this idea that Strauss was someone whose influence was central to the neoconservative movement came from,>>25527462>Strauss was a GreekophileThe neocons have always been big classicists opposed to moral relativism. This get their views from classical political philosophy like Plato and Aristotle which they think will lead to virtue rather than from Christian theology like the Religious Right does, but the neocons can latch onto religion to enforce the social order. You wonder what this has to do with supporting Israel or having a militaristic foreign policy, but you often hear them dooming that Western civilization will fall prey to barbarians if it doesn't get over its cultural crisis that results from relativism and Westerners being unable to say that their civilization is superior and worth defending. Anyways a lot of the philosophy stuff people focus on with Strauss is his argument that modern relativism undermines the idea of objective moral truth and a knowable standard of justice rooted in human nature.
>>25527600Yes. This board is irredeemably bad.
Surprised to see a Strauss thread with more than one anon defending him. Nice to see.>>25527357>His influence on neoconservatism was small to nonexistent.I wouldn't go that far, but you are right that his concrete influence needs to be qualified. Irving Kristol was very interested in Persecution and the Art of Writing, and his son Bill studied under Mansfield. Now, that all said, there are three points worth noting in support of your (and my) case: that the more concrete figure behind Perle and Wolfowitz was another Jewish expat at UoC, Albert Wohlstetter, he was the more decisive figure w/r/t foreign policy (especially since, if morons like >>25527366 would bother to read Strauss instead of pretending to have, they'd discover that Strauss says very little of anything about foreign policy anywhere, even in the lecture transcripts, and when he does, he's closer to isolationism and skeptical that military ventures will effectively accomplish regime change without stirring up worse consequences); the other figure with a concrete felt effect on neocon policy, as you point out, is Kojeve, through Fukuyama, and Strauss explicitly opposes Kojeve's views; finally, from reading Tyson Greer's writings on the Iraq war, the neocon claims only really started to be promoted by Bush II in the lead up to his second term, Rumsfeld was disinterested in regime change in favor of shock and awe, and the Bush II cabinet only turned to neocon messaging when it became clear that neither shock and awe was accomplishing what we hoped, nor that anything was going to be found to justify their claims that Iraq was tied to 9/11 and that they had yellowcake uranium. And, regarding that messaging, liberal reporters bought it totally, instead of seeing it for what it was, a cynical excuse to justify themselves after stupidly leaping into a quagmire.
>25527366>twitter grifter spacing designed to make you complacent and hypnotized
>>25527692>The neocons have always been big classicists opposed to moral relativism.Two points. You don't have to be a classicist to be opposed to moral relativism, Burkean conservatism still informed with a paradoxical relativism toward cultures and traditions regardless if they broke with the ancients. Second, uh, who, exactly? Bill Kristol and Kagan, and that's it? Do you know what concrete power and say they had over Bush II beyond being cheerleaders in WSJ editorials?>Anyways a lot of the philosophy stuff people focus on with Strauss is his argument that modern relativism undermines the idea of objective moral truth and a knowable standard of justice rooted in human nature.No, undermines the idea of any truths or standards at all. Strauss came across as a moralist to idiots like Mises and Seattle liberals who don't think anything anyone does matters on a selective basis, but Strauss doesn't prove or even try to set out proving the existence of objective justice, because philosophy for him is fundamentally investigative, Natural Right and History is an inquiry for the sake of philosophizing, not settling everything for all time. And that's a very out of date view of what makes him philosophically interesting, the past thirty years have been a turn more to the Theological-Political Problem, noetic heteregeneity, and the status of nature.
I've read that Thiel's thinking is heavily informed by Strauss. Not familiar enough with Strauss to know how accurate this is
>>25527771He wrote an essay decades ago called The Straussian Moment, but the schtick is he compares Strauss with Renee Girard and comes out siding with Girard, so I imagine his position has been exaggarated over time by people learning the title of the essay and never reading it. >>25527600 is always true.
>>25527366Did you just come to us from 2016? Jeez.
>>25527366>The entire last 80 years of the behavior of Jews is the long shadow of the Holocaust. They have tried to engineer a world, a planet, that will never try to kill them again the way the Nazis tried to kill them in the 1940s.eveey single person on the entire planet knows that it didnt happen and they deserve it. that understanding didnt exist even 10 years ago, but thats how insufferable theyve been
>>25527357>Strauss didn't invent this. The idea originated with Plato.It didn't actually, Plato got it from Socrates. And Socrates got it from a plum seller who used white lies to sell overgrown plums. It is crucial we trace the idea's actual lineage because uhhh welll hmmmm errrr.... it isn't, it was always futile, stfu, I genuinely loathe people tracing every fart to whatever piece of paper we find about it first
>>25527893Are you having a stroke? OP's pointing to the Noble Lie in Plato's Republic because barely anyone who criticizes Strauss for the imagined view that he promulgates Noble Lies bats a eye at the Republic, where it's explicit and out in the open.
>>25527934Yes I am.
>>25527366/pol/tard tourist gtfo
>>25527357>political philosophy; it was as scholarly as it could getPolitical philosophy is not scholarly
You are a fool.The Straussian cabal is real and very evil and has been controlling American politics since the Nixon era.Strauss taught that political elites should see themselves as philosopher kings and lie to the vulgar masses of people in order to keep the masses in-check so they don't overthrow the ruling intellectual elites. When philosophers aren’t ruling overtly, they should rule covertly. He HATED ordinary people.He also formed groyper-style cults of his students, whom he taught rabbinical-style. Neocons like Irving and Bill Kristol were die-hard followers of Strauss and sought to implement his thought any way they could.Paul Wolfowitz was a student of Strauss who was one of the primary architects of the Iraq War and 9/11 false flag. Look up the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the PNAC call for a "new Pearl Harbor."Neoconservatism is an expression of Jewish supremacy. Jews believe they are the "CHOSEN PEOPLE" and seek to preserve their ethnocentrism and tribalism against the universal brotherhood of man brought into the world by Christ. You can't separate these things.POWER OF NIGHTMAREShttps://youtube.com/watch?v=jxBbw13Y3GcNeocons are satanists and moral nihilists:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kEi5Mx6KfIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGVkNi3fcMwZionist Jew YouTuber: "Claiming Jews were behind Iraq War is 'BLOOD LIBEL.'"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUA2Sy3jAZE&t=6013s(1:40:13)>"oy vey goyim, let us lie and deceive the public and give us the oil and let us establish a rothschild bank"They aren't even making an effort to hide it anymore.Total neocon death.
Question: why did Strauss believe political philosophy was superior to all other forms of philosophy and shit?
>>25527357>>25527451>>25527462So what side did Strauss root for in the Hanukkah story?
>>25528901This retardation has been hashed out and addressed for years, but if you wanna keep swallowing down the sensationalist trash produced by the U.K.'s Michael Moore, have at it and enjoy, ruminant.>>25528923Lmao
>>25527473Agreed. Starts off by shutting the fuck up, anon.
>>25527366consequentialism is kind of gay though, deontology is where its at.
>>25528905See Aristotles Politics and Nicomanchean ethics: political science is the master science, the science meant to guide all other sciences to the greater good of the common good. It serves as the root to understand and anchor everything else.
>>25529145I’m jewish btw
>>25528905He didn't. He thinks metaphysics and philosophy of nature are more important. His emphasis on political philosophy is partly due to personal character quirks (when he went to UoC, he was placed in the political science department and respected that formal placement), and partly to recover the difference between Socratic and pre-Socratic philosophy, where the pre-Socratics just went for the gold without really accounting for the philosopher himself as someone both embedded in societal context and as someone questioning that context (e.g., rejecting poetic myths in favor of reasoning). Related to that is that the Socratic reorientation requires having to acknowledge the web of political opinions we're caught up in so that we can understand nature without too much distortion on account of our hopes and disappointments getting in the way.
>>25529232Here's how much of a barnyard animal you are. Did you ever bother to look at the PNAC report mentioned in the picrel of >>25528901? The line about Pearl Harbor? They're not talking about getting America to go to war, they're talking about a transformation in military defense capabilities and tech:In section 5, titled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force," the first paragraph lays out the subject under discussion:>To preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades, the Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts, and seek to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs. Information technologies, in particular, are becoming more prevalent and significant components of modern military systems. These information technologies are having the same kind of transforming effects on military affairs as they are having in the larger world. The effects of this military transformation will have profound implications for how wars are fought, what kinds of weapons will dominate the battlefield and, inevitably, which nations enjoy military preeminence. >The United States enjoys every prospect of leading THIS TRANSFORMATION. [Emphasis mine]And here's how they bring up Pearl Harbor on the next page:>Further, the process of transformation [I.E., OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF MILITARY CAPABILITIES], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. And if you bother to read the rest of the page, they outline *what transformations they're calling for*, which amounts to "global missle defense, control of space and cyberspace, and some loosey goosey talk about a two stage strategy for transitioning conventional forces to whatever new tech." *That's it*. Listen, they're retards, but only dumb ruminants such as yourself swallow down shit randos say on twitter without looking into it.Rumsfeld, one of the signers, also actively tried to sideline Wolfowitz during the first term, because he wasn't interested in regime change in either Afghanistan nor Iraq, btw.
>>25529145What does Adam Curtis get wrong?
>>25528901“Straussian cabal” is just “cultural Marxism” for liberals.
>>25528901> Neocons are satanists and moral nihilists:Holy shit, could you and Maupin get any more retarded?
>>25529432"Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything-all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny to battle the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke."First, Gunsmoke; this is clearly Rosen's recollection from being around Strauss just as often outside of courses and getting to know him personally, and a silly thing to assert. The most Gunsmoke or Perry Mason will ever appear is as a funny example related to whatever text he's going over, certainly never as an example of a "myth of the nation."Second, "Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything-all values, all moral truths" is wrong, though the following is partly right ("people were led by their own selfish desires"); Strauss isn't worried about people questioning anything, that's his own m.o.; to the extent he's worried about politics, he's concerned more about license in behavior that leads to both viciousness given a pass and a sensualist hedonism resulting in an unstable political regime or handing over power to tyrants so the orgies can continue.Third, "But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation." This is actual bullshit, and what's worse is that Curtis can make this look plausible because of Strauss's theses on exoteric writing, which can sound conspiratorial. But he never promotes the Noble Lie, and what's more, he doesn't discuss it anywhere near as much as one would expect based on reputation (if you look at the Plato’s Republic chapter of City and Man, it's more surprising how little is made of it). Additionally, the line on religion is simply wrong, Strauss, who I do think was an atheist, didn't buy that the Moderns had legitimately disproved revelation, he thought they handwaved it, and he was reticent to express anything like a dogmatic position for or against it at all.In the past 15 years, claims by people like Curtis (and Shadia Drury, who a lot of anti-Strauss people rely on) look even more ridiculous because both levture recordings and transcripts for two dozen full courses have been released, and we're getting his notebooks published, and they don't bear out any of these claims.
>>25527711An actually good post that didn't manage to get any interaction from the /pol/cards. Big surprise.
>>25529559Cheers, anon! I won't be shocked in the slightest if I only get schizoposts like >>25527366 and >>25528901 as responses. Ho hum.
>>25529519Okay what did Drury get wrong?
>>25527366You'd think all the books would scare away the retards from /lit/ but apperantly not.
>>25529362>unironically defending PNAC aka a think tank made up of some of the worst goons in Washington
>>25529432>>25529519Here you go, schizo:https://youtube.com/watch?v=5xztJH994y4
>>25529708>correcting a distortion of what pnac said means you're defending pnac, and not just defending good reasoning and looking at primary sources
>>25529683NTA, but all I remember from Drury’s book is an entire chapter of her rambling about natural law (as found in Aquinas) vs natural right and how the former is (allegedly) pro-freedom while the latter is authoritarian. Need someone to elaborate because it reeks of Christian/Catholic supremacy attacking Jews.
>>25529683Almost everything. If you read a quote in her books attributed to Strauss, and don't bother to look up her endnotes to check citations, she'll seem convincing--until you do exactly that, and check the citations, where she's prone to misquoting, distorting quotes (but cutting off all surrounding context), and confusing a thinker Strauss is summarizing the views of for his own position.She's so dumb that she went from trying to defend the mainstream analytic reading of Plato to writing a book against Plato and Socrates where she mistakes a student of the Lyceum who became a tyrant for one of Plato's students. Shadia is a shoddy scholar.
>>25529745What’s her agenda? No way in hell she’s this stupid and a tenured professor.
>>25529729Just re-glanced at that, and it's bad. She says Strauss understand that Aquinas distinguishes between natural and divine law, but I'm looking at Strauss's essay On Natural Law which she cites, and he does exactly that, distinguishing them as Aquinas does. I don't know what she thought she was reading, but the ability to read was wasted on her.
>>25529756Liberal progressive, teaches in Canada. Her "scholarly" works are all polemics against the political right as ahe understands them, but mostly just on Strauss and Straussians.
>>25529763Sounds like she’s deliberately distorting this stuff for an agenda.
>>25529763>She says Strauss understand that*doesn't understand that etc.
>>25529777That's what I think. What's weird is that she's very confused as a nominal progressive. She wants to harp on Strauss for what she perceives as his elitist views on religion...but whenever she talks about religion and religious believers, she veers very closely herself to her strawmanned version of Strauss? And her book on Plato culminates in a indignant defense of Homeric religion for reasons that seem totally baffling to me. Like existentialist reasons? It doesn't make any sense. At one point, this progressive liberal argues against the Socrates of the Symposium on behalf of Alcibiades so bizarre, that I just have to quote it:>Even though Socrates had complete mastery over himself, it does not follow that he treated others fairly. He was not fair to Alcibiades. We fail to recognize this because of our aversion to pederasty. If the relations involved were heterosexual, which is to say that if a woman had treated Alcibiades as Socrates had treated him, it would be obvious to us that she was leading him on, and that she was a selfish and self-absorbed tease.????? Really?
>>25529799Odd question, but has Jenny Strauss Clay ever responded to Drury’s smear campaign against her father? I’m certain she has.
>>25528901>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kEi5Mx6KfI >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGVkNi3fcMw>Caleb Maupin>a literal LaRouche plant
>>25529711I want to like Millerman, he seems okay enough a person, but even his defense here seems poor. What does the Noble Lie have to do with Socrates lying in the Apology about not studying natural philosophy? When Curtis et al accuse Strauss of promoting the Noble Lie, they seem to intend to mean national myths, and the Noble Lie from the Republic is about the city being autochthonic (i.e., they have a right to the land they're on) and that the citizens are all fraternally related through metal souls (even if the quality of the metals differ). But Socrates' lie (really more technical half-truth) is about his conduct, i.e., it's just an example of the practice of exoteric concealment. And it's about the Noble Lie that Strauss barely says anything.
>>25529814There was a letter I remember she'd published back during the Iraq war addressing the inuendos about him broadly, but I don't recall if she's ever said anything about Drury specifically.(Jenny's an interesting case of a scholar, for all the mainstream rejection of her adoptive father, she's pretty well accepted in classics, same with her passed away husband, Diskin Clay.)
>>25527357This jewish nigga is thermonuclearly based. Its a shame imperialist kikes hijacked his banner cuz he singlehandedly points the way to unfucking the west. We need to roundhouse kick technophiles and nihilistists into mass graves and find a way of hoodwinking libtards into RETVRNING to traditional culture.
>>25529821Did he actually claim Strauss was a moral nihilist in the first video? JFC this guy can’t be bothered to fucking read.
>>25527692I dont believe in objective moral truth but I do believe in general moral tendencies and the principle of signifigant enough force. New morals can be made, but there needs to be significant enough reason and potency to make them rather than them being entirely arbitrary and subjective.
>>25528901TBF, you have to admit ordinary people ARE hateable.
>>25529850Maupin recently wrote a whole book claiming neocons are secretly Trotskyists, which is ridiculous given that Irving Kristol was a trot for like a month and never seriously dedicated to Marxism of any kind. But he’s a propagandist first so yeah.
>He didn't apply the Straussian reading to Strauss
>>25529519>First, Gunsmoke; this is clearly Rosen's recollection from being around Strauss just as often outside of courses and getting to know him personally, and a silly thing to assert. The most Gunsmoke or Perry Mason will ever appear is as a funny example related to whatever text he's going over, certainly never as an example of a "myth of the nation."Yeah I think it’s weird how the Gunsmoke shit gets repeated so often. “Why teach the youngins complex political philosophy when you can simply tell them politics is simply an episode of Gunsmoke?”
>>25528901>”Jewish supremacist”Strauss was literally obsessed with Plato and Ancient Greece you mong; Jews and Greeks are opps. Calling him a “Jewish supremacist” makes zero fucking sense. It would be like calling a Vietnamese guy who’s obsessed with Medieval China a “Vietnamese supremacist”.
>>25530000>Jews and Greeks are oppsNot necessarily/>It would be like calling a Vietnamese guy who’s obsessed with Medieval China a “Vietnamese supremacist”.Good analogy.
>>25529776>liberal progressive lies through her teeth for academic cloutShocker, I say!
Am I the only one who thinks this novel is basically a dumbed-down kid version of Natural Right and History? Seems like the themes are virtually identical.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hb6vbpn1tWs>Peretti confirmed for Straussian cabal member
To provide some context for the thread instead of just people posting their hunches and gut feelings
>>25530438
>>25530152Peretti is too much of a moron to match Strauss' intellect in any way, shape, or form. So no. Evangelical slop will never be good.
>>25530438>>25530442Ah, I was wondering when someone would bring up Gottfried, as though he weren't just as guilty of slippery arguments and insinuations in the place of arguments.The question of the neocons is only of consequence because of their hand in the invasion of Afghanistan and war. And who are the figures of consequence here? Perle, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, Chalabi, Shulsky, Libby, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Kagan and Kristol are glorified cheerleaders. And of them, Perle, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, and Chalabi are all unified by...Albert Wohlstetter. Perle dated Wohlstetter's daughter in highschool and was introduced to Wolfowitz through Wohlstetter; Wolfowitz and Kalilzad both had their dissertations chaired by Wohlstetter; Perle and Chalabi were introduced to each other through Wohlstetter; Libby became a neocon via Wolfowitz through the introduction of the work of Wohlstetter; and Wohlstetter had a hand in the Wolfowitz doctrine of the 90s. The only substantively Straussian member of this group is Shulsky, Wolfowitz liked Bloom personally and didn't get much out of StraussThe only close points of contact between Rumsfeld & Cheney with Strauss/Straussians that aren't Wolfowitz and Shulsky are a gathering set up by Robert Goldwin in the 60s (Rumsfeld), and another Goldwin gathering with Herbert Storing in the 70s (Cheney). But non-Straussians were at both, unless Nelson Rockefeller and Thomas Sowell are both Straussians suddenly?The whole problem with Gottfried's vision is how myopic it is. He looks at the neocons and *only* sees Strauss and underdetermines any other possible sources of influence, like Morgenthau (an influence on Perle) and Wohlstetter; he thereby dances away from addressing neocons (or people with the reputation) who aren't Straussians, like Libby, Khalilzad, Chalabi, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Kagan; he ignores how many Straussians aren't neocons, like Bloom (who was a democrat), the Zuckerts, Benardete, Pangle, Bolotin, Bruell, Jaffa, Anastaplo, Galston, etc.; and through mere association, he can avoid addressing whether any of these people differed with Strauss on anything, as Kristol and Shulsky do, because he'll paint respect as full adherence. Dumb.
Odd question, but long ago (like REALLY long ago) I remember watching video snippets of a lecture by Strauss on YouTube. The lectures were from UChicago in the 1960s and the audio quality was obviously dogshit but I digress. In it, which I'm guessing was his intro course, he starts off by assigning Plato's Meno, which is interesting because that dialogue is all about the question of whether or not virtue can be taught. What would have been the reason why he started with that dialogue in particular?
>>25528901>He also formed groyper-style cults of his students, whom he taught rabbinical-style. What cult? You mean forming close relationships with his students and teaching them the great books through reading groups? That's just what we Jews do. We greatly admire our teachers in Jewish tradition and our teachers feel a strong sense of commitment to their students. There's nothing "culty" or nefarious about it. The sages of old did this (example: Rabbi Akiva). That's literally our culture.
>>25530608That was a straight up course on Meno, occasioned by his friend, Jacob Klein, publishing a commentary on it. Klein barely published anything, so I think Strauss was excited to see what Klein had been doing since his Greek mathematics book. Strauss, hilariously, ends up not very impressed with it, but expresses himself very politely. Very good course, can listen to or read the whole thing below.https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/plato-meno-spring-1966/>>25530617Weird defense. Strauss taught private "tutorials", which were (and still seem to be) apparently a norm from professors at UoC. Went over either Theages and/or Euthyphro with Benardete, Hegel's Logic with Gourevich (probably just Encyclopedia Logic), I forget if he did something on Spinoza with Rosen, but it was a professional thing, not a Jewish thing per se. The only private reading group I aware of was one on a few Aristophanes plays and some of Plato's shorter dialogues when he was a visiting professor to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the early 60s.
>>25530542Gottfried himself begins, in the very excerpts cited, by dismissing a detractor of the Straussians who is doing exactly the thing you are arguing against (as opposed to arguing against what Gottfried actually said or is doing in the excerpts).Nobody cares about the precise genealogical issues, really. The real issues are simple: Straussians are bad scholars and dishonest academics, first. Second, they have huge elective affinities and influence networks with neoconservatism by any honest definition of either, but I'd argue that neoconservatism is a less useful term than it was when Gottfried wrote the book. The Straussians are really guilty of two things at the ideological level, setting their bad scholarship aside: (1) badly falsifying American and European history to support American hegemony (founded on American interventionism + cronyist NGO "internationalism"), in a way that undermines American and European societies, and (2) being rampant Zionists. For many Straussians and Strauss himself, (1) was in service of (2). Straussians are not Strauss. Strauss was smart but monomanic and dishonest. Straussians are often simply stupid compared to Strauss, but wield a lot of influence. But both Strauss and Straussians have a broadly tripartite typology of modern societies: European societies, which should be "open" societies so they can safely host Jews; non-European societies, which should be forced either to become open so they are safe for Jews, or destroyed or destabilized so that they can't threaten societies where Jews live; and Israel, which is allowed to be a "closed" (ethnonationalist) society. Gottfried's point is that Strauss' scholarship is bad enough that while interesting, and worth reading, it simply doesn't withstand scrutiny; but Straussians don't believe in Strauss' ideas or conclusions because they were convinced by them at a scholarly level. They believe in them because they buy the Straussian "package" described above. It is a bizarre package that requires being a mixed liberal progressive (because this useful to Jews outside Israel) + American exceptionalist interventionist who psychotically hates Muslims and obsessively intervenes in Muslim nations (because this is useful to Jews in Israel). Not much of this is relevant since neoconservatism, Zionism, and Straussianism are all dying and declining in influence anyway. The moment their intertwining represented in history is over. Whether Robert Kagan said "I like Strauss" at Norman Podhoretz's bar mitzvah or whether Rumsfeld stroked a copy of Natural Right and History in secret meetings on Jekyll Island to plan the invasion of Iraq are less interesting than this fact.
>>25530617>That's literally our culture.
>>25529850>>25529888He's a LaRouche plant.
>>25530617>>25530628Harvey Mansfield talks about these late-night reading groups:https://youtu.be/t-gH7Waedtk?si=VgIAbn4PD2dki4df&t=430Literally kept students up to 1:30am reading Plato.
>>25530632Deal with it.
>>25530630>Gottfried himself begins, in the very excerpts cited, by dismissing a detractor of the Straussians who is doing exactly the thing you are arguing againstFirst off, no, they aren't doing the thing I argued against, their point is soundly with what I'm said, that getting the relations, extent of them, and actual shape on worldviews is important for praising or blaming. You skimmed me if you thought I was saying otherwise, Gottfried is arguing disingenuously by acting as if it wouldn't matter whether Perle and Wolfowitz actually understood Strauss or his other students or not, or as if it were irrelevant whether there were more decisive thinkers who inspired their thoughts insofar as they shaped neocon policy, but that's absolutely important. Second, Michael and Catherine Zuckert aren't detractors of Straussians, *they're both Straussians*. The rest of your arguments are all of a kind with this. There is no foreign policy teaching in Strauss, nor is there is any teaching about using Noble Lies for national myths. Not understanding the difference between a Noble [lit. Gennaios, "well-norn"] Lie and the exotericism thesis, you'll conflate them. And failing to find those in Strauss, you, like Gottfried, try to jump to Straussians, a group which you'll choose to broaden or narrow to include whoever best fits your cope, and when that fails too, you, like Gottfried again, will jump back to pointing at Strauss, motte and baileying all over the place. And the influence of Kojeve or Morgenthau or Wohlstetter? Magically beside the point, as though Strauss didn't completely oppose Kojeve, look down on Morgethau, and have no interest in Wohlstetter's technocrat shenanigans, just as most Straussians had little time for the three. But by god, you and Gottfried are going to have your cake and eat it instead of come back down to reality.
>>25530645>nor is there is any teaching about using Noble Lies for national myths.Who the fuck even started this rumour to begin with?Lemme guess... Shadia?
>>25530645But you said in your first post that Gottfried "looks at the neocons and *only* sees Strauss and underdetermines any other possible sources of influence," and now you are saying "Gottfried is arguing disingenuously by acting as if it wouldn't matter whether Perle and Wolfowitz actually understood Strauss or his other students or not, or as if it were irrelevant whether there were more decisive thinkers who inspired their thoughts insofar as they shaped neocon policy, but that's absolutely important." These don't seem to go well together. But I'm too lazy to go into it any more than I already have. I mostly posted the relevant Gottfried stuff and the other summary I gave because I want curious newbies to Strauss to be able to see all sides of the issue and judge for themselves. I doubt you and I will convince each other of anything. >you, like Gottfried>you and GottfriedGottfried is a paleocon who is deservedly bitter about the neocon takeover of the American right, both because it sidelined a real movement with far superior intellectuals and politicians (paleoconservatism) and because it was utterly disastrous for American society and foreign policy. I am the one who said that I don't even particularly care whether Straussians and neoconservatives went to each other's bar mitzvahs because at the end of the day they're merely aspects of a larger Zionist-Davocrat industrial complex that I don't like (and that is now dying a miserable death, thankfully). Again I don't care at all whether they worshipped a Strauss lingam at Skull and Bones meetings.
>>25530652It at least predates her in Myles Burnyeat's polemic in the mid 80s, Sphinx Without a Secret. His complaint was seeing some Straussians in the Reagan administration (Carnes Lord and Leon Kass, I think? Maybe he had Robert Goldwin in mind too). Before that, the usual take on Straussians from the early 60s to the late 70s was that they were merely perverse scholars who were blinded by their teacher.
>>25530641Amazing how Bill Kristol can just sit there, with that smug look on his face, casually running a YouTube channel, as if he wasn't one of the biggest proponents of one of the biggest human rights atrocities of the past 50 years (Iraq War).I'm not a conspiracy theorist so I'm not going to push the "PNAC DID 9/11" crap but FFS. A bunch of anarchists got 50+ years in federal prison for printing zines advocating the burning of ICE detention centres. Why the FUCK aren't Kristol, Wolfowitz, and the rest of them facing charges for having advocated for a bloody war?
>>25530656>These don't seem to go well together.They go together just fine, there's no contradiction between pointing out on the one hand that Gottfried underdetermines Neoconservatism and on the other hand makes the underdetermined cause only Strauss and Straussians, that's as far from "don't seem to go together well" as you can get. Clarence Thomas magically becomes a neocon because a clerk introduced him to Jaffa's writings and he appreciated them, but why are we ignoring that Jaffa's not a neocon and that he opposed the Iraq War? Gottfried is unserious, and for precisely the bitterness you note; it all comes down to marketing.
>>25530667I won't disagree with that. I like his guests, but he's such an egregious prick. He made himself look out of his mind on a panel with Douthat and Galston.
>>25530674Was that the time when he was crying? Morning Joe?
>>25530671There is a contradiction. You initially misidentified Strauss as doing precisely what he is saying should not be done. He is a serious critic of Drury and others like her, for reasons that are impossible to miss if you've read his (short) book, and even if you've read the excerpts you're replying to. When my reply mentioned this issue, you pivoted to saying Strauss does the opposite of what you were initially accusing him of doing. Possibly because you finally skimmed the excerpts. But then you misidentified a nonexistent attribution of non-Straussianism to the Zuckerts. In other words, you first shit on him for being a shallow Drury-esque Strauss genealogist, then shit on him for not being a diligent enough genealogist. These aren't STRICTLY contradictory in a logical sense, but anyone reading honestly would see you shifting around. And you are still doing it. Instead of using that top-secret Straussian "slow, close reading" technique (better: Nietzsche, Dawn, Preface §5), you are skimming and distorting so you can have a strawman to fight. Wait, distorting a text to find esoteric meanings that are the inverse of the exoteric stated meaning - I take it back, you are a true Straussian after all!But seriously: As I said, the ontology of Gottfried's intellectual-historical account is against simplistic Drurian genealogy and involves standard intellectual-historical concepts like discourses, networks, affinities, forms of influence more subtle than "Strauss spawned Strauss-Saibamen #3 and #4 in 1972," etc. He explicitly says this, in the very excerpts cited. Maybe if I say this "please read the excerpts" thing a certain number of times, you will sense a Straussian numerological pattern in it, and it will become interesting enough for you to take seriously. Again if you had read the short book you would know that Strauss spends a lot of time critiquing what you are doing as a typical Straussian tactic: force all criticism of Straussianism to appear as vulgar criticism, and then fight only the strawman. I won't bother replying to the circumstantial ad hominem. It's after midnight where I am, so like in those the fabled Strauss seminars let's read some Plato together: >"But what matter," said Charmides, "from whom I heard this?" "No matter at all," I replied; "for the point is not who said the words, but whether they are true or not."
>>25530152This whale woman's whining about her alleged religious trauma aside, from the sound of it, it seems like this novel is asking "who gets to determine what is real?" and whether or not the fact people disagree about justice proves there is no truth about justice. The "Academy" in the novel relies on instilling moral relativism in the students.If we think about the distinction between convention vs. nature, the "Academy" in the novel is obviously creating convention by altering the students' perception of reality, in an attempt to replace nature.
>>25530686>Again if you had read the short book you would know that Strauss spends a lot of time ...Typo, meant Gottfried of course.
>>25530687>something something something run nature out the door with a pitchfork something something
ITT: Claremont Institute shills
>>25530703Illiterate /pol/tards should stick to crying about jewish phantoms on rumble and kick streams.
>>25530703Explain
>>25530687Also:"There is no timeless truth; what we call truth and right emerge from historical circumstances." -- if you want to take this book seriously, the Academy in the novel is basically doing just this to an extreme end, trying to reconstruct a person's memories and perceptions so it can reconstruct his "history." And if his history determines his identity, the institution effectively determines who he is.
>>25530715If you have anything to say about Strauss that contains a deeper level of thinking than>>25527366 you're a shill to these people.
>>25530715>>25530720"Straussian cabal" comes up ever 2-3 years in American political discourse. At this point, it's all reheated nachos.
>>25530703What's wrong with the Claremont Institute?
>>25530641>In 1993, Mansfield testified on behalf of Colorado's Amendment 2, which amended the state constitution to prevent gays, lesbians and bisexuals from pursuing legal claims of discrimination. In his testimony, he argued that being gay "is not a life that makes for happiness," that homosexuality is "shameful," and that by not being able to have children gay people were not "socially responsible."Wut?
>>25530752Common Straussian W
>>25530763What the fuck was his reasoning though?
>>25529729QRD on the differences between natural law and natural right?
>>25530772Homosex is disgusting and hedonistic, and an affront to nature and human flourishing. It’s emptiness disguised as live, identical to adultery. Every homosexual and transgender is deeply depressed and living an unfulfilled life, and it shows.
>>25530831*disguised as love
>>25530728Kys, jewboy
https://voegelinview.com/the-inventive-wickedness-of-the-ultimate-tyranny-leo-strauss-vs-carl-schmitt/Enjoy.
>>25530675Post-2024 election analysis. Kristol is completely indignant, even Mansfield looks uncomfortable.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md7NXqpta7o>>25530686>You initially misidentified Gottfried as doing precisely what he is saying should not be done.There is no misidentification, it's his point to say "Straussians, and, a fortiori, their neoconservative pupils advance a claim to world dominance for a nation that they believe should guide the world," because for Gottfried there's a connection between "neocon policy advisors and the Straussian thinking they praise to the skies.">But then you misidentified a nonexistent attribution of non-Straussianism to the Zuckerts.*You* said:>Gottfried himself begins, in the very excerpts cited, by dismissing a detractor of the StraussiansAnd the people he's talking about from the beginning and throughout the first excerpt are the Zuckerts.>In other words, you first shit on him for being a shallow Drury-esque Strauss genealogist, then shit on him for not being a diligent enough genealogistNo, I shat on him for advancing his arguments dishonestly like Drury does, I never talked about how she genealogizes. I'd say you're making things up now, but that'd imply you were making things up in your first response.>But seriously: As I said, the ontology of Gottfried's intellectual-historical account is against simplistic Drurian genealogy and involves standard intellectual-historical concepts like discourses, networks, affinities, forms of influence more subtle than "Strauss spawned Strauss-Saibamen #3 and #4 in 1972," etc. He explicitly says this, in the very excerpts cited. Like how he points to Carnes Lord? He's a Straussian, therefore when he cites Teddy Roosevelt on foreign policy, it's because of his Straussian thinking (!?). That such a vision of America's role might be a point of difference between Lord and Strauss, a point of relative independence even, is treated as irrelevant; he's a Straussian, so everything he does comes back to Strauss's feet regardless.>Again if you had read the short book you would know that [Gottfried] spends a lot of time critiquing what you are doing as a typical Straussian tactic: force all criticism of Straussianism to appear as vulgar criticism, and then fight only the strawman.I've read Gottfried's book, and, while marginally better than Drury, it's stll poorly conceived. He attacks Strauss at one point for his understanding of Plato's religious views, and cites Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus, as though the Republic didn't deny the traditional understanding of the gods and the Phaedrus and Timaeus don't adjust the Olympians such as to not resemble their mythic and poetic depictions. (And Strauss's view is that Plato rejects revelation and advances a natural theology.)
>>25530772Presumably that was when "the lifestyle is a choice, not biology" could still be advanced as an argument without iffy science pretending otherwise.
>>25530728They’re Trumpers for one.
>>25530752Holy shit, based.
>>25529432>>25529519I’d also add that a leftist critique of The Power of Nightmares is how Curtis portrays the CIA as the “good cop” to the Straussians’ “bad cop”. He pretends the CIA was the voice of reason against the neoconservatives, which maybe to an extent it was, but at the same time it ignores the role of the CIA in both causing and shaping the very terror networks that the USA was accusing the Soviet Union of backing. If we’re talking sheer number of atrocities during the Cold War, the CIA was way worse than the neocons by far.
>>25531699Maybe, just maybe, you ought to analyse the mutual interpretation of contradictions of the opposed subjects that compose the cia as a synthetic subject
>>25530831>>25530833You certainly sound fun at parties.
>>25527366This is exactly right. You need to think of all jew thinkers as jews first and thinkers second. This is not the case 100% of the time (Heisman, Weininger, etc.), but its pretty damn close. It's hard to overstate how being hated by every society that has hosted them for the past 3000 years has mentally scarred jews on a genetic level, to the point of living in constant fear of exposure.
>>25531815None of these guys were “Jewish supremacists”, idiot.
>>25531827What the fuck are you talking about? The specific jews I referenced are examples of the rare exception from the rule. Learn to read, mongoloid.
>>25527366>>25531815People like this are trying their hardest to make me belive jews are right about the goyim.
>>25527366>>25528901Meds. Take them.
>>25529362I really, really hope you’re not denying Wolfowitz is a war criminal.
>>25530728They’re the ones behind Project 2025 along with the Heritage Foundation.
>>25531986Being a stickler for accuracy in quoting isn't defending Wolfowitz, who oughta be shot out of a canon with Kristol and Shulsky.
>>25531184Nobody in their right mind would read Gottfried as saying the Zuckerts are "detractors of Strauss," and no one who knows anything about this subject would think Gottfried could have said that and gotten it past his editors. I don't know why you are chasing this. Even if I made a grievous error, you still should not have assumed either I or Gottfried were talking about the Zuckerts. The explanation is simpler: The excerpt on neoconservative connections begins just after he finishes demolishing lazy critiques of the Straussians, and he continues to do so in the rest of the excerpt (Stern, Drury). Your Carnes Lord point is valid if we interpret your entire argument as: "Gottfried says 'don't do vulgar genealogy' but then he amounts to vulgar genealogy anyway." Let's leave aside the fact that you are far more obsessed with genealogies than he is (just in the opposite direction). The problem is, again, simple: Gottfried doesn't have to choose between doing EITHER genealogy or no genealogy. He is doing intellectual history. If you find he slipped a little into the vulgar side of things in his Lord attribution, well, that's fine. Like I said, I don't particularly care. We can describe Straussianism in Foucauldian archaeological terms for all I care. As long as people who might waste their time on it have reasonable evidence before them that it's retarded and bad. Gottfried is useful for that, for my purposes ITT. If those people read my posts, Gottfried, and your posts, and earnestly think "the Straussian seems correct: Awful Shit Neocon Policy Guy was more decisively influenced by Awful Shit Neocon Who Only Kind of Liked Strauss and not by Awful Shit Guy Who Really Liked Strauss and Agreed with Neocons on Everything," then they can go and waste their lives doing bad Plato eisegesis at one of the two departments where Straussians can still groom promising young classicists with conservative inclinations and ruin their careers. If they read me and Gottfried and think "so these Straussians are basically Cold War liberals who want American global hegemony so that they can, one, forever defend Israel, and two, keep the rest of the world a safe multicultural globalist shithole for Jews who don't want to go to Israel," then they will first of all be correct and second of all avoid wasting a lot of time. >He attacks Strauss at one point for his understanding of Plato's religious viewsSo does every Plato scholar outside of the shrinking, dying, retarded Strauss bubble. So do Donald and Robert Kagan (pic related): https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/posts/2006/02/i-am-not-a-straussian-at-least-i-dont-think-i-am
>>25531184Since you specifically cited part of the book which I am formally accusing you of not having read, here are the citations so that people can read for themselves whether it is truly "Strauss says Plato critiqued traditional Greek religion and Gottfried denies this!" Also, I can't believe I missed this: >(And Strauss's view is that Plato rejects revelation and advances a natural theology.)I really don't want to get into this fight with you because I have a feeling it will be very tedious. But I will say, this is not my reading of Strauss, not Gottfried's reading, and not the reading of anyone I've ever met, including many Straussians. "Natural theology" in what sense? Emphatically not in the sense of metaphysics, since Strauss and Straussians show zero interest in the Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics that would dominate Islamic and Christian civilization until the early modern period, and at the very outset of Natural Right and History, Strauss says that this entire system has been demolished by modern science (in so many words). In fact one of the huge criticisms usually leveled at Straussianism is that they claim Plato is critiquing religion, not just traditional religion but religion inclusive of mysticism and metaphysics even, but then the entire Old Academy that follows him is mystical and metaphysical even more schematically than he is, and then Middle and Neoplatonists uniformly read Plato exactly the opposite of how Strauss reads Plato, and their readings then form the intellectual and scientific backbone of occidental civilization for one and a half millennia. Gottfried himself alludes to this in pic related.
>>25532194>Nobody in their right mind would read Gottfried as saying the Zuckerts are "detractors of Strauss,"Then you weren't in your right mind when you described them exactly as that.>and no one who knows anything about this subject would think Gottfried could have said that and gotten it past his editors.I didn't claim that, but I took that as an example of your own understanding and sloppiness.>I don't know why you are chasing this. Even if I made a grievous error, you still should not have assumed either I or Gottfried were talking about the Zuckerts.This is the general quality of your case. You (again) said above,>Gottfried himself begins, in the very excerpts cited, by dismissing a detractor of the Straussianswhen the people he's addressing at the start and throughout in the excerpts are the Zuckerts, which turns into you claiming *I've* misidentified something, which now becomes "no one could've made that mistake, and even if I did, it doesn't matter," by a wave of the hands.>Your Carnes Lord point is valid if we interpret your entire argument as: "Gottfried says 'don't do vulgar genealogy' but then he amounts to vulgar genealogy anyway." Let's leave aside the fact that you are far more obsessed with genealogies than he is (just in the opposite direction). The problem is, again, simple: Gottfried doesn't have to choose between doing EITHER genealogy or no genealogy. He is doing intellectual history.This is specious. Gottfried finds it perfectly plausible to assert that association of any kind, whether deep or shallow, is enough to speak on the subject as a Straussian, which undercuts any assertion that he's doing serious intellectual history; for him, and for you, if Wolfowitz took courses with Strauss and Bloom, and did his dissertation with Wohlstetter and came into a circle largely defined by Wohlstetter, only the former is relevant, and Gottfried and you have every excuse to overlook the latter, as though the classics nerd who wrote and taught almost exclusively on the history of philosophy was more relevant for Wolfowitz writing a dissertation titled "Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East: The Politics and Economics of Proposals for Nuclear Desalting", and not the guy who wrote almost exclusively on modern military posturing and cold war foreign policy.>So does every Plato scholar outside of the shrinking, dying, retarded Strauss bubble. So do Donald and Robert Kagan Man, really got me by showing me what retards think. Bloom's argument (a repetition of Strauss) is that the Republic is ironical, not he "didn't really mean it," but that the city in speech overtly lacking in any possibility of coming into being. That's even what Socrates says to Glaucon in book 5 471c-473a and book 9 591d-592b, "the city is *possible*, but actually setting it up is improbable *and beside the whole point of what we're doing*, and you need to settle for 'setting up this city' in your soul instead."
>>25532249The greentext wars begin. This is why I said "I really don't want to get into this fight with you because I have a feeling it will be very tedious." Let me sum the whole thing up like this: let people make their own decisions by evaluating your claims about Gottfried's argument at the end of this post >>25531184 vs. what Gottfried actually says in the picture attached to >>25532228 Then they can evaluate, based on the charitability of your exegesis of Gottfried writing in plain English, whether your exegeses of Plato and geopolitics have made a good case for a Straussian education. That will save everybody the hideous greentext/blacktext alternation seizure. Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to go read one of the 99.999998% of Plato interpreters throughout history who have read him the opposite of the way Strauss reads him, while freely acknowledging that Strauss' monomanic emphasis on the zetetic reading helped me be a better hermeneut in a small but important way. If I run into any problems interpreting Proclus' metaphysics, I'll be sure to consult the many, many texts by Straussians on "natural theology" and its construction on the basis of relentless recursive zetesis.
>>25532228>Since you specifically cited part of the book which I am formally accusing you of not having read, here are the citations so that people can read for themselves whether it is truly "Strauss says Plato critiqued traditional Greek religion and Gottfried denies this!"I was talking about page 51, and the excerpt you're posting has Gottfried making errors about the Phaedrus: he claims there's two extemporized speeches by Phaedrus on what Lysias says, followed by Socrates' speech, when it's the other way around; Phaedrus pretends to be about extemporize Lysias' speech, which he's hiding in his cloak, Scrates calls him on it and they both read the scroll Phaedrus has, then Socrates gives two speeches, a shorter one premised on Lysias' subject, and a longer one departing from it. There is no argument in the mytho-poetic portion suggesting anything like Gottfried's "what a truly good person must believe about Zeus as the source of justice", justice is treated as a "hyperuranian" being independent of the gods, which the gods are constantly making circuits in flying chariots to catch glimpses of. Gottfried also seems to ignore that the whole back half of the Phaedrus is about rhetoric, where Socrates explains how to adjust speeches to different audiences ("giving speeches of many colors and embracing all harmonic modes to a many-colored soul and simple ones to a simple soul"), among other subjects. I note also that Gottfried has no citation to Strauss or any Straussian for what he imagines their reading of the Phaedrus to be.>But I will say, this is not my reading of Strauss, not Gottfried's reading, and not the reading of anyone I've ever met, including many Straussians. "Natural theology" in what sense? In the sense of a theology that can be discovered by reason, what other sense? That Strauss isn't loud about it doesn't mean it's not his position, but it's a theme of his last books on Xenophon and Plato's Laws, and the relatively recent publishing of his notebook on the Euthyphro bears it out. Bloom, Pangle (I think), and Meier are the ones who disagree here, but Bruell and Bolotin saw this as his position, as doing Svetozar Minkov and Hannes Kerber.>since Strauss and Straussians show zero interest in the Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics that would dominate Islamic and Christian civilization until the early modern periodThat's simply untrue, as way above in the thread, Strauss respected his department position at UoC and adherred to it, but at the New School he taught on Timaeus, Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, Descartes, and Bacon, and Benardete and Kennington were always interested in that, same with Bruell and Bolotin.
>>25532228>In fact one of the huge criticisms usually leveled at Straussianism is that they claim Plato is critiquing religion, not just traditional religion but religion inclusive of mysticism and metaphysics even, but then the entire Old Academy that follows him is mystical and metaphysical even more schematically than he is, and then Middle and Neoplatonists uniformly read Plato exactly the opposite of how Strauss reads Plato,Sure, I actually agree that the former is an unmerited assumption of some Straussians (Bloom and Pangle being the most guilty), and I think they depart from Strauss's more careful views on that point, and I agree the latter's a blindspot for a number of Straussians. But the Old Academy is largely invisible, Speusippus only inherited the position of scholarch as a relative of Plato, and Aristotle says weird things, like downplaying the philosopher-king in the Republic completely and taking the Athenian Stranger of the Laws to be Socrates. (And Numenius, an important source for Plotinus, takes the Euthyphro to be a critique on Athenian religion period.)
>>25532228>as opposed to informal accusationThe bourgeois intellectual.
>>25528901>Zionist Jew YouTuber: "Claiming Jews were behind Iraq War is 'BLOOD LIBEL.'"Technically it is. Blaming Strauss for any foreign policy fuckup by the neocons de facto counts as blood libel, especially given that Strauss never said a word about foreign policy.
>>25532358>>25532377Good posts, and I think as with many other things in the thread you're plenty right about particular details (in particular Gottfried's sloppiness) but missing the big picture I'm more interested in. As I made my last post I actually walked away from the thread thinking "wonder what he'll respond?" and answering myself with "he'll do that thing, at least once, that all Straussians do: 'you can't say Straussians ignore X because actually [list of eight relatively late and minor Straussians] talked about X." We both know that Straussianism is not primarily interested in metaphysics, in any meaningful sense of the term. Not in the way a Gerson is. We both know that Strauss is not interested in exploring the logic of emanationism, and that he would rather read Machiavelli and Hobbes than Ficino and Bruno. That's not itself a bad thing. So would Pocock and Skinner. I just think it's slightly disingenuous to say "Strauss was interested in Plato's natural theology," in the context in which you said this, when this term could equally mean euhemerism or emanationism with angelological characteristics. Clearly Strauss isn't drawing the line at Iamblichus and Pseudo-Dionysus "because they had scriptures," while still being as interested in Proclus as he was in Plato. There's no defending Gottfried's sloppiness on some of the issues of detail but I still think his main point stands just fine. Most paradigmatic, "classical" Straussians really can be caricatured fairly enough as undervaluing what the vast majority of interpreters of Plato, even textual internalists like Cherniss, would describe as Plato's metaphysics, in favour of endless zetesis. This is often enlightening - we can see that from Gottfried's sloppiness on the Phaedrus, and I admitted I've been influenced by it (more than you know) - but it is fair to call it a fringe view, and it is fair to call Strauss and Straussians relatively ahistorical in their method. I'm sure Strauss would not object if I said "he fails to live up to good historicist standards," but it is also the case that good historicist standards are normative for the various disciplines that study Plato today. The fact that Strauss taught something doesn't mean much. I've read many of his unpublished lectures front to back. He most often has a polemical approach. But I will admit I haven't read his lectures on the Timaeus et al. You and I have both clearly been in Straussian classes, I imagine with eminent Straussians on both sides. Can you really deny that some of those classes, however ingenious, were eisegetical? Whole classes on whole books of Plato in which the metaphysics is never touched, on my end. Or people at the end of an entire course saying "Um, what about the metaphysics though?" and being told they missed the whole point - the point being as always: zetesis, zetesis, zetesis.
Continuing from >>25532609You and I have both clearly been in Straussian classes, I imagine with eminent Straussians on both sides. Can you really deny that some of those classes, however ingenious, were eisegetical? Whole classes on whole books of Plato in which the metaphysics is never touched, on my end. Or people at the end of an entire course saying "Um, what about the metaphysics though?" and being told they missed the whole point - the point being as always: zetesis, zetesis, zetesis. Our argument seems to be me saying "the caricatures are fair enough to be heuristically useful" and you saying "if I can problematize even one heuristic, it must collapse." Again, as with most other issues in the thread, if we were to actually get into it we'd end approaching each other in the middle.I would strongly disagree about the Old Academy being invisible, but I am a classicist and John Dillon is a hero of mine. A lot of important work has been done in the last generation or so and new approaches have shed a lot of light on lacunae that were fatal for a naive genealogical approach. I think your reading of Speusippus is contradicted by this research. For the record, I am not saying that Plotinus' (or anyone's) "no, Plato was a mystic" interpretation of Plato is correct. I'm saying it's surely meaningful that such interpretations are far, far better attested historically than the interpretations I (and I would guess you) at least often encountered in Plato classes taught by Straussians. The Neoplatonists had a vulgar systematizing interpretation of Plato that obscures Plato just as much as the excessively zetetic one. I've been trying to hint throughout my posts that I think Strauss himself is interesting, especially as a corrective against other things, and should be read. I just think it's disingenuous when people claim there never was a Strauss camp, never was a Strauss paradigm, never was a Straussian clique, etc., while also trying to make Strauss palatable to young right-wing men online by selectively portraying Straussians so that they appear as "based trad." Most of Gottfried's best points in his book are aimed at this propagandistic self-styling.
>>25532609>>25532610And a good rejoinder. I do have points to address, but I'll save those for tomorrow. I will speak though to the following, since I can say something quickly about it:>You and I have both clearly been in Straussian classes, I imagine with eminent Straussians on both sides. Can you really deny that some of those classes, however ingenious, were eisegetical?I've actually only had one professor who's a Straussian, and I *hated* him (and retrospect has not improved my opinions of him), and the rest of my professors who I loved were either explicitly anti-Strauss or took a "he's interesting, but I much prefer Klein" view. Incidentally, I only came to Strauss from the anti-Strauss camp, and only settled down to read him to prepare to tear apart his Plato interpretation, and then found that he wasn't anything like I assumed.
>>25530703Imagine thinking "shills" would put in this much intellectual effort for a check.
>>25530752>>25530763>>25530772>cited Plato, Tocqueville, RousseauDamn, didn't know Rousseau hated homos.
>>25528901Do conspiratards really?
What people really dont realize is there are two strains of straussian, one is called the east coast straussians and the other is called the west coast straussians.East coast were the neocons everyone knows who were around during the bush years, the same years of endless war in the middle east and an economic crash that would discredited them.West coast straussians believe in regime changing america itself. these guys have supported trump in the trump years
How do I join the cabal?
>>25532776Foreskin sacrifice
>>25531184>bill kristol has moved to the leftYeah he's a whiny lib now. SAD!
>>25530793Anyone???
>>25532765So which ones are worse?
Yikes
>>25532765>What people really dont realize is there are two strains of straussian, one is called the east coast straussians and the other is called the west coast straussiansLiterally everyone who isn't a retard knows about East vs West Coast Straussians.
>>25532896>do conspiratards really?
>>25532896Didn’t he claim there was a bunch of numerology in Machiavelli’s writings?
Jews will cease to exist and the world will move on. I for one will toast to it.
>>25533136That’s a good thing, why?
>>25532779>>25530632
>blah blah blah “Trotskycons”This is just polemical stuff. They don't really believe it, it's an old far-right trope going back aways. The neocons-as-Trotskyists line also emerged as part of a civil war within American conservatism. An interesting thing is that Caleb Maupin really tries to connect Max Shachtman to neoconservatism.There's an interesting article I just looked up that attacks this.https://www.scribd.com/document/613414672/William-F-King-Neoconservatives-and-TrotskyismReading through it. Key points:(1) The successors to pre-Cold War Old Right wanted to discredit the neocons as truly conservative by asserting that they are descended from Trotskyists.(2) This was also flirting with antisemitism because Trotsky like many neocons were Jews so therefore the neocons were engaging in Permanent Revolution from the White House or somehow applying the methods of it.(3) This started in the 1980s when neocons began attaining influence in the Reagan administration and conservative think tanks, and picked up more energy in the 1990s and after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.(4) Irving Kristol was one of the few of the original neoconservative brain trust who really was a self-described Trot at one point. There was also Seymour Martin Lipset, and Kistol's wife. And a political scientist named Martin Diamond. But a lot of others who gained prominence on the right were either never on the left at all, or if they were, they were either liberals or left-social democrats who were opposed to Leninism. This was also mostly when they were either teenagers or in their early twenties.
>>25533194(5) The extent of the Trotskyism of these four people is greatly exaggerated. Because again, they were kids. Kristol was also never a member of any explicitly Trot group. He was briefly a member of the Workers Party of Max Schachtman in 1940. Actually these people were part of a small faction in it called the "Shermanites" which was anti-Bolshevik (so therefore anti-Trotskyist) which caused Schactman to kick them out, and very quickly they began publishing a journal (called "Enquiry") that was criticizing Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism.(6) Irving then joined the Army during WWII and at this point no longer considered himself to be a socialist of any stripe. That pretty much goes for all four of these people from what I can tell.(7) Schachtman was an associate of Trotsky but broke with him, later moved to an anti-communist form of social democracy over the following decades and joined the old Socialist Party but Trotskyists got expelled from that in the late 1930s. There were some later neocons who were followers of Schachtman in the late 1960s. This was on the right-wing of the Socialist Party.(8) Irving who was the most Trot of them, unlike other neocons, was not particularly enthusiastic about American military force in the same way that others in the Bush administration were. He was more of a realist in the sense that he thought American policy should behave unilaterally yes, but the "crusade for democracy" stuff isn't something he believed in.(9) Other neocons who did call for spreading a "democratic revolution" like Michael Leeden and Joshua Muravchik were not Trots. Muravchik had been a young socialist. This guy Leeden has a pretty wild biography:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen(10) The idea that these people are doing permanent revolution is basically ignorant or lying about Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. It wasn't just "do militarized socialism and invade everyone." It was about how attempts to carry out a bourgeois-democratic revolution that would do land reform and achieve national independence in third-world countries would fail unless it was led by the working class in a socialist revolution that would combine and pass over a specific historical stage. That's what that actually was.
Yes, I’m Jewish. I’m proud. I love Trump.I love MAGA. I love Strauss. I love the Claremont Institute. I hate white people unless they’re good goys who advance Jewish supremacy. I hate redneck cattle.
>>25533198Have an easy fast on Monday.
Babe wake up active Strauss thread again
>>25528901>Zionist Jew YouTuber: "Claiming Jews were behind Iraq War is 'BLOOD LIBEL.'">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUA2Sy3jAZE&t=6013sYou should try watching this entire video. You might learn sonething.
>>25533198East Coast or West Coast?
>>25532896>gematria>”satanic”
>>25530728
>>25533455>smartest, most well-researched /pol/tard
>>25533455Okay, and what evidence is there that Trump is being controlled by “Straussians”?
>>25532727Again, he’s a paid LaRouche plant.
>>25529145>>25529432DESU I think it’s kind of sad how a whole generation was mislead to believe the Power of Nightmares stuff. It was a major redpill for those of us who remember watching it on early, early, early YouTube as teens.
>>25528901
>>25532609Okay, now that I have some time to respond, I'll open by first laying out my straightforward contention on the Strauss controversies. So where I appreciate Strauss and Straussians is primarily on how they comment on philosophy (I acknowledge here that you take issue with those readings), so my primary frustration is that, in being interested more in Benardete, Kennington, Rosen, Bolotin, and Bruell, and their like, it becomes immensely frustrating to have it assumed that in appreciating them, and insofar as they're Straussians, that I give a pass to or sign off on everything that every Straussian thinks or does, and that I have to address Wolfowitz or Kristol because of their association, when I want to talk about Plato or whoever. And I also contend that there's a greater diversity of thought and relative independence between them than tends to be recognized (e.g., comparing Rosen, Lampert, Meier, and Strauss himself on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, or even comparing Rosen, Lampert, Benardete, Craig, Stauffer, Bolotin, Bloom, and Strauss on the Republic; there's an agreement that they read an author as if they had maximum control over what they say and how they want to say it, but they really do differ on a multitude of details, Strauss and Bloom have polar opposite takes on Thrasymachus' blush). I also readily acknowledge they differ in quality (Bloom's commentaries on Plato strike me as facile compared to Benardete's and Strauss's, and Pangle can be outright sloppy in his work), which is another source of frustration, because why do I have to answer for Bloom when I think less of him and better of some of his peers and students? I would much prefer to judge figures on a case by case basis, whereas it seems most of the arguments against Strauss and his students take them as a synedoche.Okay, greentexts.>"he'll do that thing, at least once, that all Straussians do: 'you can't say Straussians ignore X because actually [list of eight relatively late and minor Straussians] talked about X."But when is it proper then? Why does , say, Bloom or Jaffa outweigh Kennington (one of Strauss' first students at the New School) or Benardete or Rosen and their students?(Cont.)
>>25532609>We both know that Straussianism is not primarily interested in metaphysics, in any meaningful sense of the term. Not in the way a Gerson is. We both know that Strauss is not interested in exploring the logic of emanationism, and that he would rather read Machiavelli and Hobbes than Ficino and Bruno.I think that may have been true of some of the students, but I'd just as much put that to having taken Strauss in a political science department and having gotten degrees in political science. As above, Strauss was much more interested in those subjects than sometimes appears, and, for better or worse, he limited himself to what was plausible to teach in such a department (hence why his lectures usually open with "Why are we reading this in a political science program?") I would note that sometimes he let's his interests slip, such as in the Cicero course when he starts talking about Heidegger and nature, or writing on Maimonides' treatises on logic and astrology in Studies On Platonic Political Philosophy. And, though you don't take it as representative, this is increasingly the thrust of modern Straussianism.>it is fair to call it a fringe view, and it is fair to call Strauss and Straussians relatively ahistorical in their methodI think that depends on how heavily you weight "relatively," and what you'll count as historical in method. There's usually appeal to historical circumstance, such as the effects of the Peloponnesian War and its players, impiety trials, how Greek tragedy and comedy might be shaping views, and so on with whatever given figure. And Strauss was fond of recommending scholars like de Coulanges, Glotz, Ridgeway, Maine, Brochard, Burnett, and so on.>I'm sure Strauss would not object if I said "he fails to live up to good historicist standards," but it is also the case that good historicist standards are normative for the various disciplines that study Plato today.Historicist, sure, but are you saying historicist standards are the same as historical standards?>I've read many of his unpublished lectures front to back.If you mean the shorter one-off lectures, I could agree that he's more polemical (though not simply), but I don't really see that in the lecture courses outside of the first class usually addressing historicism.>But I will admit I haven't read his lectures on the Timaeus et al.No transcripts, as with all the New School stuff. There are plans to publish his notebooks that contain that material, as well as his 50s notebook on Plato's Statesman, which should be interesting in looking at metaphysics more forwardly.>>25532610>Our argument seems to be me saying "the caricatures are fair enough to be heuristically useful" and you saying "if I can problematize even one heuristic, it must collapse." Again, as with most other issues in the thread, if we were to actually get into it we'd end approaching each other in the middle.That may be probable.
>>25532610>I would strongly disagree about the Old Academy being invisible, but I am a classicist and John Dillon is a hero of mine. A lot of important work has been done in the last generation or so and new approaches have shed a lot of light on lacunae that were fatal for a naive genealogical approach. I think your reading of Speusippus is contradicted by this research.I wish it were otherwise, but I found Dillon's book, while helpful, to oversell how much we know, which is depressingly limited outside of Cicero and the Academicorum Philosophorum Index Herculanensis, especially with respect to Plato's own time. There are some interesting things to know, like that Speusippus and Xenocrates didn't take the creation story of Timaeus as literally true, contra Aristotle, but we know more of the names of associated figures than their attitudes or how the Academy was run, nor do we have enough to compare Aristotle's views with. Hopefully the Herculaneum scrolls fix that somewhat.>For the record, I am not saying that Plotinus' (or anyone's) "no, Plato was a mystic" interpretation of Plato is correct. I'm saying it's surely meaningful that such interpretations are far, far better attested historically than the interpretations I (and I would guess you) at least often encountered in Plato classes taught by Straussians. The Neoplatonists had a vulgar systematizing interpretation of Plato that obscures Plato just as much as the excessively zetetic one.I agree.>I've been trying to hint throughout my posts that I think Strauss himself is interesting, especially as a corrective against other things, and should be read. I just think it's disingenuous when people claim there never was a Strauss camp, never was a Strauss paradigm, never was a Straussian clique, etc., while also trying to make Strauss palatable to young right-wing men online by selectively portraying Straussians so that they appear as "based trad." Most of Gottfried's best points in his book are aimed at this propagandistic self-styling.I both see where you're coming from now, I think, and I actually agree myself.
Why are Jews so obsessed with finding “hidden meanings” in texts?
>>25527357>I don't know where this idea that Strauss was someone whose influence was central to the neoconservative movement came from"Power of Nightmares"(2004) by Adam Curtis. Quite explicitly and quiet influentially.
Was strauss a self hating jew?
>>25527366Ignore all the fucking retarded fags claiming that you're wrong. The Iran War right now proves you 100% right. It's beyond debate. America's descent into neuroticism is a result of its increasing Jewishness
>>25534289any text worthy of serious literary attention has hidden meanings, and discovering them is intensely pleasurable
>>25531955What an utterly delusional thread. How are there people in here seriously dismissing Jewish influence and neoconservatism when we have all witnessed TWICE in 20 years the Republican Party devolve into extreme financial corruption and foreign wars? How do you have the fucking gall to say any of this is a conspiracy theory? We watched in real-time MAGA completely go mask off and just become another neocon movement for Western chauvinists to assert their power in a period of decline only to catastrophically fuck up as usual because they launched too many wars for Israel Maybe Strauss is not the ultimate culprit for this, whatever, but it's undeniable at this point that neoconservative ideology + Jewish influence has been an abject accelerant for Western decline and there is absolutely no effort among the American ruling class or the right-wing to assess this fact and change course. They've only done the exact same mistakes over and over again.
>>25534440Based on?
Is it true that Strauss supported Nazism at first on the basis it was a "return to Rome" until he realized it was anti-Jew? I've read this in like 2-3 different sources.
>>25534609No, but that's been spread by one of Arendt's biographers, something to the effect that Strauss proposed to Arendt (true) but that Arendt told him off by saying he was the kind of jew who wanted to be part of the Nazis and resented that they wouldn't have him (false). The original sources, from what I recall, were just Arendt complaining about Strauss, but nothing about Nazis or even tying it specifically to the proposal, combined with someone else attesting to the bare fact of the proposals--Hans Jonas, I think?There is a letter from '33 from Strauss to Lowith:>As concerns me, I will receive the second year. Berlin recommended me, and that was decisive. I will also spend my second year in Paris, and I will attempt in this time to undertake something that will make my further work possible. Clearly I have major “competition”: the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat is assembled here. It’s terrible - I’d rather just run back to Germany.>But here’s the catch. Of course I can’t opt for just any other country - one doesn’t choose a homeland and, above all, a mother tongue, and in any event I will never beableto write other than in German, even if Imustwrite in another language. On the other hand, I see no acceptable possibility of living under the swastika, i.e., under a symbol that says nothing more to me than: you and your ilk, you are physei subhumans and therefore justly pariahs. There is in this case just one solution. We must repeat: we, “men of science,” - as our predecessors in the Arab Middle Ages called themselves - non habemus locum manentem, sed quaerimus… And, what concerns thismatter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian andimperialprinciples, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination. I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio… parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of theRomanthought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto.Tl;dr, Germany's his home he feels, even if the Nazis think otherwise; he doesn't think the excesses of the Nazis are in themselves an argument against the political Right; he thinks only from politically Right principles is it legitimately possible to protest Hitler.
>>25534698>tfw your ex hates your ass so much she lies about you being a literal Nazi
>>25534730Kek.[Back when Yahoo Groups used to exist, there was a Strauss group, and one of the members got in contact with Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, to ask about the episode, since there's no citation attached. She was kind enough to go through her notes and found that her sources were Arendt's assistant, with the text just being Arendt talking generally about not liking Strauss, and Jonas spilling tea that Strauss proposed to her and she rebuffed him. Where the Nazi part came into the picture is a mystery. But Young-Bruehl's dead now, so any further clarification is deadended.]
>>25534289It's strongly embedded in Jewish tradition, especially when you get into the more mystical stuff. Basically, every word and sentence in Torah has a meaning behind the meaning behind the meaning, and it takes a brilliant mind to decipherAgain, we Jews strongly revere our teachers and scholars for a reason.
>>25530728Anyone affiliated with them is almost certainly affiliated with the feds.
>>25530728>>25534815https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/how-the-claremont-institute-became-a-power-center-in-trumps-washington-00700147
>>25534862Lol, fucking Claremont.
>>25534766To be fair, I go full Wicked-Witch-of-the-West on all my exes.>>25534868Jaffa's org, right? Or rather, his students' org?
>>25527366fpbp but only because neoconservatives are mega gay and Straussianism is a form of crypto-absurdist semiotics
Kikes got bodied hard in this thread.
>>25534893Posting baseless, recycled conspiracy theories from the mid-2000s aren't exactly what I would define as "bodied".
>>25534879>Jaffa's org, right? Or rather, his students' org?Yep, both. Not really clear to me the difference in status between Claremont graduate and fellow, Kirk and Posobiec aren't the first people I think of when I think of Claremont, but sounds like money's being passed around to front their messaging regardless, so *shrug*.
>>25534462Which "Straussians" are behind the current war with Iran?>inb4 claremont
>>25534879https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbhE21FSZBs
>>25534698fucking lol that's hilarious
>>25534598based on the obvious fact that any sophisticated work has origins and references that are uninterpretable if one reads it purely literally and divorced from all other literary works, traditions, and conventions
>>25530975this was good
>>25532609>>25532610>>25532617As an outsider who likes both Gottfried and Strauss... it seems fairly obvious that: 1) Strauss is an insightful and illuminating scholar in his own right; 2) his reading methods need to be taken into consideration and added to the toolkit of any interpreter (e.g. the way Harvey Mansfield in a conversation with Bill Kristol broke down Machiavelli's, Montesquieu's, and Tocqueville's seemingly odd and bizarre book/chapter structure of their works to draw attention to certain ideas and pay homage is... well it seems extremely jarring and deliberate); and 3) the Straussian movement has come to carry a certain metapolitical agenda, even if much of it cannot be blamed on Strauss himself nor necessarily attached to Strauss's personal views (to the extent where they are clear or even plausibly known). This is more of a contingent appropriation and coincidence of interests rather than a Machiavellian conspiracy hatched by Leo Strauss.I don't think the enmity between paleoconservatives and politically-sympathetic Straussians is warranted in this day and age, especially if Reagan-era bygones are allowed to be bygones. In the mean time, I'll keep reading Chronicles Magazine and The New Criterion like a good little goyservative scholar.
>>25534440>any text worthy of serious literary attention has hidden meanings, and discovering them is intensely pleasurableme imagining a gooncave for Straussians except its an endless montage of textual numerologies and bunker buster explosion ASMR
>>25527357Neoconservatism is a jewish movement to use America for Israel and other jewish interests. The godfather of neoconservatism Irving Kristol is a jew. Most of the notable neocons like Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz and Elliott Abrams are jews.>>25527366First post best post
>>25531815>"A jew is honey-mouthed in poverty, insolent in equality and a fiend in power."- Russian proverb
>>25534901>it is.... LE CONSPIRACY>*sucks jew cock some more*
>>25527366>>25528901/pol/
>>25535447>>25535455>>25535504Blaming a Plato scholar for American imperialist wars of aggression because he and many of his former students happened to be Jewish is, in fact, blood libel, asshole.
>>25535841Can't blame Leo Strauss for this. But you can absolutely blame Straussians for displacing paleoconservatives in the movement, which ended up creating a neoconservative ideological sphere that helped push America to fight more wars. Straussians were happy to take 30 pieces of silver and even haughtily claim that they had a better sense of the original America.
>>25535866>Straussians were happy to take 30 pieces of silver Keep shit like this in /pol/.Also, I find it weirdly sentimental to think that a bunch of nerdy Jewish boys were so dedicated to their former professor that they’d send America into a bunch of clusterfuck military conflicts just so their professor’s teachings could be realized. Kek
>>25535988Who said anything about Jews?
>>25536080>“30 pieces of silver”
Do the conspiratards ITT not realize the neocons/Straussbros, free market neoliberals, and the Religious Right didn’t exactly like each other nor did they see eye-to-eye ideologically at all, but merely formed a political alliance because it was considered politically convenient?
>>25536113What's antisemitic about that phrase?
>>25535866How were the paleocons any better than the neocons?
>>25527366>>25528901If Judith Butler had like 14 of her former students working in top positions in Mamdani's administration in NYC, something tells me neither of you would call it a "cabal" or insinuate there was anything nefarious going on.
>>25536538Paleocons were generally more traditionalist than neocons on nearly all domestic and cultural issues. They were also much more non-interventionist in foreign policy and generally more opposed to mass immigration than neoconservatives.
>>25534462America’s actions under Trump 2.0 are so utterly counter-intuitive and suicidal that I simply refuse to believe that this is all happening out of incompetence. To me, it does not follow that not a single person in the administration is actually capable of dissenting from all of Trump’s deranged decisions — hostility to our allies, tariffs, Iran War, getting our bases in the Middle East wiped, potential economic crisis, etc. I’m sorry but I just can’t believe that. It’s more likely to me that America is doing all of this as part of a deliberate strategy influenced by a mutation of neoconservatism — albeit a stupid strategy, whatever that is.
>>25536632>something tells me neither of you would call it a "cabal" or insinuate there was anything nefarious going on.I would.>>25536675Trump has always been bought and paid for by Zionist Jewish supremacists. Anyone who fell for the idea he was ever AMERICA FIRST is utterly moronic.
>>25536632Butler teaches lingustics, not political philosophy.
>>25528901Maupin's views on this subject are a literal cut-and-paste from The Power of Nightmares.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpjN18mxHxo
>>25527357>He wasn't even a big fan of liberal democracy.He defended liberal democracy.
How do I get my girlfriend to take the Strauss pill?For the record, she's Catholic and a staunch anti-abortion activist. But, she considers herself a leftist (even though her understandings of Marxism and anarchism are pretty bare bones) in the tradition of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Her big thing is proving fetuses are people, and should have rights like born people, and she argues for this idea in ways that are highly reminiscent of an Aristotelian view. How do I Strausspill her so she's one of us?
>>25536765There is a whole Straussian technique to enslaving Catholic Straussians, see Strauss' 1950s letters and comments that Christian conservatives are useful shabbos go- I mean allies because they can be made to think Straussianism is conservative elitism when in reality it's authoritarian multiculturalism and classical liberalism whose sole raison d'etre is making ethnonationalism impossible except in Israel
>>25536765Get her to watch videos from the Claremont Institute. Michael Anton is Catholic, I believe.
>>25527357>>25535841https://x.com/etherXwave/status/2040599696691900915>Nick exposes the Peter Thiel Mafia and its ties to Straussianism, Neocons, and Israel.>“Harry Jaffa (…) said that Strauss' sole mission was to make the world safe for Jews.”https://x.com/etherXwave/status/1882898194616738178>Bari Weiss, Costin Alamariu, Peter Thiel, Yoram Hazony.. What ties them together? >A clandestine influence operation inspired by Leo Strauss and connected to Claremont Institute, founded by his disciple Harry Jaffa, that serves the interests of Israel. Nick Fuentes explains.
>>25535841Die, rabbi
>>25536954Not a fan of Fuentes but these videos are good, it shows he understands the influence networks.
>>25536954And why is it a bad thing that these people are all disciples of Strauss?
>>25536765Start by telling her that her leftist views are a product of modernity’s hatred of virtue and are thus inconsistent with Catholicism and Church teaching.
>>25534964I was with him until he started whining about the holly at the end.
>>25536632
>>25536675Literally the only policy you listed that aligns with Neoconservatism is the Iran War, and all the other ones are antithetical to it, if not actually "paleocon" policies, which you retards are saying is better than neocon policy.
>>25536954>>25537009Favela Groypers like yourselves are perhaps the most retarded people involved in politics today
>>25536765See if Mansfield will talk to her one-on-one.
>>25536765>Her big thing is proving fetuses are people,That’s an incredibly retarded and inconsequential hill to die on.
>>25536175Given all the posts of the last half day, apparently not. Careful, they're already hurting themselves in their confusion!
Smells like kabbal in here
Which Strauss book should a person start with.>>25534316That's the first place I heard of him.
>>25537154Natural right and history. On Tyranny is very good as well.
>gets embarrassed by Kojeve Jews literally haven’t been able to recover and hence they need to start wars to hide their inferiority complex
>>25537154>That's the first place I heard of him.See:>>25529519>>25529362
>>25537159Summarize both
>>25537154>>25537159I'm almost suggest *against* Natural Right and History as a first dip, it'd be easy to go in and confuse the purpose of the book for proving a conception of natural right, when he really wants to just re-open it as a question for philosophy (that's what he says in a letter to Voegelin, anyway). What Is Political Philosophy? might be a better intro, since it touches on so many of his typical subjects as a collection of essays, including an essay clarifying his stance on exotericism and addressing some criticisms of it.
