tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2342171110691845876.post6991166577469999214..comments2023-10-10T03:33:08.428-05:00Comments on Little Blog on the Prairie: The Politics of Emotion and the Role of GovernmentWhitney Pitcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13490756857309833446noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2342171110691845876.post-18559038691665575272013-05-05T10:46:31.655-05:002013-05-05T10:46:31.655-05:00Plato modeled his so-called "Republic" o...Plato modeled his so-called "Republic" on the city-state of Sparta. <br /><br />Babies born to Spartan mothers had to pass a worthiness test imposed by the state. If the infant failed to pass muster with the Spartan autocrats, it was taken out to the wilderness and left to die. All children were taken from their mothers at the age of 7 and raised in separate dormitories. Even husbands and wives lived separately, in dormatories segregated by sex, and rape was tolerated under a theory of social Darwinism practiced by the Spartans millennia before Darwin and Spengler.<br /><br />The Spartans did not grow their own food, That job was relegated to the indigenous population, the Hulots, whom the Spartans had conquered and subjugated to servitude. <br /><br />Plato's so-called "philosopher king" rulers were the authoritarian antithesis of the Athenian model of participatory democracy. We owe our form of government to the seeds of self-rule as first practiced in Athens.<br /><br />But we are seeing, today, the worst of Plato's ideas propounded and put into practice in the name of "progressivism." Infanticide is openly practiced in the USA (late term abortions), the state-sponsored eugenics of Obamacare echoes the Spartan practice of eliminating those deemed by the state to be unworthy of survival (the "death panels"). Public policy has seen the proliferation of one-parent families, with the state assuming the role of primary breadwinner for millions of American children, as the Spartans did with their dormitory system.<br /><br />We don't have a king, yet. The progressives are working on it. But we do have a permanent political class, with the rest of us cast in a role similar to that of the Hulots to the Spartan elite.Laddie Blah Blahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16474416524698003749noreply@blogger.com