“Ron Paul needs to separate himself from the kooks — and fast. He has a long, proud record of independent thinking, that could be dragged under fast.”
The “9/11 Truth” kooks are as careless in reading Paul’s statements and listening to his speeches as the “Paul = kook” kooks.
Alcibiades, a former participant in the group of young men of promise who followed Socrates, was a millstone around Socrates’ neck once he betrayed the Athenian cause to Sparta. Socrates could maintain his distance as much as he liked (e.g., the hilarious contribution of Alcibiades to the “Symposium” dialogue), and still be handed the hemlock for “corrupting the youth of Athens”.
As the US ship of state founders on the reefs of fiscal insolvency and foreign adventurism to which it has been brought by several generations of mediocre helmsmen, the latest ‘empty suits’ struggling for control of the helm and their avid supporters will behave much as described in REPUBLIC BOOK VI
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.7.vi.html
Here Adeimantus interposed and said: To these statements, Socrates, no one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down. And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring. For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by the very study which you extol.
S: Well, and do you think that those who say so are wrong?
A: I cannot tell, he replied; but I should like to know what is your opinion.
S: Hear my answer; I am of opinion that they are quite right.
A: Then how can you be justified in saying that cities will not cease from evil until philosophers rule in them, when philosophers are acknowledged by us to be of no use to them?
S: You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a parable.
A: Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all accustomed, I suppose. /s
S: I perceive, I said, that you are vastly amused at having plunged me into such a hopeless discussion; but now hear the parable, and then you will be still more amused at the meagreness of my imagination: for the manner in which the best men are treated in their own States is so grievous that no single thing on earth is comparable to it; and therefore, if I am to plead their cause, I must have recourse to fiction, and put together a figure made up of many things, like the fabulous unions of goats and stags which are found in pictures. Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering —every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain’s senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such a manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain’s hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not-the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer’s art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?
A: Of course, said Adeimantus.
S: Then you will hardly need, I said, to hear the interpretation of the figure, which describes the true philosopher in his relation to the State; for you understand already.
A: Certainly.
S: Then suppose you now take this parable to the gentleman who is surprised at finding that philosophers have no honour in their cities; explain it to him and try to convince him that their having honour would be far more extraordinary.
A: I will.
S: Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him —that is not the order of nature; neither are ‘the wise to go to the doors of the rich’ —the ingenious author of this saying told a lie —but the truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them good-for-nothings and star-gazers.
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If generations of classical scholarship has generally misread REPUBLIC, an insightful critique of utopian thinking, and useful outline for creating a personal “just internal regime”, as a serious promotion of utopian thinking, why should we be surprised that modern fevered devotees of the political life systematically misread a clear-eyed and consistent observer of the political scene just as blindly?
He was a man without honor.
However, this has nothing to do with the thread. I can just as easily speak of the wandering nutjobs.