How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People

  Much of the western world is best described as a contentious and polarized place(s) with a hefty tint towards the fractal. There is an obvious explanation for noticing the fractal patterns in medium to large Western cities, Western countries and the entire World by simply noting that there are different cultures and some can cultures get along with each other, while some cultures do not.

 A culture is made up more than just its foods, clothes, languages, and arts as there are also the general attitudes and the moral positions that are part of the package. In the year of someone’s Lord 2018, the Prime Minister of Canada is quoted as having said "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,'' and then went on to explain that Canada doesn’t define itself as a ‘nation state’ as strongly as the European nations do. This idea was flushed out more in more detail in the article “TITLE-TBD” published on Dec 12^th, 2023.

 The ‘sub’ prefix in subculture use to mean subset though now it seems to imply subversion; how that shift happened has not been made obvious, though there are plenty of decent speculations to go around. It now seems that we can now bare witness to what happens when a non-subculture, but a completely different culture, enters Trudeau’s mosaic based pseudo-reality Canada. In 1933, on the baseball field at Christie Pits Park in Toronto CA. there was a ‘mostly peaceful protest’ when the team from the German neighborhood was to play a game with a team from the Jewish neighborhood; that game was not completed.

 The current political mantra seems to be boiled down to something as simple as ‘listen and believe’, be this applied to ‘the experts’, ‘the science’ or some other group and if you don’t believe or at least pretend you believe then you will be called an anti-something-phobe. If you show that the L&B narrative does have holes, there will be attempts to cut out your digital tongue as it were.

 DISCLAIMER:  This writing contains no legal advice, medical advice, or financial advice because the worst vice is advice.

On Punching Down

When a 3^rd party accuses the party of the first part is punching down towards the party of the second part, the 3^rd party has just judged that the party of the first part has superiority over the party of the second part, thus showing the 3^rd party’s bigotry.

On Loving Ukraine but Hating Ukrainians

 War is known as ‘the meat grinder of men’ that eventually boils down to numbers, the number of bullets, the number of missiles, the number of tanks and ultimately the number of men. In 2022, the year of the recent invasion, the population of Russia was 144.2 M and that of Ukraine was 38 M; rough math shows that Ukraine would have to maintain a 3.5 to 1 kill ratio over the Russians to simple hold ground assuming all things being equal. For the last two some odd year things had been somewhat equal as both sides have had an average age of just over 40, though things are not so equal anymore as Ukraine recently lowered the age of their draft from 27 to 25. One indicator of how any war is going is just how far outside the category of ‘disposable men’ either side is willing to go.

 A question to be asked of those who support this war: Is the funding being put forward to support war or is the war being put forward to support the funding?

 On Reading the Room I

 Historically, being a man was dangerous yet simple while being a woman was safer yet quite complicated. Regardless if one is on the social construct team or the evolutionary team, and each side can explain why, that when a man and a woman walk into a room each of them will first scope out the women already present. Why precisely this happens is beyond the scope of this author, though it does happen, though some assumptions can be made as to what the drivers are.

 Incentive is the root cause for both the male and the female gaze, as people are and have always been driven by incentive. The next step in this argument is to posit what the general incentives are for the typical man and the typical woman entering the room, using the old school definition of men and women. The male eye seeks out the women in the room for reproductive reasons, with the caveat being that the ‘he’ is hoping, remembering or both. The female eye seeks out the women in the room for hierarchal reasons with the caveat being the ‘she’ sorting out if they are over-dressed or under-dressed for the occasion; why this is important is beyond the scope of the knowledge for this author.

 At the party, young women looking for husbands and husbands looking for young women is not as equal as it first appears.

 On Reading the Room II

‘Confession through projection’ is the way of saying every person will look at the world as if the whole world acts as they would act; an act that could be labeled as a micro-judgment. “I’m not judging” are objectively the words of a liar, subjectively though the words are seen as typically harmless due to what the words imply; the insinuation is that the liar will not be honest in conveying their judgment towards ‘the other’ for the purpose of avoiding some or all confrontation(s). A parallel can be found in a mother eating a flour based brick tells ‘little Billy’ that his cake tastes wonderful, a white lie as it were.

 On War

 “Si vis pacem, para bellum”, is from the Latin and it means "If you want peace, prepare for war". The “Western world” has developed a level of hubris where by it is assumed that the maxim above need not apply. Many people are currently being reminded that War is and always will be the very nature of existence. For the most part every non-mutually beneficial engagement or interaction is a war; though it is not War, seeing as there are predefined rules of conduct adhered to by all parties. 

 For ‘gits and shiggles’ as it were, please go to your favourite search engine and enter ‘define war’. One may not have to scroll down too far to find out that there is a legal definition for War thus making War governed by ‘the law of armed’ conflict, which is also known as “International Humanitarian Law.” Authoring legislation must involve some sort of psychedelic drug consumption because the normal use of the word ‘humanitarian’ as an adjective is – ‘concerned with or seeking to promote human welfare’.

 The International Criminal Court has 124 Party State members out of the 195 countries globally psst… US, Russian, England and China are not on the list. The ICC is under scrutiny from the United Nations, a UN where 130 member-states effectively disagree with the location or the outright existence of Israel; with two-thirds of the body created to maintain world peace, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see why Israel has had such a hard time of things over the years.

 The good people at The Oxford Dictionary say that genocide means ‘the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group’, while the UN offers up as part of its definition ‘genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’; the acts can be found on the United Nations’ genocide prevention web site. The word means ‘identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and "substantial."’

 It seems that, like so many other words these days, the word GENOCIDE has fallen into the ‘Pit of Hyperbole’. Israel was fully out of The Gaza Strip in 2005 leaving behind some 1.31 million people, some fifteen years later that population grew to around 2.1 million. The current death toll within Gaza is hovering around 35,000 resulting in a population reduction of 0.0167, which hardly seems ‘substantial’.

 Ending on a sardonic note, perhaps this ruckus internationally would have been avoided if only Israel had put an iPhone assembly plant in The Gaza Strip with nets attached to the building to stop child labourers from committing suicide.

 

The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Attributed to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Neo Bigots

 The current slogan of the Washington Post is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” though they should re-brand with the new slogan - ‘Democracy Dies under DEI’; not that any article addressing this concept will ever show up in that rag. Written in 1215, the Magna Carta Libertatum (L. "Great Charter of Freedoms ") attempted to provide a level legal playing field for all Englishmen, this was done in the effort to replace Feudalism as Feudalism put forward the idea that all Englishmen were not equal as they held a ‘position’ within the social hierarchy; a position from which they could not easily escape. The Magna Carta along with its descendants such as the constitutions of England, The US, and Canada, seem have had a good run, all things considered.

 A feudal system is based on pigeon-holing people where all people are restricted to their allocated pigeon-hole; the children of peasants remaining peasants and children of Royals remain Royals with all of the hierarchal layers in between. The parallel between the pre Magna Carta feudal system and the current ongoing drive towards social re-allocation based on the ‘Oppression Olympics’ seems obvious. Both systems are predicated on pigeon-holing with the only difference being that the first tried to drag the majority of the population out of the pigeon holes, while the latter is seeking to populate and/or repopulate the available holes.

 Unfortunately this is not a war on a single front and when one has a war on many fronts it is never a trivial matter. Metaphorically, consider the following two situations, the 300 Spartan versus Xerxes’ army and WW2-Germany versus the English Commonwealth, the USA, and the USSR.

 A second frontal assault on maintaining the standards of Western society is being led by the eco-champions; for the sake of clarity, an eco-warrior is the person on the ground. The eco-warriors are literally on the ground as they seem to like to glue themselves to the road, slow march along a road, or attempt to spoil things that members of the public in general find enjoyment in. The eco-champions are those who fly to global destinations, with the exception of China, to hold fancy parties where they myopically discuss the primary food for plants, thus encouraging the regression of Western societies back to the days of old in feudal Europe, in regard to general energy security.

 Some people believe that the ideals behind Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are waning within the corporate sphere. This view is understandable when one considers that a DEI department is a cost centre and many people see their economy is hurting, and so many companies will need to cut costs. DEI is not waning; it is being supplanted by both ESG (Environment, Society and Governance) and BRIDGE (Benchmarking Race, Inclusion, and Diversity in Global Engagement). ESG is a scoring system within both the fiscal and corporate worlds, a distinction without a difference some might say, it can be used as both the stick and the carrot towards ensuring compliance as it is a factor used to set interest rates and market capitalization recommendations. BRIDGE is still fresh faced and so understanding its impact will have to wait for some day in the future.

Perhaps coincidentally, the British band The Stranglers released a song titled ‘Skin Deep’ in 1984 and it is strongly recommended the reader listens to that song. Within DEI the diversity seems to be focused mostly on skin colour with religion coming in a close second and gender comes in third; thus making more pigeon-holes and stuffing in more pigeons. Oddly enough, it seems that for some people the determining difference between peoples is only skin deep, evidence of this can be seen by searching Google for ‘Larry Elder black face white supremacy’.

 While DEI sounds good in its full title, it falls on its face in practice. The acronym would be better matched to it praxis if DEI stood for ‘Differential Enforcement Ideology’. It is said that hindsight is 20/20 and the reader is asked to look to back to the past 10 years or so and see how well the DEI mantra has played out. Those who ran BLM post George Floyd were not diverse, did not provide equity of outcome and most certainly did not include the people whose businesses were hollowed out by fire nor any inclusion regarding the vast sums of monies donated; meanwhile the BLM leaders did end up with some very nice homes.

 Another possible expansion of DEI is ‘Dependency Encouragement Incentives’ and this one is probably the most insidious.  One has only to dawn their history glasses again to see examples of how this has been done before and some of the consequences. The American’s Affirmative Action policy is possibly the best example of this DEI derivative and so once again the pigeon holes got stuffed. Incepted on Sept 24^th 1965 as part of LBJ’s Great Society plan, this policy eventually became a quota system, a quota system with the unforeseen consequence of increasing the drop-out rate of those it was intended to help. This happened because in order to meet said quota, some schools lowered entry standards thus placing the ‘protected’ persons underwater within their educational experience; where as the same person may have done well at a not so prestigious institution. The Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS) overturned Affirmative Action in June of 2023.

 Sticking with the expansion above, another unintended consequence was disproportional incarceration and once again LBJ and his Great Society initiative is the source. According to Dr. Thomas Sowell, in the 1950s the fatherless homes within the black American community was around 20% and now it is around 80%. Dr. Sowell has posited that the cause for this meteoric rise was a government program that to this day is providing tax based funds to single mothers on a per child basis. Stepping outside of Dr. Sowell’s characteristic politeness, it seems that the general tax payer is getting screwed for the benefit of others without any conjugal benefit.

 The next expansion to play with is ‘Disinformation Exaggeration Incitement’. It is said that in the USSR a man would take the two papers Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiya (News) then riffle-shuffle them together like a cut deck of cards making both papers un-open-able, then the man would proclaim “finally there is truth in the news and news in the truth, unfortunately we can not read it”, his friends would then laugh.

 Phrases like ‘fiery but mostly peaceful protest’, ‘a one size fits all solution’, ‘YOU don’t know MY truth’, and ‘Trump has to be taken off the ballot to save our democracy’, all of which seem straight out of Pravda. Some will say that “the Internet” ruined the NEWS outlets, this is an overly simplified talking-point in these transitional times; the transition of note is the shift away from ‘one of us’ towards ‘not one of us’ seemingly all across Western societies. In days gone by the citizenry was more amicable exposing themselves to many sources with different perspectives, yet since those days the ‘different perspectives’ have: drifted further apart, become more anchored in place, and are increasing in number.

 The information highway is as equally culpable as a printing press when it comes to the distribution of information, from the good, the bad and the ugly, with disinformation somewhere in between; with the exception of post publishing edits. It is the opinion of this author that the pre-Internet era publishing can be characterized by two conditions: history and money. Modernity has reaped the benefit of history curating all of the trash out the public syllabus, money use to be a measure of meritocracy, a practice which seems to have ended with “modern art”.

 Another acronym many people may remember is PC, Politically Correct, or perhaps Provocateur and Contrarian depending on your attitude. Another gift from the USSR the term Politically Correct means that while a narrative may not be technically correct it is made in support of ‘the Party’; Lysenkoism being the prime example of this. Lysenko and his PC ideas added millions of deaths to the event known as the Holodomor. Other recent versions of this line of thinking can be found in the phrases such as “safe and effective” or “gender affirming care for children”. While the parties may have changed, the ideological tactic has not.

 This article has reached its conclusion with the intention of showing that words do matter. Then when presented as an acronym thus obscuring the actual words, further enhancing the confusion, thereby masking the true intent even more. While words are important, actions are literally more impactfull, hence why words that call for violent action are typically frowned upon; that is unless both the call and the violence ‘works’ for those who already have power or desperately want it.

  

From: V for Vendetta

“Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.”

 

Moderating Moderation

 

The term ‘everything in moderation, including moderation’ or any slight variant has been passed down throughout the ages, has been attributed to the likes of Socrates, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, as well as Mark Twain. It now seems that this saying cannot honestly be passed down to the next generation as now it seems we to have run out of moderation.

Moderation must be looked at as being some sort of un-extreme within the constraints of ‘too much’ or ‘too little’; a middle ground as it were. Of course the two extremes define where the middle is made manifest, though this too can be quite broad depending on where an individual looks; and as such things must shift over time as the societal focus shifts from topic to topic.

A societal talking-point often used is ‘disgust’ as it is a very strong driver, though it is best used in moderation. Disgust is most likely an evolutionary trait that developed out of a sense of safety, an over abundant disregard for cleanliness has led to disease and death, while an over abundant regard for cleanliness has led to the othering of people and death; that was the Holocaust and yes Hitler is reported to have been a germophobe.   

Another societal talking-point often used in the Western world is ‘liberty’ as it is a very strong driver, though it is best used in moderation. John Locke (1632-1704), known as ‘the father of liberalism’ is accredited with saying “every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of nature.” Then from Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), we get "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals." The final quote for this part comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), who is said to have said ‘The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.’

Of the three men named above, Dostoevsky’s words are of the most interest. Locke’s words are simply a justification for the ideal of setting a jury. Oliver Wendell’s words are simply a justification for self restraint. The words provided by Dostoevsky on the other hand are what may best be described as a comparative contemplation.

The Dostoevsky quote requires a party of three parts because it can be broken down into the following: ‘outstanding citizens’, ‘criminals’, and the ‘reader’. In reading the words of Dostoevsky, one has to make the choice of which sort of citizen is granted the moral high-ground. Some people will take the side of the criminal by putting the blame on anyone other than the criminal, thus putting the outstanding citizen at a disadvantage. A criminal will often crime is, by definition, a truism. To those who lean towards denying personal responsibility, the following questions must be asked: a) what message is being sent to the ‘outstanding citizen’ when the ‘criminal’ is no longer treated as an offender, b) what message is being sent to the ‘criminal’ when he learns that his fist no longer has to stop and the nose of the ‘outstanding citizen’ and c) what sort of society will be made?

When moderation becomes overly moderated at the societal level shit happens, a thing which can be seen in real time at the time of this writing. If by chance you are reading this in the future, simply look to the news section of your search engine of choice and enter ‘New York City 2024’ to see what shit looks like. So long as history has not been scrubbed or rewritten then you the reader should see a number of stories of people being pushed in front of subway trains, at least one story of officers of the law being physically attacked, at least one officer of the law being shot dead by a criminal who had been arrested and charged twenty-one times, countless number of car jacking incidents, and stories of many outstanding citizens having a general feeling of distress. At the time of this writing 2024 is just emerging from its first quarter of the calendar year and so this the current year is nowhere near completed.

Of course there are many “experts” with many accreditations, who have written many papers that we, as a society, selectively trust to give explanation to situations. It does not take a highly accredited expert to understand what is going on, people act based on incentives and those incentives are being set, managed and enforced by persons driven by their own incentives. Of course disincentives are also a plausible tool for convincing people how to behave, though without moderation a society risks moving towards tyranny.

Typically, the Government holds ownership on the application of force within the society over which they govern; when the society decides that the government is no longer granted said license, the peasants are revolting, literally. Unfortunately, through law and regulation the Government has licensed-out the application of force to groups in need of ‘protecting’, these so called protected classes came to the realize they were handed a leg up over other members of their society and leveraged their newly licensed power.

One example of this was and still is the bastardization of English grammar through the assertion of personal pronouns. Pronouns are simply: in the first-person (I), in the second-person (you), and in the third persons (he, she, they, and them). The reader can do there own litmus test on this new grammatical paradigm by conjugating any verb, only in the present tense is required and then accept the level of their self confusion as a form of informal polling. Of course like any focus group or social-political poll ever, the extrapolation of the polled as a representative of the gen-pop must be considered and accounted for when honest societal representation becomes front of mind.

For many people the purpose of Government is to provide the citizenry that which they can not provide for themselves with the primary purported focus being on security. This creates a tantalizing conundrum for the political class as they will be tempted to make unrealistic policy promises in the race to ‘purchase’ voters.

 Many a Government will make an appeal to empathy via the phrase ‘we are thinking of the children’ and then said Government will typically add in yet another protective law that extends their control over the population at large, thus adding even more cogs to the bureaucratic machine and yet still those people will be paid.

So now the children will actually be thought of. Margret Thatcher is accredited for the phrase, ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.’ As the bureaucratic machine grows so will the payroll grow, this leaves the Government with only two choices: raise taxes, or print money; regardless of which path a Government takes, the children will suffer today or they will suffer the day after tomorrow. Overly burdensome taxes will impact the nutritional value of the foods eaten by children, especially for those who have no access to arable land as the parents will seek food at lower and lower cost. Money printing on the other hand limits the future of a child today being able to create generational wealth and security as  more money is chasing the same amount of imported goods, inflation, and thus by extension limiting the pursuit of happiness for the children’s children many days after tomorrow.

 Paraphrasing an easily recognizable historic saying, ‘with great liberty comes great responsibility’, and the second portion of this version and the original seems to have been forgotten by those who want both liberty and power. Persons, who want liberty and power without the guardrails of responsibility, self-imposed towards avoiding some sort of enforcement, are usually referred to as tyrants; historically those tyrannical people come to realize that reality kicks in right around the time that they became about seven inches shorter, as Charles I of England found out in 1649.

 Of course there will be those… (Screeching car halt or needle dragged over record sounds, take your pick.) Ending this article was becoming a challenge; until just now.

  

 A conversation ensued in the elevator just now where I was told that my holding a door for a woman could be insulting to the woman could be insulting; oddly enough this was told to me by a woman. In the telling it was stated that I could get in trouble, my retort was ‘insults are hurled and offence is taken’, a cliché I’ve explained in previous articles. The ride in the elevator wasn’t long enough for this woman to take offence and I didn’t care enough to be offended by said person; words like coddling and patriarchy where part of her rhetoric.

 What this woman doesn’t know is that I also hold the door for men, children, and pets. I don’t care who I provide kindness too, with self-proven assholes being the exception. My comment, ‘people should accept kindness when they can as there seems to be a global shortage’ fell on deaf ears. This left me wondering how the conversation would have gone if I changed the gender of the target of my kindness to male. Interestingly, the patriarchy is a problem all the while the matriarchy walks unchallenged. The centre of power can be known by witnessing who is not allowed to be challenged. I was threatened by a woman, leaving me to wonder where my Government is on this.

 Sir Thomas More: ‘This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!’ – "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

The Allegory of the Media

 This the current year is 2024 and there is a problem. Approximately 2524 years ago Plato wrote down stories about Socrates, his teacher, which included his methodology and his struggle to stand up to the sophists. There are a number of online definitions on what a sophist is and I encourage the reader to look it up so they can form their own opinion; for the purpose of this writing VOCABULARY.COM will be used.

 A sophist is someone who makes good points about an issue - until you realize those points aren't entirely true, like a political candidate who twists an opponent's words or gives misleading facts during a speech.

 The best piece of Plato’s works that describes Socrates’ struggle against the sophists, and their ways, is titled “The Allegory of the Cave”. It is strongly recommended that the reader familiarize themselves with the prose and please spend more than four minutes regardless if it involves reading or video watching.

 The basic premise of this allegory is that a group of people are chained inside a cave restricted to facing the same wall and all they can observe are the shadows of animals paraded between them and the fire behind them. The narrative continues with a single man escaping the cave and via sunlight his world changes from 2D to 3D in something better than TECHO-COLOR. The narrative continues with the man returning to the cave and attempts to convince the occupants of the cave that there is a better world outside in the sunshine and those in the cave refute the claim. The current term for this is ‘living in a bubble’.

 With the foundations now set, the argument moves on. Many of the current Legacy-Media talking heads seem to be vying for the role of Cave-Manager over striving towards the title of Caver-Liberator. Many people working in Government(s), be they elected or not, walk hand-in-hand with those Legacy-Media actors; these people too are striving to become your Cave-Managers. Another assembly of aspiring Cave-Managers is the social-media platforms that have a TOS that provides for the preferential treatment of one recognized group over another group that has not been ‘recognized’. Then, when all of these want to be Cave-Managers are in cahoots with each other, the shackles holding those in the cave will only become tighter and heavier and unfortunately some of the spelunkers will never take note until it becomes unnoticeable to them.

 There are a plethora of phrases that we have heard as of late, such as: “no person is illegal”, “safe and effective”, “man made climate change”, “trans-women are women”, “Trump is literally Hitler and we are not going to let him on the ballot in order to save our democracy”, and finally “gender affirming care”.

 These phrases are the de facto shadows on the wall of a cave managed by the sophists.

 The quoted statements above are examples of sophistry, though upon first review the statement looks legit, yet it is in fact actually off topic. A good example of this is the first quote, the actual discussion at the time was about people doing illegal things and then the argument got twisted, thus presenting only the shadow on the wall.

 The third quoted statement simply denies “the science” as it can’t explain the ice age, unless of course the ice age is now a conspiracy theory. Carbon Dioxide makes up ~0.04% of the atmosphere and has been labeled as a green house gas (GHG). CO₂ is not a poison as it is a ‘food’ for plants, much like Oxygen is a ‘food’ for the animals and O makes up ~21% of the atmosphere that contains ~78% Nitrogen (N). Being reminded of the elemental table occasionally is always a good thing.

 It seems that Green Templeton College at Oxford is home to the oldest operational weather station that opened in 1767 maintaining daily full records since 1815. Now open your minds-eye and imagine what Green Templeton Collage looked like in 1815 with regard to paved roads, parking lots, and concrete buildings with black tar based roofs, all of which are heat sinks that are now surrounding the meteorological centre. The Canadian government has a weather website at HTTPS://WEATHER.GC.CA and the reader is strongly encouraged to visit the site, scroll down to the ‘Averages and extremes’ section and note the highest and lowest temperature information provided is limited to the years between 2006-2014; following that, apply the Socratic Method.

 The Socratic Method takes an argumentative approach towards seeking truth by asking the two smallest of all questions, HOW and WHY. The basic premise is that the student puts forward an assertion and the interlocutor/philosopher requests the how/why the student knows what they just asserted. That first question is followed-up by the philosopher, without vexation, asks ever more pointed questions driving the student closer and closer to a re-evaluation of the source of the student’s assertion. The penultimate step is for the philosopher to revisit the original question/assertion made by the student and echoes it back where the student responds after the philosopher’s questions and their own contemplations; and when you can, please be your own interlocutor.

 Socrates articulated using critical thinking based on philosophy and logic as the pursuit of truth over and above the sophistry of rhetorical devices. For this, he was found guilty of ‘impiety’ and “corrupting the young”; for this he was sentenced to death. Impiety is when someone is doing things that their church, synagogue, temple, mosque, school principal, government or parents would find unacceptable. Obviously in the Socrates’ time only temples, government and parents would be applicable. He was then required to carry out his own execution by drinking hemlock, thus showing that current ‘cancel culture’ quite mild by comparison.

 “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.”

- Socrates -