Ron the sharp and cutting, Marsha the dear, and 118 the disparaged,
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 6:40 PM, X Acto <[email protected]> wrote: > So, 118, > > At least Marsha forwarded an interesting story, but you always seem > to fail at even the smallest attempt at wit. That WAS an interesting story, Marsha, and juxtapositioned nicely with two of my recent readings, one concerning the welfare of the great grandmothers of plato and socrates and dear old aristotle, the other, called *Favorite Wife*, the memoirs of a cute blonde mormon girl, raised in a polygamous colony and torn between two brothers, both prophets on earth and qualified to bring the word of truth into human ken. Interesting eh, that the word of truth was that they could have their pick of the cute young girls in the colony. Hal was reading it when he died but never finished it, so I thought I'd read it. The other book, juxtapositioned in this cozy little serendipity club, was a real old thing I picked up at a garage sale, called The Fifteen Most Decisive Battles of the World, and is a fascinating read and available online <http://www.standin.se/fifteen.htm>, as well as having it's own wiki page. I got it because it was so old I thought it might be valuable, but I've been reading it because it's so interesting. Very Victorian in outlook, it starts with the battle of Marathon as the most important battle in history. "Two thousand three hundred and forty years ago, a council of Athenian Officers was summoned on the slope of one of the mountains that look over the plain of Marathon, on the eastern coast of Attica. The immediate subject of their meeting was to consider whether they should give battle to an enemy that lay encamped on the shore beneath them; but on the result of their deliberations depended, not merely the fate of two armies, but the whole future progress of human civilization." When the author points out the vast control of all the world's known civilizations by Darius, and only little Athen, the newly democratic nation-state standing between the expansion of this mighty empire and the unprotected and undeveloped west, we can get his point and appreciate the drama of the situation. The relation to today's thesis in this regard of matrimonial matters is pointed out by the author in comparing the two societies: "It is also a striking fact that the governments of all the great Asiatic empires have in all ages been absolute despotisms. And Heeren is right in connecting this with another great fact, which is important from its influence both on the political and the social life of Asiatics. " Among all the considerable nations of Inner Asia, the paternal government of every household was corrupted by polygamy. where that custom exists, a good political constitution is impossible. Fathers, being converted into domestic despots, are ready to pay the same abject obedience to their sovereign which they exact from their family and dependents in their domestic economy." The book by the Mormon girl, examines this same phenomena from the inside and shows us the inevitable evolution of conflict when the male hierarchy is deemed godlike by all the females in his life. It's this domination of the female thinking by the male that weakens a society by enfeebling the development of true individuals. For a community to produce strong individuals, you need equal access to masculine and feminine consciousness and a balance between those two forces. Marsha's posting of Phyllis and Aristotle, points to the same struggle or balancing act and the importance of this balancing act finding it's proper equilibrium for the future health of society AND intellect. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
