CapitalistImperialistPig

How a state gets transformed into an oligarchy: SOCRATES: That storehouse filled with gold we mentioned,169 which each possesses, destroys such a constitution. First, you see, the timocrats find ways of spending their money, then they alter the laws to allow them to do so, and then they and their women disobey the laws altogether. ADEIMANTUS: Probably so. SOCRATES: Next, I suppose, through one person seeing another and envying [e] him, they make the majority behave like themselves. ADEIMANTUS: Probably so. SOCRATES: After that then, they become further involved in moneymaking; and the more honorable they consider it, the less honorable they consider virtue. Or isn’t virtue so opposed to wealth that if they were set on the scale of a balance, they would always incline in opposite directions? [551a] ADEIMANTUS: It certainly is. SOCRATES: So, when wealth and the wealthy are honored in a city, virtue and good people are honored less. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Th...

Or, in some cases, trying to read. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. This book is a monster, almost 1200 pages in its paperback edition, but I listened to the 48 hour audible edition. We picked it up for a long drive, but we didn't drive nearly that long. Murakami is clearly a master, probably the best modern novelist that I have read. He is a Japanese writer, writing in Japanese, but his characters would hardly be out of place in London or New York. Murakami knows English well, and has been a prolific translator of American novels into Japanese, and oversaw the translation into English. The genre is a sort of magical realism - a realistic world into which strange events start intruding. Carver, Chandler, Salinger, and Theroux are just a small sample of the authors he has translated, and the influence of the detective yarn is strong in 1Q84. He claims to have been influenced by Shakespeare, Kafka and Stephen King. I mentally compared Murakami with a couple of notably long books ...