If you/humanity could start over without forgetting the lessons, which mistakes did you/we learn from that you/we would not repeat?
Please do not reply that you/we would do everything the same and so wouldn’t change a thing and don’t need to start over (it’s not about needing to start over, it’s about what if). Especially don’t reply that you/we would just make different mistakes so what’s the point? Just scroll past or answer the question. 
I/we would do everything neither completely the same nor completely differently, but similarly. So I/we wouldn’t substantially change a thing. Yet I/we may still need to start over:
Strange/ironic how that’s the exact conclusion reached about love in the Symposium, but rather than the exertion being an imposition. it is a freely sharing/receiving. Receptivity can be very compromising. It is not for the faint/feignt of heart—but only the heart who can willfully sacrifice their power to empower the other’s. Mutual empowerment has no limit.
It’s funny how he says the nonpolitcs of today, when this is the most ultrapoliticized period in human history without any remote close second.
The lesson that it doesnt matter how many lessons you have learned when you have no means for transferring tacit/experiential knowledge through generations, so no matter what you build, it will be destroyed by the upcoming generations which cannot appreciate it since they never experienced the problems that justified it’s existence.
… what do you mean you have no Means? Why because you killed all the grandparents in triage during a pandemic? …because you decimated the family by making them work their asses off and losing all connection with each other? …and on and on and on.
You can transfer logical information.
You can teach and thus transfer reading, writing, math, physics, chemistry… anything that is based on logic.
What you cannot transfer is something that either requires experience as part of the equation/justification, or is too complex to be taught in a linear/logical manner.
I.e.: Why should you defend free speech even if its a speech you abhor, disagree with and find appealing?
Why should you not try to censor fiction, arts and/or thoughts even if you dislike them?
Why should you talk, connect and converse with those whom you disagree with and even hate?
Why should you fight for the most disgusting outliers and fringes of human society instead of letting the law make precedents on removing them?
There are a billion things which on first glance run completely counter to your interests.
Why would you speak up for your enemy? Why would you speak up for something that is technically not against the law, but you find abhorrent or disgusting?
It takes experience and wisdom to understand that there are a billion things which if you do not stand up for, they will snowball into an avalanche and eventually bury you and your family alive as well.
And these are things which are patentably, 100% of the time will eventually degrade and vanish in every society, leading to history repeating itself.
Well, actually, there are ways to transmit them.
That’s why the haters of life and freedom always make it a first priority to neutralize them.
When your point of departure is gratitude for life, even with all its hell, you lack a certain focus that haters will never even for a second lose.
So far, that is mostly what has been lacking from those who would celebrate life. A sense of project.
When things are good, you feel like it is God’s gift. And this is true. But how does God gift? Through minute, painstaking build-up over thousands of years on the shoulders of massive humans.
It takes time and effort and is valuable. It is worth protecting. God will not “come down from Heaven and stop those motherfucking bullets.”
Also worth mentioning that, for all the cyclical cataclysims, something always remains.
It will take more cycles for so little to remain that the thread is lost.
The kinds of things I find of appalling are on the level of pedophilia, and I think those should definitely be absolutely obliterated from society, and the freedom of people who do those things should be absolutely restricted until they pull their heads out of their asses. Let’s be specific about what we’re talking about here. It is not a true “slippery slope” that if we completely rid society of pedophilia—or predatory pricing on essentials, even—the family or true freedom is at risk. You can’t legislate moral feeling, but you can definitely legislate moral behavior in the society in which you are an active participant. Only cheaters who would lose (according to their evaluations) if they played by self=other try to convince you otherwise.
You trying to tie pedophilia to the subtleties of how markets work is a prime illustration that the slippery slope exists.
Locals can, and would be all to happy to, deal with pedophiles, if the cancer of socialism would get out of their way.
tell that to Pharoah right before Moses showed up with the plagues
How many times was the law and the prophets lost, and rediscovered? God will not let the thread be lost.
God doesn’t owe humanity anything. This is sometimes lost on people.
A lesson Moses himself learnt well.
Conservatism does not mean the end of war. Israel’s war against Egypt was entirely about conservation, about tradition.
…are you talking about the Hyksos?
I really wouldn’t call it a war in Moses’ case. It was more of a coup d’tat.
God took his people out of slavery in Egypt, by the way, to save them from themselves. They were losing their way, their grasp on their roots, on the painstaking buildup.
I am sure more than one looked back some 20 years into wandering the deserts and thought “Egypt wasn’t so bad.” God was teaching a lesson. He wasn’t going to let the Pharaos get in the way of it. The plagues were not a moralistic undertaking.
The plagues were symbolically representative of an affront to every single one of their false gods, actually.
Nonsense. They were given the chance to go right on worshipping whatever their little hearts craved.
There was a single reason the plagues were visited on them: getting in God’s way as he ripped his people from Egypt, like bark from a tree.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
It’s interesting to see how it is referred to in the New Testament and what returning to slavery represents.
Except as soon as his people were out, God left Egypt in peace. So explain that one.
Alexandria. Boom.
Really? You’re going to tie Macedon’s invasion of Egypt to some drawn out revenge of God’s? The Macedonians, who famously worshipped a number of immortals, making sacrifices to them?
Not every great war is a special one like Moses’.