Cassiopaea Forum Reading Workshops - Public

(CRW Am-EU) What temporary schedule is best for you?

  • Sunday 17:00-19:00 UTC (18:00-20:00 French time)

    Votes: 28 65.1%

  • Saturdays 17:00-19:00 UTC (18:00-20:00 French time)

    Votes: 15 34.9%
  • Total voters
    43
Hi everyone,

Below are the links for the recent Aus-Asia-Am group workshop for The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

Here's the video of the last meeting
The audio
And the folder
And the slideshow

We will read Laura's series on The Cosmic Context of Greek Philosophers Part 3 for our next meeting at 7 pm Sydney daylight savings time (GMT +11). See you all then!

Below are the links to what we explored in our discussion:
~ Loveliest of Trees by A.E. Housman ~
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Click to expand...

cassiopaea.org

Session 19 February 2000

February 19, 2000 Laura, Ark, Frank Q: Hello. A: Hello. Q: And who do we have with us? A: Woneen. Q: And where do you transmit through? A: Cassiopaea. Q: First of all, I would like to know if you have any comments on our guests earlier this evening? {A doctor and his wife.}...
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Hyperboreans, Luwians and Alevis

Hi to all, This is something I intended to do a few months before I joined this forum but I never had a chance to do it because of my exams. Our subject in this thread includes Sufism, Alevi-Bektashi tradition and some Greek Mythology as well. My main sources will be the poems of Alevi-Bektashi...
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looking for an article about the formation of israel

Those who Forget the Past There is still the question hanging as to why our current culture has so little awareness of this vast and powerful Jewish Empire that dominated Eastern Europe and Western Asia for such a long period of time. The answer probably lies in the religious divisions and...
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Howdy all,

The Am-EU group finishes Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 of Dr. Andrew's Łobaczewski's Logocracy: A Concept of the State System (translation by Harrison). The synopsis follows:

Logocracy - Chapter 8: The Principle of Public Sovereignty

While democracy in the past has in part passed the test of time and experience, its doctrines, in addition to not adequately aligning with the laws of nature, are idealistically naive in that they don't account for the previously mentioned psychological realities. Giving the universal right to vote without the appropriate knowledge makes it too easy for democracy to turn into a semi-secret rule of organized minorities.

In all societies, there exists a minority of individuals with mental deficiencies/deviations and moral failings that limit them from fully performing their duties as stated in democratic principles. Ponerogenic activity can stem from this and it's important to limit its flow if not alright stop it.

"We must recognize as a natural law the sovereignty of a rational society which is capable of exercising sound judgment and prudence". This principle will need to be refined naturally in a logocratic society using objective knowledge on the nature of societies. It may come to fruition with the help of increased knowledge flow in a society, and via a politically neutral organization (logocratic/civic association).

A logocratic society, in its aim of better utilizing the talents of all, will recognize the failings of democracy's party system, where there is a tendency to place into power those who are unfit to take on tremendous responsibility. The new system would have this neutral logocratic organization that would attract a wide range of folks with moderate views, as they tend to have a more critical mind, and would vote based on the personal qualities of candidates instead of falling back on a party or "tribe" mentality.

Logocracy - Chapter 9: The Principle of Competence

The principle of competence in modern societies can be seen in many jobs that require specialized training, knowledge, and/or psychological predisposition in order to perform them. Surgeons make a great examples as they not only do they need to be a doctor, but also require additional training to perform their responsibilities to society. Without proper measures in place to limit those who would not excel in such positions, society would suffer its consequences stemming from the resulting incompetence.

There is a lack of competence criteria in the political sphere, where this naivety severely misaligns it from the laws of nature. Logocracy would ameliorate this by seeing the principle of competence as a natural law, stemming from the laws of nature, and permeating this idea to all social functions. Naturally, it would be the logocratic/civic association that would oversee this principle come to fruition in political activity.

Civil Rights​

To vote, one would need to take the appropriate exam and civic pledge. In engaging with this learning process, it may cultivate inspiration towards advancing their skills in these fields. The study material is as follows (up to 100 pages for each), that would be published by the aforementioned logocratic/civic association:
  1. Economic geography of the country
  2. Political history of the last ninety years
  3. Elements of economics and management
  4. Psychological and social issues
  5. Constitutional law
This practice would remove approximately 12% of the population from political activity. The upsides are, ironically, a higher voter turnout, increased quality of voting due to higher political awareness, and limiting those susceptible to demagogy. This process would also be available to foreigners as well, provided they complete the necessary work for the right of citizenship.

The civic pledge consists of:
  1. An obligation in line with logocracy—to be guided by one's own discernment of affairs
  2. An appeal to conscience and justice
  3. May include a short religious invocation of moral significance that drives one to positively influence responsible behavior.
It would not consist of:
  1. Commitments such as defense of borders or political orientations
  2. Parts that would not go well with the morally sensitive and national minorities
By completing this, it would give citizens the right to vote for all representative bodies, and perhaps the president if it's decided by the popular vote. They would also gain a civil right (not the same as a citizen right) to lower elective positions in one's community such as village leaders and aldermen, and be able to take part in local councils.

Parliamentary Members’ Rights​

Would-be members of parliament should undergo academic preparation, which is scoped by parliamentary honoraria. With the help of the council of the wise, this will be refined by appropriate resolutions of parliament. Logocracy would not bar anyone who has potential talent in this sphere, and allow those to prepare for any number of years according to their current life situation.

Parliamentary study would include the five aforementioned disciplines (see Civil Rights above). Additional aspects to study are:
  1. Social sciences with emphasis on psychology, psychopathology, and ponerology
  2. Parliamentary activity and issues facing legislative work
  3. Principles in line with logocracy—religious cognition
Where democracy fails, these methods would create the necessary rigor and better align with the principle of competence which is sorely needed in the political sphere. This would improve adaptation of critical minds and talented people, increase resistance to demagogic activity, and create a more mature and efficient parliament.

General Offices​

The chief executive offices, in its great responsibilities, will be tasked by those generally who are younger and who are fully normal and mentally fit. While some older folks have the necessary merit and talent, it is important also to consider psychologically how their age affects their performance. Is there a decline in mental activity? Do they tend to live in the past? Have they let egotism creep into their psyche over the years?

A logocratic system would be more resistant to psychopaths taking leadership positions. To bolster this resistance, it would be up to the council of the wise to remind society of how these positions of power attract those predisposed to ponerology. If they do achieve their dreams of power, history shows that large-scale devastations would follow.

The council of the wise will have a direct hand in assessing the health and mental state of candidates for these high-responsibility offices and would have the ability to veto a would-be candidate and one who is already in office if they prove to be unfit for the role. If there's pushback, an open-dialogue will be needed and the council would disclose its reasons for such a decision for the good of the public as a whole.

In closing, the principle of competence is one of the pillars of logocracy, and would be written in the first part of the constitution. It would be permeated throughout all aspects of society, while at the same time not be used as a source of privilege for the wealthy or become a self-gratifying tool for organized groups.

For Next Meeting - October 22nd, 2023

We will start Logocracy - Chapter 10: Ownership of Property for the next time. See y'alls!
 
Hi everyone,

Below are the links for the recent Aus-Asia-Am group workshop for The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

Here's the video of the last meeting
The audio
And the folder
And the slideshow

We will read Laura's series on The Cosmic Context of Greek Philosophers Part 4 for our next meeting at 7 pm Sydney daylight savings time (GMT +11). See you all then!

Below are the links to what we explored in our discussion:

~ Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day? by William Shakespeare ~
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Click to expand...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1717507570095788200

en.wikipedia.org

Scythians - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

I found Lydia- here is a map showing the various ancient regions in Anatolia & the Greek coast:
1698534100959.png
For ease of reference, the Greek dialects and map of Assyria:

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Howdy all,

The Am-EU group starts with The Circulation of Elite's Happier Federalist Stories substack article and then moves to Chapter 10 of Dr. Andrew's Łobaczewski's Logocracy: A Concept of the State System (translation by Harrison). In that chapter, we finish the general overview of the chapter by Harrison and left off at the beginning of the first major header: "Ownership of Property". The synopsis follows:

The Circulation of Elites - Happier Federalist Stories (Switzerland and Canada)

Federalism is a type of government with powers split between regional governments and an overarching, general government. Over the years, the West's federalism degenerated to top-down federal states, and eventually led to a funneling of power into national, unitary states.

There was a time when the Swiss system was in danger of permanently becoming a unitary state, and doing away with its bottom-up and communal approach. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Switzerland did eventually adopt a unitary government in 1798. Forces were looking to keep it that way, but it only lasted a few years. Swiss federalism largely avoided this potentially unfortunate fate largely due to its historic political structure—the Swiss cantons:

For centuries the Swiss cantons were independent of monarchial rule. Their old regimes were elitist, but they were still very much part of their own community. As small societies, the cantons were not able to develop complex regimes. Most lacked the resources, for instance, to build up bureaucracies, the modern form of “rational power.” Especially in rural regions, public works – such as road-building and the construction of aqueducts in the Alps in the Valais canton – were done on a community basis: every adult man was obliged to work for several days or weeks a year for the common good. In addition, many other economic activities – for example farming in rural regions and crafts in the cities – were bound up in organisations which required collective decision-making. This, and the mutual dependence of people in small societies, promoted communalism. (Wolf Linder)
Click to expand...

During the periods of chaos in 1848 (European Revolutions of 1848), the Swiss settled on the idea of "modern federalism" that is composed of three levels, each given portions of state powers:
  1. Federation (federal)
  2. Cantons (regional)
  3. Communes (local)
The Swiss parliaments largely resemble the U.S. senate in that it consists of:
  • National Council - 200 seats divided among the cantons according to its population.
  • Council of States - 2 members from every full canton, for equal representation and giving smaller cantons a better chance in the political sphere.
In balancing these state powers, the federal state has been kept in check largely due to the historic presence of the Swiss cantons. Its main mission is to manage foreign relations, maintain the national army, and act as an arbiter or intermediary for the cantons. Its other powers include upkeeping the federal postal service, currency and coinage.

The main branching points transforming U.S. federalism into a top-down approach that outwardly portrays itself as one that is bottom-up is the introduction of the 10th amendment, where in its ambiguity, is able to funnel and centralize power at the federal level:

In the US, the 10th amendment proved to be a difficult way to shift powers from the states to the central government. Thus, US authorities developed the practice of “implied powers” or the “interstate clause” which allowed the federal government to assume new powers by mere interpretation of the existing constitution. Not so in Switzerland. From the very beginning, the Swiss parliament was reluctant to provide the federation with new powers and has interpreted Article 3 of the constitution in a strict sense. Not only the establishment of a national bank, any form of federal taxes, the creation of a social security system, the construction of federal highways, subsidies to the cantonal universities, and the introduction of environmental policies, but also “small” issues like subsidies for hiking trails all needed formal constitutional amendment and ratification. This is one of the reasons why constitutional amendments in Switzerland are proposed practically in every year while in the US they are rare events. (Wolf Linder)
Click to expand...

While the Swiss system borrows much from the U.S. 1787-89 constitutional federation, this amendment would likely not fly in their system due to its aforementioned history and its natural checks to prevent power grabs by the federal state. One check in particular is the federal state's overall magnitudes lower federal spending in relation to the U.S. The author notes that in federalism, those "who control spending, controls the federation".

Canadian federalism on the other hand, takes inspiration from Britain's federal system rather than the US'. Learning from the US civil war, it sought to adopt a more centralized federal approach to governance, citing that the decentralized U.S. system is what caused much of their strife. The founding fathers however didn't find it feasible to instate a pure, unitary government due to the sheer size of its country.

In essence, this led to an initial pooling of power in a centralized government, with one such example is their last word on any provincial legislation. Over the course of 150 years, there were repeated failed efforts to create a regionally representative senate as such as the ones in place in the US and Switzerland.

Despite this, Canadian federalism over the years have trended towards a more federal populist system, with the formation of a provincial rights movement soon after its 1867 founding as its first major marker towards equal treatment of provinces in the confederation. Another turning point was the transfer of natural resource management to the provinces, giving them negotiation leverage over the federal state. Even the federal state's ability to overturn provincial legislation was effectively made null, only being invoked during WWII—a time of crisis. In Quebec, many decisions were also made to protect its communal spirit with regards to its institutions, traditions, culture, and language.

In relation to both the Swiss and Canadian systems, the US' federalism has taken an unfortunate route in its top-down approach, creating a facade system where it preaches democracy and populism, but its innards are one that more closely resembles an oligarchy. With the recent COVID corruption for all to see, it is in the hopes that through its chaos people will actively look for solutions—perhaps reviving traditions and values of its lost, but deep federalist roots of the USA for which it was originally founded.

For Next Meeting - November 11th, 2023

We will continue with Logocracy - Chapter 10: Ownership of Property at the "Ownership of Property" subsection for next time.

I will unfortunately be missing this meeting, but will aim to be at the next one. Have a good one and see y'alls!
 
Hi everyone,

Below are the links for the recent Aus-Asia-Am group workshop for The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

Here's the video of the last meeting
The audio
And the folder
And the slideshow

We will be having a roundtable discussion on related topics to TMAHE & Laura's articles on the Greek Philosophers for our next meeting this Saturday at 7 pm Sydney time (+11 GMT). Feel free to share poems, videos or anything of interest. See you all then!

Below are the links to what we explored in our discussion:
~ The Sun Rising by John Donne ~

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
Click to expand...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1719939721596690873

Uruk - Wikipedia

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en.wikipedia.org

Ingá Stone - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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