Tribunal - Cardassian courts and our own

[Madner Kami]

Troy was more or less based on the Iliad, which was not history but a legendary story of the previous Greek civilization. Greece having been through a dark age after the Bronze Age Collapse. The Sparta in that story does not necessarily have much cultural connection with the historical Sparta that existed in the time of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. If the history is shit, well it was not based on a historical document in the first place.

To call Sparta progressive by our standards is to focus on one aspect at the expense of the whole. Their political philosophy was based on a having a professional hereditary military caste in order to keep order over the far more numerous helot class who kept their city fed. If memory serves, the helots were analogous to peasants or non-chattel slaves and were people the Spartans conquered early in their history.

Sparta did not exist at the time of a possible Trojan War for a simple reason. The Sparta of that time would be of mycenean descend, while the Sparta of Leonidas is of dorian descent. The Dorians are a group of people who migrated and took over the area known as Greece as a follow-up to the bronze age collapse. There are theories around, which suggest that the Helots are the descendants of the original mycenean population, while the Spartans are the descendants of the Dorians taking over and establishing themselves as a ruling elite, similar to what happened in Britain when the Saxons invaded (not going to argue this theory's validity, as it's besides the point). Either way, Classical Sparta only happens after a bunch of socio-political reforms in the wake of quite some social unrest and civil strife, undertaken by the semi-mythical law-giver Lycurgus somewhere around 800 BCE (remember, the bronze age collapse is at 1200-1150 BCE).

[Mickey_Rat15]

Troy was more or less based on the Iliad, which was not history but a legendary story of the previous Greek civilization. Greece having been through a dark age after the Bronze Age Collapse. The Sparta in that story does not necessarily have much cultural connection with the historical Sparta that existed in the time of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. If the history is shit, well it was not based on a historical document in the first place.

To call Sparta progressive by our standards is to focus on one aspect at the expense of the whole. Their political philosophy was based on a having a professional hereditary military caste in order to keep order over the far more numerous helot class who kept their city fed. If memory serves, the helots were analogous to peasants or non-chattel slaves and were people the Spartans conquered early in their history.

Sparta did not exist at the time of a possible Trojan War for a simple reason. The Sparta of that time would be of mycenean descend, while the Sparta of Leonidas is of dorian descent. The Dorians are a group of people who migrated and took over the area known as Greece as a follow-up to the bronze age collapse. There are theories around, which suggest that the Helots are the descendants of the original mycenean population, while the Spartans are the descendants of the Dorians taking over and establishing themselves as a ruling elite, similar to what happened in Britain when the Saxons invaded (not going to argue this theory's validity, as it's besides the point). Either way, Classical Sparta only happens after a bunch of socio-political reforms in the wake of quite some social unrest and civil strife, undertaken by the semi-mythical law-giver Lycurgus somewhere around 800 BCE (remember, the bronze age collapse is at 1200-1150 BCE).

Yes. That was what I was alluding to. There was a large cultural change in Greece between the Greek Heroic Age and what we usually mean by Ancient Greece. We do not know a lot about how the Mycenean civilization worked. The concept of the Polis as the basic political organization and dislike of monarchy seemed to have developed out of the dark age transition.

[GreyICE]

I also am beginning to see the issue of guilty-full/little-witnessses and innocence/public-weaponizes-law-against-innocence.

While the Cardassians have every legal way to convict you of murder, sabotage,petty-theft, conspiracy to suicide, and marketing of fantasy porno (wth is that even a thing?!), they don't have the viewpoint of HOW you did it? Or WHAT choice is your truth since you can fabricatie a half-truth and walk scot-free.

I live with a warrented peadophile in my building and while he doesn't leer into real porno, he can apparently have political-immunity in his dad's lumber business that allows Bring-your-kid-to-work-day?

When evidence is no longer the metric for conviction, you can get some really weird things happening. Brock Turner appears repentant (and is from the appropriate family) - 3 months. Driving drunk while rich and kill four people? Affluenza. Probation. Yawn in a courtroom while black? Six months. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2009-08-10-0908090539-story.html

It's like sentencing is tied to the court's perception of your value rather than an objective reading of the facts.

P.S. The Spartans were not a very literary culture, and virtually everything we know about them comes from the writings of others. It's at best inaccurate and at worst pure fantasy. There's not enough facts to debate anything about their culture.

[Madner Kami]

P.S. The Spartans were not a very literary culture, and virtually everything we know about them comes from the writings of others. It's at best inaccurate and at worst pure fantasy. There's not enough facts to debate anything about their culture.

That is an idiotic statement for various reasons. As a start for you to rethink your stance, I suggest reading up on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcman

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrtaeus

[GreyICE]

P.S. The Spartans were not a very literary culture, and virtually everything we know about them comes from the writings of others. It's at best inaccurate and at worst pure fantasy. There's not enough facts to debate anything about their culture.

That is an idiotic statement for various reasons.

Not the least of which is that it's true. For instance, take the two poets you mentioned. Here's the wikipedia text on Alcman:

There were six books of Alcman's choral poetry in antiquity (c. 50-60 hymns), but they were lost at the threshold of the Medieval Age, and Alcman was known only through fragmentary quotations in other Greek authors until the discovery of a papyrus in 1855(?) in a tomb near the second pyramid at Saqqâra in Egypt. The fragment, which is now kept at the Louvre in Paris, contains approximately 100 verses of a so-called partheneion, i.e. a song performed by a chorus of young unmarried women. In the 1960s, many more fragments were published in the collection of the Egyptian papyri found in a dig at an ancient garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus. Most of these fragments contain poems (partheneia), but there are also other kinds of hymns among them.

In other words, we have about 100 verses of his poetry, and what other people wrote about him.

As for Tyrtaeus, Wikipedia is even more direct:

Virtually all we know about the life of Tyrtaeus is found two entries of the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia redacted in the 10th century AD.[2] Traditional accounts of his life were almost entirely deduced from his poetry or were simply fiction,[3]

And those are the two Spartan writers we have the MOST material about.

Next time you want to toss insults around, if I were you I'd take a good amount of time to verify your facts first. Because dude? You're a fucking moron.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I cannot help but feel that the topic has drifted somewhat.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Thousands of US Judges who broke oaths or laws remain on the bench.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-judges-misconduct/

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Good. They should be benched. Let the better judges take the field.

[GreyICE]

Good. They should be benched. Let the better judges take the field.

That's, um, that's not what this means in this context.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Good. They should be benched. Let the better judges take the field.

That's, um, that's not what this means in this context.

Hmm. I just googled the definition of bench and I think you might be right.