[68c12c16]

I think what we call the skill of "analysis" is to divide an abstract object into a set of its containing elements, and then differentiate those elements and treat each element for its own different case.

China is one such abstract object...It's never about pro-china or anti-china -- after all it is a society of 1 billion individuals who are all differentiable from each other (and we have to differentiate a random chinese people from their government)...if we find a certain aspect of China appealing and potentially benecial to our own society, then why not just "like" that aspect and learn from them?

In the last few decades of the 5th century BC, Sparta and Athens fought a war with each other, which Athens had lost...but this did not prevent Plato (who was an Athenian) from praising certain aspects of Spartan society.

[BurritoAlPastor]

And also didn't prevent us (a couple thousand years later) from lumping them all together as "ancient Greece". Distance from the components, in time or space, lets us paint the set as homogeneous.

[68c12c16]

I was just doing a categorical mapping, which you might call it analogy...

How is that "lumping" relevant to the current discussion initiated by King-Aaron?

[King-Aaron]

I certainly don't disagree. I do think that your point is possibly lost on a lot of people that are drawing these sorts of comparisons though...

[68c12c16]

sorry...analogy quite often can cause confusions...I will try to make more intuitive and relevant ones in the future...

It's just that the current situation between China and the U.S. bears a lot of similarities as that between Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) and Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War. At the time, Sparta was an oligarchic society and Athens was a democratic one. Thucydides considered the cause of the war was because Sparta was worried about the rise of Athens could threaten its own way of life, and Athens wanted to spread democracy to other city states. There seemed to be no intrinsic conflict between the two states...the problem was that they did not trust each other, only because they were different. I personally feel this situation is quite like the current situation between US and China...There is no intrinsic conflict; they just don't trust each other (sometime even a bit phobic of each other), only because they are different...

[cjhanks]

And then didn't he die from ingesting hemlock?

[alasdair_]

>And then didn't he die from ingesting hemlock?

No. He probably died in his sleep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Death

You're probably thinking of Socrates, who deliberately killed himself by eating hemlock.