First of all, if you've been having trouble finding the site via whitee.com - sorry about that. I'm in the process of doing something with the site and that's going to be down for a little while. Hopefully not too long. But you can get here via the oocities.com/smegmarecords address for now. This little blip will be a good thing soon enough.

So, here's a weird thing that happened...kinda rocked my intellectual socks off a bit. I just finished reading the book Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. It's a neat little book using jokes to explain philosophy. In it, the authors mention this article by Garrett Mattingly (I have no idea if there's any relation to Don) called The Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?

We all learned about The Prince in high school and/or college. And to everyone it seems pretty standard...do whatever it takes to get and keep power. But Mattingly looked into Machiavelli's other writings and his life in general and The Prince is the only thing in this guy's life that would suggest this attitude about politics. Machiavelli did a lot of other political and social work and none of it points to this POV. So Mattingly concludes that The Prince is satire.

Why did this take so long? We've all been good little bobbleheads just accepting what's been spoken. Now, I don't have the time to do the research myself on Machiavelli, but it's another example of just how lazy as a species we can be. There are a huge number of scholars who have been alive since this work was written. It's taken hundreds of years for this to come up. I think that's pretty remarkable. Maybe not sexy, but remarkable.