07-20-2018, 12:59 PM
(07-20-2018, 06:01 AM)TheNomad Wrote:(06-25-2018, 06:53 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-24-2018, 08:17 PM)TheNomad Wrote: As soon as people cite The Holocaust in any way and use the word Hitler, that is when they have lost their barking mind over some doctrinal offense they must sanctify with absolutism.
The references were used to distinguish between objectionable material (opinion), indefensible positions (provable falsehood) and an accurate description of objectionable or provably-false material (the quotations could be themselves truthful. Godwin's Law applies when someone cheaply compares someone or an institution to Hitler, Nazism, or the consequences of either as a deprecation of someone else. Thus an Israeli program to reduce tobacco use is not 'Nazi' simply because the Nazis were opposed to tobacco. On the other hand, if someone really is a vehemently racist, militarist, despotic opponent of democracy then one might have a valid comparison to Hitler. If you are a singing a near-translation of the Horst-Wessel-Lied in an unironic way and not for dramatic or educational purposes, then you are probably a Nazi.
Maybe I could have used the example of someone who has been stopped for erratic driving who proclaims to the police officer who stopped him. "Osshifer, I only had a cupp'la beerzh" and then fails the field-sobriety tests and for whom the Breathalyzer registers a 0.15% BAC is clearly false (it was four beers) or at least deceitful (the beers were 'forties') in his protest of sobriety, the report of the drunk's verbal claim might be accurate.
I hope you realize (and I'm calling this out as I would like to be done unto me) your description of the obviously stereotypical "black" drunk in the story might be offensive to some people.
Butterfly McQueen agreed to kowtow Ms Scarlett in GWTW but she said no to the watermelon when they asked her to eat it on-screen. I mean, there is a limit to these things. I personally have no issue with it. I don't think it could have been more so unless you added that the 40s were Colt brand. I mean, I SAW Billy D Williams in that commercial as a kid.
I was not referring to any alleged cultural attribute of race among drunk drivers. The 'forty' is usually associated with poor people with little education. It is perfectly designed for dangerous binge drinking, and I am surprised that states allow it to be sold. That people are pouring it into glasses for three or more people? Or that people drink a third of it in three different times? I don't accept that because the last third after a few days would be awful.
Most mass-market American beer is awful, and the more recent new brands or revived narrow-market beers are much tastier. The tastier beer, as opposed to the insipid swill that heavier drinkers consume, is wholly unsuited to chug-a-lugging. I can't imagine (at the extreme) chug-a-lugging a Pilsner Urquell, the best-tasting beer (this Czech import has a distinct nutty taste) that I have ever had. I suppose that European alcoholics might get drunk on it, but Americans would not get drunk on it. There are far cheaper ways to get drunk.
...Oh, yes -- Butterfly McQueen was right to refuse to eat watermelon on screen. It was not essential to the plot. Watermelon implies some ugly stereotypes -- but as a white man I have no personal problem with it. I love it!
Quote:MOVING ON... I had said people really do - when pressed or feeling cornered in a belief or system - they do grasp for absolutes for what I believe is a personal safety net FOR their ideology. Ideologies over time become as a personal fortress we may built to protect what we believe and want to believe.
We circle the wagons, and everyone in the wagon train who ends up sharing the same concern for the time might forget old differences in a situation that can give them a shared fate. Irish Catholics and Mennonites of Swiss origin might have had severe differences getting along before setting out in the same wagon train and they might have intended to settle in very different communities. But under attack from Indians they had something to share in their fears. They could as easily end up dead. More recently, if one is in a consummately-dangerous combat (as when missiles are coming in), people get a focus on things other than the differences that they had before they enlisted.
People are seeing threats to their literal interpretation of the Bible -- as that if the first chapters of Genesis suggest that the world is a literal seven-day Creation and that there was a literal worldwide flood, then the Earth must be a few thousand years old, and the entire Earth must have been inundated -- even the summit of Mount Everest. Biblical prophecy as in Revelation must be true, and Jesus is coming soon. To such a believer, anyone who challenges any part of this must be part of some demonic plot to destroy Christian faith.
Look at some of the consequences of some articles of Faith. If Jesus really is coming soon, then such concerns as global warming are moot. The Faithful will be raptured away from this sinful world and into some Heaven while the sinful are damned to experience great tribulations. Most who miss the Rapture will be damned to Hell, which the world will be like in horrific wars and monstrous tyranny. If Young-Earth creationism is true, then study of anything that contradicts it could lead to the sort of demonic takeover of the human soul that leads people to Hell.
But I am a rationalist, and I believe that old tales cannot be accepted as truth simply because they are in some holy writ. I have a deprecation of the worldwide Flood in that Noah could have never gotten around the world to collect all the animal species that now exist from where they were and then circumnavigate the world to put the penguins in Antarctica, the kangaroos in Australia, the zebras and chimpanzees in Africa, opossums in the Americas, and wolves nearly everywhere in forty days. Add to that, Moses would have needed a very sophisticated set of aquariums just for the fresh-water fish and amphibians that would have otherwise perished at sea. Am I damned to Hell for that? That suggests that God is merciless on matters of faith. I'd like to believe that a righteous person who simply worships the wrong God or worships God in the wrong way will be excused for that and gain admittance to Heaven for righteousness. The most egregious sinners? Either obliterated or damned to Hell. I certainly don't want to go where the Nazis are.
Quote:Adolph Hitler and Manson and these people are SYMBOLS of evil for many, many people. I do not personally believe in a "devil" figure, but I understand where and WHY that concept came to be. Humans create and/or latch onto people/concepts/religions/etc as mortar to secure the blocks of their own personal fortress. When pressed or feeling pressed about an issue of great importance, human beings will conjure a PARALLEL or a HARD EXAMPLE (to them) they can cling to in order to assess the world around them and the events happening. So, I get saddened when Adolph Hitler is conjured not as a historical figure but as a personal gauge and ultimate evil under the bed by which a respondent to the conversation tosses into the mix when it really does not belong there. For it is incendiary in itself, really has no purpose, and serves only to inflame and nothing more.
Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson are not 'symbols' of evil; they are evil. My best description of the Devil is the perverse or corrupt superego, or absence of a superego, that allows one to do evil with relish. That Devil can lead people to do horrible things. My conception of the Devil suggests a play in which the Devil is the greatest adventurer in history, tempting people to do exploitative or destructive acts so that he can bring them with him to populate his nightmarish Hell. That Devil loves injustice; he enjoys hearing blasphemy as a music lover might appreciate the witty counterpoint of a Bach fugue. Adventurer? He's been everywhere -- slave ships and Nazi murder camps alike. He has been among infantry in human-wave charges and he has been in the war room with generals. Courage? Hardly. He is for all practical purposes indestructible. Oh, yes -- the Devil can change gender when it suits him, just as he can cite Scripture to serve his ends. (Shakespeare). I would place him at the many witch trials that lead to the execution of innocent people accused of witchcraft, at lynchings, and drug deals. I would have him tempting people to drive drunk I would even give him a role in the sinking of the Titanic. Why should he fear being on a sinking ship? Passengers and crew might die, but he can't die!
Quote:I mean, based on what I have seen some here say, aren't we struggling with this now NATIONALLY? With families torn apart, friends not speaking, turning the channel to msnbc or fox or whatever because we know that when we turn it on IT WILL TELL US WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR. Haven't we expressed that this sucks and should not be happening? How do we stop that? Does it not begin by stop hiding inside our fortress and saying "it is all lies out there"?
...and that is the problem. People do not want objective reality. We are in a messy time, one in which power is on the Far Right and truth has a liberal bias, which is a dangerous situation. That is how things go when Donald Trump is President.
Quote:In short, using absolutism to sort of "end' the dialogue and basically say "this is my standard, this is my personal gauge to asses what you are talking about" it leaves no room for expansion, shuts down the dialogue immediately and is wholly representative of my ultimate "thesis" concerning who and how Prophets are at the heart of all doom in the Saeculum. I would go so far to say that anyone who read the strauss/howe texts can see they, themselves, clearly point toward the idea the Prophet is at the epicenter of the Crisis (always) from sort of beginning to end. We can disagree about that, but to me it was something so clearly represented by the authors it is almost (was) beyond mentioning............. for just assuming it was already understood by anyone studying this subject matter.
But in the last Crisis Era, the Prophet/Idealist generation did its allotted job in America and the British Commonwealth -- and did it very well. Who could better express the idea that Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo were the representatives of Satan intent upon transforming the world into a Hell as fearsome as the one that one might ascribe to Mephistopheles? Who could then better imagine a better world based upon principles that deny all applicability to the fear, hunger, brutality, and repression inherent in fascism?
Quote:I never got the feelz that Heroes were the problem. After all, the authors named them HEROES. Heroes don't destroy, they fix. Artists don't cause drama, they create. Nomads just don't care. So we tolerate everyone else's bullshit fomented by the Prophet. They called it Prophet for a reason. Like I said, this was to me almost beyond even mentioning. We all could argue all day about OUR PERSONAL BELIEFS toward the archetype, but clearly we are here because strauss and howe wrote books and had amazing structural concepts. How is it we then read their construct and then say "no, that's not right". I mean, they made it. If we aren't on the same page with their framework, wtf are any of us doing here? I never heard of the four archetypes or the saeculum or the turnings before that book. They invented this "science" so we should probably go with their findings and/or construct?
Can we concur that Dubya and Donald Trump are the wrong sorts of Prophet/Idealists for leading America through a Crisis Era? There were Prophet/Idealists who created the eugenic theories and racist claptrap to which Hitler grasped in his plan for his idea of a better world (never mind that it would be Judenrein and that many people would be consigned to slavery on behalf of the "Master Race"). There were Prophet/Idealists who tried to convince Americans who did not have slaves that slavery was the best thing possible for enslaved blacks.
Maybe the world has the difficult task of determining which Prophet/Idealist agenda is best. The Boom Generation us still young enough to have people capable of setting an agenda for a better world that mandates a struggle against evil, domestic and foreign. Donald Trump is obviously not up to it, and his agenda is at best suspect. There are many possible solutions to our economic distress, cultural depravity, and hazards of dangerous technologies. We have yet to see the unification of most of America behind one agenda. Can we mess up? Sure, and very badly. I look at the fascists who rejected Idealist morality and fostered national resentments manifesting themselves in the closest thing to Apocalypse that Humanity has ever known. Churchill and FDR demonstrated that a moral agenda was stronger than ethnic enmity, and when the Second World War went so badly for Germany as to splinter the country, then Germans who had a choice turned to an Idealist/Prophet (Konrad Adenauer) who could enunciate principles for a new and humane Germany.
Quote:It is not trivial or flippant to overlook this, actually it is quite important. Once we start saying "no, the HERO is the problem......." I mean, cmon..... really? Professor X is not Magneto. If you do that, the entire framework of the story no longer functions. Heroes can be serial killers just like anyone. But we are past that, no? We are all smart enough to go above that level of deduction to examine the archetypes as a whole.... and sorry, that involves close to 90% objectivity if not more.
If anyone is saying "Adolph Hitler was born as a Hero so BLAM your theory cannot be right" then, that person really does not belong in the conversation. They just don't have the faculties to engage in this. (btw I really don't know what archetype he is).
I don't consider Hero/Civic generations wholly innocent in history. Need I remind you that among contemporaries of the earliest wave of American GIs were Ernst Kaltenbrunner (the man in charge of the Nazi concentration camp system; Adolf Eichmann, who set up the logistics of the Holocaust; and Josef Mengele, who performed obscene pseudo-medical experiments upon helpless people? Nazism was anti-feminist, but it encouraged some young women to be brutal camp guards. There were young guards who selected people for the gas chambers, and let us not forget the inimitable Irma Grese (a contemporary of many young American soldiers), who as a guard had trained dogs attack helpless inmates. Blind obedience to evil is itself evil. And let us not forget that some contemporaries of American and British Idealists were major perpetrators of Axis horror -- Koki Hirota, Prime Minister of Japan during some horrific massacres in China; Wilhelm Frick, author of legislation to dehumanize Jews and set them up for extermination while establishing the apparatus of the totalitarian police state; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who made the Wehrmacht complicit in Nazi-sponsored atrocities and planned aggression against many countries; and Ion Antonescu, Romanian military dictator complicit in genocide mostly in western Ukraine.
All generations are capable of evil, whether small-scale robbery-murders or outright genocide. Whatever generation we are, it is our responsibility to choose decent, humane, competent leaders in democracies.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.