03-22-2022, 01:30 PM
(03-21-2022, 11:16 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: 1) No fault divorce was a mistake.
Most divorces have either an arch-villain ("he beat me with his fists" or "she drained me through credit cards")' or shared culpability. Some marriages are mistakes due to cultural clashes. One spouse might mature and the other one might not. Easy divorce should be available in cases of abuse and pervasive adultery because in such cases the marriage has already dissolved.
Quote:2) "War crimes" should only be prosecuted if the person broke the laws of his or her nation at the time and did not do so under duress. If tried by another country, there is a violation of national sovereignty ("international committees" have no legitimate sovereignty, only countries). If tried for something that was legal at the time, the prosecution is ex post facto and therefore also illegitimate.**
Even Nazi Germany had laws against murder and theft as statutory law. What was wrong with the Nazis was that they believed that they could excuse murder, enslavement, and robbery in service of the Party, the Nation, and the Leadership. What the Nazis were convicted of was all illegal in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, the Weimar Republic, and interwar Austria before the Anschluss. The Allies prosecuted their own soldiers for ordinary murder, looting, and rape. Does anyone think that (had the Austrian Empire survived) that "Kaiser Otto" would have cut any slack on such crimes? I think not.
Quote:3) If you can't make a living out of high school, your education system has failed you. If you can't make a solidly middle class income out of university, your education system has also failed you.
Or the system has. High school used to churn out the large armies of factory workers, and it still churns out huge numbers of people suited to factory work. The factory jobs that used to be the most reliable means out of poverty are no more. College education has its fault in pushing early specialization (one learns the vocabulary and is narrowed into fitting certain roles in life at the exclusion of others).
If you want to teach anything practical to college students that is not a narrow trade, then it is salesmanship. A capitalist order recognizes little more practical than creating and maintaining an enticing display of merchandise or breaking down a customer's sales resistance. Selling is an essential part of capitalist commerce -- and of politics and education. Sure it is philistine, but it works. The system needs people to sell vacuum cleaners, and not so many people who have narrowed themselves into a box related to a college major.
Quote:4) If your ancestors committed human sacrifice, I give zero fucks about their civilization being destroyed, just like how I gave zero fucks that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia and Maoist China all fell.
Reputedly there was nothing wrong with Aztec civilization that the most benign expression of Christian religion (Quakerism?) would not have solved. There was nothing wrong with German life that Reform Judaism (which originated in Germany) would not have solved.
I actually watched video of the execution of Satan Hussein and took great delight in watching a horrible man die. I shed no tears over Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu being ripped to pieces by a firing squad.
Quote:5) "Elite" should not be an insult. Being successful and having erudite tastes are something you should be proud of. Just don't be an oligarch or bureaucrat. Those are indeed legitimate insults.
One could be a great admirer of art like Hermann Goering or a great lover of music like most Nazi bigwigs and be a horrible person, but on the whole great literature, art, music, and architecture elevate most of us. So does the majesty of nature at its best. Ugliness debases life. Being an oligarch or a bureaucratic gamesman usually implies imposing poverty, itself ugly, upon helpless people.
Quote:ex: in 2015, they literally arrested a baggage guard, for "accessory to murder" because he (legally at the time) worked in one of the Nazi camps. You don't have to have any sympathy for the Nazis to realize how ridiculous that is.
Among the defendants at the Nuremberg trials was Walter Funk, head of the Reichsbank that basically fenced the loot from occupied countries and of course Holocaust victims. He was convicted of crimes against humanity for such and sentenced to life imprisonment. In a way he was a 'baggage handler" of the Third Reich.
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.