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The Old Hack

NP September 10, 2018

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31 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
40 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

So does technology. But both Nazi and Daesh demonstratively did used technology.

Please do not be ridiculous. It requires neither culture nor any particular kind of brains to use technology. Any murderer can pick up and use a gun. This does not make him a culture.

... ok, using technology is not that hard. But technology which got humans on moon is based on Nazi research.

34 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
43 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Then we have Aztec culture, which includes barbaric stuff like human sacrifice ...

Certainly. It is merely a ritualised form of the same sort of genocide most European countries have committed all over the planet. Unfortunately for the Aztecs they failed when confronted with the Spanish, who turned out to be much better at genocide than they were.

I don't think Christians, or specifically Spanish conquistadors, ever used human sacrifice. (Although Joan of Arc might object to that.) They just killed those people. It might actually be one of reasons they were better at it - without the ritual, killing is faster.

41 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
49 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Barbars are not people without civilization. They are people who have more primitive civilization that those who called them barbars.

That depends entirely on your use of the word. And there is indeed such a thing as peoples without a civilisation. 'Civilised' means 'citified', and again, that is the basis of culture. Once you have a sufficiently large and stable civilisation, culture -- a way of living -- can begin to develop on a large basis.

The "city" included in civilization is city in broad sense - bigger village would suffice.

Even then, you are already in conflict with definitions from wikipedia. First civilizations and first cities appeared few thousand years  BC ... but we already talk about culture hundreds of thousand years ago.

47 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

A parasitic group that stages a hostile takeover of a number of cities and use their power to promote an agenda, however -- they are not a culture. Both the Nazis and DAESH merely appropriated the trappings of culture from elsewhere and used them to masquerade as a nation or state.

Ok, claim that Nazis and Daesh stole their culture would be harder to dispute. Nazis definitely stole lot of things, including swastika ... however they at least attempted to make their own art.

... Daesh, meanwhile, is not exactly known for art ... except destruction of.

 

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

.. ok, using technology is not that hard. But technology which got humans on moon is based on Nazi research.

You are still not getting it. That research was made by German researchers from German universities that had grown from centuries of German culture. And all of it had been co-opted by the Nazis. I will give you this challenge: point to even ONE actual cultural achievement produced by Nazi 'culture'. ONE. It can not be done. There is NOTHING in the Nazi movement that was not stolen from elsewhere.

It's either that or you are postulating that the Nazi mentality was always there hidden in every single German and that it still is there today. And frankly, while I know some people do believe that, all they are doing is displaying the exact same mentality of hatred.

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

I don't think Christians, or specifically Spanish conquistadors, ever used human sacrifice. (Although Joan of Arc might object to that.) They just killed those people. It might actually be one of reasons they were better at it - without the ritual, killing is faster.

That really depends on how you look at it. The Crusades killed an AWFUL lot of people and sometimes they were butchered in what you might call a ritualised manner. 'Deus Vult' was used to justify a LOT of killing. But yeah, they were pretty damn efficient at it.

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

The "city" included in civilization is city in broad sense - bigger village would suffice.

Not for culture.

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Even then, you are already in conflict with definitions from wikipedia

Pssst. Let me tell you a secret. Wikipedia is not actually the be all end all of all knowledge. It is just a knowledge repository being vigorously and constantly edited by a lot of fallible human beings who sometimes have trouble agreeing on the exact direction from where the Sun will rise the next day. :danshiftyeyes:

Or in other words, I can live with being in conflict with Wikipedia. When I am, it is not necessarily me who is wrong. For that matter, it is not even certain that Wikipedia is being used correctly.

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

First civilizations and first cities appeared few thousand years  BC ... but we already talk about culture hundreds of thousand years ago.

Hm. That is a matter of definition. These are not the large cultures that ended up spanning empires. They were simply small ways of living confined to tribes. 'Agriculture' contains the word 'culture' but all that means is living off food grown from the land and that is pretty wide. The kind of culture I am talking about are the ones involving art forms so broadly accepted that they became styles used across long distances and sometimes for many centuries. If you take three tribes from fifty thousand years ago they might be quite close but have little in common as to how they did things. More modern culture, starting with for example Babylon, Egypt and the Romans, produced art so influential that it was widely admired and adapted for long distances and over many centuries. The sexagesimal system we took our minutes from is a remnant inherited from the Babylonians. That is an example of staying power.

But tyrannies and dictatorship tend to be lackluster when it comes to cultural contributions and what they do leave behind is largely a reaction to them, not as a result of them. ('Guernica', for example.) Nazism was not a culture. It was a movement, and a reactionary movement at that. It was based on fear and hatred of the strange, the different and the new. What few icons it created were stolen from elsewhere. The 'art' you linked to above, for example, is directly copied from Greek and Roman statuary. All poor Albert Speer really managed was to add size and bombast to his architecture. And Saddam Hussein, in his absurd admiration of Hitler, pathetically copied that. He essentially made copies of copies and called it art.

(Mind you, I would without hesitation call Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' a work of art. But again, that is a reaction to Nazis and not actually produced by them.)

Fear and hate are destructive in nature. By definition they cannot create. Perhaps the best example is the time Stalin desired a hotel constructed to impress guests from outside of Russia. He ordered some architects to plan one and they went to work, fearful of displeasing him. So they came up with two different schemes: one Renaissance, one Baroque. They took both plans with them and presented them to Stalin. He took one glance at them and said, "Yes, use that." Then he left.

None of the architects dared to follow Stalin and explain to him that it was two sets of plans, not one. And they were terrified of appearing to disobey him. In order to cover their behinds, the final structure was half Renaissance, half Baroque. You could safely call the overall effect... shall we say, unusual. But I am not sure I would call it a daring new artistic effort of Stalinist 'culture.'

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18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

When it's possible to get context for scene just by looking few pages back and forth ... but, obviously, reading the start is next thing I do when I start caring. It's not like I have enough time to read all webcomics I land on ... and when the start has considerably lower quality ...

I've always hated starting in the middle of a story; usually when it comes to webcomics I hit the "first comic" button without even reading the latest comic (though I'll sometimes glance at the "about this comic" page if there is one). Of course, if a comic with a large archive doesn't have a promising beginning I'm not going to spend too much time reading it to find out if it gets better; I've probably missed out on some good comics this way but I'm okay with that - it's not like I have to read all the good comics out there.

Of course, given the low quality of early EGS it might seem surprising I stuck with it long enough to get hooked, but I wasn't all that critical of my entertainment at that point in my life, and Dan's humor appealed to me enough to get me through to Grace transforming, which added enough interest to keep me reading through to Sister. And by the end of Sister I had to find out how things turned out for Ellen, and was already well on my way to being too attached to the rest of the main cast to give the series up.

18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

What did you use the backup for if not list of webcomics?

(I have list of webcomics I read in database. Synced between three computers every day. Not that I'm adding new comics so often, the database also includes last page I read. RSS is great help in following comics with irregular schedule.)

It was actually a backup of my entire hard drive; unfortunately I hadn't been keeping up with backing things up regularly. (At the time I just kept track of webcomics via bookmark; these days I have a list in a text document, though most of the list is comics I've heard of that sound interesting that I've never gotten around to check out.) I know there were at least a few comics that I didn't loose the links to due to my finding them prior to my last backup, but many of these I'd either lost interest in or were no longer being updated.

18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

On the other hand, there is no exact single definition of culture ... I just think you are incorrect in taking "can't be manifestation of barbarism as well" as axiom. Even barbars can have culture.

18 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Actually they can't. Pretty much by definition. Culture requires civilisation.

I really don't think I'd go so far to call Nazis (or any of the other groups in question) "cultures", but I could see how someone else might. As hkmaly says, there are a lot of different definitions for culture - and some of them are pretty broad. In fact, the term is even sometimes used for the transfer of information between individuals and generations through non-instinctual means in non-human animals (for instance, different bands of Chimpanzees have learned different ways to make and use tools, and as a result some primatologists consider these bands to have different cultures).

18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Barbarians are not people without civilization. They are people who have more primitive civilization than those who called them barbarians.

The term "primitive" itself is often used in a subjective and judgmental manner; it might be possible to compare how advanced one society's technology is, or how complicated their system of government is, but I don't think it's a good idea to call an entire culture/civilization "primitive" without further clarification.

So to rephrase your statement, barbarians are people whom the people who called them barbarians consider to be more primitive than (and by implication inferior to) them.

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14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
16 hours ago, hkmaly said:

.. ok, using technology is not that hard. But technology which got humans on moon is based on Nazi research.

You are still not getting it. That research was made by German researchers from German universities that had grown from centuries of German culture. And all of it had been co-opted by the Nazis. I will give you this challenge: point to even ONE actual cultural achievement produced by Nazi 'culture'. ONE. It can not be done. There is NOTHING in the Nazi movement that was not stolen from elsewhere.

I'm not THAT well versed in Nazis to think my inability to respond to this says anything about Nazi.

14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
16 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I don't think Christians, or specifically Spanish conquistadors, ever used human sacrifice. (Although Joan of Arc might object to that.) They just killed those people. It might actually be one of reasons they were better at it - without the ritual, killing is faster.

That really depends on how you look at it. The Crusades killed an AWFUL lot of people and sometimes they were butchered in what you might call a ritualised manner. 'Deus Vult' was used to justify a LOT of killing. But yeah, they were pretty damn efficient at it.

Justify, yes. But they streamlined it. Instead of coming to person, saying "Deus vult" (which is already very short) and killing him, they just cryed "Deus Vult" on start of battle and then didn't bothered with God until after the battle. Also, ANY crusader could done it, there was no need to high priest.

14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
17 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Even then, you are already in conflict with definitions from wikipedia

Pssst. Let me tell you a secret. Wikipedia is not actually the be all end all of all knowledge. It is just a knowledge repository being vigorously and constantly edited by a lot of fallible human beings who sometimes have trouble agreeing on the exact direction from where the Sun will rise the next day. :danshiftyeyes:

Or in other words, I can live with being in conflict with Wikipedia. When I am, it is not necessarily me who is wrong. For that matter, it is not even certain that Wikipedia is being used correctly.

Let me tell you another secret: this discussion is not worth to actually look for any other dictionary for me. Wikipedia is good enough.

14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
17 hours ago, hkmaly said:

First civilizations and first cities appeared few thousand years  BC ... but we already talk about culture hundreds of thousand years ago.

Hm. That is a matter of definition.

I'm sure I already mentioned that there is no single exact definition of culture.

14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

These are not the large cultures that ended up spanning empires.

No, they were small cultures. Still counted as culture.

14 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Fear and hate are destructive in nature. By definition they cannot create. Perhaps the best example is the time Stalin desired a hotel constructed to impress guests from outside of Russia. He ordered some architects to plan one and they went to work, fearful of displeasing him. So they came up with two different schemes: one Renaissance, one Baroque. They took both plans with them and presented them to Stalin. He took one glance at them and said, "Yes, use that." Then he left.

None of the architects dared to follow Stalin and explain to him that it was two sets of plans, not one. And they were terrified of appearing to disobey him. In order to cover their behinds, the final structure was half Renaissance, half Baroque. You could safely call the overall effect... shall we say, unusual. But I am not sure I would call it a daring new artistic effort of Stalinist 'culture.'

... this reminds me some replies I get from boss. Difference is, I don't fear to point out the answer is inadequate :)

Nazism was not just about fear and hate. There were important components but not everything. And sure, lot of the rest was copied, but most of renaissance was copied as well ; you can get something new just from what you choose to copy.

7 hours ago, ChronosCat said:
18 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Actually they can't. Pretty much by definition. Culture requires civilisation.

I really don't think I'd go so far to call Nazis (or any of the other groups in question) "cultures", but I could see how someone else might. As hkmaly says, there are a lot of different definitions for culture - and some of them are pretty broad. In fact, the term is even sometimes used for the transfer of information between individuals and generations through non-instinctual means in non-human animals (for instance, different bands of Chimpanzees have learned different ways to make and use tools, and as a result some primatologists consider these bands to have different cultures).

Yes.

7 hours ago, ChronosCat said:
18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Barbarians are not people without civilization. They are people who have more primitive civilization than those who called them barbarians.

The term "primitive" itself is often used in a subjective and judgmental manner; it might be possible to compare how advanced one society's technology is, or how complicated their system of government is, but I don't think it's a good idea to call an entire culture/civilization "primitive" without further clarification.

So to rephrase your statement, barbarians are people whom the people who called them barbarians consider to be more primitive than (and thus inferior to) them.

True, especially considering some specific cases of who was called barbarian ... it wasn't always fair (like in case of Persians). On the other hand, the "typical" barbarians - Germans, Celts, Gauls ... - compared to Ancient Rome before the fall started were more primitive in almost all senses. (It starts to be debatable during the fall, when decadence went up and economy down in Rome ...)

7 hours ago, ChronosCat said:
18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

When it's possible to get context for scene just by looking few pages back and forth ... but, obviously, reading the start is next thing I do when I start caring. It's not like I have enough time to read all webcomics I land on ... and when the start has considerably lower quality ...

I've always hated starting in the middle of a story; usually when it comes to webcomics I hit the "first comic" button without even reading the latest comic (though I'll sometimes glance at the "about this comic" page if there is one). Of course, if a comic with a large archive doesn't have a promising beginning I'm not going to spend too much time reading it to find out if it gets better; I've probably missed out on some good comics this way but I'm okay with that - it's not like I have to read all the good comics out there.

Well, I don't. And there are lot of comics without any story to speak of. So I usually look at few pages around the one I was refereed to (or last one if I was refereed to whole comics) to see if it's enough story-driven to require looking at beginning. Basically, I'm not in "reading the story" mode yet ; I'm in "decide if it's worth reading" mode.

There are comics which I follow for long time without finishing reading archive, but I DID at least read the beginning of them AND I'm taking advantage of them consisting of multiple semi-independent stories ("books") ... for most, I either do the archive reading eventually or decide they are not worth following and stop reading them ... or postpone them to later.

7 hours ago, ChronosCat said:
18 hours ago, hkmaly said:

What did you use the backup for if not list of webcomics?

(I have list of webcomics I read in database. Synced between three computers every day. Not that I'm adding new comics so often, the database also includes last page I read. RSS is great help in following comics with irregular schedule.)

It was actually a backup of my entire hard drive; unfortunately I hadn't been keeping up with backing things up regularly. (At the time I just kept track of webcomics via bookmark; these days I have a list in a text document, though most of the list is comics I've heard of that sound interesting that I've never gotten around to check out.) I know there were at least a few comics that I didn't loose the links to due to my finding them prior to my last backup, but many of these I'd either lost interest in or were no longer being updated.

Oh, I understand that. There are things I set up to be backed up automatically. Then there are things which I occasionally remember to back up. I have no things backed up regularly without being fully automatic ...

(Also, I really hope having everything important on RAID 1 will protect me from problems ...)

 

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There are cultures where you treat members of your own tribe extremely well, but if you can get a guy from the neighboring tribe to come over for dinner without mentioning that, rather than a guest, he's to be the main course, you win brownie points within your own tribe. (Hey, you not only provided meat, but arranged for it to deliver itself!)

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2 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

There are cultures where you treat members of your own tribe extremely well, but if you can get a guy from the neighboring tribe to come over for dinner without mentioning that, rather than a guest, he's to be the main course, you win brownie points within your own tribe. (Hey, you not only provided meat, but arranged for it to deliver itself!)

Wow. Are these cultures as influential as the cultures of Rome and Egypt?

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1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

No, but they are still cultures.

Oooh! Tell me about their cultural influences! What works of art have they produced, and how have they shaped their successors? I'm sure you can come up with examples. The Babylonians were thousands of years ago and as mentioned we got the sexagesimal minute from them, and of course they established the idea of a formal code of laws. The Egyptians left so much great art and established mathematical principles we still use today. (The windmills that deliver the clean energy that powers my apartment were designed based on Egyptian mathematics.) The Romans and Greek, well, I'm sure I don't have to give many examples, especially not to an American.

If they don't have influences like these, for all I care they could be yogurt cultures. They are cultures, too, and would serve about as well in WHAT THE WHOLE DISCUSSION IS ABOUT as yours.

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21 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

You are still not getting it. That research was made by German researchers from German universities that had grown from centuries of German culture. And all of it had been co-opted by the Nazis. I will give you this challenge: point to even ONE actual cultural achievement produced by Nazi 'culture'. ONE. It can not be done. There is NOTHING in the Nazi movement that was not stolen from elsewhere.

Naziism also had the problem that it didn't remain in power long enough to produce any generations of "natives". The oldest of the people who were too young to remember pre-Naziism had barely come of age before the war was lost. That makes it very hard to speak of anything coming from a "pure" Nazi mindset or culture, since every person who was able to generate anything had already been raised in the pre-Nazi culture. If there had been enough artists who had been raised entirely within the Nazi environment, then we might have enough data to make a comparison. This stands in contrast to the situation with the Soviets, who had a lifetime (70-ish years) for the ideologies to set in and raise children and grandchildren entirely within the system. Certainly much of what went on under Stalin was as horrific and low-minded as what went on under Hitler, but Stalin's setup survived long enough to give us an idea of what kind of mindsets formed in people raised entirely within it.

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38 minutes ago, ijuin said:

This stands in contrast to the situation with the Soviets, who had a lifetime (70-ish years) for the ideologies to set in and raise children and grandchildren entirely within the system. Certainly much of what went on under Stalin was as horrific and low-minded as what went on under Hitler, but Stalin's setup survived long enough to give us an idea of what kind of mindsets formed in people raised entirely within it.

I have not really spent that much time looking into it -- do you know what cultural innovations and art and literature the Soviet system managed to generate in the time it had? I'd be curious to know.

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Oooh! Tell me about their cultural influences!

Does it count if they influenced mainstream media in some way? I mean, I can think of a few Anthony Hopkins movies that portray an aspect of cannibal culture.

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4 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Does it count if they influenced mainstream media in some way? I mean, I can think of a few Anthony Hopkins movies that portray an aspect of cannibal culture.

Not really, no. That is a reaction to cannibalism produced by mainstream media. A genuine cultural contribution by a cannibalistic society would involve some sort of cannibal art, science, literary or architectural achievement that originated from them and either survived to our time or found acceptance in other cultures in a form that was clearly traceable to them.

Similarly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" cannot really be called a Soviet cultural achievement even though they ran the Gulags and provided the abuse that Solzhenitsyn suffered. Rather, it could be called countercultural in that it provoked him to write it as a response. And I am afraid I must reject Elie Wiesel's "Night" as an example of Nazi culture for the same reason. If for no other reason than I have trouble seeing concentration camps of any sort as a cultural achievement.

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19 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
20 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

No, but they are still cultures.

Oooh! Tell me about their cultural influences! What works of art have they produced, and how have they shaped their successors? I'm sure you can come up with examples.

I suppose you don't count someone as athlete until he won at least country-wide race.

19 hours ago, ijuin said:

Naziism also had the problem that it didn't remain in power long enough to produce any generations of "natives". The oldest of the people who were too young to remember pre-Naziism had barely come of age before the war was lost.

... if they were so lucky to not be send to frontline.

 

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49 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I suppose you don't count someone as athlete until he won at least country-wide race.

I am too tired to continue this so you win. Nazis are a pinnacle of culture and since you admire them so much for all of me you can keep them. Maybe you can have a stay in a concentration camp sometime so you can marvel at Nazism at its peak.

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16 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

I suppose you don't count someone as athlete until he won at least country-wide race.

I am too tired to continue this so you win. Nazis are a pinnacle of culture and since you admire them so much for all of me you can keep them. Maybe you can have a stay in a concentration camp sometime so you can marvel at Nazism at its peak.

... I'm pretty sure that wasn't the prize I was going for :)

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1 minute ago, hkmaly said:

... I'm pretty sure that wasn't the prize I was going for :)

You won it anyway. Consider it an award for playing Nazi apologist to a man whose family was almost murdered by the 'cultural contributions' of the Nazis.

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4 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
7 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

... I'm pretty sure that wasn't the prize I was going for :)

You won it anyway. Consider it an award for playing Nazi apologist to a man whose family was almost murdered by the 'cultural contributions' of the Nazis.

I wasn't trying to apologize Nazi. Even if their culture would be stellar (which it wasn't), it wouldn't apologize what they did. I just see denying someone's culture as bad precedent. You know, in the "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" sense, although I would definitely not go that far for Nazis.

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Just now, hkmaly said:

I just see denying someone's culture as bad precedent.

But I did not do that. I asked you to provide an example of a Nazi cultural contribution with staying power that they hadn't just copied from somewhere else. You still haven't.

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11 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
13 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I just see denying someone's culture as bad precedent.

But I did not do that. I asked you to provide an example of a Nazi cultural contribution with staying power that they hadn't just copied from somewhere else. You still haven't.

Mein Kampf still has so much power that when someone tries to publish it, it leads to public debation and attempts to forbid it.

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8 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Mein Kampf still has so much power that when someone tries to publish it, it leads to public debation and attempts to forbid it.

Hahahahahahahaha. Have you ever tried to read it? I defy you to read even the first half of it without giving up.

I am STILL struggling to read the damned thing and I have beat my brains out against it for more than a year. But seriously, I would like you to try. And then explain precisely what is in it that you see as a cultural contribution.

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Look, let's just end this, please. This is not helping me with my burnout and my stress and it keeps nagging at me. I am willing to concede that I set a high bar for what is a cultural contribution of lasting value that makes its originating group entitled to name themself a culture, but it is in the context of the start of the discussion which deals with cultural appropriation and abuse of culture that provides an identity. All I am asking for is some sort of cultural contribution you can identify with that isn't either eating your fellow human beings or mass murder.

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19 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Mein Kampf still has so much power that when someone tries to publish it, it leads to public debation and attempts to forbid it.

Hahahahahahahaha. Have you ever tried to read it? I defy you to read even the first half of it without giving up.

No and I suspect neither did the ones who attempts to forbid it. That IS some power.

19 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Look, let's just end this, please. This is not helping me with my burnout and my stress and it keeps nagging at me. I am willing to concede that I set a high bar for what is a cultural contribution of lasting value that makes its originating group entitled to name themself a culture, but it is in the context of the start of the discussion which deals with cultural appropriation and abuse of culture that provides an identity. All I am asking for is some sort of cultural contribution you can identify with that isn't either eating your fellow human beings or mass murder.

Ok, enough with the murder distraction and back to original discussion ...

On 9/12/2018 at 10:35 AM, The Old Hack said:

This is the age of the Internet, people. Research has NEVER been easier. If you want to use elements from a foreign culture, LOOK IT UP. If you got this far, you know how to read. Use Google. Spend as much as half an hour reading articles about the subject matter. Then you will have a basic idea. And if you want to be thorough -- a concept entirely foreign to Shriver, it seems -- there is such a thing as social media where you can reach out to the people of a specific culture and ASK them for information. If you do it politely and respectfully and you have done at least a minimum of homework first, odds are that you will find someone who is glad to help.

Internet makes easy to get information, but it won't make easy to understand. In fact, you might easily end in trap of repeating someone's else misunderstanding, especially if language barrier prevents you communicating directly with people from that foreign culture.

Obviously, you should try. Spend some effort trying to understand and be polite. But you may still fail. And it's not fair that the outrage may be same no matter how much effort you made.

Not writing about other cultures at all is not solution.

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3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

No and I suspect neither did the ones who attempts to forbid it. That IS some power.

Yes. That's fear. Is fear a cultural contribution? Am I unfairly representing Nazis when I say of them that people feared and hated them? Should I feel concerned about their feelings?

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Not writing about other cultures at all is not solution.

But doing what Shriver recommends and completely ignore those people who may be harmed is no solution either.

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42 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

No and I suspect neither did the ones who attempts to forbid it. That IS some power.

Yes. That's fear. Is fear a cultural contribution?

In case of Nazis, I think saying they upgraded fear to art might make sense. So, this would be pretty hard question to answer.

43 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Am I unfairly representing Nazis when I say of them that people feared and hated them?

I wouldn't say so, but note that I'm not Nazi, not even expert on them, so my opinion is not important for this question.

44 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Should I feel concerned about their feelings?

Oh, definitely not. They don't deserve it. Although that might be politically incorrect thing to say ...

46 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:
3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Not writing about other cultures at all is not solution.

But doing what Shriver recommends and completely ignore those people who may be harmed is no solution either.

At least not correct one. Extremes are rarely correct solution.

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4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Oh, definitely not. They don't deserve it. Although that might be politically incorrect thing to say ...

Given that they wanted to and STILL want to murder me, my wife, my father, my brother, his children and more other people than I can readily count, I do not feel inclined to spare their tender feelings.

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