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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • You know there were some acquittals at Nuremberg, right? Papen, Schacht and Fritzsche all went free.

    The second phase, after the first phase had tried the Nazi high command, arrested almost 100,000 people, identified 2,500 who were not just Nazis but actual war criminals, tried 177, and convicted 142. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death.

    I’m not saying right or wrong here, since we’re already talking about that and having enough difficulty in it already. But the exact step you are skipping over in creating a class “that went to Nuremberg” whose lives have no value, was a critical, critical part of how the allies ran the trial. It might explain why in the other conversation you are confused about why the allies did it that way, if you are confused about what it was they actually did.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#Verdict

    Someone who is actually capable of changing and renouncing the ideology isn’t a Nazi.

    This also irritated me. Who makes this determination, on which life and death are being staked? You? We just bring everyone who’s carrying a Nazi sign in front of you, and you decide whether they are actually capable of changing and renouncing the ideology? Or if not you, who does it?


  • Not sure how you got from:

    The ones we think are guilty get lawyers and trials, no matter what we’re pretty sure they did. That’s what humans have to do for each other, in a just world. It doesn’t mean you don’t set things right, but you still give them human value and rights, even the worst, before you put them to death if that’s justice.

    … to concluding I was criticizing the outcome of the Nuremberg trials. Obviously they were a good thing, and the outcome was a good thing. Anyone actually reading my messages would observe me repeatedly using the example of the process and the good outcome of the Nuremberg trials as a perfect example of what we should be emulating.

    I suspect you’re still trying to “win,” and desperately rearranging things I’m saying into things I am not, so you can do so. I welcome you to try again if you’d like to.





  • If it helps, you can think of it not as a statement about the value we give to the Nazis, but the value we hold ourselves to.

    A buddy of mine had a relative who was in Germany for the occupation. He was one of the guys I was talking about, miming tiny violins. He fucked a lot of German girls who were half starving. He had money and food and all the armaments of the occupation behind him, so they didn’t really have a choice. He would go into people’s houses and just take stuff, if it looked like something cool he wanted. My friend said he thought that having that experience, having this guy over there in his formative years having all his darkest instincts catered to and amplified, basically ruined him as a person. His whole life he wasn’t able to really be right because of it. But at the time, I guess he thought something along the lines of, “What’s the difference?”

    After all, they’re Nazis. Or basically Nazis. Anyway, their lives have no value.

    Like I say, I do get what you’re saying. But also… what do you do, when you have a whole population, millions of people, who have all given approval in some way large or small for some kind of monstrous crime?

    Some of them deserve to die. Some of them are redeemable. In general, for most of them, I think that kind of question is mostly just not anyone else’s business to get involved in. Whatever they did or didn’t do is going to have to be something that they live with, maybe square up with their maker after if you think of it that way, and nothing you can do can tip the scales of it in any direction. But what about their kids? What about the society they’re now trying to build in the aftermath? It’s so easy and satisfying to say they all have no value, not look at them as human people with all the potential and all the evils and failings that entails, not examine the factors that tipped all so many of them over into taking part in what they did. Not try to make sure you really understand it, try to work it out, so you can see how to work so it doesn’t happen again.

    There is an easy answer to all of these questions, of course: “They’re Nazis. Fuck 'em.” In combat, that’s the answer. But out of combat, what future are you building when you write off a whole population because they all took part in a culture that started excusing or committing terrible crimes? Maybe they were confused by propaganda. Maybe they were scared, or just went with the herd. Maybe they had that darkness inside them. Maybe they were creative instigators. How are you going to look into every one of them, and decide what the answer is? Choosing one universal answer is easy, but that doesn’t make it right. And like I say, you are going to lose something of yourself when you start looking at other human beings that way. That’s part of why a lot of people who’ve been in combat come back with bad bad problems.

    This whole set of questions about how to relate to that whole population of evil is about to become (or has become) a pretty fuckin’ relevant question in America.





  • I don’t think that thought experiment refuted anything.

    This speaks to a difference of mindset about talking about stuff on the internet.

    I wasn’t trying to “refute” anything. I was just trying to say what I was trying to say. You can believe it, or not, or partially with caveats, or have some kind of rebuttal, it’s all fine. In no way was I trying to refute anything you were saying. It’s not necessary for one of us to “win.” Sometimes, I’ll be trying to prove someone wrong when I send comments to them, but this absolutely was not that.

    It seemed like maybe you were hearing something different than what I was saying, and so I tried a different way of explaining it that hopefully would make it more clear. Then, after reading it and understanding it, there’s a whole different step where maybe if you decide to you can agree with it. Or not. Honestly, that part’s not completely my business. I’m just trying to explain what I meant. Along with acknowledging (if this wasn’t clear) that, yes, in another sense, any Nazis are human garbage, and who really cares what happens to them at the end of the day.

    If your model is that we have to “refute” until one of us wins, I think I will not take part. I made multiple efforts to say what I was trying to say. If you want to take it on, or not, is entirely up to you, and I think I will cease with any continued effort to put it across.


  • triggering talking points:

    mutti merkel years and how she blundered big time nordstream pipelines german’s industrial base over reliance on russian gas which is was the real reason for german foreign policy vis-a-vis russia and eastern european states

    What in the fuck are you talking about?

    Now we are from Nazi nepo babies to Angela Merkel?

    Okay, sure, I did a search for “Merkel” in !europe@feddit.org

    OH LOOK: https://feddit.org/post/4096183 and click on the article, if you’re curious, and Ctrl-F for “Russia”. Or, read the comments:

    She comes from the same broken mindset and corrupt party as Kohl who was the worst of all chancellors Germany ever has suffered from.

    worst of all chancellors

    (Yes, someone made the joke)

    For me it’s hard to have a positive view of her. The more I learn about the past, the more my jaw drops at how fucking ignorant our leaders were. Russia has been at war since inception till today almost nonstop, with only a few years of non aggression. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia

    A quick cherry picked list that should’ve been more than enough reason to NOT SEND BILLIONS OF EUROS TO RUSSIA!!!

    AND LOOK: https://feddit.org/post/5145647 and read the top comment.

    I think you’re just making up combative nonsense, dude. Can you show me in the modlog where someone got deleted for criticizing Angela Merkel or Stefan Quandt? Without also being a cock about something which would maybe lead to them getting deleted for that, just saying along the lines of the comments above that Merkel was terrible?

    Edit: Emphasized the joke a little more



  • The Nuremburg Trials still falls within the determination that Nazi lives did not matter. The executions were definitely the point.

    Maybe it’s just a question of semantics. But to get at the point I was trying to make, you can try a thought experiment:

    Imagine someone brings in a big leaking bag of garbage off the street. They haul it into the courtroom, get a lawyer for it, spend months making sure it’s resupplied with water when it stops leaking and gets good housing, repeatedly had experts come in and examine it and look up the records of what type of garbage it had inside it. And then, everything having been satisfied to everyone’s satisfaction, they take it out and toss it in the dump.

    Or, someone puts leaking garbage on a truck, drives it to a place where it’s stored until they can get themselves organized to get rid of it, and then they burn it. It’s given an asset tag, but mostly just so they can make use of a system to count the garbage and make sure there’s nothing of value in any of the bags.

    You get my point, I think. My point is not that you need to be tolerant or soft about people who are going to try to kill you. My point is that they are (depressingly enough) very much human beings, the whole time they’re doing that, and the allies did good by vigorously rejecting the “anyone who wrongs me stops being a person” model.





  • I do get what you’re saying. The system is unjust. It is. What I am saying is that the unjust features of the system have nothing to do with the system. It’s just the nature of people. You could have the American system, or the Soviet, or anarchism, or Star Trek, or whatever, but the people with more power assembled to themselves will always be able to dominate the less powerful to some degree. Until you start doing a full Harrison Bergeron power-equalizing system, which of course is enforced by a Harrison Bergeron central all-powerful wait wait wait….

    I do get what you mean, that the American system is corrupt and oligarchic. It is. I just am saying that any theory where you want to do whatever-else instead of the American system needs to take into account where the corruption in the American system comes from, and put up some strong defenses against it in whatever new way we’re doing instead.





  • I think the key difference is that no one was bringing Brian Thompson to justice.

    The nature of humans is that they seek justice for themselves. Congress and the courts are, in theory, an uneasy compromise to offer people justice in exchange for demanding that they don’t go out and make justice for themselves. Because we’ve seen where that leads, and it sure isn’t good.

    You can believe in the rule of law and still think Brian Thompson deserved to die. Because by any legal standard, he committed more homicides than pretty much everyone on death row. And yet, somehow, our system is so twisted up that it is fine. Everything Thompson did was perfectly legal. Just like slavery, segregation, and the holocaust.

    I don’t think killing CEOs at random is a route to any good thing. Bringing random violence into the political equation serves one side only, and it is not ours. But it is perfectly consistent to condemn murder and still support Luigi, in reality.


  • One of the best things that happened in the 20th century was the firm reaffirmation, after the war was over, that Nazi lives do have value.

    The allies would have been within every reasonable right to just string up the Nazi leadership like Mussolini, make a new treaty of Versailles, and mime tiny violins any time one of the citizens of Germany raised the alarm that their kids were starving. And, a lot of the people on the ground basically did exactly that. But the word from the top is: They are humans. They have rights.

    The ones we think are guilty get lawyers and trials, no matter what we’re pretty sure they did. That’s what humans have to do for each other, in a just world. It doesn’t mean you don’t set things right, but you still give them human value and rights, even the worst, before you put them to death if that’s justice.

    The whole roots of the war lay in misery and hate. What are we going to be reaping in 20 years if we just replant it all because it’s “what they deserve?” Let’s put an end to it.

    It doesn’t mean we didn’t do terrible things in the war, or kill in self defense. Even kill whole cities in an instant, if you need to. But the killing isn’t the point. It’s just a protection, and it needs to end as soon as you can see a way to end it.

    And then, back to human life and value. That is, in fact, what separates us from the Nazis, is that we’re not looking to throw it away.





  • I could be wrong, but I think it’s pretty likely that Putin will refuse to meet with him. At the end of the day, Putin wants peace, but all that happens if he doesn’t get it is more dead soldiers and more economic ruin, both of which he seems to be fine with. And, now that Trump is in office, time is on his side.

    It’s a good move by Zelensky, still: Show that he won’t accept performative shows of him being “lesser than.” He has nothing to gain by letting himself get pushed around. Of course, Trump isn’t helping by going around squawking about stuff he wants to give away to Putin, but I honestly don’t think anyone takes Trump seriously enough for that to be as big a crisis as it seems like it would be.

    I think Tim Snyder’s writing about “The Weak Strongman” also applies to Putin as it does to Trump (to a much lesser degree, Putin’s certainly capable, he’s just too criminal to be able to make his country capable).

    https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman