Seriously, you're so much more eloquent than I. And, apparently have the ability to read my brain.
Anyways, to state more of the obvious, I completely agree.
The one that always gets me is how EVERYONE says they'd be against the holocaust. And, dammit, I just watched most of "Triumph of the Will," and most of the people I know casually (frankly) aren't smart enough to know that it was propaganda. And, really, if EVERYONE were against National Socialism, then the holocaust wouldn't have happened (at least on the scale that it did).
Sorry about the creepy brain-reading, by the way. I checked out this book from the library that was all Read Your Flisters' Brains In Ten Easy Lessons and I got a little carried away and dammit now I probably owe another apology for the SILLINESS.
But yeah, like you said, the creeptastic-est (vocabulary!) part about the holocaust (and other incidents in history like it) is the way that, given the scale, it necessarily has to have gone unchallenged by the surrounding culture in order to have occurred. I think this creates a sort of cognitive dissonance in people. People seem to like to believe they can just default to the social norms and nothing too bad will come of it, but that's just not true yet. I mean, we've just recently (relative to the rest of history) started to look at social norms at all, much less overcome our reluctance to assign value judgments to those norms. : /
LOL, yes. And, I'm not sure I'd really want the power to read my flist's minds. It might be a very scary exploit. :/
And, I would cite things like the Patriot Act and recent torture when deciding how far we've come. I mean, we just stripped rights away from people who we thought we're the problem, and tried to lock them up and torture them. Sound familiar? And, most people were perfectly okay with that as long as we didn't throw the torture in their faces. And, then, a lot of them were still okay. Because we'll let our government get away with just about anything in a fear-driven state. Sigh.
It's true. There's just so much inaction. And if one more person shrugs and says "human nature" (as though that's some sort of unchanging, quantifiable list of traits ><) by way of excusing this sort of behaviour, I'ma be upset. I mean, really. Like we could have evolved as far as we did as a social species if social disease were somehow programmed inescapably into our genes.
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Anyways, to state more of the obvious, I completely agree.
The one that always gets me is how EVERYONE says they'd be against the holocaust. And, dammit, I just watched most of "Triumph of the Will," and most of the people I know casually (frankly) aren't smart enough to know that it was propaganda. And, really, if EVERYONE were against National Socialism, then the holocaust wouldn't have happened (at least on the scale that it did).
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Sorry about the creepy brain-reading, by the way. I checked out this book from the library that was all Read Your Flisters' Brains In Ten Easy Lessons and I got a little carried away and dammit now I probably owe another apology for the SILLINESS.
But yeah, like you said, the creeptastic-est (vocabulary!) part about the holocaust (and other incidents in history like it) is the way that, given the scale, it necessarily has to have gone unchallenged by the surrounding culture in order to have occurred. I think this creates a sort of cognitive dissonance in people. People seem to like to believe they can just default to the social norms and nothing too bad will come of it, but that's just not true yet. I mean, we've just recently (relative to the rest of history) started to look at social norms at all, much less overcome our reluctance to assign value judgments to those norms. : /
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And, I would cite things like the Patriot Act and recent torture when deciding how far we've come. I mean, we just stripped rights away from people who we thought we're the problem, and tried to lock them up and torture them. Sound familiar? And, most people were perfectly okay with that as long as we didn't throw the torture in their faces. And, then, a lot of them were still okay. Because we'll let our government get away with just about anything in a fear-driven state. Sigh.
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