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2017-09-13, 03:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2009
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- The land of corn
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Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
AMFV, it's impossible to take seriously the idea that the south fought for democracy because the institution of slavery is inherently anti-democratic. Fighting to preserve slavery is a direct attack on democracy, and it doesn't matter how many people who stand to benefit from slavery agreed that it was a good idea. You know who weren't asked in your "the majority wanted slavery so how could it not be democratic" example? The slaves.
Get out of here with that garbage.
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2017-09-13, 03:08 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2011
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
You'll note that is not what I was arguing or even a close paraphrase. I was saying that there is more complexity to it than to simply say that South was "against democracy" or "anti-democratic" as I recall the exact words were. I'm not for Slavery, I wouldn't have likely been for slavery at the time. But I'm not for condemning somebody for fighting on behalf of their state because their state was for slavery. I'm certainly not suggesting that somebody who did is "anti-democratic" because it's too complex to boil down to that simple an idea.
Southerners were not monsters, they were soldiers. And Soldier's valor deserves to be remembered even when they were fighting a war for the wrong reasons. I want my ancestor's valor remembered even when they did not fight for the right reasons, so I can understand fundamentally how somebody from the South would feel the same.My Avatar is Glimtwizzle, a Gnomish Fighter/Illusionist by Cuthalion.
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2017-09-13, 03:49 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- Raleigh NC
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
I accept and respect that. Soldiers a lot of times fight for other reasons than whatever garbage is spewing out of politicians' mouths -- and if anyone out there is going to die for a politician's promise, I would say they are almost certainly very misguided.
People fight for all kinds of reasons, some good and some not. But some fight because they want to protect their families from war's desolation -- to go out on the trenches so their families can live in peace at home. As I climb into my forties, that reasoning becomes more and more important.
RE Lee was one such man. He fought for Virginia because, to him, his state was an extended family to be protected from any attacker, regardless of cause.
As I said, I accept and respect that. And I respect your ancestors, who perhaps fought in part to protect their homes.
Nonetheless ... I don't believe that is the reason all those statues went up. It's part of the long struggle for historical memory in the US, and since those statues were put up for such a reason I believe they can come right back down, and better ones put in their place.
Respectfully,
Brian P."Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2017-09-13, 03:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2015
- Location
- On the tip of my tongue
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Remembering the valor of the common Southern soldier? Perhaps. Here's a draft of the plaque.
Here lie common soldiers of the Confederacy.
Conscripted to fight for an unjust cause in an unjust war,
Still they fought with valor for their brothers in arms,
For love of family and home.
The tragedy is not that they lost, but that their valor and their love were appropriated to serve such a terrible end. (I am, however, open to objections concerning my characterization of what common soldiers of the Confederacy fought for. 1/4 of Confederate households owned slaves.)
As for the people who did the conscripting; who authored the war; who stood to benefit from industrialized human misery; who resolved the contradiction between our nation's magnificent ideals and contemptible practices by decisively rejecting the principle that all men are created equal...Let them gather cobwebs in forgotten corners of obscure museums. They must be remembered, but they do not deserve a prominent, public place of honor in our memory.Last edited by Lethologica; 2017-09-13 at 04:00 PM.
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2017-09-13, 04:09 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2013
- Location
- Twin Cities, Minnesota
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
No, I kind of assume that racism is still an ongoing problem in general. Here's a random example. Statistics.
Versus what? Your completely unsourced claims that everything here is totally innocent? That's not value neutral. It's more grandiose than mine. To hear you tell it, the fact that a nation was formed, fought and died for slavery, and then decades later erected figures celebrating men (some of whose only claim to fame was fighting for this cause) managed to somehow be magically removed from all that?
I'm not entirely sure that's true. I don't think that you can find solid proof of that allegation.
I'm not sure that your sources are entirely unbiased on that subject. I can't go into greater detail, but there's not a lot of facts in those allegations either.
1890 to 1920 is a LARGE span of time, and again, you're assuming a causal relationship where there is not strong evidence (primary sources) that such exists.
Well the South certainly thought it was substantial enough to secede over, so that's something, so at least at the time people did not believe that it was poppycock.
I don't think that you're going to find argument that the South was in the wrong, but arguing that only those who fought on the side of the North were in the right, isn't really accurate, Soldiers, even generals, are not responsible for their nation, it's the other way around.
Indeed. The other complicating narrative is that while not every Household owned slaves, a majority certainly wished to. Furthermore it was useful to White elites to provide impoverished whites with someone they could look down on to maintain the economic inequality of the era. That's societal classicism 101. Southern identity is not some separate rational for why the statues went up, as AMFV would have it. Racial inequality was intractably linked to Southern Identity of the age. And it didn't magically disentangle itself after the war ended.
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2017-09-13, 04:28 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2015
- Location
- On the tip of my tongue
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2017-09-13, 04:30 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2010
- Location
- Northern Hemisphere
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
In the interest of answering the
conspiracy theoristOP's question, I thought immediately of Philip Short's biography of Pol Pot and its reference to the cpap, collections of traditional sayings taught to Cambodian children:
The cpap, at least in the form in which Sâr [the future Pol Pot] would have learnt them, had another particularity. They portrayed the Khmers [Cambodians] as honest and sincere but "foolish and ignorant", constantly being duped by their smarter Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours:
Your eyes are open and can see,
But see only the surface of things
Learn arithmetic with all your energy
Lest the Chinese and Vietnamese cheat you
The Khmers are lacking in judgement
They eat without giving thought for what is proper and right,
Each season they borrow from the Chinese,
And the Chinese gain control of the inheritance their parents have bequeathed.
There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky, tiddley-pom!
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2017-09-13, 04:48 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- Raleigh NC
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Meanwhile, answering the OP: Grave of the Fireflies . 'Nuff said!
Respectfully,
Brian P."Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2017-09-13, 04:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2013
- Location
- Twin Cities, Minnesota
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
I never said it was exclusive? But the South's economic apparatus and wealth being explicitly tied to slavery, among other things, did create cultural divergences. That's why Northern factory workers could support abolition on pure economic incentives even if they didn't have egalitarian feelings towards African Americans.
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2017-09-13, 04:57 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2014
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Well I'm not from the USA but unfortunately I have to be side with AMFV on this one
It makes no sense to tear down monuments, they are part of history, if anything they are a reminder of what NOT to be you can't just pretend terrible things didn't happened, they did happened and we evolved past that.
Think of Taj Mahal, a splendorous castle whose creator allegedly removed the hands of the masons so they couldn't create such perfection again.
Or the Egyptian pyramids build by slaves, many who died in the process.
Should those monuments be taken down too?
Just because something is a symbol doesn’t mean it can't change it's meaning, it's part of America history and you can't simply close your eyes and pretend it didn't happened.
And save some really messed up people, people are just that... People, they make mistakes, sometimes because of the social structure of their time but they are not evil monsters or demons, they loved, they had kids, they had a Mom and dreamed of things to come just like us, Genghis khan loved his wife and George Washington had some really messed up ideas about women, because they were people and we can't forget that.
For those who like to think of people as heroes or demons I recommend a big dose of Liev Tolstói literature and Hannah Arendt philosophy.Last edited by S@tanicoaldo; 2017-09-13 at 04:59 PM.
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2017-09-13, 05:03 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
I can see this but even accepting this there's still bias. The south's ideology was bad enough that desertion among its soldiers would be at least as admirable as valor, and deserves equal celebration and commemoration.
Fun story, during WWII my grandfather was conscripted into one of the axis armies and his squad went out of their way to surrender to the allies without even having been first engaged in combat. That's admirable. That deserves a statue.
IIRC the pyramids were actually mostly built by a mix of professional builders and sycophants wishing to suck up the the royal family, slaves were used but only when they could not find enough of these first two groupsLast edited by Bohandas; 2017-09-13 at 05:13 PM.
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2017-09-13, 05:15 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2014
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
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2017-09-13, 05:21 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2010
- Location
- Northern Hemisphere
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2017-09-13, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
don;t underestimate the role of cheapness and greed
edit:
also power tripping and megalomaniaLast edited by Bohandas; 2017-09-13 at 05:25 PM.
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2017-09-13, 05:30 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2012
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2017-09-13, 05:48 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2012
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
No, I can't. If the planet isn't viewed as a noösphere, how can efforts be successfully orchestrated to develop it as a planet rather than a higgledy-piggledy collection of countries and geographies? Let's not get into the politics here, but just the engineering aspect: if the NAWAPA were to be successfully created, it would demand coöperation among Canada, the US, and Mexico. They would have to think in terms that are effectively identical to the noösphere, in their germane region. So, their economies would in a sense merge, collaborating in this geoengineering effort. The whole world is waiting to be developed like that, but it can't and it won't unless people think, at least implicitly, in terms of the idea of the noösphere.
As for innoculation, if that isn't a medical principle then what is? How about sterilisation? "Ideas that work" indeed, ideas that accord with the way the world really works, and therefore can be adopted and exploited to achieve the desired change.
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2017-09-13, 06:01 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2014
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Hey Donna, it doesn't matter how evolved and advanced we get we will always find something to be unhappy about.
Last edited by S@tanicoaldo; 2017-09-13 at 06:02 PM.
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2017-09-13, 06:06 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2008
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
You're listing unequaled architectural marvels here, a more accurate equivalent would be paint by numbers paintings made in great abundance. Looking at the statues from a purely artistic perspective and staying out of politics, I'll just say that not everything is worth preservation, public art benefits from changing every so often, and these are exactly the sort of thoroughly mundane works that routinely get replaced with no commentary.
I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2017-09-13, 06:22 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2015
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
America needs to get over what doesn't represent it anymore and pull that down, just like they did it with the Statue of George III.
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door."
I want more Strong female characters.
"In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me, and despair!"
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2017-09-13, 06:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2011
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- Calgary, AB
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
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2017-09-13, 06:35 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2005
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
I never had the feeling of the 90's.
It was a pretty **** time for me.
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2017-09-13, 06:55 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2009
- Gender
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Actually it's closer to being the other way around. When you have surplus of people via conquest, immigration or other means, you can afford to solve problems by throwing loads of people at them. When you do not have surplus of people, suddenly you need to be much more carefull about managing your human resources.
"It's the fate of all things under the sky,
to grow old and wither and die."
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2017-09-13, 07:21 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2009
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Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2017-09-13, 11:14 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
Omegaupdate Forum
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Temple+ Modding Project for Atari's Temple of Elemental Evil
Morrus' RPG Forum (EN World v2)
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2017-09-14, 12:06 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2008
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2017-09-14, 03:13 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2010
- Location
- Northern Hemisphere
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Do you get any of your news from non-LaRouche sources? Or have you transcended the mainstream media, like Donald Trump has?
Anyway, this is exactly what I mean by overfitting the curve. The idea of the noosphere is DE-scriptive. You can analyse events post hoc and detect the idea of the noosphere at work, if you really want to, but it contributes nothing to our understanding of the future. How is implicitly thinking of the noosphere distinguishable from the unremarkable daily workings of the universe? Countries sometimes cooperate with each other. Look at the Montreal Protocol. Did the Montreal Protocol come about because people grasped the idea of the noosphere? Was the noosphere the function that generated the Montreal Protocol as a point on the graph? No. The architects of the Montreal Protocol would look blankly at you if you started talking about the noosphere to them. So drawing a line labelled "noetics" through that point on the graph is a pointless exercise, because that line is going to diverge from reality as soon as you try extending it into the future.
When you say "you" can afford to do X or Y: who is this "you"? Are you talking about a planned economy, or is this an aggregate "problem-solving" that emerges out of millions of people acting in rational ways? When unemployment goes up in Western countries, there doesn't seem to be a problem-solving agent, a national HR department, that takes those people and throws them at a problem. There are problems, and there are unemployed people, but they don't necessarily find each other. So there has to be another term in the equation if you want to explain slavery from the supply side.Last edited by Hazyshade; 2017-09-14 at 05:03 AM.
There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky, tiddley-pom!
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2017-09-14, 05:33 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2007
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- Earth... sort of.
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Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Avatar by K penguin. Sash by Damned1rishman.
MOVIE NIGHTS AND LETS PLAYS LIVESTREAMED
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2017-09-14, 07:30 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
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- Switzerland
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Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
Yeah. Half the purpose of the Egyptian monuments was to occupy farmers during flood and growth seasons when field work couldn't be done. The workers were also reasonably well paid and got reasonably good food.
Resident Vancian Apologist
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2017-09-14, 07:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2009
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Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
BTW, having many different jobs and diversifying wasn't unusual for farmers in the antiquity. A Roman farmer with a little plot of land would tend to his own vegetable and fruit garden, and maybe have a small cereal field, but he wouldn't be able to survive on those alone. So he would occasionally work in the mines, and would surely help out the large landowners during harvest seasons. This way he was paid in money, with which he could buy ready-made clothes, pottery, and food.
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2017-09-14, 09:48 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Are stories where evil wins unique to the West?
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
Omegaupdate Forum
WoTC Forums Archive + Indexing Projext
PostImage, a free and sensible alternative to Photobucket
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