New CBB

I'm not terribly interested in early modern England. Post-industrial revolution things get a little more interesting, but, at least the way it's usually presented, it bores the pants off me. Maybe I just haven't found the right book, though. That said, I did read some interesting stuff about enclosure back when I was in college, but that wasn't in a class about English history. Similarly, the period of American history from the end of the Civil War to WWI can be incredibly dull, since the most important political questions during that period were about stuff like tariffs, monetary policy, and the civil service, and if the class/book/whatever just focuses on that without discussing their deeper economic and social implications (like, say, your high school American history class), then that can be super boring.

I'm not a huge fan of ancient Greece, either.

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death to vowels
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I've been puzzling over this one for a while.

The only answer I can give is: I don't have one.

I find the interconnected web of human interactions and events that make up human history fascinating regardless of when and where it all takes place.

I do find the period of the decline of the Roman Empire/rise of Christianity immensely depressing, however. And, of course, the Holocaust brings shame upon us all.

Dan

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Valar morghulis.

Zidhgebzhail Orthography

Funny, I could swear I saw people doing exactly this on TV once.




EDIT: Damn! Pun not intended.

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Make that twice: Planet Word and Mythbusters.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Ha! I originally heard about the effect from "official" research, but I smiled when I saw Mythbusters duplicate it.

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

World War II. A lot of lock-step marching behind figures like FDR, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo. The amount of flag-waving was so intense it would make 9/12/2001 look like a Vietnam War protest.

Also, the internment of Japanese-Americans and sale of their possessions was unforgivable. None of the Americans who pulled Japanese-American internment off got punished for it, even though they everyone involved should have gotten life in prison and be made to pay all their money back to their Japanese-American victims.

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My Kankonian-English dictionary: 36,000 entries and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!

Should, maybe. But the frightening thing about WW2 was that all of the involved parties agreed on all essential matters of policy. The only big difference between the nazis and FDR america is the much greater extent Hitler was willing to pursue his people's ideas to their logical conclusions. Ideas that, today, are mostly unchanged. Even Nuremburg itself was a show trial, a way for the winning party to wave their dicks around and prove to themselves that they had bigger ones.

The idea that the perpetrators of the Japanese-american internment camps should have been punished would have been considered absurd in its own day. Everyone but the victims agreed with what was going on, and the victims only wished it were happening to someone else instead. World War 2 was something... far, far darker than you probably care to imagine.

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Really?
I assume you're trying to make some point either about the illegitimacy of state power, or about "collectivism", depending on whether you're a left-wing anarchist or a right-winger who considers the Nazis, Stalin, and FDR various flavors of socialist.

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death to vowels
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Actually, nazi germany was, economically speaking, centrist. And it's true, all of the parties agreed on many matters of policy.
And i object to the use of word "people" here. Many germans were not nazis.

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| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

Both.

Nazi ideology had, at its core, two fundamental ideas.

- First, that human interaction is zero-sum. Prosperity to one group necessarily denies prosperity to another.

- Second, that it's both possible and desirable to provide prosperity to favored groups by exploiting unfavored ones.

Remove either of these ideas and the entirety of their belief system crumbles like a house of cards. Everything else is details on how exploitation of unfavored groups should be carried out, and moral justification as to why the favored groups are more deserving of prosperity than the exploited.

Furthermore those two core ideas were present not only in FDR america, but are alive and well in all the ruling ideologies of the west. Modern society is far more similar to nazi germany than most are comfortable admitting. This is why you occasionally see unironic praise of Hitler's policies "outside the whole holocaust thing" with his smoking bans and such.

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That't the kind of argument that are frequently encountered in websites and internet forums, but which receives little attention from more serious political philosophers. Basically, one person claims that the ideology some other person adheres to "really" is the same as some other ideology, that both persons despise. The "argument" laid forth for this claim is that both ideologies share some abstract similarity.

A social conservative might thus claim that "libertarians are really marxists at heart (they both wants to re-design society from abstract blueprints, showing little respect for established social mores, etc.); leftists can claim that "libertarians and fascists are really the same (since they don't share the class-war analysis, etc.)", etc. Proponents of virtually any ideology can say that virtually any two other ideologies "share the same fundamental ideas".

The problem is, of course, that though one can point to similarities between any two ideologies, one can also point at differences. To take a closer look at one of the alleged "similarities" between FDR liberalism and nazism:



But nazis and FDR liberals disagree what counts as "favoured" and "disfavoured" groups, and what counts as "exploiting", as well as on many other issues. They are both similar (and so are also proponents most other political ideologies, like conservatives, social-demicrats, moderate libertarians, communists, etc.) that some state power is acceptable. But what state power, and what justification for this state power can be given, differ highly between the various ideologies. What one ideology counts as legitimate exercise of state power, may be regarded as illegitimate by another ideology. The similarities between the various ideologies thus boil down to that they don't think that a radical laissez-faire system (at least not always) is the most just political or economic system, and at least in some situations may render unwelcome results. But they may disagree highly on in what situations laissez-faire systems fail, which in turn follow from that the different ideologies may have very different ideas about justice, and what people are entitled to to begin with.

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constructedlanguages.net

Of course you can point out silly, superficial similarities and differences: Marxism and the american republican party both use the color red to identify themselves, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim that they're the same on these grounds alone. What needs to be decided is which aspects of an ideology are fundamental and worthy of attention, and which aspects are superficial and may be ignored. I think that race-war vs. class-war conceptions politics is a superficial and, thus, unimportant difference: That they view socio-economic interactions as inherently antagonistic is enough to reject both. The comparison won't convince anyone who doesn't already agree with that, but why should it?

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Maybe, maybe not. Proponents of marxism and racism of various kinds would probably claim there are important differences between the notions of 'class' and 'race', respectively. In fact, I think they would use very different arguments to justify their positions. The kind of argument that would justify 'class' as a fundamental socio-economic analysis would probably not justify 'race' as an equally important category (and vice versa; the kind of arguments that makes 'race' a fundamental notion, would not do so with 'class'). Both positions may be wrong (which I believe they are), but different arguments may be needed to refute them. Both marxists and racists would believe that a laissez-faire system is 'unfair', according to their respective conceptions of justice (=such a system would fail to give certain people what they are entitled to). But since they may have widely differing views about what people are entitled to in the first place, their shared belief that a laissez faire-system would fail to live up to their conceptions of justice or fairness, might be more of a negative trait they share.



If one aims to convince anyone else that the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist worldview is true, it would be unwise to use comparisons and analogies that presuppose the basic assumptions of the worldview.

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constructedlanguages.net

Of course. However, I'm not really trying to convince anyone of that.

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