TIL: Today I Learned

[Borachio]

I've the sense that I'm just discovering something more accurate about myself. Rather than me becoming more of an idiot.

I'm certainly not as alert as I used to be, though.

 

[Cutlass]

I think that part of the problem might be that we tend to think of things like Jim Crow in quite impersonal terms, as an issue of education, employment, housing, and so on, in part simply because those were the sorts of issues that civil rights activists sought to address through legislation. Even lynchings tend to appear as statistics, as a number-per-year. That means we're left with a certain distance between the practice and the experience of Jim Crow, which makes cases like that of George Stinney appear incomprehensible. I think we need to be more prepared to draw out the psychology of white supremacy, try to join the dots between people thinking it was acceptable to exclude black people from a Woolworth's counter and thinking it was acceptable to murder black children. That's an alien mindset, a frankly terrifying mindset, and reading about relatively dry material such as housing segregation won't prepare you for it.

There have been admirable efforts to draw out the psychology of black people under Jim Crow, from the period itself onwards, but that's only one side of the story. Racist whites have remained something of an enigma, often a flattened caricature driven by sheer hatred, and that sort of stereotype doesn't hold up when you look at a case like that of George Stinney, where the racists have names and identities and appear to be otherwise normal, non-psychopathic people. You find yourself faced with something undeniably monstrous and undeniably human, and that's gonna mess with your head.

I think this is why it remains so much of an ongoing problem. We have all these ordinary every day people, and if no members of the hated group are around, then they come across as just ordinary, often likeable, people. And yet put them in that wrong situation, and without any consideration of the wrongness of it at all, the nastiness comes out. And it's no unique to any group. How is this different in kind from all those in Europe who turned over Jews to the Nazis? Or the Nazis and other Germans who ran the camps themselves?

There's some true ugliness to the human condition.

 

[Gary Childress]

I think this is why it remains so much of an ongoing problem. We have all these ordinary every day people, and if no members of the hated group are around, then they come across as just ordinary, often likeable, people. And yet put them in that wrong situation, and without any consideration of the wrongness of it at all, the nastiness comes out. And it's no unique to any group. How is this different in kind from all those in Europe who turned over Jews to the Nazis? Or the Nazis and other Germans who ran the camps themselves?

There's some true ugliness to the human condition.

It's a scary thought. Germany was full of people who performed very well in their jobs in WW2. The German war machine was probably the most efficient on Earth. They lost the war but ultimately their front line casualties were almost always lighter than that of their opponents (at least according to stats I've seen). From the outside it's hard for me to imagine myself living in Nazi Germany and what it would have been like to be an ordinary citizen there. I suppose as someone diagnosed with a mental "illness" I probably would have been exterminated as well.

 

[Phrossack]

Ultimately, people might seem nice, act nice, and have similar upbringings, hopes, and fears as you, but that doesn't make them any less evil when they do something like behead infidels or gas Jews. I'm sure that in many cases, Nazis or jihadists or members of lynch mobs may have led pretty relatable lives, but that doesn't make me want to sympathize with them or think less harshly of them. The "banality of evil" doesn't detract from the evil from me.

 

[Verarde]

edit: I'm an idiot

 

[Takhisis]

You celebrate getting clothes for Christmas?

 

[Verarde]

afokjsdl;fknsdlfn

wrong thread

TIL that I need to pay more attention to which tab I'm in.

 

[Tahuti]

The German war machine was probably the most efficient on Earth.

Not really. Germany was ruled like a kleptocratic third-world country: Hitler couldn't get rid of Göring because he needed him hard politically, yet Göring was one of the reasons why Germany lost the Battle of Britain. Hitler also never fully mobilised the German economy for war until it was way too late.

The Nazis did have talented commanders like Rommel and have a significant industrial capacity, which certainly helped Germany hold out longer than would otherwise be the case.

 

[Gary Childress]

Not really.

Unfortunately, like or not. Yes really.

 

[GenMarshall]

Today I learned that my bachelors degree is worthless...

 

[Kyriakos]

Why? Is it in Telecommunications?

 

[gay_Aleks]

It could be in History. But hey, you know, at least you'll get a severely underpaid and stressing job for granted, as a teacher!

 

[cybrxkhan]

Or it could be philosophy! Well, unless you go into law with that, but that's another issue then as gain.

 

[Kyriakos]

Or it could be philosophy! Well, unless you go into law with that, but that's another issue then as gain.

Actually that was a pretty dumb statement... a degree in philosophy is always useless.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Actually that was a pretty dumb statement... a degree in philosophy is always useless.

As a history major, I do enjoy having and using somet other major as a punching bag when people talk down on me.

Still, in the US, from what I've heard and know, philosophy majors that go into law tend to do very, very well, though I don't find that very surprising.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Soo... what can you do with a History degree?

 

[Kyriakos]

TBF, a History major is likely even worse than my own Philosophy one. Both are useless academically if you don't have at least a Masters, and they are generally breeding grounds for all sorts of hipsters nowdays

Still, if i did not have this degree i would not run the library program on the Presocratics/Plato, so in the end it did help

 

[gay_Aleks]

Phew, dodged a bullet there. Thanks a lot, Mathematics. Or, technically, Informatics, but it's all the same plus the satisfaction of seeing code doing something as opposed to making complicated calculations and then seeing..nothing?

 

[Tahuti]

Today I learned that my bachelors degree is worthless...

Bachelor degrees are overrated in general, evenSTEM degrees are. The problem is that people nowadays study for a job outside academia instead of inside it, and when people do study to get an academic job, it is to propagate current political orthodoxy at academia instead of gaining new insights.

Academia are basically dead and beyond any saving. People either study for corporate employment or to become ideological bulldogs that do anything but enrich intellectual discourse. I said it.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

I wonder what ideology E3 ubiquitin ligases espouse. Also, you're starting to sound like a broken record.