FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2d ago
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
...a university putting out a statement that causes a chain reaction that leads to the President of the United States and a majority of Congress to change their position on providing military aid to Israel?
What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?
I don't see a world where the US decides to stop providing military aid to Israel within the next decade, let alone in time to have an effect on the current conflict. Even if literally all the universities put out statements saying that they should! In my experience a university statement on a hot button political issue has never come close to anything like that kind of impact.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2d ago
My intuition is that people should not be allowed to turn public spaces into de facto designated areas, only de jure ones. And keeping people out of areas they have a right to be in because you disagree with their politics, or don't like the way they look, is harassment if anything is.
If we're concerned about confrontations then the protests themselves should be discouraged, because that's how confrontations begin.
Yes, obviously (assuming that harassment is a chargeable offence, which I don't think it is).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2d ago
They're going to pull US military aid out of Israel...by protesting at Columbia?
Even if their protest is successful, how is Columbia University going to pull that off?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2d ago
So you're saying that refusing to let students enter common areas that they have a right to be in is not harassment, but recording video in a public area (as is your right) is harassment?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6d ago
I find your comments intriguing, because I have the opposite reaction you describe. To me a well rendered painting or drawing of a landscape is often more attractive than an actual landscape. Or if not more attractive, more pleasing in a slightly different dimension. Have you ever felt a desire to be inside a picture: not literally, but to be in the place the picture is depicting? That the art is trying to communicate something higher and better than anything we can actually find our our normal existence? That the artist is taking what is beautiful and good about a landscape but crafting it in a way that no real landscape can match up to, throwing out the small bits of ugliness that is inherent in any landscape we can actually see and replacing it with the ideal? Because that's something like 70% of my aesthetic preferences. I want art to be more beautiful than life, more transcendent, more glorious and inspiring.
What do you see attractive about something like Miro painting? To me there's no real attraction at all. It does not show me anywhere I would want to go, any emotion I would want to feel, any state of being I would want to inhabit. I don't find it repulsive, but I don't see the point of it at all. What's the draw for you?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6d ago
I was wondering why my avatar was suddenly an anemic 12 year old boy! Did not expect to find the explanation for that here at The Motte.
There's definitely a non-binary bent to it. I got three options of faces, one of them is boyish and the other two are feminine. I thought maybe trying a slightly bulkier body style would make me look less like a tween, but while my body bulked my head remained the same size, making me a microcephalic.
I don't think I've ever played a game before where I actively hate seeing my avatar's face.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
So, your claim is that the gas chamber at Dachau was not designed to execute humans, but merely to delouse. As proof of this you cite a source which claims the gas chamber at Dachau was designed to execute humans, but was never finished and so not used. This seems to support the fact you dispute, that this was a 'homicidal gas chamber' designed to execute people. This source makes me believe that perhaps the 7th Army's report was wrong about people being executed in the Dachau gas chamber, but does nothing to make me believe the ludicrous notion that it was designed for delousing. A delousing chamber labeled as a showering facility, with fake shower heads that lead nowhere. You know, to take the lice by surprise so they wouldn't be tipped off.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
I will believe the report of the 7th Army over your no sources cited whatsoever.
My mistake, when I said 'gas chamber' I meant 'homicidal gas chamber'. The camp had a 'gas chamber' but it was never used to kill anyone.
The Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment of the Seventh Army disagrees. Page 33 of the report:
"The internees who were brought to Camp Dachau for the sole purpose of being executed were in the most cases Jews and Russians. They were brought into the compound, lined up near the gas chambers, and were screened in a similar manner as internees who came to Dachau for imprisonment. Then they were marched to a room and told to undress...There were 15 shower faucets suspended from the ceiling from which gas was then released. There was one large chamber, capacity of which was 200, and five smaller gas chambers, capacity of each being 50. It took approximately 10 minutes for the execution. From the gas chamber, the door led to the Krematory to which the bodies were removed by internees who were selected for the job. The dead bodies were then placed in 5 furnaces, two to three bodies at a time."
So we have, on the one side, an SS document (which you haven't produced, though I have been so kind as to produce my source for your to examine) that says that the camp had a gas chamber but that it was never used to kill anyone. On the other hand you have a US report claiming that it was used to kill people, with photographic evidence, and the fact that the gas chamber is still there and can be seen today, and was clearly designed to administer poison gas for the purpose of killing people. Do you have any evidence that the execution device was never used to execute people? Something that would cause me to doubt the fine men in uniform of the 7th Army?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
You cite as evidence an SS document saying no gas chamber was ever built, I cite as evidence a US Army investigative report from 1945 that not only says "yup, there's gas chambers here, we saw them ourselves" but includes photographic evidence. Not based on the testimony of "hundred of Jews" but based on the testimony of American soldiers of the Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, Seventh Army, who were sent to the camp to investigate and report back. They have photos of the crematoria, the gas chamber buildings, and a detailed physical description of the gas chambers themselves.
I don't see how a single SS documents saying that no gas chamber was built at Dachau beats a comprehensive US report, with photographs, saying that there was a gas chamber there.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
Eye witness accounts will be more reliable than human remains in the case of trying to determine whether Carthaginians really sacrificed children, particularly for something that occurred so long ago in the historical record. That doesn't mean that eye witness accounts are the only kind of evidence, or can never be wrong, it's just a recognition of the fact that testimony gives us more specific and more reliable information than trying to interpret 2,000 year old bones in a hole in the desert. When physical evidence matches eye witness testimony it gives that testimony more credibility, but if you dig up Carthage and you can't find pits full of baby bones that means either the eye witness was not reliable, or that no physical evidence survived the passage of time, or evidence survived the passage of time and you haven't found it yet.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
I disagree. While you have to take the potential biases or other points of unreliability into account when dealing with eyewitness testimony, they are still more reliable for a historian than most other forms of evidence. All evidence has to be interpreted properly, whether it's eyewitness testimony or a pile of bones in the desert. Bones, for instance, can tell us many useful things: some of the injuries this human may have undergone, and whether they had a chance to heal or not, carbon dating information on provenance, gender, level of bone health, etc. If the historical question you are trying to answer is "How did Richard III die" then access to his bones may be very helpful indeed. But if the question is "What wars did Richard III wage, and against who, and why?" then written accounts will tell you far more, and far more reliably, then digging up bones will.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
The word holocaust was not in use yet at the time he wrote that book.
While Eisenhower did not talk about it specifically in that book, he was aware of gas chambers and crematoria. In 1944 he received a report from Captain Yurka Galitzine on the Natzweiler concentration camp that specifically mentions mass executions (by firearm), experimental gas chambers, and crematoria.
Colonel William Quinn wrote a detailed report on Dachau that Eisenhower received in 1945 that described the gas chambers and crematoria in detail, with photographic evidence. The report also references a contemporaneous account, a diary of an internee who recorded his experiences.
The contemporaneous documented testimony and photographic evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
13d ago
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it.
You would be wrong to doubt it. Over 1.5 million died in the gulags, and over a twenty year period citizens were regularly snatched out of their beds, taken to the basement of the Lubyanka, and shot in the back of the head. At least 700,000 Russians were executed between 1936-1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.
Eyewitness evidence is waaaaaaaaaaay better than archeological evidence when it comes to history. Ask any historian what they would rather dig up: a clay tablet with a contemporary account of an event, or a bunch of pot shards. Better yet, ask them if they’d rather have an ancient Akkadian magically transported to the modern day to talk to, or to find a new pile of old foundations and grave goods from the same era. Eyewitness wins every time.
Eisenhower does actually mention a holocaust in crusade in europe. Specifically a "Bomber's Holocaust", carried out by the allies against the germans. But nothing about a mass extermination of jews, only that when released from the work camps they and all the other prisoners were starving from lack of food, largely because German logistics had collapsed.
In a press conference Eisenhower gave in 1945 he said the following: "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty."
In a military cable to General Patton in 1945, Eisenhower wrote the following: "We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail…I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps.
And, of course, in his autobiography Crusade in Europe Eisenhower wrote the following (page 446):
"The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
"I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda”. Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."
In the same book, on page 480, he wrote the following while discussing displaced persons (DPs) after the war:
"Of all these DPs the Jews were in the most deplorable condition. For years they had been beaten, starved, and tortured. Even food, clothes, and decent treatment could not immediately enable them to shake off their hopelessness and apathy. They huddled together — they seemingly derived a feeling of safety out of crowding together in a single room —and there passively awaited whatever might befall. To secure for them adequate shelter, to establish a system of food distribution and medical service, to say nothing of providing decent sanitary facilities, heat, and light was a most difficult task. They were, in many instances, no longer capable of helping themselves; everything had to be done for them."
And again on page 481:
"Of all the distressing memories that will for ever live with American veterans of the war in Europe, none will be sharper or more enduring than those of the DPs and of the horror camps established by the Nazis."
As you can see, in his autobiography he does not blame the deplorable condition of the Jews in the camps as being the result of a breakdown of logistics but on "Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and as the result of years of being "beaten, starved, and tortured" in "horror camps".
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
Eyewitness accounts are about the most reliable sources of evidence you get when it comes to history. The more of them you have the better, since you can cross reference them. And there really seems to be too many eyewitness accounts to discount, particularly contemporaneous accounts. Like a letter President Truman sent Eisenhower in 1945 about the problem of finding housing for displaced civilians in Europe in which he writes "Apparently it is being taken for granted that all displaced persons, irrespective of their former persecution or the likelihood that their repatriation or resettlement will be delayed, must remain in camps--many of which are overcrowded and heavily guarded. Some of these camps are the very ones where these people were herded together, starved, tortured and made to witness the death of their fellow-inmates and friends and relatives" and quotes a report from another source (Earl Harrison, an American on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees) who wrote "As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy." And that's just one random letter from Truman, we've got scads of accounts from US soldiers, survivors, and European citizens. Famously Eisenhower held a press conference in 1945 where he said "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty." To say that there are essentially no contemporaneous accounts is simply not true.
If you discount those accounts because they were by Americans, who were at war with the Germans, then you're holding an absurdly high bar for historical evidence. I doubt more than 10% of what we teach in history books could meet such a standard of evidence.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
Between 1948 and 1980 Arab nations such as Yeman, Iraq, Morroco, Lebenon, Syria, (and Iran, but they're Persian, not Arab) expelled around 800,000 Jews. Some left voluntarily, others were forced out by official policy, others by riots and pogroms. In 1948 there were around 800,000 Jews living in North Africa and the Middle East (excepting Israel): today there are about 3,500. A great many of those Jews had their land stolen from them and left with what they could carry away.
I can't say I support the policies that led to the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world: but given that it happened, I certainly do not support Jews going to war against the Arab world until they get their land back! Similarly, I'm not sure if I support Israel conquering Gaza and the West Bank, but I certainly don't support the status quo of all these Palestinians refusing to live in peace until they have their land back. They're not realistically getting their land back. It is time to move on, and make a better life.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
The ultimate nature seems to be that some things are aversive and some are attractive. This is not subjective, it is an objective property of the specific subject/object system in question. That is to say, it can be objectively true that different organisms have different needs.
We can only identify what something needs (or what would be attractive for something) if we have an understanding of what that thing is: of it's nature. If it has no nature, then it's nonsense to say that there are things it needs. Needs or else what? Or else it will not fulfil it's nature?
It sounds like it is not the case that all the things you think are sacred are considered sin by the Catholic Church, nor are the things they call divine and sacred the things you'd call skill issues. It looks to me that your primary divergence with Catholicism is the morality of transhumanism.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
I don't think you do lose the concept of disease. You can reclaim it straight from the etymology. Dis-Ease. A disease is when the things you are trying to do are harder than they need to be, physically, emotionally, or existentially.
That definition of disease would lead to some very unintuitive results. For example, if I want to remove a 1,000 pound stone from my backyard but find I am not physically strong enough to do so, does that mean I have a disease? The thing I'm trying to do is certainly harder than I'd like it to be. How do you define how hard something needs to be, so that it makes sense to call not being strong enough to life up a glass of water a disease, but not being strong enough to lift an elephant isn't? The only route I can see to defining how hard something needs to be is to have in your mind an idea of a normal human, and an idea of how hard things would be for that human. Since I have an idea on how strong a "natural" male should be, I can make a judgement that the man who can't life a 1,000 pound stone unaided is normal and healthy, while the grown man who can't lift a glass of water has something wrong with them: a disease.
In the case of benign tumors that aren't causing an inconvenience, we don't typically call them a disease.
Do we? I would consider benign tumors a disease, just not a threatening one. The International Classification of Disease manual, version 10 (ICD-10) is the handbook used by medical providers to identify diseases (it's in the name). ICD-10 code D21.9 is "benign neoplasm", ie a benign tumor.
It is true that typically doctors do not recommend removing benign tumors, but that's not because they're not a disease: it's because the cure would likely cause more harm than the disease would.
I get that some people don't call aging or mortality or ignorance diseases. But my in-group does.
Christians would agree, death is not natural to man. "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he 'has put everything under his feet.'"
My issue is that the things that I think are the divine and sacred nature of human beings, are things that they call Sin.
Which things exactly? Just self-modification, or is there something else? Pride? Lust? Envy?
And the things that they call the divine and sacred nature of human beings, are often the things I call skill issues that the divine wishes to see us overcome.
Which things? Love? Joy? Peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self control? Or is it just the human's being sacred thing?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
The question is, without a solid goal of "perfection" you can't really meaningfully pursue it. One man cuts off his own leg because he believes that will make him more perfect, is that glorifying God through an act of self-creation? If your goal is merely to transform, then cutting off your own legs is as good a goal as growing five more of them. But if your goal is perfection, to get better and better, to "grow great enough to Glorify god in greater ways" then you need a fixed goal to be working towards. Chesterton put it well in Orthodoxy:
This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed. Whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits. But it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait. So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful. But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitless. The question therefore becomes this: How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art? How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? How can we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out of window?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
It seems likely. I mean, if someone says they're actually a fish, and if we had the technology to turn them into a fish, we'd still probably err on the side of their mind having a problem as opposed to their bodies having a problem. If someone is physically male but claims to be a female, either their body or their mind is wrong. Given all the ways the mind can go wrong, and given that there is nothing obviously abnormal about their body, it seems reasonable to assume the abnormality is in the mind. Especially since we can't actually physically change someone from a male to a female or vice versa, we can make them look and feel a bit more like the other gender.
See though, that strikes me as much more probable than the university statement thing. That fits within my understanding of how the world works. American sports has a recent history of doing stupid stuff, and people freak out about criminals being killed by police all the time. When was the last time a statement from a university affected anything?
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