YES, ignorance rules!
Logo, where did You get that Hume quote??? I didn’t know that Hume spelled Horkheimer and Adorno in German.
… or is Kerry that much better? 
Being that only around 50% of the eligible voting population in the U.S. (which is one of the lowest in industrialized democracies) actually makes the effort to vote, I think there term “apathy” is more suitable than “blindness.”
50%? I thought it was much lower.
The quote’s from A Treatise of Human Nature…book II, part 3, sec. 3. It’s a good read.
And yes…Kerry will be a significant improvement. Anyone committed to firing Aschcroft, overturning the Patriot Act, devoting resources to alternative energy research, providing universal health care and respecting America’s allies represents a significant step forward. At any rate, it’s the biggest step forward one can hope for right now.
Well said, Logo!
Michael
Why even ask that, theres the bad with the good. Hitler tried to take over, bush is trying to free.
Look at what’s going on in the prisons in Irak.
We’re all Hitler and Bush and Stalin - put each of us in a certain situation and we’ll all act like the poor bastards we so love to find fault with.
You must stop drawing lines around people and ‘quarantining’ them as ‘evil demons’ or shoddy goods. We’re all in this existence thing together!
And thus we have to try and work together - and it just doesn’t help things to be making absurd comparisons.
We like to think ourselves somehow better than Hitler or Bush - that’s exactly the way a Hitler and a Bush think. We think that we are somehow morally superior. This is delusion!
The fact is that ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of the people on this planet are fools and talk foolishly most of the time. What’s more given half the chance they’d make an even bigger fuck-up than the ones they so love to despise.
Personally I think everything that can be said has been said. If you’re going to compare someone to Hitler you have to compare him with what makes Hitler Hitler… namely, the merciless mass genocide and what he did to a race of people. There is no comparison whatsoever. But I’m not going to repeat what I think has already been said…
There was one comment that I guess slipped under the radar. It is this one:
Anti-anti-semitism is a waste of time? It wasn’t but a month ago that a Jewish kid’s school library was firebombed, and there has been a recent wave of hate crimes near where I live. I agree that people tend to notice things more when it affects them. Anyways, that comment worries me… I hope it is obvious why.
No comparison… Hitler was good for the German economy. 
Seriously though, many of these comparisons are being made between the acts of Hitler’s entire term of office versus Bush’s current first term. Wait a few more years, if Bush rides the war wagon into getting a second term and maybe declaring some kind of martial law to preserve control then it will be time for these comparisons. These are the kind of judgements for history to make, the best we can do is attempt to foretell it.
Besides, he reminds me more of Stalin personally.
— See all the anti-Bush people here in the Guantanimo bay gulag. —
Monooq
Re: “[i]There was one comment that I guess slipped under the radar. It is this one:
phrygianslave the wise wrote:
Ben, I’m not going to go down that road of arguing with you about what Adolf did or didn’t do. I don’t agree with anti-semitism, whatever form it takes, but I also don’t agree with anti-anti-semitism. That’s a waste of time and energy.
Anti-anti-semitism is a waste of time? It wasn’t but a month ago that a Jewish kid’s school library was firebombed, and there has been a recent wave of hate crimes near where I live. I agree that people tend to notice things more when it affects them. Anyways, that comment worries me… I hope it is obvious why[/i].â€
[b]The only thing to have slipped under the radar here is moral integrity!
(1) Anti-Semitism is neither good nor evil but a thing indifferent.
(2) Anti-anti-Semitism is neither good nor evil but a thing indifferent.
It would be an inconsistent and false ethic that allowed (1) and disallowed (2)
It is largely false reasoning that has allowed men to get away with crimes against their fellows and humanity in general.
When people think correctly the sort of things you referred to don’t occur.[/b]
Being a Jew I’m appauled at the comparison. I don’t even wish to enter this absurd debate.
Hatred added to hatred solves absolutely nothing!
Castro and a few hundred thousand cubans seem to think so
Which was more evil: Hitler, Stalin or Mao? and is the answer to that question determined by statistics alone? users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm
Is it strange that the punishment for having committed ten murders is no different than the punishment for ten-thousand murders? Hitler was a monster, a monster no more or less than any “generic” murderer is a monster. Simone Weil wrote:
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, while real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren.”
Hannah Arendt, having studied evil for some thirty years, came to the same conclusion,“Evil has no depth.” Heinrich Himmler urged his S.S. officers to become “superhumanly inhuman,” when in fact, one can only be subhumanly inhuman. I refuse to think of Hitler any differently than I think of any two-bit murderer. I refuse to confer upon him the “superhumanly inhuman” status that his followers so relished.
“The evil that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other…seems without boundary; the Holocaust, genocide, torture - and the little acts that are calculated to hurt, to humiliate, to violate and degrade. Evil is the betrayal of dignity…a spirtual sickness, a disease of the soul.” – Robert Sack, A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good
Evil is without boundary; it has no depth. George W. Bush is a murderer. As Governor of Texas, he oversaw the executions of men who in most cases were guilty of having murdered one human being. Yet Bush’s lies and deceptions have, up till now, resulted in some 16 thousand human deaths. In my version of a just world he’d face the same punishment as any garden-variety murderer; the same punishment as I’d alot to Ted Bundy, Adolph Hitler or Idi Amin. Bush’s evil is no exception; it’s not special. He’s simply another run-of-the-mill, murderous ideologue.
“We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people to annihilate this people who wanted to annihilate us… We can say that we have fulfilled the most difficult duty out of love for our people…You have to know what it is like to see one hundred bodies side by side, or even five hundred or one thousand. To have kept control and at the same time…to have remained decent, that is what has hardened us. This is a glorious page of our history.” – Heinrich Himmler, Oct. 4, 1943
Michael
Are you being ironic? I’m sorry I cannot take such a question seriously: it’s an idea for a comedy sketch, yeah?
Why are you so interested in “punishment?†A ghoulish curiosity in matters that are none of our business is unhealthy and morbid. It is tantamount to complaining and is therefore the lot of the unhappy and unwholesome. There is only one kind of punishment and that is moral punishment.
But of course those who espouse the practise of atheism will first look to man’s punishment system: prisons, fines, executions, and the suchlike, which are nothing but perversions of the true law in which god alone rewards and punishes.
God condemns the murderer to everlasting moral death, a prison from which there is no escape except via the door of remorse and repentance.
Human law is a blunt and clumsy instrument written by blunt and clumsy do-gooders.
Morally there is no difference whether you kill one man or one million. To say that because Mr X killed more people than Mr Y he is more evil is not just ridiculous and childish but it is thoughtless and makes a mockery of death and murder.
I agree, Hitler was nothing more than a common murderer and thug. But the world is choc-a-bloc with such types. Probably nine out of ten people you pass on the street, (despite their protestations to the contrary,) put in the same situation would have no hesitation in acting the same as the one they would condemn and punish.
We can quote the opinions of others till the cows come home… Simone Weil says… Hannah Arendt says… Heinrich Himmler says… Robert Sack says… my dad says… well my dad’s a policeman… well my dad’s a wrestler… well my dad’s a Mafia boss…
but what do you say?
Again, I ask you, why are you so eager to punish your brothers? With views like this you make yourself no better than those you condemn. This paragraph is hopelessly flawed. If you became president you’d oversee the execution of George W. Bush!!! What kind of morality is that?
And you quote Himmler! Jesus, can you not see that you hold to the same bullshit morality that he espoused!!!
phrygianslave the wise,
no comment on your nonsense. except to say that it is absolute nonsense.
ie “anti semitism isn’t good or bad” …as a jew that scares me
you know this, but such extreme moral relativism scares me
“nine out of ten people would do what hitler has done”
that is what you squared up in one of your posts.
Monooq
Stop looking at yourself as a Jew first and start looking at yourself as a human being first, a citizen in a brotherhood of human beings.
You choose to twist and pervert what I’m saying. You have a problem, and I can’t help you with it until you change your attitude.
Nine out of ten people you pass on the street are immoral and live in error. Let me change this to nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand.
That’s why the world is raging with war and famine and tyrannical governments and is, in short, a total mess.
Basically because people place value in things of no value. Thus you get the British with all their shite, the Irish with theirs, the Americans with theirs, the Arabs theirs, the Jews theirs, etc., etc., all proud of being part of some bullshit fabricated divisive cultural entity or other. Some people will identify with a national anthem, some with a flag, some with a racial type, some with a particular church or creed - all hopelessy fucked-up and deluded!
And it goes on even in philosophy - the admiration and worship of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Descartes or some other dead booby or other and then the quotes and great passages of verbiage instead of the use of intelligence and brains to some purpose.
Hitler was a thug and murderer. But what makes any of you so different? Instead of going on about some dead tyrant why don’t you do something to make it impossible for you yourself ever to end up the same way?
You have the nerve, Monooq, to take a tone of contemptuous and righteous indignation with me! So predictable! But please, Monooq, don’t give me the Jewish stuff. I judge a man not on his country or race or religion but on what comes out of his heart, and thus far, you have misunderstood and twisted what I am about. Because of that I judge that you are in poor fettle and very unhappy. But it is not by misrepresenting me and my words that you will get any better.
And how many of those you passed on the street today will go home and rape their wives and abuse their children and get drunk and scream at other car drivers on the road and insult their neighbour and so on…? For it is from tiny acorns that giant oak trees grow.
phrygianslave the wise wore:
My friend it is the rest of the world that makes us Jews. They see Jews whether we are religious, secular, isolated or assimulated. The Nazis killed orthodox Jews as well as those Jews that did not even know they had any Jewish blood in them.
You say we are all the same, all human beings? But what is it that seperates us? Have you ever stoped and thought perhaps we are all not the same, perhaps there is something that makes a Jew a Jew. Hitler said every Jew needs to be exterminated even if he does not know he is a Jew because there is a consciousness inate in every Jews soul. This moral weak consciousness he called it. Hitler sounded like a Rabbi only that he arrived at a different conclusion.
What makes a Jew a Jew? Outlook. Thats what seperates peoples, nations and societies as well as individuals. How we look at the world. In this sense Jews exist for we look upon the world through a different set of glasses. We are taught to look upon the world one way and other nations another way.
Through our fathers and the countless generations before us we have been taught to look at the world the way we do as other cultures and nations have been taught to look at the world as they do.
If ye wish I can go into examples for you that demonstrate my point.