I hope they slap all the morons around with a big stick: The teacher for failing to act. The principal should lose his job, as should the officer and the magistrate in question.
Seriously, they did the exact opposite of what they should have done.
The bullies were probably doing one of those sports the US seems to put above anything else. Which means that they should also ban the school from any and all sports leagues they're involved in.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Got the weirdest 'WTF' text today from a friend who asked if we could host a moderately famous actress at our apartment for a weekend in May. My first response was "uh?" followed by "sure, I guess?" followed by "wait, have you seen our apartment?"
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Post is useless without name drop.Originally Posted by wiggin
I know but in the interests of privacy...Post is useless without name drop.
Let's just say she's a main character in one of the top rated sitcoms in the US.
The point wasn't the fame per se; more like a big honking WTF that our apartment is nice enough to host anyone who has the money to stay elsewhere. It's more of a convenience thing, I guess...
Plus you're presumably nice hostsI know but in the interests of privacy...
Let's just say she's a main character in one of the top rated sitcoms in the US.
The point wasn't the fame per se; more like a big honking WTF that our apartment is nice enough to host anyone who has the money to stay elsewhere. It's more of a convenience thing, I guess...I also prefer couch surfing, and not just because of the costs.
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
IS IT MY FAVOURITE SHOW How I Met Your Mother??!?!?!??!?!I know but in the interests of privacy...
Let's just say she's a main character in one of the top rated sitcoms in the US.
The point wasn't the fame per se; more like a big honking WTF that our apartment is nice enough to host anyone who has the money to stay elsewhere. It's more of a convenience thing, I guess...
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
A commercial for viagra with a caution that Viagra doesn' t protect against STD's including HIV. I mean, what the fuck?
Congratulations America
Of course not, it's Mariyam Bialik. How could you guess this one wrong?IS IT MY FAVOURITE SHOW How I Met Your Mother??!?!?!??!?!
Congratulations America
I guess I just don't associate Wiggin with "cute jewish scientist"
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
You don't think I'm cute?
I guess at one point your wife must have thought you were cute, but how are we to know if you still are cute enough to satisfy our criteria?You don't think I'm cute?
Congratulations America
ata chacham/muchshar/nechmad veh ata motze chen be'einayYou don't think I'm cute?
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I ooze cuteness through my posts. If you aren't perceptive enough to notice, that's not my problem.
?נו באמת אני רק חתיך בשר בעיניך, כןata chacham/muchshar/nechmad veh ata motze chen be'einay
I thought I had to join an Israeli board to get a reply like that.I ooze cuteness through my posts. If you aren't perceptive enough to notice, that's not my problem.
?נו באמת אני רק חתיך בשר בעיניך, כן
Congratulations America
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Wow! I was supposed to be cheating on, lying to (I ain't tellin' on mysef), and then abandoning my wife. It also seems that I was (am) not supposed to love my children so much (or is that just for the ladies?). No wonder I'm so unmiserable and unlonely. I only read the first two paragraphs before my self-loathing kicked in and made me weep. Do we win in the end?
The worst job in the world is better than being broke and homeless
Today I happened upon a documentary about Jewish children being sent to The Netherlands after the Kristallnacht in Germany. They had some footage of the events in Germany and then I noticed something I had never noticed before: there were posters saying in gothic script 'Deutsche wert euch, kauft nicht bei Juden'. Posters I must have seen a thousand times before. But today for the first time I saw that the lower half of some of these posters contained a text in a rounder script stating the same in English. (Germans defend yourselves, don't buy from Jews).
I had no idea really, but that must have been aimed at an international public back then.
Congratulations America
I can't speak to that particular poster, of course, but it's definitely true that they pushed their agenda on far more than just a national level. It's scary how much support there was for racialist policies, even in the US, let alone on the Continent. I heard a talk last night from a woman who lived in Vienna as a girl; after the Anschluss, she remembers hunkering down at home with her family during the overwhelming jubilation (and no small amount of violence) that ensued, and her parents' shock at the broad public support for Nazism in general and racial policies in particular, even among people they thought to be free of antisemitic bias (such as her nanny). Fortunately, they managed to escape to Switzerland where they got American visas in 1940 with the help of some US cousins... but for many others (including her paternal grandparents) it was not to be. National socialism, while obviously placing a premium on the German race above others, believed that their brand of politics and policies was a fundamentally universal one.
Funny you should mention those children spirited out of Germany in 1938; my wife's grandmother and great-aunt were two of those children; they lived in Holland for a short period while their parents and aunts/uncles argued endlessly about whether they needed to leave Europe entirely; no one could quite believe what was happening, and many thought they were safe in Holland. In the end, the grandmother's family did manage to secure visas and transportation to Chile, but they left behind family in Holland who were deported and killed after Holland was invaded. Both the grandmother and her sister passed away this year, so we heard their stories in greater detail during various eulogies. It makes you wonder - pretty much everyone of Jewish descent that I know has family who just barely escaped being slaughtered through a combination of luck, foresight, and courage. If something like this were to happen today, would I correctly read the portents and save my family? I honestly don't know; it's easier today with the state of Israel (not needing a visa), but that only works as long as borders are open... as those families who waited too long after Kristallnacht found out. I look at the pictures of families and children from the ghettos and camps, and if you change the clothing/hairstyles a bit, you could be looking at kids my wife and I might have some day; would I be any wiser or luckier than them?
People in my grandparents' generation kept all sorts of seemingly elaborate precautions for such a circumstance - large amounts of cash and jewelry hidden at home, as many different passports as possible, etc. It seems paranoid in a place like the US, and I certainly do none of those things... but I occasionally wonder if I'm being as complacent as those Jews in 1930s Europe. Who knows?
The Holocaust didn't appear out of thin air. There was deep-seated support for anti-Semitic views and acts, and the acts of violence escalated over time. The same is true for anti-Semitic laws, which didn't just come into effect within a day. Even in Nazi Germany, it took nearly a decade between the rise of the Nazis and the whole-scale extermination of Jews. Plus there's a reason there has only been one Hitler: he did what he did due to a lot of unique circumstances that are unlikely to be ever replicated. That includes a long-term massive depression in a developed economy, a country where sizable minorities have hated Jews for centuries, a country with a powerful military surrounded by countries that were unwilling to do anything in the face of this country's aggression. And lastly, this was a country within close vicinity of a whole lot of Jews.
Now if you're talking about a localized genocide against any group, then there are plenty of modern examples...
Hope is the denial of reality
This "even" makes it sound like the US were better than the other countries. Pretty far from it, though. Hitler got quite a bit of his Eugenics ideas from the US (Rockefeller and Carnegie come to mind), not to mention this whole thing with the internment of citizens of Japanese descent. Blacks were still treated like dirt.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Not exactly on the same level as what was happening in central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s...
Hope is the denial of reality
Oh, great, the "Well, we weren't as bad as them" card. Has about the same weight as the "But he started it!" card.
Maybe you'd like to present your argument to the Native Americans and Blacks which were forcefully sterilized back then? "But, hey, guys, at least we didn't kill you! *nudge, nudge, wink wink*"
I mean, you guys didn't exactly stop the programs even after the atrocities of WW2 came to light...
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Right. There is little qualitative difference between forced sterilization of some poor minorities and the large-scale killing of substantial portions of the population.
Hope is the denial of reality
Loki, playing the "let's compare numbers" on atrocities like those doesn't serve any purpose, that's my point. They're still atrocities and it makes no sense to say: "Oh, but here they merely sterilized them", which by the way, has the same ultimate purpose: To get rid of said part of the population.
The point is that comparing one particular suffering to another one by just looking at the numbers, cheapens both. It creates this notion that something can only be really atrocious if the numbers are large enough. That's the same kind of thinking which makes rape sort-of okay because no-one was killed.
I'm saying here that each instance of those atrocities is incomparable. It's not something you should use to somehow lessen your own responsibility because, hey, "we were not that bad!" That's quite dubious from an ethical perspective because it can be used to cheapen almost anything: "Oh, well, I stole that lady's last money but it's not as bad as the Holocaust!"
Or do you mean to say that, say, eradicating the Native Americans was not so bad because it wasn't as big as the Holocaust?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
That's a very interesting bit of family history; from the documentary I understood that about 1/3 of the approximately 2000 children who were sent to Holland survived in the end. The others were killed; in one particularly poignant situation a girl was sent to a bakery to buy cookies by her brother who then by the time she returned had become a victim of one of the very first razzia's in what had become effectively a Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam.
As for your more general point; I think you can't really predict what you would do in a 'similar' situation. One of the reasons for that would be that you probably wouldn't be able to even establish what your options would be. Events can radically change your choices. For example: two girls were sent to Holland and still were there as the country was occupied. Their parents then reasoned that given the fact that the situation of their daughters all things considered wasn't better with them living in another country they wanted to have them back home. However, when they tried to repatriate their children they found out that the regime would allow their daughters to leave Holland, but would NOT allow them to return to Germany as their citizenship had been cancelled.
Congratulations America
Actually there isn't.
Congratulations America
Didn't really mean to spark this discussion, but I'll graze the edges of it just to respond.
I don't disagree - there's a reason I'm not particularly paranoid in the US about these things. And yet I can't help but wonder if Jews in Germany felt the same way in the 1930s; the country had been pretty friendly to Jews who acculturated themselves, in sharp contrast to the past of most European nations. Why expect it to get so much worse in such a rapid manner? People might have expected the occasional pogrom or the like (a la Kristallnacht), but I can't imagine anyone even contemplating a systematic machinery of death just based on some antisemitic hostility.
I don't honestly believe it is likely to be a problem in the US any time soon, but I can't help but wonder about Jews in other countries, even today - notably in the FSU, but also elsewhere. Would people have the foresight to move in time? I doubt I would.
I was actually saying 'even' to forestall those who think the US had some moral superiority here; certainly eugenics theories were loudly trumpeted in the US in the first half of the 20th century, and we have a long and difficult history of fraught relationships with the Other.
That being said, I do think that Loki does have a point. Virulent racism and racist rhetoric - and even internment - are not the same, quantitatively or qualitatively, as the Nazi atrocities. Despite the strong support for eugenics among part of the US intelligentsia, concrete action to put recommended policies into practice was remarkably small. As I understand it, euthanasia/extermination never got any serious foothold in the US, despite its being bandied about by some prominent eugenicists. It was precisely because of the overwhelmingly negative response to euthanasia that radical eugenicists ended up pushing for forced sterilization procedures as the 'next best' solution. (I do want to acknowledge here that some limited de facto extermination happened in the US - e.g. infecting the institutionalized with TB - but was far from a comprehensive or approved policy.)
I agree with you that there is little to distinguish the end results of a comprehensive sterilization campaign from a comprehensive extermination campaign. In many ways, one could argue they are morally equivalent. However, another distinguishing characteristic of the US vs. German eugenics program involved the targeting and scope of said programs. Firstly, the US eugenics campaigns did not for the most part focus on race. The vast majority of the involuntary sterilization campaigns were targeted at categories - the mentally ill, the handicapped, the criminal. There was certainly a racial and socioeconomic bias in this targeting, but it was not rooted in specifically racialist philosophy so much as a broader eugenics. It doesn't make it any less horrific, of course, but it's a crucial distinction. Your aforementioned cases of involuntary sterilization of African Americans and Native Americans were marginal in their application and numbers - only a few thousand over the course of the entire program, mostly in the context of some other factors than merely race. That many people were being sterilized each month in Germany by the end of the 1930s. Scope matters; one was clearly a comprehensive campaign in genocide, while the other was an evil but localized excess in support of eugenics theory.
I want to be entirely clear here - the American eugenics theories and programs were entirely, 100%, wrong. Yet they were distinct in method, targeting, and scope from Nazi policies.
*shrugs* Obviously I can't know. Yet I wonder nonetheless. It's so easy to look back at the folly of European Jews in the 1930s - how could they have been so blind? However, I can't help but think that I would be no wiser in such a circumstance.
Part of this, I suppose, is because of the narrative of American Jewry. Every single American Jew I've met who immigrated here from the Old World thanks their lucky stars for making it to the United States; I know many people who celebrate the day they arrived here every single year. Despite the hardships of immigrant life here, and the still extant antisemitism, American Jews see the US as one of the best things to ever happen to the Jewish people. My grandparents' generation speaks glowingly of the complete absence of government-sanctioned discrimination, the rule of law, and the general acceptance of the Other due to the immigrant makeup of our society. This is obviously viewing the US through rose-tinted glasses, but the narrative - at least as it applies to Jews - is not entirely without merit. Jews in America have integrated into society to an extent far greater than nearly anywhere else, enjoying positions of wealth, prestige, and power that would have been unheard of in previous countries of residence. Does this lead to complacency? Perhaps it does. By the standards of the 1920s/early 1930s, you might have said the same thing about Germany. So while I don't think the US is about to dust off plans to round up the Jews any time soon, I can't help but wonder if my attitude is really all that different from those ill-fated Europeans 80 years ago.
Wiggin, I strongly disagree: At some point it doesn't really matter whether there were hundreds, thousands or millions of people.
I mean, you yourself, even though you stated that you found the programs wrong, said that those were "only a few thousand". I find that a very problematic view of such incidents.
Let's call it "Comparative Genocide" (and, yes, I know that's strictly not the best term but let's roll with it for the moment). What purpose does it serve to compare numbers of atrocities? To make a ranking of what was absolutely worst?
I'm not sure there is a valid purpose. I'm of the opinion that every such incidence should stand for itself. That's only fair to the victims (and "fair" to the perpetrators).
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
The critical distinction is this:
Genocide is a concerted attempt to completely eliminate (or at least significantly reduce) a race/ethnicity/religion. Nazi atrocities (as well as many others - e.g. Turkish, Hutu, etc.) qualify but the US eugenics policies do not. If the US was making a concerted effort to eliminate the African American and Native American populations in the 20th century, they did a really bad job. Yes, there were piecemeal attempts to do precisely that, but it never gained widespread acceptance and always needed an excuse ('unfit' parents because of e.g. disability or criminality or whatever). A few thousand sterilizations is awful and a crime, but it isn't genocide. I don't doubt that some eugenicists in the US would have gladly expanded the program to become a genocide, but it never had the political, legal, or public backing to become a reality. This is a very important distinction, and not one of merely degree.
I think a pretty good case can be made that the US policy towards Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries amounted at least to ethnic cleansing, and quite possibly to attempted genocide. That is a stain of shame on our country's history and should not be glossed over. But in my mind, the 20th century eugenics and sterilization programs in the US did not come close to the same thing, and should not be lumped together.
Nevertheless, I agree that this comparison is pointless; I had no interest in starting a discussion about this, and was only trying to highlight the universal reach of some eugenics thinking/policies in the early 20th century.
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