tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post164931204480831066..comments2024-03-27T03:19:11.216-04:00Comments on Assistant Village Idiot: Odd ExcusesAssistant Village Idiothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01978011985085795099noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-62909782673707759392014-02-08T10:20:51.418-05:002014-02-08T10:20:51.418-05:00My dad used to say the U.S. was as bad as Russia. ...My dad used to say the U.S. was as bad as Russia. But once he retracted and said, "No. The U.S. lets me live where I want to live, and doesn't force me to live next door to someone I can't stand." <br />He also laughed a lot when an English immigrant next door told him he would have been arrested in England for the state of our garden.<br />He is hugely disappointed that I became a conservative. He adored Pete Seeger.leliahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09322159218521168878noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-32298847687141968902014-02-08T09:29:35.514-05:002014-02-08T09:29:35.514-05:00Richard, an interesting story. The recent childre...Richard, an interesting story. The recent children's book <i>Breaking Stalin's Nose</i> might be of interest to you.<br /><br />James, that is why <i>Bloodlands</i> had controversy around it when it came out. Still does. Because of censorship, we are only now getting the full story.<br /><br />There was enough information to tell us an approximation of the truth. Word did get out.Assistant Village Idiothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01978011985085795099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-73735597163993326382014-02-08T09:22:42.232-05:002014-02-08T09:22:42.232-05:00By "above the fray" I mean without a dut...By "above the fray" I mean without a duty to participate, and without a duty to investigate and weigh the evidence.<br /><br />Weighing the evidence is hard work when censorship is involved--way easier to decide by the level of noise you hear.<br /><br />That's one of the tough problems in science too--you measure X in domain A because A is available. What relationship is A to B, and how can you measure what X would be in B?jameshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01792036361407527304noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-79453384124726039762014-02-07T23:24:57.965-05:002014-02-07T23:24:57.965-05:00No one size fits all explanation when we look at o...No one size fits all explanation when we look at our folkies, at our left, and their take on the Evil Empire. Which is why you included many possibilities.<br /><br />Years ago I read a memoir by one of the Weatherwomen. I forget her name, but I believe she went to Bryn Mawr, so you know she wasn't cognitively deficient. Her reaction to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslvakia went something like this: "How could the Russians do it? I mean, they are revolutionary." So bright, and yet so blind.<br /><br />Some of the neutrality or indifference to the Evil Empire came from "the enemy of my enemy cannot be my enemy." People whom they greatly disliked who were also anti-communists, such as segregationists, made them see the Evil Empire with a more benign eye than would have otherwise been the case. If I am going to oppose this adherent of Jim Crow on civil rights, why should I stand with him against Communists?<br /><br />I am reminded of the father of a childhood friend who shocked me when he told my father that he thought the Americans were as bad as the Russians. It was the first time I had heard someone espouse moral equivalence of the US and the USSR.<br /><br />The parents of my friend's father had both emigrated early in the 20th century from a small town in a land that later fell behind the Iron Curtain. As an adult, he had made a number of trips back to the old country to visit relatives. <br /><br />Not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, after decades of espousing moral equivalence, my friend's father got a lesson in moral equivalence. He found out that while through the years he had attended a number of outwardly cordial dinners in the old country together with the relatives of both sides of the family, the two sides of the old country family didn't get along all that well. <br /><br />During WW2, someone who had married into his father's family- who later rose high in the Nomenklatura- had executed several members of his mother's family. Such was what Communist partisans did to Socialists back then. A further irony is that one reason for his seeing the two sides as being morally equivalent was because his mother, while in the US, supported socialism.[His father was apolitical.] If he had only known back then how socialists got treated in the old country...Richard Johnsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02815508395644671620noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-44066735073670342512014-02-07T22:45:56.713-05:002014-02-07T22:45:56.713-05:00Several things play roles here.
Criticism sounds ...Several things play roles here.<br /><br />Criticism sounds wiser than praise. <br /><br />Parents, above the fray, send all the participants in the quarrel to sit in the corners.<br /><br />I think we sense that before God we're all equal in the dust. <br /><br />If I am able to see the essential moral equivalence of the thief and the banker, I must therefore be wise, above the fray, and have god-like superiority to the mere mortals who argue about such petty things.jameshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01792036361407527304noreply@blogger.com