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[Pencil_Art]

-Has read Nietzsche-

-Has also read Nietzsche, or at least knows of him-

I think ChairmanPoo has got it. You may want to take a look at the TV Tropes page for Friedrich Nietzsche, it does a fairly good job of explaining his view in tropes. Nietzsche's ideas may have been controversial (and still are today), but you have to be careful not to take his quotes out of context.

-Why French Revolution, when you have diplomacy?-

It can be difficult to convince the kings to up and leave their fortunes to the poor, or for wealthy landowners to pay their servants a bit more, or even for the then-incumbent King Louie XVI to do a better at job at being a... king. The French people were suffering from extended periods of poor harvest and the results of a defeat in the Seven Years' War (heavily increased taxes due to massive government debt), and it was easy to see the rich, who were living in luxury over the vast majority starving people, as being somewhat tyrannical. When starving, and covered in dirt, it is difficult to even find audience with powerful people, and more difficult still to find the patience for it.

-Modern art is not art-

Debating what is or isn't art is largely useless, because what does or does not constitute art is largely up to one's personal preferences. Wikipedia (the best source of information) says that "Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author's imaginative or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power." Maybe making a chair out of junk does not exactly express the author's imaginative or technical skill, but such objects may still be appreciated for some hidden symbolism. I don't necessarily like most of what comes out these days as art, but the label 'Modern Art' is extremely diverse and it pays to have a closer look at it before classifying all modern art as similarly devoid of taste or meaning.

d) In what way it is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Consider asking yourself why the person would feel this way instead of asking them, and you will learn a valuable lesson in empathy.

Hey, did you know that your "great country" was founded by a bunch of slave owners who said that all man are created equal?

For better or for worse, that was what kick started America, one of the great powers in this day and age. There's no need to kick the dead horse on this one, because all it will do is make people annoyed at you for bringing up issues that are so far in the past that they have ceased to be relevant. If it grates on your nerves that people call their countries great despite having been founded by slaving misogynists, consider that slavery was prevalent in many early societies and that therefore almost all people living in modern times have in some way been affected by slavery in the distant, distant past.
Anyway, that's what I needed to get off my chest.

[scriver]

No, that was his little brother, Nietzschen.

[Archibald]

Pencil_Art: I know it can be difficult, but they could at least try before killing each other. Every country on the planet was built on the sweat and back of the poor. It can also be destroyed in that way. People have the power. Not the government.

As for art, it is something that requires skill, patience and knowledge to do and that sort of "artists" has none of these. Sculpting is difficult. Writing is difficult. Painting is difficult. That is why you practice and practice. There are authors who spent years making a single work and it paid so much that they passed the test of time. You are not "just another artist" if your portrait is known five hundred years later, you know? What skill is there placing few things at random and saying "you do not understand my vision" when someone says "That is just shit placed at random". Come on now. It feels insulting to all the previous generations. We have gone from people like Van Gogh and Cezanne to placing a fucking urinal upside down and calling it a "fountain".

For America: Awesome. We can go to a bit of a more recent history. Like... NASA! Yes, NASA! Did you know that Explorer 1 and Apollo program were created with the help of a Nazi scientist (the same guy who created rockets that the Germans used to bombard GB)? Then there are countless experiments they tried on their own citizens (see operation Sea Spray, Big Buzz and Willowbrook), the atomic bombs... the list goes on.

[IcyTea31]

Was it Nietzsche or some other person that did that little thing about how we all live and die without meaning, but so long as there was a single instance of joy in that existence it was all justified?

That's called existentialism. Many philosophers wrote on it, Nietzshe being one of the first, along with such figures as Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky. Their work was later continued by people like Sartre and Camus. They all had different ideas on just why life is meaningless and how you can give it meaning, but the basic idea is the same.

For America: Awesome. We can go to a bit of a more recent history. Like... NASA! Yes, NASA! Did you know that Explorer 1 and Apollo program were created with the help of a Nazi scientist (the same guy who created rockets that the Germans used to bombard GB)? Then there are countless experiments they tried on their own citizens (see operation Sea Spray, Big Buzz and Willowbrook), the atomic bombs... the list goes on.

Funny thing there, the Nazis lost most of their scientific capacity when they replaced most of their best scientists with unqualified party members for various reasons such as teaching "Jewish science", whatever that is supposed to mean. Said scientists fled to countries like the UK and the US and brought their expertise with them. This is pretty much the reason why Germany is no longer a huge scientific powerhouse despite having had so many great minds before the World Wars.

[Trekkin]

Funny thing there, the Nazis lost most of their scientific capacity when they replaced most of their best scientists with unqualified party members for various reasons such as teaching "Jewish science", whatever that is supposed to mean. Said scientists fled to countries like the UK and the US and brought their expertise with them. This is pretty much the reason why Germany is no longer a huge scientific powerhouse despite having had so many great minds before the World Wars.

That wasn't the case with von Braun, though. He didn't flee the Nazis; he was brought over after WWII as part of Operation Paperclip, having previously been in charge of the V-2 program.

Quite why we're supposed to be ashamed of turning his talents toward the (mostly) peaceful exploration of space, I don't know.

[Archibald]

Quite why we're supposed to be ashamed of turning his talents toward the (mostly) peaceful exploration of space, I don't know.

Peaceful? Please. It was a dick-measuring contest.

[Trekkin]

Quite why we're supposed to be ashamed of turning his talents toward the (mostly) peaceful exploration of space, I don't know.

Peaceful? Please. It was a dick-measuring contest.

"Dick-measuring contests" aren't wars, and this one also gathered a lot of useful scientific data and only got people killed accidentally. I fail to see how that's worse than bombing Britain.

Besides, 100% of the countries who have ever succeeded in manned Moon exploration did so as part of just such a "dick-measuring contest." When we have a more effective way to fund space exploration, I'll be glad of it, but this one worked and continues to work.

[martinuzz]

Better than anyone else at the time. The American Revolution predates the French Revolution, which is about how long it took for the concept to arrive in Europe. Really, the current system of goverment in most of the Western World pretty much started there. With a forerunner in the Roman Republic, which, granted influenced a lot the early US system. But it was certainly the first of the new batch of Republics.

You are forgetting the Netherlands. A lot of the inspiration for the US declaration of independence, it's Constitution, and state organisation came from the contemporary Dutch Republic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Republic

[Reelya]

- Ah yes, nothing says "liberty, equality, fraternity" like killing your own people and sending them to the guillotine.

The only reason this is remembered at all was because it was one of the rare times in history when it was nobles getting the chop instead of commoners. Just think about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_France

Prior to 1791, under the "Ancien Régime", there existed a variety of means of capital punishment in France, depending on the crime and the status of the condemned person.

    Hanging was the most common punishment.
    Decapitation by sword was reserved for nobles.
    Burning for heretics and arsonists. The convict was occasionally discreetly strangled.
    Breaking wheel for brigands and murderers. The convict could be strangled before having his limbs broken or after, depending on the atrocity of his crime.
    Death by boiling for counterfeiters.
    Dismemberment for high treason, parricides, regicides.

Think about this. Before the revolution you could be dismembered while alive, boiled to death, cracked to death on a huge wheel, burned alive, sometimes after being strangled, or you could be hung or decapitated. But decapitation was seen as the "elegant" way to die, and reserved for only the wealthy.

And you're going to tell me you're upset because they chopped the heads off of the guys who used to condone boiling people to death? Really? France's entire pre-revolution government consisted of Hannibal Lector wannabes. If you don't chop their heads off when you have the chance they gouge out your intestines then set you on fire before dismembering you. And I'm not really exaggerating there. The French monarchy would do that shit in a second to set an example to other would-be rebels.

The guillotine was heralded because it was clean and fast compared to how the noble class used to kill most people. But the nobles didn't want to develop clean and fast execution methods, because torture and suffering was a big part of the deterrent.

[Archibald]

"Dick-measuring contests" aren't wars, and this one also gathered a lot of useful scientific data and only got people killed accidentally. I fail to see how that's worse than bombing Britain.

True. They are not wars. But they could be potential reasons for war. I mean, there was so much tension between the two sides that it only needed one spark to turn the whole planet into a radioactive Gobi.

Reelya, nobles or commoners. I don't make distinctions when it comes to killing. No one should die with such barbaric methods. If you are going to use such methods, then don't call yourself civilized. As for revolutions, you know the Murphy rule of revolutions; whoever comes after a revolution is going to be even worse than the one before. Just take a look at Russian history. True, tsarist Russia was awful but at least it didn't send you to a gulag for accusations that had no evidence/base whatsoever. It was pretty common for a neighbor to run to the government and accuse you of being a spy for stupid reasons, only to see a car parking in front of your door and taking you who-knows-where the next day.

[Reelya]

You know, a "general rule" is that if people say something is a "general rule" but they always give the exact same example to demonstrate it, then it usually means that looking over more broad examples won't show the exact same pattern.

~~~

What about the American Revolution? Did that lead to something worse than being under the British?

Was the Mexican Revolution worse than being slaves to the Spanish crown? Mexicans don't think so.

And the guy who came after the French Revolution was Napoleon, and if you look at his civil reforms they were definitely better than the murdergangs that were the French monarchy. no more boling people alive, for a start. The nobles had a vested interest in demonizing the French Revolution, so they highlight all the bad stuff, and not details such as that homosexuality was decriminalized in the 1791 rewrite to the criminal code. This was the birth of most of the world's modern legal codes. The reason you hear about this is because it was the last nail in the coffin of feudalism, and nobles around the world were horrified by that. The foreign nobles all got together to invade France because the revolution was a threat to their power. And do you want to count how many people died in those invasions vs the number who died because of the revolution? Guess what, the anti-French armies marching around to try and destroy secular liberalism before it spread killed way more people than the French revolutionaries did.

And the Indians under Ghandi rebelled against the British, and the Indians now are definitely not worse than British oppression.

Greece fought off the Turks in the Greek Revolution and they didn't seem to have the shit hit the fan, either.

And the whole point of Vietnam War was a revolution against the dictatorship and American occupation. Yet ... afterwards was definitely better than being napalmed and raped by US and Viet soldiers. Vietnam had their revolution and now they're a peaceful nation without any major turmoil in between.

Then you have a bunch of revolutions against the communists in the 1990s. If your logic is correct, they should be worse than the communists.

~~~

So yeah, any "rule" which is always based on one or two examples probably isn't actually a "rule" at all, it's cherry-picked by people who want you to think a certain way, e.g. it's the people in power who want you to think that "whoever comes after a revolution is going to be even worse than the one before" but clearly that's not true given a scan of all the revolutions in history.

[Starver]

(I have no idea how to quote desired paragraphs so I am just gonna add letters for each, ok?)

What I do:
With the quote.../quote segment, with the cursor between segments you want to reply to, add another quote.../quote pair (click on the speech-bubble thing, twelfth icon along on the bottom row, above, between the # (code) and radioactive (spolier) buttons), then remove the / from the latter and add a / to the former. Or type it in yourself. Then edit your intervention into the centre of the /quote...quote, and trim before and after that if there's excessive bits that you aren't replying to.

Gets more complicated if you're responding in the midst of a multi-layer quote, but normally you're aiming at a point where one layer of quote exists, albeit maybe after a further embedded historical layer of quote.

Also, unless you copy and paste from the start-of-post quote= part (or add your own quote=stuff), you don't get attribution info, but it makes sense that while you're ducking in and out of the same quotable text that the attribution is implicitly applied as the last actual explicit applied attribution, and only when appending another quote from somewhere else should an attribution element indicate a change of 'ownership' of the quote.  Some people fully quote each subelement, though, and that's fine enough if consistently applied throughout the post. (At that level of quote - obviously, once quote nesting happens, you have to accept as much literal quoting of other people's stylistic standards because that's what they said, give or take any intelligent trimming of no-longer-replied-to points.)


Easier to do than describe. Use the Preview button to check you haven't totally ballsed it up because of a mis-tag, before posting, and it should come out at least roughly how you'd want it to!

[Archibald]

(I have no idea how to quote desired paragraphs so I am just gonna add letters for each, ok?)

What I do:
With the quote.../quote segment, with the cursor between segments you want to reply to, add another quote.../quote pair (click on the speech-bubble thing, twelfth icon along on the bottom row, above, between the # (code) and radioactive (spolier) buttons), then remove the / from the latter and add a / to the former. Or type it in yourself. Then edit your intervention into the centre of the /quote...quote, and trim before and after that if there's excessive bits that you aren't replying to.

Gets more complicated if you're responding in the midst of a multi-layer quote, but normally you're aiming at a point where one layer of quote exists, albeit maybe after a further embedded historical layer of quote.

Also, unless you copy and paste from the start-of-post quote= part (or add your own quote=stuff), you don't get attribution info, but it makes sense that while you're ducking in and out of the same quotable text that the attribution is implicitly applied as the last actual explicit applied attribution, and only when appending another quote from somewhere else should an attribution element indicate a change of 'ownership' of the quote.  Some people fully quote each subelement, though, and that's fine enough if consistently applied throughout the post. (At that level of quote - obviously, once quote nesting happens, you have to accept as much literal quoting of other people's stylistic standards because that's what they said, give or take any intelligent trimming of no-longer-replied-to points.)


Easier to do than describe. Use the Preview button to check you haven't totally ballsed it up because of a mis-tag, before posting, and it should come out at least roughly how you'd want it to!

Thank you. It will take time to adapt as this is my first community I have ever been part of (online).

Now to the revollutions:

a) American: Alright. They got freedom. Why did they choose to expand to the west? Was it gold? Of course it was. Even if it meant spilling blood.

b) Mexican: turns out that the revolution was not so great for them after all. Just look what they got after it. Dictators, rebellions, poverty, civil wars, some more rebellions, bandits and all kinds of scum. The situation was so bad that those who lived at the US-Mexican borders had to steal cows from Americans just to have few pesos.

c)If we are going by that logic, I can argue that Stalin helped Russia by building education, raising employment and industrialization yet he blew it by sending millions to their deaths. It still won't stop anyone from condemning him as a cruel dictator that he was. Same with France. They just passed from one dictator to another. Doesn't help the fact that Napoleon was all "go republic" before deciding to become king in 1804. thus adding more irony than it was ever needed.

d) Of course they are not. The problem is, they are not good either. There is still massive poverty and crime. Not to mention their caste system.

e) for the Greek and Vietnam revolutions I am not going to argue because that is not in my field of knowledge. I simply don't know enough to talk about it.

[Reelya]

Seriously if you're blaming India's revolution for their caste system that's patently absurd and not even worth discussing. The caste system goes back 1000's of years. And look at any graph of GDP growth. India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Your argument was that revolutions make things worse than before, now you're doing what is called shifting the goalposts by making the point "well the Indian revolution didn't magically fix every problem". It didn't need to fix everything for your argument to be 100% wrong. Because you claimed that revolutions always made things worse. A single example of things not getting worse disproves your original argument, and you can't just weasel out of that by retroactive changing your argument: you're now requiring revolutions to magically make everything 100% better.

And the point of the Mexican Revolution is that it destroyed the dictatorship and lead to the Republic. Sure there was 10 years of civil war to overthrow the dictatorship, but that was the revolution. The point is that afterwards the outcome was a constitutional republic which lead to the modern Mexican democratic state. Which is frankly better than being in the dictatorship. 10 years of fighting is worth gaining permanent democracy. The outcome of the revolution was a better system of governance. BTW: You'll probably point out the crime cartels in Mexico now. but what is their actual business? It's transporting drugs from other nations further south, to the USA. The only reason those drugs go through Mexico is because Mexico is in between the drug growing nations and the USA. In other words, 99% of the crime problem in Mexico is purely an accident of their geographic proximity to America. It's nothing to do with Mexican society and everything to do with fucked up American druggies with too much money to spend.

As for your "well stalin educated people too" comparison to Napoleon. That's really absurd. Napoleon created the code of laws that most of European modern democratic republics are based on. Read up on actual Napoleon. The French revolution didn't just not make things much worse it led to almost all of what we consider modern European nation states. How can you compare the event that lead to the birth of the modern nation-state to the rise of Stalin.

Also you said "made things worse". Now you're saying that Napoleon is no good because he became a king. Well ... duh. But they already had kings. So for your theory to be true he'd have to be a worse king. But Napoleon was a better king on basically every measure. So your theory isn't valid. Napoleon got rid of the pre-revolution tortures and bizarre executions, and enacted civil courts of laws with due process. He also brought in the metric system. He was just better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon#Reforms

The ideas that underpin our modern world–meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on–were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.

How can you compare this legacy to Stalin of all people? Napoleon is half the reason we don't all live in feudal shithole monarchies. With no "French Revolution" you get no "Napoleon" and without Napoleon, you don't get all those other things he did which are still in use today, such as secular governance and the global spread of Enlightenment ideals.

[Archibald]

Seriously if you're blaming India's revolution for their caste system that's patently absurd and not even worth discussing. The caste system goes back 1000's of years. And look at any graph of GDP growth. India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Your argument was that revolutions make things worse than before, now you're doing what is called shifting the goalposts by making the point "well the Indian revolution didn't magically fix every problem". It didn't need to fix everything for your argument to be 100% wrong. Because you claimed that revolutions always made things worse. A single example of things not getting worse disproves your original argument, and you can't just weasel out of that by retroactive changing your argument: you're now requiring revolutions to magically make everything 100% better.

And the point of the Mexican Revolution is that it destroyed the dictatorship and lead to the Republic. Sure there was 10 years of civil war to overthrow the dictatorship, but that was the revolution. The point is that afterwards the outcome was a constitutional republic which lead to the modern Mexican democratic state. Which is frankly better than being in the dictatorship. 10 years of fighting is worth gaining permanent democracy. The outcome of the revolution was a better system of governance. BTW: You'll probably point out the crime cartels in Mexico now. but what is their actual business? It's transporting drugs from other nations further south, to the USA. The only reason those drugs go through Mexico is because Mexico is in between the drug growing nations and the USA. In other words, 99% of the crime problem in Mexico is purely an accident of their geographic proximity to America. It's nothing to do with Mexican society and everything to do with fucked up American druggies with too much money to spend.

As for your "well stalin educated people too" comparison to Napoleon. That's really absurd. Napoleon created the code of laws that most of European modern democratic republics are based on. Read up on actual Napoleon. The French revolution didn't just not make things much worse it led to almost all of what we consider modern European nation states. How can you compare the event that lead to the birth of the modern nation-state to the rise of Stalin.

Also you said "made things worse". Now you're saying that Napoleon is no good because he became a king. Well ... duh. But they already had kings. So for your theory to be true he'd have to be a worse king. But But Napoleon was a better king on basically every measure. So your theory isn't valid. Napoleon got rid of the pre-revolution tortures and bizarre executions, and enacted civil courts of laws with due process. He also brought in the metric system. He was just better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon#Reforms

The ideas that underpin our modern world–meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on–were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.

How can you compare this legacy to Stalin of all people? Napoleon is half the reason we don't all live in feudal shithole monarchies. With no "French Revolution" you get no "Napoleon" and without Napoleon, you don't get all those other things he did which are still in use today, such as secular governance and the global spread of Enlightenment ideals.

I am not blaming India for their caste system. I am saying that if they went through all the trouble to make for themselves a better place to live, then why also not making a discussion about it? Well, a revolution is supposed to make something better. If not changing things for the better of everyone, then why call it a revolution?

Yay! We have a republic! Never mind the fact that God-knows how many died and how everything is such a fucking mess that it can as well be compared to a wasteland, filled with bandits that would slit your throat as soon as they got the chance.

What is the point of doing something good if you are a dictator? Didn't he, supposedly, fought for the "freedom^TM" and "republic" and things like that? To list a few of his qualities: incompetent (see Russia), nepotism, institutionalized pluder of artistic works throughout his sphere of influence,  the list goes on.