It was a great movie. Thomas Crown, though, was the role he was born to play.

I know who Gramsci was. I don’t understand what you’re getting at with that quote.

It’s functionally impossible to assign whole books to middle schoolers. And don’t confuse what you learn in primary education with real study.

It’s pretty unlikely to get two more terms of a democratic presidency. Biden wasn’t VP when he won. The last VP to be elected was Bush 1. Before him, LBJ, special circumstances. Truman, also special circumstances. That takes us back nearly 100 years.

Maybe if Kamala were to step aside we could get a governor as the nominee, but that seems unlikely even though governors have better records in presidential elections. Biden didn’t run when he was VP, but I don’t remember another VP that stepped away from the ticket voluntarily.

I didn’t say school children, and I didn’t say all. I said it was necessary for anyone studying ww2. Here, that’s usually done in university.

I don’t know why Camus is so often thought of a fiction writer. He wrote some pretty serious philosophy as well. It’s like calling Plato a writer of fiction.

I’m particularly a fan of The Rebel. His Letters to a German Friend are pretty interesting too.

It’s always worth putting your eyes on the primary source yourself. History texts are not without their own agendas. You’re familiar with 1984, yes?

So you know what Hitler actually said? So you don’t fall for something like “the Germans didn’t really know what was happening”? Yes, they did. It was published, and you can cite chapter and verse.

Same reason to read anything.

I know. I was just adding extra info.

She’s not legendary, the way Achilles is. She was a real person.

You can learn names and dates of battles etc., but you won’t understand the driving forces if all you have is “Nazis are bad.”

Nazis were humans, not some kind of mythological monsters. If they could do what they did, you can too. You need to understand why they did what they did, how the ideology motivated them, or compelled them, because those same forces can work on you as well, and sometimes in ways you don’t realize.

Primo Levi survived the death camps, and wrote about his experience extensively. Despite being a prisoner, he felt complicit in the Nazi project, just through trying to survive. At one point he recalls being on a work detail, during which he discovered a water pipe that had some water in it. He drank the water, and although he saw another prisoner lusting after the water, he didn’t share, because he wanted to survive.

That other man also survived the camps and later found Levi, and asked why he wouldn’t share the water. Levi had no answer at that time, but when writing his memoir he said the structure of the camp system was such that it employed even the inmates as agents of their own extermination.

He ended up committing suicide in the 80s.

If you don’t understand the psychological and social pressures working on you - which come from everywhere, btw, not just Nazis - you can’t fight against them. You will go along to get along.

not sure if it’s more absurd

May I introduce you to my buddy Camus?

Fact is, it’s an important work for historical reasons. If you want to understand how Nazism works, and how it differs from Italian fascism, and be able to draw the lines that connect Nazis to historical German (and other nationalities) anti-Semitism, you need to read it.

If I had a copy, I wouldn’t put it on display, but it is the kind of thing I can totally see being assigned in a college course on WW2 or some similar topic.

NB: I’ve only read a few excerpts for a class similar to the one I described above.

Also, I am against book burning in any circumstance. A book is never worth more as kindling, unless you’re actually freezing and then it would be a hard choice.

I’ve seen some real ones in Ireland. It’s literally a door, with something like an elevator shaft behind it. That’s all. Pretty terrifying idea for a 16 year old.

Dan Savage pointed out in his podcast yesterday that in interwar Berlin, lgbtq-whatever-else-we-add-now people were more free than any time since probably ancient Rome before the Christian period.

It took about 3 years of Hitler in power to start shipping those people off to the camps. They still haven’t really recovered.

“Them”? The cows? Kenya knows we eat them, right?

No, the Revolution got rid of the monarchy and neutered the clergy and nobility, but it was an urban revolution of the Parisian middle class, or bourgeoisie. The situation of the peasants changed little through the revolution, and it was persistent efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose Parisian culture on the countryside. It took until WW1 to construct a coherent French nation. Weber (not that Weber) showed that in Peasants into Frenchmen in the 70s.

And Napoleon had family connections in the Italian nobility. His uncle was a cardinal. His father was a lawyer and inherited a fair chunk of change. Napoleon was hardly any sort of peasant.

It was the bourgeois that win in France, not the peasants.

Have you been to New York? How do you get by without Yiddish?

That’s surely not true for a number of reasons. The UK wasn’t a thing, and modern English wasn’t a thing. Beowulf has a fair bit of jokes in it, and that’s some 200 years earlier, in Old English, than this thing.

Hell, I’m pretty sure Plato’s Symposium starts out with a three word pun. That’s Greek and not English of course, but the idea of picking out an earliest joke is just ridiculous.