Hacker News Reader

Your biggest criticism is that it paints ISIS as bad? If ISIS can't be called bad, I don't know what can be.

ISIS is really, really bad. They behead and crucify people for non-crimes like blasphemy. They slaughter innocent non-Sunnis by the hundreds. They kidnap aid workers, then ransom or behead them. If you want to go searching, you can find videos made by ISIS that will absolutely sicken you. I won't get into their treatment of women and homosexuals, but it's barbaric.

I'm curious: Did you not know ISIS did these things? Or do you think we know so little about morality that we can't even judge these acts as bad?

"There is no room in such a worldview for nuance."

Not everything needs room nuance. It seems to be a theme is some places, HN being one, where there is a need to not assign morality as fact. But at the extremes, we are allowed to collectively decide something is good or bad as an absolute, and agree that anyone that disagrees is disturbed in some way.

Slavery was wrong, all throughout history.

Hitler was evil.

I know the arguments for allowing space for nuance or the dangers of assigning morality absolutely. Normally I agree. But sometimes, something is so close to absolute that we can discard any margin of error, because it doesn't change the conclusion.

We should almost always be careful to challenge or leave room for challenging our preconceived notions. But sometimes, just sometimes, there really isn't a need.

Edit: at least that's my opinion.

>Hitler was evil.

Evil is a religious idea. Hitler was a man, not some devil.

Those kind of after-the-fact statements are just cargo-cult that tend to obscure real historical understanding. Even if one means it well ("if we all repugned by such evil, we will avoid it") it doesn't work that way in actual life, for it tends to stick to some people and events and ignore others.

One has to understand "evil" (historically) not just loath it, in order to avoid it. And he has to place it in it's context and consider whether his side was just as "evil".

Fact 1: Before there was an official war Hitler was quite beloved in the West (including the USA), both as an ally against the communists and as an example of a strong "man of the state" against the "enemy within" (leftists, unions, liberals, etc). And they did know how he got in power and what his beliefs were.

Fact 2: Hitler wasn't some lone evil guy who brainwashed a nation. Similar ideas about the historical role of Germany, of the German people, etc, including anti-semitism were held by many German people even before Hitler became known, including prominent philosophers like Heidegger and Carl Smitt, artists and so on.

Fact 3: Anti-semitism was ripe in the US too, as was tons of other kinds of racism (not just against blacks. KKK was also against Hispanic, balkan, etc immigrants). Hitler himself wrote that he took the idea of the concentration camps from the US confinement of Native Americans ( http://www.issuesandalibis.org/campsa.html -- random reference to the first link I found, there are tons of works on those camps you can look up).

Fact 4: Focusing just on some historical events (the Holocaust) misses the bigger picture, of western powers holding BILLION of people as slaves in their colonies, including millions of deaths, lynchings, official executions, maimings and the like. The US didn't have colonies at the time, but they had millions of blacks they brought to serve them.

Fact 5: People who consider Hitler evil (and why not!), leave the people who dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities -- on men, women, chidren, babies, elderly etc -- scot free. They even ignore that the Japanese were already destitute and surrendering, and revert to their BS patriotically edited "history" to justify something which was merely a live test for the weapon and a "message" for the post-war times. Just an example -- one can find equally horrible acts by the English, Belgian, French, etc, including the Japanese themselves in China and Korea.

Leopold II of Belgium killed more people than Hitler. Somehow few people seem to know this, maybe because it was ok to kill black people back then?

>Leopold II of Belgium killed more people than Hitler. Somehow few people seem to know this, maybe because it was ok to kill black people back then?

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was alluding too. And tons of other colonial crimes besides.

For example, they very day that the WWII ended, the French killed 20.000+ Algerians who demanded their freedom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9tif_and_Guelma_massacre ).

Because we don't rank evilness based on the casualties, we rank it by how close it is to us. The holocaust impacted modern western civilization (there still are people today who lived the thing), so it is regarded as the most horrible thing ever in the west.

History tends to spend less effort condemning the actions of those who don't start off with dramatic televised speeches about the people they want to eliminate and sign off with a World War involving almost every country worldwide.

Still, at the time, the actions of Leopold's men in the Congo were considered so evil that Leopold was forced to relinquish control of the Congo by his own government, and you won't find anyone willing to argue with a straight face[1] that the Congo Free State represented anything other than the worst excesses of colonialism.... even at the time[2]. If you'd released an info graphic depicting black people with their hands severed and white people counting cash 100 years ago, educated viewers would have got the reference. And probably written to complain that the administration of the Congo Free State was a far more complex and nuanced issue than simply "good guys" and "bad guys".

[1]Mark Twain did so with heavy irony. [2]Leopold was even condemned by the British, whose monarch was a close relative and whose government was a Belgian ally with imperial possessions of their own covering half the globe, and an army fresh from conducting policies of mass-internment of civilians in the Boer War

These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler, and not in any way of the events and people surrounding him. His blame doesn't absolve anyone of any of their responsibilities for the Holocaust or any other incident in history. It is but a singular example to make my point.

Evil is not a purely religious construct. For it to be, so then would morality - but it's not. Do you believe that, in general, murder and rape are wrong? If you do, you have defined a moral compass - even if you're staunchly atheist. It's true that religion often comes with a pre-defined morality that is expected to be adopted, but as humans, we define morality and what that means to us all the time outside the context of religion.

>These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler

He was a human -- even likable when you get to know him they say (he sure made millions of Germans like him). What was "evil", if you want, was his ideals and more especially them put in practice (the war, the holocaust, the S.S. etc).

To say he was evil implies he was something different than the next person. But ordinary people, the kind that would have been a friendly librarian or baker, when caught up in some historical dynamics can end up doing monstrous acts (e.g. in Nazi Germany, in Cambodia, in Nigeria, etc). Hanna Arendt wrote compellingly about how the most "evil" man in the camps was in fact a banal bureucrat.

I also dislike how we selectively call some people evil. How many call Truman, the guy who gave the OK to bomb to oblivion two civilian towns, evil? Or maybe if Hitler had only killed 200.000 civilians in the course of the war it would have been OK?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

Edit: I was looking at the pictures rather than watching the video. The video does make mention of the invasion of Iraq and does a fair treatment of the subject matter.

---

Your points bringing up an absolute morality opens up another can of worms I'm not acquainted with well enough to discuss. If you haven't yet, I would direct you to the one about Iraq and ask you to tell me what you think. I went in with the expectation that there would be some mention of Bush's invasion of Iraq, but I got none. By its very omission and going straight to ISIS tells me that the creator of such a medium is (deliberately or not) expressing a political message.

Is it really necessary to use the medium to present value judgments? What I implied in my original post was that better media exist out there for more nuanced topics such as politics or history. Not everything in human knowledge needs to be expressed through this medium, which does it with the finesse of a sledgehammer.

I'd love to look at the one about Iraq if it weren't impossible to find behind the mystery meat navigation.

(Actually, I wouldn't, because the whole site is decadent, cutesy-wootsy infographical tripe.)

If you're still curious, here it is: http://kurzgesagt.org/project/iraq-explained/

"We should almost always be careful to challenge or leave room for challenging our preconceived notions. But sometimes, just sometimes, there really isn't a need."

How do you distinguish the cases where there is a need from the cases where there is no need without challenging your preconceived notions?

Fair point. I was trying to compress paragraphs to sentences - perhaps "no need to rehash" or "already done" - the point being that certain moral judgements always stand up to scrutiny, or have no logical alternative.

Yes! Saying "Wow, ISIS are the ultimate evil on earth" won't solve anything. Those are fellow humans, and they're doing all those killings and executions for a reason. (no one just wakes up and says "I'm going to do a genocide because it is really evil and I'm a devil")

The only time the US's role is mentionned in that video is at the beginning: "In 2003 the US invaded Iraq because of its alleged connections to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction", quickly followed by Sadam the evil dictator and the whole "shia/sunni thing" (even if ISIS isn't only fighting the shiaa, but anyone that doesn't join them, including sunnis). No mention to the fact that those "alleged relations" were just an excuse. They even say that the US was trying to end terrorism by invading Iraq.