Jochen -Sorry for the misattribution of your origin story... it does make a bit of difference I suspect. I think you once shared an anecdote about watching (participating in) the wall coming down physically? Mary had a piece of it from a brother-in-law stationed in W Germany. She kicks herself for letting go of it... worst case she should have broken it in half if she wanted to share it. I could say the same for my bit of Trinitite I gave up. And then there is the tale of the "homeopathic dose of Shackleton Scotch" at Ginny's which I won't recount one more time here!
Auspicious that Vonnegut was a POW who survived (?because he was in the basement of the prison?) the Dresden Fire Bombings.
I do think we (Americans and in similar different ways the whole Anglophone world at the time) were in fact heroes, even though we did a lot of damage along the way and our "American Exceptionalism" and the "Marshall Plan" were well disguised hubris that is now biting us (and everyone else) in the ass? It is the very thing that drives our MAGA faction that is also our huge failing... and the folks with their "red hats on too tight" can't see it through the military parades and the flags (with Trump's face overlayed) waving in our faces. They are destroying the very thing that made them proud (and arrogant) in the first place, and they (therefore WE) are taking everyone else down with us. Or maybe not, but definitely in a mini-collapse phase of the punctuated equilibrium model of civilization!
When we were in Europe a few years ago, I met two people who gave me an alternative picture that was somewhat new to me. One was Polish and longed for "the good ole days" when things were so much simpler... I don't know what her circumstances had been, but I'm guessing they were "comfortable" by some measure and there should be nothing to sneeze at for being comfortable and not wanting to be presented with so many hopes and fears as our "neo-liberal capitalist democracy" brings with it. The other's father (now deceased) had survived the occupation of NL by the Nazis and then the Liberation by the Allies... he apparently never forgave the Allies for various atrocities they might have committed in the name of "liberation"? Two tiny counterpoints, but useful to me in getting over my "American Exceptionalism".
And yes to our (illusion of) panoptic or plenoptic "knowledge". It raises the numerator (factoids/knowledge) without moving the denominator equally (context/wisdom). I have some (possibly misplaced) hope that ML/AI can be used to help us shift that ratio... I don't think the LLMs have scanned any more information than the search engines ever did, they just contextualized it more-better/differently?
On 6/29/25 1:09 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
I was born in West Germany when the country was deeply divided in East and West. British, French and American forces had occupied the Western part, Russian/Soviet forces the Eastern part. My home town was part of the British zone. I remember British barracks, British forces on the streets, and British radio stations (British Forces Broadcasting Service, BFBS). At that time Putin was a small, insignificant KGB officer in Dresden in the Eastern part - the city where Victor Klemperer lived and suffered earlier.Americans were seen in the Western part as heroes. They were the ones who had defended England and freed France from the Nazis, rescued West-Berlin by the Berlin Airlift, and stopped the communists. In the cinemas Americans were the heroes too: first in American Western movies, like "The Tin Star" (Henry Fonda), "High Noon" (Gary Cooper), etc., later in action movies like Tom Cruise's Top Gun or Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones.After the Soviet Union collapsed everybody thought America and liberal democracy had won. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History". As we see now maybe it is not that simple. Communism has drawbacks - mainly that nobody has an incentive to work because no one owns anything - but capitalism has a dark side too: it unleashes evil corporations and tends to destroy nature.There is evil on multiple scales and in multiple dimensions. Corporations and their CEOs can be evil, politicians and presidents too, churches can be evil (think of "Roman Inquisition") and political parties in totalitarian systems can be supremely evil. Even if we look at nature where animals eat each other alive we must wonder if Vasily Grossman was right in his book "Life and Fate", where he asks whether life itself is evil.Yes, we live in interesting times. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than all generations before us, and yet it does not seem to make us wiser or act better.-J. -------- Original message -------- From: steve smith <[email protected]> Date: 6/28/25 11:51 PM (GMT+01:00) To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News TD;DR (Too Downer Don't Read)I am reading Shirer's Berlin Diary <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Diary> as Mary reads Navalny's autobiography <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(book)> (aloud to me) while our daily news rolls by this season (year? decade?) is pretty disturbing, but also comforting in a disturbing way. We read (Mary out loud to me) Victor Klemperer's Journals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer> (nod to Jochen's recent reference) a few years ago.<PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining> The *dis*comfiting part is really obvious I would say... watching, through first person accounts of how an otherwise functioning, and in some cases vibrant culture can slip into a self-destructive spiral, usually with a strong opening game of abusing some *other* group of scapegoats (non-White, non-Christian, non-MAGA) on the way down. Maybe invading your neighbors (Canada, Greenland, Panama?) Navalny's reports are most salient to some of the conversations here, notably glen's references to holding stocks as a strategy to keep tabs on our /evil corporate overlords/ and even (potentally) attend stockholder meetings or demand extra documentation, etc. It appears Navalny made this into a fine art in his early days of rising to attention and influence. *I* reduced all of my "blood stocks" to 1 share about the time of the election, some significantly before. My dirtiest financial secret was riding Elno's coat-tails some ways up, but did begin to distance myself well before he went full-MAGA before the election. And best I can tell, as Chomsky indicated about "socially responsible investing", they are *all* blood stocks. Some more than others. Palantir, Anduril, United Health, Purdue anyone? In Berlin Diary, I am just at the point where Paris has been occupied and the extreme contrasts THAT yielded. The French government (as many may know) withdrew and declared Paris an "Open City" meaning they would not attempt to defend it as they had other cities and villages in the path of the Nazi Wermacht. I was raised (anecdotes and history books) to believe that this represented some kind of moral failure of the entire French People (live to fight another day!). Shirer, an American, having lived/worked in Paris was very attached, and was "sent" into Paris (from Berlin) because all other foreign media had *fled* in the face of possible invasion (in spite of the Open City) status. His reports of the police and fire remaining (mostly) intact (albeit disarmed) directing traffic (mostly Wermacht vehicles) while hundreds of thousands of evacuees were suffering (unto dying) on the roads leading away was stunning. But the destruction of Paris itself (and the millions who did not flee) would not have served anything either? I also just spent 90 mins on a video chat with my Ukrainian colleagues (from Kiev) who have been unavailable since the invasion began. We avoided direct discussion of their "troubles" in lieu of strictly technical discussions of their developments. They did "let slip" that the bulk of their progress halted 4 years ago and they were just now trying to marshall those results into something marketable (e.g. triangular LED panels designed for constructing dome-sections at a scale from 9m to 90m (diameter)... knowing that they are doing this under the constant threat of kinetic attacks from Russia and some of their (previous) descriptions of how hard they fought as young professionals (in their 30s) against the systemic corruption of (post) Soviet Ukraine gives me a little more perspective. As for the daily news: I recommend the apocryphal Twain quote: “I never read the newspapers until at least two weeks after they're published — that way I can be sure the lies have been corrected.” and Tom Hanks' movie News of the World <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_%28film%29> for some perspective? Bottom line is "how good we have it" juxtaposed starkly with "this is how it all slides into oblivion", juxtaposed with "this too shall pass". Jochen (born in Cold-War E. Germany?) and Pieter (came of age through Apartheid), et al can probably speak more personally to these contrasts? </PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining> Interesting times? .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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