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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (313876)	12/20/2024 8:47:55 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360702

You're not suggesting here that reality has to be a physical thing are you? Maybe, sort of. I haven't been thinking about this for very long. It usually takes me a while to organize and test and clarify my thoughts on this or that. This new paradigm is, well, new. Maybe there are two tiers of reality, hard and soft. Hard reality would be physical or physical-ish such as facts. Soft reality would be those notions that have sufficient history and consensus that we take them as givens.* But they do vary from culture to culture and can be changed in cultural evolution or revolution. I'd rather that soft reality be called something else to differentiate it from hard reality but that's as far as I have gotten. What I believe is that reality can change with the use of propaganda. That would be soft reality--it's real enough at the moment but subject to change via propaganda among other things. I sure don't see the culture of Germany as being so evil - skewed - just that the propaganda prevented them from seeing the reality of what was happening in their neighborhood. I have a friend who has been reading a lot lately about that bit of history and he mentioned the other day he had learned that the Germans mostly knew what was going on and liked it (as in CJ's "the cruelty is the point.") I will have to probe him more on that as part of this little exercise of mine. As to "what was happening in their neighborhood," the fact of the events that happened are definitely hard reality. *Part of what got me thinking about this is my frequent usage of the word, default, which I have adapted from it's dictionary definition . The context of my use has been as an anchor to our soft reality, the establishment culture, which is vulnerable at the moment and may just end up superseded by something else via propaganda and other influences. So much for what once seemed to be reality!

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (313876)	12/20/2024 9:13:27 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 360702

You are right, German culture was not that skewed. But the German population felt betrayed. The economy was in shambles and that democracy thing was pretty new. The oligarchs were unhappy, the Weimar Republic was just not as responsive to their wants as they would have liked. So there was a lot of pressures that pushed the Nazis forward. Even then, they never held a majority, a plurality was the best they could squeak out. But, that was all it took. Other than the devastated economy and what was felt as a brutal betrayal in a lost war, there are some parallels, though.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (313876)	12/21/2024 10:31:13 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360702

Reality doesn't change, just our perception of it. IMO, The travesty of WWII was a combination of two things: one was their militaristic culture, but even more important was the human species lack of intellect at the time. E.g. compare today to 1930. Look at how Europe is now with NATO and the EU which has prevented any wars for 75 years and in fact European countries don't even worry about their countries being invaded anymore and everyone feels secure. This is ALL a matter of the human species increase in intellect and awareness. As I have posted before in the last 100 years or so, public education and our complex world has changed humans from thinking in concrete terms to being able to engage in "higher order" abstract thinking. This enabled us to form organizations like NATO, the EU, and democracy and civil rights for that matter. < What I believe is that reality can change with the use of propaganda. The camps of Germany in that awful era were indeed a physical thing of course. But the reality that they became what they did was that the propaganda machine prevented people to see. I don't see that as culture based. I sure don't see the culture of Germany as being so evil - skewed - just that the propaganda prevented them from seeing the reality of what was happening in their neighborhood. That false world - was reality for them.