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  2. Feb 2024
    1. Unit commanders subsequentlydistributed instructions on “The Art of Writing a Letter,” urgingsoldiers to write “manly, hard and clear letters.” Many impressionswere “best locked deep in the heart because they concern only sol-diers at the front . . . Anyone who complains and bellyaches is notrue soldier.
    2. In World War IIas in World War I, soldiers classified friends and foes in terms of rel-ative cleanliness, but in this conflict they were much more apt tomake sweeping judgments about the population and to rank peopleaccording to rigid biological hierarchies. Even the ordinary infan-tryman adopted a racialized point of view, so that “the Russians”the Germans had fought in 1914–1918 were transformed into anundifferentiated peril, “the Russian,” regarded as “dull,” “dumb,”“stupid,” or “depraved” and “barely humanlike.”
    3. In the letters, it is clear that he does not just influencethem as a propagandist would, but, on closer examination, servesas their mouthpiece.”
    4. recisely becauseGermans had begun to think in terms of Feindbilder, or “visions ofthe enemy,” Goebbels regarded exhibitions such as these a “fantas-tic success.”

      feindbilder - an idea of an enemy, a created image

    5. Setapart from the familiar social contexts of family, work, and school,the closed camp was designed to break down identifications withsocial milieus and to promote Entbürgerlichung (purging bourgeoiselements) and Verkameradshaftung (comradeship) as part of theprocess of Volkwerdung, “the making of the people,” as the pecu-liar idiom of National Socialism put it.

      entbürgerlichung - purging bourgeois elements

      verkameradshaftung - comradeship

      volkwerdung - the making of the people

    6. Well-appointed homes were ransacked and formerly prominent cit-izens tormented because Jews were regarded as profiteers whosewealth and social standing mocked the probity of the Volksgemein-schaft; children and the elderly were terrorized because they were“the Jew” whose very existence threatened Germany’s moral, polit-ical, and economic revival
    7. half-Jews and quarter-Jews carried both good and bad genes and therefore could not beregarded as completely Jewish. Gross and others argued that mixedJews would eventually be absorbed into the Aryan race if they wereprohibited from marrying each other.
    8. Jewish men who were imagined to prey on Germanwomen: the gender of the Jewish peril was male, while Aryan vul-nerability was female
    9. The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.
    10. Public humiliations such as these depended on bystanders willing totake part in the spectacle. They accelerated the division of neigh-borhoods into “us” and “them.
    11. It was along this circuitry,in which Germans imagined themselves as the victims of Jews andother “back-stabbers,” that “self-love” could turn into lethal “other-hate.”
    12. Anti-semitism did not arrive on the scene as something completely new,but it acquired much greater symbolic value when people associ-ated it with being German.
    13. The idea of normality had become racialized, so that entitlement tolife and prosperity was limited to healthy Aryans, while newly iden-tified ethnic aliens such as Jews and Gypsies, who before 1933had been ordinary German citizens, and newly identified biologicalaliens such as genetically unfit individuals and so-called “asocials”were pushed outside the people’s community and threatened withisolation, incarceration, and death.
    14. “Hei hatte sagt, wer non ganz un gar nichwolle, vor dän in Deutschland keine Raum”—“he said there is noroom in Germany for people who simply refuse to take part.”
    15. Hermann Aue “(very Left),” thoughtthe Nazis would be gone within a year, so he was inclined to stickwith the Social Democrats. But several Communists who had re-portedly joined a local SA group suspected that the Nazis would bearound for some time.
    16. May 1933 phy-sicians in Bremen called for comprehensive legislation to enablethe state to sterilize genetically unfit people
    17. In September 1939, after the invasion of Po-land, unter uns became legally enforced Aryan space when a decreeprohibited Jews from owning or listening to radios;
    18. Thecalamity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” re-drawn in the postwar settlement at Versailles, and the overwhelm-ing chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experi-ences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible.During the Weimar years, the people’s community denoted the be-leaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the politicalunity necessary for national renewal.
    19. In this case it was the Nuremberg Laws, which distinguished Ger-man citizens from Jewish noncitizens: “hunting down innocentpeople is expanded a thousand times,” he raged; “hate is sown amillionfold.”
    20. “the police have theresponsibility to safeguard the organic unity of the German people,its vital energies, and its facilities from destruction and disintegra-tion.” This definition gave the police extremely wide latitude. Any-thing that did not fit the normative standards of the people’s com-munity or could be construed as an agent of social dissolutiontheoretically fell under the purview of the police.
    21. However, crime could be reduced by removing the dan-gerous body, either by isolating “asocials” in work camps or bysterilizing genetically “unworthy” individuals. In the Nazi legal sys-tem, genetics replaced milieu as the point of origin of crime
    22. The consciousness of generation, and the assumption thatold needed to be replaced with new, undoubtedly opened youngminds to the tenets of racial hygiene, which were repeatedly parsedin workshops and lectures.
    23. Boththe Hitler Youth and the Reich Labor Service aimed to mix bour-geois and working-class youths in order to pull down social barriersto the formation of national race consciousness.
    24. vast network of Gemeinschaftslager or com-munity camps was established across Germany; at one point or an-other, most Germans passed through them. Alongside concentra-tion camps and killing camps, the training camps were fundamentalparts of the Nazi racial project.

      gemeinschaftslager - community / training camps to educate germans on racial ideology

    25. The journalistSebastian Haffner noted that people in his circle in Berlin suddenlyfelt authorized to express an opinion on the “Jewish question,”speaking fluently about quotas on Jews, percentages of Jews, anddegrees of Jewish influence
    26. a domestic-sounding vocabulary; a rhetoric of “cleaning,” “sweeping clean,”“housecleaning” strengthened the tendency to see politics in thedrastic terms of friends and foes
    27. Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.
    28. In place of the quarrels of party, the contests of inter-est, and the divisions of class, which they believed compromised theability of the nation to act, the Nazis proposed to build a unified ra-cial community guided by modern science. Such an endeavor wouldprovide Germany with the “unity of action” necessary to surviveand prosper in the dangerous conditions of the twentieth century
    29. . It drew up a long list of internaland external dangers that imperiled the nation. At the same time, itrested on extraordinary confidence in the ability of racial policy totransform social life.
    30. In other words, biology appeared to provideGermany with highly useful technologies of renovation. The Na-zis regarded racism as a scientifically grounded, self-consciouslymodern form of political organization.
    31. Race defined the new realities of the ThirdReich for both beneficiaries and victims—it influenced how youconsulted a doctor, whom you talked to, and where you shopped.
    32. As parents, educators, volunteers, and soldiers, millions of Ger-mans played new parts in cultivating Aryan identities and segregat-ing out unworthy lives. They did not always do so willingly, andthey certainly did not anticipate the final outcomes of total war andmass murder.
    33. most Germans had little reason tothink of the Third Reich as particularly sinister. “It was possible tolive in Germany throughout the whole period of the dictatorship,”
    34. all the humor about Jewishness in Germany, the fear of stum-bling upon Jewish grandmothers and the relief when only a “Jewishgreat-grandmother,” “who cannot hurt you anymore,” turned up,did not dispel the suspicion that Jews were different.

      the mandatory nature of the racial passport and the nuremberg laws about jewish blood in mixed lineage emphasized that being aryan was a good thing and allowed people with a small amount of jewish ancestry to develop antisemitic feelings towards jewish people

    35. the sheerforce of the imagery and the busy schedules of national acclamationmade dissent politically risky; but even more: dissent also appearedto be futile.
    36. He believed Germans feltthat “it’s just us now” when they lived without Jews. “Just us” alsoexpressed the closed circle in which Germans could see and experi-ence “ourselves” as “we are” and as “we have become.”
    37. With the cheerful slices of German life they broadcastand the national audience they pulled together, radio plays recrea-ted the people’s community. It produced the effect of being unteruns, “just us.”

      unter uns - only us, (us referring to ethnic germans, the feeling of inclusion in a special group)

    38. Nazis wanted the Germanpeople to comprehend events on the order of grand history by hear-ing broadcasts on the radio, seeing the reassembly of marchers onfilm, and taking photographs of their own part in the making of thepeople’s community
    39. Germans even went to warwith preprinted diaries that left space for snapshots. All this was anacknowledgment of the desire to be part of and to share the Ger-man history that was being made.
    40. With banners, flags, marches, and “Heil Hitler!” the Nazis pro-duced a distinctive public choreography and accompanying soundtrack that seemed to affirm the unanimity of the people’s commu-nity.
    41. but even then nothing made the “com-munity of fate” more compelling than “the conviction that therewill no longer be future for Germany after a lost war.”

      sunk-cost fallacy-- they put so much investment into this, they can't back out

    42. “Ifonly the good old days would come back again, just one more time.Why do we have to have this dreadful war, which has disrupted ourpeaceful lives, broken our happiness, and dissolved all our big andlittle hopes for a new house into nothing?”
    43. But when the German cheers wouldnot stop, “Hitler sensed a popular mood, a longing for peace andreconciliation.” This was also an indication of the general content-ment with things as they were.
    44. crowds acclaimed the reestablishment of amass conscription army, the Wehrmacht, recalling for observers the“August Days” of 1914. Again socialists conceded: “For the over-whelming majority, 16 March is the definitive end to a shamefulpast, much more so than 30 January 1933; the day marks ‘the dawnof a new age.’” All this patriotic hoopla mattered; Versailles hadleft deep wounds, and, anyway, Germans were apt to be “childishlyproud of their army.”
    45. heexplained in tears that her two sons had fallen in battle and the bal-lot had been their voice. 61The text precisely captures the way many people thought of Ger-many: as the tenacious underdog finally asserting its rights.
    46. “its touristic spectaclesencouraged its participants to see a cause-and-effect relationshipbetween their own well being and the Nazi regime’s attempts to re-make Germans into the master race.”
    47. “People looked to Nazism as a great and radical sur-gery or cleansing” and therefore saw “the movement as a sourceof rejuvenation” in public life.
    48. The dreamof the Volkswagen seemed to promise “a new, happier age” thatwould make “the German people rich and Germany beautiful,” asHitler put it. Indeed, the Volkswagen functioned as a symbol for thenewly won capacity to dream about the future: in this fundamentalsense, the Nazis appeared as “men of the future.”
    49. Mem-ories of the Third Reich corresponded in large part to the Nazis’own prewar media representation of “good times” both now and tocome.

      consider the mobilization of memory in propaganda

    50. On the eve of the war, in 1939, most Germans ex-perienced the Third Reich as a cherished period of economic andpolitical stability. These were achievements that the population wasdetermined to hold on to.
    51. Interweaving economic opportunity with the dangers thatmight prevent it, whether it was the threat of air attack, the pres-ence of “asocials,” or the power of Jews, Winter Relief and air-de-fense campaigns made the premises of the people’s community tan-gible and persuasive
    52. Moreover, the impression thatGermans were assembling behind the Nazis reinforced itself. Moreand more people adjusted to the “new direction” when they sawthat others had done so.
    53. The Day of Potsdam and May Day indi-cated that there was considerable desire among Germans to partici-pate in rituals of national renewal
    54. citizens found the constant donations of time andmoney onerous, but they gradually accepted the new practices, andthe slew of regulations, advisories, and prohibitions associated withthem, as the best way to manage collective life. And they expectedneighbors to comply.
    55. a“Machbarkeitswahn,” modernity’s heady sense of the possible thatepitomized National Socialism as it charged into the future.

      machbarkeitswahn - the possibility of achieving something / making change

    56. National Socialists assaulted the “alternative culture” of work-ing-class socialists in order to coordinate it, but they also attemptedto overcome the very idea of “alternative,” which structured the so-cial divisions typical of Germany’s neighborhoods.
    57. “Something had to be done”—these were the simple, conclusive words voiced by a friend of KarlDürkefälden’s, jobless and a new convert to Nazism. His wordswere echoed by thousands of workers in the winter and springof 1933; though a socialist, Karl himself understood—“it’s truetoo,” he added parenthetically in his diary entry.
    58. The construction of the firstconcentration camps to media fanfare in March 1933, and therapid migration of the shorthand kz, for Konzentrationslager, intoordinary speech, left the public well aware that Nazis recognizedonly friends or foes;

      konzentrationslager (kz) - concentration camps

    59. the Nazis recognized only Volkskameraden, people’s com-rades, and Volksfeinde, enemies of the people, whom they sub-jected to deliberate and refined cruelties in a “willful transgressionof norms.

      volkskameraden - people's comrades

      volksfeinde - enemies of the people

    60. The state of permanent emer-gency declared by the National Socialists helps explain the tremen-dous efforts that they and their followers made to reconstruct thecollective body and the satisfaction they took in images of unityand solidarity. It also helps explain the violent exclusions they ac-cepted as part of the rebuilding process.
    61. restricting their rep-resentation in the professions to their proportion in the population:“that is one percent.” Moreover, she explained, “Jews want to rule,not serve.” The proof: “have you ever heard of a Jewish maid or aJewish laundry woman?”
    62. “I was overcomewith a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was amatter of life and death.” Maschmann herself was drawn to the“socialist tendency” of the Nazi movement, the idea of the people’scommunity,
    63. the “August Days” of 1914, when thou-sands of Germans rallied in the streets to support the national causein time of war, revealed extraordinary emotional investment in thepromise of national unity.
  3. Dec 2023
    1. what you're referring to is the idea that people come together and through language culture and story they have narratives that then create their own realities like the 00:12:04 sociologist abely the sociologist wi Thomas said if people think people believe things to be real then they are real in their consequences
      • for: Thomas Theorem, The definition of the situation, William Isaac Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thomas, definition - Thomas Theorem, definition - definition of the situation, conflicting belief systems - Thomas theorem, learned something new - Thomas theorem

      • definition: Thomas Theorem

      • definition: definition of the situation
        • "The Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas:

      If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.[1]

      In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior.|

  4. May 2023
    1. What am I supposed to do?” The answer is believe. Believe him.

      Belief is not something you can do. Nobody can choose to believe anything. Belief is something that happens to you.

      You might choose not to voice your questions. You might choose not to look for or at alternatives to the answers you prefer. These choices might eventually lead you to actually believe something, but you did not believe because you decided to believe.

      I grew up believing in Christianity because I was a child who accepted the words of adults as truth, without even realizing I had the option to investigate their veracity.

      I never decided to stop believing. I lost my faith because I chose to study it. I was determined to substantiate the truthfulness of the faith I already had. Eventually, after many years, I realized I hadn't really believed in Christianity for quite some time. At that time, the only choice I made was whether to let others know that I no longer believed.

  5. Feb 2023
    1. belief perseverance
      • belief perseverance
      • definition
        • a cognitive bias in which people encountering evidence that runs counter to their beliefs will, instead of reevaluating what they’ve believed up until now, tend to reject the incompatible evidence
  6. Aug 2022
  7. Apr 2022
    1. Katherine Ognyanova. (2022, February 15). Americans who believe COVID vaccine misinformation tend to be more vaccine-resistant. They are also more likely to distrust the government, media, science, and medicine. That pattern is reversed with regard to trust in Fox News and Donald Trump. Https://osf.io/9ua2x/ (5/7) https://t.co/f6jTRWhmdF [Tweet]. @Ognyanova. https://twitter.com/Ognyanova/status/1493596109926768645

  8. Mar 2022
    1. As Professor Rangi Mātāmua, a Māoriastronomy scholar, explains:Look at what our ancestors did to navigate here—you don’t do that onmyths and legends, you do that on science. I think there is empiricalscience embedded within traditional Māori knowledge ... but what they didto make it meaningful and have purpose is they encompassed it withincultural narratives and spirituality and belief systems, so it wasn’t just seenas this clinical part of society that was devoid of any other connection toour world, it was included into everything. To me, that cultural elementgives our science a completely new and deep and rich layer of meaning
  9. Dec 2021
  10. Nov 2021
    1. Other work on interpreting transformer internals has focused mostly on what the attention is looking at. The logit lens focuses on what GPT "believes" after each step of processing, rather than how it updates that belief inside the step.
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  16. May 2021
    1. Braud, M., Gaboriaud, A., Ferry, T., Mardi, W. E., Silva, L. D., Lemouzy, M., Guttierrez, J., Petit, S., Szabelska, A., & IJzerman, H. (2021). COVID-19-related conspiracy beliefs and their relationship with perceived stress and pre-existing conspiracy beliefs in a Prolific Academic sample: A replication and extension of Georgiou et al. (2020). PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t62s7

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2020, November 18). @danielmabuse yes, we all make mistakes, but a responsible actor also factors the kinds of mistakes she is prone to making into decisions on what actions to take: I’m not that great with my hands, so I never contemplated being a neuro-surgeon. Not everyone should be a public voice on COVID [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1329002783094296577

  17. Apr 2021
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  21. Dec 2020
    1. ReconfigBehSci {@SciBeh} (2020) sadly squares with my own impression of social media 'debate' - as someone who works on both argumentation and belief formation across social networks, this strikes me as every bit as big a problem as the spread of conspiracy. Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1308341816333340672

  22. Nov 2020
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  26. Jul 2020
    1. He had put the case (without mentioning names) to an eminent physician; and the eminent physician had smiled, had shaken his head, and had said–nothing. On these grounds, Mr. Bruff entered his protest, and left it there.

      So to say nothing is enough proof that there is no merit to this experiment? Isn't Ezra's thoughts inspired by textbooks/an intention to mimic the scientific process?

      I feel like such ignorance towards science is relevant today *cough*,*cough* people who refuse to wear face masks *cough*,*cough*

  27. Jun 2020
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  30. Sep 2018
    1. An obvious metaphysical question to raise here is the compatibility or otherwise of religion and transhumanism. In my 1990 essay that first set forth modern transhumanism as a distinct philosophy under that name, I explained how transhumanism (like humanism) can act as a philosophy of life that fulfills some of the same functions as a religion without any appeal to a higher power, a supernatural entity, to faith, and without the other core features of religions (More 1990). The central place accorded to rationalism suggests a tension between transhumanism and religion. But are they actually incompatible? Since rationalism is an approach to acquiring knowledge and says nothing about the content of knowledge, it is possible in principle for a transhumanist to hold some religious beliefs. And some do. The content of some religious beliefs is easier to reconcile with transhumanism than the content of others. Christian transhumanists, while not completely unknown, are very rare (and I know of none who are fundamentalists, and such a combination would surely indicate deep confusion). There are more Mormon transhumanists (although some of these are cultural rather than religious Mormons), perhaps because that religion allows for humans to ascend to a higher, more godlike level, rather than sharply dividing God from man. Several transhumanists describe themselves as Buddhists (presumably of the secular, philosophical type), and there seem to be few obstacles to combining transhumanism with liberal Judaism. However, the vast majority of transhumanists do not identify with any religion. A pilot study published in 2005 found that religious attitudes were negatively correlated with acceptance of transhumanist ideas. Those with strong religious views tended to regard transhumanism as competing with their beliefs (Bainbridge 2005).

      Having a strong belief system is naturally integral for humans. Religion is by far the most common, profound form of human belief systems, so it is relevant to propose the question of transhumanism and religion being incompatible. While it is possible that the basis of each religion can contribute to an individual's probability of simultaneously believing in transhumanism, having a belief system that consists of both beliefs would presumably be rather conflicting for any individual to concurrently believe in.

  31. Apr 2018
    1. A popular view of rhetoric is that it is a straightforward model of how communication should work: A person can speak the truth simply by using words that refer to true things in the world. If she chooses not to use sentences filled with words that refer to true things in the world, then she is engaged in rhetoric. Rhetoric, in this view, is something you add on to sentences (such as meta-phor) that decorates and obscures communication. If I say, “The cat is on the mat,” I am using language correctly. However, if I say, “The elegant feline languishes mournfully on the expensive carpet, waiting impatiently for what he sees as his lazy servants to open a can of salmon,” then I have added rhetoric to the first sentence, or chosen rhetoric over clear communication.

      Popular view of rhetoric is - a model of communication. This is what most people think. Example of how rhetoric can obscure the meaning of an otherwise clear sentence.

  32. Dec 2017
    1. Projectiles, a leading branch of the Military art Military Architecture, includes Fortification, another branch of that art

      I find the emphasis on military education to be somewhat telling about the beliefs and values of the United States during this time period. Today there is no such expectation that all young men must learn about military subjects, but in from the document it seems that there is almost an expectation that most men will eventually serve in the military. It seems that the proximity in time to the revolutionary war, and the value of independence are likely contributing factors to this belief.

  33. Oct 2017
    1. Education generates habits of application, order and the love of virtue

      Virtue is something that was really important to Jefferson - especially when it came to founding the United States’ Constitution in 1787. He argued for a smaller republic and higher education in order to prevent factions within the country, so seeing this in this report does not surprise me. He strove to preserve virtue as much as possible.