On Jan 18, 2015, at 12:30 AM, Michel Bloch wrote: Having been for several years one of the few “French moles” on your forum, I feel obliged to write for the first time. Hi Nick!
1. In Full Metal Jacket, Joker being asked why he wears the peace-sign on his marine-corps uniform, answers “Sir, this shows the ambiguity of human nature”. In real life, when he was a LtCol in the Air Force and hospital administrator setting up the Cam Ranh Bay hospital (think China Beach TV series), my father-in-law wore a piece symbol on a leather necklace under his fatigue blouse. I inherited that piece and it has two sides - one that looks like an ordinary peace symbol and, when you flipped it over, the side that looks like a B-52 bomber. Ambiguity again. The hospital commander in military hospitals is always a doctor who relegates non-medical tasks to the administrator. My father-in-law worked with a flight surgeon who had been a fighter pilot in the Korean conflict and WWII. This gentleman would fly with aircraft on bombing runs in the morning and perform surgery on wounded in the afternoon. Yet more ambiguity. Human nature includes the ability to compartmentalize different thoughts and feelings to specific environments/domains/situations. What we do and feel is based on our experiences and the similarity of the current situation to past situations more than on rational comparisons and analysis. Dan Ariely gets into this in _Predictably_Irrational_ and _The_Upside_of_Irrationality_. My grandmother was irrational but I could predict that irrationality. She was Dutch and German, born on the border early in the last century. Her parents ran a basement restaurant catering to commercial sailors in Hamburg in the '20s. The early Nazi party local set up shop in the building up above, which caused much of the restaurant's business to avoid the location. Soon the business was so bad that their banker, a Jew, foreclosed on them. My grandmother expressed hatred for both Nazis and Jews as groups. Yet she married two different Nazis and saved her Jewish employer millions in taxes. I could then predict that when she worked for an Hispanic builder in Texas she would express hatred for "Mexicans" yet save him hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. Again, the ambiguity of relationships dating back to an early experience - conventional bigotry with respect to the group but faithful work for the individual. I postulate that Dieudonné reacted to a robbery/murder/terrorism injustice in earlier life rather than the exact situation more in line with his anti-Semitism. Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084
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