Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Well well well

We are still on season 3, but someone posted the first of season 6 of Homicide Hunter on youtube and I managed to watch it before the copyright cops removed it.

But I ran across this on Instapundit:



WELL, WELL, WELL: Now 30 BENGHAZI-related emails have been recovered from Hillary’s server....
that Well Well Well is, of course, what the Lt. says when he finds interesting evidence of who did the heinous crime...

and we know that Justice will be done.

So has Kenda's phrase become part of the nation's vocabulary?

 Entomology says no: The meme started in May 2009 from this photo, posted on Demotivational website in August 2008



Or maybe it started in Shakespeare, or is the American variant of Hello Hello in the UK.

While researching the meme, I came across this photo:


Ah, sad. That is Gene Wilder, who passed away last week.

No, I didn't see Willie Wonka and the Chocolate factory, so don't know if he actually says that in the film.

But I am a great fan of Wilder and Mel Brooks, both of whom would be thrown out by the PC snowflakes if they tried to make Blazing Saddles nowadays.

But my favorite is his work in the Young Frankenstein, which my mother and I watched overseas... and we were the only ones in the theater who laughed at the "knockers" joke.

But here is a factoid about the movie, from (of all people) Spengler at PJM:

There is a running joke where horses neigh in horror every time someone says the name of Frau Blucher.

I always assumed the name came from the hero of Waterloo and was chosen because in English is resembles the world Bleech or belch.

But that is not true. He writes:

"Frau Blücher" was the married name of the renegade Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the erstwhile mistress of the philosopher and sometime Nazi Party member Martin Heidegger.....
Aside from her love of the Nazi philosopher, Arendt is despised for some of the things she wrote in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil".

Many interpret that "banality" implies the evil was banal, i.e. no big thing.

But if you read what she wrote carefully, she is saying that ordinary thoughtless people can do terrible things, and remain a person that an ordinary person (or a learned psychiatrist) would call "normal".

Which reminds one of the quote by Camus in the Plague:

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened.
People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague
The Plague, of course, is not just the story of those who passively accept the plague but the story of those who decided to fight it; it is an analogy of France during the Nazi occupation, where civilians alas too often looked the other way.

Ah, but good people would oppose such things, right?

This argument is not as easy as it sounds, since you would have been living in a society which for years has been morphing into a Culture of death, sowing confusion into what is right and what is wrong.

I interpreted her book as implying that the entire continent of Europe suffered from what we today would call the Stockholm syndrome, where people in captivity agree with their kidnappers, and that some end up helping them.

So when Arendt points out how Jewish authorities cooperated with the Nazis in keeping the peace, and even in choosing who should be "resettled" in the East, many American Jews interpreted this as her implying the Jews were partly to blame instead of seeing this as merely reporting an unpleasant fact.

I see it however as a decision to try to limit evil when the choice is between bad and worse. Remember, aside from rumors, most people did not "know" what was going on in the death camps, so it was easier to "believe" they would merely be resettled. And what was the alternative when people are starving to death anyway, and when revolt would mean certain death, not just for you but for your family? which do you chose?

Alas, if it was only this one book, maybe one could question the wrath against Arendt... but add to this Arendt's love of a Nazi philosopher and her later writings against Israel you can see why many American Jews, most of whom can name relatives who died in the Holocaust, consider her a pariah.


Of course, 70 years later, the modern world doesn't believe in evil: at least the elites seem to be clueless.

Being nice is the only rule, and if you dare to judge they quote Jesus saying "judge not". Even Pope Francis, is busy pushing "mercy" to the sinners: apparently the only ones he has condemned are "rigid" types who insist a better phrase would be "Father forgive them for they do not know what they do". That lets us judge the deed as evil while granting the one who does it the possibility of mercy.

So I agree when the Pope feels condemning Trump's tirades against illegal immigration is okay, but I wonder: Why does he remain silent about the holocaust of the unborn that is promoted and even applauded by Democrats at their convention?

And in the near future, if John Paul II is correct and the trends in Canada and the Netherlands become accepted, we will see promotion of killing the elderly and the handicapped as a good thing: something that was actually predicted by Arendt:

There is the well-known fact that Hitler began his mass murders by granting "mercy deaths" to the "incurably ill," and that he intended to wind up his extermination program by doing away with "genetically damaged" Germans (heart and lung patients).
But quite aside from that, it is apparent that this sort of killing can be directed against any given group, that is, that the principle of selection is dependent only upon circumstantial factors.
It is quite conceivable that in the automated economy of a not-too-distant future men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence quotient is below a certain level.

well, well, well...

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Eichmann in Jerusalem is on line so judge for yourself.

postscript starts at page 130.

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