Thursday, July 13, 2006

The Nazis' unrequited love for Nietzsche

Sometimes one observes something so wrong, so openly, so glaringly and so blatantly wrong, it almost becomes difficult to breath. All of one's arguments and reasons and frustrations collide, just a fraction of a second after one's mouth is opened, and fall embarrassingly short of explaining the depth of the fallacy and instead one just sort of pants, open mouthed and blubbers, "That's so wrong."
I don't mean wrong in a moral sense. Not wrong as in, "murder is wrong." or "wasting electricity is wrong" or "wearing that skirt with those shoes is wrong." It's not even wrong in the sense that 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong. I mean wrong on the sort of incalculable scale that 2 + 2 = 4,523,917.2333333333 is wrong.
I mean the kind of wrong that makes you laugh at first because logical, deductive reasoning dictates that it must be a joke and then makes you laugh again with a touch of insanity at the mere notion that it isn't. I'm talking about a type of wrong that first dwarfs then rises above, renders useless and effectively decommissions the very word, "wrong" in it's normal sense because it is THAT wrong.
What I'm trying to describe is a perversely off-target untruthfulness; a profane inaccuracy.
Am I getting through?
This "wrong", if one can even call it that, hurts - and someone published it on the Internet.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591

To use their own devices, I would summarize it as a conservative excrement. It is a frightfully subjective list of the "top ten most harmful books" published in the last 200 years. There's much I can write about it but it speaks for itslelf. Nietszche's "Beyond Good and Evil" is right up there with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" which is second only to Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels' "The Communist Manifesto." In the summary for "Beyond Good and Evil" the author writes, "The Nazis loved Nietszche."

(sigh)

Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" received an honorable mention - for being harmful.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Cliché

“Then you’re just re-inventing the wheel,” he said. “I hate that saying,” I interrupted, “it’s so cliché. All you’re saying is that you can’t think of a better way of communicating an idea other than to copy someone else’s simile.” He definitely didn’t expect me to hijack his technical conversation nor the personal attack and so sat back, a little stunned, while he visibly processed what I had said. I pressed, “It’s the same as when people say, ‘think outside the box.’
“Thinking outside the box and re-inventing the wheel are totally different things, Grae.”
His condescension boiled my blood a little. “Maybe he doesn’t know what a simile is,” I thought to myself. I sighed loudly and rolled my eyes. It seemed to take him forever to finish that sentence.
“They mean different things but are both clichés and they are both annoying.” It was then that everyone who had been listening to what I said, including myself, realized my whole point in this digression was to be cruel. But maybe no one actually was listening; we were drunk.
“It gets the point across. What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s totally thoughtless. Why not say it in your own words?”
“Like what? It’s a perfectly encapsulated idea in,” he paused to silently count to three, “three words.”
“Like anything original.”
“You want me to come up with a new way of saying something just for the sake of originality? Then you’re just re-inventing the wheel.”