Thread: Strange and Unusual Facts

After the 9/11 attacks, the Maasai tribe of Kenya gave 14 of their most important cattle to America as aid.

The wonders of communism, yet we have two posters here who will defend it to the end .. while happily living nowhere near China nor Russia.

Originally Posted by panama hat

The wonders of communism, yet we have two posters here who will defend it to the end .. while happily living nowhere near China nor Russia.

As is their right to do so.

I am sure their have been plenty of political deaths in countries that are not Communist.

I believe it is not necessarily the political doctrine but just human nature.
There are people who like to have power and do atrocious stuff to maintain that power.

Originally Posted by ootai

As is their right to do so.

Did I say it isn't their 'right' to do so? It merely points to their hypocrisy . . . which is their 'right' as well.

Originally Posted by ootai

I am sure their have been plenty of political deaths in countries that are not Communist.

Since you're playing the Klondyke/OhOh 'whataboutism' card . . . yes, there have been but the discussion/issue is Communism - in case you missed this:

Originally Posted by tomcat

After the death of her husband, she was arrested and executed in 1938, as part of the systematic Stalinist destruction of Mongolian culture and any reminders of the old regime.
A vast number of the population were killed, including almost all the shamans and Buddhist lamas of Mongolia. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 35,000 "enemies of the revolution" were executed, which represented 3 to 5 percent of Mongolia's total population at the time.

Also, if you really want to go further down that line, why not compare the roughly 100 million Deaths in China and the Soviet Union alone to deaths under other political systems.

Originally Posted by ootai

I believe it is not necessarily the political doctrine but just human nature.

Except it isn't. Human nature doesn't provide for the systemic murder under a democratic system. Certain political doctrine enable mass murderers like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Zhu Enlai etc... to create the structure for mass murders.

Originally Posted by ootai

There are people who like to have power and do atrocious stuff to maintain that power.

Here you contradict yourself - certain political doctrine allow for this, and democracy isn't one.

Originally Posted by panama hat

Human nature doesn't provide for the systemic murder under a democratic system

There's about a half million Iraqis that might disagree with that statement. If they could.

^ Define democracy . . . not totalitarianism

^
Are you saying America, and it's allies that partook in those murders, aren't democratic?

Originally Posted by pickel

Are you saying America, and it's allies that partook in those murders, aren't democratic?

The discussion was about killing one's own people.

Originally Posted by panama hat

The discussion was about killing one's own people.

...indeed, as the thread title suggests...

Doha, Qatar

^ Looks to be doing a tad better than that 'The World Islands' project in Dubai.

Originally Posted by ootai (Strange and Unusual Facts)
I am sure their have been plenty of political deaths in countries that are not Communist.

Originally Posted by panama hat

The wonders of communism

They only need to learn how to shoot their president (and few others) in live TV - and keeping the investigation for 60 years in a safe in order not to jeopardize their national security...


Originally Posted by ootai (Strange and Unusual Facts)
There are people who like to have power and do atrocious stuff to maintain that power.

Originally Posted by panama hat

Here you contradict yourself - certain political doctrine allow for this, and democracy isn't one.

...quite true, the "democracy" is just in the name of one party...

...^FOK...

Originally Posted by tomcat

...^FOK...

Yup

Originally Posted by Klondyke

I am sure

. . . that you're a fuckwit.


Try a different thread

In 1996, after 2pac was cremated, his ashes were mixed with marijuana & smoked by members of his hip-hop group, The Outlawz.

Snoop Dogg employs a 'professional blunt roller' who he pays $50,000 a year to roll blunts for him.

Red-eyed crocodile skinks belong in Game of Thrones

Originally Posted by tomcat

Snoop Dogg employs a 'professional blunt roller' who he pays $50,000 a year to roll blunts for him.

Does he employ ET to hold them for him?

A psychology experiment: “If you think you know about humanity, you don’t know humanity”

In 1974, Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic conducted a rather strange and risky experiment to examine how people think and act, given immunity.

Abramovic would stand still for six hours straight while the people who came to see her were invited to do whatever they wanted to her using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table.

She stood in the middle of the room with a board containing these words:

Instructions.
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.

Performance
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am)

What happened in the next six hours progressed to horrifying.

It began tamely. Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her intimately.

In the third hour, all her clothes were cut from her with razor blades. In the fourth hour, the same blades began to explore her skin. Various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the experiment that she would not have resisted rape or murder.



Abramovic’s own account of what the people did to her in the last two hours was even more heart-breaking. She recalled, “I felt raped, they cut off the clothes, they stuck me with thorns of rose in the stomach, aimed the gun to my head, another came apart.”

When the six hours were over, Abramovic walked among the people. They couldn’t look her in the face. She observed that people didn’t want any sort of confrontation with her. They didn’t want to be held accountable or judged for what they did, even though they were invited to do so and with immunity. It seemed as if they wanted to forget how they enjoyed hurting her.

This work shows how fast a person can turn violent under favourable circumstances, in the absence of criticism or punishment. It also shows that if one provides the stage, most ‘normal’ people could become truly violent, with her conclusion that the inherent nature of people is evil.

When people behave in a righteous way, it is mainly due to:
- fear of social condemnation
- fear of legal punishment

When these two fears are absent, people can do even the most abhorrent things in life.

PS: Some readers have opined that it is wrong to conclude from this experiment that the inherent nature of Man is evil.

Originally Posted by jabir

Some readers have opined that it is wrong to conclude from this experiment that the inherent nature of Man is evil.

...agree: Man is banal...

Lemurs chew on toxic millipedes and then rub their saliva and millipedes into their fur to protect themselves from any parasite. As a side effect, it also gets them really high.

Someone escaping the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, 1991

Originally Posted by jabir

A psychology experiment: “If you think you know about humanity, you don’t know humanity”

In 1974, Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic conducted a rather strange and risky experiment to examine how people think and act, given immunity.

Abramovic would stand still for six hours straight while the people who came to see her were invited to do whatever they wanted to her using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table.

She stood in the middle of the room with a board containing these words:

Instructions.
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.

Performance
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am)

What happened in the next six hours progressed to horrifying.

It began tamely. Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her intimately.

In the third hour, all her clothes were cut from her with razor blades. In the fourth hour, the same blades began to explore her skin. Various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the experiment that she would not have resisted rape or murder.



Abramovic’s own account of what the people did to her in the last two hours was even more heart-breaking. She recalled, “I felt raped, they cut off the clothes, they stuck me with thorns of rose in the stomach, aimed the gun to my head, another came apart.”

When the six hours were over, Abramovic walked among the people. They couldn’t look her in the face. She observed that people didn’t want any sort of confrontation with her. They didn’t want to be held accountable or judged for what they did, even though they were invited to do so and with immunity. It seemed as if they wanted to forget how they enjoyed hurting her.

This work shows how fast a person can turn violent under favourable circumstances, in the absence of criticism or punishment. It also shows that if one provides the stage, most ‘normal’ people could become truly violent, with her conclusion that the inherent nature of people is evil.

When people behave in a righteous way, it is mainly due to:
- fear of social condemnation
- fear of legal punishment

When these two fears are absent, people can do even the most abhorrent things in life.

PS: Some readers have opined that it is wrong to conclude from this experiment that the inherent nature of Man is evil.

No one thought to give her a hug, or an overcoat?

Despite publishing vast quantities of literature only three known books from the Maya civilization exist due to the Spanish ordering their books and libraries to be destroyed for being, "lies of the devil."