Comments for Arthurdobrin's Weblog

Comment on Should children sleep with parents? by toronto psychotherapist

toronto psychotherapist — Wed, 08 May 2013 03:37:07 +0000

Well it depends on your kid if he or she is still afraid in his or her bed but you must consider also the age.

Comment on Should data gathering by pharmacies be banned? by Are You Violating HIPPA Simply By Using Your Current IT Company? | Arizona Tech Works

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:50:44 +0000

[...] Should data gathering by pharmacies be banned? (arthurdobrin.wordpress.com) [...]

Comment on The role of luck in success by Lucky Rich Life – Part 2 (18/108) Luck and Success! | Your Lucky Rich Life

Lucky Rich Life – Part 2 (18/108) Luck and Success! | Your Lucky Rich Life — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:38:19 +0000

[...] The role of luck in success | Arthurdobrin’s Weblog [...]

Comment on Willed ignorance by excuses | from broken stones

excuses | from broken stones — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:38:57 +0000

[...] I try and post every 2 weeks; but I have found myself writing on other blogs instead of my own. Here, I have been thinking out loud with Christopher Page and another commenter, Lindsay, on the role and ability of the German people to stop the Holocaust. I also had some more thoughts to share with Arthur Dobrin. [...]

Comment on Willed ignorance by Rose Nooteboom

Rose Nooteboom — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:19:12 +0000

I have resisted writing what I have been thinking about your PoV not wanting to be rude, and then I realised it is kinda rude to have accused your host of cowardice, without asking him what life must have been like for him. That you didn’t is telling. You seemed satisfied to stick to a view that judges the German people harshly without wishing to hear from them themselves. ” They have their own conscience to deal with.” Not much condemnation in that statement is there….
The thing is those Germans are the ones maintaining those Historical sites, and allowing people like you to walk through them and draw their half-baked conclusions, as apparent lessons for the present. The reality is, your conclusions, your insights will only ever remain the insights of a tourist.

Comment on Willed ignorance by Rose Nooteboom

Rose Nooteboom — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 01:30:14 +0000

” But not to hold them to a standard of decency (not turn away when innocent people are murdered) is to hold them to a lesser standard. And to do that is to patronize them all.”

I am curious about this. you are assuming that there was immediate knowledge and ability to do something. Just the fact alone that there were only 500, 000 Germans identified as Jewish in 1933, half of which immigrated from the country, means that a country of 60 million had to be aware of 1/2 percent of it’s population disappearing. 3 million non Jewish Germans were but into concentration camps, the majority of the inmates at Dachau were not Jewish in fact. Who exactly were the German people supposed to be more aware of being persecuted and murdered: their Jewish neighbours or ‘themselves’ for standing up to a regime that was hell bent on control?

Comment on Willed ignorance by arthurdobrin

arthurdobrin — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:18:08 +0000

My reason for bringing up the past is not to condemn the ordinary German. They have their own conscience to deal with. My point is that everyone of us are must as capable of being indifferent, unaware or afraid.
Many psychological studies support your point, for example, the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Asch study of perception, and the Milgram study of obedience to authority. When I point out to my students that those in the experiments were just ordinary students like themselves, they have a hard time thinking that the odds are that they would act like subjects.
So I’m not finger-pointing. I am saying look at what people are capable of doing and be aware of the traps that everyone of us is capable of falling into.

Comment on Willed ignorance by arthurdobrin

arthurdobrin — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:13:18 +0000

I agree that it is likely that most of us would act like most of the Germans acted. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It takes extraordinary people to do the right thing under extraordinary circumstances. It would be better for everyone if we raised all our children to act like the rescuers during the Holocaust, not like the by-standers.
I am not holding the German people to any higher standard than anyone else. But not to hold them to a standard of decency (not turn away when innocent people are murdered) is to hold them to a lesser standard. And to do that is to patronize them all.

Comment on Willed ignorance by Rose Nooteboom

Rose Nooteboom — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:27:39 +0000

If it may be indulged, another excerpt that says it better than I seem able to today:

“We want to be nice people, we cannot imagine ourselves participating in events or attitudes that would result in something so despicable as a Nazi society. Yet Hans Fallada describes people just like you and me: people worried about being nice, about being fed, about being loved, about being safe, who have been stripped of their dignity and trust, in the name of trusting and dignifying a system that claims to want to ennoble them. “Trust Me, there is a glorious future for the German people if you would only stop thinking, and do what we say”. I can’t help feeling that the antidote to the possibility of our society falling into the same trap is for ordinary people to come to terms with their not so nice sides.
I wonder if that is why there is so much condemnation of ordinary Germans who lived in that time. Are we mad at them because they remind us of ourselves and our vulnerability? We would like to think that our best is better than their normal. But when are we ever at our best?”
http://frombrokenstones.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/fallada/

Comment on Willed ignorance by Rose Nooteboom

Rose Nooteboom — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:17:56 +0000

This is not how we ACTUALLY are with our teens though. Our priority for them is safety. Again you are projecting post war post 60s standards onto wartime children and present day children.
It is our insistence to hold ordinary German people to standards that we do not keep ourselves which concerns me. It leaves us without an accurate reference point to be able to judge our own present circumstances and vulnerabilities in our own society.