"Some would say that John Gibson is gin-soaked Christmas-ruining child molester."

Luckily Ben is on our side.

You're right, ogged, w-lfs-n must be exterminated.

For the safety of humanity.

You know how when w-lfs-n loses an argument, he'll never admit it, instead just coming back with a more outlandish claim, facts be damned?

The Northwest is Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the South begins in central Iowa. Nobody is telling me any different than that. I win.

I thought 'banalatiy of evil' was about people just going about their job which happened to be driving the rail road cars to treblenkas. is there some sort of definatvie definition.?

More seriously, though, this sort of only thinly disguised hate has been getting more mainstream recently. These are some trends that have just got to turn around.

I've deleted all of my "or then" statements. Bob may fill you in on the more dire imaginings.

Hannah Arendt wrote a book worth reading (I believe the term originates with her), but that's a fair summary in 6, I think.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is the book, originally her coverage of his trial for the New Yorker, in 1964.

The "banality of evil" was the fact that even Eichmann was sort of a boring, rule-following bureaucrat who didn't especially like his job.

It doesn't actually include sadistic guards or freelance killers, who were old-fashioned non-banal evil. One of the peculiarities of the holocaust (according to Arendt, as I understand) was that it was efficiently organized and supervise.

Genghis Khan's army was also bureaucratically efficient.

And small-minded. One detail she noticed was that E was still pissed about not being promoted to Colonel, in the SS, while on trial for his life, many years later, in Israel.

We want villains to have stature, to be like fifty feet tall and fall through measureless depths with their minions, after waging dubious battle.

In fact, Nazis were often depicted as Nihilist intellectuals to try to give them that stature, to be worth hating. The SS Colonel—I should have been that guy!, says E—played by Paul Schofield in The Train that same year is a good example.

10, 11 - And that Eichmann couldn't speak about his crimes without lapsing into cliche or... middle-manager-speak (Arendt phrases this more neatly), and that he eventually decided that killing Jews was okay despite his initial misgivings because all the other more important civil servants supported it. The first chapter (which I think was entirely composed of her New Yorker writing) covers this -- the comparisons between various nations' response to the Holocaust is later and just as interesting, but less relevant to the term.

I hear that Eichmann was actually an enthusiastic and dedicated organizer-of-genocide, that he wanted to do what he did and wasn't just doing it because it was his job.

I'm fairly certain I should be offended.

I read Eichmann in Jerusaleum and what I remember most clearly is the implications of the kidnapping for concepts of extra-national law and the Nuremberg Consensus. I have also read much of the Totalitarianism book, bits and pieces of other stuff, and dip into my copy of The Human Condition every once in a while.

There seems something really difficult about Arendt for me, like maybe she says 20th century humans are radically, fundamentally different from all other eras, something that generates resistance.

Anyway, I trust no simple explanation of "banality of evil".

Also, you know, I have in the past, on more than one occasion, admitted that I've been wrong. You just think I'm wrong more often than I actually am.

14: Why's that?

Never mind.

"THE BANALITY OF EVIL was a simple concept. It meant the following: A person who committed the most evil deeds could do so without having a wicked heart or a criminal temperament. To Arendt, this created a conceptual problem" ...Mark Grieff, 2004

Can one do evil without evil intent, without owning one's action? If I in one room, randomly pick names from the phone book, pass them thru a slot to someone who does I know not what with them, but actually kills them, am I evil for never worrying about my part in the chain? Are the people who make bullets wicked? Or those that vote Republican? Eichmann didn't kill anybody.

Just because w-lfs-n supports genocide doesn't mean he's a bad person.

Reading military history makes ideas of the uniqueness of the Holocaust disappear, if you mean "uniquely evil" by that. The massacre of captured civilians was routine during much of civilized history, in cases when selling them into slavery was impractical.

The murder of the internal enemy (German Jews) was a little unusual I suppose, but most of the Jews killed were Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian foreigners, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of non-Jewish Poles were killed too.

20: Right. One can look in vain for a Carthaginian restaurant in LA, for example.

To me "banality of evil" means people just doing their assigned jobs without ever thinking of any of the wider implications. It's easy to see in micro scale in the corporate world, at the DMV, everywhere.

Hey. Someone's horking my handle.

We'll see a lot more of the lies and slanders from these guys if the Democrats continue to hold Congress and/or take the White House, I imagine. What I'm curious about is at what point Fox's political strategy starts to conflict with the need to run a profitable business. At what point does the average apolitical TV viewer start identifying Fox News as the station that's always wrong and turn the channel? Ever? (Isn't Fox already in 3rd place behind MSNBC and CNN?) Sure, there's a market for slandering liberals, but how big and how profitable is that market, really?

I believe Fox is still the highest-rated cable news network, but its lead has slipped markedly over the last year, particularly among the 25-50 demographic. But old people love O'Reilly! (Sadly, one of the reasons CNN is performing better seems to be Lou Dobbs.)

FoxNews has slipped, but they are still way, way, way in front of CNN and MSNBC. From Wikipedia: "In July 2006, Fox had the 55 top rated episode telecasts on cable news. The first non-Fox show to appear on the list was number 56, Larry King Live."

Do you think there is something about cable news as a category that gives this bias? I mean structurally, by the nature of the audience?

but to energetically and deliberately plant seeds of nastiness and hate.

For a moment I hesitated about whether I thought this was true or not; I mean it's a pretty strange MO to get out of bed to spread nastiness and hate, but then I realized that this follows from an opinion of mine, which is that there's a group of people, which includes Gibson, who's politicaly commentary is useless because they're perspective is too warped by their own hate. Returning to your statement, you make it sound like their acting in bad faith, which is what caused me trouble. The good faith version of your statement is this: these guys want to spread their own perspective, but their view is so hatefilled, it amounts to deliberately spreading "nastiness and hate".

The point is this: If we can assume that w-lfs-n acts in bad faith when he pulls off his stunts, then we can move on to reasons why he is more evil than Josh Gibson or the Hutus.

"Josh Gibsons and the Hutus" would be a great punk band name.

evil than Josh Gibson or the Hutus

Racist.

I think the only way to fight this stuff is to make up your own bullshit - Gibson is a child molestor, sources say. Truth/falsity isn't a category these guys think in.

It is funny how the fact that CNN has a reporter in Indonesia is spun as a knock of some sort. Wait, they're actually out there trying to figure something out?

Hilzoy put up another except at ObWi:

GIBSON: Playing volleyball, right. They didn't see them in any terrorist training camps?

HOST: No.

IIRC that CNN reporter was Australian. And everyone knows we all go to madrasahs.

24: Without knowing anything about it, is it loony to suggest that the Nielsen samples might be biased towards a certain ideology?

I'd doubt it purposefully, but I suppose they might be demographically flawed in some way that had an ideological result.

32: yeah, that's what I meant