Part two! We’re back… from ten minutes ago! We discuss what’s wrong with the calendar, alternate realities, and then we get very angry. Don’t worry, it’s not like that. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
I am catching up on late episodes while doing DIY. Are you happy now Tony? –Anonymous
Do you think anger has its uses? –Jas
LINKS:
We watched two videos in between.
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Exceptionalism/Nationalism–quite a lot of the time I think extreme Nationalism comes out of being in an oppressed or threatened position. I certainly associate Japan’s Nationalism in WWII as developing out of the threat they felt from the West beginning with Perry. And Germany’s nationalism had a lot to do with the dire straits they were left in after WWI. The difference with exceptionalism is that it seems to come from a position of strength which then says that every use of strength is morally justified by the exceptionalism. That is exceptionalism doesn’t mean being just the strongest or most powerful, it means being morally unquestionable. We are strong and powerful because we deserve to be because we are righteous. So we get nuclear weapons because we are righteous. This, btw, is the dark side of why Superman is the all American hero, I think. Invincible because morally pure, and vice versa.
I realized an interesting contrast to American exceptionalism as a super-power when I was reading a history about the Middle-East in WWI which referred to the Sykes-Picot agreement. Basically an agreement between Britain and France to carve up the Middle-East after the war was over. So it is at the end of Britain’s period as the super-power, but still, it was pretty noticeable how many of the Brits who knew about it (including TE Lawrence) objected to Sykes-Picot on moral grounds. They didn’t think that everything Britain did was automatically “good.”
There was an episode of Steven Universe recently in which one of the kids could not stop thinking of something she had done to hurt someone, feeling guilty even though she had apologized. One of the adult characters sings a song to her about the fact that thoughts are just thoughts, not reality, and about learning to let go of them.
I had to look this up.
Apparently in this example, the “everyone remembers it, but it never happened” part was that everyone thinks he said “Earf” instead of “Earth”. Because everyone is racist.