Non Civil War Books and Movies

[Matt McKeon]

OK, let's be cool.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Thomaston state prison, where Wagner and another man, Gordon, also an ax murderer, were hanged, held a couple of my relatives and some of my cousins lived in the town. The Isle of Shoals was, and is, divided between Maine and New Hampshire jurisdiction, with Smutty nose being in Maine waters. A major wrangle at the trial was over who owned what piece of land and many 17tch century documents were earnestly consulted. A friend and I sailed out there a few years ago. Stark and beautiful on a summer's day, a marine research station and conference center are on Appledore and Star Island respectively. Smutty nose has a caretaker in an 18th century house, and a private cottage. The upper end of the island, where the 3rd woman Maren, eluded Wagner is home to a colony of gulls, the nastiest, bad tempered and territorial birds on the planets. The Red House, half whittled away by souvenir hunters, burned down in 1908.

Joshua L. Chamberlain makes a cameo. As governor he criticized the law that required the governor to make the final decisions on executions, partly because it meant the executive taking over a judicial function and partly because he didn't relish the task. He signed death warrants despite his feelings, but wasn't in office when Wagner took the long drop,

 

[rittmeister]

OK, let's be cool.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Thomaston state prison, where Wagner and another man, Gordon, also an ax murderer, were hanged, held a couple of my relatives and some of my cousins lived in the town.

how many of them where hanged there?

 

[Matt McKeon]

how many of them where hanged there?

I hope you don't mean my relatives. That would be impertinent.

Anyway, Maine abolished the death penalty a century ago.

There has been some armchair detecting, trying to make other people guilty besides Wagner, starting with the sole survivor, Maren Hontvet. Robinson has an interesting discussion of why this kind of speculation is appealing to certain people.

 

[Joshism]

I'm reading Issac's Storm by Erik Larson about the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Seems appropriate for this time of year. Colorful prose and a fast read.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Hannah Arendt
Arendt was a philosopher who wrote The Origins of Totalitarism and other works. She is most famous for Eichmann in Jerusalem As I'm sure we all know, Adolf Eichmann, a high ranking functionary in the SS was discovered and kidnapped by Israeli intelligence agents, and flown to Israel, where he stood trial in Jerusalem, tried by the Israelis government, for crimes against humanity. This film is about her covering the trial for the New Yorker and the aftermath of the series of five articles and the book that followed.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Hannah Arendt
Arendt was a philosopher who wrote The Origins of Totalitarism and other works. She is most famous for Eichmann in Jerusalem As I'm sure we all know, Adolf Eichmann, a high ranking functionary in the SS was discovered and kidnapped by Israeli intelligence agents, and flown to Israel, where he stood trial in Jerusalem, tried by the Israelis government, for crimes against humanity. This film is about her covering the trial for the New Yorker and the aftermath of the series of five articles and the book that followed.

Arendt was a German Jew, who fled Germany in 1933 with her husband to France. When France fell to the Germans in 1940, Arendt and her husband Heinrich were confined to a French refugee camp called Gurs. They escaped from Gurs, and eventually made their way to the United States. A university professor in New York they socialize with a group of intellectual German Jewish emigres they call "the family." When news comes of Eichmann's capture, they debate: was Israel right in conducting an illegal action in seizing Eichmann? Was Israel the right place for such a trial, and not an international court? What didn't they just shoot Eichmann by the side of the road in Argentina, one man, a WWII veteran, asks?

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Hannah Arendt
Arendt was a philosopher who wrote The Origins of Totalitarism and other works. She is most famous for Eichmann in Jerusalem As I'm sure we all know, Adolf Eichmann, a high ranking functionary in the SS was discovered and kidnapped by Israeli intelligence agents, and flown to Israel, where he stood trial in Jerusalem, tried by the Israelis government, for crimes against humanity. This film is about her covering the trial for the New Yorker and the aftermath of the series of five articles and the book that followed.

The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt on the Normalization of Human Wickedness and Our Only Effective Antidote to It

“Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

 

[Matt McKeon]

Arendt was a German Jew, who fled Germany in 1933 with her husband to France. When France fell to the Germans in 1940, Arendt and her husband Heinrich were confined to a French refugee camp called Gurs. They escaped from Gurs, and eventually made their way to the United States. A university professor in New York they socialize with a group of intellectual German Jewish emigres they call "the family." When news comes of Eichmann's capture, they debate: was Israel right in conducting an illegal action in seizing Eichmann? Was Israel the right place for such a trial, and not an international court? What didn't they just shoot Eichmann by the side of the road in Argentina, one man, a WWII veteran, asks?

Arendt flies to Israel and observes the proceedings on closed circuit TV. The trial, which included testimony from Holocaust survivors and Eichmann being questioned about the copious records he and his fellow Nazi bureaucrats loved so much, presents his defense:
He's a nobody, a functionary, a passer along of papers, a minor cog, powerless to affect events or intervene, even if he wanted to, but he didn't want to because he was required to follow orders.
The trial was transformative for Israeli society. Before hand, holocaust survivors didn't wish to speak about their experience, and the tough settlers in Israel, having won their state by force of arms, didn't respect them for not fighting harder. With the repetition of the vicious and grotesque facts of their ordeal were clear in the trial, the image of the survivors changed, permanently.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073345/

 

[Matt McKeon]

Arendt flies to Israel and observes the proceedings on closed circuit TV. The trial, which included testimony from Holocaust survivors and Eichmann being questioned about the copious records he and his fellow Nazi bureaucrats loved so much, presents his defense:
He's a nobody, a functionary, a passer along of papers, a minor cog, powerless to affect events or intervene, even if he wanted to, but he didn't want to because he was required to follow orders.
The trial was transformative for Israeli society. Before hand, holocaust survivors didn't wish to speak about their experience, and the tough settlers in Israel, having won their state by force of arms, didn't respect them for not fighting harder. With the repetition of the vicious and grotesque facts of their ordeal were clear in the trial, the image of the survivors changed, permanently.

The insight that Arendt drew from Eichmann's performance was that he was, in fact, a nobody. He was, in Arendt's view, a mediocrity, an unthinking bureaucrat, mindlessly obeying his superiors, and too dull to understand the consequences of his actions. His evil was "banal," a phrase that has echoed and resonated every time people make evil normal.

 

[Matt McKeon]

The insight that Arendt drew from Eichmann's performance was that he was, in fact, a nobody. He was, in Arendt's view, a mediocrity, an unthinking bureaucrat, mindlessly obeying his superiors, and too dull to understand the consequences of his actions. His evil was "banal," a phrase that has echoed and resonated every time people make evil normal.

In my view, Arendt's insight lacks an understanding of Eichmann true nature. He was a vehement anti-Semite who worked tirelessly to maximize the death toll in the Holocaust, a dedicated "desk murderer" who well understood his work meant mass murder and took pride in that work. His bland facade was just that, a facade, a performance. I think Arendt's argument, that evil, once it is normalized by people, in an unthinkable or passive way, is enabled and grows, is true, and not just in Nazi Germany.

 

[Matt McKeon]

In my view, Arendt's insight lacks an understanding of Eichmann true nature. He was a vehement anti-Semite who worked tirelessly to maximize the death toll in the Holocaust, a dedicated "desk murderer" who well understood his work meant mass murder and took pride in that work. His bland facade was just that, a facade, a performance. I think Arendt's argument, that evil, once it is normalized in an unthinkable or passive way, is enabled and grows, is true, and not just in Nazi Germany.

Arendt's arrogance and abrasive nature added to the controversy around the five articles and book. She seemed to criticize some of the Jews, especially the Judenrat, or Jewish leaders of various ghettos and communities for somehow not doing more. It sparked furious denunciation at the time, and I think, with some justice. The Judenrat were in an impossible position.

Anyway, a very thought provoking movie, even it is mostly middle aged people speaking German and smoking.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

"I was only following orders", is a popular refrain.

 

[Joshism]

"I was only following orders", is a popular refrain.

Obedience is imperative. The exception is if obedience would result in you doing something unethical. In that case, disobedience becomes the imperative.

 

[Andersonh1]

If fiction is included in the topic, I've been reading "Star Wars: Thrawn" by Timothy Zahn. My oldest daughter and I are both fans of the Star Wars prequels and the animated Clone Wars and Rebels series, so she picked up this book about the imperial officer Thrawn after he was the big bad in seasons 3 and 4 of Rebels. It was one of those "dad, you'll enjoy this, you should read it", so I have. My impression of the character is that he's Sherlock Holmes in space, an alien officer in the xenophobic Imperial Navy, who rises through the ranks by observing details and putting together deductions that most others miss and by adopting unorthodox methods to solve problems. It's an entertaining book and I've enjoyed it, and there's the bonus of being invited to share in something that interests my teenager, so that alone makes it worthwhile.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Biggest Little Farm
This charming documentary follows a young couple who adopted a rescue dog, and then are evicted from their LA apartment because he won't stop barking. They buy an abandoned apricot farm with the goal of reviving the land using a mix of organic and traditional methods. The farm is dead, dead, dead, the ground turned concrete under the dead fruit trees, so hard you can't sink a spade into the earth.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Biggest Little Farm
This charming documentary follows a young couple who adopted a rescue dog, and then are evicted from their LA apartment because he won't stop barking. They buy an abandoned apricot farm with the goal of reviving the land using a mix of organic and traditional methods. The farm is dead, dead, dead, the ground turned concrete under the dead fruit trees, so hard you can't sink a spade into the earth.

With liberal amounts of compost they revive the dead soil, plant crops, build and stock chicken coops, plant fruit trees, buy flocks of ducks and a massive, pregnant pig.

As if grumpy from being woken from its coma, nature begins to smite them with Biblical force.

 

[Matt McKeon]

With liberal amounts of compost they revive the dead soil, plant crops, build and stock chicken coops, plant fruit trees, buy flocks of ducks and a massive, pregnant pig.

As if grumpy from being woken from its coma, nature begins to smite them with Biblical force.

They face drought, infestations of snails, gophers, aphids, coyotes, who decimate their crops and stock. Looking over their orchard, covered with starlings, the farmer screams "All we're doing is feeding the birds!" And the snails, gophers and coyotes.

 

[Matt McKeon]

They face drought, infestations of snails, gophers, aphids, coyotes, who decimate their crops and stock. Looking over their orchard, covered with starlings, the farmer screams "All we're doing is feeding the birds!" And the snails, gophers and coyotes.

Neither one has any quit in them, though. They set the ducks to eat the snails, introduce owls to hunt the starlings, the sheep to keep down the cover crop of grass under their new trees, sheep dogs to protect the stock. Snakes and falcons hunt the gophers. Ladybugs eat the aphids. The much despised coyotes, once the sheep dogs roam the fence perimeter, hunt the plague of gophers. The couple are helped by two experienced farmhands. During a sudden flood of rain, and then a wildfire, they persist, their specialty crops selling out to farmers markets and restaurants. Then floods, then wildfires.

Its a sunny documentary, worth seeing.

 

[MattL]

I've been re-reading my favorite novel series, a fantasy series (a bit darker and more adult, think Game of Thrones-esque, though the first book came out before Game of Thrones was published) called the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind (been my favorite book series since I was a teenager and fell in love with reading, have re-read it 5+ times but it's been quite a few years since I last did). I'm on the second book Stone of Tears. Loved the first one as much as I remember and enjoying the second one.

Had been reading on my Amazon HD Fire 8, which at $50 on sale is an amazing value if you want a reading tablet. I had long wanted to get an 8" (the perfect size IMHO for in bed reading) OLED Samsung tablet. I prefer the higher resolution and OLED screen on my phone that's far better than the Kindle though the size was just too small (too hard to hold comfortably and too frequent page turns). The biggest benefit (beyond getting something high resolution, so crispness) is OLED pixels are individually self lit, so when one is black it's not a backlit black (which means some degree of dark gray) it's perfectly black. So when I set the background to black and the text to white and then turn the brightness way down in my dark bedroom the text is still very crisp against the black background and makes it super easy on the eyes and a pleasant experience reading (and self lit, I find reading in the dark relaxing). So I finally got an 8" OLED tablet to read on and it's rejuvenated my reading habit a bit (and needing to destress with work being pretty intense).