Ramessu
(Guest)
05/24/01 12:05 PM
Re: Religion and empowerment [re: Antistoicus]
( click here for the original copy in the House of Netjer webboard archives )
Hra-Ku Antistoicus,
My comment in Ankhesenamun's post was a general statement in reference to the millions of people who vegetate in front of television and bemoan the fact the world is the way it is. It was certainly not meant for Ankhesenamun who I hold in some regard, and if Ankhesenamun took that statement as an insult then I humbly and heartily apologize. (1) Since you are so into looking into past posts (2) have you missed the one where I stated that I too am guilty of sitting and 'vegetating' at times? The point is to realize that you (used in the general sense) are doing it, accepting it, and then doing something about it.
> .. You also stated (and it is still up) "the time of the
> .. Neters walking the earth is over". In other words, the
> .. Divine presence has departed us.
By this I mean that the physical manifestations of the Neters are over (excepting the Per-aa (LHS) of course). That no longer does the Divine manifest in mortal form. Again I say now where do I say the Divine is no longer on this world, especially when the point is considered that the Divine resides in all of creation from the highest to the low.
> .."The Divine gives each the tools to go about and
> .. succeed in life", states Ramessu. This raises
> .. the obvious question, "what about Ann Frank"?
What about her? (3) What about the thousands of people killed, raped, murdered every second of the day. It's called survival, people die. (4) What about the Palestinians killed routinely by the Israeli's? (5) About the Lebanese civilina plane just downed by the Isreali government just today? (6) No one is innocent, and no one is guilty. (7) There is only life and the consequence there-of. (8) It's a sad thing, but it happens. And a point often missed about the Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany is that Hitler gave the Jews a years amnesty to leave Germany. (9) Many refused, the clause Hitler threw in was that they would have no money as he would confinscate it for his war machine.
> .. Ms. Frank, in early adolescence, with only her immediate
> .. family for support, finds herself confronting the
> .. combined might of the Third Reich as her adversary.
> .. In what sense does she have the tools necessary,
> .. to deal with such a situation? What has she left to
> .. her but prayer?
Her family could have left Germany before the persecutions, her family would have been destitute true. However at least they would have had a chance. Her family decided to chance Hitler's regime. (10)
However to say that all they had to work on is prayers is not entirely true, ingenuity, hard work, faith, and more contribute to the human condition. (11) All of which revolve around free will. (12) If God directly took sides in the petty conflicts on this planet, (13) which are of our own doing I might add, (14) the place would be a wreck. (15)
And since you enjoy misquoting so much, (16) you might enjoy this little bit about Nietzche:
"Most of his final years were spent in his sister Elisabeth's care. During this time, Elisabeth grew more and more involved in the burgeoning anti-semitic movements in Germany. While he wasted away, she collected and edited many of his scattered notes and tailored them to suit her own political agenda. The fruition of this was Nietzsche's altered works and philosophy being a cornerstone in the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler's personal mantra. In 1900, he died ... in 1901, Elisabeth published The Will to Power."From http://users.aol.com/lrdetrigan/index4.html
It is more interesting to note the God he was referring to was the ironclad christian god. He never lost his belief in the Divine which if you had read some of his work you might realize. His many deregotory references to God were in direct reference to Christianity, specifically. And because I quote Nietzche in no way does that mean I condone the 3rd Reich, that is similar to saying if I quote from the Bible I supported the Spanish Inquisition. (17) They are both mistakes taken out of conjecture, and should not be held liable against the author. People are ingenius in finding new ways to hate, they hardly need any help.
I also recommend reading my post of when I recognized what an idiot I was making of myself. Take some notes, your doing the same thing I was. (18) It's called, and the post also: Losing sight of Ma'at.
Baraka,
"Ptah" (19)
"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct
way, and the only way, it does not exist." (20)
- Nietzsche
Click here to return to "Setting the tone"
(1) Bluffing after the fact, Ramessu continues his established pattern of putting an absurd spin on his earlier remarks when they are challenged. As you can see, on examination, this is not what he said or hinted at, at all.
(2) In other words, since I can follow a simple discussion and am not easy to bluff. The past posts referred to are ones occuring on this thread. To listen to Ramessu, one would think that I had confronted him about an inconsistency with a position he took ten years ago, as opposed to what had actually occured. (I had pointed out to him that an examination of the archives showed that he was lying about a post made in the recent past).
What an incredible suggestion, though, that to check and document the facts is, somehow, a questionable activity. As is so often the case with Ramessu's rantings, this comment offers us a moral inversion. The 'damage' done by a documentation of the truth is the undermining of the effectiveness of lies told about it. So, which lies have been told, here, and why should they be supported? We are not looking at the proverbial case of lying to an axe murderer about where his would-be victim has gone. Ramessu has attempted to prevail in an argument by lying about what has been said before.
No reliably virtuous outcome is being supported by his actions, unless one wishes to consider an arrogantly dogmatic belief in one's own rightness to be a virtue. As the effectivness of a dishonest technique of argumentation is not affected should one's point be wrong, and thus success following from the use of such is no measure of the rightness of one's point the validity of that which one argues for, to accept the rightness of such manipulative efforts, or, equivalently, to assert the wrongness of the undermining of such an effort, is an assertion of just that - that arrogance is a virtue.
We will see more of this incredible assertion later, in the nonsensical dispute trumped up by some of the House' membership over an alleged archiving of posts.
(3) What about her?! What about a 13 year old girl who hid in an attic for years, only to end up being dragged off to a death camp and slaughtered for no more reason than that she was Jewish, and considered to be a member of an "inferior race" under Nazi "ideology"?! This should really tell the reader something about the tone of these boards, especially when you consider the fact that the concern that Ankhesenamun felt the need to pray over, was the fate of a group of stray cats which she was going to have to leave behind, one which Ramessu took no issue with in the post which followed.
Whether Ramessu is a teenager or not, there is such a thing as a failure to act like a human being. When somebody, through his responses, shows that he thinks that the thought that a group of stray cats will have to hunt for their own food is a more legitimate cause for horror than the murder of a human being, then he has just become something less than human. The only real sub-humans to be found in the history of the Holocaust are the Nazis and their apologists, Ramessu included. (Aside from that, note the quotation out of context).
(4) To quote another Nietschzean of my past acquaintence, my response would be "Aaaaaaand?". What does this have to do with the point I made? May I hope that the reader has seen the post that Ramessu is responding to? He has stated that we are given all of the tools we need to succeed in life. Presented with a historical counterexample, and asked "what else would the victim have left to her, but prayer?", Ramessu' response is, in effect, to say "so what, death happens".
Aside from the loathsome attitude that a comment like that reflects, it isn't on point. The moral question of Whether Ms. Frank was entitled to have the tools needed to survive has no bearing on the historical question of whether or not she actually did have those tools. Ramessu is playing the game of responding to a rebuttal by implicitly rewriting history and acting as if the rebuttal came in response to a different point than the one it actually did.
(5) What about them? In a war, people get killed and the Palestinians killed tend to be combatants in the 'guerilla war' which they've been waging against Israel (a fashionable euphemism for terrorism carried out against Israeli civilians). Comparing this to the wholesale slaughter of an innocent and historically loyal population, such as the Jewish population of Germany, which had not carried out any guerilla activities prior to the slaughter, or even well into it, accompanied by the pursuit of refugees from that population into other countries, and the slaughter of said refugees and their coreligionists in those countries, is sick and outrageous. One can't help but wonder if history is taught in Texas.
What kind of man equates self-defense with cold-blooded murder? To make such a demand is to become guilty of an attempt at murder through indirect means, oneself. If the person one so pressured yields to the absurd demand that he not defend himself, he ends up just as dead as if one had pulled the trigger oneself. To then claim moral superiority on the basis that such a request is refused, is to say that a would-be murderer (oneself) is more righteous than his victim and that murder itself is a righteous act, so long as one uses the predictable actions of another as one's weapon. A more sickening inversion of morality could not be asked for. It is passive aggression in its purest form.
(6) I didn't hear about that and given Ramessu's already established track record of lying about the recent past, I wouldn't be surprised if he had made up that one, too. But, again, even if it was true, what of it. I'm tempted to point out that Ann Frank, having never been in a position to make Israeli defense policy, could scarcely be reasonably considered morally responsible for it under any circumstance, but even this wouldn't capture the full sick absurdity of the situation.
We have Ramessu seriously arguing that this thirteen year old girl, hiding, shaking in an attic along with her equally defenseless family, was something less than an innocent victim because someday, years after her death, somebody Jewish would do something that Ramessu disapproved of. That's right, Ramessu is seriously arguing this, on the basis of retroactive collective guilt.
(7) The credo of a sociopath.
(8) So, if, say, a few Jewish Defense League members dropped by Ramessu's house, and took out their rage on him by silencing him forever, that would be OK, just as long as they didn't get caught ? I'm glad that he can be so open minded.
(9) A half-truth which I addressed shortly after this post was made. The Nazis encouraged Jews to leave Germany. However, the Jews who took them up on this soon learned that very few of them were being allowed admission into any other country. The British navy blockaded the coast of Palestine, by the British governments's own account, in order to appease Arabs by limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. In one of the more notorious incidents of the period, said Navy turned back the Exodus, loaded with refugees, which then searched for somewhere, anywhere, other than Germany, in which to put into port. Nobody would let them in, and eventually, out of food and water, the ship was forced to return to Germany. Not a single one of its passengers survived the war.
Actually, Ramessu offers less than a half-truth. The Nazis did not limit their slaughter to Jews found in Germany, but carried their campaign of genocide into every country they occupied. As a result, those Jews who fled, being more conspicuous in their new homes merely by being foreign, still ended up being found and killed with great frequency. Ann Frank, herself, was in Holland, not Germany, when she was caught. Auschwitz, itself, was in Poland, not Germany.
(10) Her family hid in an attic in a house in Holland, having nowhere else to go. They were not in Germany.
(11) And what does that have to do with the subject at hand? If a group of stormtroopers have just kicked in one's door, an attempt to discuss one's hopes for a better future with them will be most unlikely to prove an effective method of preventing them from cracking one's skull open.
(12) Continuing to note that none of this is on point, as the issue I had addressed was Ramessu's claim that we could always solve our own problems (phrased just that vaguely, in his post), let us take a look at Ramessu's latest distortion. Having made reference to a variety of lofty sounding ideals in a tone which misleadingly suggests that the person he is attacking (me) is opposed to them, he tells us that we (humanity?) must have free will to be capable of these things.
True, but free will and completely unhampered action are not synonymous. If they were, would there be such a thing as frustration? What is frustration, but a difference between what wishes to do and what one is able to do? Further, were the acceptance of the equating of the two (free will and an absolute lack of impediments to free action) to become customary, in the lawless free-for-all that followed, very little if any of these wonderful things would be seen, as the amply documented history of breakdowns of the social order will attest. Indeed, in the presence of so-called "anarchy" and the violently structureless environment that it gives rise to, historically there has been little freedom to do much of anything at all, either for humanity taken individually or in its increasingly meaningless groups.
(13) Yes, a 'paltry' 50 million dead (and change) in the case of World War Two, along with the murder of over half of the Jewish population of Europe, over six million victims, many of whom were tortured to death in a variety of ingenious ways. A small matter, really, unless one happens to have a conscience.
(14) Ramessu, once again, engages in slopping thinking, in a now familiar manner. The conflicts are "our doing"? Who are "we"? The species does not speak with one voice or act with one mind; even a small community will seldom do that, and a sizable people never will. When Ramessu glosses over the difference between the individual and the group, as he did earlier when he tried to minimize the philosophical issues raised by the example of Ms. Frank (see notes 5 and 6) and as he is doing now, he willfully ignores this reality. How can Ms. Franks' innocence as a victim be denied on the basis of actions over which she has no control?
(15) which, again, would have nothing to do with the historical point made regarding Ms. Frank's limited options.
(16) Yes, speaking of misquoting ... the reader will kindly take a look at what it is, that I actually wrote.
(17) Ramessu's theory seems to be that if he rants long enough, that those reading will stop noticing that he is making no sense. (See the previous note). Regrettably, in the case of the Netjer boards, history will support this belief.
(18) If the reader is at all concerned with the truth, which Ramessu clearly wasn't, he can look back over my previous posts on this thread (1 2 3) and see that my tone was invariably calm, reasonable and measured. The man already knew that I was, or rather had been, Jewish. To write something this offensive and this dishonest, and then follow it up with a remark about how my objections to his remarks show that I need to become as enlightened as he has just become (and see that I've been doing the same thing he has been) is to take trolling to a new level, especially when I have clearly not been doing what he has been doing. To its shame, the House will say nothing about this, but then scold me for my mild objection to this outrageously offensive post.
What Ramessu is attempting to do in this post and will attempt to do, again, is to dilute the blame for his own actions by trying to drag one he has treated in such an offensive way, down to his own low moral level, where some of his shame may be redistributed onto the other person.
(19) The actual named he signed off on this post with, one which he would use in many posts elsewhere on the board. While this fact doesn't tell you enough to be able to identify him, it does point to the fact that, to use the terminology popular at the House, Ramessu is a "Ptah child", adding to the motivations of somebody who later on, you will see do something notably sleazy. I've noticed that among the Kemetic orthodox, the choice of "parent" becomes a source of factionalism in a way that the identity of one's patron deity never seems to among Hellenists.
(20) Why am I not suprised that Ramessu would end on that quote? What a lowlife!