When talking about the making of Jojo Rabbit (a must see movie, in my opinion), I remember Taika Waititi making a point out wanting to represent the colourful fashion and more lively sides of Germany under the Third Reich. War movies tend to portray Nazis as dark and dull figures with no inner life other than murdering Jews and plotting for world domination. This is probably dangerous, as we won't recognize the fascists when they're in front of us. They'll be laughing and dancing as they murder the innocent.

Similar to how we study Eichmann to learn about the banality of evil, I think pictures like this one should be in every text book. This is what evil looks like — pretty much like anything else, if you're willing to ignore the atrocities.

Just ordinary people living their lives. That's what makes the nazis so fucking horrifying. How they managed to make their people disassociate from the atrocities.

Good to not forget that normal people are capable of atrocious behavior.

The banality of evil

Just a reminder that admin staff are just as guilty of war crimes as soldiers.

10% of people are decent, 10% evil and the other 80% will just go where they think is best for them - Susan Sontag

An unrelated example, an estinated 11000 people die every year in Australia from transport pollution, try and redo how we do things based on that horrifying data ? Crickets and push back, 30 a fucking day for decade after decade, way more then any war or terrorist event. Oh we are gassing jews, gays and gypsies, of course we are!

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-24/air-pollution-modelling-university-of-melbourne-traffic/102015778

Traffic pollution likely causes more than 11,000 premature deaths in Australia a year.

Now back in Madison Square Gaden a few years before the posted photo

And then to a Trump supporer

History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme.

Ugh, teambuilding exercises. Am I right?

the occupants of the internet use a similar photo as a joke all the time

And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.

-Terry Pratchett - Small Gods

(Finding the actual quote was really hard, SEO spam has ruined google, and the LLMs kept hallucinating things that were near, but not real... I had to actually search the raw text of the book)

There are at least three Gertrudes in this picture.

This is right up there with that Imperial Japanese soldier smiling his ass off with two comfort women on his knees.