Nobel Winner Says Internet Might Have Stopped Hitler 290
There can be little doubt that the internet has changed everyday life for the better, but Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has upped the ante by saying an earlier introduction of information technology could even have prevented World War II. "Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded — ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said. I have to agree with him. If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries before the invasion of Poland, and one of history's greatest tragedies might have been averted.
Godwin says... (Score:5, Funny)
this discussion is done now.
Re:Godwin says... (Score:5, Funny)
Godwin says, "Hitler Stops the Internet From Being Effective"
It's apparent then that if the Internet were around back then, it and Hitler(and maybe the entire Universe with them) would cease to exist as soon as they met. Or maybe their existences are just mutually exclusive (in time). Or maybe...maybe...Hitler IS the Internet!11!! *POP*
*brains ooze down chest*
Re:Godwin says... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Godwin says... (Score:4, Interesting)
Godwin says, "Hitler Stops the Internet From Being Effective"
Well crap, how does that work in Soviet Russia?
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YOU NAZI!!!1111!11!111
what about darfur? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's been happening well into the days of the Internets Revolution and nobody's done a god damn thing about it
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no-one like furries.
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The reason is: nobody cares about Darfur.
It's nowhere powerful or/and resource-rich to be interesting for the West powers.
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I hate to break it to you, but the U.N. hasn't done much better, my friend.
As a matter of fact, they literally rape people in the countries they help--look it up.
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And it seems like most European countries have acted the same way, so it's hardly an issue with solely America. You're right about the oil, but at least something got the US to move at all.
Remember how much the EU did about the genocide in Rwanda?
Re:what about darfur? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just curious, but why would you want bigger countries coming into smaller countries and telling them who they can and can't kill?
"I wish America would stop trying to police the world" is not compatible with "I wish America would do something about African genocide."
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I'll attempt to play advocate here:
ponies.
Sorry,
But I really couldn't come up with a good answer to that. Obviously preventing genocide is a "GoodThing" in most peoples views (excepting the people committing the genocide I would assume). The problem is that the US tried the "we'll sit it out, mostly" part in WW2 and it begot us Perl Harbor. It seems ever since then the US has had a policy of proactively attacking situations, both figuratively and literally. We've tried to buy peace with aid, didn't work
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I think you almost made the point. The US gets involved with foreign conflicts when it is in it's interest. The whole "let's stop genocide" thing is never framed as being in the US interest.
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I don't think anyone's gonna have a problem with the US acting in assistance to a constabulary action. Whether they are trained for it or would bring such a reputation as to be a detriment is an operational concern. The problem is when decisions to implement are made unilaterally.
Not saying that the UN has any great track record. That's a whole other debate. It just happens to be the closest thing to a democratic process we have, internationally.
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I don't think anyone's gonna have a problem with the US acting in assistance to a constabulary action.
Wow, did you really just say that out loud? Ever heard of Vietnam? Fucking hell.
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Just curious, but why would you want bigger countries coming into smaller countries and telling them who they can and can't kill?
Throwing my best wild guess out there: concern for innocent people getting killed?
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So you really want the big nations to police the world? You don't think that, maybe, that will cause wars?
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Tell that to the Chinese who recently signed a deal to get lots of oil from Sudan(you know the country the Darfur region is part of).
Re:what about darfur? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what about darfur? (Score:4, Interesting)
And even if there was an internet in Darfur, it would have been shut down. In Ethiopia, the text messaging cell phone network was being so effective for protesters, that the government basically shut it down (that was over eight years ago, I don't know if it was ever turned back on). And we say that the internet can't be shut down, but if a government is really intent on shutting off electricity, barricading the roads, and bombing civilians, it's effectively shutting down the internet in at least the region it controls.
Now, would have that Nobel laureate been an historian, an engineer, an economist, or whatever, may be I would have taken him more seriously, but since he's just a Nobel poet with no other apparent expertise/experience on this subject, I think I'll just ignore him. Poets can say whatever they want. They're not required to make sense.
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There are lots of reasons to care what happens in Europe, and few to care what happens in Darfur.
Not many people want another awkward African intervention with the potential for incidents like that in Mogadishu which inspired "Blackhawk Down".
I'll be really blunt. They aren't my people, they are backward and have no value to me, and I don't care what happens to them.I can choose to ignore it with no ill effects. It's pretty damn obvious that millions of other people feel precisely the same way, or there wou
Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
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Out of what? Depression at how small the number really is?
I know I find it depressing just how many people still hate the Jews.
Could work... (Score:5, Funny)
hum... (Score:5, Funny)
Im in ur internet, stopping ur warmongering mustache
The Importance of the Minds of a General Populace (Score:5, Interesting)
Take for instance Mark Twain & King Leopold of Belgium destroying the Congo Basin. Mark joined a group and tried to just inform people of what was going on. He wrote a pamphlet King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule [google.com] in which a monologue dripping in satire of the King defending himself was designed to inform not only Americans but by and large his own people--who were unaware of the campaigns as they never saw the money. Were it not for a few brave people that could not be bribed, that information might never have gotten out! And think how easily this pamphlet might have been distributed across the internet!
And yet today, the campaigns were run so well that we don't know for sure how many millions were killed or had limbs hacked off and I don't recall it being mentioned in my primary or secondary school history books. Left largely unknown to me until relatively recently--much like the Philippine/American War [wikipedia.org] & Iran/Iraq War [wikipedia.org].
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat
So I am in no doubt the internet--an advanced dissemination of information--at anytime of war would help people collectively discuss and understand and do the right thing. I only wish I could have written a review of Mein Kampf for Germans to read before so many of them bought into it
Re:The Importance of the Minds of a General Popula (Score:5, Interesting)
Two points to consider:
1) Hitler actively embraced the newly emerging mass media technology called television. He also loved to make radio speeches.
2) Hitler was effectively elected dictator.
Hitler gained power through brilliantly capitalizing on the fear and discontent of inter-war Germans. He did that by USING mass media. If anything, the Internet probably would have helped him get his message out even more effectively.
Would it have slowed him down after he gained power, started the war and started doing the really nasty stuff? Probably not. You don't think Hitler was going to post on his blog about his death camps, do you? Or let any other eye-witnesses post on THEIR blogs?
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1) Hitler actively embraced the newly emerging mass media technology called television. He also loved to make radio speeches.
And if you can't see the difference between a medium that lets a central authority send out messages and one that lets everyone else send messages, you missed the point of the internet.
The only question that remains is if the modern internet existed at the time of hitler, would it have stopped him, or would he have managed to filter and censor it.
"the great firewall of Germany"
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See point #2. Hitler enjoyed widespread and overwhelming support. If you'd been reading an Internet forum discussion at the time it would have been full of people talking about reasons why you should help vote Hitler in.
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See point #2. Hitler enjoyed widespread and overwhelming support. If you'd been reading an Internet forum discussion at the time it would have been full of people talking about reasons why you should help vote Hitler in.
I agree he still would have been elected.
However his support might have evaporated when news and photos and video of what he was actually doing in a lot of places after things got rolling were communicated to those people. He might not have gotten nearly as far as he did.
There are lots that
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Hm. Do we have an example of the Internet's influence on war? Say, Iraq? It stopped the US from invading under false pretenses, right? Nope.
It might have helped stop the abuses at Abu Ghraib. On the other hand, the story was quite successfully suppressed by the US authorities until it was broken by a foreign news service. There weren't so many of those active in Nazi Germany.
Re:The Importance of the Minds of a General Popula (Score:4, Informative)
Hm. Do we have an example of the Internet's influence on war? Say, Iraq? It stopped the US from invading under false pretenses, right? Nope.
No, but I think coverage of the war has made invading Iran a lot less palatable to American's.
It might have helped stop the abuses at Abu Ghraib. On the other hand, the story was quite successfully suppressed by the US authorities until it was broken by a foreign news service. There weren't so many of those active in Nazi Germany.
The internet helped get the news out. It did take a bit of time for the US mainstream to pick up the story (a delay at the request of the DoD according to wikipedia), but pressure was building up, they couldn't have kept the lid on it indefinitely.
And the US media is generally still pretty 'free' and trustworthy all things considered, and if it were believed to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the state, the population would seek out and beleive foreign reports -- something they can do thanks, in large part, to the internet. Nazi germany had no alternative... either you believed what the media said or you didn't, but there wasn't any other source of news.
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Centralized or not, I don't think it makes all that much of a difference - it just requires a different set of tactics.
With a decentralized net, you go with astroturfers to support your goals and you drown out the other voices with innuendo, appeals to emotion, out right lies, etc.
On the net there is no truth, only words and fully editable media. Just look at how the obama birth certificate meme refuses to die, despite many news reports debunking it and actual high resolution photos being posted since at l
Re:The Importance of the Minds of a General Popula (Score:5, Interesting)
OMFG, YES!
Thank you for this post. I'm a child of an American soldier and a German mother. My German relatives were good people in every sense of the word. Wouldn't hurt a fly - literally (my great grandmother would catch flies and put them outside rather than kill them. She would sneak food to a russian soldier captured in the town because she felt sorry for him, despite the risk of the crime of treason). My grandfather fought in WWII on the german side and had lots of stories to tell.
I asked them all about WWII when I was a child and they said that honestly few people really knew what was going on with the concentration camps and such. It was as much a surprise to them as it was to the world at large when the story unfolded. I spent quite a few years conflicted because I thought they must be lying, until I decided the evidence available to me first-hand was superior to the much larger pool of second-hand evidence (ie. the popular media). They really didn't know what was going on, because they were just ordinary people living their lives as best they could.
This is why things like Gitmo really bother me. I never really understood how Nazi Germany could come about until I was able to witness the GWB administration first-hand. Consider that in the modern age we probably know more about Gitmo than the German populace knew about concentration camps in their day. We have a "secret prison", yet it has persisted for years and nobody has managed to shut it down for the outrage that it is.
This story really makes me wonder what the world would be like right now if it were not for the internet. Maybe all those apocalyptic sci-fi stories I read as a child would have been more prophetic than we thought at the time ...
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OMFG, YES!
Thank you for this post. I'm a child of an American soldier and a German mother. My German relatives were good people in every sense of the word. Wouldn't hurt a fly - literally (my great grandmother would catch flies and put them outside rather than kill them. She would sneak food to a russian soldier captured in the town because she felt sorry for him, despite the risk of the crime of treason). My grandfather fought in WWII on the german side and had lots of stories to tell.
I asked them all about WWII when I was a child and they said that honestly few people really knew what was going on with the concentration camps and such. ..
...
That really depends.
Asking tough questions was never a good idea in those years.
I just had to look up something myself: There's a fine distinction to be made: authorities never denied the existence of concentration-camps (AFAIK, the US had camps for most of the Japanese population in the US) and even used them as a deterrent. Death-camps, however, were top-secret.
Rumors of the Concentration- and Death-Camps made the rounds all the time (mostly through soldiers home on vacation - many of them considering
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I doubt that the internet could have stopped Hitler. Simple reason: Too much information is as bad as too little. And when people are flooded with information left and right, they simply don't care. Especially when they have better things to do.
Especially Hitler and the WW2 is a bad example of a lack of information. It's not like it was any kind of surprise coup d'etat. Hitler actually seized power legally, through an election and by being appointed Chancellor. There was no overthrow, no revolution, no big
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You haven't browsed the internet much, have you (and I mean this seriously)?
While it is true that the internet as a whole is great at disseminating even obscure pieces of information, it is also great at dissemi
Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice sentiment, but we have the internet now, and yet still, right this very second, the genocide in Sudan and Zimbabwe is very active. Not to mention the fact that the internet existed in the 90's, yet the 90's saw the worst genocide since the Holocaust and Pol Pot, with the (very preventable) genocide in Rwanda.
So, yeah. It's a nice fuzzy sentiment, but the recent and current active acts of genocide in the world are pretty clear evidence that it's just not true.
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Yeah, Americans in the 1940s didn't give a shit about Europeans getting killed. Americans in the 1990s didn't give a shit about Africans getting killed. At least their consistent.
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Umm.. they did. World history.. it involves reading.
Study some history. (Score:2)
Along similar lines, Rwanda had at least three different UN-member military groups in place, but couldn't get enough support from the US or several of her allies to grant the mission there Chapter 7 status in time to avoid genocide.
In other words: the rest of the world does stand up and do things, all the time. It's just
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As far as I'm concerned, it can only go one way - either the US is the country that stands up and does something or it's just the same as everyone else. In the latter case I'd suggest that the martyr complex implicit in th
Hitler modded -1 Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, that would have stopped him and all his fanatical support.
He is wrong, of course. If he was right, the Neo-Nazis and other such groups would also die under the heat lamp of the internet... the Scientologists would fail to gain traction and influence as well.
I think the influence of the internet is over-estimated by this guy. Give me the nobel money... let'm keep his medal.
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Le Clezio sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
. If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries
So an internet chain mail would have stopped WW2. Right...
Newsflash : Hitler didn't cause WW2, he was the catalyst. The root cause of the war was the german people's resentment of the Versailles treaty, and particularly the war reparations and the way the French treated the Ruhr people when they failed to pay up. Hitler was considered slightly ridiculous and bizarre until he started to tap into the boiling anger the germans had inside them.
Well, the Internet, Skooby, Shaggy and the gang. (Score:2)
The Internet could have guided them to places where evil villains were spooking people into evil, dictatorial regimes.
Before the Internet, they just had to cruise around in the Mystery Machine in some fog, until they found some trouble to get themselves into.
Imagine an enraged Hitler, screaming: "I Vould half taken over ze Vorld wizout you meddlesome kinder!"
Oh, for optimal performance, you would have to throw in some Skooby-Snacks, as well.
Internet increases partisanship... (Score:2)
... now everyone who has the same interests can find each other. IMHO it may have done the opposite, there were a LOT of people who thought like hitler in the era, it would have enabled people to find one another and support one another much more easily.
The internet does as much to inform, as it does to verify what one already believes. I've yet to see any idealogue be convinced by great arguments that their idealogy is false/wrong/error prone.
It takes intellectual honesty, something most idealogues don't
Even if this were true... (Score:2)
SO WHAT?
doxycycline might have stopped the "Black Death". How is this remotely newsworthy, to postulate modern technologies might have affected the past?
True in General (Score:2)
But the specific examples given are a reach! An 'internet' at that time could have just as easily pushed it the other way too.
I've always been fascinated by this, WW2 broke out while industrial technology was very high in comparison to the information and media technology of the time.
IT was so low that the average person could be convinced that the other side were inhuman monsters, but industrial technology was good enough for us to bomb each other fairly easily.
In the case of WW2 the problem fixed itself i
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TV was invented and presented before WWII. Look when Phil Farnsworth and Manfred von Ardenne were showing their respective designs: 1934 and 1935!
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Sorry to reply to myself:
The Olympics of 1936 were already shown in TV (the box mostly sitting in a radio store and people watching through the window ;) ).
Triumph of the Will (Score:2)
Nope... (Score:2)
Mod story -1, Godwin (Score:2)
Godwin in TFA! (Score:2)
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Indeed, if it weren't for Hitler, whose law would we invoke when someone mentions Hitler?
The Internet is Stopping Putin! (Score:3, Funny)
I can feel the internet as it stops repression in Russia and Belaurus. Oh yeah, I can feel it! It's really working!!
Naive rubbish. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hitler was Avantgarde. He and his marketing-message of merging socialisim and nationalisim was super-hip back in the day. And don't dare think for a moment that it only was hip with the Germans, no Sir. Aside from a sophisicated marketing machinery he was a breathtakingly unscrupulous dictator. He killed off the entire SA leader-cadre right after scoring the Machtübernahme. EVERYBODY knew he did it and ALL were scared shittless to even say 'Peep'.
Goebbels would've built broadband to every home and casted speeches of the Führer to every household and make the web a cornerstone of some Kraft durch Freude programm and at least 50% of the people would've loved him for it. And the rest of the world would've admired the Germans.
No, folks, Hilter, Himmler, Bormann and the Nazis were a very special type of evil people and they were outstandingly good it. Bin Laden, Ayatolla Comeni and Co. look like orphans compared. I have no doubt they would've use the Internet to their advantage and excelled at it.
Think todays Republic China or a healthy version of North Korea with the brakes removed and fueled by a nation of well educated people known for their drive towards technical perfection in most aspects of life - very much as the Germans are generally percieved - and you get the picture of what the Nazi Regime was made of. If anything, something like the internet would've fueled their agenda. I have little doubt in that.
bush (Score:2, Insightful)
didn't stop bush....
5 years would have stopped Hitler (Score:2)
jdb2
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Although I wonder who would have had the A-Bomb first. IIRC the Germans were working on it, too, and unlike the US, they really had to face a few setbacks due to Allied bombing.
The question is, though, would that have changed anything? Hitler wasn't the reason why the war broke out. Germany had been severely shamed after WW1. To understand why this is important, let me take you down the German history for a bit.
Germany, before WW1, had been an extremely militarized society. Military and its virtues (duty, o
Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
A rather naive view (Score:2)
Based on the presumption that only one side of the conflict would benefit from more efficient widespread communications. There is no reason to believe that Hitler's message of hatred would not have benefitted at least as much.
really? (Score:2, Insightful)
if Hitler had the technology we have today, maybe he would've conquered the whole world.
What does he think of Vitamin C? (Score:2)
So how did the internet do in stopping Bush and the Iraq war?
Sounds like yet another Nobel Prize winner musing outside his specialty.
Stopped ? heh ..... (Score:2)
Be careful! (Score:2)
I wonder how many friend Hitler would have had on myspace.
What i want to say: Hitler was not stupid. Goebbels was neither. To think about what somebody on Goebbels level of peruasiveness would have done on myspace - that *IS* scary.
WWIII (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wha? (Score:5, Interesting)
It can! Think about it, Hitler was an artist first, got stymied in that (due to lack of talent). The genocide and warmongering came afterwards. If the internet had been around, he would have been able to get his art published online and his art degree from university of phoenix. Even if he still got rejected from art, he may have set up an emo myspace page, an antisemitic/ conspiracy theory blog, and troll on /., and that would be as far as it got. In other words, if he had an outlet for his crap, he might never have gotten around to taking control of the government and the holocaust.
The internet: great at distracting would-be dictators with pr0n, lolcatz, and angry blog posts.
Re:wha? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course like we all know what went wrong in world-war 2 was a single man. How realistic does that sound.
We all know what the problem was, what caused world-war 2 : an ideology. There are however 2 problems many people have with that : ... now the effects are known ... not so much)
1) it is the very basis of progressive ideology that "all ideologies are equal" (of course except anything that's not currently identified as "progressive". Example : eugenics was very progressive in the 1930's
2) the name of that ideology of hitler was national socialism. Of course progressive ideology is socialist.
I personally think we're not just going to see just how wrong this claim is. That the internet not only does not prevent racist and abusive ideologies from spreading, but that the internet can actually make ideologies spread faster, hit harder and with less that can be done to stop it. Also the internet makes sure that the size of an ideology does not have to be that big anymore for it to do real damage : having few members does not prevent communication like it did in the 1930's.
We will see that more ideologies, instead of just islam, will find the means of terrorism. They see the success terror can give an ideology, and some people will stop at nothing to push their ideas on others. The internet empowers these people, it does not weaken them.
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Example : eugenics was very progressive in the 1930's ... now the effects are known ... not so much)
I don't think most people really know what eugenics is, or the beliefs that are behind that sort of thinking... nor how close most people are today to being just as firmly believing in eugenics and it's backing ideologies.
Re:wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have always been able to isolate themselves with like-minded kin, in the forms of cults/religions, and in the education/brainwashing of their own children to raise people with similar ideology. If anything, a vulnerable individual participating in an online community is much less isolated than one participating in an actual cult, allowing them access to a wide range of information sources which will inevitably conflict with any ideology too far removed from common social norms. As a group tries to expand itself through online recruitment, they must ultimately advertise their ideology on more general interest sites, where they will have to compete with arguments from people with more socially acceptable views.
In any online forum where individuals interact, there is always a pressure to conform to social norms (in the sense of avoiding sociopathic tendencies that negatively impact other individuals, not necessarily any kind of moral judgment on socially acceptable behavior, the latter of which is widely open for discussion). On Slashdot, for example, any antisocial commentary is immediately moderated down to invisible comment purgatory (for those with default viewing prefs). The same holds true in most other forums as well, even in the case of those forums without peer moderation, as antisocial behavior is repudiated and/or ignored (if they don't get themselves banned). The pressure to avoid sociopathic ideology is very real, and almost completely ubiquitous on the web.
The way information spreads on the internet today is that individuals are determining which information appeals to them, and either passing it on directly to their social connections, or flagging it of interest on social news sites. Inevitably, information that is socially positive will spread much more readily than sociopathic information, which simply dies a quiet death of irrelevance. Most people outside of an ideologically homogenous group will simply not spread antisocial information, making it quickly fade away with counterarguments and resistance once one tries to spread it beyond that group. The fact that information fed to people on the internet must go through a populist filter to be widespread means that sociopathic ideology hardly stands a chance at mass-appeal. Increasingly, only a secular humanist agenda has any chance of making it to the mainstream through internet information distribution. There will always be small groups of gullible or brainwashed outliers, but they will always be just that, and popular sentiment will inevitably be against them. In the context of the article, in reference to an entire society adopting a sociopathic ideology, I would argue that the decentralized nature of information distribution on the internet, dependent on populist appeal, is absolutely a very strong check against widespread antisocial ideology.
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I strongly agree with your post, other than to say that it's still possible to be isolated on the internet. Closed groups and forums with selective membership can still be a breeding ground for antisocial tendencies. They can slowly absorb people with like minds, while simultaneously rejecting those people who may offer counter arguments to their ideals.
I do agree that the internet does make this harder to achieve than, say, compared to the environment of early 20th century Germany.
Re:wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubiquitous encryption and darknets are gonna make this effect even more pronounced. Insular groups will be able to get more insular, requiring closed circuits of credentials and so on.
But likewise, their grip on their own members must weaken; In 1939, a German youth who doubted what he was being taught, would know better than to ask the important questions or search for validation for his misgivings. But if he were able to talk anonymously and securely on /b/ with some proxies Yer durn tootin' the opposition would have new and powerful ways to associate.
I guess I'm saying you got the nail on the head.
Re:wha? (Score:5, Funny)
I created a new utility suite based upon the idea that we can go back in time and create the internet before Hitler's rise;
C:\>rping Adolph Hitler -t 12-09-1932/17:32:00
Reverse Pinging Adolph Hitler with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Ping statistics for Adolph Hitler:
Mode: Crazier than a shithouse rat
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in years:
Minimum = 76 years, Maximum = 76 years, Average = 76 years
I was going to send a reverse-bootp to his mother and hope he would have been hatched.
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Re:wha? (Score:4, Funny)
Hitler would have fit right in on 4Chan.
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Hitler was constantly trying to goad countries into war before his own imagined death, rushing Germany's military buildup forward without financial regard. It's really impossible to declare that the Internet could have "stopped Hitler" because his was the kind of personality that dictated such grand world plans. He had a future planned for the German people extending beyond his life.
The way he took control of his party and eventually his country might even have been empowered by the Internet. I suspect H
Re:wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think that is what presidential campaigns aim for in general though. Have you seen the supporters at the rallies? When people start carrying signs that say McCain or Obama or whoever, my ears tend to close because that means the campaign is becoming more about the superstar than the (real) issues.
As for this article talking about the internet and stopping Hitler...I dunno. It's a bit like a fire. If it's small, it would probably put it out like blowing out a candle. But if it somehow gets big enoug
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Seriously? You're going to call Ron Paul's movement a cult of personality?
I guess that shows that Internet or not, we're still shallow enough to believe what we want to believe.
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I'd argue the reason the libertarian candidate barely has anything behind him is the exact reason Ron Paul runs as a Republican: Nobody other than the big 2 gets any media coverage. Hell, even the Republican Ron Paul was quickly squelched.
I've got better ideas than Paul, but I'm a nobody who will never hold office. Hey look, it's the leader of the libertarian party sitting next to me on the bleachers.
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Its far more likely, Hitler would seek to control the Internet in every country he controlled. It would be a dream come true, for the Nazis to monitor all communications. Hilter did after all, try to create a Totalitarian level of control, even without the Internet!. The Internet (for all its early utopian dreams) is (as the news is showing) turning into a means to monitor and datamine large numbers of people, in an automated way, while providing an automated means to censor anything they wish to suppress f
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Maybe the Internet can invent a time machine, send a robot back in time to kill Hitler's mother and save us all from the horrors of WWII?
Dude, we tried that, and it SORTA worked. In the original WWII, Hitler won.
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It wasn't me, it was my uncle. Well, it wasn't me YET.
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READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE! [abyssandapex.com]
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You won't find that in the history books
I found those in my history books and my history teacher made sure to mention it specifically. I even grew up in one of the most conservative counties in the US.
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I think the question should be "when", not "where".
History may change with increased temporal distance...
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Actually, it was highly effective in stopping Bush.
Abu Ghraib was exposed by Email. Atrocities in Iraq were exposed through Blogs. The steady flow of information through non-propaganda channels slowly turned the public opinion against him.
It took six years to stop him completely, but it helped stop a lot of what was wrong long before that. It exposed faux-rescues and provided a channel for information other than the state-influenced public media channels.
There are a lot of reasons the military wanting to ba
Re:lol (Score:5, Funny)
Show some respect. Idle is helping to protect you from Hitler.