• corbin@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    The Coco Chanel meme is quite funny, given that the writer seems too young to know much about her other than that she’s some sort of fashion lady. (There’s a Behind the Bastards series on her upbringing, business attitude, and collaboration with Nazis.)

    Not only do I not understand how the Landauer limit works, I don’t even know what it is.

    Points for honesty, I guess? But also demerits for not at least reading the Wikipedia article. Rationalists are so quick to write paragraphs explaining that they didn’t read paragraphs.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Re: Coco Chanel, it’s an uncomfortable fact that huge swaths of French society (particularly the more conservative parts) were quite OK with German involvement in French governance, at least until the forced labor requirements sending people to work in Germany. The Third Republic was hardly a model social democracy and if the Nazis hadn’t been such incompetent overlords we might have seen a coal and steel union decades before it happened, with Vichy France being an integral part of a Nazi-led European union.

      Instead the Nazis looted most of France and made it quite clear that the French were going to be second-class citizens forever, and once they started looking less unbeatable everyone was part of the Resistance.

        • gerikson@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          For sure, there were many who would have prepared to cut a deal with Hitler - let him have Europe (and to hell with the strategy of not letting any major power dominate there) in return for the inviolability of the empire.

            • froztbyte@awful.systems
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              1 year ago

              I recall reading a great twitter thread a while back that covered a lot of the nazi interplay in british high society in the years prior to ww2. really should re-find that and get it archived (and/or find some other primary sources to read about it)

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        I’m a bit uncomfortable with holding judicial persons responsible for something their management did 80+ years ago. Unless you can prove Deutsche Bank is still discriminating against Jews and confiscating their accounts, it’s not really useful to boycott them.

        Should you avoid riding with DB, seeing that many of the train lines still in use were used to further the German war effort?

        (I’m reminded of zealous FLOSS advocates who try to hold today’s IBM responsible for the company’s actions leading up to and during World War 2, simply because they really really dislike IBM).

        Germany hasn’t entirely paid for its crimes during WW2, but they’ve done more to hold themselves to account than Japan, or France, for that matter.