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Why are the ideologically evil personally nice?

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jmnixon95
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23 Jun 2010, 1:10 pm

NeantHumain wrote:
jmnixon95 wrote:
Yeah, I read once that if you got to know Hitler, he could be a pretty nice guy.

Isn't there a quote of him saying he'd jump on Neville Chamberlain's stomach if he had to see him again and frustration at his handlers for treating him like "some bourgeois diplomat" after negotiating the treaty that let him take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia? I got that from Wikipedia at least.


Key words: could be

That doesn't mean he liked everyone, lol.
I mean, who does...

Yeah... but what he did to Europe and the world really overrules the fact that he could have personally been 'nice'. Terrible stuff...



jmnixon95
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23 Jun 2010, 1:12 pm

Descartes wrote:
Wasn't Hitler a really good artist? I remember in my 11th grade history class my teacher showed us a painting done by him. It was a nice painting of nature, but when we found out it was done by Hitler, I was a little creeped out. How could such an evil man paint such a lovely picture? :?



Hitler was a mediocre artist. Sure, he could paint a picture of a castle better than I could, but he wasn't an artistic genius. He threw himself into the Nazi party after failing to be accepted to some art school.



Last edited by jmnixon95 on 23 Jun 2010, 1:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

iamnotaparakeet
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23 Jun 2010, 1:14 pm

jmnixon95 wrote:
Descartes wrote:
Wasn't Hitler a really good artist? I remember in my 11th grade history class my teacher showed us a painting done by him. It was a nice painting of nature, but when we found out it was done by Hitler, I was a little creeped out. How could such an evil man paint such a lovely picture? :?



Hitler was a mediocre artist. Sure, he could paint a picture of a castle better than I could, but he wasn't an artistic genius. He threw himself into the Nazi party after failing to be rejected to some art school.


That certainly would be a Klinger-type epic fail.



jmnixon95
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23 Jun 2010, 1:19 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:
jmnixon95 wrote:
Descartes wrote:
Wasn't Hitler a really good artist? I remember in my 11th grade history class my teacher showed us a painting done by him. It was a nice painting of nature, but when we found out it was done by Hitler, I was a little creeped out. How could such an evil man paint such a lovely picture? :?



Hitler was a mediocre artist. Sure, he could paint a picture of a castle better than I could, but he wasn't an artistic genius. He threw himself into the Nazi party after failing to be rejected to some art school.


That certainly would be a Klinger-type epic fail.



lol! Sorry about that. A lot on the mind today. :oops:



DW_a_mom
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23 Jun 2010, 1:33 pm

Hitler was not generally considered "nice" by those who met him. I don't think he is a good example for this discussion.

Bush, Jr., however .. yes. Most people who have met him genuinely like him, and even while I've hated so many of policies I can see that. And, well, are those policy disagreements differences of opinion or could it make him "evil?" I, honestly, would never say the later. In my mind he was misguided at times in the decisions that lead to what I saw as real damage. I always believed he wanted to do the "right" thing, just that he had a different idea than me about what that was. And, well, in a way I worried that his sincerity made him more dangerous.

That is basically what I see in the types of situations I believe the OP is getting at. Sincerity behind what I believe is a highly misguided opinion. Even the nicest people can be misguided.

Although ... watching those clips, that group of people did not "feel" nice to me. You can feel the judgment, the arrogance, the assumption. None of those are "nice" qualities.


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23 Jun 2010, 2:25 pm

ruveyn wrote:
What does ideologically evil mean? Does it mean that someone has an opinion you disapprove of?

well yeah!
Anyone who holds an opinion I disapprove of is therefore ideologically evil, duh!


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23 Jun 2010, 2:55 pm

NeantHumain wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Actually your list isn't "obvious". Some are obvious, but generally speaking, this forum itself has a few libertarians, so it seems a lot harder to say that they are ideologically evil.

It was a joke. I mixed in somewhat mainstream (in the U.S.) political points of view with more extreme ones. From a left point of view, though, right-libertarianism's foremost concern with business/economic needs—efficiency, productivity, free markets, the deficit, and less regulation—sometimes looks like a politicization of a personal fault (i.e., greed or a lack of compassion).

Yes, well, I can understand that, but you have to understand that even granting that, the list still fails. Libertarians are not that nice either. :P



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23 Jun 2010, 7:44 pm

DW_a_mom wrote:

Although ... watching those clips, that group of people did not "feel" nice to me. You can feel the judgment, the arrogance, the assumption. None of those are "nice" qualities.


I'm relying on what Louis Theroux himself said about the family.

Louis Theroux being interviewed wrote:
They don't separate their children from the real world either, do they?

They go to school; you can have normal conversations with these people. They're intelligent, high achieving, have good jobs, and they're kind, for the most part, when they're not on pickets. They're easy to communicate with and deal with too. It's just this one area - their pickets. They will even - so I'm given to understand and I have no reason to doubt it - work alongside gay people very happily in the work place. If a gay person goes along to talk to them outside the church or if a gay person even turned up to the church to attend a service, they wouldn't humiliate them or be rude to them; they'd shake their hand and welcome them in.

...

They're relatively "normal" apart from this obsession with the pickets?


Louis: Yes. In some ways they're a model family. All these things that you associate with the breakdown of families, like the dad's gone to the pub all the time or they just watch TV and the parents don't talk to the kids, well you can't put that on this family. They spend all their recreational time together and they all look out for each other. They don't really have friends outside the church because all their best friends are in the church. It's important to recognise the good qualities of the family as it helps explain why so many of them have stayed in it and embraced the hateful stuff.

...

Do you think you've come to an answer?

I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he's an angry person who's twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he's instilled that in his children and they've passed it on to their children. Although the second and third generation are by and large quite nice people from what I saw, they still live under the influence of their Gramps.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6507971.stm

It should be notted that while the second or third generation Phelps families might be quite "normal" (as Theroux states), Fred Phelps beat his children, exploited them by making them run all across the state selling candy, beat his wife, and abused amphetamines in the late 1960s.



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23 Jun 2010, 7:48 pm

ruveyn wrote:
What does ideologically evil mean? Does it mean that someone has an opinion you disapprove of? Who are you?

ruveyn


"Ideologically evil" is any ideologically excused reason to cause immense suffering on bystanders, generally based on something like discrimination against gender, orientation, or race. It also refers to people who advocate such suffering with a straight face.

I'm mainly thinking of racists, homophobes, and cultural conservatives here.



Jacoby
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23 Jun 2010, 8:10 pm

I suppose these "ideologically evil" people probably don't think of themselves or whatever they're doing as evil.



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23 Jun 2010, 9:34 pm

Jacoby wrote:
I suppose these "ideologically evil" people probably don't think of themselves or whatever they're doing as evil.


That's obvious. Almost nobody who commits or advocates immense evil thinks they're committing or advocating evil. The problem is why do ideologues of hate tend to be nicer people then those who advocate a less venomous ideology? I mean, to bring the notion home, many have commented on how many Islamist Terrorists seem to be such nice people.



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23 Jun 2010, 11:53 pm

Keep up a good front, so you can stab 'em in the back.

Actually, a memetic approach also works very well in describing this. The VISIBLE ideologues are people who are successful at spreading their ideas. To be able to spread your ideas well, you have to appear to be nice, generous, and other positively viewed characteristics. People are genetically pre-disposed to copy people like that.

So the popular ideologues (the one's you'll see on TV), good and evil, will appear nice.