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Willow Danube wrote:

And you just made my point.

 Lets talk about the Talibans... people went beserk went the Talibans destroyed a great iconic symbolism of the olden era in favour of Islamic fundamentalist doctrines. Historians thought they were crazy... but has anyone actually looked at their point of view? Why they thought it was wrong? if what they did actually made sense? Why was it no western historians ever wrote and made it a known fact of the view points of the Talibans? And if they did? How do I know these authors did not presummed or wrote with judgemental atitude? 

 

You are teasing me right?  The "world" pleaded with the Taliban to not destroy these monuments.  Westerners, Middle Easterners, Arabs, Christians; just about everyone in the world witnessed this destruction: and asked WHY?  WHY?  It was Omar (issued the edict) Obaidullah (carried out the destruction,)  Muttawakil (laughed in our faces,) and Wakil who were unable to 'express' the Talibans 'point of view'.  

This was the best the world got: "Mullah Wakil insisted that the edict was an internal matter for Afghanistan and had been "excessively exagerrated in the outside world and the media".  

It made no sense to anyone but the Taliban.   Yes, the world asked and wanted to know.  

 

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Let me quote Mayalily on that.. "There are no two brains alike".

I in total agreement with when it comes to Jesuits school... some of the great minds I've encountered while growing up were taught or had been to a Jesuit school. I don't know exactly what Vietnam's education system is but I can guess it is American? ... and Yes, I can see the flaw with british education system as well... the problem with centralized education is that we tend to spoon feed our students and it doesn't really encourage original thinking which is vital in producing fresh new ideas but rather cumulative thinking which encouraged improvement of the current idea. I think both are important and cannot exist without one or the other.

But I still think that when it comes to historical facts, we cannot encourage ideas and interpretations based on geographical, belief or political background. I think all historians of the world should create a 'round table' to discuss and make one correct and unbiased view of what actually happened, why, how, when, what, etc... based on proven scientific findings and reliable witnesses. Most importantly, We need to decide the 'object lesson' of said event so the younger generations can learn from it and use it for not only a greater but better cause.

@ Maya: I like your middle ground thinking but No, I don't think I won or as Charlie Sheen said it, "Winning!". My arguments could be interpreted by many as on the brink of being a communist (and it may be so..). All my arguments are based on my own experience and judgment from being educated in both centralized and decentralized system. My interpretation of history however were based on my socio-geographic experiences. As far as I am concerned, there are many discrepancies and it is wrong and something should be done to get everyone in one direction. Nuff said!

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From my stand point of view, whatever that was stated in writings were all about everyone pointing fingers at the Afghan leaders and the ignorance of the religious leaders in retorting.

While I cannot comprehend the herding mentality of the Afghans, I understood the reason why they did what they did. As far as these mullahs and religious leaders were concerned .. the buddha statue is nothing but a reminiscent of a wrong and corrupted past. It had no value nor did they think it will unite the intricately diversified etnics of the people of Afghanistan.

They were laughing at You because of your prejudicism against them, they were laughing at the Arabs because they knew if it had been them, they would do the same thing (have you seen any official Buddhist pagoda and temple in Bahrain?), they were laughing at the Christians because they hated the Christians.

Most importantly they did it to show their defiance against rejection on what they believed in. Had anyone from the opposite side 'acknowledged' this anywhere? It probably weren't internationally published except in a small local paper in a small district in Afghanistan...

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I'm so relating to you Willow because at the root of this what is conjecture and what isn't?  What is perceived truth and what isn't?

When I watched the movie "Cold Mountain" it gave me a whole other complete perspective of the American Civil War. 

 

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ETA:  I didn't reply to the post highlighted in blue. 0.o ??

And I like this quote by Willow:

It probably weren't internationally published except in a small local paper in a small district in Afghanistan...

And my answer to that is:  Willow Win again  and bingo! 'cause there is propaganda everywhere not to mention we are all getting a lot of different news and persceptives, and propaganda, even if in the same country, and especially on the internet.

And, a committee to set up what's more or less appropriate sounds like a good idea, too.  But do some researching at a college, not the internet. 

 

 

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we should not restrict any symbolism because one side of the war had a more violent army, the fact that the allies had better military strategies and weapons doesnt mean that they were good guys, the nazis killed a lot of people, but how many people killed the allies? its a historic secret.

there were germans that felt very proud of what hitler was doing, it lift up germany when it needed the most, if i was a german at that time, probably i would have been proud of my government watching how my country gets better and better, anybody would do if that happens in its country.

there has been a lot of demonizing propaganda against the nazis from the allies because they lost the war, if hitler would have won he would be remembered as "the great conqueror", its hypocritcal to blame someone because of the amount of people he killed when they killed even more.

Linden Lab should not restrict the germans who felt that nazism was good from expressing themselves just because they may be the minority, just like when the palestines had a place in SL and the jewish were trying to bring it down.

everybody should be allowed to express its opinion, being a christian, a nazi, a palestine, a taliban, whatever, thats was the purpose of the first amendment, that anyone can say anything without being prosecuted for it, so that there would not be ideology discrimination.

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The real reason that the Taliban destroyed the buddhas was because they could.  This is why any entity holding power does anything that has a negative impact on anyone...because they can.  Those buddhas had been staring down the Bamiyan valley for centuries.  If their existence was such a danger to Afghans, would not they have been a danger for centuries?

While a sad footnote in the history of the Taliban, most of the world has moved on...forgotten about those buddhas, and are on to other things.  We are a world of short attention spans.

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Willow Danube wrote:

 

They were laughing at You because of your prejudicism against them, they were laughing at the Arabs because they knew if it had been them, they would do the same thing (have you seen any official Buddhist pagoda and temple in Bahrain?), t

Buddhist no, because Buddhism never reached the Arab world. Its reached the same places as much of the muslim world, but it never reached into the Arabian penninsula or north Africa. BUT... go through the middle east and all over muslim countries you will find temples and shrines to Drews, Jews, Bahai, Babylonian and Summerian, Christian, Zarathustrian (spelling?), and the big one: the entire freaking nation of Egypt is like a shrine to 'pagan gods' that it is the Arabs themselves who work so hard to preserve in the name of history.

And even the Japanese who were alive during the war know what they did in places like Nanking or Korea... they just chose to color a different picture of it after the war and have a culture where you don't question your elders. The Germans of the WWII generation tried to do the same thing, but when their kids got to university they took one look around them and told their parents to shut the [bleep] up with the lies and admit what they'd done. Which is why modern Germany is now so humanitarian and conscious of the need for global human rights - and has monuments all over the place to remembering the holocaust.

 

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Yes, I know Storm, and I'm not a Nazi sympathizer... I'm just trying to steer people away from compartmentalizing and/or cliches for this type of sim.

As I stated earlier in the thread I am against war altogether, don't understand why in the first place, and would really have no interest in violent or war themed sims.

It reminds me of the kids who used to wake me up on a Saturday at 7 a.m. playing cowboys and indians.  What a cliche cowboys and indians is and a bunch of hogwash.   It's like people make up myths about the good guys and the bad guys that it's a compartmentalized cliche with no basis in reality (talking about the American Indians here, not Hilter). 

 

ETA:    I wanted to mention and encourage anyone reading this thread to watch the movie "The Reader".  It truly opened my eyes. 

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There are several historical symbols that are always going to cause offence to some people whether or not they are illegal or against some rule.  He may be asking if he will get into trouble for using a swastica, but even if the answer is no that doesn`t mean that it won`t cause offence to some people.

Someone built a cool sculpty eagle and textured it metal & we used it on a theatre. Turned out that some people saw that as a Nazi Iron Eagle and took offence to it. It was nothing like THE Iron Eagle, but the fact that it was an eagle and was metal was apparantly enough for it for it to be offensive...Go figure.

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im not saying that he was good, im saying the allies were as bad as he was, but written in history, they are the good guys, and nazis were the only bad guys. hitler is one of the devils of popular culture, napoleon, alexander the great, bush, are rarely mentioned as bad guys, even after they killed thousands of people. the making hitler worse that other massive murderers is the allies propaganda.

if you see a president coming in and you see that your country is a lot better now that he is in, the economy is way better, the way of life of everyone, and you come out of a crisis that you had before he came, its a new era of happiness for your country, it would be easy to be patriotic and support the efforts of your government

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You see.. We, as the people of the world were so dogged on in making the right thing. We thought they were killing a historical symbol... They did it because they could, no doubt... It's their way of expressing themselves. If people of the world screamed at the americans to tear down the obelisk monument just because it is offensive to them.. what would your reaction be?

Don't you think, by telling them what they shouldn't be doing is just us jumping right into the dumping ground of political correctness? Aren't we suppressing their way of Freedom of Expression? Who are we to say they were wrong? It is their country, their people, their culture, their prerogative.

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The meaning of a symbol exists not in the symbol itself but in the minds of the individuals who assign a meaning to it. That meaning is also not just a collection of definitions but it also includes an emotional element. When someone is "offended" by a symbol, it is because it elicits an emotional response based on how that person has learned to respond to it. Because people have vastly different life experiences, there is, in truth, no way to control the affective component of a symbol, but what we can usually be sure of is that anything can cause offence if it is encountered experientially in such as way as to cause an emotional component to be attached to its meaning.

What makes the issue of symbolism so troublesome is that homo sapiens are much more homo symbolicus than we care to admit, and the creation of taboo symbols is a fundamentally primitive human characteristic that no amount of "civilization" can cure. All cultures like to think of themselves as being rational, honest, and just, but scratch the surface of the civilizing veneer and we're still ready to swing clubs at each other. Ask any American if burning a US flag should be a criminal offense and you'd be surprised (or not) how many think it should be. Setting fire to a piece of colored cloth doesn't seem to be grounds for locking someone up, but if the cloth happens to have certain colors arranged in a certain pattern, things change: the primitive instinct gnaws through and we have the ultimate irony of people who believe in a symbol that stands for freedom of expression should not be used by people to express themselves freely!

The only way to defuse a potent symbol is to challenge it, not ban it. The specific example of the swastika, which as most people are aware only became stigmatized after the Second World War, demonstrated how much we are in thrall to our emotions. If you create an environment to simulate 1940's Germany and avoid including a swastika, you are then committing the grievous sin of historical revisionism - changing the past to avoid any discomfort in the present. If people are offended by the appearance of a swastika in a simulation, that's understandable; but we should not be censoring that contextual reality because it causes some irritation. On that basis, we end up slowly banning anything and everything that causes "offence," and people can be very creative in deciding what is offensive! The two phrases to be very wary of are "It's for the good of the children" and "It's for the good of the people," both of which are trotted out regularly by pressure groups and, sadly, elected politicians.

So go ahead and create a sim of 1940's Germany and out swastikas in it, along with other symbology that appeared at the time. Some people may be offended - and may even turn up to complain and demand the sim be closed down - but ignoring the symbology to avoid offense is, oddly enough, much more dangerous in the long term.

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I'm advocating the movie "The Reader" here because were all the Nazi's villians?  We know the higher ups were, the ones making the big money.  But were all the Germans (in the lower classes) who became Nazi's a complete and total villian, or could their have been other reasons they became a Nazi?  The movie "The Reader" may provide some answers.  It did for me, anyhow. 

 

ETA:  This quoted a post I didn't hit reply, too.  :/   It's done this to me many times... I dunno know what's up with that. 

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I know this sounds odd....but is it just me or does anyone wish peple would do more original world building or get heavily into an alternative history bit and focus on game mechanics and so on to make awsome games you just can not stop seeing or hearing about.

Portal! This is a great example. That cube was from history? It was from your childhood? Was it from a large company? Was it famous, previous to it's attachemnt to the game Portal? I have not seen that sucker before. It is new, it didn't need anything but fans to talk about it,show it and so on. I saw it and then read a thread where people where saying things about Portal, read up on it online. Portal looks amazingly fun and I heard it has some humour to it....but, the one thing I saw before I knew what this game was was that cube! They didn't need history, they didn't need fame (ok, teh company has distribution, marketing and advertising)

Not knocking those how love historical reinactments, historically based games or stuff based on fameous characters. I like some of those to! I played some in my time as well. But, yeah...new stuff! Something fresh or new! Now I can't remember that one game I saw....it was neat. It had a unique first peson perspective thing and neat lighting. I saw it in a article on game design, the fundamental composition and scene making opportunities in a level. It had great lighting! I wonder where my typed notes are on that...oh, now I have to leave and read what I wrote and see if I recorded the name.

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Quite right Venus. There are ways of depicting certain symbols, insignia etc. that are clearly designed to cause offence & other ways that are merely using them for historical accuracy.  The latter may still cause offence, because the subject matter is in itself morally offensive, but remembering how bad things happened is our only defence, when it comes to recognising them so they never happen again.

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There has been a great deal of thoughtful commentary here. To those who have pointed out that 'winners' write the history books: that is certainly true. But so do losers. All one can do is try to keep one's mind open; our ideas of history should evolve as we continue to learn. My father was fond of quoting Napoleon: "History is agreed-upon fiction". I've since seen that Napoleon probably stole that from Voltaire and that Voltaire got it from an obscure Greek philosopher whose name I can't recall. Of course, I learned all that from a book of history so who knows?

One does have to remember that those who wrote histories of things in which they played a part tend to have just a bit of bias in their favor. I don't really think Winston Churchill was solely responsible for the defeat of the Axis, but reading his history of the Second World War certainly does give that impression (I exaggerate slightly). Thucydides is somewhat famous for NOT overstating his part in his history of the Peloponnesian War. I think the key to getting it 'right' or as close to right as possible is to try to read from both sides of issues and to try to find 'detached' sources.

To the OP: The idea of a simulation that tries to recreate the era of the 1940's and WWII could hardly avoid containiing swastikas and references to the Nazis. Yes, it would probably be objectionable to a lot of people. I can't see how it could be against the TOS, though. The creator would just have to decide if the harrassment (and I don't doubt there would be some) is worth the effort.

And last: I have read all the posts up to this point and I have found not a single instance of flirting. Not ONE. I find that very disappointing and I certainly hope that never happens again.

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Dillon Levenque wrote:

And last: I have read all the posts up to this point and I have found not a single instance of flrting. Not ONE. I find that very disappointing and I certainly hope that never happens again.

Good words Dillon.  But, what's a firt?  I looked it up in urban dictionary, but cold not find an answer.  

I would be pretty upset if somebody firts in my OP.  

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I spelled it that way intentionally; I frequently omit vowels when the word can be readily recognized without them, to save time. You believe that, right? It's actually true but only when I'm writing notes. And I'd have omitted the second 'i' as well had I been doing that. I believe Hebrew or Yiddish makes use of that strategy right from the start.

In any case I've now fixed it for clarity.

 

 

 

And now I've edited this one for spelling.

 

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