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ArisKatsaris comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
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He hits the nail on the head: "At the point when everyone who fought in [the World Wars], and everyone who remembers anyone who fought in them, has died, surely they'll become as comic as the Vikings."
After all, the purpose of moral disapproval of atrocities is simply to avoid offending anyone who could be personally connected to them†. Even when people acknowledge that there's nothing besides length of time separating ancient genocides from modern ones, there's just no way to spark the same feeling of outrage.
† Of course, longstanding cultural divides can keep offense alive even when the secondhand witnesses are gone; the Armenian genocide shows no sign of becoming funny, because the acknowledgment of it is a continuing rift between Armenians and Turks.
That's absurd. When I disapprove of Serbs (and Greek volunteers) massacring civilians in Srebrenica, it's not because I want to avoid offending people, it's because I want to offend them into shame, so that they stop supporting policies and parties in my own nation (Greece) that will make a repetition of the butchery and support of such butchery, likely.
You talk as if all discussion of politics is a signalling of status, rather than a sometimes hopeless attempt to influence the future into a better direction.
You're right, of course- my comment needs modification. I'm just talking about the case where one isn't really angry about an old atrocity, but would still hesitate to make a joke about it. I'm not made of Hansons all the way down.