fractallambda

But in sober historical fact, this is an unreasonable belief; I chose the example of World War II because from my reading, it seems that events were mostly driven by Hitler's personality, often in defiance of his generals and advisors.

Bullshit.

Besides the contemporary accounts of the inevitability of war, there's also, computer modelling of state relations using pre-war evidence (In fact, the modelling even generates the split for the cold war, before the start of WWII).

For the record, Heinrich Heine also said in 1821: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen." (That was but a prelude; where they burn books,... (read more)

When I first watched that part where he convinces a fellow prisoner to commit suicide just by talking to them, I thought to myself, "Let's see him do it over a text-only IRC channel."

...I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very competitive.

You seem to imply that this is hard.

As if people had not been convinced to kill themselves over little else than a pretty color poster and screwed up sense of nationalism. Getting people to kill themselves or others is ludicrously easy.

We call it 'recruitment'.

Doing it on a more personal and immediate level just takes a better knowledge of the techniques and skill at applying them.

It's not like Derren Brown... (read 374 more words →)