(February 21, 2026 at 11:24 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(February 21, 2026 at 11:04 am)Leonardo17 Wrote: Thumpalumpacus:
 
- That’s a good point. Iranians are not fools. The majority of them (I say 70%) know exactly what is being done to them and their country. But there is still a faction (I say 30%) who will be willing to fight the US or any invading force to death even if this means an imminent death. That’s the power of fanaticism.

That is not Islamist fanaticism. That's their ingrained anti-Americanism which predates the rise of the mullahs. There's also a patriotic element to it, wherein they would fight any invaders of Iran no matter their faith or nationality.

Again, nailed it. Islamist fanaticism would be if that 30% were going to other places to fight people who had never done anything to them, apart from not being Muslim (or being Muslim, but getting it wrong).

There’s nothing inherently fanatical about defending your country.

Boru

@Leonardo17

Quote:Many people tend to forget their ideology when they have nothing to eat or no heating or water at home…

I refer you to the current situation in North Korea. Now THAT’S brainwashing.

Boru

(February 21, 2026 at 11:04 am)Leonardo17 Wrote: / Back to Iran and to the 1930’s. These subliminal thought control mechanisms were very new in the 1930’s (Freud had just discovered what we know as the subconscious mind). Fascist ideologies used this and other methods to shape opinions in the way that suited them. And the people in that time did not have any starlink. Most of them did not know about concentration camps and were even shocked to discover them in 1945.

To what people you're referring to? Germans knew about concentration camps (it would be hard for them to not know when Dachau was one). They also had knowledge about other more murderous aspect of Reich policy:

The question of how much knowledge German (and other European) civilians had about the Holocaust while it was happening has been studied and debated by historians. In Nazi Germany, it was an open secret among the population by 1943, Peter Longerich argues, but some authors place it even earlier. [Longerich is at least in my opinion one of better historians writing on the subject of III Reich. In any case he is not some random clown].

Reich atrocities weren't a secret though populace most tied to them had obvious reason to pretend that they were.

@Leonardo17

Quote:These subliminal thought control mechanisms were very new in the 1930’s (Freud had just discovered what we know as the subconscious mind). 

First of all, the ‘subconscious mind’ was not original to Freud. The word, as well as the theory behind it, dates from 1708 (and possibly earlier).

Second, people who use the term ‘subconscious’ have not read their Freud. He had abandoned the term by 1900.

Boru

Thumpalumpagus:
 
The Shah was the greatest US and Israeli ally in the region. As of today, the crown Prince is ready to meet D. Trump at any time and Israel seem to be more than ready to do anything necessary regime change in Iran.
 
Besides: The US is not that unpopular in the region. Arabs in general have this sense of admiration toward westerners in general. But almost all of them have negative feelings toward us (Turks) because of the Ottoman oppression in the past.
 
BrianSoddingBoru:
 
That’s an issue I’ve been trying to explain since I became a member of this forum. Look at these recent comments of the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee:
 
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5gkkgdzkyo
 
Let me re-explain this issue once again:
 

 
- So what is religion?
 
- In it’s origin, it’s a sum of philosophical teachings and practical advices that includes methods that will allow individuals (like you or me) to create and maintain a stronger bond with this Ultimate Reality.
 
That’s all.
 
On North-Korea:
 
-  In North Korea they arrested Otto Warmbier and released him to the US when he was already dead:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Warmbier
 
The Regime sells its own people to China to work as slaves in Chinese Factories.
 
It’s a Tyrannical regime that operates as some sort of mafia more than any form of statehood.
 
/They don’t even need brainwashing. If they don’t like you they will just kill you
 
Ivan Denisovich:
 
- Even during the Nuremberg trials senior Nazi officers claimed they knew nothing about “The Final Solution)
 
But you too are right: How does one “not know” such a thing?
 
The Subconscious Mind:
 
- To “Brainwash” someone means to “hypnotize” someone so that you get to modify their very behavior and thought processes. Like when you see a toothpaste add 200 times, you will automatically buy that toothpaste at the supermarket without even knowing it.
 
If you look at the Guernica of Pablo Picasso you get to see this general state of confusion that is based on fake realities that are shaped by constant and often contradiction ideological propaganda (in Europe in the 1930’s).
 
So I don’t stand for this or that propaganda. I like to focus on existing realities and logical solutions to these (truly existing) problems. Dictators and populists do the opposite of that. They want to hypnotize everyone because they believe that we (the ordinary people) are basically fools who cannot understand what reality is and what needs to be done about this reality.
 
That’s the root cause of everything

(February 24, 2026 at 9:39 am)Leonardo17 Wrote: Thumpalumpagus:
 
The Shah was the greatest US and Israeli ally in the region. As of today, the crown Prince is ready to meet D. Trump at any time and Israel seem to be more than ready to do anything necessary regime change in Iran.
 
Besides: The US is not that unpopular in the region. Arabs in general have this sense of admiration toward westerners in general. But almost all of them have negative feelings toward us (Turks) because of the Ottoman oppression in the past.

None of that addresses my point above. At all.

(February 24, 2026 at 9:39 am)Leonardo17 Wrote: BrianSoddingBoru:
 
That’s an issue I’ve been trying to explain since I became a member of this forum. Look at these recent comments of the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee:
 
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5gkkgdzkyo
 
Let me re-explain this issue once again:
 

---

 
My proposal was that there is a Universal Being that is both creation itself and the creative Power that originated the whole universe. I usually refer to this as The Ultimate Reality. This is a singular reality and it is a inner phenomenon that is present within all living and non-living beings. It’s something like “The Force” in the Star Wars series.
 
No one has greater or lesser access to it. That phenomenon in equally present with Jeffrey Epstein and with the Dalai Lama or the current Pope himself.
 
So there is no “Chosen People” who are destined to take this or that part of the world because such is the will of God.
 
There is also no “Order by God” for Muslims to take over the entire planet and forcibly convert everyone into the only possible way of doing things (which is the Salafist interpretation of Islam).
 

---

 
- So what is religion?
 
- In it’s origin, it’s a sum of philosophical teachings and practical advices that includes methods that will allow individuals (like you or me) to create and maintain a stronger bond with this Ultimate Reality.
 
That’s all.

If that were all that religion were, it would be less controversial. But it's not. Religion also includes controversial and unevidenced claims about reality and moral guidance.

(February 24, 2026 at 9:39 am)Leonardo17 Wrote: - Even during the Nuremberg trials senior Nazi officers claimed they knew nothing about “The Final Solution)
 
But you too are right: How does one “not know” such a thing?

Jesus fucking Christ dude did you fucking expect them to admit to genocide when even Himmler said that Shoah "is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history"*?

You know about whom in III Reich we can speak with certainty that they didn't know about Endlosung? About toddlers.


*https://wwv.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%204029.pdf [It is a link to Himmler Posen speech]

@Leonardo17

Quote:- So what is religion?
 
- In it’s origin, it’s a sum of philosophical teachings and practical advices that includes methods that will allow individuals (like you or me) to create and maintain a stronger bond with this Ultimate Reality.

Maybe like you, definitely not like me. Please don’t include me in your nebulous fantasies.

Boru

Religion is not necessarily “philosophical teaching”, nor must it contain practical advice…and it very often…perhaps fundamentally, rejects reality as it is.

At its core… which is to say this is true of every religion despite any and every other thing being a variable, is that religion is a set of communal ideas about how the world -should be- and how people -should act- as individuals and as a community bound by those ideas. Nothing else about religion is universal. Not god beliefs or any other superstition, not betterment in any neutral sense or the specific and novel contents of betterment in a given case. It can be as simple as “we want more fish” - and so the world should be that way -because- it would be better™ if it -were- that way, and we should act a certain way to make that happen (even if those actions don’t have anything to do with more fish.

In my experience, trying to cover religion in high minded or practical glory tends to be driven by the hope that it might then rub off on some particular set of religious ideations held by the covered - with the added bonus of providing…or more accurately seeming to provide, a means by which said covered can summarily dismiss all other competing and contradictory religious ideations.

My advice, not that you’re asking, Leo….is to figure out what your fish is. Then you can speak to and toward that thing directly, without the cumbersome and often trivially false bagge of religious language and ideation- which will do more to harm, block, and even flat out prevent your fish…than it does to help.

So, for example, if you would like to see fewer theocratic regimes in the world for whatever reason - it’s likely counterproductive to try to sow that on to “true religion” or “real spirituality” because…..very obviously in that case…the theocrats -are- engaging in the absolute truth of their religion, of their spirituality. They believe this world should be ruled by god, and that people should act accordingly. That this is the thing to build a greater community around…and not for nothing, that it’s just good practical advice as well as being philosophically sound. They’re wrong on every count…but their wrongness is a matter of fact, and not a case of being religiously or spiritually incorrect. Not that this will matter to them, mind you…because their being wrong is, to them, the world being wrong. The very state of it. All bound up in ideation about some other state it ought be in…which is fundamental to the entire set, you see?