I Was Arrested for Learning a Foreign Language. Today, I Have Some Closure

>I have zero love for TSA, but ...

>I am not racist but ...

Go fuck yourself.

Yeah, none of that reads to me as "parents have the right to raise their own children". It can certainly be construed that way when convenient for people who want to keep a leash on their kids, but if you actually read all of those qualifiers, it's actually saying the exact opposite.

Who determines the "appropriate direction and guidance"? What is a "family environment"? When is "interference" arbitrary? As an example, if local custom dictates beating a child mercilessly every other month for absolutely no reason but tradition, that's a good reason for intervention, to me. I don't care about local custom in such a case.

(Also, holy shit, you think honor and reputation are sacrosanct according to the UDHR? I just lost a ton of respect for that document if your reading is correct. Goodbye, journalism.)

Absurd. You could carry a language textbook in the carry-on baggage and use that. All these arguments depend on the (false) premise that one is helpless to do anything else in these circumstances, and that the inability to do this one particular thing on the flight is going to wreck your life. It's self-serving bullshit.

I don't care much for the TSA, but the fact is that an organization like that is always going to prioritize collective safety over the convenience of the individual. Thus, if you're a chemistry student, your might want to consider studying something other than explosive reactions on your next flight. If you're an engineering student you might want to consider studying something other than structural deficiencies in airframe design during your next flight. If you're a psychology student, you might want to consider studying something other than Stockholm syndrome and the interpersonal dynamics of hostage situations during your next flight.

The sad fact is that some people are inclined to jump to the worst possible conclusion and if the security screeners don't pick up on it, an overly imaginative/paranoid fellow passenger may do so and alert cabin staff to their suspicions, however ill-founded. People who are going to be crammed into a plane for hours on end, many of whom are nervous about flying to begin with, are simply not at their best, and if you're going to be sitting in close quarters with a bunch of strangers then maybe you should ask yourself 'would this weird people out?' in the interest of minimizing the potential hassle to yourself.

Case in point: I have a large reinforced equipment case that I often use on film shoots. It has huge bright yellow-and-block 'nuclear radiation' symbols on the main side panels. It's small enough to carry, large enough to carry my most important gear, and the striking graphics mean that a) it never gets lost/forgotten/mixed up with anything else when equipment is being moved around or loaded into trucks and b) anyone who doesn't know what it is leaves it the fuck alone, so I don't have to have eyes on it every second on the day on a busy film set where I have many other things to do. I've had it for years, I can pack and unpack it in the dark, and it's paid for itself many times over. I would go so far as to say it's part of my 'personal brand' - people remember from different jobs when they see the suitcase, it's a funny little icebreaker when I work with people the first time and so on.

Do I use it to transport my gear when I have to fly somewhere? No, because I'm not an idiot. When I need to fly I repack my stuff into a boring and rather inferior black ABS Pelican case, because a bright yellow box with radioactivity symbols on it is liable to give people the wrong impression. I'm OK with taking it on a train or something - I've had police officers ask me about it a few times but I'm always happy to open it and explain what is is, and it's never separated from me the way checked airline baggage is, so there's little potential for confusion. Under the first amendment I certainly have a right to use the sort of luggage I wan, and I know that there's no nefarious purpose or intent to disturb anyone when I carry the thing around. But I also realize that there's a potential for people to get the wrong impression if they encounter it in a different context, and that having people form the wrong impression in an airport would result in significant inconvenience, not least to myself. Accommodating the slightly irrational anxieties of people by leaving my 'radioactive' gear case at home is such a trivially small (and voluntary) abridgement of my rights to self-expression as to not matter. Life is too short for me to waste it sitting around trying to win arguments with security guards over my right to engage in attention-seeking display.

I don't mind the question at all. But I'm not sure there are many German documentaries portraying German soldiers in WW2 in a positive light. There's a strong cultural fear of making Germans in the Third Reich appear too sympathetic, although I think this hinders properly understanding what got us into that situation in the first place (other than the "obvious" answer that Hitler and his nazi troupe mind controlled us and everybody suddenly became evil overnight) and how we can prevent similar things from happening in the future (aside from the "obvious" answer of censorship and knee-jerk overcompensation).

A lot of the stories I'm aware of are hearsay, but it's not exactly easy to get reliable accounts about this kind of thing. One example is that in Eastern Europe in the early stages of WW2 the Wehrmacht soldiers would allegedly often not care much for the orders regarding the jews (they were just regular soldiers after all, often ones that had been soldiers before the nazis came to power) and would initially often be greeted with sympathy because the locals thought they came to kick the Soviets out. But then the Wehrmacht would often soon be followed by the SS who would of course be far less friendly to the civilians.

As far as I can tell, things generally got progressively worse throughout WW2 as the older soldiers died out and were replaced by younger soldiers who had been raised under the nazi rule and were thus far more likely to just follow the orders and believe the ideology.

An extreme example of this is the last ditch attempt at the end of the war where they tried to raise a militia of what were essentially still children to protect the mostly defeated fatherland against the "invaders".

I think it helps to remember events like the Christmas truce in 1914 when thinking about WW2: yes, the nazis were far worse than any of the powers in the Great War before that, but initially a lot of the soldiers were simply German soldiers, not "nazi" soldiers. And even those that would eventually "earn" that label would often do so for far more complex reasons than just being "evil demon soldiers".

For example, the idea of racial supremacy (which was popular in many other places than Germany at that time, btw) coupled with the economic changes caused by the seizure of Jewish properties, horrible as it was, meshed well with the less educated and less well-off segments of the population. If your life is in the gutter, it can be very uplifting to be told you're special because you're part of the master race. Especially if that is combined with a clear enemy (the treacherous Jews sabotaged the wealth you deserve) and what at that moment superficially seemed like a change for the better (look up the opinions of other European leaders about Hitler in the years before WW2 if you find the time -- it's pretty disconcerting).

Basically, Hollywood tropes aside, I doubt that there were as many hardcore nazis as you'd think. There were a lot of war crimes and a lot of crimes against humanity, of course, and the Holocaust is one of the worst things that happened in the last century, but I don't think you need to be a truly evil person to do unspeakable things -- and IMO that's the real lesson here.

As a German I'm anxious about the direction the US (in particular) is heading, not because I worry they could become Hollywood-style "evil" but because it's so easy to end up in a situation where you don't even realise what you're contributing to until sufficient time has passed. I'm certain most people who ended up contributing to the horrors of the Third Reich had no idea what they were doing even if from the perspective of today you'd think it must have been crystal clear to them at the time.