I don't know that I would blame the armchair enthusiasts...by Mischief Professional 02/22/2012, 12:09pm PST
It's an occupational hazard of lawyers that you will every once in a while run into a client with a losing case and explain to them in no uncertain detail how much better off they'd be if they let the case go, only for them to insist that this death march go full charge because Truth and Justice and Whatthefuckever are more important than their own individual well being.
I've become fascinated with this concept of memes: that ideas, once let loose in the world, are subject to mutation and natural selection in a manner analogous to viruses. They don't evolve to further the purpose for which they were "intelligently designed," nor for the good of the hosts that adopt them, but merely for their own procreation.
Take the inherent contradiction of conspiracy theorists that brilliant institutional constructs maintain the status of the powerful, yet when these powerful individuals are put under the microscope they fail to show the brilliance capable of creating these institutions in the first place. Howard Zinn's argument that the idea that war is "human nature" serves to morally absolve the powerful from the consequences of the wars they start, could in fact be an evolutionary adaptation of the meme for its own survival. If that idea mutated into a form that was harmful to the powerful, it would become subject to even more environmental hazards (ie. suppression). Did the wealthy and powerful of feudal Italy secretly and intentionally decide to break all the "official" promises of the feudal system to counter-intuitively to maintain their own power, or were they powerful simply because they become hosts to symbiotic memes that evolved survival mechanisms in unexpected ways, symbiotes that were not identified until Niccolo Machiavelli published "The Prince?"
At the same time, I wonder if the armchair enthusiasts truly are bad people for endorsing the "war = human nature" meme. If evolutionary forces created the idea's infectious processes, how are we as mere humans able to combat them?
Then again, vaccination involves putting chunks of viral capsids into people's systems to effectively say, "if you ever run across something shaped like this, get rid of it pronto!" The Scientology meme infects its host little by little, starting with a personality test, going through stages of therapy, until the host's defenses are sufficiently compromised to accept the idea of Xenu and his alien ghosts in its entirety. If, however, you expose someone to Scientology in its entirety early, if they take a trip to LA and someone offers them a free personality test, they'll know to reject the infection attempt immediately.
All that said, I think you're misinterpreting laudable, fabs. I think he finds WWI fascinating like a trainwreck and wishes to understand it in a preventative sense, he's not celebrating it. That, and it gives him a great excuse to take a fun-filled trip to France.
I've been to France twice, laudable, and I've never had people be rude to me. Opening with, "Je ne parle pas Francais, parlez vous Anglais?" (I don't speak French, do you speak English?), made a much better impression than making the (to them arrogant) assumption that all French people speak English. Also, I doubt "You'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us!" will work all that well in Alsace.
