In 1953 Mayer interviewed ten male residents of “Kronenberg” (in reality Marburg) to understand how ordinary Germans felt about Nazi Germany. The town, located in Hesse with a population of 20,000 and a university, was controlled by the United States during the postwar period of occupation. The interviews occurred during Mayer’s term at Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research as a visiting professor. All ten were in the lower middle class. The author was not a German speaker, and the men did not speak English.

The interviewees had the following occupations: baker, cabinetmaker, bank clerk, bill collector, law enforcement officer, salesperson, student, tailor, and teacher. Walter L. Dorn of the Saturday Review wrote that the interviewees were from a pro-Nazi bloc that was the “anti-labor, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic lower middle class”. The tailor had served a prison sentence for setting a synagogue on fire, but the others were never found to have actively attacked Jewish people. Mayer read the official case files of each interviewee.

The author determined that his interviewees had fond memories of the Nazi period and did not see Adolf Hitler as evil, and they perceived themselves as having a high degree of personal freedom during Nazi rule, except for the teacher. Additionally, barring said teacher, the subjects still disliked Jewish people. Mayer found that he sympathized with the personable qualities of his interviewees, though not their beliefs. Mayer did not disclose to the interviewees that he read their case files, nor that he was Jewish. Ernest S. Pisko of the Christian Science Monitor wrote “Had they known [that Mayer was Jewish] they would not have spoken frankly to him.” Pisko concluded that, therefore, the relationship built by the author and the interviewees was on “false pretenses.” At the time of the interviews, the interviewees were still not in favor of the democratic Bonn government. Pisko added that the interviewees could have objected to political developments that came had they known they would come, but that they failed to foresee how Nazi rule would develop.

The end of the book describes how the post-World War II United States took a pro-militarization stance, in the context of the Cold War, after initially rejecting the idea of militarizing Germany.

this is the book that answered most of my questions on that (But today we are seeing it happen in real time in America and yet no one is truly trying to stop it.) subject ☞https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free

what makes them “failures”?

i hate windows and i don’t use Ubuntu but it’s difficult to consider Microsoft or Canonical as failures.

I’m the invisible man
I’m the invisible man
Incredible how you can
See right through me

Every day? Must be hard if your year consist of 4-5 days total. Because that’s how many eclipses are technically possible in a year.

incredible indeed. Multiple eclipses even, every day!

there was a recent 99% invisible episode about this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/677-the-borrowed-nature-of-biomimicry/

that boxfish car looks good

Or are you seeing eclipses every day?

yes and that’s what i would comfortably call “incredible”.

i know that some cultures used the same word for blue and green. They didn’t perceive 2 different colours but hues of, for example, glaz.

orange is linked to the fruit in many languages. that’s why i posted those 2 photographs together.

Orangutans too are orange and i’m sorry for writing this sentence :) At least they’re not striped.

The Wikipedia article where you appear to have gotten that image of a tiger from even describes them as such in the first paragraph.

you must have edited that page after i have read :)

same as zebras, which are black with white stripes

same here 🤷

look at just the burnt umber and papaya whip(?)

Funnily enough this is actually why tigers are orange.

tigers are orange?

is it also incredible that you have 5 fingers on your hand? It may even be incredible that you have a hand.

It’s incredible how obtuse you are…

figuratively obtuse, literally incredible.

or is it “figuratively increbidle, literally obtuse” ?

fuck ICE, fuck tasers but then why did tasers become insufficient and they had to invent electroshock gloves?

fuck compliance too

It is quite incredible that the Sun and the Moon have the same apparent size and being in the right place at the right time I can just look at the Sun’s corona.

not “incredible”, i would say, but serendipitous.

also “The Moon is spiraling away from Earth at an average rate of 3.8 cm (1.5 in) per year, as detected by the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment.”

is it really “incredible” though?

Scotland interprets the word “brexit” differently. One day they will do the real brexit

also !pareidolia@sh.itjust.works

yes, he becomes mister bird when he is making music.

Two rear lights don’t really make you twice as safe. Silly thing to focus on.

every time i had an incident and the drivers just excused themselves with the “i didn’t see you”, i upgraded my lights to brighter, more visible ones.

except the last one, 2 weeks ago. Now it would be absurd to buy an even brighter light. I just told them to “look” and drive slower if they can’t see. If you don’t see a cyclist using a bike line on a Dutch roundabout under street lights, no bike light can help you.