I love riddles, mysteria, and other genres of Medieval Literature.  

Some artists, if they are really famous work for themselves.

How do they get famous?  This is a romantic view but not reality.  Artists must have both a business sense and a social people sense in order to get ahead.  Many do work at other jobs and they also remain obscure.  Some are discovered centuries later - unless they are performing artists in which case their art is lost.

About your other statement about things getting over-explained and then losing meaning - I understand what you mean and tend to agree.  Our modern era has a faulty thought process in that regard.  If it can be measured and defined then it can be understood.  Sometimes those very measurements and definitions obscure a thing more and more.

Communicating in a forum is a different matter, though here too sometimes one might want to talk in metaphor.  But such a thing has to be carefully thought out.  You can easily lose people.  I don't know if it works.

Maxi

Originally written by Jacek K. on October 24, 2009 7:02 PM Originally written by John Bunch on October 25, 2009 12:33 AM one had to even whisper inside one's apartment (due to bugs, etc.). Again, I thought I would get away with an oversimplification even though I was aware of it. Your correction is spot on, John, but the situation you describe was far from common in the communist Poland. Obviously, the handful of people from the opposition (elsewhere referred to as "dissidents") were monitored in their own apartments, but "normal" people normally were not...

And has anyone in Poland attempted to quantify the pool of stooges working for your People's State?  (In East Germany it was ~10% of the population, an astounding figure.)  And who were they?  Perhaps "earnest" students?  Or "careerist" civil servants?

One nice thing about America: our provincialism, combined with the Second Amendment, makes such collaboration with totalitarian ideologies pretty unlikely....

Originally written by Scott Rasmussen on October 25, 2009 9:47 PM And has anyone in Poland attempted to quantify the pool of stooges working for your People's State?

I have never seen such attempts except for the clergy, but I don't remember the figures. It may have been ~10%* but clergy was a group under a particular pressure, probably comparable to civil servants.

One nice thing about America: our provincialism, combined with the Second Amendment, makes such collaboration with totalitarian ideologies pretty unlikely....

This wording worries me because I was expecting an assurance that the US provincialism, combined with the Second Amendment, simply make any totalitarian leanings in the US impossible so, naturally, there is nothing to collaborate with.

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* It is, indeed, the figure one can find, in Polish, at http://prawica.net/node/6164

Well in Europe we have freedom of speech and may it long last!

No you don't. Nobody has total freedom of speech.   

Originally written by Jacek K. on October 25, 2009 3:58 PM Originally written by Scott Rasmussen on October 25, 2009 9:47 PM And has anyone in Poland attempted to quantify the pool of stooges working for your People's State?  I have never seen such attempts except for the clergy, but I don't remember the figures. It may have been ~10%* but clergy was a group under a particular pressure, probably comparable to civil servants. One nice thing about America: our provincialism, combined with the Second Amendment, makes such collaboration with totalitarian ideologies pretty unlikely.... This wording worries me because I was expecting an assurance that the US provincialism, combined with the Second Amendment, simply make any totalitarian leanings in the US impossible so, naturally, there is nothing to collaborate with.

Maybe putting it this way is better: common sense, in combination with an armed citizenry, is the bane of totalitarian movements. 

Actually, American history shows that such movements don't really take hold here.  We've had extremists who at times had fairly large passive support (Father Coughlin comes to mind), and some who were members of violent secret societies, which in their turn overlapped with one of the political parties; for about 80 years, in some parts of the country the Klan was an adjunct to the Democrats.  We've had one genuine quasi-fascist populist, Huey Long.  But I tend to see him more as a swamp-dwelling proto–Hugo Chávez rather than the Southern Mussolini.

The one truly fascist party on US soil was tied to an ethnic group, viz. the German American Federation.  But if the "open borders" crowd keeps prevailing, I fear we'll have a home-grown Nick Griffin in a few years.

Originally written by Scott Rasmussen on October 26, 2009 5:50 PM American history shows that such movements don't really take hold here.

It didn't take hold in Poland either. Maybe it's a universal rule about totalitarianism? In the long run it simply won't survive.

Well...erm...I see communism as an extremist ideology — essentially fascism's Doppelgänger.  Communism was similarly rejected by rank-and-file Americans, though it was accepted by elite (so called) "opinion makers." 

Originally written by Scott Rasmussen on October 27, 2009 5:38 PM Communism was similarly rejected by rank-and-file Americans, though it was accepted by elite (so called) "opinion makers."

The latter not quite so in Poland, with the exception of the first post-WWII years when one could say that a brief flirtation with communism in the case of many writers was psychologically understandable.

But, leaving aside the general hopelessness of the post-Yalta situation in Poland and the ensuing apathy which cannot be mistaken for a conscious acceptance of communism, it turned out very quickly that just about the only ones who did accept communism in Poland were not  "opinion makers" but careerists and politicians. They both belong in the category of scum and not "elite" for me. Again, I am not talking about helpless masses who simply had to shut up or put up, hence a wrong impression, sometimes, that they made a choice by their free will to accept the US-UK-Russian Yalta arrangement. They never did.