Iconic WWII photo canceled, then uncanceled

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Right back at you.

Only two things have happened throughout history:

1) People were not equal.
2) People were equal but some were "more equal" than others.

We've been living in (2) for some time, now.

Bill Clinton enters the chat. 😁

What kind of Marxist crap is that?! 😁

More seriously, yes, economics dominates both politics and religion in the modern world. However, most, if not all, socio/economic/political models will work, and work well, if we assume that people are good. The question is, which model works the best for how people really are? I don't have an answer to that question, and neither does anyone else. That said, we can definitely say that some paradigms have been more successful than others. Still, we can't necessarily attribute the more successful paradigms to the model, as the populations are different.

Let's take guns, for example. Australia had a bad day with them back in the 90's, and decided that was enough, and guns became way, way, way more restricted. The US has bad days with guns pretty much daily, and there's no way that Americans will restrict guns. Different population with a different mindset.

In any case, for a democratic capitalistic society to work well, at the very least, we would need people to be educated far, far, far more than they are in the US (and, I dare say, anywhere on Earth). But, I think we can all agree that most of us in this thread (save Bob, obviously) are pretty well educated, so, obviously, education is not enough. One has to also be willing to sacrifice at least some personal gain in the interests of a better society (and people's idea of what and how much to sacrifice varies wildly, independent of intelligence or education), and one has to also be willing to tolerate difference (which, again, varies wildly from person to person and the nature of the difference).

So, no, Marxism will never work as well as theory on a large scale. Same with capitalism. Same with socialism. There are simply too many variables that muddy the waters. But no matter what the system is, people can sacrifice a bit more than they do for the common good, and people can be more tolerant of others. If we instead focused on that, things would improve, but there will never be a utopia or anything even remotely close. If only because:

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." - Agent Smith

The bottom line is that humanity sucks. Always has, and always will. Sometimes humanity sucks more, sometimes it sucks less. But the problem is with the people -- everyone already thinks they are good people (does anyone actually believe that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., etc., etc. thought that they were anything less than good people trying to make the world a better place?). Of course, some people, like me, realize they are shit, and, on occasion, try to do something good to balance out the rest, and at least come out closer to neutral. And, also of course, there are some evil people who full on know they are evil and some good people who just do what they do, but I think they're a small minority. Most evil/bad people think they're every bit as good, if not more so, than good people.

So, how do we get people to be more good? No freakin' clue. I can't even seem to make myself more good. I mean, some things I would have taken as a given, such as when a cop executes someone that they are held accountable 100% of the time instead of what actually happens. If people in higher positions, either politically or economically are not held more accountable, as opposed to less accountable, as things are, then, no, things are not going to get better. But how do you hold people accountable? You need good people to do that. And all too often, good people in a position to do so (or, at the very least, less bad people) commit "suicide", "fall" out of buildings, etc., etc., etc..

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Nope! Not a fan of silly conspiracies when so much real deal bad stuff is going on. And, of course, I wasn't talking about Epstein, either, since he was neither good nor did he commit suicide -- there's your Clinton conspiracy theory. Might have even been a bipartisan mission with Trump. See? Republicans and Democrats can work together, after all! 😁

That's perhaps the best single sentence summary of this thread that can be constructed.

A stranger in a different photography forum (guess which one?) recommended a book to me a couple of years ago, one that might interest you and a few of the other posters here: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Even if you don't read the book, just checking the reviews from readers on Amazon is educational. You could concentrate on the one star reviews (they're 1% of the total). You'll see that those who hated the book insist that the author is alternately a leftist, a rightist, a pollyanna, a demon, or just an idiot. Ironically, such highly varied extreme reactions to the same input go a long way toward supporting the validity of the author's ideas and that of your one sentence summary. But you'd have to read the book for more details.

Kinda makes me wonder why we don't apply this knowledge to photography as well, specifically viewing images. Instead we seem to try so hard to link photographs to facts, figures, and on photo forums to exact physics and the way a camera works. We devise a system to decide which camera is best that uses an "equivalent photo" and so cancels the actual point of photography from the equation. Itself a broad assumption specifically designed to cancel out the content that is impossible to actually create. I often see people quoting equivalent apertures to a couple of decimal places even when they know that the quoted focal lengths on lenses and exif are approximate only. Also saw someone reply when asked if they thought a photo was correctly exposed that they would have to see the exif data first, they need to compare the numbers...

To create an equivalent iconic photo to the OP you would need a world conflict to be at an end, not a discussion of FOV. In fact a lot of these iconic photos work so well because the facts are obscured, so it leaves room for our memory and bias to fill that space which is the way photos take on meaning to us. The actual settings used are not what makes the photo great, it's what we want it to represent. The real problem is when we try to obscure the truth and promote perception and the prejudice that follows.

As indicated in the quote above, it's surprising just how much people want their perceptions to be fact, and how hard they will fight to maintain this perceived "freedom" (FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH - to all the Stalinists...) especially when it is driven by outrage. It's also surprising just how easy it is to manipulate a population if you provide that outrage alongside limiting their choices and controlling the information they receive.

Wealth, and power, in the developed nations is sustained by over-consumption, and nothing produces obscene wealth like the over consumption of fossil fuels. And there's nothing like education and democracy to put the brakes on that. Is it any wonder that those who currently hold that wealth and power are trying to undermine democracy and cement our dependence on what creates their wealth and power?

I was impressed though at how Trump stood up to and in the way of the government and so was protecting the population in the stolen documents case, for they are sure to come after you next... But also a little surprised at the endemic problem you seem to have with people stealing classified documents. Or perhaps it was the other way round, he wanted the people to stand between the government and himself.

I like to think the photo was a moment of joy, I like to believe it's true. But I do understand that the truth of the moment was far more human.

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