Is German the language of bad people?
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German is the language of bad people
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Pro German is the language of the mass-murderous Hitler and the German Nazis.
Objection Also the language of Einstein, Planck, Kepler, Gauss and many more.- Objection There are many other dictators and murderous groups which have spoke different languages.
- Objection The question is not whether German is the only language of bad people. And thus, the above is irrelevant to the motion.
- Objection The use of the definitive article and the singular ("the language") implies that there is only one.
- Objection Due to the phrase "bad people" being indefinite, the question can be interpreted as "Is German the language that certain bad people speak?", not ruling out the possible existence of other groups of bad people who speak other languages.
- Objection That would make the question trivial as long as you assume that bad people who speak German exist at all.
- Pro German is the language of the pseudophilosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
- Objection These are not generally recognized as pseudo and bad people.
- Pro German is the language of Marx, one of the most dangerous men who ever lived, whose pseudophilosophy and pseudoeconomics has caused untold harm and still presents a tangible risk to the world.
- Objection That assessment of Marx is not generally accepted.
- Objection Even if we accept the above: if German is the language of thinkers, also bad thinkers are likely to end up using the language.
- Objection English is also a language of thinkers, but one struggles to find anything as bad as Marx (or other culprits/suspects). (French, another language of thinkers, fares worse than English given all those post-modern pseudophilosophers.)
- Objection No way to measure as bad as Marx, was trying to spread his wisdom and an idea, that at the time seemed pretty decent, you cannot directly accuse him as the reason for all the killing that happened in communist states such as the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China. If this were the way things worked, we could accuse early monarchs for the crimes their children did, or the Greeks for the crimes committed by democracies. Pseudo Philosophers that spoke French or English: Auguste Comte, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Herbert Spencer Furthermore, you can argue a lot of English and French Royalty were also peak evil with their colonies enslaving millions of innocent people and killing thousands more. Adding to that: Maximilien Robespierre, Philippe Pétain, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier MOREOVER, a majority of mass murderers, serial killers, and other criminals, especially in the US (majority) and UK have all spoken English.
- Pro German is the language of the absolutist and rigid Austro-Hungarian empire, oppressing the poor non-German nations in it.
- Objection This seems very one-sided; one should be able to say good things about the empire.
- Pro German is the language of two of the three empires that partitioned the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, per Wikipedia:Partitions of Poland.
Con
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Con German is the language of great poets (e.g. Goethe, Schiller, Rilke).- Con German is the language of great literary authors (e.g. Goethe, Mann, Schiller).
- Con German is the language of great philosophers (e.g. Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Popper, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle)
- Con German is the language of great mathematicians (e.g. Leibniz, Euler, Riemann, Gauss, Weierstrass, Cantor, Dedekind and Hilbert).
- Objection People who excel at mathematics or in other areas can be bad people.
- Objection Assumption.
- Con German is the language of great logicians (e.g. Frege and Gödel)
- Con German is the language of great scientists (e.g. Kepler, Mendel, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger).
- Con German is the language of great musicians (e.g. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brams and Handel).
- Con German is a major language in Switzerland, the only (or one of very few?) world's direct democracy, where citizens really participate on the government.
- Con German is not *the* language of bad people because not all bad people speak German.
- Con For all the bad people that spoke German, there is no correlation between being bad and speaking German, no logical idea. Furthermore, there are bad people that spoke other languages, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, etc.
