11 replies to For the children | Follow replies to this article | TrackBack URI

1. Belinsky /# 11am • 17 Jun 2008

   Oh…my…God…

2. Roderick T. Long /# 11am • 17 Jun 2008

   Check out the two reviews.

3. Belinsky /# 2pm • 17 Jun 2008

   Haha. I thought the first review was serious at first, and I was horrified…

   Check out these gems too: http://www.amazon.com/Playmobil-Rescue-Police-Station-Jail/dp/B0002BAEYY/ref=pd_sim_dbs_t_img_5
   http://www.amazon.com/Playmobil-SWAT-Helicopter-Jet-Skier/dp/B000P2ZMFQ/ref=pd_sim_dbs_t_img_4
   http://www.amazon.com/Playmobil-SWAT-Police-Craft/dp/B000P2ZX8C/ref=pd_sim_dbs_t_img_9
   http://www.amazon.com/Playmobil-Radar-Patrol/dp/B0002YM17Y/ref=pd_sim_dbs_t_img_13

   Observe the sniper rifles held by the SWAT officers.

4. nath /# 2pm • 17 Jun 2008

   This will be needed so there is somewhere to lock up the poor playmobil figure that gets beaten up and arrested: http://www.amazon.com/Playmobil-Rescue-Police-Station-Jail/dp/B0002BAEYY/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t

5. Joel Davis /# 2pm • 17 Jun 2008

   While we’re on the whimsical side of things, how about the romanian village that knowingly voted for a dead man as mayor rather than risk change with a different person in office.

6. Mike Gogulski /# 2pm • 17 Jun 2008

   Fifty bucks? How big is this freaking thing?

   And, as the second reviewer asks: What, no taser?

   Playmobil has so far rejected my proposal for a Japanese Internment Camp Play Set, so I’m gonna have to keep shopping it around. Lego, maybe?

7. David Houser /# 3pm • 17 Jun 2008

   I was going to try to resist looking at the Amazon page so I could choose to believe that this was a parody, but I lost that game. I wonder why it’s priced so as to be out of reach of those who most need to be indoctrinated to easy submission?

   It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was disgusted by McDonald’s employee play sets and baby bottles with Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper logos. Such simpler times…

8. Aster /# 1am • 18 Jun 2008

   “I was going to try to resist looking at the Amazon page so I could choose to believe that this was a parody, but I lost that game. I wonder why it’s priced so as to be out of reach of those who most need to be indoctrinated to easy submission?”

   Perhaps because the classes whose job it is to use their brains for the system need to be rigidly brought up to love it, while no one cares what the proles think? (they are ‘not human beings’, and have been deliberately structurally abandoned to functional illiteracy).

   I wish I could say it won’t work, that a society which only allows people to work with their brains if they don’t use their brains will collapse. But positivism and technocracy make so viciously for the most functional possible dictatorship. There would be some solace if we knew that the closed society didn’t work, but Singapore seems to function fairly well. What I fear is a dictatorship which lasts forever because it is economically usustainable as a modern society- one which tortures the most sensitive and inquisitive minds who can’t live without freedom but keeps grinding on successfully with the rest of the miserable and repressed population.

   I look at these little playskool sets and the prosperous and intensely ‘normal’ life surrounding such toys, and think of this famous quote (from George Steiner):

   “We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?”

   Those of us schooled by Rand might think not only of culture but of reason, of science, of technology and prosperity. If human beings really are capable of being practical and intelligent and continue effectively forever a culture of horrors, then I fear that all of our hopes have failed forever. Richard Rorty is then right that here is no answer to power of the torturers.

   I don’t yet think this is the case- what is happening to America might help to prove it. But I fear. I fear.

9. Anon73 /# 1pm • 18 Jun 2008

   then I fear that all of our hopes have failed forever.

   Actually I agree with the quote. C.S. Lewis expressed something similar when he said that evil these days is done by clean-shaven men in tidy offices wearing nice suits. Human nature just doesn’t seem as resistant to tyranny when trained from birth to love it. As to whether that means there is no hope, I’m not certain, but I understand your horror. Orwell best expressed it by saying the state is like the image of a boot, stamping on a human face forever.

10. David Reynolds /# 2pm • 18 Jun 2008

    Equally amusing is the Playmobil Security Check Point. http://www.amazon.com/Playmobil-3172-Security-Check-Point/dp/B0002CYTL2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1213826928&sr=1-2

    There are some great customer reviews for that one, too.

11. Anon73 /# 6pm • 18 Jun 2008

    The comment about the Playmobil Abu Ghraib prison was hilarious in a dark kind of way…