The best thing about Firefox are the many extensions available, and “Stumble’s” one of them. If you don’t know this already, you should check out this webby called “World History”. It’s chock full of articles summarizing important events.

An example is this write up on Hitler’s ascent to power over here , and backed with sources (check out the books section at the bottom). The administrator has some interesting opinions also included, mostly about history and stuff. An article he wrote has quite a bit of bearing on a broad range of issues:

An absolutist might miss the mix in people - that a person can be rational in some areas of thought and irrational in other areas. An absolutist divides people into those who are evil and those who are not, failing to recognize the ease with which otherwise good people can fall into evil deeds. An absolutist might sound like a Zoroastrian and reduce an issue to what he calls a war between good and evil or between light and darkness.

Mothers can be absolutist about their child, seeing the human side of their child and refusing to see psychopathologies that got him into trouble with society. For her, her little boy is a good boy forever.

In other words, someone is an absolutist when he or she confuses a part with the whole. Put another way, they oversimplify. Analyzing the origins of a war, someone might reduce it all to oil when there are a variety of issues involved.

In the same way, we could be absolutists about historical correctness, or about UMNO being the source of all evil in Malaysia. The admin sounds like a student of history (duh), and if anything, that’s one lesson I hope all of us don’t forget. I think I’m gonna go blind reading all those entries :p