The unfortunate thing here is that the swastika was appropriated by a genocidal regime. The symbol still has a totally different life in India and Japan.
I've always hated that phrase, because it's objectively, provably bullshit. Almost everyone has some experience of a friend of acquaintance who become someone other than themselves when they got hammered.
I hate the phrase because it presumes that the person one becomes for less than 1% of their conscious life, while under the effects of a mood-altering drug, is a greater representative of their true self than their behaviour of the other 99%+ of their life while they are sober and clear of head.
The problem here is that there are a bunch of other situations in life for which being inebriated is a reasonable proxy. Sleep deprivation, extreme stress, social isolation, etc.
New parents often suffer from all of these! If you are a shithead when drunk, are you also going to be a shithead to your wife and newborn child when they most need you to be level-headed and calm?
Similarly for any sort of dangerous job. If I'm going to be sailing offshore for weeks alone with someone, you can be damn sure I'm testing ahead of time how they handle stress.
I've met/worked with plenty of people who seem very nice under normal conditions, and become complete assholes to coworkers/friends/their own wives and kids when they are under stress...
So I'd amend that to something like "what I do in stressful conditions defines me". Anyone can act cool as a cucumber before the shit hits the fan
(Batman's whole existence is stressful. He specifically gets a pass on this one)
I would say that people cannot be "other than themselves". You will just see their other side when they are drunk. And it is quite often the darker, more primitive, violent side, which they suppress under normal conditions, knowing well that other people won't like it.
There is a sentence in some Stephen King's novel (and King is a recovered alcoholic to boot) about the main hero. IIRC it sounds like this:
"There was a dangerous dog in his mind. Sober, he could keep that dog on a leash. Drunk, the leash disappeared."
I once visited an army surplus store which stocked a kind of string vest which looked like a fish-net but with thicker cords. The proprietor claimed it was developed by the Swedish military for its effectiveness in hot weather but didn’t become popular because of pushback from soldiers who didn’t want to wear it because it looked kind of gimpy.
Even if they are ugly when they are living, they're wonderful to behold when they burn! I would hazard a guess that they're unpopularity with people stems from their popularity with ticks.
In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it were Norwegian, resulting in a kind of 'Norwenglish' where words, after being loaned, seemed to take on a second life. In this way, I feel English spellings 'reference' their origins where possible and English speakers often learn to detect the roots of words and adjust pronunciation appropriately.
I suppose it depends on your definition of civilisation. I agree that emotionally the quote conveys a laudable sentiment but technically, it would probably be more correct to state the opposite i.e. that civilisation began with slavery. As the beginnings of civilisation are usually correlated with the the beginnings of agriculture and agriculture, arguably, created the demand for workers which allowed slavers to flourish.
Of course, the lengths are just doubled. If someone travels twice as far to get to someone’s home they also have to travel twice as far back. If the two met in the middle instead there would be four journeys but each would be half as long (2+2=1+1+1+1).
