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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
To each their own obviously, but I find early American history, and especially early American military history, to be darkly hilarious. The disasters of the Northwest Indian War and the War of 1812 are especially fascinating to me, as you see the American militia repeatedly humiliated at the hands of native tribesmen and British professionals alike, leading to the eventual formation of professional American army—and with that the creation of the Southern dominated officer corps that will cause so many problems going into the American Civil War.
This may be be my last post here for a while but I'll leave it at this:
Feelings may have gotten us where we are, but it could also have gotten us out of it if we actually knew how to use them.
Facts on their own might be important, but they also serve as something for feelings to act on, something for morals to have a stance on. Morals are closer to feelings than they are to fact, because even if we can say how morals came to be, we still can't say that they're right. That kind of right isn't the same kind of right as factual correctness. By and large, we might act more on moral correctness than many other things. We like to think that moral correctness and factual correctness are one and the same, but they aren't. Being morally correct is closer to feeling correct: they're not facts, nor are they truly backed up by facts; they're just widely held opinions. Facts won't always help arguments of moral correctness. But moral correctness also isn't the same thing as feeling correct. Moral correctness can say that feeling correct about something is right or wrong.
The way I see it, the current right wing govt. feels right by not caring about the feelings of minorities, dismissing them as delusions just as we might dismiss the feelings of the right wing as delusions. So I don't think dismissing emotions will help. Understanding them while still taking a stand on what's morally right and working with what's factually right might be what needs to be done better, if it's being done at all.
We've come far closer to understanding the universe than understanding emotions. I think we need to catch up with the later, because if you didn't think emotions shouldn't and don't matter, then 2017 has a good chance of rocking that train of thought.
but maybe somewhereProblem is that a moral conviction that goes against facts is bankrupt and needs to be cast aside.
Even then, while the Democrats obviously aren't perfect, the Republican party has very much helped to foster a climate of anti-intellectualism that's been immensely damaging to the political discourse and overall intellectual climate of the United States.
They have impeded and undermined biologists by refusing to take a firm stance in favor or outright denying the truth of evolution as a biological fact in order to cater to religious fundamentalists, and they continue to deny climate change as well due to their own short-sighted greed, putting humanity itself at risk. They've been complicit in propagating this conspiracy that the media and the sciences are filled with "filthy" liberal biases, instead of accepting that the truth just isn't what they or many in their base would prefer it to be.
That exact notion, that as long as it "feels" right it must be correct, regardless of what credentialed experts say on the subject, is a big part of what got us into this situation.
edited 28th Nov '16 7:39:46 PM by Draghinazzo
I'm going to join in on the other people recommending against A People's History of he US. I had to read a lot of excerpts for my history class. Zinn is first and foremost a leftist propagandist and openly so. There's nothing inherently wrong with this if you remember to keep a critical eye open, but whereas a lot of the things people dislike about Bernie Sanders can be chalked up to stupidity or blind idealism, Zinn engages in enough willful manipulation and selective leaving out of information for the sake of his narrative that the book feels intellectually dishonest. He also tends to rely heavily on Black-and-White Morality tropes to characterize the collective lower classes as all innocent poor helpless little lambs and to exaggerate all the cruelties of the rich as part of a concerted grand conspiracy to keep the poor down for the sake of it. There are ways to represent the exploitative relationship between the wealthy and the poor without relying on glurgey oversimplifications or abuse of Hanlon's Razor like these.
Also as is typical of books written when the Cold War was still going on he engages in a lot of the anti-imperialist left platitudes (he's got a lot in common with Noam Chomsky), and downplaying of the nastier actions and cults of personality of far-left despots like Ho Chi Minh and Castro in favor of a more simplistic narrative of them as humble heroes of the common man who did what they had to do in the face of violent opposition. Something that, if you truly give a shit about the well-being of the common man, should never do. And the book came out in 1980 which was late enough that he couldn't have used not knowing as an excuse for the whitewashing.
Anyway it's not completely irredeemable as it's a decent read if you just want something different for its own sake. Like if you're curious about alternate perspectives, examples of historical revisionism, or explorations of the sides of history that don't normally get much airtime. But if you're looking for a "truer" account of history than what's normally given in the textbooks it's not the solution. It's better used as a launchpad to get you to look into other events in more detail than as a reference in itself.
edited 28th Nov '16 8:16:02 PM by AlleyOop
That exact notion, that as long as it "feels" right it must be correct, regardless of what credentialed experts say on the subject, is a big part of what got us into this situation.
In the majority of circumstances, I'd agree with you. But in certain instances, doing what "feels right" may go against what the facts tell you is correct behavior, and yet the "feels" may be even more correct. To illustrate, let me quote a brief exchange from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:
Spock: Admiral, may I suggest that Doctor McCoy is correct. We must help Chekov.
Kirk: Spock, is that the logical thing to do?
Spock: No, sir. But it is the human thing to do.
The facts might tell you that it's a waste of resources to care for the terminally ill, those with incurable disabilities, etc. Or to risk the lives of an entire rescue party to save one person in peril.
And yet we do such things every day.
There are no absolutes. Each situation deserves a judgement call, not an arbitrary blanket policy.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.edited 28th Nov '16 8:25:56 PM by kkhohoho
edited 28th Nov '16 8:29:29 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."Excuse me? Hard-right dictatorships, at best, grant money to the top one percent of society while screwing the rest over. Which in effect means they do the exact same thing that the leftist dictatorships do—concentrating the majority of the wealth in the hands of a few cronies, while leaving the rest of the populace in increasingly worse trouble. The Chilean dictatorship under Pinochet, often cited by right-wingers as "an economic miracle" is actually a case in point—while a few corporations did very well, and Pinochet himself made off with millions of dollars in taxpayer money, the vast majority of the population only got poorer.
Dictatorships in general ruin their countries. Morally and economically.
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The situations in which such regimes tend to arise tend to be so severe that I seriously doubt that's actually true. Unless you count a brutal dictatorship working its citizenry to death for raw materials to sell to the west as a "strong economy".
Which is the very definition (according to the west) of a successful economy outside of the western world, since those regimes are typically happy to sell out their country to the highest bidder.
edited 28th Nov '16 8:38:54 PM by CaptainCapsase
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...No. "Creating growth" is irrelevant if the majority of the population never sees it. Which is exactly what was wrong with Pinochet (you know, alongside the mass murder, torture, etc). He brought money in, but it didn't go to anybody who needed it. The subsequent government spent a lot of time having to untangle the mess of corruption and cronyism that he'd created in order to ensure that the money that entered the nation actually benefited the nation.
I've seen a meme going around joking that Fidel died laughing after the USA essentially elected Batista.
edited 28th Nov '16 8:48:01 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
On parallels between Climategate and the DNC email hack
.
OK, why the fuck did nobody bring up the suspicions of Russian state involvement in the former? Am I going to wind up seeing T-72B3s behind everything.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotThis was also the case with the brazilian military dictatorship. Many people like to lionize that period as The Trains Run on Time, but in actuality it was as corrupt and inefficient as any fascist regime typically is, and the minimum wage was actually half of what it used to be at the height of the regime's "economic miracle". As is the case with Chile, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
I'm fairly certain that the other military dictatorships in Latin America had similar problems.
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I mean as an actual leader.
The answer is nothing. He ran Cuba into the ground, making it immensely poorer than it should have been, despite getting enormous handouts constituting 10-20% of his nation's GDP from the USSR. As a testament to his level of failure, compare Cuba to that other Hispanic island nation in the Caribbean. In 1950 the Dominican Republic had a per capita GDP half that of Cuba. Now they're about the same.
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Chile ranks far above Cuba on the HDI scale. Not only are the Chilean numbers those results are based on far more reliable than the Cuban ones, Chile received far, far less sponsorship from their Superpower backer than Cuba did, and Chile has an inferior geographical position. Policies from Pinochet's regime receive a whole lot of credit for this outcome from economists. Also, Pinochet stepped down in favor of a democratically elected government following a national referendum after 15 or so years.
By any objective measurement, Pinochet >>>> Castro.
edited 28th Nov '16 8:54:04 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."
