US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1652

On February 18 2015 16:21 coverpunch wrote:

But let's be honest, if a white guy came out and said "I know that my ancestors owned slaves, massacred native peoples around the world and destroyed their cultures, and ravaged natural habitats to feed their greed for resources, and I don't feel bad at all. I just won't do it myself", we would think that guy was a total dickhead, yeah?

On February 18 2015 16:21 coverpunch wrote:

But let's be honest, if a white guy came out and said "I know that my ancestors owned slaves, massacred native peoples around the world and destroyed their cultures, and ravaged natural habitats to feed their greed for resources, and I don't feel bad at all. I just won't do it myself", we would think that guy was a total dickhead, yeah?

On February 18 2015 21:09 Simberto wrote:


Let's do a test.

I am german. I know about World War 2, I know about the holocaust. And i do not feel guilty about it, because it happened 45 years before i was born, and 20 years before my parents were born. I think the whole affair was disgusting and evil, but it also was definitively NOT my fault, causality says that there is absolutely no way i could have affected any of that in any way. And thus i do not need to feel guilty.

Do i look like a dickhead saying that?

On February 18 2015 21:26 coverpunch wrote:

I dunno but this makes my point, because you totally omit the elephant in the room, which is what your grandparents did during the war. If they were just German civilians who survived the war, then no, you have nothing to regret in your family. If your grandfather was an SS trooper lining people up at Dachau, then we have a very different question of guilt, don't we?

On February 18 2015 21:37 Simberto wrote:


My grandparents were children, none of them were old enough to be in the military. I have no idea what my great-grandparents did during the war. But i am sure if we go far enough back into my family history, we will at some point find someone who did horrible things. Maybe not during the Nazi time, but possibly during the napoleonic wars, or the 30 years war, or whatever.

I still do not think i should feel guilty for things that i have no influence upon. If i knew someone in my families history did horrible things, that would worsen my opinion of them, and i would probably feel bad because thus bad things are connected to me and actually brought to my attention.

But still not guilty, in my opinion feeling guilty is reserved to something you could personally have influenced. Without that distinction, everyone should feel guilty all the time, because someone connected to you did horrible things in the past at some point, i do not thing there is a single person in the world where that is not true. If my father was a mass murderer who killed and ate 250 people before i was born (he is not), i still would not feel guilty about that. Disgusted probably, and i also probably wouldn't talk to him a lot, but it would still not be my fault, and thus not something to feel guilty about.

On February 18 2015 17:52 IgnE wrote:


The African slave trade as conducted by Africans before the arrival of the Europeans was an entirely different social ecology complete with different property and debt regimes. You seem to be intimating that Africans were already capturing hundreds of thousands of people as slaves and it just so happened that the Europeans came along in the 17th and 18th centuries and fulfilled an unmet demand. The reality is that Europeans came in and completely reoriented African societies, creating systems of debt and privilege that incentivized the massive selling and kidnapping of peoples by powerful Africans who interfaced with the Europeans in high-profile European trading ports.

At the height of the slave trade British ships were bringing in large quantities of cloth, iron, and copper to trade for slaves to bring to the new world. But in order to trade those goods, they had to set up a system of debts amongst the locals in order to leverage their increased capital positions and at the same time reduce risks. So they would demand security in the form of debt pawns, wherein their labor in captivity kind of substituted for interest. That kind of debt peonage was similar to form of slavery that existed in Africa before the Europeans showed up, a slavery that was based on raiding villages and viewed captives as a kind of human resource, separate from chattel, and tied to honor and dignity. "How much" a person is worth is a complicated process, because human beings are both priceless, but also must be given a price, like you can see in primitive marriage transactions and the like. The point here is that this human economy flavor of slavery is both qualitatively different and different in scope from the massive shipping of chattel slaves across the Atlantic.

As Europeans sunk their claws deeper into the trade and debt networks dotted along the African coasts, the distinction between debt pawns and chattel slowly eroded. African peoples there responded with wars, raids, massive fines, and general chaos in order to feed the insatiable demand. It was a total societal collapse in many cases, with the breakdown of traditional norms, normal chains of trade, and ways of life. So saying something like, "slavery has existed for thousands of years (and the Americans in the 17th-19th centuries were just continuing this almost noble tradition)," is to speak a grotesque misunderstanding.

On February 18 2015 21:26 coverpunch wrote:

I dunno but this makes my point, because you totally omit the elephant in the room, which is what your grandparents did during the war. If they were just German civilians who survived the war, then no, you have nothing to regret in your family. If your grandfather was an SS trooper lining people up at Dachau, then we have a very different question of guilt, don't we?

On February 18 2015 21:54 coverpunch wrote:

Well, I think we've drifted from "white guilt" to "guilt". I think the more appropriate feeling would be "shame" if we're using it in isolation. Guilt is too strong a word.

And it's interesting that you're arguing this point when you're so ignorant of your own family's place in history and just assuming it is sanguine. That's the entire reason we're talking about making people more aware of history and especially the negative aspects of history, no? You're trying to shape their personal and national identity by making them aware of these events.

On February 18 2015 22:05 Gorsameth wrote:

A nation should be willing to teach its children (aka students) the bad things that happened in the past, including those done by said nation.
That doesn't mean everyone should be aware of what their grand-grand-parents did.

Americans should be taught about what happened to the Indians and about slavery just as much as Germans should be taught about the Holocaust.

On February 18 2015 21:09 Simberto wrote:


Let's do a test.

I am german. I know about World War 2, I know about the holocaust. And i do not feel guilty about it, because it happened 45 years before i was born, and 20 years before my parents were born. I think the whole affair was disgusting and evil, but it also was definitively NOT my fault, causality says that there is absolutely no way i could have affected any of that in any way. And thus i do not need to feel guilty.

Do i look like a dickhead saying that?

On February 18 2015 22:23 coverpunch wrote:

You have to go back and read the actual AP curriculum because it isn't about teaching the "good" or "bad" things per se, it's about teaching the methodology of history by having very mature discussions about topics in US history. The AP curriculum is about following trends and reading about the experiences of minority writers. The suggested bill in Oklahoma would push for more of a traditional Great Men pedagogy featuring America's greatest hits. I think there's a nontrivial question about whether you learn more about the plight of slaves by reading about the statistics and abuses of slaves in general or by reading the fiery speeches of Frederick Douglass.

There is some overlap of course (I think most textbooks would include Douglass), but there is a wide gulf in a point I brought up before, another nontrivial question about whether it's more important to read about the continued oppression of minorities during the world wars or about the experiences of American soldiers at war.

It takes a lot of the sweetness of victory out of America's victory in World War II if you talk less about the major battles and more about the way blacks continued to be mistreated, women continued to be marginalized, and Japanese Americans were robbed of their rights and told it was legal, just, and fair. It's only the cherry on top to debate if America was morally wrong to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the curriculum suggests.

Aside: Which is ironic because the South had an extreme version of "no" - they didn't even want Truman to accept an unconditional surrender from Japan. They wanted the US to do to Japan what Sherman had done to them, which is break every bone in their body and tear their heart out (i.e. burn the other half of Tokyo to the ground), until the emperor was on his knees begging the United States to spare what was left of his people and his culture. They would have settled for him shooting himself in the head like Hitler did.

On February 18 2015 22:05 Gorsameth wrote:

A nation should be willing to teach its children (aka students) the bad things that happened in the past, including those done by said nation.
That doesn't mean everyone should be aware of what their grand-grand-parents did.

Americans should be taught about what happened to the Indians and about slavery just as much as Germans should be taught about the Holocaust.

On February 18 2015 22:23 coverpunch wrote:

You have to go back and read the actual AP curriculum because it isn't about teaching the "good" or "bad" things per se, it's about teaching the methodology of history by having very mature discussions about topics in US history. The AP curriculum is about following trends and reading about the experiences of minority writers. The suggested bill in Oklahoma would push for more of a traditional Great Men pedagogy featuring America's greatest hits. I think there's a nontrivial question about whether you learn more about the plight of slaves by reading about the statistics and abuses of slaves in general or by reading the fiery speeches of Frederick Douglass.

There is some overlap of course (I think most textbooks would include Douglass), but there is a wide gulf in a point I brought up before, another nontrivial question about whether it's more important to read about the continued oppression of minorities during the world wars or about the experiences of American soldiers at war.

It takes a lot of the sweetness of victory out of America's victory in World War II if you talk less about the major battles and more about the way blacks continued to be mistreated, women continued to be marginalized, and Japanese Americans were robbed of their rights and told it was legal, just, and fair. It's only the cherry on top to debate if America was morally wrong to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the curriculum suggests.

Aside: Which is ironic because the South had an extreme version of "no" - they didn't even want Truman to accept an unconditional surrender from Japan. They wanted the US to do to Japan what Sherman had done to them, which is break every bone in their body and tear their heart out (i.e. burn the other half of Tokyo to the ground), until the emperor was on his knees begging the United States to spare what was left of his people and his culture. They would have settled for him shooting himself in the head like Hitler did.

It seems like the AP curriculum may be trying to line up high school history with that of university-level history a bit more.

On February 18 2015 22:34 Stratos_speAr wrote:


I think this gets at the difference that you see between the subject of history in high school vs. the subject of history in college, and I don't think there's a difference as noticeable as this in any other academic subject.

In high school, history pretty much amounts to remembering dates and facts, various influences on things like legislation or a war (e.g. "What were the four main causes of WWI? M.A.I.N.; still remember this from my 10th grade honors history class) etc. The problem is that history as true academic discipline is completely different from this. You rarely actually memorize dates or anything. Instead, you are constantly scrounging up research, reading books, and integrating everything from psychology to sociology to try to account for trends and other movements in history.

I don't quite remember any of the exact exam questions from my history classes in college (they were a while ago), but my fiance is a history major currently at the same institution and one of her exam questions required her to write for 60 minutes about "Why Napoleon was the embodiment of the new, Modern European man in the 19th century" or something like that, requiring specific examples of legislation, policy, trends in culture, etc. It's far, far more complicated, nuanced, detailed, and somewhat subjective than whatever history a high schooler ever does, and it's almost a completely different subject. Furthermore, exams are extremely rare; I essentially finished a minor in history and I only ever had three history exams; the rest were research papers. It seems like the AP curriculum may be trying to line up high school history with that of university-level history a bit more. I know that my alma mater only accepted AP scores of 5 on the U.S. history test because it was so shallow in depth compared to any American history course you would take at the institution itself.

On February 18 2015 23:01 coverpunch wrote:

Yeah, Common Core is trying to address this exact problem, which is too many subjects get to a point where you tell the students "Everything you've learned until now is wrong and worthless, but you've learned it well and proven you're worthy of instruction. So let's learn the real discipline."

BUT, I think it goes a little too far to the conceptual theoretical side and strays away from the fundamentals. It's true that college-level history deals very little and very indirectly with the hard dates and places of milestones, but it's one of those things that if you don't know those things, there's no possibility of productive discussion.

I would use the debate about intelligent design as a parallel. It's fine to want to poke holes in the theory of evolution and put God in the gaps, but if you don't understand the concepts of evolution, then you don't understand modern biology and how or why we categorize organisms. The whole idea of homologous structures might not even make sense if you're going to strictly believe God created each organism separately, which means everything we think about genetics doesn't make any sense either. You just end up in a very strange place discussing nonsense because you don't know the fundamentals.

I have very mixed feelings about it but I'm willing to give it time and see if it works. The thing that alarms me most is that the best schools in the country, like the ones Obama and Bill Gates (who endorsed and pushed it) sends their kids to, don't use Common Core and aren't planning to switch. I think it speaks volumes that the elites aren't eating their own dog food.

On February 18 2015 21:37 Simberto wrote:


My grandparents were children, none of them were old enough to be in the military. I have no idea what my great-grandparents did during the war. But i am sure if we go far enough back into my family history, we will at some point find someone who did horrible things. Maybe not during the Nazi time, but possibly during the napoleonic wars, or the 30 years war, or whatever.

I still do not think i should feel guilty for things that i have no influence upon. If i knew someone in my families history did horrible things, that would worsen my opinion of them, and i would probably feel bad because thus bad things are connected to me and actually brought to my attention.

But still not guilty, in my opinion feeling guilty is reserved to something you could personally have influenced. Without that distinction, everyone should feel guilty all the time, because someone connected to you did horrible things in the past at some point, i do not thing there is a single person in the world where that is not true. If my father was a mass murderer who killed and ate 250 people before i was born (he is not), i still would not feel guilty about that. Disgusted probably, and i also probably wouldn't talk to him a lot, but it would still not be my fault, and thus not something to feel guilty about.