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On January 11 2020 14:31 m4ini wrote:Erm.. Who else would be to blame if not the guy who targeted and fired the missile? They don't wait for an invitation or fire command from the president if they're on high alert. They alone make the call, and in this case it was tragically the wrong one.
I mean... the ATC that let it fly, Trump for starting the whole thing, the Iranian command structure for creating such a chaotic situation... the guy who put them at high alert without further explanation... the guy that chose not to lock the airport down... the list is as long as your arm.
There is simply no excuse for the multiple layers of process failure that have to occur for a nation to shoot down a civilian flight from their own airport, especially when the strike that triggered the alert was at their own damn discretion. They seem to have even had time to warn the Iraqis, but not to deny flights or prep their guys on the flightpaths?
It's always possible the troops were told civilian flights would be grounded. If that did happen you can bet the brass and the politicians will be very apologetic while vowing to get to the bottom of things, and the poor schmuck who pressed the button will be taking a short trip to Erbil strapped to the next missile they launch.
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People don't need to know exactly where a country is but Iran is a fairly large country that's been in the media for years. At the very least people should have some idea that it is in the middle east, and where the middle east is. Same with neighbouring countries. It's like not know where South Korea is. Though you may not know exactly which country it is, at the very least you should know which continent it is not in; it is not in Europe, it is not in Africa and it is not anywhere in the the Americas. or not knowing where Sweden is. You may not know which country it is, but you should sure know it is in the Scandinavian region. You cannot separate the history of a country from its geographical region. It's a wonder that so many people on TL are so blase about their lack of geographical knowledge. It's like being proud of not being able to do high school maths. It's not something to be proud of.
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The problem with geography is that it tends to be a subject of a lot of pointless memorization in school, which is why a lot of people actively dislike it.
Pretty much all of my memories of geography class is being handed a list of things on a map, and being forced to memorize them. If you have spend multiple years of geography class memorizing the names and places of cities, rivers, and all of that shit, without gaining any actually interesting or useful information from it, it becomes very easy to actively dislike it.
And honestly, i don't remember a lot of it either, because it was flat memorized information without any stories attached to it, without any emotional content, or anything else. The thing i remember are the lists, not the things on the lists. Other people have made similar experiences with history. For example, my mother still complains of having to memorize "an endless list of Karls and Ottos" in history. I see this stuff as a major failure of the teachers and/or the educational plans.
Honestly, i am pretty sure that of my current geography, more comes from me playing paradox games rather than geography class.
And as others have explained, i don't think it is a major failure of a person to not know where stuff is. But it a failure to be very much in favor of killing people in a place you know nothing about. If you want to kill people, you should know stuff about them. Of course, that usually makes it harder to want to kill them.
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United States42689 Posts
On January 11 2020 01:52 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2020 01:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
That’s not a satirical article?
Besides the ramblings he’s complained about NATO and multilateral institutions in general pretty frequently, now he wants to expand it? Read the rest and it makes sense. He wants to pull America out of the Middle-East and leave NATO to solve it without them.
I’m not sure it can make sense as, to state the obvious, the North Atlantic isn’t in the Middle East.
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United States24680 Posts
Adding on with one point I don't think was made, the people who shot down the airliner may not have been provided all of the equipment to do their job properly. Clearly, they had all of the equipment to launch a missile against an air target, but they may have been unable to perform the additional validation that they were targeting the aircraft for the correct reason. I believe the circumstances were similar when an airliner was shot down over Ukraine a few years ago.
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On January 11 2020 22:56 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2020 01:52 Gorsameth wrote:On January 11 2020 01:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
That’s not a satirical article?
Besides the ramblings he’s complained about NATO and multilateral institutions in general pretty frequently, now he wants to expand it? Read the rest and it makes sense. He wants to pull America out of the Middle-East and leave NATO to solve it without them. I’m not sure it can make sense as, to state the obvious, the North Atlantic isn’t in the Middle East.
I think Gorsameth meant to say it makes sense from a Trump POV. And from that POV, it makes a lot of sense. If NATO has to solve this problem, it means it is no longer Trumps problem, and thus he can consider it solved.
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Norway28667 Posts
On January 11 2020 22:56 Simberto wrote:
The problem with geography is that it tends to be a subject of a lot of pointless memorization in school, which is why a lot of people actively dislike it.
Pretty much all of my memories of geography class is being handed a list of things on a map, and being forced to memorize them. If you have spend multiple years of geography class memorizing the names and places of cities, rivers, and all of that shit, without gaining any actually interesting or useful information from it, it becomes very easy to actively dislike it.
And honestly, i don't remember a lot of it either, because it was flat memorized information without any stories attached to it, without any emotional content, or anything else. The thing i remember are the lists, not the things on the lists. Other people have made similar experiences with history. For example, my mother still complains of having to memorize "an endless list of Karls and Ottos" in history. I see this stuff as a major failure of the teachers and/or the educational plans.
Honestly, i am pretty sure that of my current geography, more comes from me playing paradox games rather than geography class.
And as others have explained, i don't think it is a major failure of a person to not know where stuff is. But it a failure to be very much in favor of killing people in a place you know nothing about. If you want to kill people, you should know stuff about them. Of course, that usually makes it harder to want to kill them.
I mean I get that being told to memorize names of places like capitals of european countries or capitals of states in the US is really boring, somewhat useless (I mean I think if you are european you should know the capital city in most european countries, but rote memorization is a bad way of accomplishing that), but bad pedagogical approaches in teaching a subject doesn't really relate to the importance of the subject. History is obviously important, even if some history teachers have insisted that people should memorize the years during which particular kings ruled, and other boring and fairly useless stuff like that. (As far as years and dates go, they are important to know in relation with each other, but not as independent values.)
I think geography by itself hardly justifies being an independent subject (teaching how to read and navigate maps is important though), but it should be a steady component in both history and 'current events'-sociology-class.
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Northern Ireland25331 Posts
On January 11 2020 18:56 rope123 wrote:Now, I have been lurking on these forums since sc2 came out, so close to 10 years....and this might be the weirdest thing to actually motivate me to make a post, but I just can't help myself I guess: Show nested quote +On January 11 2020 02:13 Mohdoo wrote:
I can describe political and cultural differences between a wide variety of countries in Europe. I don't know which shape is which on a map, but I know the general'ish of where they are. I am not going to pretend knowing which shape is which on a map is more important than the culture/military/history/economy/politics of a country.
Knowledge of geography and the history of borders is - at least according to my own limited experiences of trying to follow world politics and being interested in history  - fundamentally important for developing an actual understanding of a people's culture/military/history/economy and politics. Infact even at school I had already been sort of interested in history, but only had the vagueish geographical knowledge you describe. I could've for example found Cairo on a map and would've been able to point into the general direction of Syria or Iran, but I would have been able to do this by logical deduction ("ah here is a big river, this should probably be the Nile ergo Egypt", "Syria is somwhere around Israel but not in Turkey right?", "Iran is a sort of big country to the north east of the arabian peninsula") and not because I actually was comfortable with a region's geography and the ebb and flow of borders. So much changes though when you actively "know" how the Levant relates to Egypt, Turkey and, to the east, connects with Mesopotamia and how Mesopotamia then is bordered by mountain ranges and vast arid areas. It, for example, becomes immediately obvious why the "European" empires like the Romans, the Byzantines or the Ottomans tried (sometimes successfully) to conquer Mesopotamia (Iraq) but never could go further. Or, lets say if you want to understand the current geopolitical and cultural situation of India. So much becomes clear about the tensions that exist between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh if you know how, after the dissolution of the British Raj, borders were actually drafted (e.g. that Bangladesh=East Pakistan was actually a part of Pakistan even though it is to the east of India in the Bengali delta and shares no border with Pakistan at all) If you then go further back in history to the time when a muslim (timurid) warlord started his conquest of the Indian subcontinent (now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) from the mountains of Afghanistan and formed the Mughal empire, you can see how the Brits could later pick up the ruins of this empire and build their Raj and why then, after the spread of nationalism and religious tensions, 2 (and a half) countries sprang out of India.. I don't know I am probably not expressing myself all that well.. to put it simply: for me when I got to know the geography of a region better so much of its past history/current politics etc etc just started to "click", to make sense..(I could give endless examples of that). Most of that I simply learned by extensively consulting maps (online) while listening to some history podcast (there are so many fantastic ones out there, and they are so much better than the education you get a school...). Now, in many ways I am quite happy with what I learned at school (Maths, Physics, English, French etc) but when I look back at my history lessons I am deeply disappointed. I actually think I had fine (history) teachers, it is simply the way history was taught a school that I find extremely lacking and I have always wondered how it could have been improved..one way: maps! So when sb advocates against maps, I have to firmly disagree. You never should have to memorize maps for its own sake, but you should look at them (a wide variety of them), constantly (while learning about history or politics), and with time you will have memorized them...in the right context maps are fun and bring history to life  Also go play Europa Universalis, you will become an expert at geography
Good post, hope you don’t go back to lurking!
It can end up being information overload, with recourse to history especially. Topography and the actual lay of the land also becomes a pertinent factor to consider, so you go beyond things like borders and where things are to what the features of the land are, what grows there etc etc. Also what geographic features had impacts in particular eras vs other ones. What was impassable in the ancient world has a road that anyone can drive through in the modern era for example.
It does enrich one’s understanding but it’s a bit exhausting to apply to everything.
I like me Roman Empire histories and World War 2 military history a lot, so I make the effort you describe for those and it definitely does make things fit together and make more sense there in a big picture sense.
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On January 11 2020 22:56 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2020 01:52 Gorsameth wrote:On January 11 2020 01:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
That’s not a satirical article?
Besides the ramblings he’s complained about NATO and multilateral institutions in general pretty frequently, now he wants to expand it? Read the rest and it makes sense. He wants to pull America out of the Middle-East and leave NATO to solve it without them. I’m not sure it can make sense as, to state the obvious, the North Atlantic isn’t in the Middle East.
On January 11 2020 22:59 Simberto wrote:I think Gorsameth meant to say it makes sense from a Trump POV. And from that POV, it makes a lot of sense. If NATO has to solve this problem, it means it is no longer Trumps problem of stumbling over how to handle it, and thus he can consider it solved. This indeed, He keeps stumbling in the ME, make it someone elses problem is the perfect way for Trump to solve the problem. That its not NATO's region or that he has previously slammed NATO isn't something Trump thinks about.
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Simberto, do you know where Iran is? Would you be able to point it out in a map of the world? If you have ever talked about Iran before here, I would had expected you to be able to pinpoint exactly where it is. It's not about learning from geography classes (UK doesn't have this rote memorisation of cities and rivers), but more of that an educated person should have at the very least a vague awareness of a global map and where places and peoples are, that a location is not simply a name but a place with people and a history.
History lessons do suck though in the UK. A pathological focus on the world wars but doesn't deal with the interesting stuff in a war but with the most boring banal stuff. It focuses mainly on the UK and isn't even taught in a chronological order but as narrow minded focus. Probably stems from that history is seen as a tool of nationalism rather than as an education.
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Northern Ireland25331 Posts
On January 11 2020 23:14 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2020 22:56 Simberto wrote:
The problem with geography is that it tends to be a subject of a lot of pointless memorization in school, which is why a lot of people actively dislike it.
Pretty much all of my memories of geography class is being handed a list of things on a map, and being forced to memorize them. If you have spend multiple years of geography class memorizing the names and places of cities, rivers, and all of that shit, without gaining any actually interesting or useful information from it, it becomes very easy to actively dislike it.
And honestly, i don't remember a lot of it either, because it was flat memorized information without any stories attached to it, without any emotional content, or anything else. The thing i remember are the lists, not the things on the lists. Other people have made similar experiences with history. For example, my mother still complains of having to memorize "an endless list of Karls and Ottos" in history. I see this stuff as a major failure of the teachers and/or the educational plans.
Honestly, i am pretty sure that of my current geography, more comes from me playing paradox games rather than geography class.
And as others have explained, i don't think it is a major failure of a person to not know where stuff is. But it a failure to be very much in favor of killing people in a place you know nothing about. If you want to kill people, you should know stuff about them. Of course, that usually makes it harder to want to kill them. I mean I get that being told to memorize names of places like capitals of european countries or capitals of states in the US is really boring, somewhat useless (I mean I think if you are european you should know the capital city in most european countries, but rote memorization is a bad way of accomplishing that), but bad pedagogical approaches in teaching a subject doesn't really relate to the importance of the subject. History is obviously important, even if some history teachers have insisted that people should memorize the years during which particular kings ruled, and other boring and fairly useless stuff like that. (As far as years and dates go, they are important to know in relation with each other, but not as independent values.) I think geography by itself hardly justifies being an independent class (teaching how to read and navigate maps is important though), but it should be a steady component in both history and 'current events'-sociology-class.
It’s basically useless as a subject, at least how it’s taught here which sounds similar to what you describe.
I had one of the top ten scores in it in the country when we did our GCSE exams (16 year old ones, the last compulsory ones before leaving school anyway), so this isn’t coming from a ‘I was bad at so it’s bad’ kind of place.
It’s not geopolitical enough to really make one understand things in that domain. It’s not based enough in geology or the science behind the shaping of the landscape to really understand much about things there either. It’s a surface level examination of both that is too surface level.
History conversely was quite good I thought. We learned about WW2 and Vietnam at that age, but in a contextual sense of causes and effects and not simply ‘this thing happened’. So for WW2 we learned a bit of WW1, the punitive Treaty of Versailles, how that bred resentment which may have remained non-ruinous but for the effects of the Wall Street Crash and how that destabilised the Weimar Republic etc.
The Conservatives want more of an English focus, god forbid it’s just rote learning English monarchs etc, to this day I am terrible at that as it’s not especially interesting.
I’m pretty good on European capitals both nationally and regionally but that’s solely through a real interest in football, not just in the modern day but there’s a lot of interesting social and cultural history in how the game developed in Europe and around the world. AC Milan are Athletic and Cricket Club Milan for a reason.
The more one interlinks things, the more interesting they become and the more interesting they are to learn about. Rote memorisation of discrete things with no contextualisation is basically useless and isn’t engaging to learn about either.
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On January 11 2020 23:28 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Simberto, do you know where Iran is? Would you be able to point it out in a map of the world? If you have ever talked about Iran before here, I would had expected you to be able to pinpoint exactly where it is. It's not about learning from geography classes (UK doesn't have this rote memorisation of cities and rivers), but more of that an educated person should have at the very least a vague awareness of a global map and where places and peoples are, that a location is not simply a name but a place with people and a history.
History lessons do suck though in the UK. A pathological focus on the world wars but doesn't deal with the interesting stuff in a war but with the most boring banal stuff. It focuses mainly on the UK and isn't even taught in a chronological order but as narrow minded focus. Probably stems from that history is seen as a tool of nationalism rather than as an education.
I do know where Iran is (though i am pretty sure the origin of that knowledge is in playing too much EU and HoI and knowing where Persia is on the maps of those games), and of course i expect someone who talks about Iran in a way that looks as if they knew stuff to know where it is. I wouldn't expect this for people asking questions about Iran, though.
My post was mostly about explaining why people take pride in not knowing stuff about geography sometimes.
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I see thank you. Also +1 for playing too much EU.
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Paradox should get some kind of subsidies form EU for teaching entire generation where things are.
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I hate to break this to you, but only a very small portion of any generation will have ever played EU
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Norway28667 Posts
I personally credit civilization (1 ) for developing my interest in history! And I do believe that is somewhat more accessible than EU-whatever. :D
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Most of any geography I know is from Geoguessr, for what its worth.
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Iran can't catch a break with recent events. They got their top general assassinated. A stampede at his funeral killed 50+ people and injured dozens more. And now pressure that led to human error destroyed an airplane full of people. Both themselves and the US is partially to blame. Man if there are religious nutjobs that seek revenge, they would be pretty furious just about now.
Does the US not get tired of making enemies? And for what... Protecting Israeli and Saudi's interests? Is it worth it?
Trump seems to have solved that problem, now NATO will have to take the blame in the middle east... US acts like a thug more and more in recent times with Trump the perfect Mob boss, that would sanction any country or organisation (ICC, WTO) if it doesn't obey.
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On January 12 2020 02:34 Zambrah wrote:
Most of any geography I know is from Geoguessr, for what its worth.
Threelimination is a pretty good game
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EPT
