America is a toilet

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Posted

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discuss

CidaShipiniZH likes this

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Posted

i am in full agreement

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Posted

why yes I agree it is the most important thing in the house just like america is the most important country in the world

SilverAlchemic likes this

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Posted

I love how it's always the country doing the bad things. What, did each and every island of Japan grow its very own penis just to rape Nanking?

Knuckle likes this

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I think the use of the country as a whole performing the actions is because getting down to the nitty gritty of "X did this but Y abstained" results in really petty, dodgy talk, and apologies are harder to extract, and history is harder to write. It's like, when it gets to the point where no one in the area at the time has an unbiased alibi for not doing something, and they're acting as the representatives of their country, then it becomes the actions of their country. Similar thing for not having repercussions from their own country on their actions.

Ammonsa likes this

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Posted

no I think each and every island in japan actually grew a dongle just to rape nanking

EDIT: Wait the original image never loaded for me and I thought it was just "America is a toilet - discuss," and I thought this was a joke thread that I was refusing to let chimetals take seriously. Only just saw the original discussion. Oops.

Chimetals likes this

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In response to LL's post, thats generally why I like to post about American stuff on here, because usually you guys give interesting and varied opinions, though probably not as unique as some would like to think. I dont mean to pretend I know everything about situations in American education but from what I've seen and what I've heard its scary, im sure some of you at least agree. This is definitely better as a thread idk why I brought it up in a status, but yeah. I want to hear what you guys say because you're looking from the inside, I wanted knuckles opinion primarily as both an American and a historian

I don't think these kinds of discussions are helped by people saying other countries do this too, that america isnt unique in that. Like, thats quite obvious, and just because I'm bringing up miseducation in the usa specifically doesn't mean im saying its unique to the usa or that its even worse than other countries.

But I do think its more interesting in the USA than a lot of others because of unique positions the USA finds itself in, such as being a global power, a leader at least in their own eyes. The way the USA portrays the Cold War even now fascinates me, am I wrong in assuming it's still framed as good guys vs bad guys still?

Im completely open to talking about Australia btw and if anyone gives me a chance I'll never stop, something some people in the skype chat have probably already noticed

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Posted

In the books that I used, there was never a mention of good guys versus bad guys. Can you give a specific example? I don't remember the USSR ever doing anything besides spying a little bit.

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Posted

Why, as a society, are we so concerned with "testing" our knowledge? That we cram information into the heads of students at ridiculous speeds and in ridiculous amounts in the hopes that something will stick.

 

It's sick and absurd that I pay so much money for college, and yet I only get a 4 year education that briefly covers EVERYTHING EVER you're supposed to know. It's ridiculous. 

 

Experts are not so because of school. School is a building block to becoming an expert on a subject. Expertise takes time, patience, and a willingness to teach YOURSELF. I pay over 2000 dollars a semester for multiple "online" classes that I teach myself. Sure, the professor provides powerpoints, tests, etc. And you do receive a grade. But you NEVER meet in class. You never discuss things with fellow students, or the supposed expert. I teach myself, and I pay them to allow me to do it. I have issue with that.

 

I make As and Bs in classes where I have NO BUSINESS making those kinds of grades, because I do not learn the material! This is such a foundational flaw in the system. Not only is the system moving too fast to learn efficiently, but it's also moving too fast to test efficiently. We cram for tests, pass, then forget the material. 

Ammonsa likes this

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Posted

No, I guess I can't give a specific example, it's just seemed like generally accepted that America were the good guys in the cold war and that they may have gone overboard a bit in some aspects like Vietnam but in general they were the good side.

 

It interests me that you don't remember the USSR doing anything, that's covered a fair amount here.


Why, as a society, are we so concerned with "testing" our knowledge? That we cram information into the heads of students at ridiculous speeds and in ridiculous amounts in the hopes that something will stick.

 

It's sick and absurd that I pay so much money for college, and yet I only get a 4 year education that briefly covers EVERYTHING EVER you're supposed to know. It's ridiculous. 

 

Experts are not so because of school. School is a building block to becoming an expert on a subject. Expertise takes time, patience, and a willingness to teach YOURSELF. I pay over 2000 dollars a semester for multiple "online" classes that I teach myself. Sure, the professor provides powerpoints, tests, etc. And you do receive a grade. But you NEVER meet in class. You never discuss things with fellow students, or the supposed expert. I teach myself, and I pay them to allow me to do it. I have issue with that.

 

I make As and Bs in classes where I have NO BUSINESS making those kinds of grades, because I do not learn the material! This is such a foundational flaw in the system. Not only is the system moving too fast to learn efficiently, but it's also moving too fast to test efficiently. We cram for tests, pass, then forget the material. 

 

Yeah, I don't think this is something inherent to the USA, it's definitely the same here and I'm sure the UK folks will say similar things. 

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Posted

If we are talking about Imperialism, then it isnt really an American thing, but rather a white-European thing, you know? Like, did anyone take the time to watch my video because it brings up an excellent argument in the why History Taught in Schools is Wack debate.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM&list=FL01u_4aallCW39jNxEA9f9Q&feature=share

 

like, why do we continue to use a map that is just factually incorrect. Whether you wanna flip it upside down or not is a question worth having, but shouldnt we be teaching geography with an actual map of Earth? And does this idea 1st world supremacy actually factor into how we teach geography in schools?

Ammonsa likes this

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Posted

But I do think its more interesting in the USA than a lot of others because of unique positions the USA finds itself in, such as being a global power, a leader at least in their own eyes. The way the USA portrays the Cold War even now fascinates me, am I wrong in assuming it's still framed as good guys vs bad guys still?

Idk how it is with younger generations (actually I'd love for Silver to hop in on this because I'd love an update on the educational system) but my fuzzy memories of it being taught was something like "there were all these communists and they had nukes and we had nukes and everyone was about ready to blow up everyone and people were taught to hide under desks in the case of a nuke even though that wouldn't do anything and then nothing actually happened the end"

 

What's really funny is how focused our textbooks are on the holocaust, even when our part of WWII was basically America vs Japan. The Japanese part and its battles are actually pretty breezed over, in my experience, and only gets mentioned for pearl harbor and the nukes, because after we dropped nukes, the war magically ended. The nukes' part is short, too, something along the lines of "they trashed the city and everyone agreed they were super dangerous and no one should use nukes again ever". Also, I'm not 100% correct on this, but I want to say that I learned later that Japan kept fighting for a while after those, anyway, and other factors caused them to finally give up. That's fuzzy memories from one of my Japan-based classes, though, so I don't have a perfectly neutral education on it from either side.

 

It's still pervading through college, though--I'm in a foreign politics class right now, and the professor will use pearl harbor as an example of an unannounced/"realism = expecting this sort of thing or doing this sort of thing" attack, and it bothers the hell out of me--because Japan tried to get the declaration of war in before the attack (by a half hour) but in the process of transcribing the message, the Japanese ambassador was too slow (ironically, America had already intercepted and decoded the message) and the message was delivered after the attack. I heard somewhere (my dad?) that American officials blocked the ambassadors from delivering the message on time, too, to make sure they were really really painted as the bad guys, but I can't find anything about that on wiki, so idk.

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Posted

If we are talking about Imperialism, then it isnt really an American thing, but rather a white-European thing, you know? Like, did anyone take the time to watch my video because it brings up an excellent argument in the why History Taught in Schools is Wack debate.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM&list=FL01u_4aallCW39jNxEA9f9Q&feature=share

 

like, why do we continue to use a map that is just factually incorrect. Whether you wanna flip it upside down or not is a question worth having, but shouldnt we be teaching geography with an actual map of Earth? And does this idea 1st world supremacy actually factor into how we teach geography in schools?

Yeah I'm not really talking about imperialism as much as specifically how the US education system treats problematic issues in its history. An imperialism discussion would probably be better I guess, so if we wanna expand to that we should.

 

I love that video, I love the west wing, it's great. Mercator projection was used for navigation on seas, but it definitely does skew perceptions on size of continents, definitely equates size with power.

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Posted

The only accurate map of the world is a globe, for honest. There's no way to project a sphere onto a two-dimensional surface and maintain 100% fidelity.

 

I do think that flipping the map would be weird-- it thins out near the top, and we would literally have to switch north and south's definitions, or we'd create another problem.

 

My big gripes with the US education system:

- Not teaching metric from an early age

- Teaching pi instead of tau

- Spelling is arbitrary and stupid in the English language, and so are many of its mechanics

 

(I wholeheartedly recommend you check out the link. Seriously though.)

 

These are just big dumb obstacles in the way of our education system. Intelligence isn't defined by what you can spell. Words should be spelled how they are pronounced, culture be damned. Teaching imperial just to teach metric later makes it harder to get into science-related fields. Teaching pi scares the dickens out of students who may have otherwise understood what trigonometry is. I didn't learn what pi represented until I took calc 2, but even then, it was still dumb to me, and tau saved my skin.

 

I used to scoff when people around me told me that stuff in math class or English class doesn't make sense, but now I realize those things don't actually make sense. We live with a jumble of stupid rules that are hard to teach and hard to learn, when it shouldn't have to be that hard. I really think we could improve a lot over the next couple generations if we got our act together on sensible standards that aren't based in tradition. That being said, I'm pretty sure education overseas still has dumb arbitrary spelling and still uses pi. :S No one is safe.

 

Like, I don't have a vendetta against math, and I excelled at spelling as a kid, but looking back, spelling was just a hurdle in learning something that actually matters. Nearly every western language suffers that sin, and pi is still a worldwide standard. If you don't feel like being mathy when I mention pi, or are rolling your eyes or something, please consider this.

 

Using pi for trigonometric functions is literally like using degrees, but before calculating your function, you divide the variable you're using for degrees by two. Literally. The coefficient for your circle constant should actually represent where you're going on the circle, not halfway where you're going on the circle. The coefficients don't make sense, so the patterns pi make look stupid and random-- which is why I never bothered learning it the first time. I never understood what it represented, I was just told to memorize the patterns with this newfangled pi thing.

 

so yeah idk man I wish education of all things were more streamlined :S And I wish politicians weren't all from law backgrounds. Like sure, have some lawmen in there, but not all of them. Where are the scientists? Where are the sociologists? All we have are people who have been trained in asserting that they are right, not actually being right. But we're taught that that's what you need to go into to be a lawmaker.

 

APPEND: Oh right, and the fact that we actually have people who argue against teaching evolution. Is there any other country that does that? Why do we do that.

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