Damn it, we can’t compete with that. pic.twitter.com/XHY9kP23iD
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) February 18, 2015
Ladies, does this work?
Open thread.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.
You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.
Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?
They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.
One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.
We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.
Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.
Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.
If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.
The words do not have to be perfect.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.
Usually wrong but never in doubt
Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.
Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.
Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?
Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.
Fear or fury? The choice is ours.
“But what about the lurkers?”
rikyrah
Oklahoma Bill Banning AP US History Would Make Students Study Ten Commandments, 3 Speeches By Reagan
by Judd Legum Posted on February 18, 2015 at 9:38 am
An Oklahoma bill banning Advanced Placement U.S. History would also require schools to instruct students in a long list of “foundational documents,” including the Ten Commandments, two sermons and three speeches by Ronald Reagan.
The bill, authored by Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher, designates a total of 58 documents that “shall form the base level of academic content for all United States History courses offered in the schools in the state.” Many of the texts are uncontroversial and undoubtedly covered by the Advanced Placement U.S. History course, such as the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg address. But the bill also has an ideological and religious bent. In addition to 3 speeches by Reagan, the curriculum as includes a speech by George W. Bush but nothing from any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.
Fisher’s bill was approved by the Education committee on an 11-4 vote.
Opposition to the AP U.S. History test “can be traced back to retired high-school history teacher Larry S. Krieger.” On a conference call marshaling opposition to the test, Krieger said it offered “a consistently negative view of American history that highlights oppressors and exploiters.” Krieger teamed up with Jane Robbins, an anti-Common Core activists. (Some, including Oklahoma lawmakers, have conflated the Advanced Placement test with Common Core.) They have their own website: http://opposenewapstandards.us.
Krieger, Robbins and others were successful in convincing the Republican National Committee to pass a resolution blasting the Advanced Placement U.S. History course, saying it “reflected a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/02/18/3624062/oklahoma-bill-banning-ap-us-history-make-students-study-ten-commandments-3-speeches-reagan/
kindness
How does one secretly trash their internet connection so as to keep the wife off the next jet to ISIS?
Stella B
Kittens make me itchy, but Nutella and puppies would be like dope.
Jamey
Sign me up! Do I get to choose whether I go to ISIS or ISIL, or do they just assign me?
Cluttered Mind
I don’t understand this obsession with “consistently negative view” nonsense. You better believe that in Germany everyone learns about the Holocaust and Hitler and the German people’s culpability. You study the horrible things that your ancestors and predecessors did so that you can avoid making the same mistakes they did. You study the good things that your ancestors and predecessors did so that you can feel a sense of pride and try to live up to the good examples. You accomplish nothing by learning about the good and ignoring the bad except producing ignorant people who aren’t able to view current events in the proper historical context and thus can’t make informed decisions. That said, this IS the middle of Red America we’re talking about here, and the leaders there would prefer that no one remember anything they said more than five minutes ago, so I guess ignorance is what they’re going for here. It’s not anti-American to want to understand your own country’s past, good AND bad. it’s definitely not anti-American to recognize the bad, of which there’s been plenty. You have to recognize the bad before you can have any hope of accomplishing real good.
Amir Khalid
I read stories like this and wonder If America is turning into the mythical land where Harrison Bergeron lived. If I understand this right, AP US History is a high-school course for students who want to continue with the subject in college, right? Why is there ideological opposition to that, of all things?
Mike in NC
Has CNN officially replaced FOX News as the epicenter of batshit insanity?
BGinCHI
You know it’s gonna work on Don Lemon.
Bye Don.
SRW1
Kittens and Nutella?!! OMG, these ISIS guys are hinterfotzig!!!
Can we do a roll-call to establish how many of the female JC commentariat are still with us!
FlipYrWhig
@Amir Khalid: AP History prepares you to take an exam that, if you perform reasonably well, probably counts for college credit. Why are they opposed to it? Because they’re on a hair trigger about “liberal indoctrination.”
Of course if they don’t learn sufficient material in AP History and thus don’t do well on the exam and don’t get college credit, they’ll probably end up taking U.S. history in college, and that’s where cooties come from, so I’m not sure they’ve thought this through.
Comrade Dread
If only I had known attracting women was so easy when I was single and in my 20’s, I would have carried a kitten with me.
chopper
if this is true, then IS is truly boned. because for all of america’s flaws, if there’s one thing we do well it’s cat videos.
AkaDad
Here’s a pretty funny YouTube series I just discovered. Adult Wednesday Addams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHUajqrhF30
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: AP, or Advanced Placement, are nationally-standardized curricula for a variety of subjects, which prepare a high school student to take an exam on which, if they score sufficiently well, some colleges will grant credit for that subject.
AxelFoley
Kittens and nutella.
Who said those ISIL guys weren’t romantic?
FlyingToaster
@Amir Khalid: The people who think like this don’t give a fuck if kids go on to college — or rather, they want them going to places like Bob Jones “University” where your credits aren’t transferable to anywhere else. Because Jesus.
My mom didn’t tell her family that my dad was Jewish; one of her brothers is a holy roller and all 4 of his kids went to “Christian” academies (subtext: everybody is white and evangelical) and his daughters on to Bob Jones. My uncle chose their coursework for them, until daughter A got pregnant and married and away; daughter B quit and went to cosmetology school and daughter C graduated adn got a job as a secretary.
I grew up in the Bible belt; I had classmates who thought I was a witch for having a 3-inch mirror telescope in the backyard. And that God held planes in the air — which always made my dad (mechanic and then inspector for TWA) shake his head in despair.
The GodBothering culture in the States is an amalgamation of people who are genuinely afraid of every-god-damn-thing; people who believe that if you placate your invisible sky demon, it will reward you; and people who are serious xenophobes — if you’re not exactly like me and mine, and read the same version of the Bible I do, I want you DEAD!
The TLC show with the Duggars is pretty instructive as to who is promulgating bills against education.
Mike E
@Mike in NC: I think the word “usurped” is operative here.
mellowjohn
@Comrade Dread:
st. bernard puppies work pretty good, too.
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Which then exempts from having to take certain history courses at university, right?
Ryan
Dang, all I got are nylons and Hershey bars.
FlyingToaster
Not for anyone over the age of 12.
Belafon
@rikyrah:
We’ve hit the propaganda phase of the end of our country: “We’re better because we’re better!”
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid:
It’s the content that’s … controversial.
Take a look at the history curriculum in Malaysia and see who controls it, and see why they want to.
The situation in the States is not entirely dissimilar.
FlyingToaster
@Amir Khalid: If the uni’s core curriculum, or your major’s curriculum requires US History, yes. And you get the college credits toward your graduation total.
Oftentimes people take AP courses to get rid of core curriculum requirements. We didn’t have AP courses at my HS in the 70s, but I did take a couple of ACH exams and tested out of required English classes (Freshman Comp!) and two years of college German. My youngest sister did have AP courses in the 80s, and went into college with 12 credits and only one “core” course left to take before working on her major.
Ryan
@Cluttered Mind: You must be mistaken. Murica (TM) can’t do wrong because it’s populated with Real Muricans. For Pete’s sake, we are defined as a shining city on a Hill!
Buddy H
@FlyingToaster: Here’s a Saudi cleric who rejects the fact that the earth revolves around the sun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPLKSI5grFY
He uses a cup of water to make his case. Focus with me!
PurpleGirl
@Amir Khalid: Yes.
I took AP Chemistry in high school. But for reasons we never completely explored, the whole class kind-of decided we wanted to goof off for the year. None of us took the AP exam. We studiously worked on trying to get the brightest boy in the school to laugh. We finally did it. The teacher “scolded” us for our lackadaisical attitudes.
SatanicPanic
@Mike in NC: FOX is CNN with added anger. That’s about the only difference I can see. They’re both likely to decrease viewer intelligence
Just Some Fuckhead
@rikyrah:
Which Ten Commandments? The ones that form the basis of our Judeo-Christian law, that were destroyed by Moses in a fit of anger? Or the ones that God replaced the originals with, word for word, a mere 14 chapters later that include such timeless prohibitions like “Don’t boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk”?
Spinwheel
@Zandar:
@FlyingToaster:
Zandar’s good then.
FlyingToaster
@Buddy H: If it weren’t so effing expensive, I’d like to shoot him up to geosynch over Saudi Arabia and give him a telescope to watch planes take off.
elmo
I knew a fellow like this in my last job. Educated man, affable, intelligent – and insisted, in several discussions with me, that the Constitution was a perfect document when written and was divinely inspired.
No amount of probing or inquiry would change his mind. What about the amendments, I asked. Didn’t they improve the document? Yes, of course. Well, I asked, how can you improve on perfection? “It was perfect for the time.” So, I asked, it was actually better to have slavery in 1800 than not to have it? It would have damaged the perfection if the 13th Amendment had been added in 1795? “That’s not what I said. But it was perfect for the time.”
Best example I’ve ever seen of the adage about not being able to reason a man out of a position he wasn’t reasoned into. It was literally an article of faith with him, and he could not or would not see the absurdity.
Buddy H
@FlyingToaster: The sad thing is, he could easily afford it. All that oil money.
SatanicPanic
Oh goody, Spinwheel has shown up to tell us how Zandar is doing open threads wrong.
EconWatcher
The United States is awesome, and that AP History Course was obviously trying to teach that we’re not awesome. So good riddance.
Mike E
Here’s a lawmaker who has the right attitude about the state of things in NC.
Betty Cracker
RE: The ISIL attempt to lure the ladies to a particularly violent patriarchal hellhole with kitties and hazelnut spread — as a dog person and PB&J fan, I’m luckily immune to their charms.
RE: AP US History, or A-PUSH as my daughter and her schoolmates call it, from what I’ve observed, it’s a pretty balanced course, even in a state like Florida that has more than its share of religious zealots and wingnuts attempting to subvert the educational process. Yay!
Buddy H
I’m looking forward to the new season of “Black Jesus” – I want to see that community garden back in business. Apparently Fred Willard bought the property. I’m sure they can fool him.
I really like Ms. Tudi. She is a writer, producer, fine actor and comedianne…. and there is no wikipedia entry for her. I think this is called in showbiz the Ruby Dee effect. A talented woman of color will be ignored, no matter what she achieves. Julie Dash, the woman who directed “Daughters of the Dust” is another example. And very sad.
It continues to this day; some talented ladies of color who write, direct, act for years and years…. and no recognition. No attention paid to them whatsoever. Angela Gibbs, who is brilliant as Ms. Tudi in “Black Jesus” for example.
Then some little blonde girl comes along, gets a small part in some crap comedy, and suddenly: a star!
Bobby B.
Nutella’s no good. Try an open jar of mayonnaise.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
The ideological opposition is to the curriculum, not to the basic concept. In true free market fashion, the Advanced Placement tests are created and administered by a private (IIRC not for profit) company, not by any government agency. That company is more interested in pleasing college history departments with the rigor of its curriculum than in pleasing conservative ideologues by turning it into patriotic indoctrination. Now the conservative ideologues are striking back by banning it.
Amir Khalid
@Buddy H:
There was once a Golden Age of Islam when Muslims led the world in science, mathematics, and yes, astronomy. That guy — “cleric”, my ass — sounds just like Bill O’Reilly. He, like BillO, is an ignoramus from a degenerate civilisation.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Just Some Fuckhead:
And are they supposed to study the Jewish, Protestant, or Roman Catholic version?
Okay, trick question — everyone knows they have to study the King James Version because every other version of the Bible is a hell-inspired road straight to Satan.
gene108
@Amir Khalid:
Because for many Americans, this quote from Sean Hannity sums up their view of America: “The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth”. Hannity’s America (6 June 2008)
America’s the best, and essentially perfect, and therefore anything that points out America is less than perfect hurts peoples feelings and their worldview.
Amir Khalid
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Maybe they mean the movie.
sharl
@Amir Khalid: Cervantes at #23 raises an interesting issue – how do different countries “edit” the national and local history they teach their children, especially the less pleasant aspects? In the U.S. we’ve always wrestled with this, from teaching about the atrocities committed against our aboriginals (American Indians) and the slaves, to more local incidents like the Mountain Meadows Massacre (only recently has the Mormon church come clean on that).
There is some legitimate stuff in all this; after all, there is only limited time in a course to cover a whole lot of territory. How do you decide what to cover, and how much time to devote to different events/eras? I think we have one or more historians here (e.g., smitheus, IIRC?) who could take an informed stab at that question. I know little about it, except that it has always been a challenging issue for even knowledgeable folks with good and honorable intent, and entire conferences and task force initiatives are devoted to the issue.
One problem we’ve had recently is the ascendancy of some truly dangerous knuckle-draggers to leadership roles in the Texas educational system. What makes that really bad is that Texas buys A LOT of textbooks for elementary and high school systems, so they largely drive the textbook market in this country. The big worry is that wingnutty textbooks will be forced on most of the country because of this particular market dynamic in U.S. textbook development and sales.
On a separate but related matter: I work with a retired corporate R&D exec, born and raised in Belgium and very well educated. Over dinner one evening he was asking me about the blogs I read, and in the course of that chat I mentioned a commenter at Atrios’ site who went by the darkly parodic moniker “King Leopold”.* A few days later this man told me he had to search on this name, since he couldn’t recall having heard of King Leopold II and associated horror stories.
So yeah, we got a problem, and I wish it got even more publicity than it does. But we ain’t alone…
*A lot of us thought it was a regular over there using a different nym to occasionally make a point, fwiw; funny how many earnest and unaware commenters s/he took in.
boatboy_srq
@Cluttered Mind: Cultural insecurity. The US hasn’t been around all that long, the citizenry doesn’t have umpteen centuries of identification to lean on, and new arrivals keep coming in and changing the definition of Ahmurrca. It’s the political equivalent of Future Shock.
GregB
Never tried putting Nutella on kittens. Sounds scrumptious.
Roger Moore
@mellowjohn:
But Islam seems to have a more favorable view of cats than dogs. Mohamed had cats, and there are wonderful stories about how much he liked them, so they’re obviously A OK. Dogs, though, are generally seen as unclean and acceptable only as working animals rather than as pets. So IS is much more likely to use kittens as a recruiting tool than puppies.
SatanicPanic
@Cluttered Mind: Germany may very well be an outlier. I don’t think Japan discusses their various WWII war crimes in school textbooks.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@sharl:
There’s been quite a lot of pushback against the insane edits the Texans have demanded.
I can’t find any of the articles now (probably behind a paywall), but I’ve been hearing reports of custom textbooks for Texas for a while now. From what I remember, the big publishers noticed that given a choice, a lot of states will take California’s textbooks over Texas’, but Texas is large enough that it’s worthwhile to make their very own printrun.
MomSense
Does this include a lifetime guarantee to do all the litter box changing?
sharl
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Ah, that’s good to hear. I hope that push-back bears fruit.
mai naem mobile
Why are they using a western devil food? Huh?huh? Why aren’t they using baklavas? Btw, I had a client who was muslim who said dogs aren’t allowed under Islam because they’re considered dirty but cats are ok. I have.no idea if that is true.
cmorenc
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
The answer to your “trick question” is that the key reason for using the King James version of the Bible is that Jesus spoke in early 17th-century English. Therefore, any other later translation introduces corrupting inaccuracies to the words Jesus spoke, of which the KJV is a literal contemporary transcription.
Buddy H
@sharl: What makes that really bad is that Texas buys A LOT of textbooks for elementary and high school systems, so they largely drive the textbook market in this country.
I’m old, but I remember when I studied the civil war in elementary school and middle school, and when we got to the post-war period, it was just the words “carpet bagger carpet baggers carpet baggers” again and again and again.
I really didn’t learn about reconstruction until I read on my own many years later.
Roger Moore
@sharl:
To be extremely generous to the Belgian educational authorities, those were the result of King Leopold’s personal wrongdoing, not of Belgium as a country. The Congo was Leopold II’s personal property, not Belgian property that he was running on behalf of the country. That’s the rationalization I’d use for not teaching kids about it in school.
Iowa Old Lady
I think people are afraid that education for anything other than pure job skills will make their children think differently than they do. They’re probably right.
Amir Khalid
@mai naem mobile:
There seems to be no actual cite from the Quran or the Hadith that says dogs are unclean. I think it was the Sunni religious scholar Imam Al-Shafie who is cited on this. But bear in mind that his authority is not on a level with God’s or Prophet Muhammad’s. Also, he’s been dead 12 centuries, so his technical knowledge on things like hygiene and veterinary science may be a little out of date.
Scott S.
@Spinwheel:
You’re unhinged, kid.
Sell your computer — it’s only feeding your illness and unhappiness. Get a hobby, learn to paint, learn to dance. Those are healthier obsessions.
mainmati
@Amir Khalid: Exactly. This is Advanced Placement not the general curriculum. Having done AP courses when I was in high school (long time ago and in a blue state) I would have protested the nonsense of what is being proposed for AP History in OK. My guess is that Dan Fisher probably barely made it out of high school and certainly didn’t take AP anything himself.
chopper
@GregB:
i would think the cat would flip out and kill everything in sight.
my god,that’s IS’s secret weapon. murderous nutella-covered cats.
chopper
@SatanicPanic:
and then he just keeps writing “screw Flanders” over and over again.
NotMax
AP does not (yet) stand for Adulterated Pedagogy or Awful Propaganda.
mai naem mobile
@Amir Khalid: When you have people in the 21st century photoshopping pictures and cutting tape up to mislead people about what.some public person said, why do people believe that the oral tradition from thousands of years ago didn’t change some pretty large pieces of literature? You really have to.be naive to believe that those exact words came from god or prophet or the FSM.
Cluttered Mind
@boatboy_srq: Germany is half the age of the United States as a unified country with a national identity. It’s not that I don’t understand and in many ways agree with your point…it’s just that it doesn’t have to be this way and it wouldn’t be this way if not for the persistent efforts of Real Muricans(tm) to rewrite and whitewash our history.
SatanicPanic is quite right about Japan having a gigantic blind spot for accurate WWII history, but I’m not so sure that makes Germany an outlier. Japan has some rather unique circumstances as well. Japan is still the only country to ever have nuclear weapons used on them, and honestly I think I can understand why they might collectively take issue with ever wanting to suggest that in any way they might have had it coming. Despite all this, I still don’t think Japan’s distortions of WWII history come anywhere close to what people in certain parts of this country are taught about our history. My wife made it all the way to college history courses before she learned that the Trail of Tears wasn’t a voluntary relocation. She grew up in small town Ohio, and the stories of the public schools there and what they teach turn my stomach. And that’s Ohio. I don’t even want to think about what people in small town Mississippi are learning.
FlyingToaster
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Changes in state law in Texas have changed the situation.
The “Texas” books are still endemic across the South — but not up North or West. Just like US History texts in South Carolina depicted Sherman like the Devil, whereas in Missouri or Indiana he was just one of Grant’s more efficient officers.
Many K-12 academic publishers have multiple versions of the same text — with a slightly varied title to differentiate in-house as to who the market is for. You have the one aimed at the Northeast/WestCoast/UpperMidwest, one aimed at the South, one aimed at Home Schoolers, one aimed at Prep Schools.
Once you get to university level (where I did time for my sins), they can’t be bothered.
trollhattan
@SatanicPanic:
My understanding is Japan has a blind eye WRT their roll in WWII, especially compared to Germany. Another few generations and it will be reduced to a paragraph noting a period of general unpleasantness in the twentieth century.
SatanicPanic
@Cluttered Mind: Even if they don’t discuss WWII human experimentation or the rape of Nanking, I’d be surprised if Japanese kids learn about treatment of Ainu, for instance. Or their treatment of ethnic Koreans.
It would be interesting to know about other countries. I believe Turkey officially doesn’t admit to the Armenian genocide, so I doubt that makes textbooks. Other countries? I don’t know.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: Coming back way late, and I see others have answered as well, but AP courses, at best, get you out of core requirements, or enable you to skip a level. If you get a sufficient score on, say, AP Physics, then at university you can start physics at 102 instead of 101. At some universities it gets you nothing – my daughter got a top score on AP English Lit, and her university said “that’s nice.”
jl
Kittens wouldn’t work on me if I was dealing with a suspicious outfit. Enough nutella, yeah, I might let my guard down for a moment. I’m a guy, so that might explain the difference.
Roger Moore
@Cluttered Mind:
As a unified country, yes, but they had a national identity even when they were a bunch of independent microstates. The formation of modern Germany was the result of a unification of people who believed that they belonged in a single country, not the agglomeration of a bunch of disparate groups. That’s why Germany had such strong nationalism from the get go; it already existed well before the modern German state did.
mainmati
@Roger Moore: There was a story I heard from a Muslim when I was working in Egypt that the reason Muhammed didn’t like dogs is that once when he was preaching in Mecca, a dog repeatedly barked at him, interrupting his sermon. He got so furious at this interruption that he declared dogs unfit for Muslims. Probably apocryphal but interesting for all that.
Amir Khalid
@mainmati:
That’s a shaggy-dog tale if ever I heard one.
rikyrah
Even as the crime rate goes down, the number of people in jail is rising.
By AJ Vicens Tue Feb. 17, 2015 6:30 AM EST
The United States has a prison problem. We have just 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. Even though our imprisonment rate has grown more than 400 percent since 1970, locking people up has not proved to be a deterrent.
The prison problem also extends to jails, which hold defendants awaiting trial and prisoners sentenced for minor offenses. A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on justice policy, reports that America’s local jails, which hold roughly 731,000 people on any given day, are holding more people even though the crime rate is going down. Jails disproportionately detain people of color longer and for lesser crimes. The report also finds that jails are less likely to give inmates the rehabilitation and mental-health support that could keep them out of prison.
“I observe injustice routinely. Nonetheless even I—as this report came together—was jolted by the extent to which unconvicted people in this country are held in jail simply because they are too poor to pay what it costs to get out,”writes Vera president and director Nicholas Turner. He described poor detention practices in which the mentally ill, homeless, and substance abusers are routinely jailed for bad behavior and described the practice as “destructive to individuals, their families, and entire communities.”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/jails-prison-bail-racial-disparity
chopper
(Spinwheel is on phone with radio station.)
Spinwheel: Yeah, I’m telling you Zandar can’t blog at all. Now, I’m not the type to have a grudge for no reason…
Host: Sir, if I could just break in for a moment.
Spinwheel: Yes, Roy.
Host: Do you have a question for Sandy Koufax?
Spinwheel: Yes. Mr. Koufax, don’t you think Zandar is a big jerk? – [phone line is cut] – Hello? Hello?
Spinwheel dials number again.
Spinwheel: Yeah. Spinwheel again. I think we got cut off.
-Host signals to cut phone line again-
Spinwheel: Hello?
Spinwheel dials number again.
Tommy
@SatanicPanic: They do not even have a military do they. Makes you think a Japenese kid might ask why. I don’t dislike the Japenese people but they did shoot my grandfather. I think of that to this day more than a little.
srv
Who Is Jeb Bush?
Alex, I’ll take “I’m my own man and will look forward, not backwards and meet my two new advisors Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley”
Cluttered Mind
@Tommy: Any time you have negative feelings about the Japanese because of their actions in WWII, read this.
Some of America’s greatest heroes in WWII were first or second generation Japanese-Americans. Japan’s leaders in that time were godawful, but it doesn’t reflect on the Japanese people or Japanese culture as a whole. I know you know that too, but you’re right that it’s hard.
SatanicPanic
@Tommy: They have a military, though it’s supposed to be limited to self-defense. Their mission, however, has been slowly changing, and some politicians are pushing a more aggressive stance
EDIT- since we’re on the subject, I’ve talked to people from that era in Japan, and the ones who went told stories that were terrifying and sad, and I know one guy who was a month away from becoming a kamikaze pilot before the war ended.
Cacti
@Cluttered Mind:
I’m going to have to call horse puckey on that one.
You’ve basically made the argument of every confederate states apologist, but replaced “southern” with “Japanese”.
SatanicPanic
@Cacti: Mmm, I’m not sure. Does the Iraq War reflect on American culture? Yeah, I guess. But should we blame all Americans? That seems unfair too. I don’t know, I spent a lot of time in Japan and ended up deeply ambivalent about Japanese culture, but part of me thinks I might feel that way about anywhere, because it’s not my culture.
Cluttered Mind
@Cacti: I did think a fair bit about the Confederacy and their modern day apologists when writing my posts. I almost didn’t hit submit because I was concerned about the argument you just raised. Eventually though I decided to stand by it because there is a big difference. In Japan they gloss over the history and whitewash what they did, but it’s whitewashing of the “sweep under the rug” variety. They’d prefer to just forget it ever happened and move on. Sweeping it under the rug is the last thing the Lost Causers want. They want to keep stoking the resentment and keep it alive forever. In the American South you can have organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, you can have Congressmen openly refer to the Civil War as the War of Yankee Aggression on the floor of Congress, you can have Confederate Flags flying over state houses. They don’t want to move past it, and they certainly don’t want ANYONE forgetting about it. I highly doubt that Japan has a bunch of yahoos carrying out WWII reenactments, and if they do it’s certainly not to the extent that the American South goes with the Civil War stuff.
It may seem like a trivial difference but it’s really not. Japan might not want to face up to what happened but they certainly don’t ever want anything like that happening again. The Lost Causers in the American South don’t want to face up to what happened either, but many of them are still openly expressing a desire for secession.
Amir Khalid
@Tommy:
But Japan does have a military.
My parents lived through a brutal Japanese military occupation in WWII; they would have lost friends and family to summary Japanese “justice” a time or two. I never once heard them express any sort of grudge against the Japanese as a people. You were born some two and a half decades after the war, and you’ve never experienced anything close to that. I’m mystified that you dwell upon your grandfather’s death like that.
Bobby Thomson
@rikyrah: this just can’t be right. PC is just a liberal thing, according to Chait.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Shot or killed? (Rooster Cogburn)
FlyingToaster
@Tommy:
As Elsa says, “Let it go”.
Zeros shot my dad down; but his (Nisei) dentist had been an ambulance driver in Italy at the same time that my dad was grounded from flying and put on a ground crew on Tinian. They became friends when they met at the VA; our dentist’s family was put in a camp outside Monterey, and as he was at uni, was given the choice of camp or the Army.
I don’t blame Spain for throwing my (dad’s) ancestors out in the Reconquista, either. It does no one any credit to blame anyone but the criminals who did the actual fucking crimes.
Everyone start paying their own freight, dammit; nobody has an entirely clean lineage, but you are responsible for what you are doing right now.
SatanicPanic
@Cluttered Mind: There are people who loudly (literally- they drive around in buses with speakers attached shouting right-wing slogans) are calling for a return of Japanese militarism. It’s a growing problem as the people who survived the war die off. But it is different in that there wasn’t a movement from day one like it was in the South.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cluttered Mind: and @Amir Khalid:
First, @FlyingToaster makes a very good point. I would like to add to it. Backlash bigotry is a huge factor. These people know that they’re not allowed to call anyone a nigger, not allowed to beat or murder gays, and not allowed to publicly talk about how women are bad at math. Many of them remember a time when they could get away with all of that, even be praised for it. This creates a great deal of anger and frustration, and that anger has been simmering for decades. One result is that they’re on a crusade to declare themselves beyond criticism, that THEIR people (Americans) are Exceptional, that they it’s unacceptable to accuse even their ancestors of bigotry. They don’t want to feel the constant danger of being called out on their bigotry anymore.
SatanicPanic
@FlyingToaster: my grandpa was on the ground crew at Tinian. His stories from that time sound more like a vacation than a war should sound.
Belafon
@Cluttered Mind: Another good one to read about is Chiune Sugihara.
anderj
made to Mobile for Mardi Gras. lots of fun. Got myself interviewed in the process (starts at 1:10). My girlfriend is in cognitive. The drum bands were the best imho. I don’t really get the scavenging for beads and cookies (except for the methheads; to them it was diner!)
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic: At least when I took AP exams, back during the Ford administration and scored “Fives” on them, the credit I got at the University of Oregon was a “pass” in freshman equivalent classes.
Mind you, a “five” is the highest score you can get on an AP exam. Should be the equivalent of an A, but no, I got “pass” credit.
Cluttered Mind
@SatanicPanic: That does sound problematic. Surely it isn’t condoned by prominent Japanese political leaders though? Part of the reason we can’t put a stop to stuff like that here in this country is because the borderline treasonous behavior and rhetoric is being guarded (and in some cases repeated!) by prominent GOP leaders.
@Frankensteinbeck: I like to point to this sort of thing whenever anyone criticizes the Sunni-Shia conflict as some sort of alien thing that can only happen in the backwards Middle East. I ask people who say stuff like that if they think the South will be over Sherman and the March to the Sea any time soon, and if they don’t think so, then what exactly is the difference? “A member of his family killed a member of mine 400 years ago” isn’t functionally different from “Their people burned my ancestor’s village to the ground 150 years ago” as a reason for being pissed. If a grudge can last for 150 years then it can last for 400 years no problem.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bobby Thomson: Chait is a fuckhead.
There is no more virulent strain of Political Correctness than you will find on the right. They are fanatic about it, and this kerfuffle over AP American History is a prime example of it.
raven
@anderj: Did you get any of my suggestions?
Villago Delenda Est
@Cluttered Mind: One can look at the Serbs who are still pissed about the Battle of Kosovo (which took place 626 years ago).
Botsplainer
@Cacti:
In my view, in order to reach a reasoned conclusion about the quality of Japanese war leadership, you have to look at her war aims.
Were they reasonable?
Regardless of result, were adequate resources employed toward reaching those goals, and were there reasonable retrenchments made in accordance with both tactical and strategic priorities as the course of conflict proceeded?
Domestically, was the wartime government attempting to meet the needs of the citizenry?
Were the acts of the Imperial forces in implementing the war aims consistent with longstanding internal values expressed by national culture?
Personally, I think there was a major difference between Japan and Germany in the conduct of the war. Japanese acts were pretty rational as war aims.
Gindy51
@mellowjohn: LA Burdick chocolate and puppies and they’d never run out of female recruits.
Cluttered Mind
@Villago Delenda Est: Absolutely. I’m sure you can find similar examples all over the world. I just usually prefer using examples from American history because I find those sorts of ignorant arguments being made most often by people who would be better swayed by arguments closer to home than by examples of what other silly foreigners have done.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: Well, I’m not sure I’d count the Rape of Nanking as “rational”. Or the various attempts to exterminate potential adversaries in Singapore and all over the rest of China.
One of the little explored aspects of the War in the Pacific is the US submarine campaign against Japanese shipping. One of Japan’s key objectives was to secure oil and other natural resources that were non-existent in Japan itself. In order to exploit the areas they conquered in the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, they had to ship those resources to Japan. Which made them pretty much as vulnerable as Britain was at the same time.
The US submarine campaign was devastating, but gets very little notice because, well, aircraft carriers and battleships are much sexier.
SatanicPanic
@Cluttered Mind: I wish that were the case, but the current PM has been pushing for more military money, and visiting the Yasukuni Shrine– basically dogwhistling to the far-right. The situation there is kind of scary right now, at least in terms of where the country is headed.
FlyingToaster
@SatanicPanic:
My dad, after his 6 weeks in Darwin healing up, was reclassified as “Tech Sgt” rather than “Master Sgt” Flight Engineer, and sent to Tinian. He claimed it was very “MASH” like, all behind the lines by that point and they weren’t sending out bombers w/o sufficient fighter cover anymore. And he lost in the betting pool for what was behind the barbed wire; he’d bet on bubonic plague and, of course, it was atomic bombs.
trollhattan
Here’s a photo taken 031945 of a Japanese dive bomber conducting a meet-n-greet with my dad’s ship. The photo was taken from the USS Hornet.
Tommy
@SatanicPanic: My grandfather who is no longer with us. HUMP. This happened:
China, India, oh my. Most of the valuable things in my house are from China and/or India.He loved both places and their culture. Happy, happy …
raven
@FlyingToaster: In an interview with Studs Terkel, E B Sledge said “The guys 100 yards behind us a Pelilu didn’t really know what it was likes”.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@FlyingToaster: The articles I recall reading were interviews with publishers on how electronic textbooks could change the balance of power. The iPad was a fairly new thing at the time, and the publishers all talked about the troubles the Texas books caused them in other states, especially in California.
jl
@Villago Delenda Est:
Post at TPM and link to CNN article goes into some detail regarding the ‘anti-American’ AP and suggested ‘pro-American’ replacement curriculum in OK. From what I can see, the replacement is both better and worse than what one might expect.
Better, in that documents like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X speeches and writings still included.
Worse, in that there is some goofiness, like including the Mecklenburg Declaration as authoritative authentic document, which is doubtful, since the only near contemporary documentation we have of it is a copy by Jefferson, who thought it was bogus. But that has been dropped.
Worse, in that some penny-ante partisan BS is shoved into it. Speeches by St Reagan and Dub are included, but nothing by any recent Democratic presidents.
Original Okla. AP History Bill Included Disputed Mecklenburg Declaration
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/oklahoma-ap-history-mecklenburg
Culture of Truth
Those would work on me
raven
@Tommy: People drove it too. It was called The Ledo Road.
” Overlooked is the fact that it was decided not to build the road to the original specification of a double-track (two-lane) road over its entire length, the fact that it was never assigned the originally planned number of truck transport companies, and the fact that it actually assisted the airlift operation over The Hump to which it was constantly compared.
As the road was built it served as a combat highway enabling the reconquest of Burma, serviced a pipeline that paralleled it to carry fuel all the way to China, and allowed safer more southerly routes for airlift flights to China. The accomplishment of building the Ledo Road stands as a testament to the men responsible and the American spirit that made it possible.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Cluttered Mind: Oh, yes, I see your point, and it’s quite correct.
The butthurt of some in the South never ends. It was a proper ass kicking, in retrospect, perhaps not proper enough. I think Sherman went easy on them.
sharl
@FlyingToaster: Some of the links in the Wikipedia “Monopsony” entry you linked provided considerable reassurance; thanks! Having said that, my impression is that these folks never give up, so unfortunately, eternal vigilance is required. Such is life, I guess…
@Roger Moore: In thinking more about my colleague, another possibly relevant fact was when he was born, which was within a couple years of V-E Day. Belgium was in a post-war rebuilding phase for a number of years, and I doubt that it was considered politically viable to incorporate any national “dirty laundry” in any formally adopted school curricula while that rebuilding was ongoing. Also, this guy was born and raised on a farm (in the Flemish part of Belgium, fwiw), so his experiences may be more reflective of decisions made regionally. We haven’t gotten into any details of his schooling back then, or the history of Belgian education in general.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
I think there’s a huge difference: the difference in attitude toward those times. While there are some liberal white Southerners who don’t do so, a substantial majority of white Southerners revere the antebellum South and treat Confederates as great heroes. They put the Confederate battle flag on anything they can think of, including their state flags, name public facilities after Confederate generals, and try to enshrine the Lost Cause as the correct reading of history.
In contrast, the Japanese as a group would rather ignore WWII if they could. There aren’t prominent public displays of the Imperial Japanese battle flag, there aren’t a bunch of prominent public structures named for Hideki Tojo or Isokoru Yamamoto, and the version of history they’re most likely to see shows Japan as a victim of WWII but not a defeated hero. Yes, there are right wing Japanese nuts who want to defend everything Japan did, but they’re a minority rather than a dominant majority.
SatanicPanic
@FlyingToaster: ha, grandpa might have been part of that bet. He said it was unusual they were being so hush-hush about what was in the plane and that no one knew until after the bomb was dropped.
raven
@Roger Moore:
I don’t know about that. I’ve lived in Georgia for 30 years and I think most people don’t care one way or the other.
Xantar
AP credits are also very useful for getting into competitive colleges, even if you don’t end up using them to skip classes. No college actually requires them because not all high schools have AP courses, but you better believe they are nice to have on your transcript.
Barney
Inevitably, such a stupid banner has the Daily Mail at its base. From Aug 2014:
This does, however, show just how low CNN has sunk – recycling months-old Daily Mail nonsense.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Tommy: Is there a reason you hold on to your grandfather’s war service? My father had in his back shrapnel from his time in the Pacific (WWII). His view was pretty much that “both sides shoot at the other side in war; that’s kinda what makes it battle service.” To my knowledge, he didn’t give it much thought beyond that.
It was his injury, and thus not mine to dwell on. Though I admit that as a kid, it was kinda cool to see the shrapnel get more visible over the years.
Roger Moore
@Cluttered Mind:
Yet some of those same people probably support Zionism, which is about undoing events that happened two millennia ago and based on promises that God supposedly made even longer ago than that.
Betty Cracker
@raven: I agree. It may have been true as recently as the 1960s, but the average Bubba around here today couldn’t even name a Confederate general.
SatanicPanic
@Roger Moore: don’t be so sure. For a while there it was impossible to keep track of which major cities were being run by RWNJs- Shintaro Ishihara (Tokyo) was the worst, but he’s since retired. Osaka’s mayor Toru Hashimoto‘s party was originally called the Japan Restoration Party. I mean, that’s pretty fucking fascist.
FlyingToaster
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
I know that some of the adaptations I advised on (I worked on the back-o-the-textbook CDs and DVDs before tablets) were about adapting to searchable texts and electronic delivery. And some that I’ve consulted on since WarriorGirl was born were about how to strategize hot-linking to current information.
I hope that not having to buy and maintain physical textbooks would make choosing more appropriate materials likely; however, I know from my local public school that it’s not happening yet.
Mike E
@Cacti: It took Japanese leadership (the emperor) to finally save Japan from it’s generals and from the people themselves who might have died by the millions repelling the impending Allied invasion…Hirohito stepped up, told his military council “No!” and went on the radio to instruct his subjects to stand down, something practically unprecedented in their nation’s history (the broadcast of his voice was a first, anyway). Two nukes were not enough of a deterrent.
Mebbe the right wingers look at him and like-minded others as “Chamberlains”, who knows.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
The surface battles were also a few distinct, dramatic events rather than a long-running campaign of minor skirmishes. That makes for a much more exciting narrative.
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): My old man fought against them from Guadalcanal to Okinawa and had great respect for the Japanese as fighters. His brother, who spent the war a Navy Pier, hated them! When dad coached in California in the late 50’s-early 60’s he said he’d watch his Japanese players to see when they were worn out, then he knew they’s all had enough.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
And here I thought they all had Stonewall Jackson tattoos.
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
I’d find that argument more persuasive if the sitting Prime Minister of Japan wasn’t a member of an Empire of Japan revisionist group, and didn’t make a trip to the Yasukuni Shrine, to pay homage to the names of those who died in service to the Empire, including 1,068 convicted war criminals.
It would be like the POTUS visiting a Confederate veterans cemetery to pay his respects.
ETA: My mistake. Abe just sent a message of support and a delegation of cabinet members to honor the Empire of Japan’s war criminals.
raven
@FlyingToaster: Ya’ll may be interested in this textbook project.
Peale
@SatanicPanic: It would be interesting to find out how they cover their colonial expansion. If they’re like the Europeans, they’ll have a debate about whether or not they were good for the subjugated peoples. Its kind of difficult to look at Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan after Japanese rule and think “wow, those Koreans really were lucky. They got railroads and baseball.”
Cacti
@Peale:
It’s harder to whitewash events that happened in living memory, and in the age of film and photography.
Peale
@Barney: Step 1: Flood ISIS held territory with Nutella.
Step 2: Embargo Fluoride toothpaste. Step 3. Wait five years. ISIS will become a toothless threat in no time.
SatanicPanic
@Peale: The line I’ve heard is that everyone was doing it and it was hypocritical of the US and European powers to condemn them for it. Japan had to or someone would come and do it to them. I don’t know if that’s the official line though.
ThresherK
@Stella B: Nutella makes me itchy–hazelnuts. We could team up and I can have double the kittens, and you can have double the Nutella.
(I’d have to wear lots of that traditional garb to hide my gender. But–double kittens!)
FlyingToaster
@raven: Cooool!
This needs to happen where feasible. Back at Uni, one of our physics profs didn’t use a book; you picked up his hand-crafted text with his notes week-by-week from either the Union bookstore or from White Rabbit copiers. It was certainly cheaper (for both him and his students) than publishing a textbook would have been.
bjacques
@Roger Moore:
About that German nationalism predating (first) unification:
In Leipzig, southeast of town by the cemetery is a behemoth now known as the Genocide Memorial. Planning for the monument began in 1814, after Napoleon had been defeated, and a year after the Battle of Nations convinced the German states that maybe it would have been better to stick together instead of cutting separate deals and leaving the Prussians to get stomped. Instead of getting nationhood, Germany got screwed in the 1815 Congress of Vienna, while France, the defeated party, got off relatively lightly, partly thanks to Talleyrand knowing how to play to the politics of the victors. I think the monument also came to represent frustrated ambition, because when it was finally built and dedicated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, instead of something tasteful like the obelisk at Waterloo, it was a monster that signalled to Europe that it had better sleep with one eye open. It’s got eight massive stone guards and it looks like the entrance to Gondor, topped by Darth Vader’s helmet.
I took the AP English exam and managed to place out of Freshman English in college. Good thing, too, since I was already going to be carrying a heavy load with the basics of an engineering degree.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: I think our dads were contemporaries. I’ve never properly thanked you for giving me the info on how to get my old man’s service records. I’m really grateful.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: The Narrative rules. Always. Even if it’s not as strategically significant as those boring submarines torpedoing merchant ships.
JGabriel
@Comrade Dread:
Anyone can carry kittens. It’s getting them to sit still while you coat them in Nutella that’s shows people you’re truly determined.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cacti: Or Ronald Reagan traveling to Bitburg to pay respects to fallen members of the SS….
Oh…wait…
Roger Moore
@Peale:
I don’t think it’s such a good idea to lump Taiwan in with Korea and Manchuria. Taiwan was transferred from military to civilian administration before the military got completely out of control, and Japan targeted it for eventual assimilation. My impression is that the Taiwanese who were there under Japanese control thought they did a better job of running the place than the Chinese did either before or after, and this is reflected even today by Taiwanese having more favorable views toward Japan than other countries in East Asia.
trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est:
Always willing to jump in with some Ramones when the opportunity arises.
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Yes you have but you are welcome again.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Unless I’m mixing Tommy up with someone else, I think his grandfather was one of those people who refused to consider buying anything made in Japan, ever, even decades after the war.
Amir Khalid
@bjacques:
Do you have a link to an image of that memorial? Your description of it has piqued my curiosity.
Pat J.
It depends on the kind of cat, no?
raven
@Amir Khalid: google doesn’t
Bob In Portland
Strelikov speaks.
sharl
@Amir Khalid: bjacques’ description of the memorial seems to match this, which isn’t described there as a “Genocide Memorial,” though perhaps that history has been incorporated in the memorial since its recent restoration…dunno.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: Genius Bob strikes again. The author of the piece you cite, Nikolai Starikov, is not the same person as the former Russian spec-ops guy and leader of the DNR, Igor Strelkov and, in fact, is critical of the latter’s role. Nikolai Starikov is head of the Great Fatherland Party, a politically conservative and openly Christianist bloc. This is whom you are reduced to quoting?
grandpa john
@raven:
agree with you and I live in SC , Abbeville to be exact and since Abbeville was the site of the first meeting of secession (Secession Hill ) and the last meeting of the Confederate cabinet ( Burt-Stark House ) as they fled, There is more of a historical presence and dwelling on the past, here than in many places, but it is not obsessive. This is probably due to the influx of people moving in from other places, many of them even northerners that are not inbred with the confederacy mysticism and idolatry
chopper
@Gin & Tonic:
well that’s just hilarious. maybe bob got him confused with nikolai volkoff, semi-famous pro wrestler.