Yeah I live here & had the unfortunate opportunity to hear the Dept of Ed try to spin this in an interview. Their spokesperson said, to paraphrase, that “No, of course not. These standards are evenhanded and show the good and the bad from an objective perspective.”
Of who? I am just so sad - my oldest kids made it though during the brief shining period of good education in my county, but I have one with a couple of years left, who is seeing it plunge back into the bullshit ‘education’ that was what I suffered through. Just butts in seats, indoctrinate don’t educate, that might lead to thinking.
Let's be perfectly clear: The US was destroying large Japanese cities and their occupants at the same scale as Hiroshima and Nagasaki for some time, just with less efficiency, and much of the Japanese populace was prepared to fight to the death with shovels and sticks.
I'm not saying that the atomic bombs were a good thing; I'm just pointing out that they weren't particularly worse than what the US was already doing, and prepared to continue doing. And that in the moment, a display of such offensive power could be argued to be a quicker way to end the war, and prevent having to do a ground invasion of the home islands. With today's hindsight, we can definitely see clearly the other local and global repercussions of nuclear weapons, which makes the US having used them carry many different connotations.
But that's likely not even the whole reason nuclear bombs were used in 1945. The USSR were only grudingly allied with the US, because they needed help early on in the European theater. Well before the bombs were dropped, the Soviets had ramped up their military strength and were running roughshod over eastern Europe. Germany had already surrendered, and USSR looked towards the east, taking over Manchuria and Korea, with the Korean peninsula split at the 38th parallel at Potsdam, before the Korean War.
The US wanted to use the bomb as a deterrent to the Soviets, and using atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 accomplished that goal, as well as reducing the expense and risk to US military forces already at war, without increasing the effects on the ground very much. Japan's surrender had plenty to do with making the decision on who to surrender to, with the preference being the US and not the USSR. But Japan did not want to surrender unconditionally, they wanted to ensure that the Imperial government could do so while saving face, and probably while not also being imprisoned or killed. It's likely that Japan would have surrendered with or without any atomic bombs, certainly without the second one.
But the US needed to demonstrate to the world, particularly to Stalin, that they could build as many atomic bombs as they wanted, and that came from dropping a second one in quick succession after the first.
Was getting serious a few years ago, it’s past that now. We’re to the point now where we could actually theoretically fall. We’re being generally outmaneuvered, as we’re mostly being modern and democratic, and they perceive themselves as fighting a war.
In a war, you do what you have to do to win, the normal rules no longer apply. Even human rights are irrelevant if your war can remake a world without them.
I see it as the last hurrah of the past. If they don’t stop the world now, fascism might be dead forever in western history. This is the last chance they may ever get to truly create the world that they want to see. Otherwise economic, technological and educational factors will deprive them of even the opportunity eventually.
Make no mistake, the goal for many is some kind of WW3. A significant portion lean towards a doomsday cult. They look to things like global warming and they see the second coming. They are not interested in concerns about disaster whatsoever, if anyone hasn’t noticed yet.
It’s cyclical, so I don’t think this is the last hurrah of fascism.
Additionally, when everyone has a phone in their pocket with access to confirmation bias, it was inevitable that this would be the result. Social media has amplified echo chambers to levels never seen before, and it’s made even worse by the fact that those social media sites use algorithms to keep users engaged as much as possible for increased ad exposure. Unfortunately, those algorithms will show you inflammatory content, as that’s been shown to grab users’ attention the most: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024292118
However, social media may be creating perverse incentives for divisive content because this content is particularly likely to go “viral.” We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language. These findings contribute to scholarly debates about the role of social media in political polarization and can inform solutions for creating healthier social media environments.
We have seen this unfold in virtually real time over the last decade or so. The result is an ever more divided and radicalized society that becomes more and more exploitable by populists.
I find it difficult to look at the breadth of recorded history and see anything cyclical about it. Never saw people flying through the sky in machines until pretty recently, or communicating instantly across the globe.
Regarding social media, yes, that is a major concern. I think we need to wreck the market locks of the major tech giants. Which is why I picked a Fediverse service and not any of the other reddit competitors.
When people say that history is cyclical, they don’t mean that it is literally repeating itself verbatim. They’re referring to human nature/behavior. There’s been numerous cycles in that regard that haven’t varied that drastically. One only needs to even examine the last 150 years and see that we’re once again experiencing a modern version of the Robber Baron Era (in the US at least for this one), the rise of fascism and populism, an increase in xenophobia and demand for isolationism, etc.
Look at human history, on a global scale technological development has been constantly increasing over time. Locally there are plateaus and even valleys like the middle ages but those have always been temporary and afterwards canceled out when development went back to going up again. Overall the technological knowledge of humanity has always been increasing and it seems like a trend that is almost impossible to stop. Example for directional technological progress : pointy stick -> bow & arrow -> sword -> cannon -> rifle -> tank -> nuke -> drones
Social development of societies on the other hand seems to be oscillating between several poles instead of having a general direction. Examples for social oscillations:
authoritarian rule <-> individual freedom
capitalism <-> socialism
aggressive expansionism <-> peaceful cooperation
Germany is a good example for this oscillation process, it went monarchy -> democracy -> fascist authoritarian dictatorship -> democracy -> today the AfD (neo nazi party of Germany) has the best polls ever, so the direction is changing again.
I see what you’re saying, I noticed similar things in my youth. As I studied more though, I realized I was simply cherry-picking, and filling in the gaps with pop culture misconceptions.
The plateaus and valleys you describe, for instance, are some of these misconceptions, stemming from old schools of thought. Modern scholarship points how how progress in many arenas continued through the dark ages and medieval period. You could look at the history of something like military fortifications and see this progress very clearly, in a situation where we have a great many old examples to study.
Regarding this social oscillation you describe, I think it’s fairly cherry picked. With the whole data set, this starts to become more clear. How about the history of Denmark or the UK? How about Chinese or Japanese history? These will all break your hypothesis.
We can talk about these things, it’s completely okay. You did nothing wrong and neither did I, we’re just two people having a conversation. We’re all good here man.
Faschism is to eventually win unless you do something to oppose it. There would always be ones who’d try to recover it for their own benefit. It requires conscious effort, education and empathy to not give in into that set of ideas, like it needs a decision to skip fastfood and go to the gym\walk but for society as a whole. It’s unhealthy and causes cancer, but it always somewhere there.
You could make that argument. Florida Republicans are teaching children that the slaves benefited personally because they learned skills they could use.
The Florida Department of Education says the new standards don’t teach that slavery was beneficial.
However, one of the benchmarks (SS.68.AA.2.3) states students will be taught, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Either this is some very unfortunate phrasing for establishing that people like Phillis Wheatley are required material (and even then it was less ‘thanks to’ and more ‘in spite of’) or something more nefarious is afoot.
I'm pretty sure these people were always racist, they just found out there's a bunch of other people being quietly racist who will back up their shitty decisions and then they became more brazen.
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