Trump wants 'Patriotic Education'.

lil devils x

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Fun fact about Australia, free settlers actually outnumbered convicts quite significantly. But even then, convicts would come as indentured labour, not slavery. Indigenous Australians would be somewhere in-between (i.e. not technically slaves, but had wages withheld). Plus, there's blackbirding.

Though to be frank, Australia is among the last places I think of when it comes to slavery, and this isn't out of a white blindfold view of history, it's more the fact that if you look at the history of the world, you find slavery EVERYWHERE. I'm not even sure why "economic slavery" is an argument that 's even being used. If I owned another human being as, say, a sex slave, I might not be making a dent on the economy, but it doesn't make my actions any less heinous. And if we're applying this on the level of nations and empires, so, to list a few, the United States used slaves to grow cotton, the Ottoman Empire used slaves to work in salt mines, various Arab caliphates used slaves for harems and soldiers, and the Aztecs used slaves for human sacrifice. Does slavery become worse if it's used to fund the economy?

Also, even if we're doubting the scale of slavery in numerous societies...




Not saying any of that's ideal, but I can't call it slavery. And even if it is "wage slavery," I'd still rank that above slavery, serfdom, or indentured labour.

Granted, just writing that is kind of like saying it's better to eat dogshit rather than catshit, but at the very least, there's a potential 'out' from such positions that the other forms of labour I mentioned above wouldn't allow.
I'm going to disagree, but then again, I have literally seen a black mother and her 5 children sleeping in dirt holes in the ground under floorboards covered in found plastic with no actual roof over their heads in an inhospitable environment. I have seen the working and living conditions of other Native Americans who are treated no better than slaves EVEN in this time. There were slaves who lived better than some of my own brothers working LESS hours. People really do not realize how bad some people STILL have it in the US and the world for that matter. You see these shacks in this film? There are STILL people forced to living in these conditions in the country, I went to school with kids who our bus picked up from houses JUST like this, or even worse like Esthers.

We still literally have people who have as little as slaves, or sometimes even less. Not because they don't work hard. They work harder than most, just this is how bad people are paid these days. Not having employers beat you , rape you and kill you is a plus, but if you are suffering and die anyway because of how little you are paid, the end result isn't much better. Having poverty conditions on par with slavery due to not being paid a living wage isn't much of an improvement here.

Slavery wasn't "ONLY BAD" because of the worst abusers. We aren't talking about the " worst offenders" as examples of why slavery was bad, Even the slaves who were treated well were still slaves and had little to no wealth. Slavery was bad because of the way they forced people to live "beneath" others, they were viewed as "less than" others and undeserving of the same basic access to human decency. We still have that by forcing people into poverty and desperation to provide for themselves and their families via wage slavery. Not paying people a living wage forces people to not be able to even afford a roof over their heads or food on their tables. Many never are never able to buy new clothes or shoes or other basic necessities due to the severity of this.

With the amount of wealth in this world, there really is no excuse for the conditions they are imposing upon the workers who are doing the work that is creating the wealth for others to accumulate but being denied the ability to do so themselves.
 
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Exley97

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Your daily reminder that the Right is just as bad as the Left when it comes to political correctness. They just sell it as "patriotic" correctness.
 
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tstorm823

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I mentioned both as cases where the US were indeed early.

But as for monarchs and state religios in present-day-Europe : Are those actually relevant anywhere outside of the Vatican, Monaco, Liechtenstein etc ?
Any thoughts on US positions on immigration as compared to the rest of the world?
 

Mister Mumbler

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They also said Trump was going to have transexuals in concentration camps so.... I don't see how you think they were prophetic somehow.
Well, I'm not going to try and convince you as this is just my opinion on the matter (and despite my happy-go-lucky dog, am a rather cynical person in general). And like I said, I didn't believe it at all until this year, but goodness has this year been truly an awful one, and the two big things that flipped me were Trump sending in unmarked federal agents into Portland and his general handling of the pandemic, specifically in regards to his comments to Woodward ("I know how bad the virus is, but I'm going to downplay it"), especially when taken in context with comments he made after that interview (such as that whole "well it's only affecting blue states so who cares").
 

Silvanus

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Worst torture I ever heard of. [...]
Creating a civilization that gives a flying crap about human rights is huge. It was never guaranteed. And we can lose it if you don't appreciate it.
I'm pretty sure most countries managed to get by without doing that bathtub thing.

Human history is gruesome, yes, but avoiding its very worst excesses is a very low bar.

Both are leagues ahead of the rest of the world.
In the "total overseas conflicts" league, perhaps.
 

gorfias

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I'm pretty sure most countries managed to get by without doing that bathtub thing.

Human history is gruesome, yes, but avoiding its very worst excesses is a very low bar.
Hitler didn't meet that standard. Nor Castro, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. To this day, I wonder what % of the world could be called free vs. not free. I hear slavery is back in Libya. North Korea a hell on earth. Venezuela they're eating zoo animals while women leave jobs as health providers in hospitals to become whores because they cannot feed themselves.

Take what we have for granted you can lose it.
 
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Avnger

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Hitler didn't meet that standard. Nor Castro, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. To this day, I wonder what % of the world could be called free vs. not free. I hear slavery is back in Libya. North Korea a hell on earth. Venezuela they're eating zoo animals while women leave jobs as health providers in hospitals to become whores because they cannot feed themselves.

Take what we have for granted you can lose it.
And never ask for anything more because that's how we get your boot in our face?
 

Secondhand Revenant

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I suspect a country is kinda sad if proof of greatness is that you can name the worst people in the world. Also wonder how many countries qualify for this greatness if all you gotta do is not have Hitler. Sealand is pretty great I think by many of these standards.
 
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Silvanus

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Hitler didn't meet that standard. Nor Castro, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao.
Ok. And being better than them... means the US is living up to its founding principles? Those are some low-bar principles.

To this day, I wonder what % of the world could be called free vs. not free. I hear slavery is back in Libya. North Korea a hell on earth. Venezuela they're eating zoo animals while women leave jobs as health providers in hospitals to become whores because they cannot feed themselves.

Take what we have for granted you can lose it.
Modern, "underground" slavery never went away, and exists in the United States today, numbering tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. By importing from extremely-low-cost factories in countries with poor labour laws, the US also funds slavery overseas.

Our freedom from servitude should never be taken for granted. But imagining that our countries (mine being the UK) are free from culpability is doing precisely that. The myth of American exceptionalism has prompted people to refuse criticism of their country on patriotic grounds, and to overlook the abuses happening to people within its borders.
 

happyninja42

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The myth of American exceptionalism has prompted people to refuse criticism of their country on patriotic grounds, and to overlook the abuses happening to people within its borders.
The even worse aspect of it, is they've mutated their jingo patriotism to include their religion, so it's doubly insulated in their heads as something you can't fuck with. It's not just their rights as a citizen, to behave the way they are, it's also a DIVINE thing. So if you criticize it, you are questioning their faith, and that's just wrong!!! So you shut up trying to make me question what I'm doing!! Because my God Wears the Red White and Blue!! And if they are a veteran too? Oh fuck, forget it. It's like they think every soldier was birthed straight from Lady Liberty, and the doctor was Uncle Sam, and the American Bald Eagle was standing at attention in the delivery room, saluting the fatigue wearing proto-soldier, while Jesus clapped in the corner.

The level of soldier worship is really fucking terrifying over here.
 

Asita

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But you also write America was never great.
I'd argue that anyone seeking validation of greatness through their nation's history 1) Needs to grow up and drop the "my daddy country was better than your daddy country" line of thinking, and 2) Sucks at 'big picture' thinking and is looking at an overly narrow snapshot of the past without consideration for the myriad improvements in life between that moment and now.

Moreover, I'd further argue that what we confuse for patriotism is closer to religious fervor, wherein it's so often treated as scandalous to even suggest that your nation is less than the best country ever. We in the US are particularly infamous for this with how often we crow about how the US is "the greatest, most powerful nation in the world" and a lionization of the "Founding Fathers" that really does border deification. I mean hell, to this day we debate on what their opinions would be about the current state of US law, and we ascribe great weight to that as if they were some kind of infallible prescient sages who should always have the final word.

Anyone who looks to history and says "we should use this as a tool to foster pride in our great nation" has misunderstood the purpose of it. History has its moments of brilliance and beauty, but it's also rife with tragedy, atrocity, ineptitude, and bloodshed. History is not studied to make us feel proud of our ancestry, it is studied so we can understand what our predecessors did right and what they did wrong. And we do this in the hopes that through that knowledge we can further improve upon the world we inherited, expanding on the successes and fixing the failures of our history as we hope our descendants will do the same with what we leave them. If "was <nation> great?" is a question you hope to answer in studying history, you are perverting the purpose of the discipline. The key concept is "knowledge from inquiry" not "national pride".
 

Secondhand Revenant

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Like legitimately I think that most of human history was crap and not a lot to be proud of, and all we need to do is strive to improve. This concept of countries being great in the past etc is like, idk naive at best to me or motivated by some kind of sense of nationalism more often.
 

gorfias

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And never ask for anything more because that's how we get your boot in our face?
Well, I would hope people can run short of inciting the murder of police officers because you want to shift some spending priorities.
Ok. And being better than them... means the US is living up to its founding principles? Those are some low-bar principles.

Modern, "underground" slavery never went away, and exists in the United States today, numbering tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. By importing from extremely-low-cost factories in countries with poor labour laws, the US also funds slavery overseas.

Our freedom from servitude should never be taken for granted. But imagining that our countries (mine being the UK) are free from culpability is doing precisely that. The myth of American exceptionalism has prompted people to refuse criticism of their country on patriotic grounds, and to overlook the abuses happening to people within its borders.
You sound like a Trump voter!
I think hollowing out the US manufacturing base to take advantage of quasi slave labor in China is a bad thing. Trump's against it. Defend our borders and sex trafficking will take a hit. Etc.
I'd argue that anyone seeking validation of greatness through their nation's history 1) Needs to grow up and drop the "my daddy country was better than your daddy country" line of thinking, and 2) Sucks at 'big picture' thinking and is looking at an overly narrow snapshot of the past without consideration for the myriad improvements in life between that moment and now.

Moreover, I'd further argue that what we confuse for patriotism is closer to religious fervor, wherein it's so often treated as scandalous to even suggest that your nation is less than the best country ever. We in the US are particularly infamous for this with how often we crow about how the US is "the greatest, most powerful nation in the world" and a lionization of the "Founding Fathers" that really does border deification. I mean hell, to this day we debate on what their opinions would be about the current state of US law, and we ascribe great weight to that as if they were some kind of infallible prescient sages who should always have the final word.

Anyone who looks to history and says "we should use this as a tool to foster pride in our great nation" has misunderstood the purpose of it. History has its moments of brilliance and beauty, but it's also rife with tragedy, atrocity, ineptitude, and bloodshed. History is not studied to make us feel proud of our ancestry, it is studied so we can understand what our predecessors did right and what they did wrong. And we do this in the hopes that through that knowledge we can further improve upon the world we inherited, expanding on the successes and fixing the failures of our history as we hope our descendants will do the same with what we leave them. If "was <nation> great?" is a question you hope to answer in studying history, you are perverting the purpose of the discipline. The key concept is "knowledge from inquiry" not "national pride".
My mom used to tell me that Nazi Germany became what it did due to an excess of patriotism. I counter that France fell to the Nazis because there was not enough of a sense of patriotism.
There are great things about Western traditions. Can we improve? Sure. Should we remind ourselves of the sins of the past? Absolutely. But teach kids to be ashamed of things like the enlightenment, valuing human rights, which some say exist only because Jews are trying to pull one over on you? That the US flag is "upsetting" to some people? I think we need to fight this sort of thing. Or get ready to be thrown in an oven.
 

Revnak

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Defend our borders and sex trafficking will take a hit. Etc.
I was unaware that sex traffickers had themselves and their victims apply for entry as refugees. Pretty sure your knowledge of this issue boils down to sheer terror at the idea of a brown man having sex with a white woman.
 

gorfias

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Please do not make inflammatory remarks.
I was unaware that sex traffickers had themselves and their victims apply for entry as refugees. Pretty sure your knowledge of this issue boils down to sheer terror at the idea of a brown man having sex with a white woman.
Ewww.... written as if you want to rape kids. Stop it.
 

Specter Von Baren

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And? I don't think most of us are calling things great for it.
If the most common state of humanity is "worse than trash" then I would still consider "trash" an improvement. A recovering alcoholic can and should be proud of themselves for going 6 months without a drink but just because you can feel pride in such a thing does not mean you dismiss that there is more work to be done.