The British burned down Washington D.C.???? Exactly 200 years ago today????

[bankside]

Shifting gears.... When they burned Washington, and bombarded Fort McHenry, it was an attempt at "shock and awe" that was supposed to make rational people capitulate....

...the British Empire of the time failed just as completely to understand this new creature, the American.

i.e., irrational people!

it all makes sense now!!!

 

[DonQuixote]

And durned passionate, too.

 

[DonQuixote]

Those are good questions. The borders may fit the geography and the indigenous divisions better than the European ones - Italy has only been a unified country for a relatively short period.

Then, again - that population density and megalomania thing - rats in a maze - may have come to play in the Eurozone more than here.

Putin's latest rebuke that it's best not to mess with Nuclear Russia - scary and so much bluster at the same time.

 

[thewiz]

Living in DC, the occasion of the burning of Washington seemed to be "new news" to many. The White House of today bears little resemblance to the White House that was burned in 1812 (or that was originally constructed under the tutelage of George Washington). After Harry Truman became president, the place was found to be falling apart and legend has it that his daughter's piano began to fall through a second story floor. The entire interior of the White House was gutted to the original stone walls and the material is buried at Ft. Meade under the baseball fields. The porticos, east and west wings, and underground command centers were also later additions to the original White House which is white only because of the limestone mix that has to be regularly applied (the capital building and White House often get a little yellowish prior to the reapplications).

Probably the biggest loss in the burning of DC was the destruction of the Library of Congress where a number of original works perished in the fires set by the British; works that were irreplaceable.

I guess I have a double connection because I grew up and spent much of my life in Michigan. People always asked why there were Forts in Mackinaw (or Mackinac) as well as other parts of the state. We didn't always enjoy a good relationship with our neighbor to the north and they were part of an active defense. Today, 1/2 to 3/4 of our imports and exports cross through the Detroit area and with Canada.

 

[Keeland]

After Harry Truman became president, the place was found to be falling apart and legend has it that his daughter's piano began to fall through a second story floor.

Lincoln didn't sleep here. A one-minute 16-second video:

 

[belamyi]

Perhaps Latin America has less ambition and greed for their neighbors and less historic enmity. And maybe the manana culture is not conducive to invasion and sustained wars.



That's horrible but not surprising. The decline in history knowledge has preceded the general decline and been noted by surveys for some time now. Aside from the inevitable snarky attacks about school marminess and dropout murderers, there is a real pattern in our schools today that parallels Margaret Mead's comment about serial polygamy. By parallels, I mean that we don't think of dropping out in the proper way, just as Westerners didn't think of polygamy properly, but reserved its use for those savage people somewhere else.

We track dropout rates as a marker of failure to achieve a significant milestone of learning. The severity of the growing problem has managed to divert some public attention from the greater problem: serial dropout behaviors. Whereas we focus on what is a seminal failure by dropping out altogether, we do not so much focus on the markers of dropping out in degrees.

The statistics plainly show that students drop out in progressive stages and proceed on to take their degree. Vast numbers of graduates finish with reading levels stymied at the fifth grade level, and writing skills commensurate. Even larger numbers have taken no significant math or science. Courses have been watered down, year after year, to become little more than how to balance a checkbook or similar glorification of 3rd grade math. Social studies courses redefine objectives to make exposure to culture and history as the goal, not retention of any basic facts that are pivotal to those lessons. Busywork and worksheets have become the hallmark of many classrooms more worried about riling students with real work than obtaining measurable learning.

Are all classrooms so? No. But the problem is pervasive enough that it is a real factor in the continuing stratification of public education to the levels of haves and have nots. Neighborhoods, cities, and regions benefit from the grouping of supportive families while the impoverished suffer from the moneyed flight. It used to be white flight, but that is no longer the real driver since other ethnicities have moved into middle class careers and the real dividing line has become income.

The majority of our schools are sick to the core and it is affecting society and industry and the standard of living. Foreign competition is justifiably outstripping us because our skill level has fallen to the level that others can do it cheaper with greater skill.

Yeah, but all that skill only makes sense and has power as long as there is an order of things that you are taking for granted: if international politics and economy are screwed by a global conflict, or even by a lesser one, the global impact amounting to the same, you are reverting to dynamics in which it makes no difference, no sense, in which there is no use having a qualified force that won't get the opportunity to put those skills to practice.

In fact, that is EXACTLY what has been happening in Africa, for all the small exceptions in this or that small country or region: you get a healthy, able and very qualify force of people, people who as kids wanted to be doctors or engineers to help people and help build their country, but who are driven out of it by the lack of opportunity, in the best case, and armed conflict in the worse so that it will make no difference what their own capacity is or where the general level of the country is at.

There is a paradox that should be given an easy name for reference, for example the Quesada paradox which is but the social sciences application of a more general paradox in logic: you can say the people are the nation, or a nation is made of people, or a nation is made with people... and you will be saying different things driving down to the fact that the mass has nothing to do with the nation, much less with the general tone and level of education and civilization and all that. That paradox shows that what is said IN MANY CASES, though NOT IN ALL, about oppresive elites, is the inversion of the right understanding of it, to wit, that the problem is not so much that elites are refractary to change and extension of the knowledge that supports their own status but, rather, that those who are not elites are ignorant of a power they are not willing to exert, to improve and assert themselves according to the power of knowledge, that is, going beyond the matter of course, the habits given to them and to which they accomodate.
That conflict of oppresive elites is only pointed at when newer elites compose the genealogy and epics of their own status, as business people (bourgeoisie in old Europe) did against aristocracy, and then they use "the people" to justify their status, as representing the general of the population, when that general population is always driven by more basic instincts, while those new elites, as all elites, are driven by very specific motivations and with a very articulated understanding of their own status, as of that of all the other agents implied.

This all boils down to the conclusion that what we are dealing with, what you were pointing at, is the weakening, the receding role and action of elites: elites, not just the rich or/and the wiser guy in the village, but the people with not necessarily a material ascendant, have given up their influence, their real, acting influence on people who are just either happy or plied to what feeds them.
This may be self-imposed because the model they represent, inherited by their predecessors, is simply becoming a spent force and they can not find anything outside that model, because then they would be a new force, a new elite in the making, and they can not obviously be against yourself, not by choice, but by mere nature: you can seem to betray your own class with this or that update, but that is always the mere developing of all the consequences contained in the original nutshell: it short, it's the old adage that everything holds in itself, like all living things, the seed of its own destruction, and that will perhaps be more obviously revealed to you when you think of all that was implied in capitalist liberalism, that had been at first held back by more aristocratic, "gentleman practices of the previous regime, and that now unfolds in all its ruthless, pure logical glory for us to suffer.

Apart from that, it is funny to observe, in consonance with what I pointed out above in this same post, that people usually, always, point out either at the learned part (scientists and academia in general) like to the general to show the general tone of the country, like when Germany is shown to be very learned and progressive just up to the mid 1930s, and then they were all nazis by either act or by omission, when all that, that learning like that weathercock "simple, decent" common people, are just like toys in the hands of those elites who, as I said, do not need to be particularly clever or learned or even decent, but simply have a very definite and lasting plan of influence to drive their country along. Best example was that so-called neocon that Bush Jr had his country and the whole world gone through, directly during a decad or so, and whose infleunce and consequences we are suffering: for example, the Iraqi hornet's nest.

 

[belamyi]

Like a lightning rod, and as predictable.

"Predictable" what?

 

[Kulindahr]

Living in DC, the occasion of the burning of Washington seemed to be "new news" to many. The White House of today bears little resemblance to the White House that was burned in 1812 (or that was originally constructed under the tutelage of George Washington). After Harry Truman became president, the place was found to be falling apart and legend has it that his daughter's piano began to fall through a second story floor. The entire interior of the White House was gutted to the original stone walls and the material is buried at Ft. Meade under the baseball fields. The porticos, east and west wings, and underground command centers were also later additions to the original White House which is white only because of the limestone mix that has to be regularly applied (the capital building and White House often get a little yellowish prior to the reapplications).

Well, that won't have to be done much longer -- new nanomaterials are on the way that can make a surface the color you want and it will stay that way forever unless scratched or pitted, and maybe even then.

 

[Kulindahr]

That's horrible but not surprising. The decline in history knowledge has preceded the general decline and been noted by surveys for some time now. Aside from the inevitable snarky attacks about school marminess and dropout murderers, there is a real pattern in our schools today that parallels Margaret Mead's comment about serial polygamy. By parallels, I mean that we don't think of dropping out in the proper way, just as Westerners didn't think of polygamy properly, but reserved its use for those savage people somewhere else.

We track dropout rates as a marker of failure to achieve a significant milestone of learning. The severity of the growing problem has managed to divert some public attention from the greater problem: serial dropout behaviors. Whereas we focus on what is a seminal failure by dropping out altogether, we do not so much focus on the markers of dropping out in degrees.

The statistics plainly show that students drop out in progressive stages and proceed on to take their degree. Vast numbers of graduates finish with reading levels stymied at the fifth grade level, and writing skills commensurate. Even larger numbers have taken no significant math or science. Courses have been watered down, year after year, to become little more than how to balance a checkbook or similar glorification of 3rd grade math. Social studies courses redefine objectives to make exposure to culture and history as the goal, not retention of any basic facts that are pivotal to those lessons. Busywork and worksheets have become the hallmark of many classrooms more worried about riling students with real work than obtaining measurable learning.

Are all classrooms so? No. But the problem is pervasive enough that it is a real factor in the continuing stratification of public education to the levels of haves and have nots. Neighborhoods, cities, and regions benefit from the grouping of supportive families while the impoverished suffer from the moneyed flight. It used to be white flight, but that is no longer the real driver since other ethnicities have moved into middle class careers and the real dividing line has become income.

The majority of our schools are sick to the core and it is affecting society and industry and the standard of living. Foreign competition is justifiably outstripping us because our skill level has fallen to the level that others can do it cheaper with greater skill.

Ignorance of history has international implications: anyone who actually had a grasp of history would never have invaded Iraq.

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

bet ya sum uni gonna discova planet civlied folkees stoopid afta anoda 100 yr research grant

haaaaaaaaa

_let rock_
wich volcao?
" anyone doodoo "

thankyou

happy porn day

_hey world leadurs ya got clean undys on?

 

[belamyi]

Ignorance of history has international implications: anyone who actually had a grasp of history would never have invaded Iraq.

What a foolish thing to say: the problem is not ignoring history, but ignoring it [sic]

You don't even need the "this time it's different", or "we are different" or "that was in times past"... when you are determined to ignore even what you have learned, and when the rest of the people are naively ignorant, you can not but help repeating history: in fact, that may actually be the primary fuel of history.
That happens with teens growing up and facing the world like with younger governments facing the world and history.

 

[xbuzzerx]

Ignorance of history has international implications: anyone who actually had a grasp of history would never have invaded Iraq.

Very true.... but almost everyone involved with that had Ivy League educations and the very finest schools. So you've pointed at the huge flaw in Deja's analysis, which is that you can have the very best opportunities to learn in the world and still understand absolutely nothing about history. It doesn't surprise me at all that wealthy white American males from conservative Christian backgrounds and limited exposure to the rest of the world could receive even an Ivy League level education in History and still default to the worldview that was instilled by their upbringing when it comes to actually applying any of that knowledge to forming policy abroad. And, predictably, completely fuck it up as a result. Bush didn't "not know" that there were two large mutually hostile sects of Islam in the Middle East because "schools just don't teach it anymore." He didn't know because he was the kind of student who entered History class and napped or generally didn't give a shit. And there's millions of them, and many of them are a lot wealthier and more upstanding and from better educational backgrounds than I suspect Deja would be comfortable admitting.

As someone who was a student a lot more recently in this purported huge drop-off of educational comprehensiveness or quality, I feel absolutely justified in saying that little or nothing has changed in terms of how much History is taught or how it is taught (though that in and of itself may be part of the problem), the bigger problem by far is that many people enter a History classroom already decided that they aren't remotely interested in what they're about to learn, and certainly don't pay enough attention to form new or different critical thoughts about how they look at the world or its history. And to pretend that attitude is not directly tied to the general sense that America is the center of the universe and we really don't need to think or care that much about what happens anywhere else (or even in different time periods) is delusion. And our entire society reinforces this idea that History is irrelevant and just a yawn-fest of dates and names you have to memorize, and treats it as understandable that one would utterly not care about it and just cram for tests and forget it all after school. It is not a good school/bad school issue, at all, though a bad or underfunded school certainly wouldn't help. It's a cultural problem and it is not relegated to any particular socioeconomic status.

In one line? Americans don't think they have anything worthwhile to learn either from the past or (especially) from any place outside of America. That problem is more persistent and more at the root of the problem than all the school budgeting or curriculum setting details combined.

 

[gsdx]

What a foolish thing to say: the problem is not ignoring history, but ignoring it [sic]

You've used '[sic]' a number of times and I still haven't figured out why. Is it used differently in Europe?

 

[Vitamin]

Very true.... but almost everyone involved with that had Ivy League educations and the very finest schools. So you've pointed at the huge flaw in Deja's analysis, which is that you can have the very best opportunities to learn in the world and still understand absolutely nothing about history. It doesn't surprise me at all that wealthy white American males from conservative Christian backgrounds and limited exposure to the rest of the world could receive even an Ivy League level education in History and still default to the worldview that was instilled by their upbringing when it comes to actually applying any of that knowledge to forming policy abroad. And, predictably, completely fuck it up as a result. Bush didn't "not know" that there were two large mutually hostile sects of Islam in the Middle East because "schools just don't teach it anymore." He didn't know because he was the kind of student who entered History class and napped or generally didn't give a shit. And there's millions of them, and many of them are a lot wealthier and more upstanding and from better educational backgrounds than I suspect Deja would be comfortable admitting.

As someone who was a student a lot more recently in this purported huge drop-off of educational comprehensiveness or quality, I feel absolutely justified in saying that little or nothing has changed in terms of how much History is taught or how it is taught (though that in and of itself may be part of the problem), the bigger problem by far is that many people enter a History classroom already decided that they aren't remotely interested in what they're about to learn, and certainly don't pay enough attention to form new or different critical thoughts about how they look at the world or its history. And to pretend that attitude is not directly tied to the general sense that America is the center of the universe and we really don't need to think or care that much about what happens anywhere else (or even in different time periods) is delusion. And our entire society reinforces this idea that History is irrelevant and just a yawn-fest of dates and names you have to memorize, and treats it as understandable that one would utterly not care about it and just cram for tests and forget it all after school. It is not a good school/bad school issue, at all, though a bad or underfunded school certainly wouldn't help. It's a cultural problem and it is not relegated to any particular socioeconomic status.

In one line? Americans don't think they have anything worthwhile to learn either from the past or (especially) from any place outside of America. That problem is more persistent and more at the root of the problem than all the school budgeting or curriculum setting details combined.

Your theory that American arrogance leads to an indifference of history may not be correct. When it comes to foreign countries they often take place in cities and towns Americans have never heard of, and have no real understanding of where they're located. This can make history unrelatable. In either case, American centrism does seem to be the primary culprit.

 

[belamyi]

Very true.... but almost everyone involved with that had Ivy League educations and the very finest schools. So you've pointed at the huge flaw in Deja's analysis, which is that you can have the very best opportunities to learn in the world and still understand absolutely nothing about history. It doesn't surprise me at all that wealthy white American males from conservative Christian backgrounds and limited exposure to the rest of the world could receive even an Ivy League level education in History and still default to the worldview that was instilled by their upbringing when it comes to actually applying any of that knowledge to forming policy abroad. And, predictably, completely fuck it up as a result. Bush didn't "not know" that there were two large mutually hostile sects of Islam in the Middle East because "schools just don't teach it anymore." He didn't know because he was the kind of student who entered History class and napped or generally didn't give a shit. And there's millions of them, and many of them are a lot wealthier and more upstanding and from better educational backgrounds than I suspect Deja would be comfortable admitting.

As someone who was a student a lot more recently in this purported huge drop-off of educational comprehensiveness or quality, I feel absolutely justified in saying that little or nothing has changed in terms of how much History is taught or how it is taught (though that in and of itself may be part of the problem), the bigger problem by far is that many people enter a History classroom already decided that they aren't remotely interested in what they're about to learn, and certainly don't pay enough attention to form new or different critical thoughts about how they look at the world or its history. And to pretend that attitude is not directly tied to the general sense that America is the center of the universe and we really don't need to think or care that much about what happens anywhere else (or even in different time periods) is delusion. And our entire society reinforces this idea that History is irrelevant and just a yawn-fest of dates and names you have to memorize, and treats it as understandable that one would utterly not care about it and just cram for tests and forget it all after school. It is not a good school/bad school issue, at all, though a bad or underfunded school certainly wouldn't help. It's a cultural problem and it is not relegated to any particular socioeconomic status.

In one line? Americans don't think they have anything worthwhile to learn either from the past or (especially) from any place outside of America. That problem is more persistent and more at the root of the problem than all the school budgeting or curriculum setting details combined.

You ignored my post relating to that as others ignore history: I said that, in those cases, it is not that they ignore history, it is that they decide to "ignore" history.

And young America is no different, actually, than young, republican France or anywhere else in the world. The worst of them all are those who do not care either about history or about history, only about the big bro says and does, and they just follow the trend.

 

[xbuzzerx]

You ignored my post relating to that as others ignore history

Probably because I wasn't responding to you?

 

[belamyi]

Another problem with history is that, like literature or the arts, even the more scientific-minded people, (in fact all the more so those who are ready to despise other well-established "hard" sciences, who have much less problems, that is, under zero, to despise humanities) are not just dfata which are there to force themselves with arithmetical rotundity and with self-evidence... it's not that history needs "interpretation" (everything needs so), but that there is no established method to deal with it accurately, and not because there is some intrinsic difficulty, but because its sphere of action being more "obvious", more material, more easily recognizable, no matter how inaccurate or intuitively, it will be far more difficult to establish the distance and mystery necessary to hold people back.

Mathematics and physics need a further step, the application, to become something visible, but history data, which, again, is not the same as history as a whole, are just there for anyone to feel allowed to, not only have an opinion, but to be right. When it comes to history, you can use literature or cinema as some "applied science" and present the historical sources of a historical problem in any way you please... and so you end up like my spinster aunt, loving American Far West movies (of Roy Rogers aesthetics) because she likes how people in such backward times an places were so presentable and good-looking.

 

[belamyi]

Probably because I wasn't responding to you?

Responding to me or not does not preclude you from reading what I said: what is worse, the fact that you skipped royally my post, or that, having read it, you decided to ignore its ideas, and show it by not responding to them,. but to previous posts..? oh, my, that is EXACTLY the question I am relating to with the post you "responded" to, with your own response, and with mine relating to them all.

So for you the important thing is not the idea or the content, just who posted it or not... what a surprise.

 

[belamyi]

You've used '[sic]' a number of times and I still haven't figured out why. Is it used differently in Europe?

Differently from what.

The use I follow assumes that something one writes may be wrongly interpreted as a mistake, and you insist, with that "[sic]", that it must be interpreted according to the way it was written, not according to some other way considered more standard and "right".

 

[xbuzzerx]

Responding to me or not does not preclude you from reading what I said: what is worse, the fact that you skipped royally my post, or that, having read it, you decided to ignore its ideas, and show it by not responding to them,. but to previous posts..? oh, my, that is EXACTLY the question I am relating to with the post you "responded" to, with your own response, and with mine relating to them all.

So for you the important thing is not the idea or the content, just who posted it or not... what a surprise.

News flash Belamo. No one is required to respond to you, or to read you. I did neither.