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Jesus. I have a long as train ride on Friday so this comes at the right time. Thanks Dan!
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Dec 30, 2014 13:14
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I like how he points out the anti-Wilson folks are a small fringe group of historians and yet justifies that as enough to say Wilson is a mystery in terms of whether or not he's good or evil. I hate it when his South Park Republican poo poo infects his lectures, it's part of why I couldn't bear listen to his McCarthyism episode.
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Dec 31, 2014 08:45
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Wilson really was a jerk in a lot of ways he didn't touch on in the episode. Open racism, literally being buddy-buddy with the KKK, allowing certain parts of the US government to re-segregate.
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Dec 31, 2014 17:05
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Nintendo Kid posted:Wilson really was a jerk in a lot of ways he didn't touch on in the episode. Open racism, literally being buddy-buddy with the KKK, allowing certain parts of the US government to re-segregate. I mean he takes a Progressive historical figure, frames the two camps literally as "Good" him and "Evil" him and then goes, "Dunno!". Then he says some people thought of Wilson as a Gandhi or Christ-like figure and Wilson definitely didn't live up to those standards, so maybe he was actually devious evil. :o It just felt to me like the sort of thing he'd do, I think if I waited for him to ever feature an ep where he put Ronald Reagan under this level of critique I might end up waiting forever. Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Dec 31, 2014 |
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Dec 31, 2014 18:22
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Nintendo Kid posted:Wilson really was a jerk in a lot of ways he didn't touch on in the episode. Open racism, literally being buddy-buddy with the KKK, allowing certain parts of the US government to re-segregate. I haven't heard the episode yet and I'm not going to defend Wilson, but keep in mind for the era, LITERALLY everyone was openly racist, he was from the south, and talking about that, Birth of a Nation, the KKK; it would be a diversion. Wilson was ahead of his time with international cooperation and self determination. It doesn't make his views less repugnant, but clearly he was a man of his time.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:42
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I don't mean it to say that it detracted from the episode for me, it was just the sort of thing where I rolled my eyes and thought "Of course you'd frame things like that, Dan Carlin". His brand of South Park Republican "common sense" usually mercifully avoids infecting most of his historical talks though.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:45
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I'm not a regular listener to Common Sense, but I wouldn't exactly call it friendly to main stream Republican thought. Maybe the Rand Paul wing, but Dan is the furthest thing from a neo-con. What is a "South Park Republican"? I honestly have not heard that term before.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:49
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What you guys aren't getting is that Wilson wasn't racist just according to our modern day judgment. Even at the time he was by far more racist than Taft or Roosevelt.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:49
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Gaius Marius posted:What you guys aren't getting is that Wilson wasn't racist just according to our modern day judgment. Even at the time he was by far more racist than Taft or Roosevelt. Of course he was. Taft and Roosevelt were northern Republicans. Wilson was a southern Democrat.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:52
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PerilPastry posted:Give "Oh No Ross and Carrie!" a try! They're the opposite of The episode where they go to the team of teen exorcists is amazing. Ross and Carrie are amazing because they're able to be respectful and kind to the people they go to see and usually walk away with a level of understanding that's not possible with a smug blowhard. The only people they found so loathsome they couldn't stand were the truthers and the Long Island medium, and only because those people are really horrible.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:54
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and have a great sense of humor about themselves.
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Gaius Marius posted:What you guys aren't getting is that Wilson wasn't racist just according to our modern day judgment. Even at the time he was by far more racist than Taft or Roosevelt. He was a racist at a time when the Klan was near the height of its power. Huge, popular, parades and membership being a social plus. Just because TR and Taft were less racist doesn't make Wilson out of sync with society at the time.
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Dec 31, 2014 20:18
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Zeta Taskforce posted:What is a "South Park Republican"? I honestly have not heard that term before. It's usually the hybrid moderate Republican/libertarian viewpoint that derides all liberals and people on the far right, so they think they take the correct stance on everything because they fall in the middle. See also: "Independents" who pretty much always vote Republican. It's a play on the thing that South Park did (still does? I haven't watched in years) where they present the two sides of the episode's conflict as being wrong, ridiculous and incapable of coming to any sort of compromise. Inevitably, at the end of the episode Kyle and/or Stan, through the wisdom of innocence, have a monologue where they resolve the issue at hand, and state how today they learned that the true answer is somewhere in the middle. The problem is that people create a false dichotomy between a relatively moderate consensus on one hand and a fringe opinion on the other, and argue for compromise. e.g. When talking-head cable news shows have Tea Party guy on the one end and a moderate Democratic Senator on the other, and it implies that the correct answer is somewhere between them. See also, when a climate scientist and a climate change denier, STEM professional with no professional connection to climate study are presented as having equivalent arguments and put to a debate. It doesn't matter that only one side has a sane argument, the fact that you put them into direct opposition lends credibility to a side that doesn't deserve any / takes away credibility from a side that shouldn't even dignify the other to an equal platform.
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Jan 1, 2015 01:47
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Right, exactly, they operate through false equivalencies, like making Kerry and Bush the turd and the douche sandwich or whatever the dumb joke was. Carlin's the sort of "Common Sense" dude to sometimes employ these arguments, often using the historical "well, we dunno for sure I guess..it's history...maybe somewhere in the middle" type stuff. He creates this murky equivalence between the Good Wilson and Evil Wilson camps, enough to muddy the waters (especially with his personally stated uncertain "middle ground" position on the topic) despite having earlier implied the Evil Wilson camp is the wacky fringe group. Painting FDR and Wilson as enormous failures has been the neocon retcon wet dream for like forever Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Jan 1, 2015 |
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Jan 1, 2015 02:02
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It's irritating, but at least he has the decency to frame the wacky fringe side as such. On TV, they set up the debate and leave it to the viewer to suss out who the shitbag is. That way they can lend legitimacy to the shithead and avoid totally alienating people that agree with either side. They set the bounds of the debate based on their target demographic and reap the sweet sweet ad revenues.
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Jan 1, 2015 02:25
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PerilPastry posted:Give "Oh No Ross and Carrie!" a try! They're the opposite of This is great, thank you!
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Jan 1, 2015 02:30
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Wilson was a monster with virtually everything that had to do with race relations. Black people were way better off the few years before his presidency than after it. People like to think the time between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era was slow, steady, and gradual improvement when it came to the social and political rights for African Americans. It wasn't. It often got worse for black people, and the Wilson presidency was certainly one of those "it got worse" periods. Switching gears, maybe it's just me seeing "South Park Republicans" or "Truth in the middle" thrown out way too often in D&D and TVIV, but I'm often getting tired of hearing it. Or it becomes quick way for people to shut down conversations. Yeah, I find the politics of South Park mostly grating at its most spineless moments. I just think charges of "false equivalences" gets thrown around way too often on non-South Park things when people try to make some sort of nuanced point on tribalism or human nature. Also shouting "South Park!" is often used on people who for good reason really don't want to pick their poison. (And to South Park's credit; it's far from the most irritating popular cartoon.) I didn't listen to the podcast in question, though. I'll take people's word for it that it's annoyingly South Park-ish in the most conventional way.
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Jan 1, 2015 02:49
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even with the minor nit picking on Dans method and his not perfect approach, I think we can all agree that he works hard to put out a good history podcast. And I appreciate the discussion generated in this thread. I find the whole thing very fascinating. I don't understand people with absolutely no curiosity for the worlds history. Am I right dudes?
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Jan 2, 2015 08:09
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Gooch posted:even with the minor nit picking on Dans method and his not perfect approach, I think we can all agree that he works hard to put out a good history podcast. And I appreciate the discussion generated in this thread. I find the whole thing very fascinating. I don't understand people with absolutely no curiosity for the worlds history. Am I right dudes? You have no idea. I was working in a library a few years back and one of my coworkers, a young woman in her '20s, held up a copy of "1776" and asked "Why would anyone write a book about a year?" After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I explained it to her. She shrugged and went back to work none the wiser.  Now in her case, I wasn't expecting too much. She'd been a beauty on "Beauty and the Geek", after all. But what disturbed me was that I went around and asked a number of our coworkers her age, including some I'd thought to be intelligent and well educated, and none of them knew what the significance of the year 1776 was for Americans. In America. In a reasonably well off suburb with an award winning high school.  And only one of them was at all disturbed that she didn't know and made any effort to learn more. I mean, look, I don't expect everyone to get into military minutia. I know about Dan Sickles nearly costing the Union the Battle of Gettsyburg, and maybe the war, in the Peach Orchard. I don't expect random people off the street to get that. That stuff is for us MilHis nerds. But it'd be nice if people knew that there was a Battle of Gettysburg at all! Or that when we all get July 4th off of work, it's because of things that happened on July 4th, 1776! Is that too much to ask?
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Jan 2, 2015 16:33
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People will always be idiots.
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Jan 2, 2015 16:51
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Heteroy posted:It's usually the hybrid moderate Republican/libertarian viewpoint that derides all liberals and people on the far right, so they think they take the correct stance on everything because they fall in the middle. See also: "Independents" who pretty much always vote Republican. I get the sense South Park does that in part because of the smug liberals who act assured in their correctness on every issue, ironically doing exactly what they're reacting against. But while you are right about those specific examples, the general liberal dogma isn't always the right one either. So I don't think the equivalencies are always false.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:37
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jng2058 posted:You have no idea. I was working in a library a few years back and one of my coworkers, a young woman in her '20s, held up a copy of "1776" and asked "Why would anyone write a book about a year?" After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I explained it to her. She shrugged and went back to work none the wiser. I don't get it. The Sherman Edwards musical is good, but it didn't really have a lot of impact on public consciousness. It's not unreasonable that someone wouldn't know about it. The thing that impresses me more about that question is why wouldn't someone write a book about a year? A lot of stuff happens in a year. It could have been historical fiction about significant events that happened to someone in that year. Or a history of the world impacting events that occurred that year all placed in context with each other (I haven't read it and I assume the book has a narrow focus on the start of the American Revolution; sorry if I'm wrong there). People write great books on every subject imaginable, why not a year? But then I guess that's all part of having a world-view so tiny that they don't know of anything significant happening in the year 1776.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:49
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You think that's crazy? I read this April 1865 book that was just about one stupid month. (FYI it was a drat good book)
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Jan 3, 2015 04:52
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1066 is another fun little history book about A Year. History is so dope that I dunno how you can't like it. I mean, the poo poo that has happened. It's nuts.
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Jan 3, 2015 10:10
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I read this one book that was just about a month! August 1914
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Jan 3, 2015 11:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:I read this one book that was just about a month! August 1914 Hah, I'm currently reading The Guns of August too. Great read but I'm glad that I read The Sleepwalkers before.
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Jan 3, 2015 14:20
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Beeez posted:I get the sense South Park does that in part because of the smug liberals who act assured in their correctness on every issue, ironically doing exactly what they're reacting against. But while you are right about those specific examples, the general liberal dogma isn't always the right one either. So I don't think the equivalencies are always false. Its not about liberals being right or wrong, its about equivocating an entire range of opinions and ideas to one crazy fringe idea.
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Jan 3, 2015 14:21
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Damo posted:1066 is another fun little history book about A Year. Mostly its the focus on memorizing dates and names, turning history into the world's most boring excel equation. So instead of, say, asking for a description of what happened in the battle of Canae, students are instead told to recite the date it happened, numbers of troops involved, and who the principle generals were. Focus on the action, intrigue and lascivious nature of events and names and dates will largely be picked up along the way. Focus on the stuffy details and students tend to forget everything in that boring rear end chunk of data taking up space in their brain. Memorizing dates is far less important than simple chronological knowledge anyway. Chronology helps with context more than precise dates and makes it easier for students who are never going to play Jeopardy on Historic Dates night, let alone do actual historical work.
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Jan 3, 2015 21:19
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Gyges posted:Mostly its the focus on memorizing dates and names, turning history into the world's most boring excel equation. So instead of, say, asking for a description of what happened in the battle of Canae, students are instead told to recite the date it happened, numbers of troops involved, and who the principle generals were. I can tell you for sure, never in any of my history classes did we have to remember the numbers of troops involved in a battle, and if a date was required it'd be only in a multiple choice question with greatly different years.
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Jan 3, 2015 21:24
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The only good history professor I had in college was a high school teacher by day. You could tell he had actual passion for the subject and was just happy speaking to people marginally more involved than 16 year olds. The older tenured ones were universally awful.
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Jan 3, 2015 21:38
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Nintendo Kid posted:So what things exactly do you want to call conspiracies but the mean man won't let you? Legit curious here. Well, his definition of a "true" conspiracy is that specific, verifiable claims are made which are subsequently proven true. So for example PRISM is not a considered a proven conspiracy theory, even though a lot of people (including myself) speculated about it before Snowden, due to the fact that those people did not have enough information to make specific, verifiable claims. Saying "the government uses the internet to spy on citizens" isn't a theory because it is unspecific, and even if it was, the Snowden leak (which proves the government uses the internet to spy on citizens) was the result of Snowden's actions and subsequent investigative journalism, so it wouldn't count as proof. So basically nothing is a "true" theory unless someone comes out and says "such-and-such happened at this exact, location, date, and time" and someone other than a reporter looking for that information comes across the proof that it is true. Even if it is an actual criminal conspiracy like Watergate, Iran Contra, or the Bay of Pigs, none of those things count because they were not specifically theorized about prior to the journalistic efforts that uncovered them. So there basically aren't any conspiracy theories at all, according to him. And thus they can never be proven true.
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Jan 4, 2015 18:09
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Gyges posted:Memorizing dates is far less important than simple chronological knowledge anyway. Chronology helps with context more than precise dates and makes it easier for students who are never going to play Jeopardy on Historic Dates night, let alone do actual historical work. An alternative approach I read about with regards to teaching history was to abandon the idea of starting from 3000 BC in the first place. A student arguably is not going to care about the Ancient Egyptians unless you really make a concerted effort to make it interesting, but you might have better traction with starting in the now and tracing it back to how things got that way. Like, ISIS versus the Kurds in the north vs the Shi'a in the south: how did things get that way? You go back to how Saddam held the country together at the barrel of a gun, and then how Iraq as a country was formed with little-to-no regard to ethnoreligious divides in the first place because Sykes-Picot was mostly an economic thing, which then winds you further back to what Iraq was like under the Ottomans, etc etc etc History ends up being a target for being politicized because some people figure that if it's not being used for indoctrination, it doesn't really do anything, because they don't know that history is a skill insofar as whenever you run into A Thing, you'll want to dig into its past to get perspective and context.
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Jan 4, 2015 18:30
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bad day posted:Well, his definition of a "true" conspiracy is that specific, verifiable claims are made which are subsequently proven true. So for example PRISM is not a considered a proven conspiracy theory, even though a lot of people (including myself) speculated about it before Snowden, due to the fact that those people did not have enough information to make specific, verifiable claims. Saying "the government uses the internet to spy on citizens" isn't a theory because it is unspecific, and even if it was, the Snowden leak (which proves the government uses the internet to spy on citizens) was the result of Snowden's actions and subsequent investigative journalism, so it wouldn't count as proof. PRISM doesn't count as a conspiracy theory since there's been repeated leaks from the NSA over the years as wella s straight announcements that they work with companies to get what they want and also want to monitor everything possible (see: ECHELON). It was a known mission to spy on people of interest to the government and it's a completely obvious subsidiary that this would mean spying on citizens (not to mention that PRISM's stuff was explicitly done partially by the FBI instead). And yes the term conspiracy theory in english generally applies to things that aren't true, because it's no longer a "theory" once it happens, then it's just the crime of conspiracy.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:55
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But, according to him, there really aren't any conspiracy theories at all; a statement like "the CIA essentially started the crack epidemic by flooding the market with cheap cocaine in order to fund their clandestine operations under Reagan" doesn't even count as a conspiracy theory because it doesn't make a specific claim about a specific event at a specific time and place. Not that I'm some sort of conspiracy nut; this just seemed kind of smug - there are no "true" conspiracy theories because there are no "real" conspiracy theories! Hahaha!
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Jan 5, 2015 05:17
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bad day posted:But, according to him, there really aren't any conspiracy theories at all; a statement like "the CIA essentially started the crack epidemic by flooding the market with cheap cocaine in order to fund their clandestine operations under Reagan" doesn't even count as a conspiracy theory because it doesn't make a specific claim about a specific event at a specific time and place. Again, "conspiracy theory" inherently refers to something false, people who believe them will rarely claim they believe in a conspiracy theory since it's tantamount to claiming you can't prove it. E.g. they'll tell you about the Bilderberg Conspiracy or whatever but as far as they're concerned it's already proven.
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Jan 5, 2015 05:21
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Yeah but according to him it doesn't even count as a "theory" unless extremely specific (and fundamentally impossible) conditions are met. It just seems sort of disingenuous - "I'm going to do a show about true conspiracy theories but nothing qualifies as a theory so none of them could ever be true" Why do a show at all, then? bad day fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 05:24
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bad day posted:Yeah but according to him it doesn't even count as a "theory" unless extremely specific (and fundamentally impossible) conditions are met. Well yeah because when you have a theory it has to be testable. When people just go, basically, "i think something vaguely happened at some vague time" yeah it's not going to count. bad day posted:It just seems sort of disingenuous - "I'm going to do a show about true conspiracy theories but nothing qualifies as a theory so none of them could ever be true" I didn't realize you were talking about that specific episode, it was intended as joke title (like that one magazine that ran a cover that said "WAS DARWIN WRONG?" and then the feature article was just titled "NO"). Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 05:27
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It's like he's trying to prove dogs can't talk by arguing that all dogs are really wolves. Even if he's technically correct, it's an infuriating line of reasoning.
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Jan 5, 2015 05:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:An alternative approach I read about with regards to teaching history was to abandon the idea of starting from 3000 BC in the first place. A student arguably is not going to care about the Ancient Egyptians unless you really make a concerted effort to make it interesting, but you might have better traction with starting in the now and tracing it back to how things got that way. That sounds a bit like what Dan Carlin said in one of his common sense podcasts about history education and I think he is right. Context is really important, just learning facts for a test doesn't do poo poo.
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Jan 5, 2015 11:25
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PerilPastry posted:Give "Oh No Ross and Carrie!" a try! They're the opposite of This is a seriously good and funny. Thank you for suggesting it.
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Jan 9, 2015 06:37
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Zeta Taskforce posted:This is a seriously good and funny. Thank you for suggesting it. WEH posted:This is great, thank you! 
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Jan 9, 2015 14:51
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