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The military history thread
GarandMarine:
Thanks Groggy! Joan was my patron saint when I was still Catholic.
Akima:
--- Quote from: GarandMarine on 30 May 2014, 04:26 ---Loath as I am to link the O'Reilly factor this clip is just kinda sad. http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/142510-memorial-day-reporter-asks-beachgoers-military-history-questions-answers-appalling/
--- End quote ---
It is sad that America's education system has so obviously failed some young people, but judging these no-doubt-edited answers as "appalling" (see the URL), is heavily freighted with what Mr. O'Reilly presumably thinks is worth knowing. I wonder, for example, if that smug douche with the microphone knows after whom the chemical element Meitnerium is named*, or if he could reel off an explanation of Avogadro's Law if put on the spot on his day off? If he could not do these things, would he be more or less "appalling" than the people he and Mr. O'Reilly decided to hold up to ridicule?
(click to show/hide)*Lise Meitner. Yes Bill, a female physicist; imagine that! But don't worry, she didn't get a Nobel Prize like her male colleagues. The natural order was maintained, civilization was saved.
I was struck by the provincialism of the questions too. To "Who won the Civil War?" I would have answered "Which one? If you mean the American Civil War, the Union won". To me, "the Civil War" was won by Mao Zedong's Communists. Despite being foreign to the USA, I had no difficulty answering the questions correctly, but I wonder if microphone-man could as accurately give an account of major events of the Second Sino-Japanese War, or of the Battle of Milne Bay, for example.
Edit: Thinking about that clip again, the question "Who won the Cold War?", to which apparently the correct answer is "We did!", exhibits even worse parochialism than the American Civil War question since "we" apparently means America. "Which dictator did the US topple in Iraq?" is another example. Australian servicemen died in the Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, for example, and served in Iraq (as did those from other members of the "Coalition of the Willing"), and yet O'Reilly's narrative airbrushes out the contribution of the USA's allies in both conflicts. That is a particularly dubious view in the case of the Cold War, which was a long-term military/economic/political contest between large multinational alliances, each headed by a superpower.
I suppose the idea is that one should be educated well enough to parrot a cartoon version of history, but not enough to recognise that that is what it is. Yes, I know, it's Bill O'Reilly... I suppose I should not expect too much.
GarandMarine:
Asking Americans questions in America, one can reasonably infer that one is asking about American history. If you were canvassing in Shanghai the Civil War would of course refer to China's, as would any give revolution, so if you wanted to ask about the American, French or Bolshevik (Russian) revolutions you'd specify. Similarly our Civil War is the "Civil War" (or the War Between the States/War of Northern Aggression depending on where in the area you are) and the revolution is simply the revolution of the war of independence. We have no need to clarify because it's our history. If we're talking about the October or French revolutions we too will clarify. With some small exception in certain Irish neighborhoods where the various Irish Rebellions and Revolutions are talked about in a similar manner over pints and toasting the 'Ra. (and not even that much of that any more, 9/11 cost the remnants of the IRA a lot of the last of their dwindling Irish-American support, that said remanents are just drugging running gangsters now doesn't help them either)
I thought the "We Did" as a "correct" response was more or less a "pity, correct" then any indication of actual rightness. Though the argument could be advanced that while Korea and Vietnam existed within the greater context of the war neither did much to "win" the cold war, but American defense spending, in "winning" the arms race broke the Soviet Union's financial back, enabling victory, meaning the U.S. "won" the Cold War.
Grognard:
I watched an Australian Lt. Col. beat a USMC major in a push up contest a few weeks ago.
as for the American education system?
please don't ask me to jump on that pulpit: my blood pressure can't handle it.
mustang6172:
Aren't you glad voter turnout is less than 50%?
Isn't it amazing there are no fat women at that beach?
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