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Goodbye America?

ttwtt78640 said:
My point is that a six grade student is not simply someone who has turned age 12 - it is someone who has mastered (at least) English and math at the fifth grade level. The same is true of grades on a test, a grade of "C" is not what most of the (given) class managed to get right (grading "on a curve") it is managing to get 70% to 79% of the test's questions answered correctly.
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And your point is well said and well taken.
However, the real reason schools started "grading on the curve" and other nonsense has a LOT less to do with the storied "leftist influence on public education" and a LOT more to do with toxic teacher union pressure to gain money advantage through "better" test scores, and that came about when districts started getting pressure from Washington to either boost scores or lose funding.

Yes...IT IS a subtle form of cheating. (or maybe not so subtle)
No, it's not union specific either, corporations do similar crap all the time, from the very tippy top of the CEO's office and on down the line through management.

Labor noticed it, probably right away!
Unions just did a "monkey see - monkey do" on it and got equally gainful results.
It's just good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity applied to cheating.
We saw a bit of the same thing applied at the VA when appointments were falsified and sick disabled vets started dying in hallways.

We saw a bit of the same thing when Volkswagen falsified their emissions scores on their cars.
Hmmmm, so maybe it isn't "Yankee" at all, maybe it's universal? :lamo
Surprise!! We hoomin' beans ain't so different after all, only our accents are different!

But yes, you are absolutely right, this needs to go away, and tests should not be graded on a curve, they should be graded on real results, and to get real results, we need committed teachers who are happy in their jobs, and committed students who are aware of the big picture and on point with a recognized common goal.
And in order to make it work, we need to cut back on the adversarial relationships that have formed in the last couple of decades.
We are AMERICANS, we are all in this together, we are all raising children together, and we must all invest in their future together, for our own security and stability...together.

But I agree wholeheartedly with your complaints, and I am eager to establish common ground in an effort to arrive at solutions.
 
Jezcoe said:
In what required college classes would the Progressive line have to be towed in order to pass?
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It's not the classes that determine the bias, it's the Professors (of which there are many).



 
nitroexpress said:
It's not the classes that determine the bias, it's the Professors (of which there are many).



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If Dinesh D'Souza said that the sky was blue I would go outside and check.

He is wrong about nearly everything.
 
aociswundumho said:
Progressivism is incompatible with individual rights and American ideals. Eventually they're going to weasel their way into power and turn the country into a leftist s***hole, just like they have everywhere else.
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Inventing a new type of government where every citizen is free and equal is a fairly progressive idea, wouldn’t you say?
 
AlbqOwl said:
They will have returned us to the bondage from which the Founders and the Constitution freed us.
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What was the bondage again? Living under the jackboot of a tyrant king wasn’t it? That George III was the absolute worst and the progressives would have you drinking his tea all over again.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
And your point is well said and well taken.
However, the real reason schools started "grading on the curve" and other nonsense has a LOT less to do with the storied "leftist influence on public education" and a LOT more to do with toxic teacher union pressure to gain money advantage through "better" test scores, and that came about when districts started getting pressure from Washington to either boost scores or lose funding.

Yes...IT IS a subtle form of cheating. (or maybe not so subtle)
No, it's not union specific either, corporations do similar crap all the time, from the very tippy top of the CEO's office and on down the line through management.

Labor noticed it, probably right away!
Unions just did a "monkey see - monkey do" on it and got equally gainful results.
It's just good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity applied to cheating.
We saw a bit of the same thing applied at the VA when appointments were falsified and sick disabled vets started dying in hallways.

We saw a bit of the same thing when Volkswagen falsified their emissions scores on their cars.
Hmmmm, so maybe it isn't "Yankee" at all, maybe it's universal? :lamo
Surprise!! We hoomin' beans ain't so different after all, only our accents are different!

But yes, you are absolutely right, this needs to go away, and tests should not be graded on a curve, they should be graded on real results, and to get real results, we need committed teachers who are happy in their jobs, and committed students who are aware of the big picture and on point with a recognized common goal.
And in order to make it work, we need to cut back on the adversarial relationships that have formed in the last couple of decades.
We are AMERICANS, we are all in this together, we are all raising children together, and we must all invest in their future together, for our own security and stability...together.

But I agree wholeheartedly with your complaints, and I am eager to establish common ground in an effort to arrive at solutions.
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The use of standardized testing was supposed to ensure that real test scores were used. Of course, that is resisted by the teacher unions since it makes it very obvious that such cheating is going on when a "B student" fails a standardized test. This is (a large?) part of why employers insist on college degrees (in anything?) - at least then they have some idea that their applicants are, in fact, trainable since a HS diploma is no longer a guarantee of that.
 
Bullseye said:
As I mentioned early northern states had banned slavery by 1804 and international slave trade by 1808. In other words within 20 years of our founding we were making significant strides to ending slavery. It wasn't a cake walk and compromises were made.
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That’s putting it mildly. Your “compromises” includes half the states throwing a massive tantrum and starting and losing a war which killed 700k people.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
As the confederacy would never had existed without slavery to revere it trying to omit the slavery aspect would be historical revisionism.
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You don't omit it from the historical record. You just don't include it in the things you celebrate. See my later response to @Visbek.

Lord Tammerlain said:
It would be like German's revering Nazism while trying to omit the racial superiority aspects of it. It was what made Nazis, Nazis
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Geoist said:
I just can’t see how it can be separated. One can have reverence for Southern Culture and separate it from the stain of slavery, just not the Confederacy, specifically. Can we separate Nazism from the Holocaust?
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Nazism is a good analogy, although I'll argue that Nazism had dozens of evils associated with it (eugenics, genocide, fascism, human experimentation, child indoctrination, etc.) while the antebellum South had principally one: slavery, founded in racism.

But to answer your questions, in spite of the evil the Nazis perpetrated, one sees all kinds of Nazi accomplishments being expounded today. The Nazis were phenomenal scientists, engineers, warriors, and socialist thinkers. Turn on documentary channels, you can see shows on Nazi megastructures, Nazi tanks and submarines, Nazi stories of the front line, Nazi war strategy and great war commanders, Nazi ideas about socialism that persist in Europe and the West until today. The documentaries make a clear distinction between appreciation for what the Nazis were able to accomplish in industry, academics, socialism, war, etc. and the Nazi regime itself. It's routinely done.

This is to say nothing of history that focuses on German individuals who lived under Nazi rule.

Visbek said:
By the time the Constitution was ratified, numerous states started phasing out or banning slavery. The Roman Catholic Church was not a tiny Italian denomination. Washington and Jefferson and other leading figures knew that slavery was wrong, and would tarnish their reputations, they just couldn't see a way to end it.
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And the Southerners thought they were all full of crap. They were racists. I don't deny this. They had a deep-seated belief that blacks were intellectually and socially subhuman. If you don't see somebody as a human being, you can do almost anything to them without compunction in pursuit of the "greater good". These same issues are front and center in many of the contentious issues our our time.

The South had its own moral views on the acceptability of slavery, and they bet the farm (and their lives) on their worldview. If you had been born in the antebellum South, 9 out of 10 chances you'd be crowing about the necessity of slavery in the debate halls back in the day, thinking you were doing the black man a favour.

Visbek said:
At the absolute minimum, by 1800 the idea that "slavery is immoral" was not an obscure fringe belief with no scientific basis.
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There is no such thing as a scientific basis for the idea that slavery is immoral. I think what you're trying to say is that there was a scientific basis for the idea that blacks are capable of self-governance even as far back as 1800, which is an accurate statement. (There was also, incidentally, a scientific basis that the converse was true.)

Visbek said:
People were no more a "slave to the broad consensus" in 1725, or 1776, or 1825, or 1860 than they are today.
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Vehemently agree to disagree.

Visbek said:
Support for slavery was far from ubiquitous. By 1850, 90% or more of whites were literate. In the century before the Civil War, people had plenty of time to debate and decide whether they wanted to fight for independence, or have a strong central government, or get involved in European affairs, or how to manage the expansion west, or deal with slavery, or a whole host of other political issues. The idea that most Americans were so close to starvation that they couldn't pay attention to political issues at all is utterly ludicrous.
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They could "pay attention" to political issues to various degrees. Understanding them and getting a fair presentation of all the viewpoints was another matter entirely. Participating was still more prohibitive. Participating effectively was something only the wealthy enjoyed, at least when it came to non-local governance.
 
Visbek said:
Oh, and don't confuse the justifications for racism with the justifications for slavery. There were plenty of people who held racist beliefs, who did not support slavery; and unsurprisingly, the ideas they held *cough* conveniently justified their racism without justifying slavery.
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What's your point?

Visbek said:
Distinction Without a Difference
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Allow me to elucidate.

"Revisionism" is when one denies historical truth, e.g. "The Holocaust is a hoax.", "The Nazis didn't invade Poland."

"Focusing on virtues" is when one divorces virtues from faults in their assessment of historical truth to focus on the former, e.g. "Nazi engineering was second to none.", "Nazis were pioneers in the field of behavioural science."

Visbek said:
No, I'm suggesting that we should and do hold people responsible when they behave immorally. And as the severity of their immorality increases, then pointing out their positive qualities is less and less convincing. Unless, of course, you're trying to excuse people who enslaved others, and killed to maintain a system of slavery. How convenient.
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"Excuse" is your word, and it's at the very center of what this thread is about.

You either can't or won't divorce the sins of the Confederacy (the antebellum South, more generally) from everything else it believed, stood for, and accomplished. Fine. This is a tough sell.

The vignette in the OP is about Americans who can't or won't divorce the sins of America as a whole from everything else it believes, stands for, and has accomplished. They can't see anything except the evil, and they refuse to celebrate the good.

I can't stop them and I can't change their minds. But I can say that they're bringing all the evils upon the nation that Mr. Robbins is claiming. Respect for American institutions is crumbling, support for (frankly) asinine ideas like reparations is rising, and if the trends continue, you're not going to have a nation for much longer. The craziest part of all is that many of these iconoclasts acknowledge this and don't seem to care.

Visbek said:
There is a huge difference between your false claim of "1%" and the best available data showing it was 30% or more.
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Firstly, don't put in quotes what isn't a quotation.

Secondly, my number of 19 out of 20 is 95% (meaning 5% ownership), not 1%, and I include the census numbers of 7.7M/8.1M as validation. Touch up on your fractions before accusing others of BS.

Thirdly, your own "Punditfact" link to Dr. Glatthaar's data cites 24.9% of households, not 30%. You're misquoting your own data.

Fourthly, 4.9% (~5%) is exactly what Dr. Glatthaar reports as individual slave ownership.

And finally, my point isn't to claim that Southerners wasn't "a pervasive element of antebellum life" but that whatever number you take--95% or 75%--the overwhelming majority of Southerners didn't own slaves. You want to trivialize this fact to justify your contempt for Southerners, and it's not a trivializable fact.
 
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COTO said:
Nazism is a good analogy, although I'll argue that Nazism had dozens of evils associated with it (eugenics, genocide, fascism, human experimentation, child indoctrination, etc.) while the antebellum South had principally one: slavery, founded in racism.

But to answer your questions, in spite of the evil the Nazis perpetrated, one sees all kinds of Nazi accomplishments being expounded today. The Nazis were phenomenal scientists, engineers, warriors, and socialist thinkers. Turn on documentary channels, you can see shows on Nazi megastructures, Nazi tanks and submarines, Nazi stories of the front line, Nazi war strategy and great war commanders, Nazi ideas about socialism that persist in Europe and the West until today. The documentaries make a clear distinction between appreciation for what the Nazis were able to accomplish in industry, academics, socialism, war, etc. and the Nazi regime itself. It's routinely done.
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Nobody is building monuments/statues honoring the Nazis or waving a Swastika flag.

*Edit* Actually, there are Swastika flag-wavers, but I think we all agree they are the most hateful individuals in society.
 
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aociswundumho said:
The country really needs to split up. Progressivism is incompatible with individual rights and American ideals. Eventually they're going to weasel their way into power and turn the country into a leftist s***hole, just like they have everywhere else.
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Somebody ship this guy a safe space.
 
Obscurity said:
Total ignorant idiocy. No high school history class teaches that this country is racist or sexist.

Idiotic garbage video.

Ignorant trash.

Dismissed.
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Yup. It's typical victimhood ideology. It always comes flying out when this status quo tactic of theirs below starts failing them...

seenoevil.jpg
 
Jezcoe said:
I am not asserting that there be a binary. The whole of American History should be understood. The good and the bad.

One shouldn't ignore the bad stuff. And there is a lot of bad stuff. But we should also celebrate the change that has been made to overcome the injustices of the past.

Because if you don't know history, you are doomed to repeat it. The good and the bad.
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Every nation on earth is based on killing other humans, always has been. Repeating it like some kind of mantra for people to flagellate themselves in perpetuity isn't helpful.
 
Geoist said:
Nobody is building monuments/statues honoring the Nazis or waving a Swastika flag.
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Nobody is claiming these things don't represent that Nazi regime in toto. (Or at least very few people are.)

Such is not the case for Confederate monuments or the Confederate flag. Ask anyone supporting the monuments or the flag and most will tell you they've divorced what they're celebrating from the abuses of slavery. They want to celebrate states' rights, bravery on the battlefield, valor in the face of increasingly long odds, the tenacity of the Southern people, Southern culture, Southern heritage, etc., etc.

This may seem absurd or disingenuous to you, that people would divorce one from the other, but it's really the only way we can celebrate or venerate anything of that scale. And as I say, progressives, like the rest of us, live in mighty big and fragile glass houses when it comes to divorcing good and evil to celebrate the good. We shouldn't be so quick to demonize people when they do it.
 
Fishking said:
Every nation on earth is based on killing other humans, always has been. Repeating it like some kind of mantra for people to flagellate themselves in perpetuity isn't helpful.
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Not disputing that at all.

Understanding the past instead of ignoring it isn't a left/right thing.

Or it shouldn't be at least.
 
COTO said:
This may seem absurd or disingenuous to you, that people would divorce one from the other
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It is. But I suppose we should just agree to disagree. Appreciate the civil debate.
 
Jezcoe said:
Not disputing that at all.

Understanding the past instead of ignoring it isn't a left/right thing.

Or it shouldn't be at least.
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I don't think many call for ignoring the past. That's the point of my statement. Nothing we have today exists without this having have happened, or is still happening in many parts of the world. We can teach and learn from history but dwelling on it does nothing. Further, using that history as some kind of uncurbable original sin is just worthless to anyone. We've progressed in many ways. The U.S. has among the best inclusiveness and equality to ever exist in the history of humans. We're pretty damn good, even though we have a long way to go still and need to keep improving.
 
Rome still exists.
Sure, not the same as past.
But all things change.
The only constant in life is, change.
 
aociswundumho said:
The country really needs to split up. Progressivism is incompatible with individual rights and American ideals. Eventually they're going to weasel their way into power and turn the country into a leftist s***hole, just like they have everywhere else.
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What individual rights are you referring to?
What ideals?

You lost right to privacy. Thanks to bush and R's. Privacy rights are the worst rights to lose. See Patriot Act. Most every conservative of the day, cheered it.
 
VySky said:
Six years ago in 2013 I contributed to a Blog for gun owners. One on my contributions is titled 'Why I'm Losing Hope and the other 'The Decay of Society'. Unarguably, we continued spiraling down the path without detour. I'll leave one of them here.

Not sure if forum rules allow me to provide a link, so I'll await clarification.. Being new, I don't want to get tossed as it appears my point of view(s) are in the minority, which inspires me to continue making my voice heard.

-VySky

Why I'm Losing Hope

Because I was raised to love God & Country. My grandparents were hard working tobacco farmers for all their lives. They never ventured far from their home in Tennessee. During my youth, I spent my summers there working in the hot August fields and in the top of some bat and spider infested barns. But you know what? It felt like Utopia. The family would gather on Sundays for dinner (lunch down south) then retire to the vast fields for games of baseball until the lighting bugs blinked at sunset. America was a different place then. It was a place were a man was judged by the sweat off his brow and how he provided for his family. As grandma used to say; "I don't care if you dig a ditch for a living, just dig it to the best of your ability". They were true Americans who taught me the value and pride which comes from a hard days work.

I have tried to pass the culture to my son's. And to some extent, it is still a work in progress. It's just hard for them to see the forest through the trees. Some today get more fired up about a new release of the Ipad than it does at the prospects of employment. Sad

What would my grandparents think today of the America that turned it's back on their values? I picture the Indian with a tear in his eye (viewing litter) from the commercial years ago. The difference today is he would be reduced to a mere man on his knees viewing the cesspool society has manifested and nurtured.

The election was a referendum on the American Dream as my generation knew it. The shear fact that a little over half of us (America collectively) voted for the continued weakening of our National Sovernity is hard to stomach.

I can only hope the reason immigrants flock to America is because of the image it used to reflect, not the image of today. But as the subj: reads, I am on the slippery slope called hope and am growing more bitter by the day.
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Tobacco farmers.
Tabacco, The #1 killer of Americans
 
TheParser said:
Yes, goodbye to America as we currently know it.

Some people are eagerly looking to its disappearance.

They sincerely think that the United States will be a much better place once a certain group of people leave the scene.

Others respectfully disagree with this cheerful prognostication.

Only our great-grandchildren will know who was right. (Although I am pretty confident that I know who is right.)
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America is not even close to the same as it was when founded. 250 yrs ago.
Not even the same as 100 yrs ago.
And definitely different from 50 yrs ago.
 
Jezcoe said:
The video offers a false choice.

Is America to be remembered as being built by slavery or for overcoming and abolishing it at the cost of many lives? It is both.

Is America to be remembered as a place of rampant discrimination or a place of accepting people in active pursuit of a more perfect union? It is both.

Is America a country of grinding exploitation or a place of limitless opportunity? It is both

So this either/or binary and saying that one has to "choose" is nonsense and divorced from history.

And I give the video extra points for squeezing the "War on Christmas" in there.
.
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Despite all its flaws the U.S. is the greatest most prosperous nation in all Human History.

The Left feels the need to discredit the US from its very Founding because their ideology played no real part in making it great.

The Rigid Individualism, the limited power Govt ideals of the Constitution and Bill of Right made the US the best. Those values are about as anti-Left as is possible.

Constantly bringing up slavery is a favorite Leftist tactic to try to discredit the U.S.

The problem with that is when you look at any specific time in US History regarding slavery and race relations not only does the US not stand out, like with everything else we are still better than most of the rest of the world.

If you go back to 1700's every country on earth was build on slavery.
 
Casca XV said:
Despite all its flaws the U.S. is the greatest most prosperous nation in all Human History.

The Left feels the need to discredit the US from its very Founding because their ideology played no real part in making it great.

The Rigid Individualism, the limited power Govt ideals of the Constitution and Bill of Right made the US the best. Those values are about as anti-Left as is possible.

Constantly bringing up slavery is a favorite Leftist tactic to try to discredit the U.S.

The problem with that is when you look at any specific time in US History regarding slavery and race relations not only does the US not stand out, like with everything else we are still better than most of the rest of the world.

If you go back to 1700's every country on earth was build on slavery.
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America does stand out compared to others. Most countries ended slavery before we did, without a civil war and none of them saw 100 years of terrorism afterwards supported by discrimination and segregation.
 
dairyair said:
Tobacco farmers.
Tabacco, The #1 killer of Americans
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It's called freedom of choice. You're free not to smoke if you want.

VySky
 
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