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u/Aydarsh · 11 pointsr/circlebroke

Well, this comment made me a bit angry (I get butthurt easily about these topics):

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/w3daf/only_a_little_racist/c59zx2c

Here is what I don't like about this post: It is an oversimplification of the trends around the entire world. China is growing as an economic powerhouse, but it is not going to REPLACE the United States as the world's foremost superpower! For more insight into this, I would recommend The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria ( http://www.amazon.com/The-Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/039306235X ). What he explains in this book is that America is not IN DECLINE. It is just that the rest of the world is catching up. In this world, America is not the ONLY superpower in the world. Hence, it is called the Post-American world!

Also, there is a lot of things that China has to overcome before it can become a superpower. For example, it needs allies. Even though China has a lot of economic alliances with other countries around the globe, its influence is making its neighbors weary. For example, South Korea, Japan, and even VIETNAM are starting to have closer ties to the only other country with major pacific influence: the United States. There is a great article talking about America's influence in the pacific ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/americas_pacific_century?page=full ). Think about this: if Vietnam is becoming allies with the country that used to bomb its own people, you know you messed up (in China's case, it happened with with the South China Sea problem). China's navy is also dwarfed by that of the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_warships_in_service_worldwide) This is key in power projection in the pacific, because the country with the more power in the seas gets to dictate the rules (up to an extent, of course). China tried to exert its power in the South China Sea, so countries like Vietnam and the Philippines asked the U.S. for more naval support. This has put China in a spot where it can't dictate the rules to the smaller nations.

Another thing that China has to fix is the problems with its economy. Just like the United States, it has a considerably debt problem. Even though the public debt is lower than that of the United States, China has a TON of major state-owned companies. The debts that these state owned companies have make China's national debt as a percentage of its GDP much higher than that of the United States ( http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/09/jim-chanos-china-has-tons-of-contingent-debt-via-state-owned-enterprises.html )! China also has a problem with making ghost-cities. China is building a lot of buildings that aren't even inhabited. Some people are even saying that this is a housing bubble that may burst (here is a great video on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM ).

Another problem that China faces in the future is its aging population. This problem is its aging population( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/20/china-next-generation-ageing-population). China's population is getting progressively older, which may cause a slowdown for its economy. This has already happened in Japan, which has partly caused the slowdown in its economy. This is happening in European countries as well (like Germany). What makes the United States so different? Immigration! Immigration is the thing that makes America so unique, and will continue to make America a vibrant place ( http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/29/a-reason-to-be-optimistic-in-todays-economy/ )

Don't get me wrong, China will have the world's largest GDP by 2030, ( http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/China-2030-complete.pdf) according to the World Bank. However, its GDP per capita is considerably smaller than that of the United States ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita ). On top of this, the United State's hdi is pretty high, which means that its standard of living is high as well: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HDI). Therefore, what we can see is that China will have to catch up A LOT if it wants to surpass the United States of America (fuck yeah).

TL;DR: What you have just seen is me being butthurt to the fullest extent. I basically states the reasons why China won't become the world's largest superpower in the near future.

u/zekthegeke · 2 pointsr/circlebroke

A couple of things:
Re: Machiavelli- This is what historians do, when they are doing a good job of adapting their work to a mass audience. So in that course, you will be led through a (riveting and fun!) deep read of Machiavelli's seminal works, provided with the historical context of his life and world, but all towards thesis-driven analysis of what he was doing, what it meant to him, what it meant in his world, and what we might make of it now. He talks explicitly about the historical method as he applies it, and you are encouraged (but not required, it is a course for everyone!) to read alongside his progress through the works and strengthen your capacity to interpret primary sources, to a basic level.

Re: Cotton: Cotton is a huge topic. Good history books about it look like this, which is to say, the author adopts a critical lens that seems like it's from another field, but is in actuality the historical, historicized application of a way of looking at things. Peer and popular reviews both find it to be a deeply persuasive way of destroying the myth of slavery as some kind of pre-capitalist institution, and rather a foundational institution of American and global capitalism. He also illustrates how cotton didn't become "de-enslaved" as a result of the American civil war, but rather simply encouraged extraordinarily aggressive extraction and colonial-style exploitation by Europeans of diverse existing and new colonial holdings, notably the "Slavery is illegal buuuut" British in India. Now, you may find none of these persuasive or useful, in the end, but it is undeniably a provocative, thesis-driven examination of the topic that works towards important questions, and with a topic like cotton, there are just a ton of good books out there by historians doing other things with it.

To give you an example, one of my specialties is legal history. So when I work on an issue (for instance, corruption), one of my default starting points is to organize the facts in a legal-historical manner, not to be confused with a legal analysis that a law professor would do even though it might integrate such analyses at various points. But it will be in service of a historical thesis ("x argument about the role/change over time/effects of corruption in a place"), and while it might not wind up answering a question you care about personally, you can rest assured it bears little resemblance to the "Stuff happened! Here are some stories about it with a tenuous connection to current evets!" things that clog bookstores.

Another example: Intellectual history sounds like philosophy, but it's not about debating the merits of the ideas per se even if it integrates analyses of the ideas at some level; it's about the historical context, the place of the ideas in a given time, and so on. You would share ideas between a 17th Century European Intellectual History class and its Philosophy equivalent, and would likely have many of the same readings, but what you would do with them and how you would think about them would be quite different, and if you specialized in it as a historian your papers and books would be quite different from a philosophy professor's even if you have common ground. Does that make sense?

tl;dr-I would say what you are looking for is not popular history so much as history geared towards non-specialists, and a great way to get recommendations for that is to look at the askhistorians book list and, of course, ask questions about potential sources towards the questions you are interested in (because there may simply be an article or whatever you'd miss that covers a lot of the ground). It's the same way that you wouldn't want to mistake pop science writing as a sign of what the particular scientific field is up to or what it can offer you or me as a layperson.

u/0rganiker · 37 pointsr/circlebroke

Wait, does unidan have his PhD now? Last I heard he was just a grad student. I'm being honest, I don't know. But I do know plenty of grad students with heads much, much bigger than their accomplishments. I would hesitate to call some professors "experts" so I don't think unidan should really be considered one either. That's just my two cents, though.

There's an excellent book on the recent (past 100 years or so) history of chemistry and it's surprisingly rich with drama. I bring it up because there's a theme running through the book that echoes what you mentioned. It details several examples of brilliant, famous chemists stepping very slightly outside of their own field and making complete fools of themselves because they didn't bother learning the fundamentals of the field they were stepping into. For example, multiple Nobel laureate chemist Linus Pauling stepping into biochemistry to solve the structure of DNA. People don't seem to realize that being brilliant in a specific area doesn't automatically make you brilliant in any other area, not even necessarily a closely related one.

u/a_bearded_man · 11 pointsr/circlebroke

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4003531/entire-jon-stewart-interview/

I absolutely love this interview. Sadly, people don't take the time to watch things and get the full context. The exchange at 9:30 is pretty funny.

There's a great book that I'm working through right now called Amusing Ourselves to Death which gets into a lot of problems that we see with news media - namely that the ease of information transfer has been a double-edged sword. While we can disseminate more, there are certain things you lose when you transition to new media. In the case of tv - it was that more of the message is transmitted through how things look/soundbites/etc. You don't get good debates - you get a series of soundbites. You don't get topical news - you get whatever draws eyeballs for ads. Etc, etc, etc.

u/[deleted] · 11 pointsr/circlebroke

>stillnotking is apparently an expert on early childhood development after reading one book covering one side of a two sided debate. Now I know where creationists come from!

Uh, respectfully, I think you're honestly mistaken on this one: AFAIK, this poster accurately stated the general consensus view in the scientific community and even provided a source. Why is CB criticizing him for not providing additional sources that say something else? Off the top of my head, I can give you a handful of sources that will review the relevant academic literature and offer the same conclusion: here, here, here, here, or here. To quote the last source, the excellent GNXP blog (emphasis in original):

>To review, on many bio-behavioral traits the different choices parents make seem to account for on the order of ~10 percent of the differences you see in the world out there amongst their (biological) offspring. Of the remainder of the variation about half of it is attributable to variation in genes, and the other half to unaccounted for non-shared environment. In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris proposes that that last effect can be reduced down to social environment or peer groups. Her line of argument is such that parents are important because of the genes they contribute, and, the environmental milieus which they select for their offspring.

>On one level I find this banal to review. If it is not the orthodoxy, this position seems relatively uncontroversial, and the results fall out of the data with minimal manipulation. But as a society such facts have simply not been internalized.

If you want to analogize to the evolution-creationist "debate," I think stillnotking is on the side of evolution (and hence didn't mention creationism because it wasn't relevant as a scientific theory), rather than being a close-minded creationist in the analogy.

u/bradle · 1 pointr/circlebroke

I'm not an Anthropologist, but I found this book really interesting. It's specific to the meal in America though. Sort of along the lines of what you're asking about though.

u/filibusterdouglas · 6 pointsr/circlebroke

Yeah I didn't really have a clue about how it was in North Korea until reading this book. As an american who has never gone more than two days without food, it was hard for me to even imagine what they went (and go) through. Thanks for the link

u/xgtrsl33- · 3 pointsr/circlebroke

When I took a prehistoric food class we read Feast. It was an easy read and goes into the evolution of cultural aspects of food.

u/WorriedFan · 0 pointsr/circlebroke

Yeah Mexicans and Islam goes first, as for economic data, people always bitch about the economy so it is not really valuable at all.

Trump appeals to the uneducated white poor. But it is naive that these people even understand economic issues. They are angry, but not angry at Wall St. they are angry about people in their faces, the social issues. Wall St. is smart enough to lay low.

http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X

This is how the Trump voter works, Trump will start parroting traditional Republican views on Taxes for the rich and these people will support him regardless and with glee, because the SJW filth hate Trump.

u/navHelper · 5 pointsr/circlebroke

If you bought everything day one, then yeah. Now you can get all the content and the most recent expansion for $60.

u/GodOfAtheism · -23 pointsr/circlebroke

Personally, I think that, much like all candidates promise the moon, he is too in regards to a lot of his more racist rhetoric. The thing you first have to remember is that he literally wrote the book on negotiating. So he throws out some big bluster, gets the attention on himself, and forces everyone else to respond to him. He's taken control of the situation, which is exactly what he advised in the aforementioned book.

But look a little deeper: He's endorsed single payer, he's said he's okay with some gun control. He wants to tax the rich and lower taxes on the middle class, he's fine with opening relations with Cuba again. Again, barring the racism (Which again, I think he's overstating, considering the aforementioned Cuba thing.), he's about the most left leaning Republican who stands a chance I've seen.

u/ALoudMouthBaby · 3 pointsr/circlebroke

Do you have any data to support these assertions? Im curious, but hard numbers really are important here.

> http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X

This seems as relevant as ever. Im adding it to my "to read" list, sadly itll be a while till I get to it though.

u/sirhotalot · -7 pointsr/circlebroke

Registries are completely ineffective and are a purely reactionary measure that works well with getting votes. Age of consent laws are useless because they don't reflect reality and weren't even really enforced until feminists and religious conservatives in the late 1800's became concerned at young girls becoming more open with their sexuality and marrying older men for economic security or dating them because they had money. They likened it to prostitution.

A history of age of consent laws

Here's a brief overview

These laws have always unequally targeted men and teenagers, in fact in the US the supreme court made a ruling that stated only men can commit statutory rape.

Anybody having consensual sex with anybody should never be a crime. People have a right to their own bodies and they get to decide what to do with it.

As for pedophilia, that's a completely different ball game but here's some information:

Studies of child-hood sexuality:

http://www.ethicaltreatment.org/research.htm

http://www.ipce.info/booksreborn/martinson/infant/InfantAndChildSexuality.html

http://newgon.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://sexuality.spaceandmotion.com/sexual-development-children-teen.htm

http://www.ejhs.org/volume3/Haroian/body.htm

Studies done into the psychology industry:

http://www.amazon.com/First-Do-No-Harm-Industry/dp/0864700474/ref=sr_1_42?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347509168&sr=1-42&keywords=first+do+no+harm

http://newgon.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.srmhp.org/0402/child-abuse.html

http://www.srmhp.org/0402/repression.html

http://www.ipce.info/library/web-article/trauma-myth-susan-clancy-book-review

http://transres.freeweb7.com/levine.html

http://www.ipce.info/library_2/files/rind_jen.htm

http://www.nambla.org/trauma_myth.html

http://tanadineen.com/writer/writings/sexualharass.htm

Manufacturing Victims: http://tanadineen.com/documents/MV3.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Harmful-To-Minors-Protecting-Children/dp/0816640068/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pdT1_S_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=76HTLA12QPTR&coliid=I2ZYLJADY7SNA0

http://www.amazon.com/Erotic-Innocence-Culture-Child-Molesting/dp/0822321777/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=76HTLA12QPTR&coliid=I2OBVH6P4AIKLB

Articles and books on the hysteria and others:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Fear-Americans-Minorities/dp/0465003362

http://bigthink.com/ideas/41459

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/11/29/six-year-old-wisconsin-boy-being-prosecuted-for-playing-doctor-with-a-five-year-old/

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,460225,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kern_County_child_abuse_cases

http://newgon.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.srmhp.org/0402/child-abuse.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20050310183555/http://logicalreality.com/openbb/board.php?FID=61

http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/faulty_science/us-congress-senate-condemn-scientific-researc

http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/An_insight_into_child_porn/

http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/child-porn-witch-hunt/children-loved-child-porn-modeling-photo-sessions-were-the-highlight-of-my-life-children-traumatized-by-federal-government-prosecution

http://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/i_did_not_know.htm

http://www.b4uact.org/facts.htm

http://www.vice.com/read/the-a-to-z-of-sexual-history-incest

http://www.historyundressed.com/2009/08/incest-within-royal-families.html

http://www.srmhp.org/0402/repression.html

http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/child-porn-witch-hunt/legal-child-pornography-reduces-child-sex-crimes-milton-diamond-hawaii

http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/teenage-sexuality/child-porn-laws-kill-destroy-lives-judge-jack-b-weinstein

http://transres.freeweb7.com/levine.html

http://human-stupidity.com/irrationality/stupid-dogma/child-porn-witch-hunt

http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-bad-as-you-think-theyre-much-much-worse/

u/lolgcat · 5 pointsr/circlebroke

Everybody on the web (and plenty of people IRL) compare things they dislike or disagree with to Hitler/Auschwitz. Reductio ad Hitlerum.

u/abidingmytime · 2 pointsr/circlebroke

What if those parents worked hard all their lives, sent their children to school, and then had to leave behind every single thing they owned and escape with their lives? This happened to entire populations of black citizens in certain places in the US. Read Buried in the Bitter Waters about "racial cleansing" in the US. At least 260 towns and counties have been documented. Property rights, civil rights, all legal rights were thrown out the window.

Just because the US community has sanctioned systemic racist and classist abuse for all of its history is no reason for a poor or black/brown child not to not have everything that some middle class white person in the US has had, right?

The government isn't the problem evileggo. It simply provides a scrap of a safety net, with far too many holes.

u/FuckingCryAboutIt · 5 pointsr/circlebroke

> increased troop presence in somalia destabilizing the country while ignoring genocide in rwanda

For anyone interested in the Rwandan Genocide, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by a Canadian General in charge of peacekeeping in Rwanda is a MUST read. It really lays out the frustration they were feeling trying to get the UN and its super powers more involved. The US sat by mainly because of how badly we got beat up in Somalia and that the US public was dead set against losing soldiers to conflicts that didn't directly affect them :/

u/thevelarfricative · 3 pointsr/circlebroke

>Yeah... i haven't anything said about the khans except about the brutality.

Right, except for this book, which Reddit often slavishly praises:

>The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

Yea, and Hitler built the Autobahn!!1! \s

Read an American or European history textbook and tell me that Genghis Khan is viewed in the same light as Hitler.

>Liking. The swastika is different than naming your shop Hitler. Slick.

Are you just inserting random periods now?

Here is a restaurant called Genghis.

Here is a MongoDB app called Genghis

There's this movie on Genghis Khan, which, while very well produced and made, still glorifies a bloodthirsty barbarian.

>I have a different.view, i view any admiration of a mass murderer as insane. Deal with it.

insane- in a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction; seriously mentally ill.

Then I must disagree. Indians who glorify Hitler are merely acting from within their cultural contexts. They're not insane; maybe ignorant, but definitely not insane.

I get it: To Westerners, Hitler is the end-all and be-all of Evil. He is the Worst, with a capital W. You find it literally unfathomable that anyone before or after him could be remotely as Bad. That's because that's what you're taught in school. Indian textbooks don't really stress that as much. Is that a bad thing? Of course. Is that worse than Western textbooks glorifying Churchill, Genghis, etc.? Not particularly.

>And putting. Churchill. In the same ballpark shows how much you know. It's not much

Then you haven't heard of the Bengal famine

u/int3rcept · 9 pointsr/circlebroke

I was afraid this would happen. You essentially read exactly what you wanted to see in my post.

> Just because you didn't freak out or cry when you saw the World Trade Center collapse doesn't make you "all kinds of fucked up"

Where did I ever suggest that? You took something I said all the way at the bottom of my post, completely unrelated to my reaction as a teenager to the WTC, and tried to jiujitsu those things together.

To clarify, I said that if you were playing truly disturbing videogames at a young age, ones that place you in the roles of a genocidal death camp guard or a serial rapist, then you would be "all kinds of fucked up". That doesn't take a PhD from Harvard to figure out.

> Have you been desensitized to seeing violence happening on a screen? Apparently so. I can't say I or any of my gamer friends have had the same experience, but that's anecdotal evidence for you.

It's pretty much proven that Generation X and Y are far more desensitized to violence than previous generations because of media. That's just proof.

> Even if it's true, does it really matter? That doesn't make you any more likely to commit violence in real life, and I'm sure you'd still have a strong emotional reaction if you were actually involved with or witness to a real, in-person violent situation.

Yes, it does, because it cultivates a great potential to kill.

I recommend you to read On Killing by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former psychology professor at West Point. West Point. You know, the military academy that trains future US Army officers. He's kind of an authority on what it takes to prepare soldiers to kill human targets.

His research compiled some very interesting facts. For example, Samuel Marshall, a Brigadier General and World War I vet, noticed that there was a big ratio disparity between rounds fired and rounds hit among servicemen in World War II. Few soldiers were even actively aiming at their targets.

To amend this, several training changes were made. The US Army replaced their bullseye targets with ones shaped like human silhouettes. Instead of firing at static targets, the focus was shifted to pop-up targets, forcing soldiers to react and fire rapidly. They didn't have the luxury to think about the action they were able to carry out.

The soldiers who graduated from this adjusted program and went into the Korean War had far higher kill ratios. Not because they were better trained, but because they were desensitized.

Videogames don't make you a killer but it gives you far greater potential to be one. I'm not foolish enough to think I've been immune to those effects and anyone who disagrees is laughing in the face of 70 years of proven military research.

You typed an emotional, reactionary reply where you assumed that I'm saying video games are bad. I'm not. Dude, you are talking to a guy who used to work for Major League Gaming. I probably put more hours into violent games than anyone else in this thread, but that doesn't mean I'm going to act like some threatened child whenever a serious psychological study comes up linking games and violence. I absolutely do believe there is a correlation. No doubt about it. Violence is a powerful tool to tell great stories but, like anything else, you get used to it over time. The first time you see naked women at a nude beach may be a big deal, but by the 50th time, they just becomes part of the background.

There's obviously a big difference between killing something in a game and killing in real life but even the simulation of it already prepares an individual to an extent. Basic Training is a far cry from actual warfare, but it prepares you.

By the way, if you read Grossman's book, you will see that he also agrees with us in saying that violence is not a bad thing in and of itself. On the contrary, it's actually a vital trait required in true self-defense. If there is a clear threat or danger to yourself or your loved ones, there's no way to guarantee that safety unless you're willing to kill to preserve those lives. What he's saying is that it's foolish to believe that violence is cultivated in a bubble. You can't tell me religious beliefs, political beliefs, or whatever lead to violence and then turn around and claim that suddenly certain mediums are just incapable of affecting the subconscious, especially a medium that features killing as a staple.