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[Orange Wizard]

It sure did but you only learned about it in school.

Your grampa never told you stories from the war?

You are still talking about memetic exchanges.  And the primary memetic exchange is still school education.

m8

[mainiac]

Yeah, and there's a significant difference in the quality of the exchange between "This is what it might be like if it happened" and "This is what it was like when it happened".

There but for the grace of god...

[Shadowlord]

It's worth pointing out that school, particularly k-12, can also whitewash history and portray the nation in an inaccurate way to make it look better, for national pride or just because it's what the people who approve the textbooks demand.

[mainiac]

That can be used to argue either point.  If we are personally not involved in the events, our biases are less extreme.  People often will pass their biases on to their children.

[Frumple]

Yeah, grandpappy or mammy or whatever can whitewash and distort at least as easily.

Seriously though, you don't exactly need to talk to someone that bombed civilians or shelled cities to know that shit's wack. I've ran into both, one in family, and I heard them talk about it a long time after I realized that, yeah, that's bad juju.

[Orange Wizard]

Photos and videos are the way around that.
In highschool we were shown videos of concentration camps in Germany, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and one in particular I remember of emaciated bodies being piled into trucks to be carted away from a starving village in Ukraine.
It's very hard to whitewash something when you can see it before you.

[mainiac]

This feels like a derail from the star trek thread.

[Orange Wizard]

It's mostly your fault

[Rolan7]

It's really mine, sorry
Thanks for humoring the trekkie derail

[mainiac]

The federation has always been a metaphor for the US.

[smjjames]

Quite a number of Star Trek episodes revolved around some aspect or other of the Prime Directive.

Peurto Rico doesn't want independence, it wants to improve it's economic situation as part of the United States.

Haven't they been on the fence for a while now?

[mainiac]

Haven't they been on the fence for a while now?

Not really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_status_referendum,_2012

[smjjames]

Haven't they been on the fence for a while now?

Not really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_status_referendum,_2012

Hm, I wonder why they didn't go statehood at that time? and I wonder when they'll try again.

Their current economic situation would certainly complicate things, but I don't see that as a barrier to statehood.

[mainiac]

I think because congress didn't act.  We can see many similarities to the way the Federation was slow to allow the planet Bajor to join.

[Shadowlord]

[Ninjad, because I went and read the wikipedia puerto rico article, probably]

Well, it's because a territory can't turn itself into a state. The US congress, the President, etc, have to do it, iirc.

[That article said Obama thought they needed another referendum, this time funded by the US federal government. It said nothing about that happening, however.]

E: IIRC, the federation was all set to admit Bajor, until Sisko broke the joining up because he had a warning from The Prophets that Bad Shit was coming and Bajor needed to stand alone to be safe.