October 14, 2004

• Here's one a colleague was ranting about the other day... Rove allowed Bush to do poorly in the first debate deliberately, to lower expectations for the later debates (same as 2000 strategy) and foster overconfidence in Kerry. i.e. Rove didn't coach Bush for the first debate, knowing Bush wouldn't coach himself, then started coaching after that (when Bush was probably more cooperative too). Here's the clever bit - Rove also allowed Bush to blow the first debate in order to gain audience for the later debates. Most voters aren't normally that interested in the debates, but they'll tune in to the 2nd and 3rd if they're expecting a car wreck, just like any other gawker. Then they get to see Bush do well, or at least decently.
• /boggle
• Theories new/interesting? How about who removed the missing pages (and volumes) of Lewis Carroll's diaries (author of Alice in Wonderland), and why? Great blog entry on the subject with lots of links here.
• I love wacky conspiracy theories, but I think the best ones are ones that combine the serious with the totally outlandish. Here's my latest effort: One day I want to write a book about history education and nationalism. However, suffice it to say that one of my classifications of how history is taught in secondary school is what I call the 'nation building' approach. According to this approach, the purpose of teaching history isn't so much to teach about history, but to turn history students into good citizens. That is to say, the purpose is to inculcate them with essential national myths that aren't, neccesarily, factual but will tell them about their place in society and how they should relate to their Nation and state. These stories are not neccesarily fabrications, although sometimes they are, but they're not what academic historians would recognise as real history either. The United States has a very decentralised school system, however the 'nation building' approach seems to be very popular there. Many an American undergraduate sits down in history 101 and is told, to their consternation, that they should just forget everything they learned in high school history class because it isn't real history. Far from what people in other countries might think, many of the 'improving stories' that American high schoolers are told are not right-wing or ultra-nationalistic. For example, high school students are often warned away from the perils of mass hysteria by hearing about the McCarthy witch hunts, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and the WWI era renaming of German foods (eg. 'liberty cabbage' instead of sauerkraut). Clearly, however, the secret and sinsiter cabal of high school teachers who secretly run the US behind the scenes thought that these old stories were wearing a little thin. After all, when it's been more than 80 years since 'liberty cabbage' its very easy for students to convince themselves that such excesses were the madness of an alien people in another age. Hence 9/11 and the resulting mass hysteria closely replicating every one of those time honoured object lessons. History made anew for a new generation! You want proof of this? Evidence? Very well! Did you know that, at an early and impressionable age, every member of Bush's inner circle found themselves guided and mentored by high school teachers? The smoking gun, I tell ya!
• they say history is written by the winners but really it's written by the writers where would xena be without gabrielle? where's my scribe? oh, crap, i'm the scribe.
• having gone to many different schools growing up, i had to learn US history three times, never got to anything else. i like how everyone kinda blew by columbus day issues this year, sopranos covered it, i guess but to amend what i just posted: so many things get proved "wrong after all!" and so many things that were supposition (like "glass is a superfluid") get printed as fact. INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE! MISINFORMATION IS EASIER AND FREER! at least regurgitated fact/fiction books like thedavincicode are good for those who don't know, but bore the fluck out of people like me al least hellboy was great on lore and research and even got all the tiny details in the background