America: Like It Or Unfriend It 277
Hugh Pickens writes "As we celebrate America's birthday today, head over the to the NY Times and take a look at a very clever 'op-art' creation, 'Like it or Unfriend It' by Teddy Wayne, Mike Sacks, and Thomas Ng, that represents what 'America's Wall' would look like through our history. Beginning with 'Christopher Columbus wrote on America's wall: 'This IS India, right?,' through 'America added Great Britain to Kingdoms I am Fighting With,' through 'The South has changed its privacy settings to accept carpetbaggers,' and finishing with 'America stopped playing the game Wild-Goose Chase While Nation-Building,' and 'America has joined the China Network' the wall includes dozens of invitations, likes, posts and changes to privacy settings that shows a summary of American history as seen from a Facebook perspective. Our favorite from the 1980s: 'Ronald Reagan created a page: "Trickle-Down Economics" followed by "Half a million upper-income people like this.'" For another take on 4th of July data visualization, Tim O'Reilly points out flag.codeforamerica.org, which aggregates twitter posts tagged #July4 into an evolving flag tapestry.
I didn't know I "friended" it to begin with (Score:5, Insightful)
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
When did we stop nation building again?
Turrorists. (Score:5, Insightful)
A part of me can't help but think of what our founding fathers would think of America today and how quickly they'd be branded as terrorists.
War on Drugs, TSA, 'mandatory' DUI checkpoints, gun control, police abuses, etc, etc.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-
Imagine if a group of informed citizens stood up and sent that to the feds. How quickly would they be shut down?
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are not nation building (Score:3, Insightful)
You are maintaining an empire.
HTH.
Ronald Reagan (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see... When the inept Carter admin was overthrown I got a tax cut. It was my first job out of college and the pay sucked. Hardly upper class.
And wait, there's more. The tax cuts gave us a couple decades of growth. Oh, and the Soviet empire fell.
You know, he was a good president after all.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
When did we stop nation building again?
When we became too P.C. to finish a war. If we're nation building now, it's somebody else's nation and financed by our national debt.
Funny To Whom? (Score:2, Insightful)
Clever? I think not. Facebook satire has been around ever since Facebook hit the big time. This is not original by any means.
On top of that, the lefty drivel and Bush-bashing has no appeal for, oh, at least half of the NYT's potential audience. Unless of course, they no longer have any interest in having readership that leans to the right.
Re:You know... that might not be a bad idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you find it depressing? I would imagine that any society where these things don't evolve would be on its way to the end.
I expect the generation that went through school after me probably had their parents saying the same things about computers in schools, my mother probably said the same thing when "School House Rock" came on TV, and her parents probably said the same thing about organized education, so on back to the printing press, literacy, and so forth... One can imagine a parent saying "If oral tradition was good enough for us, it should be good enough for our children".
Not all change is negative, not all of it is positive either of course. Change can however stimulate people to think in new ways and consider things that they did not consider in the past.
An oft quoted study in fact measured productivity improvements around change. If a study group *thought* that a change was being implemented to improve productivity, productivity improved. In the case I read about I believe it was "replacing light bulbs with wide spectrum bulbs" the "work people" came in and swapped out the tubes with identical ones and productivity went up for awhile and plateaued and then regressed back to mean levels.
So if doing something new and fresh causes kids to learn, speaking as a parent, more power to innovative educators. If it is only a short term improvement, that's fine too, just be thinking about the next thing down the road.
"Think of the children" - why make learning hard/repetitive/stale when we have choices?
Min
Re:Turrorists. (Score:5, Insightful)
posting something on Facebook != starting a revolution
Re:Ronald Reagan (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, he gave us $4tn in deficits, several bubbles in the equities market and led the nation to increasingly hand over its money to the rich on the basis of a completely disproven theory of economics. Hell, even Reagan himself know that tax cuts for the rich were not a panacea which is why he raised them that second year in office.
Re:Turrorists. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Birthday? (Score:5, Insightful)
Had we lost the war we wouldn't be observing Independence day at all. The reason we observe it on July 4th is because that was the day on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and the day on which quite a few individuals more or less signed their own death warrants had the bid failed.
I think it's the right choice as it better exemplifies the spirit of the revolution than the day upon which we succeeded in throwing the Brits out.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
it's somebody else's nation and financed by our national debt.
You have to know who your pimp is. Financing is done by China and Japan, since they own most of the national debt (the US government holds most of the rest, but that's just the fluff that's propping up the illusion of the US dollar).
Re:Too gay for words. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. The word 'Ghey' was invented by mouth-breathing morons who felt bad about getting ostracized for their use of the word 'Gay' but didn't really want to stop using it either.
And like all good compromises, everybody hates the resultant state of affairs.
friend or foe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ronald Reagan (Score:2, Insightful)
Government overspending, indeed. Why, did you know that St. Reagan (pbuh) dramatically increased military spending so he could willy-wave at the Soviets?
What's that you were wharrgarbling about narrative, now?