112 Gripes About the French | Hacker News Reader

112 Gripes About the French

en.wikipedia.org

408 pointssamclemens339 comments

The actual document in pdf format seems to be here: http://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads...

> (...) tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful.

Well. I mean...

Joking aside, the text is amazingly blunt and honest, in a rather refreshing way.

  "The French don't bathe."


  The French don't bathe often enough. They can't. They don't have real soap. (...) The Germans took the soap.

> the text is amazingly blunt and honest

It would likely have been written to be comprehensible to people with a fairly low reading level.

There's also an excerpt from the NYT in there, number 33.

People weren't as fragile and sensitive then. It was better in that way.

Except that it's actual nonsense. Not long after WW2 the congress tried to ban comic books for spoiling the youth,just couple decades later people were holding public protests against the Simpsons, and the first TV show to mention the word "period" was met with similar level of protests as if that's something dirty and unspeakable.

No, it's the exact opposite - "back then" people were far more fragile and sensitive and doing or saying the wrong kind of thing could have serious consequences on your life.

Those are examples of a morally conservative society, in which a Judeo-Christian value system was in place, and when there was a stronger emphasis on conformity. I guess the sensitivity was in breaking those rules. In those times too, however, children were taught "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me".

Now, everyone is comfortable with talk of sex and biological realities...but a book critical of transgenderism is literally called "violence": https://www.rt.com/usa/529308-american-booksellers-associati....

I guess critics of such topics are today's Juvenile Delinquents. /s

You are both right, in some ways we have become less bashful about certain aspects of life, but also society today is a bit more particular about some things. It is no longer enough to disagree with someone, you must destroy their will to continue.

Well yes, but you also use that fact to be blunt and dishonest, like saying "Yep, the french don't wash. Guess they're just uncultured. They're still our allies, get used to it!"

Why? The US literacy rate in the 1940s was 97.1%, and the US military had special programs to teach the illiterate to read. During WW2, 95% of illiterate recruits achieved minimum literacy within two months through the special training units developed for that purpose.

I know it’s easy for some people to think of a trigger puller as a dumb grunt - even more so one who served 80 years ago, but it’s not accurate or fair.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp [1] https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/s/soldiers_lit.htm

I didn’t mean it as a value judgement; it’s clearly written to be very comprehensible. That’s a good thing!

Literacy at what level?

From your first source: "In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education." The manual had to be written at 8th grade level (at most) in order to be easily understood by more than 50% of the army.

Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like. There's an important distinction between reading level and intelligence, and I think we conflate the two in modern writing. Simple language doesn't need to be simplistic.

> Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like.

There's a common trope about "8th-grade" education in the US, and a fairly common response to it, e.g., https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/p_test/1895_Eightgr_test.h....

There are, of course, reasons for the differences that aren't merely reactionary "people are dumb now" or "technology FTW!!1!" I suspect some of the quoting of Tacitus is due to a more classical emphasis, even in early education (see, for example, the McGuffey Readers[1]), where Latin and Greek were more widely studied, and their authors more integrated into the grade-level curriculum. I didn't read Herodotus or Tacitus until college (a classics course) and was pleasantly surprised by how readable and accessible they were.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers

Perhaps also to enable the French to read and understand it? You wouldn’t want them just reading the gripes (which are short and simple) and then not reading the responses.

I think more writers, especially technical writers, should am for this type of writing.

I like simple.

The DoD produces documents that are either

a) incredibly clear and straightforward, or

b) completely impenetrable (esp. anything with a diagram)

There is no middle ground. Seriously though, the Army's writing manual is top-notch and most high schools would be better for spending a month or three teaching from it.

It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday. My stepfather escaped nazi Germany, and moved to the us in the 40s. He grudgingly adapted to daily bathing (my mother's insistence), but remarked how very American that is. He was very 20th century European, for sure.

>It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday.

Americans of a very close earlier ear didn't bathe everyday either...

That's true. It was the 1970s when we were pressuring the stepfather.

Many Americans of the exact same era probably didn't bathe every day.

And true in Europe today. Ever been on a train in Germany in the summertime?

Ever been on the L in Chicago in a car without working air conditioning?

Spoiler: Everybody stinks.

Wrong. Try Japan. They're clean, polite, and courteous. Crowded trains in August (like all year) are surprisingly absent of body odor (and litter, and noisy people, ...).

Different folks are indeed different in some ways.

Well if you want to compare Japan to other countries, you should be aware that the fear of being a burden to others due to one's body odor is a very Japanese phenomenon [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taijin_kyofusho

Asians sweat less and their sweat does not stink as much for some reason.

I read that body odor is controlled by the same gene as the one for ear wax.

People with wet/creamy ear wax smell. People with dry/crumbly earwax don't smell.

I'm not sure if it's true in general, but it's true for me and my partner.

One of our kids has creamy ear wax, and the other has crumbly ear wax. I'm curious if only one of them will need deodorant once they get to puberty...

Genetics is fun.

https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythearwax.html

Didn't the Asians refer to the Portuguese as "garlic eaters"? When one eats garlic, the scent comes out in the sweat - so you can smell them coming.

From my own experience, if I eat garlic and later scrub my head with a wet washcloth, I can smell the garlic on the washcloth.

Sweat doesn’t smell. Bacteria strains common in Asia don’t produce stinky compounds.

As a German, I want to add that on German trains, "in the summer" implicitly means "without working air conditioning" ;).

(Sort-of-jokingly. On ICEs, you're most likely to actually freeze body parts off due to the harsh AC. On local trains, you'll dehydrate due to excessive sweating. There is no middle ground.)

(European here) my grandparents bathed I think once per week, we often joked about this in the family. My uncle who is a commercial construction inspector/engineer arranged for a full bathroom model a couple years before they died. When we went to sell the house he complained the bathroom was unused and looked the same as the day he signed off on it.

Despite this, they never smelled bad to me, they certainly had a recognizable smell, but it wasn't foul. Contrasting with myself, if I don't shower for a day, I'll get remarks from my girlfriend the next afternoon, and on the third day I smell so foul I can smell it myself. I also get more randomly itchy.

I wonder if by showering daily I'm somehow tampering with my bodies ability to fend off some foul smelling bacteria or something. Besides fearing to smell bad for a couple weeks (months?) to find out, I also enjoy showering to start my day fresh and I like the way it makes my hair feel.

There might be other factors too, like changing into pajamas at night (possibly changing underwear or no underwear), and then fresh clothes in the morning?

As for hair, there's a whole "no shampoo" movement, takes a few weeks for the scalp to adjust.

To what extent is someone's "smell" a product of their local dermal biome and what they've been inoculated with, so to speak, via sharing deodorant, clothing, activity level, diet, etc?

Yes

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/hygiene...

A young Steve Jobs famously thought that as long as you ate a certain diet, you could skip showering/deodorant and still smell ok. His coworkers/manager at Atari did not agree and put him on the night shift: https://techpp.com/2017/02/24/steve-jobs-facts-you-might-not...

I think once your body is used to showering daily, it is never the same in terms of microbes, or it takes years to get back to whatever.

I need to bathe daily. If I don't I get a sore under my arm, and I can smell myself.

I had a girlfriend, well kinda, who didn't believe in showering, and she did smell. I never had the nerve to tell her.

My grandfather didn't bath, and didn't have an odor. He was small, and very skinny though.

My best friend didn't bath, and he did smell. I should have habituated to his smell since I saw him so much, but no. His smell was so bad, I needed to put down a towel before he sat on any chair.

I saw my grandfather once a year.

Smelly armpits are due to particular strains of bacteria that feed on sweat compounds and skin cells. If you haven’t been infected with the stinky ones you might last two days in moderate weather. Get infected and the time goes down to two hours. I found out the hard way, sharing a bar of soap. Avoid. :-/

About 1/3 of Germans still don't bathe every day. 1/6 of the French don't bathe every day.

To this day I don't bathe or shower everyday (maybe once a week, or two weeks?). I can't understand this American obsession with running away from your own real self. Why all this intollerance of being and smelling like a human being?

This isn't rocket science. Bad odors are offensive. If you stepped in dog shit, you'd (hopefully) clean you shoe and wouldn't get on a soap box about "running away from the true natural smells of nature" or some other nonsense.

Meh! It's just shit homie! I'm surrounded by it all day every day (no I don't clean shit off my shoes either). "Bad" odors are entirely subjective. Soap box? Last I checked this is an internet forum for seemingly highly sensitive people.

That's gross

Maybe? Gross is not a concept I was raised with. I also raise goats and am often told I smell like a buck in rut (because I do, as I'm always around them). Was always confused after I moved to the US what all the "ewwww!" screaming from my peers was about. What is hoped to be achieved by expressing something like that I wondered? Putting a person in the "other", or "not good enough", "not clean enough", "not wealthy enough" category? Bizarre anti-social behavior in my opinion.

Having dog shit on your shoes is gross. Smelling like a goat is also gross.

I like the fact that the French didn't like American presence on their sole and had offensive feelings towards that, while at the same time, they were forcefully present all over Africa with totalitarian and oppressive military administrations.

In Algeria, many fought in WW2 as part of the French Expeditionary Corps (e.g; my great-grandfather) with the hope that in case the allies win, Algerians could possibly negotiate some sort of self-governance. on the 8th of May 45, thousands of Algerians protested for independence. The civilians faced an immediate annihilation by the French military [1], resulting in up to 30,000 dead civilians. And who can believe this happened in the aftermath of ending NAZI Germany?!!!! I mean that's very ironic but well ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9tif_and_Guelma_massacre

A lot of the allied leaders get a better historical reputation because they’re naturally compared to their opponent, Hitler. Without Hitler there as a foil, most of them would be treated far worse by history.

Charles de Gaulle should get more crap over his behavior in Algeria than he does. Same for Churchill and his behavior in India.

Geopolitical ambitions were well beyond the daily awareness of French citizens, moreover, we don't know what the average French citizens view on those things would be.

Most of them just lived through existential horror.

Number 48. seems related, both about cleanliness and being blunt. I was glancing through the text and I was very surprised when I found it.

> "I'd like the French a lot better if they were cleaner."

> That's perfectly understandable.

Yeah I kept thinking you'd never get away with talking that way now.

Also, page 35:

> The French haven’t had paint for a long time.

Some cultural asymmetries have swung the other way since. For example:

    41. "At the Folies Bergers or the Casino de Paris, even the usher girls demand tips! What a racket!"

Imagine a US person going abroad and being upset about tipping expectations today.

Imagine the first one being written today:

*We came to Europe twice in twenty-fee years to save the French*

We didn't come to Europe to save the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to Europe to do anyone any favors. (...) In this war, France fell in June of 1940, We didn't invade Europe until June of 1944. We didn't even think of "saving the French" through military action until after Pearl Harbor -- after the Germans declared war on us.

This would not even pass the lowest paid PR lackey at the DoD in 2021.

Fantastic read!

Via the French Wikipedia page about this booklet [0], I learned that the probable author is Leo Rosten, author of “The Joys of Yiddish” [1]..!

That makes sense as “Joys” is an incredibly funny and witty read on the interplays between Yiddish and English in the US. Much recommended

From Rosten’s Wikipedia page [2]:

—

In his book, The Joys of Yiddish, he defines the word chutzpah as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."

—-

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nos_amis_les_Français

(Funnily, the booklet’s title was translated to “Our friends the French”)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joys_of_Yiddish

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Rosten

Wonderful. I found that book in my mother's library--love it!

As a french, it reminds me very much of the FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency manual: a pragmatic and clear book that tries to make approachable what seems an impossible topic to handle.

That's really a side of the american culture I'd like we promote more.

Also a proof militaries are not devoid of humanism.

In case anyone is interested in a link: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf

It's indeed an interesting read.

> As a french

Aaaaaargh

https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/jldsdr/sérieux_les_...

What's the copyright situation of this book?

Say I want to restore it, clean it up, and publish a nice epub (using as source the PDF already linked in a comment here). Is it copyright infringement, or is its copyright expired now?

"112 gripes" was published in 1945, thus sites like https://www.biblio.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-determine-if-a-bo... suggest it's expired . But also, it was republished in the US in 2004 (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7). Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?

(More general question: how can I check if a book is still copyrighted? Webpages like the one I linked above aren't very precise and leave room for interpretation; is there something easier / more canonical to use?)

Most US government publications are are public domain: https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-laws-in-u-s-governme...

But determining the copyright status of anything old is really much harder than it should be.

Thanks and thanks for the link; didn't know about this sub-case.

Repeating a point of my original question, in case you have something to say about it: "112 gripes" was published in 1945, thus sites like https://www.biblio.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-determine-if-a-bo... suggest it's expired . But also, it was republished in the US in 2004 (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7). Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?

EDIT okay forget about the re-publish question, another HNer commented about it.

> Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?

Any changes (spelling, typos, the typesetting) in the new publication would be under a new copyright term. In practice, if you make your copy from the earlier out of copyright edition then you're fine. (Assuming you are correct that the earlier edition is truly out of copyright)

> Assuming you are correct that the earlier edition is truly out of copyright

Given that it is:

- A US Gov document (see other comment about it)

- From 1945 (so, from 1923-1963) and without an explicit Copyright symbol on the document

, I tend to believe so. Maybe I can find not-for-profit lawyer advice to confirm it.

This is incorrect. In the US new copyright is only awarded for acts of authorship. Minor spelling or punctuation changes, or typo fixes, are not authorship. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

I would be interested in a cleaned up version of this text. If you plan on rewriting the content from the PDF, I can lend a hand !

Sure, thanks! Ping me at ronan foo jouchet bar fr . Will get in touch if I follow-up on making this happen.

> For the right to speak involves the duty to listen. The right to criticize involves the responsibility of giving "the other side" a fair chance to make its point.

I wish this could be chiseled in rock somewhere prominent

It would be spray painted then the legislature would vote to remove it.

I love the idea of this, but it also plays poorly with

> Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

But I guess, to be fair, giving the other sides a fair chance to make it's point doesn't mean you need to provably debunk it if it's wrong.

This just seems like a rather clever permutation of ad hominem.

“The reason I won’t refute your argument is that it is so incorrect that it would take me forever to explain why.”

Not really. Ad hominem is directing the subject of your argument at the person instead of their ideas.

Brandolini's law is more like the adage, "a lie can travel halfway around the world, while the truth is lacing up its boots." It's very easy to spout correct-sounding lies in such a volume that countering them becomes an academic challenge.

You're looking at it wrong. It's that there is so much bull out there that it would be impossible to refute it all.

Or as Pauli said, "Not even wrong."

Can't be that hard or expensive, let's make it happen

Well, go for it!

I find this an embarrassingly entertaining read! I particularly like this bit:

“The French are not up-to-date. They’re not modern. They’re living in the past."

“… The World Almanac for 1945 concludes that as far as social legislation is concerned, "France is in the vanguard" .. The French were certainly up-to-date in establishing old age pensions, compulsory insurance against illness, disability and death, maternity insurance, and so on. It was France that introduced the forty-hour work week.”

Clearly the author views theses social policies positively. I wander if that was what the average American thought back in 45.

Nobody worked 40 hours weeks after the war in France, except maybe civil servants.

That's not the point. It never was the point, it's never been the point of ANY law about ANY duration of the work week. It defines the LEGAL duration of a week's work because that's going to be used for calculating the PAY.

Wehn we went from 39h -> 35h for instance with the same pay, we're just compensating for the massive increases in productivity that occured while salaries stayed flat for 30 years.

And civil servants basically work the same hours per year as workers in the private sector, in France. Always have since 1945. In 2019 it was 1640h vs 1703h effective hours per years, a 3.8% difference.

> And civil servants basically work the same hours per year as workers in the private sector, in France.

Not, not at all. They retire many years before the private sector and have way more vacation. You forgot that tiny detail.

> Clearly the author views theses social policies positively. I wander if that was what the average American thought back in 45.

Probably most of those who voted for Roosevelt in 1944 and some others who voted for Dewey for other reasons. The results of Roosevelt's New Deal led to a comparatively wide support of social policies in the US for decades.

The US established basic social insurance in the 30s, and generally ~all industrialised nations were going in this direction in the era fairly uncontroversially; at the time I don’t think it was particularly contentious.

The idea that social welfare is a partisan issue, with one side considering it to be, essentially, a bad thing, is really a fairly modern invention in the US; Reagan era.

The opening paragraphs are lovely and absolutely not what I'd expected based on the name. This is the America we want to live in.

"We insist upon the right to express our own opinions. But we also believe in the right of others to express their opinions. For the right to speak involves the duty to listen...We know that the truth can only be found through open and honest discussion, and that the common good is served through common attempts to reach common understanding".

We need to be reminded of this.

The left and right are so divided that they're intolerable of one another. Neither side believes the other is worth listening to.

It's a shame.

We're all animals traversing a complicated landscape. There's daily pain and suffering, and then we die. We should remind ourselves how similar everyone actually is, and that the diversity of our views are humanity living and breathing through our mortal, aging bodies.

What's worse, that division is extremely profitable to some. So they spend their resources stoking that division. This only serves to drive the wedge deeper. Meanwhile, it's like the classic game of Three Card Monte. We are so busy hating the people we're told are "our enemy", that we ignore potential real enemies.

One side wants trans people to be able to use the same bathroom and universal healthcare the other side talks about shooting democrats and Myanmar style coups.

It is impossible to be tolerant of the Fourth Reich or those who if they don't condone it will at best tolerate it for tax cuts.

Our unresolvable division is because 10% is evil and 30% is nuts and the remainder can't have anything they want if they don't embrace the crazy.

These people will sacrifice our actual values for pale shadows of same.

In Portland.

One side of the crowd holds signs like "Down with the Fash" and "Trans Rights are Human Rights."

The other side of the crowd literally wearing "RWDS" Patches (Right Wing Death Squad) and "Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong" shirts.

Some of the people in this thread: "Huh! I don't see any difference between the two. Both sides! Hurr durr."

You're painting the entire right as Nazis though. That's not at all accurate. Some people just don't want to be taxed, want their guns, and are afraid of the theory of evolution.

You're failing to see the huge distribution of people on both sides.

There are Nazis on both sides, but there aren't many. The majority are closer to the middle, and the media uses the extreme examples to enrage and divide for dollars.

> You're painting the entire right as Nazis though.

Do you know what you call someone who is okay associating with white supremacists?

A white supremacist.

You're so wrong.

You're dealing in absolutes and lumping everyone you disagree with into the Hitler/racist bin. It's an indoctrination.

Explain non-white conservatives. Explain them in other non-US countries such as Japan. Explain white (often Christian) conservatives that adopt minority children.

You're so single minded in your hate towards these people, most of whom you do not know, that you can't see that you're wrong. Perhaps it is your world view and experiences are that are limited.

I'm sorry you feel this way.

I hope you can start loving more people than you hate.

I will not love people who associate with and vote for those who wish people like me, and people I ally with as brothers and sisters, to be treated as subhuman. Or wish me to be dead just because I'm not like them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/pride-mon... - As Pride Month begins, Republicans double down on restricting transgender Americans - Across 33 states, more than 100 anti-transgender bills have been introduced just in the first few months of 2021.

https://www.koin.com/local/multnomah-county/pinochet-did-no-... - A number of Patriot Prayer supporters, including group leader Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, wore t-shirts at the Saturday protest in Portland that read: Pinochet did nothing wrong.

If peoples' lives are so easily overlooked that you'd rather save a few bucks on your tax bill and will vote for people who align with white supremacists, then yes, you're scum.

The people who aren't outright nazis will vote one in while either lying to you and I or lying to themselves about doing so. The threat of the rise of the original Nazi party in Germany did not turn on the majority of its boosters wanting to burn Jews and other victims like toast. It turned on them being first willing to overlook violent rhetoric and then later willing to cower in fear lest they themselves join the victims.

Absolutely the entire right are Nazis, collaborators, on their way out politically.

xkcd doesn't agree with the "duty to listen".

https://xkcd.com/1357/

I don't see those things as incompatible at all.

"giving the other side a fair chance to make its point" (from very next sentence) doesn't mean they can't blow that chance by being obnoxious, unfair, offensive, or plain wrong. I don't think the OP argues that this "duty to listen" extends forever, that you have to keep listening after you have determined that "the other side" is being an asshole.

I think a tit-for-tat approach is fair. If the other party is demonstrably not listening to you, you can drop the duty to listen (and you should probably just disengage). If someone is participating in good faith, but wrong or an asshole/obnoxious/offensive, I don't think that justifies censorship.

In any argument at least one and frequently both positions are plain wrong. Both parties think that is true of the other. If that were a reason to drop free speech norms, they would always be dropped.

Civility is an aspirational value, but communities that enforce it invariably will do so in a biased way. Rude behavior is easy to spot in the outgroup and easy to overlook in the ingroup. Offensiveness is nebulously defined- someone might be offended by the word 'asshole', someone else by the banning of vulgarity. How a community defines civility privileges people from backgrounds that define it similarly. Those closest to the issue will have a harder time keeping their emotions in check- eg. a white person might have an easier time arguing dispassionately about racism than a minority.

If you can get around those issues, I think you should. Civil discourse optimizes for a lot of the factors that justify free speech in the first place. Not so with being wrong; a major benefit of free speech is that those who are wrong and participating can be righted, to the benefit of all parties.

xkcd isn't exactly an arbiter of truth

That xkcd actually reinforces the duty to listen, but clarifies that nobody has a right to a specific response from listeners.

Randall makes a typical mistake: the constitution bans one specific form of censorship, therefore all other forms of censorship are acceptable.

They are not, they just aren't so unequivocally bad that you can ban them in the constitution with a single sentence.

> the constitution bans one specific form of censorship, therefore all other forms of censorship are acceptable

The First Amendment is perhaps the most powerful manifestation of the philosophy of free speech in our world today. As a result, we have a habit of conflating the two. But a culture of free speech can wither while the First Amendment remains strong (and vice versa).

The exercise of editorial discretion in a privately owned publication or forum and censorship are two very different things.

What steams my clams is that the people who complain about private forums exercising editorial discretion tend to be the same people who insist that private property rights are sacrosanct, and so, for example, private property owners should be able to ban union organizers from their property [1]. This strikes me as brazenly hypocritical. Either free speech trumps private property, or private property trumps free speech. You can't have it both ways.

[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/supreme-court-holds-uni...

The answers to each gripe are simple, straightforward and convincing. I love how it's written.

It's prejudice vs logic and wisdom.

To me it is logic and wisdom, with some (appropriate) bias towards its audience.

I wish that people would listen to responses to common misconceptions on Facebook and Twitter these days.

The answers are all great, but I could also understand why an American soldier would have those gripes in the first place!

Does anyone know whether this had any impact on relations?

My experience with seeing discussions online doesn't give me much confidence in the persuasive ability of "here are logical reasons why what you're feeling is wrong".

Online discussions are a lot more scatterbrained than sitting down to read a book. People are more willing to take a second & more logical look before responding when they cannot tweet back.

Also, this has a lot of reasons why the reader is right to feel a certain way.

I saw a comic from 1898 "Un diner en famille" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_d%C3%AEner_en_famille which I understand the captions to be "Let's not discuss the Dreyfus affair" and "they discussed it".

I won't disagree that the internet can exasperate things like this.. the comic feels _too_ familiar in the internet-age.

This whole thing is amazing. It still reads really well today, like there's no tone of racism and nothing seems inappropriate (which is a hard thing to achieve with time).

I wish we had such a book currently on how arabs and the muslim world are different, but not so different than us.

> We didn't come to Europe to save the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to Europe to do anyone any favors. We came to Europe because we in America were threatened by a hostile, aggressive and very dangerous power.

> In this war, France fell in June of 1940, We didn't invade Europe until June of 1944. We didn't even think of "saving the French" through military action until after Peary Harbor -- after the Germans declared war on us

I can't stop reading, this is so interesting, this is really a lesson on racism and discrimination. I'm curious about who wrote this.

> It was inevitable that some Frenchmen would rub some Americans the wrong ray=. City people often rub country folk the wrong «ay the same goes for a Pittsburgher in New Orleans or Texan on Fifth Avenue. We Americans believe in the value of differences -- if basic political beliefs and goals rest on a common foundation. "Unless you bear with the faults of a friend you betray your own."

another one:

> You don't have to love the French. You don't have to hate them either. You might try to understand them, The more important point is not to let your feeling blin d you to the fact that they were and are our allies. They were in 1917, too. The most important question any people can ask itself is this: "Who fights with us? Who fights against us ?"

This one could apply to our relationship with China maybe?

> Yes, we quarrel with the French. The members of a family argue pretty freely inside the home ; We quarrel with our allies, We don't quarrel with our enemies -- we fight them.

I like how this one is phrased so that it sounds like France gave more money. I also really thought that France gave the statue to the US entirely.

> In France, 180 French cities, forty general councils, and thousands of anonymous Frenchmen contributed a quarter of a million dollars (not francs) towards the statue, (The United States raised $280,000.)

that's how much a cocktail was back then:

> A. G.I., comes out of a night club in the States and says, "A buck and half for a Scotch and soda".

that one can apply to the homeless crisis in the US:

> Some of the French are scroungers. Hungry people lose their pride. An empty stomach does not worry about losing face.

France sounded like a muslim country back then:

> Most French girls before the war had far less freedom than our girls back home. A great many were not permitted to go out without a chaperone. France is dominantly Catholic in religion and in morals. The immoral Frenchwomen are, of course, the easiest women for us to meet. That's why we meet so many of them.

this one is hilarious:

> This always startles Americans - at first . Kissing on both cheeks is the traditional French greeting between old friends. For their love making, the French prefer privacy, if available, just as we do.

It's interesting how the second part goes into "germans are so much nicer than french people".

PS: holy shit I can copy/paste from an old picture of a book O_o

And one day, successive iterations of OCR, copy & paste, and machine learning will have us remembering the events of Peary Harbor.

Peary harbour was the site where the confederate forces of Robert Peary, in 1909, fought the communist forces of Franz Ferdinand. Ferdinand's forces were armed with revolutionary fire-arms, fitted with sights known as "Cross-hairs". This was immortalised in the song "Take Me Out" by the band "The Beegees", famous for their Delta-Blues sound, in 2067.

> in 2067

Music from the future? ;)

I'm somewhat relieved that that's the only point of my comment you pulled me up on.

Hah. The first encounters between the French and the US in WW II were hostile: The US landings in Morocco against French resistance.

> Hah. The first encounters between the French and the US in WW II were hostile: The US landings in Morocco against French resistance.

I feel this statement grossly misrepresents history. French north Africa was controlled by Vichy France, which was Nazi Germany's puppet regime and did not represented french sentiment or opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch

Vichy did represent French sentiment at the beginning. Things changed with time.

> Vichy did represent French sentiment at the beginning.

No, not really. The Vichy regime was the dictatorship puppet regime imposed onto the remaining french territory after the third republic was dissolved, and enacted policies imposed by Nazi germany such as rounding up Jews to hand them over to them. It grossly misrepresents the french sentiment of the time to even suggest that France suddenly had a change in heart and decided to not only accept Nazi Germany as it's political and ideological compass but also jump enthusiastically and head-on onto the Holocaust to the point of eclipsing even Franco's Spain.

You're mixing up things, misconstruing what I said and ignoring the timeline.

The national sentiment in June 1940 when Pétain formed the last government of the 3rd Republic was _very_ pro-Pétain and the country as a whole was pro-armistice. The Vichy regime was formed on the basis of popular support to lead a policy that, if it didn't gather the unconditional support of everyone, didn't alarm many. You have to keep in mind the Parliamentarian 3rd Republic was seen as having failed miserably. All the while 1.8 French men were held as PoWs in Germany and the government was expected to gain them back.

Until mid-1941 pro-Vichy sentiment remained high and the Resistance movement was at best paltry, with people like de Gaulle seen as trouble makers.

Germany invaded the USSR on the on June 22, prompting the Communists in France to enter the Resistance. At the same time the systemic plunder of the French economy, with the help of Vichy, was coming into fruition and starting to be felt. Real antisemitic and repression policies started being implemented in the second half of 1941.

The Vel d'Hiv Roundup happened in mid-1942. In June 22 1942 French workers were incentivised to leave France to work in Germany. Two months later, on August 22 work conscription was instituted and accelerated in late 42 / early 43 while the Germans invaded Southern France, up 'til now nominally in the hands of the French government.

From _that_ moment national sentiment truly turned, Vichy lost all the good will it still had, the French lost all illusions that Pétain was anything more than a mop and large amounts of youths trying to dodge slave work in Germany entered the Resistance.

I think you « grossly misrepresent » French sentiment much more than I do.

As Bayart said, you are mistaken. Although de Gaulle's forces claimed that the Vichy regime was illegitimate, it it very difficult to justify the claim based on either popular support (Vichy and Petain almost certainly had the support of the majority of French at the surrender of the Third Republic, and for years afterward) or diplomatic recognition (Vichy had recognition from dozens of countries, including the US and Canada). Conversely, de Gaulle himself had difficulty in justifying his claim that he was legally acting on behalf of the Third Republic.

Thanks. My initial read of the other comment was that the US was fighting the French Resistance, when it was the opposite.

>I wish we had such a book currently on how arabs and the muslim world are different

I also wish we had such a book currently on how progressive and conservatives are different

sometimes groups of people are just nasty, bad people worthy of mocking and ridicule. You can't always pretend that situations are around reasonable differences of opinion with each side being honest actors. Each situation is going to be different. the english/french situation may be one way and the progressive/conservative situation may be different.

sometimes groups of people are just nasty, bad people worthy of mocking and ridicule

Yes, conservatives aren't just people with a different belief system than yours. They are bad people, liars, evil, rotten to the core, and deserve to die.

How did you decide that he meant conservatives == nasty, bad people?

It was a statistical observation. The people who phrase it the way the parent did, usually tend to be on a specific side.

(The other side has its tell-signs as well).

If you are liberal you believe conservatives are greedy, amoral and probably evil.

If you are conservative you believe liberals are stupid and probably brainwashed.

This is America.

You need to evaluate verifiable facts and come to conclusions. In discussion regarding two sides, A against B, you don't just say well each has it's good points, each has it's bad, we have to be fair and balanced. No, this is especially where newspapers have it wrong. You are fair and balanced when you appropriate praise and scorn to sides based on the externally verifiable facts, and the honestness of their actions. You don't blindly give both sides equal footing for fairness.

When a man beats up a wife, _you don't say_, well, look, she probably wasn't the easiest to live with, and he had it tough dealing with her. He is a good business man, and a pillar in the community. so look both sides have positives and negatives. (Well to be fair as a society we usually do, do this, but clearly we are wrong).

No the facts say otherwise.

I don't think the point is advocating some sort of moral relativism but rather to steel-man both sides in good-faith rather than respond to some sort of caricature of each.

Yes i agree caricaturing is clearly wrong. But i am saddened by this group think that all groups of people should be given even standing as all having positives and negatives. People should be given standings based on verifiable evidence with regard to their actions. If your group is composed of bad actors, your group is bad. We don't have to treat you fair and balanced.

And if you're neither, you can see through both charades.

I think interrogating those differences can help you either find out if they are borne of "nastiness" and ignorance, or if there is actually fundamental difference in values that should be explored.

E.g., Someone could assume a person is against voter ID simply because they want to disenfranchise specific groups or they can legitimately be concerned about fraud. If we just assume the former, it misses any opportunity to make rational arguments about the claims of the latter.

Yet if you look at all the cases of actual election fraud and voter fraud, they (almost?) exclusively fall on the side pushing voter ID the hardest.

I'll use myself as an example:

- Voters should show proof of citizenship when voting.

- The US needs to take a serious look at implementing Universal Basic Income, and not just because of the automation of jobs.

- Abortion should be legal up to the earliest that a fetus has survived out of the womb, roughly 3 months.

- We should celebrate diversity, and, we should be able to talk about what makes us different. Without risking censure.

- We should have a clear, straightforward and streamlined path to citienship for anyone who wants to become an American.

- Mass media has done a masterful job of brainwashing Americans for the purpose of polarizing us, which drives outrage, clicks and ad revenue.

What label do you apply to me? How about none? People's beliefs are on a spectrum, they aren't binary. But we should each understand the 'first principles' of why we believe what we believe, and dig deeper than a news article. Once you view people in this way, you actually have to get to know them before you can decide whether their beliefs align with yours.

Labeling people and judging them based on a superficial observation is the opposite of inclusion. I was taught that in grade school 50 years ago.

You're correct. I should have been more clear that progressive and conservative labels are more apt for individual viewpoints and not as a defining characteristic of the person. I think that logic can still be applied, though. The point I was trying to make is that with any label (whether French/American or conservative/progressive) it's more productive to try and find clarity about the opposing viewpoint rather than just slapping on a rigid label lacking nuance.

While I wouldn't want to label 11thEarlOfMar personally, I think it can be helpful to look at each of those views in the context of a larger framework because it helps understand what value systems you operate with to either find inconsistencies or common ground.

Edit: I think the fact that people are so quick to either label their personhood or assume someone else is doing the same is indicative of the problem. It's also a bit troubling that a post simply advocating for contextually understanding differences would get downvotes. I don't know if that's a problem with my inability to communicate that point effectively or something worse.

To be clear, I agree with your original post that some type of mediation between the poles would be helpful.

Reflecting a bit more, it's hard to imagine that a government could convince it's people to go to war without a large degree of brainwashing to demonize the foe. To some degree, we need our soldiers to believe that they people they kill are deserving of death, even though the they were most likely brainwashed and drafted into the conflict on false pretenses. In a symbolic way, this happened in the US in 2020, but this time, private industry and the government entered symbiosis in polarizing citizens into a civil conflict. And people were killed.

We owe it to ourselves to peel back a couple of layers of the onion, and understand and respect other well supported beliefs, even if those beliefs differ from our own.

> - Voters should show proof of citizenship when voting.

You'll get no disagreement on this from any liberal. In fact the disagreement lies not in proving citizenship but in the methods to do so. If you have to show proof to register then why do you need to show proof to vote? In fact, if you have ID that proves you are a valid voter then registration shouldn't be necessary at all.

Republicans not only want you to show citizenship. They want you to show it 2, 3, 4 times in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of The Leopard“.

>If you have to show proof to register then why do you need to show proof to vote?

Isn’t the argument that you need to prove the person voting is the same person who registered? Where I live, you only need to give a name and address verbally to vote and that can be gathered online fairly easily.

(Just to be clear, I’m not saying voting fraud is rampant but can understand the risk)

>You'll get no disagreement on this from any liberal.

Maybe in France but in the US you will absolutely get disagreement from liberals.

>If you have to show proof to register then why do you need to show proof to vote?

If you showed proof to get your driver's license then why do you need to show proof to drive?

If you showed proof to purchase/register your vehicle why do you need to show proof of registration when you get pulled over?

>In fact, if you have ID that proves you are a valid voter then registration shouldn't be necessary at all.

In fact, if you have ID that proves you are over 21 then registration of your firearm purchase shouldn't be necessary at all.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

>If you showed proof to get your driver's license then why do you need to show proof to drive?

The general counter to this is that one is a privilege and the other is a right. Usually any hurdle to exercising a constitutionally protected is going to receive some pushback. The same goes for the firearm registration issue.

>The general counter to this is that one is a privilege and the other is a right.

True. People on both sides of the isle use the "privilege not a right" counter on various issues.

>Usually any hurdle to exercising a constitutionally protected is going to receive some pushback. The same goes for the firearm registration issue.

Exactly. Owning a firearm is a right so this example still works here.

> If you have to show proof to register then why do you need to show proof to vote? In fact, if you have ID that proves you are a valid voter then registration shouldn't be necessary at all.

Why don't you ask every other country why they do such a thing? Seriously, if the issue was as clear-cut as you make it out to be ("Those peoples are just trying to suppress the votes of their opponents") then the US would not be one of the few places in the world where this is controversial.

It's not controversial in some of the largest democracies in the world, and yet you want us to believe that you really think that it is controversial?

The short answer is that doesn't always work because the U.S. is different in important aspects (and this doesn't mean necessarily claiming American exceptionalism).

I think there are some problems when you bring in the "Why don't you ask every other country?" argument. For one, not every country has the same protections that the U.S. carries in the Bill of Rights. This is why you can't, for example, use this defense when it comes to banning intolerant speech even though it may be done elsewhere.

I think the generous interpretation is this law feels like a "show me your papers" statute which the United States generally has a philosophical angle against. It would be comparable in some people's eyes to a "Show me your vaccine card" enforced by the State. Pragmatically, the ID law may also create de facto racial profiling. Although I think the opposite side of this feels the issue is more about State vs. Federal immigration enforcement than really striking down the "show me your papers" provision.

You misunderstand me - I am not saying that the law is needed/not needed. I'm not on any particular side of the argument.

What I am saying is that presenting the argument as a clear-cut case of $PARTY wants to limit voter participation from certain demographics is disingenuous - it is NOT clear-cut at all because more countries require voter registration than not.

So no one should be attacking labeling a proponent of this law as a Nazi just because they support it - the majority of the world's voting democracies can't be Nazis, now can they?

I agree, but I am saying the “other countries think this is obviously fine policy” is a flawed argument. There are many good and bad reasons a policy is acceptable in one country and not another. That’s not to say the fascism argument is a good one either, just that there are more principled points to make.

I would obviously apply a more progressive label to you. UBI, not anti-abortion, celebrating diversity, citizenship approval, MSM being dodgy.

Another thing that's been mostly sweeped under the rug wrt WW2 is that Russia both did the most damage to the German army and paid the highest price.

America only started their offensive after Russia started winning and likely only wanted to deny them Europe. And the heavy casualties in the war likely caused Russia to fold on the cold war as well, there were just not enough able men after the war to create families with about 80% of the male population in their prime dead. That low birth rate circle continues to date.

The world would've been a very different place with the USSR still in power and indoctrinating europes youth for generations.

America likely did save the Democratic western Europe at that time, just not from Germany.

No western democracy could have paid the human cost the USSR did. Arguably they only paid such a high price due to their industrial underdevelopment which was partly due to their economic and political system.

It's often said that the war was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Soviet blood.

>Arguably they only paid such a high price due to their industrial underdevelopment which was partly due to their economic and political system.

Very arguably, as it's actually the opposite: the socialism forced mass force industrialization, and prepared USSR better for WWII than Russia ever had any chance of being.

Well, technically the Tsardom is also a economic and political system.

Yes, it just wasn't a very effective one in comparison... In fact it was dying for decades before 1905 and finally 1917 put it out of its misery...

> their industrial underdevelopment which was partly due to their economic and political system

I'm sorry? They went from a peasant society immediately to defending against multiple foreign invasions (including the U.S.) to fighting and defeating the fascists, all in three decades. That was achievable only due to their economic and political system.

His intent was not to suggest that the USSR was always backwards, but rather that due to it's history the development was not undertaken until the war. The Tsars didn't do it because they were busy being feudal masters and the communists because they were nation building and hadn't faced the german onslaught yet. Atleast, that is how I understand it. His comment is not an underhanded insult.

> They went from a peasant society immediately to defending against multiple foreign invasions (including the U.S.) to fighting and defeating the fascists, all in three decades. That was achievable only due to their economic and political system.

This is old, debunked propaganda trope recited for a millionth time.

No, USSR never went to industrial giant overnight, for a reason it never been it. USSR relied on single digit of large factories for everything during the war.

Even tiny Eastern European countries USSR invaded were heads above USSR, to the point the first thing USSR did there were stealing all factory equipment, and relocating it to new factories in USSR.

For background consistent with the overall theme of this post, I'd strongly recommend Solzhenitsyn's "The Red Wheel" [0], and especially the first volume, "August 1914" (1984 edition).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheel

The USSR pay a high price because they suffered a massive, brutal invasion for years, against 80% of the German forces. None of that happened to the western countries.

> Arguably they only paid such a high price due to their industrial underdevelopment which was partly due to their economic and political system.

So arguably it had nothing to do with the largest war of all time waged against them explicitly for their annihilation?

Could you clarify what you mean with "economic and political system"? Do you count the Tsar's reign and the years of civil war under that heading?

Russia did pay a massive cost for WW2, but they also paid a high cost due to: 1) their attempt to placate the Nazi’s with their non-aggression pact and attempt to avoid war (which they weren’t that prepared for), 2) the Great Purge in the late 30’s where they executed and imprisoned a massive number of experience officers, which they had to replace, 3) their tactics (no retreat) which resulted in massive encirclements and POWs who were starved to death.

Eventually the USSR learned and with support of the UK and US in terms of materiel turned into a formidable fighting force. But a decent amount of their casualties were somewhat self-imposed.

True but the USSR was ally of Germany, two dictator states started world war two.

What history have you been reading?

I think it's a reference to this pact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

Ha! Think we posted at same time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_P...

Also USSR pretty much annexed eastern Europe after the war, in a way they are the only country that won anything out of ww2.

The USSR and Germany concluded a non-aggression-pact in 1939 with a secret amendment to divide Poland and the Baltic states between themselves. This late became known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (or Hitler-Stalin-Pact, or Nazi-Soviet-Pact). With the Sowjet occupation of Bukovina in 1940 and definitely the German attack on the USSR ("Operation Barbarossa") in 1941, the pact was defunct.

In December of 1941, after Pearl Harbour, the US entered the war, and then you had the main combatants in place:

The allies with the USSR (Stalin), USA (Roosevelt), British Empire (Churchill), France (de Gaulle), Republic of China (Chiang Kai-Shek), against

The axis with Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), and Japan (Hirohito).

Marshall Georgy Zhukov: "Today [1963] some say the Allies didn't really help us ... But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war."

Stalin himself is also reported to have said the Soviets couldn't have won the war without American aid, among other Soviet leaders.

Worth nothing that Russia was the 2nd largest recipient of American lend-lease (after the British), which started well before the Normandy landings. Yes they were in the unenviable position of the being German bullet sponges, but they couldn't have even done that without American supplies. So it's arguable the US did save Europe from Germany: 100% indirectly at first and more directly later.

Swept under the rug as well is the Luftwaffe secret training facilities in the Soviet Union (in circumvention if the Treaty of Versailles) and among other things the Soviet invasion of Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis.

The Soviet Union paid a very high price, but their hands were not clean.

> This one could apply to our relationship with China maybe?

This is absolutely nothing like the situation with China, which is definitely NOT an ally of the west.

Shortly after assuming his position as President of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping disseminated a secret internal paper with his most important views and plans, including the 7 biggest threats to China in his eyes. In 2013, this "document number 9" was leaked. Among the 7 threats were democracy, human rights, and independent media.

Seriously, China does not just have a different culture with slightly different ideas. They view our most fundamental values as their biggest threats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...

Edit: As pointed out by several commenters, my remarks refer to the Chinese Communist Party, not to the Chinese people.

Isn't the republican party dismantling democracy right at this moment? Also, America is a friend of human rights mostly as lip service, see Hague Invasion Act. And the calling American corporate media independent is a stretch. If these are the most fundamental values to Americans, they do a poor job defending them.

We donate more to humanitarian causes than the next 10 countries combined. We openly admit we're not perfect and work to make things better. We do more good than anyone else - by a MASSIVE margin. We openly admit we've made mistakes.

Where does this reflexive anti-American bullshit come from?

The what you call "reflexive anti-american bullshit" comes because of post like yours, which without evidence spout claims such as "we do more good than anyone else - by a assive margin".

The US (as in government) like all large powers are doing a lot of self interested power politics. They have overthrown many democratically elected governments and supported (and sometimes even put in place) some of the worst dictatorships in the world, because it was in their geopolitical interest. They invaded a sovereign country and presented lies to justify the invasion. They jave introduced a massive worldwide surveillance system, that is essentially spying on everyone. Have used that aperatus to spy on allies, and used it for to gain every economic advantage they could get.

Is pointing this out "anti-american bullshit". Has someone who did these things done more good than anyone else by a massive margin?

Go look up humanitarian giving. These are quantifiable numbers. We do more than the next 10 countries rolled up.

We AGREE about the negative bullshit the US has done. We're actively trying to work on that shit, none of us like it. We've actually done a stellar job looking at our history and current practices and saying "That was fucked up" and "We should fix this going forward."

But we still do WAY more good than, like I said, the next 10 countries combined.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/275597/largers-donor-cou...

So it's not all roses, but... Yeah, I wouldn't dismiss us as a net benefit.

Your source says that, per capita, Germany pays more than the US.

Did your per Capita calculation roll up the populations of the next 9 countries it would take to equal the US?

So your point about why the US are great and morally ‘stellar ‘ (to use your word) is that it’s —- big? Wow, that’s anticlimactic.

Add up all those populations. We're exceedingly generous, although less so than the Germans.

You may want to run the numbers on Norway (5 mio people), Sweden, Netherlands, etc. and all the others that aren’t even on a list that only shows totals and not per capita ‘generosity’.

See, I don’t know if this is helping the case you are trying to make against cycomanic. You come here claiming you are more generous than the next 10 combined, when, in reality, you aren’t even in the top 5.

In terms of total dollars given, by far and away? If you add up the populations of the next 9 countries, it dwarfs the US population.

Norway would fit in 1/3 of the most prosperous part of Los Angeles. I assumed we were talking about geopolitical powers.

You provided the list, I can’t help that you now do not like it anymore.

I mean, believe what you want, just make sure I’m nowhere near when you explain to the waitress why your party of 20 tipping $11 is so much more generous than the one guy tipping $10.

You regularly tip $200 when you're out in a group?

I mean I guess if it's a wedding party, now that I think about it.

You know how you just got all defensive and insulted about a generalization made about America? That's how the Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Iraqis etc. feel when you make generalizations about them.

The recent US leadership hasn't done a very good job of representing "American Values". You can expect anti-American sentiment from this.

It may not be justified when referring to individuals, but neither is the xenophobic response to any of the countries listed above.

Fight the governments, not the people.

...the countries that repress their own citizens and don't have a free press? You go to China and point out abuses. See how it goes. Or Russia - just don't stand by any windows.

Those countries have legitimate issues we call out. We call ours out too. That's the difference.

Have you heard of Navalny?

Yeah he's legit - he was poisoned twice trying to speak the truth. That's not something that happens in the US. Surely that counts for something?

If you're looking at the dismantling of human rights I think the left and right are equally culpable.

It would be more accurate to say that Xi and the CCP view democracy, the media, and human rights as the greatest threats to their power, and they’re right - when running a dictatorship these things are a problem.

We have to make a distinction here. The book is about the French, the people, and how they are when you live with them in their own country.

Almost all news about China are not about the people of China, but instead treat China as a single entity defined by its government.

I think GP has a point is that we could get a better understanding of China by considering the people, their culture and how they live on a day-to-day basis rather than by focusing on Xi Jinping.

I'd like to see more reports of westerners actually living there, rather than government talk.

To reply in the style of the book, China learned lessons from its history just like we learn from ours. They cannot easily forget the century of humiliation that was brought upon them by the West.

hmm japan isn't very west nor is mongolia...

Isn't China our biggest trading partner. This sounds like xenophobia.

Mexico and then Canada.

Nope, China, then Canada, then Mexico (the EU treated as a unit beats China).

Canada and Mexico are bigger export targets from the US, but the US imports much kore from China, making it a bigger overall trade partner.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_...

Huh, you may have been looking at curerent year-to-date goods-only figures, but aside from the problem of being goods only (services are traded to), there is seasonality to trade, so current year YTD figures aren’t a good measure.

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...

Each comment GP made corresponds to quote following the comment. i.e.:

>This one could apply to our relationship with China maybe?

>> Yes, we quarrel with the French. The members of a family argue pretty freely inside the home ; We quarrel with our allies, We don't quarrel with our enemies -- we fight them.

With that said, I wouldn't interpret the US relationship with China as one of alliance nor as one of enmity (yet).

Uh, the US military has declated China it's main adversary and the US just had a presidency that used "clash of civilizations" to describe the relationship with China, why do you think "enmity" is not an appropriate word?

Because the relationship with China is more complicated than that. You can see it in the NIH funding research at the Wuhan virology lab or all the made in China goods that the US consumes.

It makes sense for the military to recognize the other forces that pose the biggest threat. But regarding declarations by politicians, it appears to me that internal politics in both countries are driving politicians to make such statements. As in, both American and Chinese leadership see advantage in creating an external enemy. Naturally, as China's power rises, the relationship changes texture, but how much of our attitude change is recognition of the changed situation versus a change in attitude induced by the political class?

> It still reads really well today, like there's no tone of racism and nothing seems inappropriate (which is a hard thing to achieve with time).

How about this:

    Some Frenchmen have certainly gypped some Americans . We 
    remember the times we were gypped . We forget
    the number of times we were not. How many times were
    you treated fairly, honesty°' ?

    Were you never "gypped" back home -in towns near
    army camps ? (See question 4 83),

Are you suggesting that the term "gypped" may've been racist? Presumably because its etymology may be a reference to a stereotypical behavior attributed to gypsies, which some might regard as a racial-slur for [Romani people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people)?

That passage doesn't give me that vibe -- it seems to be trying to suggest that the relevant behavior, "gypping", isn't culturally unique, but rather could be found back in the United States, too.

Concerns about terminology etymologically-based on cultural stereotypes aside, it doesn't read like the author was expressing a racist perspective, but rather trying to speak to such preexisting-perspectives as to dispel them.

Would probably want to do some checking on this first, though I'd suspect that "gypsy" wasn't widely regarded as offensive back then, either, much like "Negro" literally just meant "Black". Seems like sometimes terms are retro-historically recast as racial-slurs, apparently in an attempt to create a gap between historical-texts which use such terms and later-texts which don't. Kinda like depreciating an API in favor of a clone as a mode of depreciating the corresponding ecosystem.

Gypped isn't offensive just because they prefer to be called Romani. It equates Romani with swindlers. Saying some French and some Americans swindle too isn't the same.

It's better to understand what people are trying to say than to misattribute false interpretations.

For example, in this case the speaker clearly wasn't trying to equate Romani to swindlers. Any logic arriving at such a faulty conclusion would seem fallacious, presumably due to over-simplification.

I attributed no intent.

It's hard to guess what point you're trying to make.

My best guess might be that you're trying to represent a belief that words have context-free meaning, and then you're very short in your own communication in part due to that same belief.

However I disagree with jumping to conclusions about stuff. For example, while I might try to guess that you're arguing that words ought to be held as context-free, such an argument would seem quite naive, such that I'd prefer not attribute it to another on the basis of speculation alone.

In short, I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Calling something inappropriate implies nothing about intent. It's what people say to children who don't know better for example. And explaining why it's inappropriate doesn't either. My communication was long enough to identify your false implication.

While I might try to guess that you're arguing that readers' contexts ought to be held as irrelevant, such an argument would seem quite naive, such that I'd prefer not attribute it to another on the basis of speculation alone.

Right off the bat:

"The right to speak involves the duty to listen."

The statue itself was paid by the French, the US funds were for the pedestaland earthworks.

> It still reads really well today, like there's no tone of racism

Since both countries were at the time white majority and controlled, there wasn't any need to address race in any way. There was no "race" dimension. Therefore, I wouldn't take the lack of racism as a virtue, but just that it would be off-topic for the purpose of the book.

EDIT: Look through the book - every illustration of French, Germans, and Americans depicts white people. The book, as typical of the era, just doesn't address race. It only addresses culture.

> nothing seems inappropriate

  "The French can't drive a car. They can't keep it up. They ruin vehicles."

  The French, on the whole, certainly do not drive as well, keep a car up as well, or protect their vehicles as well as we do. Neither do women, compared to men.

  We have had more mechanical training, more technical experience. And at the present time we have incomparably better maintenance facilities.

It’s an anachronism that doesn’t fly today, but to be fair this seems descriptive rather than prescriptive.

The first line is one of the questions right? So it doesn't count.

The rest doesn't seem inappropriate to me, I can believe it to be right.

> This one could apply to our relationship with China maybe?

When the relationship was different from today's, during WW2, the US Army published a Pocket Guide to China:

https://archive.org/details/PocketGuideToChina1943-nsia/mode...

If I understand well, the Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French people (not the French State) but the pedestal was american : there was none when the statue arrived, and it waited for a year there in its crates.

"The promoters of the statue in France formed an organization, the French-American Union, in 1875. The group issued a statement calling for donations from the public and presenting a general plan specifying that the statue would be paid for by France, while the pedestal upon which the statue would stand would be paid for by Americans."

Source : https://www.thoughtco.com/who-paid-for-the-statue-of-liberty...

As Steve Martin once said, “Those French have a different word for everything!”

I kind of wonder why it's always acceptable to have general critics about the Frenchs, but take exactly the same discours and replace it replace it with Jews or Blacks, and sundenly, it becomes completely racist and unacceptable.

You can't compare a nationality to an ethnicity/religion and a race, respectively.

Why?

Race operates on an individual regardless of their behavior. It is a construct that is based on physical appearance only. Race is something that an individual has no control over.

Culture and ethnicity are constructs derived from behaviors, including language, manner of dress, interests, etc.

Culture/ethnicity is something that depending on the individual, they can have far more (though not total) control over, via changing manner of dress, language, etc.

Discrimination can be based on either one, but the immutability of the former distinguishes it from the latter.

Yeah, maybe French people could just unfrench their frenchiness...

The whole point of the pamphlet is they shouldn't have to in order to be accepted by the American troops, but a white French person with sufficient linguistic and cultural flexibility could pass for a white American, and largely would in contexts where they did not have to speak.

And black person could never do the same.

A black person could pass for a white person in contexts where did not have to show their skin colour, it's not that different or even rare.

> A black person could pass for a white person in contexts where did not have to show their skin colour

So basically on the phone or email only.

In every other scenario, like when walking down the street or encountering law enforcement, it's pretty much impossible.

Which is more important, culture or race? Same-culture bonds of language, ideals, values, traditions look stronger to me. I connect to people from my hometown, of my culture, regardless of race, way more than to people who just randomly have my race but don't know any of my memes or have similar values.

Another example: bonds within military units are cultural, not racial; if race were more powerful you'd expect soldiers from mixed-race countries to change sides due to stronger racial pulls - which I don't think happens, and which would be super problematic, wouldn't it? A Japanese-American soldier is American first, right? Suggesting that race is incomparably larger of a gap than culture has some really serious implications.

It's not about what's most important to one's identity, it's about what's more harmful in present times. Racism is still deeply harmful, in a way that making fun of the French/British/Americans/whatever isn't. A lot of the latter just devolves into mostly good-natured international ribbing, about Yanks being fat, the French being smelly, British food sucking, etc.

Also, it's easy to say that one's perceived race isn't important if that's not an issue that affects you, but if you were black and were experiencing frequent racism from people merely looking at you (not otherwise even interacting with you in a way that could allow them to determine your national identity), then you might sing a different tune. I'm a white American, and my experiences at home and abroad are much different to those of black Americans, for reasons having everything to do with perceived race. In most countries you will be treated substantially differently if you're visiting as a white westerner vs a black one. That has nothing to do with national origin and everything to do with racism.

Anyway, point is, all the differences I identified plus all the ones you identified mean that the two are quite different and aren't equivalent.

As a mixed race person married to a Jew, I think it would be tremendously healthy for a well-informed person to write one of each —- but within a specific national and time-bounded context.

Yes, I agree. Modern writers have no such freedoms to do this type of writing. Imagine the backlash of just page after page of "The blacks are X" or "the Jews are Z". Even writing down the criticisms to be debunked would send the Twitterverse into a meltdown.

Have you watched any stand-up comedy. Lots of comedians are making fun of the idiosyncrasies of different ethnicities, nationalities, religions. The problem is generally, who is doing it and how you do it.

Question 78: A 73% casualty rate for the French in WWI seemed bonkers to me at first glance, but it probably makes sense for the kind of war it was

Ref: https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-demo...

As an outsider who speaks both french and english, and has been to both countries, it always stuck me how similar Americans and French people are. Both sides would rather die than admit they are so similar in terms of spirit an attitude, and this brotherly hate is the main reason they are so similar. It's pretty funny.

Can you expand on that? I have dual citizenship, have spent each half of my life in both countries and I find French and Americans very different. How do you see them as similar?

Not the OP---I agree they're very different, but there's a striking resemblance in how both countries think their political and intellectual culture is civilization's crowning achievement and the entire world should adopt it. (Of course, the US has been more able to do export theirs than France in recent decades.) IMO this shapes both countries' relationships to the rest of the world.

I have less first hand experience, but I also think the level of distrust in the government (esp. central / federal) among rural populations is particularly high in both countries by developed nation standards.

I couldn't disagree more. International policies are completely different in the US and in France. The US are extremely interventionist and some may say "aggressive", this is not at all the French doctrine. It was very clearly apparent during the 2nd war in Iraq. France ignored NATO for decades until recently.

As for a more philosophical point of view, again, disagree. Universalism is indeed a concept of the French Republic while the US vision is exceptionalism. These are complete opposite.

Finally, I guess there is a certain amount of distrust of the government in rural areas (is it specific to France and the US?) but where in the US the expectation is that the government should be doing as little as possible, in France the expectation is that it should do much more to help/support people. The relationships of Americans and French to their respective government are complete opposite again. In France, people expect a lot from the government who is supposed to be the great equalizer.

> I have less first hand experience, but I also think the level of distrust in the government (esp. central / federal) among rural populations is particularly high in both countries by developed nation standards.

I don't think they're really comparable.

The most obvious example is policing. In the US, local law enforcement has a lot of independence and discretion, to the point "sheriff has to grudgingly cooperate with out-of-touch FBI guy" is a literary cliché. In France, in rural areas the default expectation is that gendarmerie (basically centralized military police) will handle most serious problems.

In France the central state is pervasive in a lot of areas that are either local or privatized in the US.

The actual text: http://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads...

That text is as important now as it was then. And it can easily be used everyone, with slight adaptions, by replacing France and the US with other nations.

Israel and Palestine? That would be a good read.

Other way around. This text seems very similiar to: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Instructions-British-Servicemen-Fra... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Instructions-American-Servicemen-Br...

The questions in the chapter entitled "the French and the Germans" paint a picture that despite defeating the Nazis and witnessing their atrocities, many American servicemen harbored deeper sympathies to German culture than to French, and this pamphlet was intended in part to fix that. Examples of questions in that section:

"The French aren't our kind of people . The Germans are"

"The French are not as clean as the Germans"

"The Germans are easier to get along with than the French, because the Germans are law abiding"

This is reminder that despite the US being at war with the Nazis in WWII, the heinous beliefs behind the Nazi agenda had a lot of resonance in many other countries, including the United States. In fact, in recent years, it's become better understood how Nazism was inspired in part by the Jim Crow laws and culture in the US.

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazism-and-th...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-r...

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-...

Delightful. Plus ça change:

> 49 "Why do they knock of work for two to three hours every day?"

> They keep their stores open two to three hours later than we do. (They did when there were things to sell; there's no point in keeping a store open if the shelves are bare.)

> The long lunch hour is a custom which is not confined to France. It is found in Italy, Spain, the Balkans and many parts of Germany. It is a custom we find annoying because it interferes with our comfort (as tourists) and because it differs from our way of doing things.

> The average Frenchman maintains that a lunch eaten at leisure is a lot better than a chicken-salad-on-toast gobbled down at a drugstore counter. "We take time to live as well as work," one Frenchman said.

ETA: It does take a more sombre turn in the chapters about France vs. Germany (Questions 69 etc.), which appears to indicate that many soldiers felt that they should have sided with the Germans rather than the French.

"Our friends the French" (the book's title in France) is a much softer title.

American soldiers griping about the French wouldn't have wanted to read Our Friends the French. And French people tired of American soldiers griping wouldn't have wanted to read 112 Gripes About the French.

What strikes me me as amazing is that straightforward answers are viewed as "omg". We live in a society where its viewed as shocking that people shared their thoughts.

Amazing read, to get a glimpse of 'gripes' of Americans back in the day. Reminds me of the whole "Freedom Fries' fiasco. Times may change. Some gripes stay.

Same thing in the UK during the years long wait for D-Day.

Americans were very well paid relative to their UK peers and of course didn't have the existential angst of broken nation facing uncomfortable odds. American GI's would be jovial and upbeat while having definitely enough money to spend at the pub, which caused problems.

Left out my favorite from Steve Martin. "The French have their own word for practically everything!"

But seriously, left out from the list of great of Frenchmen Laplace, Lagrange, Galois, DeLambert etc. But I guess the list of mathematicians would have made the book too thick.

Thank you for adding this. It’s faded/hard to read. Anyone got an OCRed or retyped version?

I couldn't find one and am considering working on a restoration. See thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865583

EDIT see also https://www.e-rcps.com/gripes/

I'm intrigued by the choice to conclude with this:

"France is a decadent nation"

How does one measure decadence? The Germans said, "Democracies are decadent".

I like the French translation, Our Friends the French

Interesting.

I always had the impression, the US citizens and french citizen where buddies. Because of the independence war and the statue and everything.

I had plenty of gripes about my brother when I was growing up. Those gripes were trivial but real and talking about them is far healthier than not.

I miss him terribly now.

One of the 'gripes' is:

"One Frenchman told me the French practically gave us the statue of liberty. How do you like that?"

Not sure if you are joking?

> France is the country with the deepest, most sedimented reservoir of anti-American arguments. Its long genealogy has been well documented over the years, most recently by Philippe Roger, who argues that French anti- Americanism is older than the United States (Roger 2002).

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/meunierces...

> Surprisingly, polling data reveals that France is not drastically more anti-American than other European countries – even less so on a variety of dimensions.

ibid

I'm going to suggest to you that when trying to get the most out of a research paper, you might want to read beyond the second sentence of the abstract.

It balances and talks about the paradoxes - such as the French obsession with McDonalds.

France is well know as being the little Russia and certainly a deep reserve of anti American sentiment. Mostly due to media and education brainwashing.

When the USSR broke up, I had a school teacher at the time who said Russia will cease to be an enemy and become like France, an ally that opposes us a lot and causes headaches just out of national pride.

Spoken like a true American who only heard about those places from TV shows, movies, and mass media "coverage"...

"media and education brainwashing" LOL

I think you both need to read the book this submission is based on and try to apply some of its lessons in this thread.

Beyond common ground and "we're all human" triteness, there are also deep cultural faults...

The book is right in addressing the ones it does.

But not every aspect of a culture is valid.

I was trying to say: stop doing this US/EU stereotype insult exchange stuff. It's boring and it's been done to death on basically every platform where people have been able to (pseudo)anonymously communicate.

Funny because, actually, I'm not American. You might want to avoid ad hominem attacks when you want to make a point.

Admittedly I'm not clicking on the link (2002 is peak antipathy both ways due to Iraq war build-up), but I've seen similar stuff that doesn't account for French people have a negative attitude towards everything compared to other countries. If you ask French people in a poll whether they approve of something they are much more likely to disapprove

And I would add that includes many French things and France as well.

The French love insulting Americans nearly as much as the Brits enjoy insulting the French (it's like a sport there).

France and the United States could not be more alike in national spirit (as elusive a concept as that is). Born of a similar era in revolution with practically the same slogans. Their constitutions paraphrase each other. Both deem themselves the birthplace of the modern republic and democracy, perhaps modern civilization itself.

With all that in mind, I wouldn't say buddies. More like siblings... with a serious rivalry going on.

Allies, not buddies.

It is a great read. Thanks for the link!

Impressive honesty in the first pages

Question 74 is kind of astonishing in a modern context. I mean, I suppose maybe the average soldier in the 40s didn't understand what the Nazis _were_ in the way they would now, but I'm surprised it needed to be addressed.

> France sounded like a muslim country back then:

>> Most French girls before the war had far less freedom than our girls back home. A great many were not permitted to go out without a chaperone. France is dominantly Catholic in religion and in morals...

Can you imagine: from that to disallowing fathers to do a DNA test in less than 100 years!

What are you on ? It's perfectly legal, there's just a process to follow because it's completely illegal to take someone's DNA without their consent, unless there's a criminal procedure with sufficient proof.

Sneaking a paternity test by taking someone's DNA surreptitiously would be not only worthless as a legal document, but also put you on the spot for litigation.

Following your logic: 'French girls were fully permitted to go out but there was just a process to follow - presence of a chaperon.'

Seriously, just open Wikipedia and read about different countries e.g.: In the United States, paternity testing is fully legal, and fathers may test their children without the consent or knowledge of the mother. Paternity testing take-home kits are readily available for purchase, though their results are not admissible in court and are for personal knowledge only.

Except that taking someone's DNA without their consent (or the consent of their guardians) is nothing like making girls (and women) be accompanied by a chaperone.

I always find it fascinating that many American people believe very strongly in individual freedoms, the same people often believe these freedoms do not apply to children (or teenagers) and parents should have unconditional ownership over their children.

But do you really need the consent of all the guardians?

Yes, generally you do. In many countries you need consent of all guardians for all serious interventions, like operations, school changes, travel outside the country...

So why should a paternaty test be different?

Please omit personal swipes from your HN comments, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. It just makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without that first bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've never heard of this. I'm reading the original right now -- it's amazing.

This website has serious problems with its voting culture. The serial downvoters should be banned from the site, but they never will be, because dang doesn't see the problem. You can't take disagree, and you can't agree.

Whatever, I'm out. Life's too short.

On some sites, folks will up-vote things that they agree with and down-vote things that they disagree with. Or, sometimes up-votes are a mode of expressing emotional-support or communal-acceptance. Maybe that's what you're used to?

Here, folks tend to prefer substance. They'll often down-vote you even if you express a view that they agree with if your comment doesn't contribute something worth reading. And they might up-vote your comment, even if they disagree, if it was interesting to have read.

This is more of a place to exchange ideas than find validation. You're not being rejected on a personal level -- down-votes aren't personal attacks. And people don't necessarily disagree with you, either.

I’ve found ‘chat’-style comments are downvoted i.e the internet equivalent of small talk.

Except when they're not. For example, when something about a specific retro computing feat is posted, people will just ramble about something very faintly related that they saw or did or purchased or dreamed about recently. E.g. topic is about an Amiga accelerator card, and there will be someone mentioning how they recently cleaned up the Amiga 500 they had in the garage -- like, who cares? Exactly like the comment we're discussing now: nobody cares except the author of that comment. Yet I never see those downvoted, and I know if I responded to them pointing out that this isn't their blog, I'd get downvoted.

I just looked at the front page, this is literally the first discussion I clicked on before even getting to search for "retro" or "Amiga" as I would have otherwise:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27864139

What is the content here? "For some reason I thought something else"... okay? Yet that isn't greyed out, it is the top comment. Why? Because of "Karnaugh map"? There are no replies because it offers nothing to discuss except more such ramblings about what someone might have encountered or lazily assumed (or pretends they have assumed so they can casually drop that they know a thing).

People who read the comments first like when someone highlights an interesting part of the article. It led some people to learn about Karnaugh maps probably. And it didn't have lots of competition.

The top comment of this discussion is a link to the scanned book.

That just means it wasn't a perfect example for what I was referring to, but if I were to go digging, I could find you ten thousands of comments like these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512113

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512254

It really just is small talk, no information, nothing. Instead of trying to find a rationalization for these, too, why not accept that yeah, small talk is perfectly fine, until it's not, and it's frowned upon, unless it isn't? Because it contradicts the self-congratulatory notion that "folks here prefer substance"?

Can you not see that your down-voted comment contributes absolutely nothing? You haven't seen it before and you're reading it now... ok... so what? What can anyone do with that information? Why did you post it? What was the point?

You're being downvoted for a really simple reason: HN doesn't like comments that boil down to "This." or "100%.". You need to add some value. It sucks that this even applies to "I'm excited, this is great!" but what can you do.

Did the book address the topic of rapes by US soldiers? This was a big issue after liberation, and still is a major issue near US bases nowadays (in particular Okinawa).

No. 75 years later this topic is still taboo

It's honestly not taboo anymore. Multiple history books have breached the subject, and we can now say that while they were rape from US soldiers, the sentiments were inflated because the liberation let a lot of locals distraught, angry an hungry. Also US military had a bad reputation for multiple other reasons (some racism maybe, but also the bombing and the fact that they sort of replaced the germans as an occupation forces (it was temporary however). When looking for stories about US rapes, historian saw that the sotries were extremely localized (None came from brittany, although this was one of the first liberated area and also a poor one).

Also, US soldier were rude, assertive and agressive towards women, and this was caused by racism and too much ego (French woman image from back home and stories from WW1, and their own self-inflated image)

"US soldier were rude, assertive and agressive towards women, and this was caused by racism and too much ego"

Do you regard French and Americans as different races?

What's considered "a different race" has changed over the years and the classifications we have today is mostly along social and political boundaries. Before WWII, Polish natives were often seen as of a different race, today we would consider them Caucasian.

Note how the remaining big race classifications recognized by the US Census are divided up mostly based around areas with which we still have some political tension or heavy political history: Asian, Middle-Eastern European, Latin American and African, and Native American and Native Alaskan, and Hawaiian.

I think you're conflating race with ethnicity and nationality, which makes all three concepts meaningless.

The connotations of the term race has changed. It was definitely common in the fairly recent past (WWI) for English people to speak of Germans as a different race, indeed using the term more like we would use ethnicity today. See also the English division of India into martial and non-martial "races".

You are implying a use of the term which is more influenced by biology and some vague, folksy notion of genetic/darwinian relation, often focused on skin color etc. I understand your distinction. but it is, almost by definition, more modern.

The definitions I've known have remained stable until very recently. I'll stick with Race: genetics; Ethnicity: the group/tribe one "grows up" or is most shaped by; Nationality: the country you're in/from.

They can all align to (mostly) one group, like in India and China, or can be mostly aligned like in northern Europe, or a melting pot like the US.

It's the "connotations" (i.e. conflations) that are the reason that almost everything is labeled "racist".

Please try and define "genetics" in a way that isn't, in some way, sociopolitical. To give one example out of many thousands across history, still somewhat alive today: do you consider South Koreans and Japanese people to be the same race? Do you know if those groups consider themselves to be of the same race?

The concept of race very much predates our understanding of genetics, which is a relatively modern science.

I didn't define race in any sociopolitical way -- precisely the opposite, in fact. The socio-political aspect comes from the Nationality+Ethnicity parts.

My wife is Chinese, and feels a racial kinship to Asian people from many countries: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, ... Refers to all as Asian.

> The definitions I've known have remained stable until very recently

As stated, they were not. Race and ethnicity (and also words like breed and stock) were much more synonymous 100 years ago. If you aren't keenly aware of semantic shifts like this, you will misunderstand older texts.

I'm also not sure if you're actually suggesting that China and India are (by any definition) racially and ethnically homogenous. If you are, I must encourage you to study those countries more.

As a German (who also lived in Sweden, Australia, NZ) I always cringe when I hear how Americans (from both sides of the political spectrum) use the the term race as something that actually has some sort of biological/genetic basis.

There is absolutely no scientific basis for the racial categories used today.

Apart from the fact that the genetic differences between all humans are tiny compared to different races in animals (which is I guess where the term comes from), there is also the fact that many ethnicities which are lumped under a common race differ more from each other than from many other "categories", e.g. Africa has more genetic diversity than all other continents combined. Therefore one "black" person might differ significantly more from another "black" than from a Caucasian or Asian person.

I mean the irony that there is the "racial" category of "African-American".

I think this is also not just semantics. The use of the term race associates much larger differences than there actually are, which makes it easier to justify discrimination/hate.

Question 81 mentions problems caused by US soldiers.

Crimes by foreigners generally cause a lot of outrage, regardless how common they are. I saw stats a few years ago that had the crime rates of US troops in Japan lower than the native population. While the crime rates of immigrants was higher than natives. But one of these topics is politically correct and the other is not.

Yep just came across it as well:

> If you were a French soldier, whose land had been invaded, whose wife or sister or mother had been taken into a German concentration camp and raped or killed, you might have found it difficult to control Your emotions.

> Lastly, a good many French women have been in terror of American troops, especially in Paris. Our SIP records testify to a deplorable amount of drunkenness, molesting of women and street fights -- by americans.

You cant compare general crime rates of soldiers today, when it is big political problem and army does a lot to cut it down. Up to disallowing soldiers to even leave the base.

With rape specifically after war, years ago in completely different situation.

Not sure you want to call rape (or crime in general) by the local population "politically correct".

I'm guessing such a book exists in south korea at the moment? I've heard that there's a lot of tension between the US army and the locals. One soldier even raped some local girl back in 2011.

The problem is that people in the army are not the most educated people, and thus they're not the best ambassadors when abroad.

Military personnel on average have more formal education then the general public. High school drop outs aren't even allowed to enlist anymore without a special waiver. Almost all officers, and many enlisted, have Bachelor's degrees. Senior officers usually have Master's degrees.

That doesn't coincide with the amount of kids that are hired in the military.

>without a special waiver

Oh wow so difficult for a recruiter who is paid per recruit to fill out. /s

The military is often the last resort for many people, as a result it attracts a different demographic.

>officers, and many enlisted, have Bachelor's degrees.

So? Aren't most deployed people non officers?

The availability of waivers is strictly limited. Recruiters are only NCOs; they lack the authority to grant waivers on their own and they aren't paid per recruit (although failure to meet quota could result in a negative fitness report).

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/us-military-enlistment-sta...

Officials are probably more educated than the general populace, since they almost always need a university degree, but enlisted personnel might even be high school dropouts, so I wouldn't trust any regular soldier to be humble and respectful.

You're just completely wrong and obviously didn't bother to check the facts before commenting. The US military has a much lower proportion of high school drop outs than the general public. Your lack of trust is irrational, elitist, and offensive.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232726/education-levels-...

Right, because well educated, wealthy men don't rape teenagers...

The original is a delight to read. Sadly, I can't help but wonder how many would be "triggered" by the answers today.

How do we, as a society, start accepting rational self-criticism again?

> How do we, as a society, start accepting rational self-criticism again?

A good starting point would be to stop using the word "trigger" when someone reacts in a way you don't like to something you say.

Personally I interpret it as a way to diminish the other side position by suggesting they don't have control over their emotions regarding some subjects. Not a good start.

Is there a more appropriate word to describe this? Honest question as a non-native English speaker.

Seems like this is a commonly used term/usage: https://www.google.com/amp/s/dictionary.cambridge.org/us/amp...

"Offended" would be my suggestion. "Triggered" is only really used in this sense as part of bad faith culture war discourse, mocking the idea of trigger warnings.

I've heard advocates of trigger warnings share their lived experience by talking about what "triggered" them, using that word specifically.

There's a big difference between describing one's own experience and labeling others.

The word is used in the context of PTSD. e.g. "hearing fireworks triggered flashbacks from the war"

More generally, a "trigger warning" is a "content advisory warning" by another name.

I don't think they mock the idea of triggers.

They leverage and weaponize the concept, which is arguably worse.

? but trigger was started and used by that side themselves.

I’d advise reading the book “112 Gripes about the French” and then applying that same empathy to the people you dislike in our modern era.

Where did you get I disliked anybody? Parent used "sides" before I did, and it's seems absurd to say the right started trigger to mock the left

> Parent used “sides” before I did

My philosophy is that I don’t care who started it. I care how I respond to try to improve things.

(Though I myself have a lot to learn as well.)

my understanding is that the word trigger is used in psychology to describe a wide range of traumatic responses. e.g whenever a war veteran suffering from ptsd hears firework it may trigger a strong traumatic response. //victims of abuse can get "triggered" by the presence or even mention of their abuser etc

it applies to a wide range of traumas and responses some of which might be more or less extreme, so it does include some small things: if you ever get a minor burn, the idea of touching a potentially hot surface might make you somewhat uncomfortable - you could call that a triggering experience even though it's not nearly as intense as the other examples.

Triggering experiences are generally considered to reinforce trauma and generate unncessary distress and should therefore be avoided

And so we use trigger warning before movies etc to warn users of potentially upsetting/triggering content such as war, torture, sexual violence and various forms of abuse, it's really not that big of a deal

This was the original idea, that some people with genuine traumatic experiences and were currently suffering from mental illness could choose to opt-out before proceeding on to read/watch something. But the concept got wildly out of hand as activists, especially younger adults, began obsessively applying it to nearly any piece of written word and anything they could frame as traumatic.

For example, if you're about to present a movie to a captive audience that involves depictions of rape, it would be good that someone who has experienced rape, especially recently, knows that it will ahead of time and has the ability to opt-out because it might trigger a traumatic episode. The circumstances where you have a captive audience and it's not clear from the context what will be depicted are actually quite rare, so its usage should be rare.

But young people, trying to signal their virtuous compassion and understanding to like-minded individuals, would put "trigger warnings" at the top of blog posts about things like "racism" or "homophobia", and all that would be discussed would be that they overheard a slur at the store.

At some point, the dominant use of trigger warnings was by people with thin skins, ready to get offended on behalf of "victims" who had suffered, at worst, nothing more than people being rude or mean to them. Pretending like these kinds of negative encounters are anything close to the mind-breaking trauma of getting raped or watching your fellow soldiers explode in front of you is disgusting, and eventually everyone caught on that the activists were trying to equivocate real trauma with "hurt feelings". Worse, they were effectively teaching young people to internalize and exaggerate negative experiences so that they could identify as someone with PTSD. That doing this made them unique and gave them extra attention from others who wanted to actively show compassion to victimized people. For lonely young people who want a cause, it was extremely attractive because it gave them identity, purpose, and community. But in reality, it was largely a perverted roleplay which coddled everyone involved and made them emotionally fragile.

The original concept of trigger warnings is solid, but should be practiced only where necessary and never attached to the phrase "trigger warning", as that nomenclature has been ceded to the activists.

I have never seen triggered in relation to self-criticism.

Do you have any example of answer that is "triggering" today?

> How do we, as a society, start accepting rational self-criticism again?

You might want to start with taking critique from the people you deem to be "triggered" seriously. That would be a first step in rational self-criticism. Otherwise you're selling a gut reaction as rationality to yourself. This is a common mistake people make. You might end up disagreeing with their critique - that may well be - but even then in most cases you'll likely take something from it, might be able to understand the topic at hand with some further nuance or get a deeper understanding of your position and its merits.

The France of 75 years ago sounds like a paradise compared to the France today, which I don't feel particularly safe in--at least in Paris.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_21st-century_F...

and the fact that murder is not prosecuted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/world/europe/sarah-halimi...

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