US History and actual History.

[flarty]

slavery they only do cause they have black kids in there school and I'm sure they don't go to far into the nastiest parts.

Then explain why we don't learn about white slavery that predates the black slave trade. Instigated by the same people non the less.

Firstly, the "White Slave Trade" was controlled by Arabs, Turks, Ottomans, Berbers, and other north Africans. Second, it's quite inaccurate to call it "White slavery" since white people didn't exist until there was a reason to establish a racial caste system in the post-Colombian world. There were English people, French people Spaniards, Slavs, etc., but not White people because: "'White' depends for its stability on its negation, 'black.' Neither exists without the other. . . " - Frantz Fanon.


Third, White Slavery isn't terribly relevant to American History, because it isn't American History. There were no White Codes, there was no Billy and Becky Dove Laws, there were no eugenics societies plotting to eliminate American Whites in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was never an Apartheid State established in any corner of the US built specifically to terrorize and disenfranchise White Americans. There is no legacy of White slavery in America.

Just because you have not come across the topical information before does not mean it is no there. There's a few books written on the matter. The best I've read is http://www.amazon.co.uk/They-Were-White-Slaves-Enslavement/dp/0929903056 thought it does contain a few historical inaccuracies. Now the question you should really be asking is why is white slavery never really acknowledged in America?

Thanks for the encouragement, but I'm sure at some point in the future I'll slip up and expose myself as the idiot that I truly am.

Hey when you can admit you don't know everything, you have an open mind and will gain something from every discussion. In other words every day is a school day

 

[flarty]

meh fail post

 

[Sean951]

The US had effectively ceased operation in the early 70s. The South didn't fall until 1975 after Democrats repeatedly (and in my opinion, correctly) refused to support further actions. They did, however, win the battle of public perception. The Tet Offensive ended, as I said, in a resounding defeat for the North. But video of it went on the nightly news and people went from kinda maybe supporting the war to actively protesting it.

So you go from stating that "the US won the Vietnam War" to essentially backpedaling by saying "the US lost the Vietnam War because the public didn't support it"? Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're writing here.

Regardless, the Tet Offensive did not soundly defeat the Viet Cong. It was a massive win for the southern forces, but it only had a very temporary effect on the rest of the war.

No, that's not really what I said at all. The US had all but withdrawn and as of 1973 and the Paris Peace Accords it had washed it's hands of the mess. Troops stayed in a few bases, back in the advising role, but they launched no more offensives and didn't continue the intense bombing campaigns that they had been using for several years.

You confuse the Viet Cong with the North Vietnamese Army. They were not the same and after the Tet Offensive, they never regained the numbers to be much of anything. Here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong#Tet_Offensive] is a brief summary of just how disastrous it was for them. While Vietnam remains an embarrassment that shouldn't have happened, the US did win. Then they left. Then, 2 years after the US said "I quit" the South fell.

 

[Da Orky Man]

3. Time. As much as I hate to say it, time is our greatest enemy and our largest weakness when it comes to teaching the material. I teach condensed evening classes. Sixteen class session over eight weeks to cover U.S. history from colonial times to 1877. That means I literally have 2 hours to cover the Civil War in my general info class. Two hours to cover a war that spanned four years of fighting, political intrigue, and scarred the nation enough that we are still dealing with those wounds 148 years later.

Consider yourself lucky you only have a few hundred years of history to teach. We may have had to deal with a few thousand. From Queen Victoria to Henry VIII to William the Conqueror to Boadicea.

Instead, we get a bucket of WW2, a bit of WW1 and, for some bizarre reason, the American West.

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

You confuse the Viet Cong with the North Vietnamese Army. They were not the same and after the Tet Offensive, they never regained the numbers to be much of anything. Here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong#Tet_Offensive] is a brief summary of just how disastrous it was for them. While Vietnam remains an embarrassment that shouldn't have happened, the US did win. Then they left. Then, 2 years after the US said "I quit" the South fell.

The Viet Cong were fighting on the same side as the NVA. The Viet Cong, along with the NVA, suffered heavy losses during the Tet Offensive. They also had population numbers on their side, and this allowed them to continue conscripting soldiers long after the Tet Offensive was finished. Those forced conscriptions allowed them to continue fighting until 1975, when they finally overran Saigon.

That doesn't sound like a US victory to me. Sounds more like "cut and run, and leave the dirty natives to their war".

 

[Sean951]

Although 1970 was a much better year for the Viet Cong than 1969, it would never again be more than an adjunct to the PAVN.

Yup, sounds like the VC did quite well for themselves.

But yes, the is essentially what it was. We were done, the politicians deemed the war over as far as we cared, so we left. Had we stayed and not signed the Paris Peace Accord and then passed the Case-Church Act, it is likely that the bombings would have continued. The Ho Chi Minh Trail would have remained, at best, a trail. But keep in mind, the person in charge of Cambodia at the time was... less favorable to the North Vietnamese.

So yes, the US said "screw this" and left because there was no way in hell for a politician to stay in office and support the war in many US districts. While I may consider Vietnam to have been a pointless war fought for stupid reasons, I recognize that it was the politicians that ended it and had they not, I doubt the North would have won. As I've said, it still took them 2 years after the US quit doing anything other than foreign aide.

 

[mokes310]

Yup, it's horrible. Read up on First Nations' history and you'll understand why...hell, look at MLB.com, NFL.com, NHL.com and you'll understand why...

 

[the clockmaker]

The US had effectively ceased operation in the early 70s. The South didn't fall until 1975 after Democrats repeatedly (and in my opinion, correctly) refused to support further actions. They did, however, win the battle of public perception. The Tet Offensive ended, as I said, in a resounding defeat for the North. But video of it went on the nightly news and people went from kinda maybe supporting the war to actively protesting it.

So you go from stating that "the US won the Vietnam War" to essentially backpedaling by saying "the US lost the Vietnam War because the public didn't support it"? Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're writing here.

Regardless, the Tet Offensive did not soundly defeat the Viet Cong. It was a massive win for the southern forces, but it only had a very temporary effect on the rest of the war.

Tet was the end for the Viet Cong, they were an irregular force comprised mainly of communist south Vietnamese. They were effective because they could fade in and out of the populace. In the Tet offensive, they were sacrificed in an attempt to take and hold ground, and they ceased to exist as an effective fighting force.

The NVA on the other hand...

 

[Therumancer]

I am starting to wonder if this should have been in Religion and Politics... Damn hindsight... If possible and if needed to. It can be moved there, if so Mods allow.

I hope this can be kept civil but after reading another thread it got me thinking. How much of the US History (involvement with other nations), is just censored to make the US look better? Now as a US Citizen who did good in my US history class, I didn't feel it was bias.

What I meant was that it never seemed to shy away from all of the bad things we did and how we were straight up wrong in situations and so on.

One example I heard in another thread was that even before we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, apparently Japan was already gearing up to sign a surrender and then after we dropped the bombs they were almost ready to fully retaliate.

Which is much different than I learned. What I learned was that Japan wasn't willing to surrender and a land invasion would have been more costly and ended more lives than dropping the bombs. After the first bomb was dropped, apparently they didn't surrender and the second bomb is what happened.

Now I just don't know which is the truth, I would like to believe what I was taught, at least if I am remembering my class correctly (it was a bit ago...), is correct but I can't be sure.

So can anyone kind of give me some examples of events that are alerted in US history to make certain events in the history book look more pro-US than what happened?

The US is one of the few nations that actually alters history to make itself look worse for political reasons or to be diplomatic with other nations. One thing Americans love is to bash their own country, and try and judge past actions by current morality and events, especially by putting into a vaccuum and avoiding comparison with other nations and what the rest of the world was doing compared to us at the time. We also like to tend to create impractical moral codes and put ideals above reality, especially today, which probably creates more than half the messes we find ourselves in. Being pretty much the poster child for "good is stupid".

In retrospect we like to do things like try and convince ourselves Japan was about to surrender before we "evilly" dropped A-bombs, but that was hardly the case, they were literally loading their kids into flying bombs and launching them at us, and preparing for glorious last stands in the worst case. We've convinced ourselves due to the results that WMD are evil, and something that should NEVER be used rather than used strategically or as a matter of last resort. Attempts to try and re-write what happened with Japan are largely done by moralist "peace at any price" elements to try and avoid similar actions when facing similar kinds of situations today with say "The Middle East" or "North Korea". The idea being that re-doing history in an anti-US direction is the lesser of evils compared to using these weapons, a sort of "bubble logic" that collapses under examination, but persists because at the end of the day people want to believe it's true, and wait for magical solutions to "big issues" rather than having to actually do anything on a large scale and put that much blood on their hands.

A thing to also understand about the US is also that it was highly isolationist for most of it's history. The typical portrayal of the rest of the world as a bunch of whining ingrates who treat the US like crap until they need help is pretty much true. The US did not want to get involved in either World War, in fact our big attitude was to let Europe take care of it's own affairs. As we sat out of things, Europe did stupid thing after stupid thing and let events snowball to the fact that we eventually had to get involved to clean up their mess. The US didn't even really have that huge a military infrastructure in World War II, we pretty much took up the weapons of the Europeans and provided the manpower, in many cases literally arming ourselves with the tools of surrendering french units in paticular. It wasn't until the realtive end of the war that the US started to seriously turn to arms production, things like the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) which became pretty infamous weren't around until pretty far in, and never in any huge quantities. After World War I, the US largely went back to isolationism, and when World War II happened the US for the most part had a "F@ck Europe, let them stew in their own mess this time" attitude. We pretty much watched Europe ignore the problem as Hitler dealt with the countries one at a time, and gradually built Germany into the power it was. After "Pearl Harbour" at the tail end of a number of incidents, including U-boats attacking US shipping, and realizing that The Japanese at least weren't going to leave us alone, we entered into World War II in response to all the begging to come save everyone... which we did. The US again turned the tide. The way World War II ended, with the problem Russia ws going to represent for the western world being obvious, meant that the US couldn't really enter into isolationism again. We pretty much became what we are now due to demand and being forced to, and honestly everyone hates us for butting in, and acting as a sort of moralistic "world police" UNTIL they need help. When there is a problem it's always "help America" and "America isn't giving us enough aid". We've almost literally broken our own country trying
to do the right thing, and people still give us crap and tend not to give us any credit unless we're actually aiding them right at the moment.

Incidently, that's a big part of why my basic arguements are that we should pretty much go borderline isolationist again. Instead of using our military as "peacekeepers" and such, we should instead use it only for direct American benefit such as business and trade interests, which is what we're accused of anyway. Let all the countries that have US troops keeping warring factions away from each other fight each other. I also think we should stop giving foreign aid of any sort until we get our own economy back in shape. After all we have starving people and people who can't get medical aid here in the US, and we should take care of that before sending uniformed personel to places like Africa to flip cheeseburgers and provide free hospitals to a bunch of people who generally hate us anyway.

I'm not going to argue this, since I already know people won't like what I'm saying on these forums. I could, I just know it wouldn't go anywhere positive or productive. The odd thing though is that when you get down to it my basic attitude on history and politics is actually that we should give most of the world what it claims it wants 90% of the time and to do nothing but mind our own business (literally). As I've said before, when there is a crisis, why not call France for a change, I mean it's a world power, and I'm sure it will go running right out there to help at it's own expense and gladly shoulder the needed burdens, and if it's complaints are to be believed it will do the job so much better than the US has without any kind of problems or moral ambigiouity at all... I mean the US are a bunch of incompetant meddlers after all, and such European powers obviously know what they are talking about, and I really do believe they didn't really need to be saved in two world wars that the US wanted to stay out of....

 

[Commissar Sae]

"In Vietnam, the US and Co. most certainly did "beat" the North in the sense that after the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong ceased to be a threat and it was 2 years after the US left until the South fell.

No way. I'd say the North resoundly defeated the United States. With no small thanks to the result of their ingenious engineering, the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US had effectively ceased operation in the early 70s. The South didn't fall until 1975 after Democrats repeatedly (and in my opinion, correctly) refused to support further actions. They did, however, win the battle of public perception. The Tet Offensive ended, as I said, in a resounding defeat for the North. But video of it went on the nightly news and people went from kinda maybe supporting the war to actively protesting it.

Like I said earlier, the Viet Cong were not the North, they were south Vietnamese communist insurgents. More often than not the American troops on the ground barely saw the actual Northern troops. So while the Viet Cong were effectively destroyed after the Tet offensive, the Vietnam Peoples Army had nothing to do with that since other than supplying the Viet Cong when they could with training and equipment.

The American troops on the ground effectively held the major cities. As soon as you stepped out of them though you were in Vietnamese territory and more often than not US troops got butchered when they faced concerted efforts. They then took out their frustration on the civilian population, the one thing that is 100% guaranteed to make you lose a guerilla war.

 

[Vegosiux]

I'm not going to argue this, since I already know people won't like what I'm saying on these forums.

Standard tactics again, I see. If you participate in a discussion, expect to have your position challenged. Putting up a wall of text then going "but whatever, not going to argue here" is just trying to get out of the debate without having to back up your points should they be challenged. There's a line about cake that would be fitting, but I hate that line.

What people "don't like" about you arent your points, it's your passive-aggressive attitude, your unwillingness to participate in proper debate, how you talk about people "not liking what you're saying" before anyone even replies. You know, a lot of us here are quite capable of respectful disagreement, provided there's a basic level of respect and civility extended from the other side as well.

Or in other words, unless you're willing to back up your points with some proper sources, you might as well not open your mouth at all, because your glorious greatness is worth jack squat around here, and nobody's going to take what you said at face value, just because you said it.

Oh also, strawmen are bad, mkay? Please, either discuss things properly, or don't discuss at all, it's rude to disrupt other people's conversations with random throw-ins you yourself don't care about enough to stand behind.

 

[Sarge034]

The best example of history being "sterilized" is anything to do with the rail road. From leaving out that the RR workers were basically slaves, hiring the Pinkertons to "quell" worker uprisings, and even convincing the government to authorize Colonel Billy Mitchell to use military aircraft against miners and their families. Billy Mitchell, I might add, is now required reading and used as an example of what a US Air Force officer should be.

How fast do we forget...

 

[Combustion Kevin]

down here in Dutch land, we're taught quite extensively about the second world war, but done very much in context with the first world war and the cold war.
We also learned about the what exactly caused Hitler to rise to power, what he did, and how he shot himself in the foot (and later in the head HOHOO!) during his regime, it was all in a very "cause-and-effect" kind of way, Stalingrad, Hiroshima and D-day were nothing more than extended footnotes since our study material very much focused on the big picture, rather than the messy details of the event that brought it about.

still though, the after effects of that war are still very much felt here, fervent nationalism is regarded with distaste or outright suspicion when asociated with politics, which is why the US, China, Japan or other such countries go parading we get kinda uncomfortable from time to time.

but then again, we too like to excagerate out history for a good ol' historic high five, the eighty years war with spain ends with the "Netherland underdogs overthrowing the spanish dictator", and we remember our heroic "members of the resistance" for their sacrifices in WW2.

Nobody was gonna mention we played nice with the Nazi's during the second world war, we were a "brother people" to them (Arian blood) and were way outmanned and outgunned.
No sense in pissing of the german who thoroughly kicked france's ass, right?

 

[Olas]

American here. I don't think American history is really all too biased. There are clearly a lot of bad things that have happened throughout it like slavery, the trail of tears, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis that are talked about plenty, sometimes even more than the other stuff. And why would we rewrite history anyway? It's history, it's all in the past and most of the people responsible are long dead. It's not like we're trying to hold up this image that America is and always has been perfect.

As for the Japan thing, I get a feeling not even the people who made the decision to drop it knew 100% for sure what Japan was going to do. We like to attribute everything to deliberate and informed human decisions when in reality some things happen purely by mistake or due to an unknown or uncontrollable element. Like the Iraq war for instance, people love to criticize the Bush administration for it, but I do genuinely think Bush believed the WMDs existed, and at least had some well meaning intentions I starting it. Not that I'm fully absolving him of it or any of the other countless horrible decisions and mistakes he made as president.

 

[Auron]

The US had effectively ceased operation in the early 70s. The South didn't fall until 1975 after Democrats repeatedly (and in my opinion, correctly) refused to support further actions. They did, however, win the battle of public perception. The Tet Offensive ended, as I said, in a resounding defeat for the North. But video of it went on the nightly news and people went from kinda maybe supporting the war to actively protesting it.

So you go from stating that "the US won the Vietnam War" to essentially backpedaling by saying "the US lost the Vietnam War because the public didn't support it"? Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're writing here.

Regardless, the Tet Offensive did not soundly defeat the Viet Cong. It was a massive win for the southern forces, but it only had a very temporary effect on the rest of the war.

Military-wise if not for the scandals and problems at the time, the US army would have burned them to a crisp. The Vietnam War was "lost" due to public perception, media manipulation and political scandals. It's pretty clear when you read about the battles really.

One example I heard in another thread was that even before we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, apparently Japan was already gearing up to sign a surrender and then after we dropped the bombs they were almost ready to fully retaliate.

That story's pretty complex, and very few individuals even my non specialized history teachers(It's my major.) there's a translation problem(a certain phrase during the talks had two meanings and was very vague to the translators.) and an infighting within the Japanese government and military with the radicals wanting to take the war on until their last breaths.

Ultimately the message they delivered was that there would be no surrender and they would fight to the death, the bomb was the logical reaction and allowed for a much lower loss of life on both sides, turning the streets of Japan into wake Island 2 was the other option. Inhumane as it was, it was a sound strategic decision given the circumstances.

So, Japan's leadership was willing to surrender but some weren't and did their most to sabotage the effort, those guys won and then even they gave up.


I do believe the most clear example and probably already discussed to death by page three is the war on terror which has some fair reasoning but could have been handled much better. Don't have time to read the entire topic now but I doubt someone actually cleared the nuclear bomb bit.

So why was they attempting to get Russia to mediate peace between themselves and the allies in the months before the dropping of the bomb?

When it is said that the Japanese were unwilling to surrender it is meant that they were unwilling to surrender under any terms the allies would accept. You must realize that one of the core goals of the United States in the terms of Japanese surrender was to eliminate them as a potential threat for at least a generation. This meant disarming the Japanese military and changing the Japanese government. The Japanese were unwilling to accept those terms (as outlined in the Potsdam Declaration) and so sought Russian mediation in the hopes that with the weight of the Russians they could get the surrender terms they wanted.

Far as I know(and I'll get the reference the Japanese themselves tell there was infighting on the matter and the prime minister was willing to consider the North American conditions, the military and radical factions within the government didn't however and wanted to keep their jobs and military tradition, so you're right but there was divided opinion. There's no discussion about the probable smaller casualty rate of the bombs however, an invasion of Japan where everyone would be called to defend it would probably be way more bloody than Germany.

Basically everything that's happened in foreign diplomacy to Latin America?

And also very few people seem to realise that America has propped up dictatorships & delivered weapons to extremist groups. I guess that this is quite recent history so it could be more sensitive to cover.

Thank god for that at least regarding Brazil, we had relatively little foreign aid, but I dread absolutely DREAD at the notion of a communist party actually revolutionizing things here, it has a corruption problem big enough as it is with a fake republic, a communist regime would be more brutal and dangerous than the military dictatorships we've seem on the americas(central and south.)

 

[dyre]

The Vietnam War itself has almost nothing taught about it, though my textbook amusingly blamed the South Vietnamese for losing the war.

It's correct, but it probably neglects to mention that for all our meddling with the conflict (which incidently started because we didn't honor our agreement with HCM, who kept his end of the agreement by lending guerilla aid against the Japanese), we gave SV very little incentive to actually fight. Their entire economy was propped up by us, their regime was easily as brutal and tyrannical as the North, and even if they did win, we were already going to hand them over as a French colony again.

The more I read about what went on behind the politics of the Vietnam conflict, the angrier I get about how we mucked it all up simply by not showing a little backbone and keeping a promise to people who helped us against Japan.

It seems to me that without US propping up Diem and rigging the elections for him (or allowing him to rig the elections, don't remember which), there wouldn't have been a Vietnam War. I imagine reunification would have gone as planned, and who knows, maybe in the absence of conflict Ho Chi Minh's commies would've been less tyrannical. Either way, it wasn't our fight, and we certainly didn't make things better for people there (or in neighboring countries). If one starts a war, it's a bit ungentlemanly to blame an unwilling ally for losing it :\

Btw, did you know one of the main reasons we chose Diem instead of anyone who was actually well-liked in S. Vietnam was because he was Catholic? We didn't trust Buddhists to fight the communists, so we had to get someone we felt was like us in power.

 

[Therumancer]

I'm not going to argue this, since I already know people won't like what I'm saying on these forums.

Standard tactics again, I see. If you participate in a discussion, expect to have your position challenged. Putting up a wall of text then going "but whatever, not going to argue here" is just trying to get out of the debate without having to back up your points should they be challenged. There's a line about cake that would be fitting, but I hate that line.

What people "don't like" about you arent your points, it's your passive-aggressive attitude, your unwillingness to participate in proper debate, how you talk about people "not liking what you're saying" before anyone even replies. You know, a lot of us here are quite capable of respectful disagreement, provided there's a basic level of respect and civility extended from the other side as well.

Or in other words, unless you're willing to back up your points with some proper sources, you might as well not open your mouth at all, because your glorious greatness is worth jack squat around here, and nobody's going to take what you said at face value, just because you said it.

Oh also, strawmen are bad, mkay? Please, either discuss things properly, or don't discuss at all, it's rude to disrupt other people's conversations with random throw-ins you yourself don't care about enough to stand behind.

I shall continue to do what I've been doing thank you, there are some solid reasons behind the current trend which I have explained before.

Among other things I will point out that pretty much everything I have said on these forums is easily defensible and indeed I've pretty much won every serious debate I've been in here by any objective standard. I have simply grown tired of lengty, circular discussions with people insisting that the sky is green, and wanting to dismiss anything anyone says that disagrees with them. Present a source? Well that source is biased because it disagrees with them. Then come the attempts to derail things with a flame war and yeah... no thanks. Those keeping track might notice I actually made a New Years resolution on the subject. I suppose if someone was to actually come up with something you know, new, valid, and thought provoking on some of these topics, and put it up anyway they might get me to do more than just make a statement for the purposes of balance nowadays, but really I see more QQing about the fact that I'm not going to argue nonsense with people. I long ago established my credentials in these forums, whether anyone wants to accept that or not (and yes I imagine right now the peanut gallery is revving up to make flames about how those credentials are objectively negative ones).

It's more or less like this. When we throw around an issue like gay rights, the typical "defense" you see is that allegedly experts have "proven" that my arguements are false and that gay men aren't more likely to attack children than anyone else. These "experts" of course being respected and carrying weight among those making the arguement simply because they happen to be saying what the poster wants to believe or happens to reinforce the arguement they are trying to make. In reality anyone with half a brain knows that no such research has ever truely been conducted because it is simply put impossible to do under our current system. By and large any kind of research has to be conducted using volunteers or publically accessible information. When your dealing with these kinds of trends towards criminal behavior you by definition need to be empowered to violate any and all privacy rights, and snoop people by the millions in order to track their trends. A "study" conducted from 1,000 volunteers or whatever isn't going to tell you crap because there is no way to guarantee they are revealing their secrets. To find out you need to have people who are totally unaware of you, and to be able to dig into what they are doing when they think nobody is around. Even police files don't work for this kind of thing because they by definition only involve people who "slipped up" and were investigated, and in general there are limitations on what someone can access for purposes of a study. Those who have the authority to snoop on people generally have it very carefully regulated, and can't do it on a massive scale, and what they find out in general outside of the scope of an investigation can't be released.

The point here being that anyone who has the abillity to give real information on the subject can't reveal it, and nobody has the authority to gather that kind of information on a massive enough scale. You'd pretty much have to give the goverment (as it would take govermental resources) carte blanche to snoop anyone and everything and then compile files on the trends and release that information publically.

In the final equasion the only person who has any right to an opinion on a subject like that is someone who has had investigative authority in some context, even if that is not what they were looking into specifically. They might have SOME idea of what's going on, but no scientist or "expert" without it ever will. This applies to most social issues. It's also incidently why I hold the general position that such experience should be a pre-requisite for holding public office, or any kind of job that can create or modify policy within the goverment. It's also why I've given the rather "hateful" middle-ground position on gay rights that we should impose laws allowing this kind of tracking and information gathering, largely because then such information could be compiled in an official context, on a large enough scale to make a differance.

The point here not being the gay rights arguement (which I'm not going to get into again here) but the simple fact that beyond a certain point there is no real reason for me to conduct it anymore. I by definition do not consider any sources other than those coming from those with the right kinds of surveillance authorities to be valid. What I say is based on personal experience from having done such a job. The other side is thus in the position of either accepting what I have to tell them as someone who can actually claim first hand experience, or to call me a liar, and honestly if they think I'm a liar then we have nothing to talk about anyway.

Most arguements come down to the same basic thing, but in other ways. You trust your sources, I trust mine, and/or I am speaking from personal experience. "You" can state your side, and I'll state mine, but I see no real purpose in argueing about it other than to see how long a circular arguement can be kept going until whomever I'm talking to starts trying to turn it into a flame war because they can't handle it. Why bother?

Maybe if someone has something new to say, or something I'm going to take seriously, things will change. Right now, I'm just going to do the mature thing, say my piece for balance, and move on.

I'll also confess that a lot of it has to do with boredom in conducting the same, go-nowhere arguements again and again. I still feel the need to make some statements for balance, but I don't feel any pressing need to spend 72 hours or so argueing about the same garbage, in the same way.