The U.S. Goverment

[SpiderJerusalem]

i actually have heard German history classes are the most modest and always teach students the every fact in detail to learn how evil they were, though i have never witnessed or heard in person.

Well german history classes focus mainly on WW2....in fact they leave out whole parts of german and wolrd histroy to repeat the holocaust every year.Its almost like "nazis are bad!germans are bad!we owe the jews!" but that depends on the teacher.

ofc its important to teach that part of our history and tell the kids what fucked up shit happend there, but I hate that they ignore other parts of histroy and shorten the complex history of WW2 to "nazis are bad, mmmmkay".

Im a huge history nerd and it always hurted me to see history classes dumbed down to the extreme....

[pyrale]

ofc its important to teach that part of our history and tell the kids what fucked up shit happend there, but I hate that they ignore other parts of histroy and shorten the complex history of WW2 to "nazis are bad, mmmmkay".

Well, to be honest, germany as a whole has a rather short story, and I see no reason to teach prussian history to people in Palatinat rather than, say, austrian history. I guess communism era is also a bit too recent to teach.

I guess german history teachers are kinda fucked up with what they can teach :d.

[SpiderJerusalem]

ofc its important to teach that part of our history and tell the kids what fucked up shit happend there, but I hate that they ignore other parts of histroy and shorten the complex history of WW2 to "nazis are bad, mmmmkay".

Well, to be honest, germany as a whole has a rather short story, and I see no reason to teach prussian history to people in Palatinat rather than, say, austrian history. I guess communism era is also a bit too recent to teach.

I guess german history teachers are kinda fucked up with what they can teach :d.

well in german school you have 2 classes of 45min a week history.the topics are: ancient rome and greek, rough summary of middle age, early america, french revolutions, industrial revolution, german unification( bismark and stuff) and than WW2, WW2, WW2, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!!!

btw saying germany has no history worth of teaching is insulting....may I ask where you are from?

[Kiwi]

A good read i wanted, a good read i got. ( at 4:51 AM Dagnabbit )

[pyrale]

btw saying germany has no history worth of teaching is insulting....may I ask where you are from?

I said few common history. Palatinat has much more history with France and Belgium than Prussia, for instance. So yeah, talking about mediaval germany is like talking about patchwork - there's no real common political frame to talk about, which makes it hard to have an history class about it (except for a few things like protestantism).
On a general note, middle age isn't a period that is very attractive to history teachers, though.

Btw, french school program is more or less the same, except we also talk a bit about WW1.

[SpiderJerusalem]

btw saying germany has no history worth of teaching is insulting....may I ask where you are from?

I said few common history. Palatinat has much more history with France and Belgium than Prussia, for instance. So yeah, talking about mediaval germany is like talking about patchwork - there's no real common political frame to talk about, which makes it hard to have an history class about it (except for a few things like protestantism).
On a general note, middle age isn't a period that is very attractive to history teachers, though.

Btw, french school program is more or less the same, except we also talk a bit about WW1.

ok sry for the misunderstanding.

actually you are right abbout the palatinate( I live there btw), but people here feel more connection with fellow germans than with belgium or france.equal languag and culture seems to be more important than common histroy

I have french orgins too, my ancestors migrated to germany 5 generations ago.but ofc I feel more german than french

[spectacle]

Honestly, what I hate with libertarians (and that's why I bashed you a bit Jorb) is that they have no result to show. When you ask them to show what their plans effectively did, metrics of their ideology's effectiveness, you get nothing. When you point out examples of their fails, you get answers like "this was not totally libertarian", "this was a failed attempt", etc. Much like talking with communists, dare I say.
On the other hand, social democracies as we can see in northern countries do pretty well, score very high in every human development measures, resisted the economic crisis rather well etc. You can arguably say that they had something to work with, but comparing them to other countries with the same potential tends to show that this model does give results. This also applies to finland which was not nearly as strong economically speaking, by the way.

So yeah, I'm not advocating public services everywhere, but fact is they have proved that they could do just as well as private service (if you take just one example, the two lowest price energy service providers in europe - one is public and the other one is private. The one that is public provided much money to the government, and cost nothing).
However, I tend to think that public service (or atleast strong govt regulation) is mandatory in some services that are the base to healthy economy : education, energy, transports, social care, communications networks. I think it's easy enough to understand why maintaining quality in those services is mandatory to ensure productivity and reliability to the free market.

But really, please show proofs&examples of what you talk.

This. Money talks and bullshit walks.

It is somewhat ironic that for all of the Libertarians' love of the free market, they have a rather poor understanding of how it works, their philosophy is based on an idealized "free market" rather than on any real market that has ever existed.

Social democrats on the other hand have actually studied the free market economy using science. They have solid information about how it actually works, and are using it as a tool for national prosperity, free of ideological hangups.

[ArvinJA]

Honestly, what I hate with libertarians (and that's why I bashed you a bit Jorb) is that they have no result to show. When you ask them to show what their plans effectively did, metrics of their ideology's effectiveness, you get nothing. When you point out examples of their fails, you get answers like "this was not totally libertarian", "this was a failed attempt", etc. Much like talking with communists, dare I say.
On the other hand, social democracies as we can see in northern countries do pretty well, score very high in every human development measures, resisted the economic crisis rather well etc. You can arguably say that they had something to work with, but comparing them to other countries with the same potential tends to show that this model does give results. This also applies to finland which was not nearly as strong economically speaking, by the way.

So yeah, I'm not advocating public services everywhere, but fact is they have proved that they could do just as well as private service (if you take just one example, the two lowest price energy service providers in europe - one is public and the other one is private. The one that is public provided much money to the government, and cost nothing).
However, I tend to think that public service (or atleast strong govt regulation) is mandatory in some services that are the base to healthy economy : education, energy, transports, social care, communications networks. I think it's easy enough to understand why maintaining quality in those services is mandatory to ensure productivity and reliability to the free market.

But really, please show proofs&examples of what you talk.

You are looking for anecdotes and not "proofs". I am sorry, but the world is a bit too complex for post hocs and cum hocs to be acceptable tools of logic.
If you study things closely, you will see what has made Sweden successful compared to other nations, and you will see that it was not social democracy which built our wealth.
You are merely claiming that since Sweden has been mostly ruled by social democrats, social democracy must work. There is something to be said for the Lutheran tradition in Sweden though (when it came to amass wealth), and our free trade/low-tax period. There's a reason why most major Swedish companies were founded before government started expanding, and there's a reason why we're cutting back on our government right now.

EDIT: Also, here's some data (in Swedish, sorry): http://www.ratio.se/media/43604/privat% ... ttning.pdf no increase in net real jobs since the 50s. Oh snap.

[pyrale]

but the world is a bit too complex for post hocs[...]
If you study things closely, you will see what has made Sweden successful compared to other nations

I lol'd.

But yeah, basically what you keep repeating is that sweden was industrialized and in a good economic context when social-democracy started. I don't deny it, I'm just stating that social democracy was successfuly used in sweden to convert this prosperity into long-term advantages. Look at other countries that built huge capital on post-war era : how many were as successful as sweden ? How many applied a libertarian economic policy ?

Of course I'm not saying that every country has what it needs, both economically and (most important point imo) socially to implement what has been done in sweden. It doesn't make swedish social accomplishments any less fruitful and worthy of attention. You can find other examples of it in other countries btw.

Now what do you have to support your ideology, experiences, successful libertarian economic policies, anecdotes or whatever you call them ? Because you're just criticizing what has arguably been the most succesful political/social system in the world and you challenge it with NOTHING. And when people show you examples of how some liberalism applications failed, you just dismiss them it was "not liberalism".

But yeah, talk to us about how sweden became so rich before 30's.

[ArvinJA]

What other countries in a similar situation are you referring to? Social democracy has up until recently successfully been piggyback riding on an otherwise strong economy, what's your point? It has also proven to be quite unsustainable (pensions and our healthcare is probably due for another reform whenever the right has the chance to do it). If you want to see the success of free market policies you can look at Taiwan and compare them to their neighbors. Their economic success has come through free trade. I don't wish to provide anecdotal evidence though, so I hope you will investigate my Taiwan claim further on your own, and hopefully you will come to the same conclusions as I have, or else we could discuss it further.

Also, Sweden has been a pretty homogeneous society with a Lutheran backbone, the horrible social policies that were implemented by social democrats would probably have failed way more spectacularly in most other countries.