I actually think this is brilliant. Most Americans have no knowledge or personal connection as to where their food comes from and what goes into producing it. The ag sector is also, sadly, rife with worker abuse, farmers commit suicide at way higher rates than the general population, and our food system is getting increasingly industrialized and specialized, with small farms getting gobbled up by megacorps. But because agriculture usually happens away from population centers (sometimes far away) there’s not a lot of public awareness (or sympathy) of issues. Meanwhile soil depletion and unsustainable practices are setting the US up for all kinds of potential future disasters (second dust bowl, anyone?), and that’s before you factor in climate change.
So yes, let’s have all Americans get even a few months of experience with our food system!
Get bent loser I have a job and house and life, if I go farm for you I’ll lose it. Steal a kid like the army does.
My personal lived experience is the only valid one 😠
-Conservatives
(See also: the only moral abortion is my abortion, government spending is handouts unless it’s for my farm and business or subsidizing my unnecessary gigantic vehicle. Queers are bad but my daughter came out to me and I really wish everyone would stop bullying her, etc.)
i think we should force everyone to do at least 2 years of philosophical education and study.
It would unironically be good for the average persons intelligence.
You could probably fit it into the K-12 program without losing any value elsewhere if you cut out things like memorizing maps in regions of the world that are so unstable that those maps won’t be valid anymore by the time kids graduate, studying writers like Shakespeare that lived so long ago that what they wrote in could barely be called English, and mandatory electives.
A lot of schools have this already but are very good about naming them non-obvious things.
My sons is called success 101.
mm, idk i’d have to see the class materials to be able to tell you whether or not this was true philosophy. The best phil classes are the ones by the insane teacher. That’s how you know you’re going to learn something.
you would definitely need to push this as a required junior/senior class, the unfortunate thing is that you need a legitimately insane teacher to actually learn something valuable from it. Generic course material doesn’t work as well for something like this i think.
There are definitely some interesting ways to integrate it into english though, that’s an idea.
At this point, we should force everyone to just line up to get a solid smack across the face. Real hard too.
i feel like fallacies are a bit of a golden goose, if you’re educated in the field of fallacies, you’re basically just educated in the field of debate, being educated in philosophy is going to allow you to generically recognize these fallacies, though without being able to identify them, as well as all of the additional benefits of engaging in philosophy (like understanding the concept of worldviews)
another problem with fallacy, is that you can also just kinda, make shit up. Or accuse people of doing the same fallacy you’re doing, it’s sort of cyclic in nature like that. It’s interesting in theoretical thought though, i’ll give you that one.
The thing is, fallacies do matter because they are meant to describe what is not “good faith” argumentation. They are sophistry. It’s like, the basis of our modern western philosophy, and our current legal system. How can a student tell if a philosophy is valid if they don’t even know if it’s logically consistent or argued in good faith? They don’t even know what good faith is. Fallacies are the basic arithmetic of philosophy. It’s like having students memorize math problems without ever connecting math to the real world, and then expecting those kids to actually be math literate. You can’t do it. You’re neglecting fundamental (and I mean that word emphatically) knowledge.
It’s like mental gardening. The ability to recognize and respond to fallacies in our own internal thinking helps us stay organized within our own minds and not fall victim to traps or scams.
No, fallacies are not something that you just accuse another person of. An ad hominem attack is a specific thing. A strawman is a specific thing. Yes, fallacies can be quite complicated to identify and understand (eg appeal to authority) - but that’s okay. It’s okay to learn a complicated subject.
Sometimes though, when people don’t want to do that hard mental load of learning fallacies (because they’d have to change their own mind regarding many of their own fallacies and heuristics), they dismiss fallacies and say “meh, but I don’t wanna!” That doesn’t invalidate learning about them.
Interestingly enough, I had fallacies as part of my base native language class. Can’t remember if it was middle school or high school, but we definitely learned about the most common ones like ad hominem, false dilemma, slippery slope, etc.
Kinda imagined it would be similar elsewhere, but unfortunately not I guess
I’m 47.
Get back on the farm, slaves. Danny needs his guava juice.
Will they get to keep the produce? Otherwise, this is just slavery and very much in line with conservative ideology again.
Where does it say you don’t get paid?
Also, in terms of understanding how things happen, this is definitely not a bad thing.
So many people take everything for granted. I worked a couple of years in agriculture. Long days, tough work. I will never look down on a farmer, and it thought me some neat lessons in life too.
I worked on a farm from 23-30 and my body is kinda destroyed now. Had surgery on my wrist, my back hurts all the time. I’m getting arthritis in my fingers and knees. All at the ripe age of 36.
It’s definitely valuable work, but there’s a reason old farmers tend to walk like Arthur Morgan.
Call me naive, but it seems to me that if everyone was pitching in for a season of farm work, less people overall would be doing 8/15/etc consecutive years and getting their bodies destroyed.
You get paid for jury duty. Making a living off of that? When i read national duty i heard conscription in my head. Maybe because i just assume the idea is as good as the compensation.
When watching the TV Series The Handmaid Tales I kept thinking that things like their very heavy security appartus, military for the continuing seccession war and heavy use of dedicated manpower doing manual work in house chores (at least for the upper classes) would use too much manpower, taking it away from actual productive activities and thus making a modern nation level of life (in the material sense, not other senses) unsustainable, though Gilead could sorta keep going for a while drawing down on the wealth of the part of the US from were it was formed, before falling down to mid-XX century South American levels of wealth or worse.
However temporary slavery like this “national duty field work” might actually “solve” some of the agricultural production manpower shortage problems in such a society.
So it actually makes sense (in a sick way) that it’s appealing to the most extreme Fascist amongst the Republicans.
Is it better to force poor people to work in farms to survive? In a world where a large number of ‘modern’ westernized countries have active military conscription for young people, I don’t see this as being worse than that, either. The thing with slavery, is that it is lifetime, unpaid, terrible conditions, based on a feeling of superiority, only for the targeted groups, etc.
Of course, the better solution is just to treat farm workers fairly and pay them well, and work on automation at the same time. But rich people were forced to work in farms too, the conditions would probably get a whole lot nicer for everyone involved, and it would probably create a pretty big incentive to start automation as well.
edit: to actually be fine, it would have to be run by the govt. on nationally owned farms, like schools are, for workers to be paid and well treated, and for rich people to not be exempt
