Comment by yieldcrv
20 days ago
Its noteworthy to me that it took till 1943 for the reality of the threat to be taken seriously for this outcome
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
What can I say, it's hard to give up data. So I guess the situation must escalate until the bad outcome was undeniable.
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
A lot of that is because of the advent of computer systems built by IBM to maintain records.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
IBM also built a calculator for the IRS in the late 1800s. They have been working with the government before nearly anyone still alive.
Edit: it was for the 1890 US census, not the IRS. I apologize for my prior error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
Friend, are you really conflating a calculator with a system of records knowingly used to enact the Holocaust? I recognize your point, but the valley between the two things is so large that I'm going to assume you're trolling.
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I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
fwiw we do make a lot of jokes about getting rejected from art school
To be fair, I never heard about the Canadian-US war before I moved to the States. But we went over the Nazi regime multiple times in school [I am German].
The War of 1812? It might get a brief mention in American schools, but not much. On the other hand, we get several years of holocaust class spread across social studies or history class and english class. Hardly any WW2 discussion, except for the holocoast and a smaller amount about the atomic bombings.