It's an extravagant view to say the least. Iran is one of a series of major, independent, influential polities that have succeeded one another since 550 BC in the same region with a degree of continuity, with an immense historical impact.
Knowledge of it is being equated with knowing about Missouri or Wyoming, seriously?
Is it not interesting because of the lack of novelty, or not interesting because you think it's acceptable to want to kill someone but not to actually know much about them?
I don't think being able to accurately tell where Iran is is a requirement for wanting to kill someone from there, no. Knowing approximately where it is is useful, but what does it really matter if you confuse it with the next country over?
It means that you have been wholesale influenced rather than informed about the conflict that politicians are peddling to you, as you don't have a grasp on the most basic facts of the matter. We're talking of civilian support for acts of war here.
Specially since an actual war with the people of that polity is an obvious outcome.
If one lacks the knowledge to even identify another nation on the global map, you have to wonder if this person actually has strong, sound judgement (when they speak in favor of dropping bombs) or if they’re easily malleable partisans.
No, because Missouri is not a country. I'm always puzzled by this attitude that individual US states should have the same hierarchy in knowledge of the world as actual countries.
US states are like Chinese provinces. We know about our states, they know about their provinces and we both know a little bit about the countries we have ties to. US and Europe and the Americas, China and East Asia/pac rim and a bit of Africa.
Basically, smaller countries study more about their surroundings more and bigger countries have more internal stuff to learn.
A lot of Americans have trouble locating Nebraska or Kansas on a map. I’m sure a lot of Chinese might get confused about where Shanxi is, especially since many of them have never left their own counties before.
This is a very simplistic analysis of these particular regulations, and not at all a way to extrapolate to regulations in general.
If we have no way of making up for the water consumption and pollution caused by appliances, then there is no tax that you can impose on it to make up for the externalities.
Regulating the way they function is the only way around the issues that you just can't encode in price.
The Spanish try to whitewash their atrocities by speaking of a purposeful campaign of defamation from rival powers.
So successful it was, apparently, that it made disctinct stories of Spanish brutality materialize in every country in the Americas.
The legend of the Black Legend also emphasizes the enlightenment of the Crown's laws regarding the legal status and treatment of indigenous peoples.
Unfortunately the rumors spread by the English about the treatment of natives were so convincing, that the Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos also came to believe that they had the right to enslave the indians and create a racial caste system where mestizos would live as serfs for centuries.
Or maybe it just was that the laws were never effectively enforced.
Yes, it is alive because the Spanish did do things like cutting the hands and feet of entire indigenous settlements, as they did with the village from which the mapuche general who resisted the initial Spanish drive into Chile suffered.
The somewhat reasonable laws regarding the encomienda system were pervasively circumvented by the encomenderos by always demanding tribute in labor, and having it paid for generations.
The mestizaje and conversion to Christianity was used, in the end, to also circumvent laws regarding the treatment of natives by creating an entirely new underclass of people lacking in rights.
The Black Legend is what's known in Latin America as "history".
Yes, it's a complex issue that evolved over the course of centuries. But it's a remarkable exception that the Mapuche managed to settle a border with the Crown.
I've never said that Chile was any better. I mean, it was in comparison to some periods, the early conquest saw mutilation as collective punishment and impalement as execution of POWs.
What you just said isn't a defense of the Spanish Empire. If anything it is about the capacity to resist of the Mapuche and the power of decentralized self-organization. There just wasn't an emperor-high priest to kidnap and extort the Mapuche into surrendering like with the Aztecs or the Inca.
Aztecs were conquered with the help of other slaved tribes. Do you really thing that several sailors could conquering an empire of millions? Spaniards were helped by Aztec enemies.
I know that Latin American successor states then went on to do the same and worse.
The Chilean Congress only this year acknowledged the genocide of the peoples in Tierra del Fuego, perpetrated by mercenaries of settlers of various nationalities with total impunity from the Chilean state.
Do look up the Wikipedia article on the War of Arauco for accounts of the cruelty of Pizarro and Pedro de Valdivia. As I said, the enforcement of the various laws regarding the indigenous populations were... lacking in enforcement.
Knowledge of it is being equated with knowing about Missouri or Wyoming, seriously?