Through a brief-ish but productive AIM conversation with Vaughan, I've started compiling a list. The document consists of "things I know little to nothing about, but should know about if I don't want to be an embarrassment to my family, my country, and myself." The working list is included below this entry. Feel free to suggest things I may not know about that I should investigate.
I also realized that I never talked about the real indulgence relevant to my post yesterday. While it's nice not to criticize harshly, it's really luxurious to praise unabashedly. Try doing it sometime. It's amazing! It has all the creativity of a good lambasting with none of the guilt. You can be even more creative, because the field is less explored (this isn't really the same as love poems and religious praise). Try telling someone they're so un-fucking-believably fabulous. It's stunningly good! "You just blew me right out of the water, like, dropped to your knees and took me from the pit of the ocean to fucking heaven. I'm pissing ambrosia on Zeus, that was so awesome." You know. Just ride with it. It's so amazingly satisfying.
OK, here's the working list:
Things I should know
Genocides
Rwanda
Sudan
Khmer Rouge
Serbia-Bosnia
West Africa?
Conspicuous Absences
Stalin
Pol Pot
Argentina
How Things Work
US
How a bill becomes a law
Constitutional amendments
SCOTUS, how a case gets there, what happens
Lower courts: who are they? how do they work?
Candidates for president
How presidential election works
International
The UN
How the EU works
WTO and how it interacts with the G8
How currencies fluctuate
How Canada and the UK elect their leaders
How the regions got their structures
How the EU was formed
Why africa is structurally fucked
Yugoslavia
USSR
The Koreas
One Germany
Northern Ireland/Ireland
Palestine/Israel
Individual mideast countries
Apartheid
OK, some of those I know more about than others (how we elect the president). But some I know absurdly little about. Feel free to add things along these lines, and for other categories, including "things that will kill us all, or at least tens of thousands of us."
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Other good things to know:
- Flood Survival Skills. Especially if you live in a coastal city when ice cap water rises from the grave to ENSLAVE ALL HUMANITY. Yes, global warming deserves thoughtful study.
- Basic Automobile Maintenance. It's always nice to be able to change your own tires. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm speaking out of my own emasculation.
- Robotic Engineering. It'd be neat to have your own helper robot, right? Then you wouldn't have to worry about that automobile thing above, because she (the robot will definitely be a girl robot) could do it all. That is, if you could trust her...
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