Found in 3 comments on Hacker News
headcanon · 2020-10-08 · Original thread
You're right, but its difficult for a website (or anything really) to encode the semantics without inviting criticism. These speeches, along with news broadcasts, make assumptions about their audience, and their content is carefully designed to appeal to that audience's biases and value system while appearing "neutral" or "factual" on the surface.

In this case, Trump's speech makes the assumption that his audience sees themselves as "patriots" and subscribe to the narrative that their way of life is under attack by people who "hate America" and want to indoctrinate people to do the same. This paints the other side as being against their value system and champions their values.

The problem is, even explaining that in those terms will cause people to take exception, so it's both difficult and dangerous for a website to do so and remain "factual" or "neutral".

Take a look at the 5-star reviews for this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Patriots-History-United-States-Entitl...

Compared to this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062...

Most people really hate it when you tell them things that run counter to their narrative, and have a hard time even seeing their narratives as biased one way or another.

Pairing A Patriot's History and A People's History makes for some interesting perspective. They don't really offer explicit points/counterpoints, but they certainly frame things differently over similar time periods (which cover America's coming of age to a powerful world presence).

https://www.amazon.com/Patriots-History%C2%AE-United-States-...

https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062...

brianto2010 · 2010-08-02 · Original thread
A People's History of the United States (Zinn) [http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-Present/...]

There's so much history that isn't taught in school (politically covered up) and Zinn presents many of these little-known history gems. Be warned, there is a light liberal swing.

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