Historyspeaking topic
The West holds Germany to a much higher standard of historical accountability than Japan. Why, and does it matter?
— r/changemyview
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- The asteroid thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs was so lethal because it struck a shallow sulfur-rich seabed rather than open ocean, a matter of a few hours' difference; had it landed elsewhere, life today could be entirely different. If the existence of all mammals, and therefore of humans, hung on the angle of a rock's impact, it shows how baseless the feeling that 'we were meant to be' really is.
- Coca-Cola spreading the modern red-and-white image of Santa Claus around the world means the color of his outfit was standardized by an advertising campaign. If a detail of a childhood tale we assumed was 'always like this' is really a marketing decision, how many other 'age-old traditions' in our culture are actually sales strategies?
- Medieval people did not sleep in one long stretch like we do but in 'two sleeps': they woke around midnight to read, pray, or talk for an hour or two, then went back to bed. If the belief that eight hours of unbroken sleep is 'natural' actually arrived with artificial light and industry, maybe our midnight awakenings are not a disorder but an old memory.
- Was the Reformation only a religious matter? What kind of political and social earthquake did Martin Luther's 95 Theses set off against the power of the Catholic Church?
- One explanation for the 'bewitchment' symptoms in the Salem witch trials is poisoning by a rye fungus containing compounds similar to LSD. If a fungus in the bread could lie behind a town's mass hysteria, doesn't it make you ask how much of what we explain as 'evil' or 'madness' is actually biology?