Enjoyed the videos as always, recent viewer subscribed a week or so ago; There is one video I think you might have some researching and that is if Mark Twain was truly Atheist as we have been taught or did he just really dislike the Catholic church. I have seen arguments for both. It seems also that those from those times wee often seen as Atheist if they dared rebel against the Catholic church in some areas, not all but some.
Idk if Harry's made you put the ad at the beginning, but I will say with serious topics like this, it makes you seem less serious immediately going into an ad after your hook. I know you aren't less serious, but as someone looking on the outside it seems disingenuous just an fyi.
@@daemonbug what is the alternative? Ideally creators could just be paid properly, but until that time- why should someone not be compensated a living wage for their full time job? Bffr, this isn't that serious of a topic and the sponsorship does not detract from the quality of the video or it's conetent
The free bleeding one made me so mad. There is evidence that many very ancient societies used some form of padding so they didn't free bleed. The idea that the French aristocrats would just... bleed all over their rococo decor is complete and utter madness.
It’s true, many ancient cultures were noted and known to use forms of cloth rags, mostly made of linen. Though some cultures were known to use a form of bog moss (no joke), as it was highly absorbent.
The British silence on poopy Versailles is the most valid point ever. There’s no way the British wouldn’t have been absolutely RAGGING on them for being nasty there’d still be jokes about it to this day
This is what I've always thought is the ultimate way to shut down "the US didn't go to the moon" even tho I've never had the chance to try it: if the US didn't go to the Moon, why wouldn't the Soviets debunk the Moon landing? They used everything even slightly wrong they could find about the US in their propaganda (and vice versa) so why would they ever put up with a fake moon landing?
They even went as far as to make fun of and ridicule French fashions in the Georgian era. Even to those in Britain who adopt French fashions got lampooned.
One of my biggest pet peeves is people misunderstanding the way historical people used the term ‘bathed’ vs ‘washed’. People read that historical people didn’t ‘bathe’ as frequently as we do now, and think they were dirty and disgusting. But historically to ‘bathe’ was a distinct term vs ‘washing’. Before plumped bathrooms, someone may not have submerged themselves in an entire tub full of water very often, called ‘bathing’. But people did ‘wash’, aka give themselves a scrub down with a bowl water and a cloth, what we’d now call a sponge bath.
The Romans would rub down with perfumed oil and then use what was basically a blunt sickle to scrape off sweat and old skin when they really wanted to get clean. Sitting in water was for socializing... Oh wait, I forgot, they don't exist... (/s)
Some will even say Europeans didn’t bathe or wash themselves until the moors taught them which isn’t true. Everywhere on the planet had a bathing culture of some kind and discovered it independently.
There are several other factors why historical people weren't as disgusting as people today think of - from the middle ages to the 19th century, all people wore linen next to the skin, a fabric that is highly absorbent and moisture wicking. And people would change their shifts sometimes multiple times a day! There were no synthetics fibres that hold sweat against the skin that we wear now that makes us feel sweaty and gross at the end of the day. And in a world without central heating, there would be months at a time people probably barely sweat at all! I do historical reenacting, and I have worn linen shifts under wool dresses on 30C days working outdoors, and felt extremely cool and fresh.
Reminds me of the Straw man fallacy. No point in winning an argument when you're not allowing the other party to put up a challenge and show you their true points.
Yeah I hate this trend online nowadays where suddenly nuance doesn't seem to exist anymore. Like... we can criticize these people for the things they have done WHILE not making up blatant lies about them, and doing so will actually put the spotlight on the bad stuff they have done so we can, you know, focus on that, which should be the goal anyway.
They literally taught me "the Europeans believed the earth was flat" thing in elementary school and I'm still mad about it. I love your videos so much! Thank you for doing these
I must admit that we were taught that as well (in Europe or at least were I'm from lol) during the early school years and only later on learned that it was a victorian smear campaign
@@tom1644x - Or they are all Terry Prachett fans who don't want to admit it. (Fantasy writer whose "Discworld" books all take place on a flat planet supported by huge elephants standing on the back of a gigantic turtle.)
Honestly, I think part of the problem with Keller is that most school only give her life past the "wah wah" moment about a paragraph, so the story becomes "this girl was broken until a very nice teacher fixed her!" while the real story is closer to being "these two disabled women worked their asses off to succeed in a society that barely saw them as human" (which is less "feel good")
Oof! That rings a bell. For societies that don't seem to value teachers nearly enough, we do seem to be oddly fond of these "...and then the teacher magically fixed everything!" narratives, don't we? 🤔 (Dangerous Minds, anyone...?) No disrespect to Ms. Sullivan at all, but that narrower narrative, to my mind, drastically devalues the incredible intelligence & strength of will Ms. Keller had in her own right...?
And the schools teach it this way on purpose, because Keller and Sullivan were strongly opinionated socialists. The narrowed baby version turns Keller into a good ol' bootstrapping American saint. Same thing they do with MLK Jr. and pretty much everyone else in the entire civil rights movement.
It is really strange as it being deemed as a teacher-student situation when it was two intelligent women working together. Honestly I think if it was two men it would be seen as very different.
@@annastevens1526 I feel this so much as an educator. My country is one of the top scorers on the international PISA tests and we do a lot to be considerate of student's needs and differences. I honestly think we are at a point where every child who can do well is already doing pretty well and those who aren't doing well have external forces preventing them from doing well that we can't quickly fix like cognitive disabilities or severe trauma. People love the stories like dangerous minds, hellen keller, and education by tara westover (great book about a girl raised in an abusive morman household who "escapes" by self-educating). They are all feel good stories but they are all about students who did not have opportunities who once given the smidgen of opportunity everyone else had by birthright went on to do great things. But people want that applied to every student even though it's a very unique situation. It's the difference between finally giving a person glasses who could barely see and trying to teach someone to see who is blind and everyone saying to you "well why can't you do what you did with that other kid who got glasses!" I remember an interview between Bill Gates asking Tara Westover how we could improve the public education system and she confusedly says "i'm not really the best person to ask.. i didn't attend public school". People love the "quick fix" stories but don't want to do the long difficult work of getting to the root of these systemic problems.
7:34 The reason why Colombus decided to go in the opposite direction to get to Asia was precisely because they already knew the Earth was round. he expected to eventually find Asia. what was new to Europeans back then was the realization of an entire continent being in the middle
And he believed he'd reach Asia/The Indies because he heard the circumference of the Earth from a guy who did the math wrong, abd had a nap that depicted Asia as being far bigger than it actually is, so he thought the distance from Europe to Asia was easily doable in ships of the day. This in turn is why a bunch of the folks he asked to fund the expedition prior to the Spanish crown declined, because they did the correct(well closer to correct, margins of error and all that) math and figured that crossing the combined Atlantic/Pacific Ocean that seemed to cover that entire journey, would be completely impossible to cross(and considering how close Columbus's first expedition came to failing, they were quite right)
@@RipOffProductionsLLCSo what I'm hearing is we'd have potentially avoided a lot of shit had those first folks asked him just how big he thought the Earth was, rather than merely assuming he was a dumbarse who knew how big it was and was vastly overestimating himself/the ships' capabilities.
Yep he was not laughed at because he thought the earth was round, but because he claimed it was 9,000km shorter circumference and the people laughing at him were correct
Fr we need more videos on "the great stink" or something. A giant cartoon-y stink cloud being the reason that people started learning about germs is so insane to me
@@brettrobinson2901 i dont know what happened for you to become so indeferent to the weirdest shit humanity has done, but if youre that bored with western history try looking at ancient chinese history. it's buckwild to say the least.
@@brettrobinson2901ever heard of the story of a guy who lifted a rock then wrore a first person story in the view of the rock saying it was lifted by him, only for his head to be smashed by the rock?
Harriet Tubman: saves countless lives ensuring countless legacies, demonstrates incredible resiliance, courage and conviction and represents some of the best qualities of humanity. Tiktok 2023: she punched babies.
I do eagerly await the day we as a society decide that it was actually racist for her to save slaves because they should have been able to do it themselves and her not letting them was oppressive. After all we already decided it was racist to have a Native American on butter so we kicked him out and kept the land
@@creed8712 .... sigh, why do I try. You don't want to learn, you just want to be angry, even if it's at shadows in your head. You are on a history channel, complaining about a fake version of events that did not happen like that, and when told this, you double down. Needless to say, I see no reason to lead this particular mule to water.
@@creed8712 Wait... are you seriously bitching in the YT comments over a fucking butter mascot?😹A mascot you're allegedly so upset over that you forgot she was a woman? While also inventing an entirely unrelated and imaginary second scenario, just so you can passive-aggressively mald over that too? Publicly??? Try harder, tryhard.
I do appreciate how she even acknowledges in the video with her chuckle. No no no harriet tubman was not elbow dropping babies to keep em quiet. She was drugging them with opium and other potent sedatives. By modern standards and understandings, not great. But, for what was known at the time, brilliant. "We need this baby to be quiet and calm for a long time. Here is a mix of plants we can feed them that will make them sleepy and tired so we dont get caught by people hunting down escaped slaves."
I was brought up on Gripe Water for wind as a baby, as were our kids. This contained alcohol (3.5%) until 1992! My grandmother used to buy cocaine and laudanum from the pharmacist for pain until it was made illegal in 1920. How times change.
OK what's a secondary source? I only know of primary, people who were there (and could still be unreliable). Is secondary like contemporary newspapers?
@@matttran7161 A secondary source is a source created by people who did not experience the event or thing they're talking about. They are generally considered less reliable as the creator can only know what they have been *told* about the thing by others, which leaves room for bias, misunderstanding, and inaccuracy.
@@LollipopLozzy454545 actually primary and secondary sources both have their pros and cons. Secondary sources are less direct but may have more of a sense of perspective
@@matttran7161primary sources are firsthand accounts of the event, usually by people who were there as a witness; these are good for direct accounts of the action, but are ultimately accounts of people that can mistake things or just plain get things wrong. you're good using these as a way to get accounts and experiences of the time period, but stray away from making definitive accounts from them. iirc it also includes things like technical documents, blueprints, plans of action, memos, etc, which are generally more reliable but require augmentation from personal accounts secondary sources are sources from people who weren't there directly, and are generally based on primary sources to draw a conclusion. unlike primary sources they're a lot more reliable if gotten from a reliable source since they tend to combine perspectives and draw facts and conclusions from there. this is because anywhere from small details ("it was at 12:33 pm!" when it was infact at 1 pm) to major details ("i knew for certain he was dead when he fell over", when he just tripped instead) could be wrong, and so multiple accounts have to be used to establish what actually happened. these have a drawback in that they're also prone to the bias of the author, who may have a favored narrative or not enough primary sources to draw the right conclusions there's tertiary sources as well, which consist of multiple secondary sources: think Wikipedia or Britannica, which are good overall summaries of events and tend to be a bit less biased if made up entirely of reliable sources. hopefully this answers your question in a long-winded manner
@@matttran7161 I've always been taught that primary sources are from the people/era in question. Testimonials, letters, memoirs/autobiographies, artifacts, contemporary writings or art, etc. would be primary sources. Secondary sources are created after the fact by people who studied the event/era rather than living it, such as biographies, textbooks, essays, etc. For example, primary sources for Marie Antoinette's life would include artifacts, contemporary letters/press/art, quotes she said or people then said about her, etc. Secondary sources about her life would include biographies, documentaries, reproductions of her artifacts, PhD dissertations, etc.
Oh my god… and the idea that every woman in every era up until now was tightlacing. NOPE. I don’t even know tightlacing would be possible in a corset from the Regency period? I mean, perhaps, but it would not have the same waist-snatching effect of an Edwardian or Victorian era corset.
You could do a whole series on "inspiration porn." As a disabled veteran who has been dealing with worsening medical issues over time, I'm often met with some form of "try harder, eat healthier, meditate, etc . . ." as a cure. Which then leads to my personal struggles with having to use a wheelchair most of the time because of my broken body. And there comes another issue -- A majority of wheelchair users are ambulatory, meaning we don't necessarily have to use a wheelchair 100% of the time in 100% of the situations. And so many of us are treated like liars, or exaggerators, or whiners, or overly dramatic. Sadly, I've been accused of "milking" my disability, of lying, of being a hypochondriac, etc. It's horrible and disgusting.
I absolutely second this. I'm disabled via a trifecta of mental illness/neurodivergence, infectious disease, and a congenital spine defect. God, the "try harder"/"live up to my pre-existing concepts of who you should be" shit that people are put through. I feel for you deeply, and I'm sorry you have been and are being subjected to that. I want stronger words than horrible and disgusting to exist. That fact about wheelchair users is so, so important. Disabled folks are judged for just about anything we do, any medications we take, and any devices we use to assist ourselves - I used to walk with a cane or a service dog most of the time. I no longer do, as my physical pain is finally under control. Thus, I must have been exaggerating and faking. It makes me so, so angry. As long as we live in a society that thinks "you don't look disabled" is a compliment and only values disabled people for either providing the public with inspiration porn via our lives, attitudes, and actions or being able to perform capitalism, videos like the series that you've suggested are so important (also - and I hope this is an okay thing to say - thank you for your service 💜)
I am in school for physical therapy, and the thought that someone who uses a wheelchair part of the time being called a liar has never occured to me. Of course it makes sense that people would say that when you think about it, but I guess it's just made more sense to me from the beginning that some people would be able to get around fine while at home or on really good days but would need some extra support when in the community or on worse days. Thank you for mentioning this so I can consider how to educate future patients in addressing this type of response
Yeah, it's pretty wild. I see it in all forms of disability. My best friend is blind but doesn't require a cane or guide dog, so apparently she's "faking it." Wild y'all.
@@trustytrest Yes. Yes, they do. I have many of these all-or-nothing stories. A classic for me: I was walking my mobility dog to the pharmacy, minding my own business... when a woman stopped me, blocking my path, asked me who I was training the dog for, and when I said he was mine, she looked me up and down slowly and asked what was "wrong" with me because I didn't look like her idea of what disability should be. Invisible vs. visible, not using a wheelchair or cane or service dog every day, not being the "right" kind of disabled... the list goes on and on.
As a physically disabled woman, it makes me so annoyed when I have had people tell me that Helen Keller was a fraud, it always felt like they were diminishing me and what I and so many others are even capable of, just because I am a little person and sometimes I use a wheelchair to get around and have hearing aids, does not mean that I am less capable than anyone else.
I am so sorry this happens to you. I have read her book and she was a fantastic woman. She fought for civil rights and spoke out for women's suffrage. The story of her and Annie Sullivan is so great to me. She was not a fraud and you are valid!
Edit: I LITERALLY paused the video 5 seconds before the Helen Keller part cause I spotted this comment and just HAD to ask about it cause what the fuck!?! Disregard my questions below! I'll leave this comment up so we can all laugh about what a huge derp I am! :D Fraud? In what way? That Helen Keller was faking her disabilities? Is that what they're asserting?
I became aware of the "Rome isnt real" woman when she responded to someone on Twitter with the claim that old paintings have that yellow discolouration not because of the aging varnish, but because the lack of sunglasses and greater amount of time spent outside meant most people were colourblind and couldn't tell the difference. I pointed out that it's awfully coincidental that removing the varnish (an understandably controversial practice!!) reveals more accurate colour rendering, that there aren't any other kinds of pervasive colour errors in art of the era, and that besides plenty of people don't wear sunglasses all that much and we dont have broad society-wide colour vision issues because of it. She blocked me. I did start to wonder if it was all a troll; this video leads me to suspect it's something closer to a grift, albeit fishing not for money but rather for engagement. EDIT: After some reflection on the nature of conspiracy theories, I think it's more a matter of motivated belief. I don't think the belief is insincere, but we all have a tendency to settle on beliefs (i.e. stop examining them for inconsistencies) which are somehow satisfying to us, be it that they're comforting, or that they conform with our preconceptions, or that they position us socially in some way we find appealing. The latter can be particularly relevant for conspiracy theories: people seem able to accommodate beliefs that are self-contradictory - and which in some cases go completely against the believer's previous values - because it places them in an engaged community with a strong sense of being party to something special. For Donna, however, the social component seems to be more that of being an authority figure revealing profound truths: her asserted authority and insight is so great that it completely undermines significant portions of academia. I think she genuinely believes it, because we all want to believe that we're special and will have a significant impact on the world.
The claim that spending time outside without sunglasses can lead to "becoming colorblind" should be an instant sign that the speaker is an idiot. Colorblindness is a genetic condition, and is _absolutely not_ something that can be caused by "too much sunlight."
the "sticks your fingers in your ears and repeats 'I can't hear you, I can't her you....'" response to contrary arguments, a sign of someone who is surely confident in their position and can defend it using hard evidence (not)
the "rome was an invention of the spanish inquisition" thing made me so angry i learned everything i could about the OP's arguments so i could refute them and now im about to go back to school for anthropology
Classics major, and yeah those videos made me incredibly mad in a way that inspired me to learn way more about Roman culture. I have to say, if anyone was going to invent a language, WHY would they make it like Latin? That's a theory credibility knock off the bat I'd say.
@DJ Casheeel - So, a negative effect in that you challenged the assumptions and are now doing something about it. All the best in your learning experience!
I think the Harriet Tubman tweet is def a misunderstanding of slang. It made instant sense to me bc I was always told she gave babies and toddlers meds that would keep them sleeping to keep them quiet. I know countless ppl that say knocked out in reference to sleep all the time.
no fr. i hate when people who aren’t familiar with slang and AAVE jump to conclusions with things. leads to a lot of issues. it’s not really their fault, but it’s really scary and disappointing when things get misconstrued to a large level.
The free bleeding one makes me so mad bc I write fanfiction and have had to research this very subject. There's literally physical historical evidence of how people took care of their periods before the invention of modern period products.
I feel you. Right now I'm takin a 5 minute break from working on a fanfic set in a fantasy version of the 1500's, and I still feel the need to add as much historical accuracy as I can. The only reason I made it clear that this is a fantasy world was in case I included misinformation.
Fanfic writers are unsung heroes in terms of historical accuracy. I deadass went down a rabbit hole for a good several hours to find out approximately when humans started using nets to catch fish and around when it could be observed that said information was reaching other coastal settlements. Then there's the stories set in fantasy late-1300s where I absolutely have to get the food they ate right or I will explode.
@@lolatulip3609 Me, up at 2 am, vibrating from all the caffeine: If I dont work out how to describe the clothes my characters have to undress for s m u t accurately in early 1800s I will _perish_
man, I cannot TELL you how much research I have done on *one specific historical family* to be able to reference them in a fanfiction centered around a fictionalized version of a real historical figure 😮💨 hours upon hours, months on an in-depth family tree, all just to not use most of them as characters
The problem with Momlennial was that if your debunking got enough attention, she'd pull up information on you, tell her fans you were a racist/misogynist/white supremacist and, in the case of a few, openly dox them (which is why we think her original tiktok was taken down).
I guess one shouldn't be surprised if someone who showed a total lack of ethics in their presenting of "information" also showed lack of integrity in how they dealt with those who challenged them...? 😢 That's tough to hear, though. Glad they were taken down (at least temporarily! 🙄) But that sort of pattern is troubling because I feel like it discourages many who might otherwise speak up to challenge misinformation-spreaders? We've seen a similar pattern here with right-wing extremists physically threatening & digitally harassing those who step up to support the LGBT community. Doing the right thing isn't necessarily safe alas!
I actually found the truth of the Harriet Tubman knocking out babies with natural medications bc that makes so much sense considering her access to those things and the fact that, yes, a crying baby is a bad thing when hiding from bloodhounds
Yeah, I found out about that a long time ago. I thought that the literal knocking out people were making sketches of was some sort of pun, I had no idea that people actually believed in that…
@@MossyMozart yeah that is true, but the same wording, “knocking out”, can be applied to either literally knocking someone out through force or making someone go to sleep through natural medications.
Oh my god I knew a girl in high school who was ADAMANT about the Helen Keller conspiracy. She said she was going to make her senior quote “Fake it till you make it, just like Hellen Keller” (it got denied btw). My history teacher basically called this girl dumb and my Bible teacher just laughed.
When the history teacher and the bible teacher both agree that you're an idiot, you're probably an idiot. That or the "history teacher" isn't all that good at history. But in this case it's *definitely* the former.
What is a Bible teacher? Do they only teach about the Bible, or religion in general? I don’t think we have Bible teachers where I live so that’s the first time I hear that.
@DanAndHoe Its most likely a religious private school. In the US for instance we do not have religious classes where qe are taught that one religion is correct. At the most some schools may have a religious class where different religions are taught ans explored in a removed sort of way.. but this is pretty rare. Private achools are able to indoctrinate the kids into one religion and it costs money to go there while public schools cannot endorse religon bc it is publically funded. I hope this helped you underrstand a little. The commenter may not be from the US but if they were this woulld most likely be the case
The Helen Keller thing bugs me so much. My elementary school was named after her, the inside of the building is lined with brail and, there's the alphabet in sign language along the walls outside the library. We have numerous books on her, we watched documentaries of her in class. I've learned so much about her, she's always been a special influential person for me, so it's really upsetting that someone I have always been inspired by is caught up in this conspiracy. I have a disabled brother, so even more so I love that there is someone like Helen Keller to look up to. It just makes me so sad.
To me, it feels like able bodied people can't fathom that a disabled woman could do things for herself and thrive. they can't understand that she could learn to read. The thing is, it would be like people who can hear and see learn for her as she knows no different. They don't realise that disabled people don't work the same way as they do, so we accomidate our needs and find a different way to do things. like I use a walking stick and when I was little I taught myself how to button up my school Cardigans with one hand. These people have a very small minded way of thinking as they probably know nothing about disabilities or what disabled people do differently to live.
@@LJNorthey yes, that's really good input and a really good perspective. Society was not built with disabled people in mind. Therefore it's inspiring to see someone like Helen Keller beat the odds and succeed in a society that wasn't made to accommodate her disabilities. I feel like people who claim that Helen Keller faked it, both underestimate the abilities of disabled people, like you mentioned. But they also see them as lesser, just because they live in a world that does not cater to their specific disability. It's extremely problematic to view people that way, when much of the stigma around disability comes from our society. Either way, we should continue to celebrate women like Helen Keller, and combat the incorrect narratives about her
You can just look at Paralympics to see what disabled people can do. What about alpine skiing? Going 100 km/h..... on one leg! Or any of the sports people excels in despite having to work harder than able bodied. Actually, I would call people doing sports in Paralympics absolutely able bodied.
I remember a girl in my psych class being SO deadset that Hellen Keller wasn't real. I always thought she was just an idiot. I don't say that about a lot of people, but it's disheartening to find out that it's not just her
Someone said that to me today. He was surprised when I told him she wasn't deaf and blind from birth, and couldn't fathom that someone could learn how to speak or comprehend a language of any kind through touch. I can't understand people.
@@z.amelius *I* admittedly have a hard time understanding how she did it, and that's what allowed the conspiracy to spread. People don't get how she did things, and the comfortable answer is to conclude that she didn't. Hearing that girl talk about it, her explanation was more or just "well, I guess she could do things, but... that's hard" and a little bit of "oh, well, she had help with some things, so therefore can we really say any of her accomplishments are hers?"
@@drewjay8940 - Helen Keller may have been blind and deaf, but she wasn't stupid. When Anne Sullivan came to teach her, she had fertile ground in Helen. Keller always acknowledged her huge debt to her teacher. And yes, it was very hard on Anne, Helen, and Helen's family.
@@MossyMozart exactly! I wasn't trying to say otherwise. I wasn't calling Helen Keller an idiot, that was about the girl who thought Hellen Keller wasn't real.
much of helen’s writings regarding her radical socialism were burned after her death. interestingly, her pro-eugenics writings were not. being deaf-blind is quite rare (only 1/20,000 if i remember correctly), and most people have no experience or knowledge about it beyond helen keller. so when someone spreads ableist lies, it’s easier for many people to fall for because they have no frame of reference.
To be fair, in the book "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians" it is noted that while educated people very largely held that the earth was round, there seemed to be a variety of views among peasants.
As a daycare worker I am unsure whether to laugh or cry that people thought Harriet Tubman was giving these kids abusive head trauma. One would think her punching out a baby would cause there to be some form of noise in of itself. SHE WAS NOT ONE PUNCH MAN
We're all One Punch Man when our opponents are babies. Also, even if she had punched babies (I'm not saying that she did, I'm speaking purely hypothetically here), that wouldn't diminish all the good that she did.
@@itsaUSBline Harriet Tubman is one of the most amazing women in history no doubt. One of the other things she did was she made a cloth bag to put the kiddos in that held them on her waist, in a way she pioneered the idea of wearing a baby, to soothe them.
@@endergamer7483 pioneered? You can't honestly tell me she was the one and only person who put a baby on her body? She's an amazing woman but don't be like Tik Tok.
@@endergamer7483 Cavemen wore babies in bundles similar to inuit people's papooses. People all over the world have been wearing their babies for thousands upon thousands of years, there is anthropological evidence of this on literally every continent (from indigenous north Americans, indigenous South Americans, people from the arctic regions like the Saami people from Lappland, people in Qin China, and all over eastern Europe, Russia, etc.). Wearing a baby was not in anyway a new thing in the mid 19th century, nor was it pioneered by Harriet Tubman.
It's straight up movie logic. A quick little 《POW》 and the kid is out and quiet for hours, and not, you know, screaming as loud as they can because now they are scared AND in pain.
It's kinda like the old myth that I see perpetuated around that medieval people didn't brush their teeth, meanwhile (iirc), many of their skulls had perfectly fine teeth because sugar wasn't a huge part of their diet and there is evidence they had toothpastes and even mouthwash. I think it's pretty safe to say that despite time periods, people don't like to feel too dirty and will find ways to keep themselves as clean as one can...
kinda late also that the bread (and their diet overall) they ate are coarse as fuck like imagine a sourdough with hard unpopped popcorn inside, that shit's gonna girnd your teeth that they ACTUALLY grow properly (yeah that goes into the topic of how the prevalence of soft/sweet foods in general ruined our teeth which is a topic all to itself)
God, I'm pretty sure my parents heard the Versailles bathroom thing AT a tour of Versailles. THAT'S how pervasive that particular bit of misinformation is!!
i was in another museum in paris and the tour guide fucking misgendered an artist even tho his pronouns were written on the fucking wall???? some ppl need to be fired
@@madmagdelena absolute history keeps getting shat on by the costuming youtube friend group (abby cox, mina le, karolina zebrowska, bernadette banner etc) so im not surprised theyd day shit like this
The fact that us English have spent centuries clowning on Napoleon for his height - even though it was perfectly average for the time - is the most damning proof that the pooing on the floor at Versailles is not true, cos ur right. English propaganda (especially in the Napoleonic era) would have been on it like locusts on grain.
One thing about the Poe balloon hoax, he actually showed up at the place where he said the balloon would land carrying a sign telling everyone that came they'd been duped. Essentially the whole thing was an elaborate prank because he held a low opinion of the readers for the magazine he wrote for.
This is how I feel as someone who is really, really into wildlife/nature and has been my entire life. I'm in school for it and I work in wildlife rehab. People make the wildest out of pocket claims about animals, usually some romanticized fact with little scientific backing. Then I get called a Karen or a liar when I correct it. So frustrating.
For real. I also think the world would be a better place if the difference between "poisonous" animals and "venomous" animals was common knowledge, instead of them being considered synonyms.... 😭
@@alexw.7097 or if it was common knowledge that the vast, vast majority of snakes and spiders are not venomous and virtually none are inherently aggressive.
@@alexw.7097 I'm in school studying wildlife ecology and conservation, and I have had peers say to me that they wish all snakes would die. Like dude please change your major what the hell 😭
OMG, it was so hard for me when I moved to Australia from Canada. I was very used to just letting spiders live in the corners, because natural pest control. Now I have to triple check the spiders to make sure it's not a venomous species. Also, I loved finding snakes as a kid, now I have to be cautious of them😢
In regards to Versailles not having bathrooms at a level of a modern day convention hotel; if you are that rich (like multi-billionaire level), you can pay someone to follow you around all day with a chamber pot for when you need to relieve yourself. And positions like that were sought after, as they gave you access to a lot of information, which in turn made you valuable to a lot of other rich people.
Mr Putin has a secret agent always following Putin with a special suitcase that can be turned into a loo. Putin’s poo is carefully collected, not to leak onto the public.
@@zweisiedler. I think they actually used a form of toilet paper if they were that rich. "I'm so rich I can afford to have paper made specifically for ass-wiping."
The Hellen Keller myth makes me miserable, especially since it shows how little people believe in disabled people, and how little they want to challenge their beliefs about disabled people
Exactly! My friend who is a very avid Tik Tok user once brought the myth up and looked at me genuinely confused when I mentioned it was horribly disrespectful to Helen Keller and anyone else with terrible disabilities
@@user-sg4ov7ng4h Didn't survive? Why would they not survive? Neither of those are fatal. Go read the wikipedia page on deadblindness. "In 1994, an estimated 35,000-40,000 United States residents were medically deafblind."
My mom's been taking in a lot of Tik Tok misinformation since the covid vaccine became available to the public, now she just listens to anything from fake movie trailers to alpha males dissing women on their podcasts (not joking)
I really appreciate Kaz pointing out that fact checking isn't a panacea; people at the time made stuff up or put a spin on the truth - worse, some documents may have been destroyed
that's right. the thing with human sciences (very arbitrary term -- exact sciences like maths and chemistry also rely on previous human made texts) is that it's a constant gamble wether what youre working with even happened or not. as long as there isn't someone alive who can tell you what that time was like, and even that isnt perfectly accurate, research is through a scratched lens at best.
im glad my tiktok history stuff is almost exclusively archaeologists looking at finds and crying abt them or them debunking weird people's misinformation
Regarding the Rome misinformation: I actually met a teenager in real life that was entirely under the impression that Catholicism was culturally appropriated from Mexico… I think she had said she was shown that conspiracy theory from a video much like you showed by a relative of hers, that I had the unfortunate experience of meeting multiple times in my life, and my God, she was consistently knee deep in xenophobic rants and conspiracy theories every single time. She especially hates Catholic people, so she certainly didn’t get along with anyone in my family. 🤦🏻♀
thats so funny because you can critique the catholic church on so many things, especially regarding the forceful spread of religion, and yet,,, instead of getting mad at spanish colonization she got mad at imaginary cultural appropriation i am SOBBING
It's perplexing people not knowing that Catholicism is a big thing in South America due to the colonization from Spanish people, which were very big on it.
@@queertearss Literally this. We were talking about how the church had historically been compliant on the systemic torture at “schools” for indigenous children... Somehow she was angry about cultural appropriation from Mexico to Italy? Yet didn’t know Spain had colonized ANY countries at all. She didn’t know America was a cluster of colonies from Britain either, she thought America and Britain had always clashed since the beginning of time. 🤦🏻♀ I hope she got away from that crazy relative, I can’t imagine being lied to about the whole world for that long. I do genuinely hope she’s ok, that is some serious abuse no one needs to put up with, family or not. 😕
I remember reading accounts of *one* noblewoman in Versailles who actually did just "go" wherever she wanted. The fact every account about her mentions this does lead one to believe it was very unusual behavior.
I'd love to have time to run an ancient Egypt history account... but I can't bring myself to do it. Just thinking about fighting misinformation is exhausting.
That's the struggle. It takes half an hour of video time to refute and put into context five seconds of lies. Not to mention the actual research behind the scenes.
Actual historians in Egypt already suffer so much, I feel like ancient Egypt is the only culture/empire being appropriated by people on every continent I've seen Thai people claim to be the original Egyptians
@@yeah5874 the amount of people who claim to be from somewhere else?? like hello?? also its rly weird that its thai ppl out of other ones bc they have been doing a lot of historical research especially the 90s and its so rich
@@evelynwright329given that she was a deeply pent up (on account of thr whole. Yknow.) teenage girl i can definitely imagine a few things hed feel should be cut
This was the first I’d ever heard of the Helen Keller Conspiracy and it freaks me out. I’m a disabled person going into special education and currently working as a writing tutor at my college. We have DSS (Disabled Student Services) which provides accommodations and help to students with disabilities. As a tutor, I will sometimes gently suggest that a student visit DSS to get accommodations for say dyslexia or dysgraphia which is almost always met with disgust and denial. Systemic ableism is real. It is a problem. We do not need it to be enforced by random people on TikTok making lies up for clout.
Thank you Kaz! My elementary school history teacher literally said that in medieval times before Columbus people used to think that the earth is flat. It sucks to see how far some lies have propagated 😭
Every Columbus Day my spanish teacher would go on a racist rant about how the liberals want to cancel Columbs and he would always cite that and it was just so strange overall
I was told that they thought the earth was flat too. I didn’t question it until this video - and I think I’m generally pretty on it with questioning dodgy sources.
I know there is a long running joke about historians calling gay couples ‘friends’ but I find the social change in platonic affection fascinating (especially between men) - it being historically more acceptable for male friends to hug, kiss or otherwise be physically close in a platonic way, much like women still do with their friends. Its kind of why people joke about the Hobbits in Lord Of The Rings being gay. I sometimes see posts about photos of ‘historical queer couples’ and they’re almost always uncredited and lacking context - so there is no way of telling if a photo is of a genuine queer couple, friends, or even siblings. Which makes it even harder to find the real queer stories, and also enforces the toxic-masculinity idea that men cannot be affectionate without it being read as feminine or unmanly.
I mean, if these best friends never got married but are recorded to not only live with eachother but also share a bed I think it's safe to say they're more than friends. There are circumstances where it's pretty obvious they are more than friends. But I get what you mean, and I agree lol (I feel the need to clarify that this was mostly a joke lol)
I remember that on two sisters in law. One was mad crushing over her but the other didnt really say much, apparently shr loved her husband very much tho
It's even more odd, that society actually endorses that platonic closeness when it suits them. Such as in WWI... But come home and cuddle the Bros and nope... Gheyyyy.
I mean.... there were absolutely times when historians pretend a couple is not gay when it absolutely was and they were doing a little more than just hugging and kissing. It's just not good to make a blanket assumption about every instance of friends being described. You make a good point that I'd like to add to. Throughout the overwhelming majority of human history there was no "gay" or "straight." You did what was expected of you because you had to, but in many civilizations it wasnt super condemning or even seen as a big deal if you had a sexual or romantic relationship with the same sex, because you werent branded as another sexuality, anyone could do it. Therein lies the historical blurriness between best friends and romantic partners, it was not always clear even back then because it didnt need to be. Ofc all of this depends on when and where we refer to. In some societies homosexuality and bisexuality served some sort of social purpose, in others it would get you killed. Tdlr: some societies didnt see any difference between friends and lovers if you gave your bestie some sloppy toppy because there was no us vs them dynamic - because sexuality was not an understood or defined thing
one crazy piece of misinformation i saw on tiktok is this video of a north korean girl singing and people saying that she messed up so the government killed her whole family. it took me two minutes to look up the video, find the girls name, and then look her up and see that shes kim jong uns fucking sister and shes a general in the army. another version was acknowledging that it was his sister but that she had to sing for her life because they couldnt both be named kim… forgetting the fact that kim is their last name… people piss me off so bad like bro it takes a few minutes to fact check before you post the video/comment.
@gracewsho It's hard to tell sometimes because there's actually a big market for making stuff up about North Korea. Like the time US news was genuinely talking about how everyone in NK was only allowed to have the same haircut.
So interesting hearing the historical inaccuracies. I’m in medical school and most medical Tiktoks are completely inaccurate to an insane level. Don’t believe someone online is a doctor just because they have a white coat! To the point I’ve heard some doctors that make content say they think the algorithm purposefully pushes inaccurate medical advice over good medical advice.
I don't think that the algorithm specifically pushes misinformation as much as algorithms based on some vague measure of engagement tend to end up favoring misinformation. Though sometimes it's also a platform maturity thing, new platforms just tend to have very few experts using them so the content on any given topic tends to be produced at best by laymen who have that topic as a hobby and predictably they don't make the greatest stuff. Like that's definitely what happened on youtube, history content on youtube when it was new was universally terrible and it's only in like the last five or so years that we started getting actual historians on here. The only content that was good from the start was some natural science stuff, math and computer science and that's because the experts in those fields were the early adopters of the internet.
@@hedgehog3180 I wonder how much is engagement with misinformation and being a new platform like you said. Vs how much of it is the fact Tiktok is run by China. On the Chinese version of TikTok, science experiments, education, history, and patriotism is pushed by the algorithm. Vs in the West the complete opposite is pushed. So I wouldn't be surprised if it's on purpose but who knows!
It’s not just medicine and history… it’s everything, and it scares the living jeebus out of me. I’m a car and motorcycle guy, and the sheer number of “heerz how 2 ryde a modorcicle in 5 minoots” videos I’ve seen, where they get the very basics of steering wrong, is insane. Same with Japan: there are so many videos about that wonderful culture made by Americans who think they’re an expert because they saw an anime once.
It's really all a goal by the powerful corporate people who run the world. If they can revert the average person to thinking more stupidly and having less skills than a medieval peasant, they've already won the hardest war: the war for truth. If everyone knew the truth, there would be no evil powerful people because no soldier would fight for them. If no one knows the truth, then everyone is that mind controlled soldier who can't realize they're at gaurd next to Hitler.
As a person with a non visible disability, I confirm that people doubt you, “you are faking it”, damn I wish I was! Since my medicines are too expensive and also sold in black market, even on some pharmacies they refused to sell me my medicines claiming that I would re sell them, with the prescription, and a wristband that says my ID and condition, I just left that pharmacy crying out of frustration
😵💫😢 I feel ya!! So much gaslighting & frustration in this space. The "faking it" accusation is particularly bizarre to me. Like, why would anyone even bother...?? It's not like this $hit is FUN! 😳 I wonder sometimes how much we owe to the work of my beloved Jane Austen & others, who depicted women with chronic invisible illnesses that were treated by the writer as faked for attention due to lack of intelligence, or purely neurotic in origin...? 😬 Feels like we're still battling that 18thC stereotype to this very day!
Same. Tired of being judged when I worked hard over 10 years getting my body as healthy as I am able so that what is left is my medical issues. I don’t look sick because hard work plus hiding illness. Most of us with a medical condition work hard to not be judged. I am sorry you had that happen to you.
I'm glad enough to have not really be accused of faking any of my shit by people, which is .. Honestly shocking, given I have like five separate major mental issues ... Maybe I'm just shit at masking. Either way, I do wish you the best, hah
Related to the fake queer love story, a HUGE pet peeve of mine as an amateur historian and reenactor is people using the tales of various monarchs having multiple mistresses as evidence of polyamory. YES there were some cases where this MIGHT apply (though the concept/terminology as we know it is pretty modern and I can assure you that folks like the Sun King or George I didn’t think of it as “polyamory”) but let’s be honest, the vast majority of rulers with a revolving door of mistresses were just cheating and getting away with it because DUH THEY’RE THE ABSOLUTE RULER. Obviously most elite marriages weren’t love matches and there was theoretically some wiggle room as long as heirs were made and alliances upheld, but that’s missing a huge feature in many of these stories: their wives didn’t have much say. In some cases they actively begged their husbands to stop flaunting their affairs and humiliating them, like Catharine of Aragon or several queens of France, but we know how well that usually worked out for them. These men are huge, over-powered jerks and yet, in several cases, I’ve seen modern poly people hold them up as poly historical figures and I just feel my head explode a little. I’m not even poly and I know that this ain’t it.
Oh wow 😵💫 I think my head just exploded a bit too?! There definitely are some good exemplars out there, but the super-over-privileged dudes who were essentially acting like the Epsteins of their era were, as you say, not it... 😵 I understand the strength of the urge to find oneself represented in history, but I feel like we need to be a bit more careful than that...? 😬
Not to mention the unhelpful obsession with Europeans. There are much more closely analogous situations to modern polyamory in steppe cultures and islamic cultures. None of these are directly analogous, either, just like ancient greek sexuality isn't analogous to modern homosexuality or bisexuality. The most (and it's a really important thing) history can tell us about sexuality is that our modern conception of it, or the form of heteronormative conception from the last few hundred years, isn't the only way to operate a society.
@@alisilcox6036 yeah, the whole thing can backfire in all the directions if you don't consider cultural context (especially culture-specific attitudes around gender). Though I will say that Islamic polygyny might not be the best example, given how many people in Islamic communities are moving away from it and many younger Muslims view it negatively. I was recently present for a super awkward conversation between a few friends from Afghanistan and an acquaintance who is poly: poly person enthusiastically compared her relationships to polygyny in Afghanistan, and the Afghan folks were FURIOUS. They called the practice an embarrassment and a blot on their society (and Islam in general) because it is frequently done in such a way that young girls and women get trapped in very unequal relationships with controlling men. As with the examples in my original comment, there was no real choice for the women, and thus there is no comparison with healthy, egalitarian polyamorous relationships between consenting adults.
I recently heard someone have the utter gall to actually say that they had "come out as polyamorous," as if being polyamorous was a sexual orientation beyond their control, rather than them just sleeping around on their girlfriend because they're too self-centered and inconsiderate to stay faithful.
I think one of the things that really gets me is expert opinion is seen as lesser than the opinions of the ignorant. It's like "no, no, no I've spent nearly tens years studying this field, but obviously this tiktok has the right answer" it makes me want to tear out my hair.
OMFG, I know, right?? 🤯 We truly seem to be living in a time when personal unfounded speculation or opinion is actively seen as more valuable (correct? trustworthy?) than an expert opinion based on extensive research &/or experiment! And that's frankly terrifying 😱 On the other hand, there also seem to be a whole slew of really good public educators working on UA-cam, in every field from historical dress to cosmology to paleontology? So I think there's some hope... If only the people that really need the education can find them!! 🙄 Gotta say, the notorious algorithms are NOT particularly helpful in that respect? If you strike a vein of nonsense, they're more likely to feed you more & more of the same.... 🤦🏻♀️ Wonder if algorithms that instead presented both "more like this" AND "here's the opposite" would be at all more helpful?
There’s a growing and pervasive anti authority attitude that’s spreading across the board. There’s so little trust in institutions nowadays that people assume they’re lying, and they instead think the ignorant randos must be the ones who uncovered the truth. It’s like a conspiratorial mindset for many people, as they’ll write off any real vetted info that conflicts with their views as flawed or fake news. My brother does research related to poverty, and he’s had people argue that something as straightforward as census data isn’t real.
This is the curse of the Internet; it has lead people to believe that their 5 minute search on the University of Google makes their ignorant opinions on anything worth just as much as experts who have spent decades studying the subject. Back in the '90s we thought it was going to be the greatest spreader of knowledge in human history... but now we realize it has instead become the greatest spreader of misinformation and lies, and almost no one cares about the actual truth anymore. Everyone thinks they know more than experts now, and the levels of ignorance and belief in harmful trash from conspiracy theories to astrology to ghosts and aliens has become greater than it ever was. The problem isn't new, but it has reached levels far greater than ever before. "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" - Isaac Asimov
Its this obsession with experts being elitist and the ‘everyday/common person’ being more trustworthy apparently because they’re untainted and more ‘relatable’. Same with the fact that conspiracy theories exist to make ppl feel special, unique, and give them a superiority-complex, that only they know what others are too ignorant to know. People want to feel like rebels and world-changers, something which any expert knows cannot be done without years upon years of hard research and falsification which even then undergoes long period of appraisal.
I knew the Harriet Tubman thing was meant to be knocking out babies with medicine but I did laugh when I saw people thinking it was a yeetus the fetus type situation. I just didn’t think they were serious. I thought it was a joke! I wrote it down in my diary later that night!
I know right?? My history teacher (bless that man!) taught my APUSH class that Harriet Tubman used medication (I think he said a substance like chloroform, although this video clarifies it is related to opium) to put babies to sleep. And even if I hadn't learned it in class, I feel it's so obvious from the phrase "knock out" that it's chemically-induced that claiming otherwise is absurd. I don't get how it could have been misunderstood to be physical "knocking out." Like what kind of person do you have to be to think that??
I know right like i read a lot about Harriet and it was very clearly stated she used drugs to make them sleep like where did someone get the physically knocked out punching thing from? And i feel like she wouldn’t want to ever punch children considering that as a child she had that iron thrown at her head (although ugh imagine the fact i just said is also fiction😅i hope not)
About 15 years ago I visited Versaille and did a tour there with a guide. I long believed the misinformation about the toilets to be true because even the tour guide told this story. It's disappointing that you can't even trust the "expert" to tell you the correct information. I hope the museum has done something about it.
I was there last fall. Not with a tour guide, just one of these audio guide thingies, but I don't remember that story being in there, so that's good I guess XD
A friend of mine is a tour guide as a side job to pay for university and he took me and a couple of others on a practice tour before getting his first real tourists. It was nice but at multiple points he told us that he knows some of the stuff he says is either a myth or just incorrect but they will keep telling it that way because it just sounds better. These people aren't experts. They memorise a script and a list of trivia. They are there to entertain not inform. And whatever is deemed more fun or interesting, what sounds more fun to hear, what sells better, will be what is told.
Remember there is a difference between tourist guides who are part of the tourism and travel “company” who show popular places to get tourist money and actual guide who has learnt about the topics and has actual knowledge.
The ancient Rome not existing hoax is so funny to me for the simple reason that in my latin class we have a running joke that our teacher is a time traveling witch who created latin just to spite us all.
I'm a queer man, and I have a B.A. in History, and one of my biggest pet peeves from non-historians is when they apply modern terms in regard to LGBT+ history. People across time and space have conceptualized both gender and sexuality radically different from how anyone on Tiktok or even just the West would. Before graduating this May, I wanted to write, what amounts to an undergrad thesis, on gender ambiguity in kabuki and how onnagata passed through the use of makeup and fashion. Part of it would also deal with the tendency of Western historians towards applying modern concepts like transness onto Asians in the 17th century is a form of cultural imperialism. I explained this in depth to someone who I'd talk to often on social media, just for them to make a post perpetuating this same behavior. I explained that gender ambiguous was the term I preferred to use in cases like this, and yet... And don't get me started on the people who used "history" as a justification for being transphobic and/or misogynistic.
This might be because lgbt+ people nowadays are tired of (usually) old conservative historians denying ANY and all proof that a historical figure might have been anything but cishetero, you know, like the "historians will say they were really good friends". I think that what we may be dealing with now might be because we've gone too far into the opposite extreme, headcanon-ing historical figures as queer whenever they so much as breathed in the direction of a same-sex person. As a young queer myself, I can sympathize with people's yearning to see themselves reflected in people of the past, but it definitely is a tricky subject to cover.
She mentioned in this video a man from the 50s being bisexual, which sounds like that to me. People feel threatened by our modern categories of sexuality and gender not being universal and eternal, which is understandable, but awful. It’s a difficult and emotional push and pull between wanting to find connection with the past and establishing legitimacy and just forcing people into modern categories for our own ideological and emotional peace of mind. I think understanding or conceiving of otherness is one of the most important and difficult things to do mentally. “Queer” history can be a great teaching tool for that. It’s so important and so fascinating!
@@sprotte6665 i appreciate your opinion but you do understand that the concept of bisexuality did exist in the 50s, right? like it was first used as a word to mean attracted to both men and women in 1892, and that meaning and the older meaning of “displaying sexual characteristics of both sexes” were both in use until the kinsey reports popularised the former over the latter. (the kinsey reports were published in 1948) like yes the conception of sexuality has massively varied throughout time and across cultures and using modern terminology for people who would have existed in a world with an entirely different conception of sexuality is anachronistic and a imposition of modern ideals backwards through time onto a period they don’t actually necessarily fit, however there were people in the 50s who would have considered themselves bisexual. i’m not saying that the particular example you’re mentioning is one or the other but i think it’s worth mentioning the context of the concepts of sexuality which were in use at the time before we outright reject the idea of a bisexual from the 50s, you know? like the 50s are within living memory, and while things were definitely different then vs now, the basic conceptions of sexuality have not actually changed as much as you seem to think within that time. this is 100% not intended as an attack, but just another factor to consider. foucault’s history of sexuality is a good primer if you want an overview (it’s one of the preeminent texts in the study of the history of sexuality) though it does have its pitfalls
I remember hearing people try to ascribe one Roman emperor as "transgender" just because he had a fetish. He also was a murdering, manipulative a-hole, so prolly not the kind of representation people want.
History M.A. here. I had a similar experience when I wrote a paper looking at the berdache of the Algonquin tribes- men who took on the social roles of women- and how the Europeans interpreted their role in Algonquin society. There’s an idea that the berdache were “just transgender,”and that’s kind of true but also not really. It was transgender in a society that had entirely different concepts of gender th Europeans, filtered almost entirely by European primary sources. Notably, there was no opportunity for women to become men, just men to become women. These societies saw masculinity as something to be earned, while femininity just was. The berdache evolved to account for young men who never “earned” their masculinity.
I’m a librarian (so I have taught critical information literacy), and also Jewish (so I have dealt with a lot of misinformation about Jews and Jewish history from so many different angles, all of them offensive). This video was simultaneously both deeply frustrating and incredibly validating and very heartening. Thanks for the work you’re doing, it’s so important. Fuck TikTok lmao
Wait, are you telling me that the manifesto written by Russian secret police in order to justify further repression and violence against Jewish people isn’t an accurate representation of an entire ethno-religious group?!?
I volunteered one summer at my local jcc in a library dedicated to the holocaust and WWII to help reorganize it. I handled every single book. I personally knew some of the faces and names on those covers. I’d seen their numbers, I’d heard their stories from their mouths. People who can deny the holocaust ever happened must come from a place of extreme privilege and ignorance to have never had its gnarled, rotten reach brush upon their lives to be able to say it never happened.
This reminds me of the early 2000s chain email forwards my mom used to send to me that I would have to debunk. One that sticks out claimed that in Japan there was a trend for "bonsai kittens" ( kittens grown in jars to keep them small"). As I was living in japan at the time I was able to state with confidence that no, this was most definitely not a thing but I always wondered what drove people to make up these things, especially since there are so many real oddities to life in japan that are way more interesting.
It's amazing seeing these conspiracies from the business end, so to speak, isn't it? During the pandemic, I saw Americans commenting online that NZ had set up concentration camps for anyone trying to enter the country. It was incredibly surreal... 😳 Really made me wonder what their media had been saying!!
It's been years but if i remember the Bonzai Kittens were either a fake site create to prank people or an art project, anyways it was related to students
The free bleeding stuff is just wild because if we accept that, we have to accept that women throughout history openly went around in bloodstained clothes (because eventual clothing staining would be unavoidable, even with good laundry techniques), or were naked/only wearing shifts for every menstrual cycle so as to avoid staining outerclothes. People have NO IDEA how long the process of manual textile production takes, and I guess aren't used to thinking of everyday clothes as an asset (and an inheritable one, no less).
Tiktok misinformation really does feel like a revamp of "linear history, they Cannot have done better than we do now", just like the Victorians did to the mediaeval era.
Or there's the inverse, where "the ancient [insert culture here] were SO much better then us today because they [insert political ideal the poster agrees with here]." Usually in "Noble Savage" narratives about the poor innocent Indians who knew no evil until the vile White Capitalist Colonizer(trademark) came and corrupted them.
Yes, or just bc they personally cant imagine or understand a specific concept ppl living before them cant either, like physics/construction and the pyramids
This reminds me of the thoughts that people before just a few generations ago didn’t care about their children/saw them as objects to help with the work. When I studied child development I did some research into historical attitudes toward children and child rearing and found some pamphlets from the 1700s(?) about how to care for a new baby. It’s just weird to think that people didn’t have basic human feelings/connection to their own children until like 100 years ago.
Reminds me of a book I read in high school about the wives of many of the founding fathers. In one section, a woman had to tell her husband (who was away in the war) that she'd had a miscarriage. Her husband wrote back about his grief, describing the devastation he was experiencing for a daughter he would never meet.
I remember one such pamphlet from the 1500s, it advised parents what to do if their toddlers hurt themselves on the furniture and were crying. They were to playfully smack the object and scold it for hurting the child, making the child stop crying and laugh instead
Well, Children yes but as soon you became double digit and didn't had a rich family you were pretty much expected to be newest cog in the machine. You feed your child today so they can work tomorrow. Of course paiting it like people were just evil is wrong but not long ago by the age 16 you were considered a young adult
@@ricardomiles2957 But that doesn't mean that parents back then didn't love their kids like we do today, or actually saw them as grown adults as soon as they were 12. It means that, during tough financial times, parents had no choice but to make their kids work in order for the family to survive. Just because a lot of people didn't have any other choice doesn't mean that they actually wanted to do certain things, or that they believed certain things.
William Shakespeare was one of the best at misinformation, rewriting literally and metaphorically the roles of Tudor kings and King Richard III. That last story threw out a lot of information that would make it harder to label Richard III a villain when you look at the actual information that didn't fully exonerate the Tudors. It still persists as a myth to this day, as told by the Yeoman Warders in the Tower of London.
Thank you for mentioning this! Many things today about King Richad III are based on mentioned by you Shakespeare or Moore who both lived long time later, also, Moore was writing for Tudors. You can see it was obviously made as an excuse for Tudors to take the throne from King Richard III. Showing him as evil was a way to show themselves as good or at least make people grateful instead of resentful towards them. At least Shakespeare's works are already labelled as fiction but still "based" on history. Moore is labelled as history while it was all made for Tudors. And we now base on mostly those sources or sources that are based on these. It's even worse with lack of sources if you research in foreign language. At leats here the main language of sources is English, so you can always find something translated to your language or most of people know English so you can just read it in English. I mainly research history of one group of people who lived and worked in Japan. So most of the sources are in Japanese. The only source in English are books by one really scary and biased person who portray them as evil even when it's sometimes obviously illogical. He claims he will show the truth about them, that now people like them, but all those good sides are lies and he will show who they really were. But all he shows are his opinions and his own ego. And there is only one, literally one, book about them in my language. It's a translation of the book by this scary person. I'm trying to learn Japanese to translate books about them and one day write books about them, both in English and my language, just to let people really research them. I already saw people researching them (something about how they are portrayed in fiction but mentioning who they really were) and citing this scary person books as sources, fully believing him. But because of my illnesses and just overall situation and my thinking I may either disappear/erase myself before doing it or I may just think I'm not worthy to write about them. On one hand I want people to know them, to love them, to see the truth, not only what this scary person wrote. But on the other hand I just don't know if I should or if I can do anything for them.
There is also a revisionist tendency that claims Richard III was some kind of saintly figure and They Don't Want You To Know, which is a bit tiresome. Second-option bias in full effect.
I mean it makes sense considering he was writing FOR the Tudors and later Stuart’s, and if he wanted royal patronage he’d big up the ruling family and cast their enemies as murderers and traitors.
The Tudors were ruthless bastards and so was Richard. They were medieval monarchs, you didn't survive by being a Disney princess. The whole revisionist woobification of Richard is utterly ridiculous. Any even cursory look at Richard's broader career even before he became king will tell you that he was a hard bastard. He even looks a hard bastard in his portraits. Though god knows the likes of Josephine Tey have looked at a guy with a hatchet face and a thousand yard stare and got the exact opposite impression.
I saw a sketch about Harriet Tubman knocking out babies on Tumblr a few days ago and I didn't even think much about it; I just went "huh" and kept scrolling. That's one way misinformation can take root: you just see something somewhere, file it away, and gradually you start to believe it. P.S. I was literally going to look up John Crapper right around the time in the video where you were talking about the bathroom habits of the French aristocracy.
I saw a few sketches like that and I just thought that it was some weird joke. There are a lot of bizarre jokes like that, so I didn't really think much of it. The idea that people are teaching/receiving it as fact is just another reason that the study of history fills me with existential dread Edited to fix a typo
That’s a good point. Then you see it again, it connects with some fleeting memory in your brain and gets reinforced. Or it sounds true because it sounds familiar.
The Hellen Keller Conspiracy makes me SO mad. As a disabled person, I have been accused of lying, faking, and exaggerating my disabilities so many times in my life. It's a legitimate source of trauma for me. And so often, whenever a disabled person accomplishes something, it's used to call into question whether they are 'really' disabled. The ableism is infuriating.
I work at a very small museum and we make TikToks to try to increase awareness of us.. . I really appreciate your content and take on this. As a platform it isn't a great spot for detailed nuanced history. But at the very least we can site our sources. Thanks for your efforts to inform and educate
It's a major problem. Existing in the digital age means libraries, museums, galleries etc have to utilize the latest digital platforms to stay at all relevant to & accessible by the public... But the format of those platforms does have a real impact on the information we convey. Loss of context, complexity & nuance seems to be inevitable! I guess all we can strive for is trying to lure viewers towards additional content that dives a bit deeper? Difficult in an era of content overload & massively reduced attention spans!! 😢 Humour, great visual images & engaging people's empathy (if we can manage it) do seem to have some effective impact, though...?
(But those can all be expensive!! Correctly citing sources can be too, because it takes time. All of those can be a resourcing &/or funding challenge for smaller institutions/organisations like the one you describe...?)
I’ve come across the Versailles misinformation before and just instantly dismissed it as nonsense. Misinformation online barely even faces me anymore sadly enough, especially as someone who enjoys history. Most of it can be instantly debunked with just the tiniest shred of common sense which is the most frustrating part
@@jesshollowaydyker5 Because false information is perpetuated by amateur scholars that take "first accounts" to heart, not properly considering the context in which these accounts are written. As she said in this video, this was during the French Revolution, so play X for doubt anytime a Revolutionary talks about the monarchy and the rich, chances are there is way more exaggeration and/or straight up slander involved. Even back then, people were familiar with making bold faced lies for political propaganda.
@@Bionickpunk But this was a published book by a quite a notable historical biographer of Louis XIV, not some random online commentators and included references. My point is that these myths have been circulated by "professionals" long before they get picked up by TikTokers and the like. Print is just as fallible I think, it just takes longer for it to circulate.
@@jesshollowaydyker5 And that somehow makes them beyond spreading lies? Always be weary of the information you are given. Chances are even the reputable historians can get something wrong, or just lie.
"It popped up on my Facebook Feed" I had to Facepalm myself immediately. It's like those wild stories that you and I heard as kids, a friend of a friends cousin once told to somebody... totally true. Billy definitely ate 50 frogs and became a frog himself.
it depresses me to no end that there's literally thousands of people who believe with all their hearts that the earth is flat and there's nothing anyone could say that would convince them otherwise. i just live in a wholly different reality from some people and it's been a struggle to come to terms with that
My dad has recently started getting way too into a bunch of conspiracy stuff from the internet, and completely believes the earth is flat. My whole family has pretty much shunned him from talking about it, but it’s really upsetting watching your dad go from explaining science to you when you’re little to trying to tell you the earth is flat. I guess I just resonated with your comment, it is hard.
If you think about the Harriet Tubman thing for more than a few seconds it's pretty obvious that something doesn't add up. Knocking an adult unconscious often leads to permanent brain damage. I can't imagine it's possible to beat a baby into unconsciousness without killing it. They're pretty fragile.
Someone else mentioned it so you may have seen it already but knock out is slang in certain areas for put to sleep. As funny as it is to imagine Harriet Tubman drop kicking a toddler it's more likely trying to say she gave them some sort of sleep aid to keep them asleep and quiet.
This just makes me think about the 'flip the table' arguments I've had with people about the Borgia family. Piecing together what was most likely the truth about that family is difficult enough, but to constantly have to throw aside rumors and weird ficton attached to them is exhausting.
out of interest, what are the most commonly-known myths about them that you hear most frequently? i know little about the borgias and im just curious lol. ive seen like 2 episodes of that tv show with jeremy ironsand thats it
@@okayokayfineilldoit A lot of incest and murder. If you watched Jeremy Irons’ The Borgia you might’ve seen a toned-down version of The Banquet of Chestnuts, an alleged party where the Pope’s mistress Guilia Farnese invited Cardinals to a dinner with at least 3 witnesses hiding behind the wall and brought in sex-workers dressed as nuns. There was a game later on in the evening where the Cardinal who slept with the most women would win something. I don’t think I have to tell you about the rumors surrounding Cesare and Lucretia (or Lucretia and Rodrigo) and Cesare murdering his brother and later on his sister’s husband. No matter if these rumors are true or not, I find the Borgias to be a very very interesting family.
Tik Tok is the latest in a long trend of making content shorter and shorter. The less space you have to educate, the more context and nuance is lost. Learning takes a long time. The fact that long form video essays exist gives me hope that not all, well, hope is lost. Edit: Helen Keller was a revolutionary socialist and an IWW member who fought for disability rights before the term existed. I literally cited her pro IWW (my union) speeches in my Master’s Thesis.
Personally I like long-form content more because I can just put it in and have one thing to focus on for the next 20 minutes to 7 hours. Meanwhile, shorter videos are bad for me because I can't handle changing focus that often, to the point that I'll still be focused on a clip from 10 videos ago, and getting the topics confused with each other
@@Gloomdrake i tend to watch youtube while i play video games and watching longer videos is more convenient for me bc i can let the video play in the background instead of having to pick a new one every 30 seconds
@Dr.Anarchy69 I feel like history, psychology, archaeology, science, you-name-it... They're ALL ABOUT the context & nuance!! 😆 But as humans, we just seem to consistently be really bad at those things...? As you note, the constantly-further-compressed format of our comms channels makes it almost impossible to convey all that essential information, too... I wonder what on earth it must be like to be a teacher in this era, where there's simultaneously more information accessible than ever before, AND more misinformation, whilst students' attention spans become limited by habit to the length of a text or Tiktok post....? 🤯
The Harriet Tubman thing reminds me of when old texts say "gay" there are at least a few teens going "omg it's about LGBTQ+". 🤦🏻♀️ Like it doesn't help the cause and I've seen adults use it against the community.
Im glsd she didnt go saitama on the babies. But maybe im just a horrible person but Hearing she knocked em out with drugs made me think of the scene in my name is earl where darnell and his dad kept drugging earl on their spy missions and he kept waking up and getting drugged again.
@@jacobcousins4234 Okay are you another teenager? You should have learned in your history class by now that people back then didn't realize a number of drugs were bad for you and used them commonly in medicine, and meds being used to keep children asleep was a super standard practice no one knew was wrong for well into the nineteenth century. I learned that much when I was 13 and I'm not even 20. Where have you been?
Studying history with excellent teachers have cemented one idea in my head. Always, always, ALWAYS check the bias of your source, even primary sources, because they have incentive to spin the information to support their own cause. Historic documents ARE INHERENTLY BIASED, and I think a lot of people forget that. I don't think I've ever read a primary source document that doesn't have some extent of bias. This is why you find as many sources as possible, because that's when you find out what a reasonable truth is, because it helps you identify the bias and where the reasonable belief is without it. Of course, I'm obviously commenting to someone who knows this information, because that's exactly what you do. There needs to be so much more content like this. Thank you for taking such an active part in dispelling the misunderstandings!
@Sarasyn Fox 💯 this!! 👏 I believe that academia has also historically been biased towards the supposed factuality of written resources in general, vs evidential (physical finds) or oral sources. Written sources have been seen as inherently much more 'reliable', so I suspect this has perhaps tended to blind many researchers to the fact that ALL these sources are information filtered through a human, who has a complete set of their own biases & preconceived ideas affecting the information they convey? Can be most problematic when those biases aren't even conscious ones, so the distortions get "baked in" at a level that can be harder for us to pick up, particularly with increased geographic, cultural or chronological distance...
My daughter was so high functioning that many times people were surprised to find out she was blind … she had in fact only a very small sliver of peripheral vision in one eye and none at all in the other. As many frustrated parents do, I once said to her “what, are you blind?!”. Yeah, imagine how I felt! Fortunately we could laugh at it later on.
It's hurtful to learn about the story of the 2 soldiers only to realize it was fiction. That hurts as someone who is a part of the alphabet mafia. We were always here and faking stories like this whether it's with good intentions or not hurts us in the LGBTQ+ community who love history and want to see more of our history unfold. This is why I love your channel. As a fellow bi, I really want to thank you for making your wonderfully respectful and insightful video on James Dean Edit: I didn't pay attention to the Sal Mineo part, but I appreciate how human you are by owning up to your mistakes
I cried so much reading Emil and Xaver story and I never saw the tweet referring to it as fiction. This actually hurts because we know of so many stories like them that they were actually true. He could have talked about any of those, or use the tombstone as a starter point to actually talk about gay couples of the past. Oh man, and I'm an archaeologist, and it never occurred to me to fact check. Great video, thank you so much 🙏🏼
The Procopius history is even weirder. He basically wrote two histories simultaneously, one in which he said Justinian and Theodora were amazing people who never did anything wrong; and the secret one where they were both literal demons who committed every sin in the book. The official book would be published to impress the emperor, the secret history would be recited if procopius realised a satirical jab at the emperor would amuse present company (and was lost for centuries till it was randomly found in a Vatican archive).
@CM Beadle It's a really good example of the huge impact created by what sources surviven huh... Imagine if we'd only had one or the other of Procopius' works today, not both! 😏 Bias tends to pile on bias to a certain extent too, so to speak? For example: the Spaniards basically trashed most of the indigenous societies of South America, whilst also recording those cultures in a way that was biased by their own religious & political beliefs. So now apart from surviving physical evidence & oral history, both pretty thoroughly fragmented by the invaders' actions, the slanted Spanish records are what we have to go off... And written records often tend to be considered "authoritative" purely because they ARE written? It's a good example of that old saying of history being written by the winners - or at least based off their version of things 😬
As you described the blue unicorns and bat people in the moon hoax, suddenly Princess Luna and her bat winged attendants from My Little Pony made sense.
As someone currently taking a whole class on fragmentation of historical items, I understand it's very tempting for people to reach out for answers that seem to give closure or explanation to something vague in history. There are so many things we will never get a complete picture of, and finding reliable sources is so hard. I can only hope that media literacy will become a mandatory class in schools since it's so desperately needed.
Thank you Kaz. The misinformation and disinformation that is rampant on social media is an informational plague on humanity. Maybe this will, over time, find a way to improve as we all learn to develop our critical thinking skills as online ‘netizens’…we must all learn to have a healthy skepticism and optimism for finding out humanity’s truth.
I hadn't heard about the Helen Keller conspiracy because I don't do tiktok. I was literally telling my nine-year-old about Helen Keller today because she asked if someone could be both deaf and blind, and I said yes, and Helen Keller was the first person who came to mind because when I was about the same age as my daughter, I read a biography of Helen Keller.
The Helen Keller conspiracy didn't start on TikTok and had been passed around almost as folklore for years before TikTok spread it even further. Also, I've heard some Nostradamus theories played on The History Channel started as email chains and weren't actually attributable to Nostradamus. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the more extensive American tradition of conspiracy theories and our ongoing love of them.
i have two younger cousins who "learn" a lot of stuff from tiktok and youtube shorts so every time i hear about yet another thing tiktok is doing badly i get stressed out that they're absorbing this stuff. luckily for me i tutored/partially home schooled them during covid quarantine and left enough of an impression as an "adult who Knows Stuff" that they usually come up to me first and ask if it's real (i think they just like feeling smart by saying they didnt fall for any of the fake stuff, unlike other kids). speaking of, watching channels like this helps me be educated enough that i can answer their weird or specific questions so thanks for all the vids!
Hellen Keller wasn’t a “fraud,” however she was a supporter of eugenics, although on a very moderate level for the time period, and she did re-evaluate this perspective later (she also notably did *not* support or believe in medical racism). This was probably due to internalized ableism and a desire to appeal to ableist ideologies. However, I do believe that the dangers of internalized bigotry are important to teach about in the classroom, especially to minorities vulnerable of being tricked into similar thinking patterns. Her efforts should not be invalidated, but she was not a perfect person and that’s okay. It’s also good to have a reason to establish that ableist infanticide is immoral early in the lives of students. Sources: disabilities studies quarterly, PBS, International Socialist Review, Time Magazine.
For it was not Marie, but versatile gives the historical information that the people at versatile would pee in the corners of the palace. Its literally true.
I think the hardest rule to stick to sometimes is to force yourself to scrutinize new information *especially* if you want to believe it. People tend to be great at debunking things they don’t want to believe but if it is something that aligns with their established views or ideals we are a lot more immediately accepting.
i study linguistics (should be writing my thesis rn haha) and the number of inaccuracies and harmful info being spread abt language is really saddening
I'm a public history major. We have to take a research methods class and my professor used a fantastic article to teach us the importance of vetting our sources, even those that are in academic journal. It was about legitimate academic fraud where someone assumed multiple fake identities and there was a circle of these people citing each other as sources. One bad source 3 sources back in a chain can spread serious misinformation, even seemingly benign misinformation makes your job harder down the road as a historian (or really any researcher/writer/educator). If I manage to find the pdf, I'll link it below. It's a lengthy read but I thought it was interesting, and it isnt super dry academic language either!
Yeah, as a historian I have had one too many run ins with things where because someone generally reputable said something once, everyone cites them, even if they are straight up wrong, simply because some historians don't question other historians nearly enough. Case in point: I was once trying to research a Civil War ironclad river boat, the USS. Ozark. According to one book, on the Colfax massacre, although she was sold for scrap she wasn't dismantled or disarmed and was instead chartered by the US Government to carry troops. Something about that... just didn't add up. I mean, the government wasn't just going to let a warship that was supposed to be scrapped sit around with active weapons! And although ironclads weren't easy to scrap, the iron plates were worth a lot of money, so there's be plenty of incentive to scrap her. SO... i checked the sources and... it became clear that no where in the orignal sources did they say it was the *USS* Ozark. Just a steamboat called Ozark! I did a very, very basic google search for all the steamboats registered called Ozark at the time. There were solidly a half dozen of them, none of them the former ironclad. I quickly figured out that somehow the author decided that the USS. Ozark was the Ozark the primary sources were talking about, probably because it sounded cooler and made it seem like the government cared more about the injustice that way, and then didn't bother to question if this assumption was right in spite of evidence to the contrary which required them to invent a non-sensical explanation to explain away the inconsistencies in their sources. And then since the rest of the book was good aside from this, that screw up has been repeated everywhere, mostly from Wikipedia and copies of Wikipedia. Historians, especially social historians, have kind of a bad habit of ignoring details that are outside their knowledge base instead of reaching out to actual experts. The result is some truly nonsensical stuff gets published, and cited by others, simply because nobody thought to call in an actual expert to factcheck them.
This pattern of one historical or academic source making a mistake (or flat-out making stuff up) and then getting cited ad infinitum by other researchers, tainting the whole information pipeline, seems to be SUCH a common phenomenon!! And even when that's not the case, one often has to be wary for how implicit bias affects the writer's reporting (cf. how Old Norse pagan myths were written down by Christian monks)... Or how contemporary sociopolitical interests can skew a historical source? (cf. academic erasure of LGBT folks in the 1900s) Honestly, sifting through all that for actual facts can be so difficult, I can really see why so many people just kinda give up and get their ideas from movies or social media, or decide to mistrust every academic source on principle! 😢 Problem is, that has such serious knock-on effects in terms of shaping how we vote, how we treat other people, how we teach our kids...? I believe the search for complex facts, context and nuance is still worth it, no matter how exhausting it is at times!
Concerning not bathing in the Baroque era, the last info I had (at least from historians) was that while bathing really happened only for medical reasons ( bathing culture suffered since the Early Modern due to a combination of syphilis and bad science), people did wash and they rubbed down frequently with linen cloths. In the upper societal circles, these were soaked in perfume, the solvent of which was alcohol. Which means they essentially rubbed down with scented disinfectant wipes a lot. Which, while not being as pleasant as soaking in a tub, will certainly get you clean. Cleanliness was always a matter of status, just look at the ridiculously frilly white shirts that just scream "I can afford to keep this clean". A stinking hall does not a good impression make. The Abby Cox video on historical periods is really good, btw.
The girl who went viral with her “Titanic was switched with the Olympic” theory made me so fucking angry, you can do the smallest amount of research and know that it’s not true. I’m glad that Titanic Guy is on TikTok to respond to these stupid theories with actual knowledge and facts
Nah they mostly say moors educated Europeans and taught them how to bath. It's one of the common claim from either black afrocentrist and from muslim nationalists...
The twitter-thread-fiction story reminded me of a random video I saw of a guy who goes by Metatron, about LGBT people in Ancient Greece. He was responding to an article saying that Ancient Greece was an "LGBT paradise" (without any sources, of course)-- and this guy just sorta ripped into it himself, and in a way rightfully so, because the article was a gross oversimplification, and pretty ahistorical... But then he went really hard on "actually it's just activist propaganda to say there was any sort of same sex affection anywhere, and it was seen with anything but scorn by anyone" down to saying that Sappho's amorous poetry directed to women is unambiguously not from a woman's point of view at all. In a way he does have a point: Ancient Greek ideas of sexuality and gender were very different than what is in place today, and in a lot of ways was pretty damn objectionable, and to call it an "LGBT paradise" is weird as hell-- but the way he presented this one shitty article to his audience made it seem like the entire idea of LGBT historical scholarship was completely without sources, without backing, and was all spin. So LGBT people trying to make history "nicer" to us ends up just giving fuel to people like that to call any sort of LGBT research or interpretations of things as just ahistorical revisionism without basis.
Eek. That particular vid of his has been sitting on my YT homepage for several weeks, & I was delaying tackling it, out of concern it would be much as you've described...? 😣 Although I respect the level of knowledge he's achieved on many topics, I do feel like he lets his own biases slant some of his content (perhaps even without realising), and this sounds like a classic example. His opinion on Sappho sounds particularly odd...?? 🤔 I feel like that sort of diatribe is especially problematic, because creators like Metatron have positioned themselves specifically as debunkers and research-based educators. If they are instead just opining on matters, and doing so without giving backup sources, they need to be really careful about flagging that, IMO, because viewers won't know the difference otherwise...?
@@annastevens1526 That's sort of the thing, he DOES have sources, and that's what makes him more convincing than the article he was debunking. The thing is, they're somewhat cherrypicked because the Ancient Greek ideas of sexuality and gender were complex and decidedly different than what we have in this age. Like, yes Plato in The Laws spoke derisively of men loving men, but that's also largely because his entire view of sex in general is that if you do it out of enjoyment or affection, then you are are too distracted from heady philosophical concerns, and too concerned with the body, which is bad. Plato also wrote a number of amorous epigrams addressed to men, and the dialogue Protagoras opens with Socrates and Crito talking about how hot young men with beards are. He quotes a number of writers who are like "It is disgusting for two men to engage in sex", and noting that none of the Greek Gods had gay relationships-- while also not mentioning things like the Sacred Band Of Thebes, or the Tyrannicides, or Apollo's handful of male lovers, or Zeus with Ganymede (regardless of the problems of age), or the works by celebrated poets like Theokritos that talk with praise about Herakles and Pan having male lovers, etc-- as even in-passing counterexamples. And he also brings up the old chestnut of bringing up how there would be one lover who was as young as 15 or 14 in these male/male relationships-- while failing to bring up that that age (or even younger) was the age that women were expected to marry as well, and that was seen as good and normal too. Every relationship was a little bit fucked up in Ancient Greece because they were mostly really obsessed with hierarchy, and any "equal relationship" was seen as odd at best. And yeah-- he says that it is "ambiguous" if any of Sappho's amorous poems to women are from her perspective. But there are several that are clearly about her, and a group of women, addressing other women who are no longer in that group (due to marriage), as well as one addressed to Atthis, where she outright quotes Atthis addressing Sappho by name. So if you aimed to tackle that video in some form, it'd be best to have some sources ready at hand yourself. The problem isn't that he doesn't have sources, it's that he's giving an oversimplified impression (while combating the even more simplified impression that "Ancient Greece was an LGBT paradise" (which, in his defense, IS a nonsense statement)).
@@NotJonJost @Z C Interesting! Sounds like a bit of a "cherry-picked examples to combat cherry-picked examples" situation there from Metatron, rather disappointing. Wonder if he's letting own personal convictions colour his research a bit there. As you note, anyone reading a little wider in the literature or examining the material culture as well as the written works (esp. the porno-pottery! 😏) would receive a rather different impression than he's giving...? Great analysis, sounds like maybe you should do a "reacts to" video yourself!! 🤭 Seriously, though - really important point about how complex things were. We tend to think of Classical Greece as a cultural monolith, but it really wasn't, either over time or across the different regions? With you 100% on the problematic power dynamics of their personal relationships! 🙄 At least, as they were legally structured. Makes one wonder how many people broke out of that mould, and strove for something more like what we'd call equality with their partner. Swimming against the cultural tide is always tough, but when you consider how much variation we have within our own societies' approaches to romance, and like us how many other cultures they had contact with, it seems potentially feasible...? & given how much some of the writers complained about uppity women & effeminate men, I suspect at least some people bucked the expectations a fair bit! Great note re Plato's general over-all bias - so important to know these things when reading. Juvenal, for instance, should definitely be read knowing his work is meant to be highly satirical in nature, I reckon! 🙈 To us the age thing seems pretty awful, regardless of gender, but when one considers the pre-teen betrothals of Renaissance Italy & barely-teen pregnancies of Lancastrian England... 🤦🏻♀️ Not unusual for the area or the pre-modern era in general, although the erastes/eromenos thing was a bit more unique.
@@annastevens1526 That's pretty much it: He saw a train-wreck, and his solution was sending more trains. I want to give him some benefit of the doubt and think he's just got some un-worked-through biases or hangups, as he's generally good and scholarly-- but boy howdy his comment section attracts some special angy folks... (And he does bring up the porno pottery, actually... but under the caveat that only outright penetration counts as "depicting homosexual affection"-- just being close and showing non-penetrative affection will not suffice, and so the number of gay depicting potteries goes down significantly in his eyes) Considering the amount of Ancient Greek literature that is irretrievably lost-- it may be very likely that there are a lot more variations of thought and life than we currently have direct access to. For even more oddness and "bucking the system" in a way: there is the less talked about subject of eunuchs in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle East (a surprisingly complicated subject, as at the time by and large eunuch meant "unable to consummate a marriage/reproduce" for any reason-- which included sheer unwillingness, not just castration. So, while still seen as a lesser caste in the general public's eyes, there was even a kind of "third sex" thing going on). Just mentioning that because it's yet another kind of odd thing that complicates the past. So, yeah, the Ancient Greeks (and also Ancient Near East in this regard) had some different ideas of sex/gender/etc that I imagine Metatron, his weirdo commenters, and the writer of the "Ancient Greece was LGBT paradise" article all would find objectionable or at least odd.
@@NotJonJost Love your initial description of the situation!! 🤣 That's a classic! Yeah, it feels like actual scholarly debate without inserting absolutes, bigotry or wishful thinking is sadly rare on this particular topic, within UA-cam or elsewhere? 😔 I did particularly like the vid Jimmy (The Welsh Viking) did on intersex people through history, because as usual he was comfortable with lots of nuance & uncertainty, whilst simultaneously presenting the firm facts we do have, and being open about his own personal position. Would've hoped to see something similar from Raphael (Metatron), but gosh. Sounds more like he's heading into personal rant territory with Shad...? 😒 Even his definition of what counts as homosexual sounds odd! 🤔 There's so many pieces depicting eromenoi being kissed or um... essentially groped by their erastes, & we're just going to handwave all that? But then maybe he also qualifies Greek pederasty as "not gay"? (!) Must make time to actually watch that vid... Yes, eunuchry (in its various forms) is another space that seems to be not much spoken about! I think the fact it usually arose from child mutilation perhaps makes historical commentators uncomfortable to analyse it as a wider social phenomenon, or accept any positives in the later lives of the victims? But then we also have highly-religious adult versions like the self-castrating cross-dressing Galli, so as usual, the field is complex & interesting...
I've noticed a lot of them are American, who have never been to the places they are talking about, therefore can say bizarre things like Hadrians Wall is a road, when you can literally see it. I feel that they see them as fantasy lands where they can easily just make stuff up.
@@brookejamieson1523 I'd agree if I hadn't seen just as much nonsense from non-Americans, it's just the sheer population of the U.S. makes it loom larger lol
I think the world of ARGs (and to a much lesser extent, creepy pasta) has a lot to answer for, in terms of presenting fictional stories as "real" in the digital space. I love the innovation of this kind of storytelling, but we really need to clearly label fictional work on Tik Tok, Twitter, and other media.
And dangerously fictional work, at that! 😳 (I'm looking at you, 5 min crafts...) There's a huge community of awesome debunkers in all sorts of fields on YT, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the algorithms necessarily work great at flagging them as "related content" to people who desperately need to see them, as opposed to their existing fans...? 🤔
And people need to start using their brains to distinguish easily dismissable bullshit from truth. So much of this crap is so _blatantly_ fake that only an active moron or a mentally disabled 12 year old would believe it to be true. So many people these days have apparently let their brains fall out.
Oh gosh, I just remembered people who have a poor grip on reality due to mental health issues could easily play an AR horror game and form strong paranoia and anxiety because of it. AR developers have a responsibility to make it clear at the outset that their games are fictional and just for fun.
Ehhh not... really. People are having this conversation since the case of the Slenderman girl but anynone with sensible grip on reality KNOWS these aren't true and nowadays people are more aware about args, less prone to believe in "internet urban legends" and most args disclaim they are a work fiction.
@@ricardomiles2957 I dunno, man. I think if you're an internet savvy person, that is true, but I know a lot of people who aren't Extremely Online who would struggle to sort truth from fiction.
I JUST did a college exam worth 50% of my grade yesterday on media literacy in social media and this video would’ve helped SO MUCH. As a fan I wouldve been able to study whilst enjoying it😞
As a library science student (who even wrote an essay on misinformation) I am so grateful for this video and all your videos. Information and media literacy are increasingly important but increasingly neglected in education and it's kinda scary. Also love that you acknowledge that no one is perfect, and mistakes still happen when it comes to sourcing info.
Tbh I'm not sure that they've ever been taught especially well? 😬 People's tolerance for written content was definitely a lot greater pre-digital age...-just check out the old wall-of-text ad copy! 😂 But I don't really believe general media literacy was ever that much better...? Think for example of the witch-hunting craze, the War of the Worlds scare, or how propaganda's been used through both world wars...
Thanks again to Harry’s! Click here www.harrys.com/kazrowe to redeem your Trial Set for just $5!
Enjoyed the videos as always, recent viewer subscribed a week or so ago; There is one video I think you might have some researching and that is if Mark Twain was truly Atheist as we have been taught or did he just really dislike the Catholic church. I have seen arguments for both. It seems also that those from those times wee often seen as Atheist if they dared rebel against the Catholic church in some areas, not all but some.
Idk if Harry's made you put the ad at the beginning, but I will say with serious topics like this, it makes you seem less serious immediately going into an ad after your hook. I know you aren't less serious, but as someone looking on the outside it seems disingenuous just an fyi.
@@daemonbug what is the alternative? Ideally creators could just be paid properly, but until that time- why should someone not be compensated a living wage for their full time job? Bffr, this isn't that serious of a topic and the sponsorship does not detract from the quality of the video or it's conetent
I like the "no pink tax," thing, but do they actually have anything pink? I would've guessed no.
@@tinkergnomad Pink tax just means things for women cost more than the same things for men I.E. personal care products
The free bleeding one made me so mad. There is evidence that many very ancient societies used some form of padding so they didn't free bleed. The idea that the French aristocrats would just... bleed all over their rococo decor is complete and utter madness.
i can’t imagine anyone being comfortable freebleeding, it’s messy and uncomfortable as is, i can’t imagine walking around like that every month
That sounds like the sort of thing people would say about their enemies across the water.
It’s true, many ancient cultures were noted and known to use forms of cloth rags, mostly made of linen. Though some cultures were known to use a form of bog moss (no joke), as it was highly absorbent.
true, but it's fun mocking the french
Ikr... where do they thing the phrase "on the rag" COMES FROM
The British silence on poopy Versailles is the most valid point ever. There’s no way the British wouldn’t have been absolutely RAGGING on them for being nasty there’d still be jokes about it to this day
This is what I've always thought is the ultimate way to shut down "the US didn't go to the moon" even tho I've never had the chance to try it: if the US didn't go to the Moon, why wouldn't the Soviets debunk the Moon landing? They used everything even slightly wrong they could find about the US in their propaganda (and vice versa) so why would they ever put up with a fake moon landing?
UNLESS the British were also doing it. (I'm joking)
@@aphemorpha I.. as an indigenous woman this could also be a mad valid take 😂 (mostly kidding lol)
They even went as far as to make fun of and ridicule French fashions in the Georgian era. Even to those in Britain who adopt French fashions got lampooned.
Actually as you heard in the video they didn't have rags, so um like actually? /s
The "Versailles court members pooped in the corner" walked so "Hogwarts students use to pee on the floor and magic it away" could stumble and fall
LMAO 💀💀💀
There are no lavatories in the starship Enterprise.
...That's what the Transporter is for.
@@willmfrank “Beam my shit up, Scotty”
On the pee?
Captain Kirk never used a toilet on the Enterprise because they used point to point transporters to remove waste😂
One of my biggest pet peeves is people misunderstanding the way historical people used the term ‘bathed’ vs ‘washed’. People read that historical people didn’t ‘bathe’ as frequently as we do now, and think they were dirty and disgusting. But historically to ‘bathe’ was a distinct term vs ‘washing’. Before plumped bathrooms, someone may not have submerged themselves in an entire tub full of water very often, called ‘bathing’. But people did ‘wash’, aka give themselves a scrub down with a bowl water and a cloth, what we’d now call a sponge bath.
The Romans would rub down with perfumed oil and then use what was basically a blunt sickle to scrape off sweat and old skin when they really wanted to get clean. Sitting in water was for socializing...
Oh wait, I forgot, they don't exist...
(/s)
Thank you for this! I had no idea the difference between the two.
Some will even say Europeans didn’t bathe or wash themselves until the moors taught them which isn’t true. Everywhere on the planet had a bathing culture of some kind and discovered it independently.
I like to compare it in my own head to washing my hair and body vs just taking a quick body shower.
There are several other factors why historical people weren't as disgusting as people today think of - from the middle ages to the 19th century, all people wore linen next to the skin, a fabric that is highly absorbent and moisture wicking. And people would change their shifts sometimes multiple times a day! There were no synthetics fibres that hold sweat against the skin that we wear now that makes us feel sweaty and gross at the end of the day. And in a world without central heating, there would be months at a time people probably barely sweat at all!
I do historical reenacting, and I have worn linen shifts under wool dresses on 30C days working outdoors, and felt extremely cool and fresh.
“I would prefer to hate them for the true bad stuff than what is fake.” I couldn’t agree with you more.
Right. That’s why I thought it was weird she accused a guy of trying to erase LGBTQ history
Reminds me of the Straw man fallacy. No point in winning an argument when you're not allowing the other party to put up a challenge and show you their true points.
Yeah I hate this trend online nowadays where suddenly nuance doesn't seem to exist anymore. Like... we can criticize these people for the things they have done WHILE not making up blatant lies about them, and doing so will actually put the spotlight on the bad stuff they have done so we can, you know, focus on that, which should be the goal anyway.
@@semoremo9548 I agree with you. Unfortunately you kick puppies and spit on babies so I disagree.
Same vibe as “you don’t have to make up an evil shadow government to hate, you can just hate the government.”
They literally taught me "the Europeans believed the earth was flat" thing in elementary school and I'm still mad about it. I love your videos so much! Thank you for doing these
Yes! I believed it until high school math, where we had to recreate Eratosthenes calculations for the circumference of the earth from Ancient Greece.
same!!
Modern flat-earthers claim they still taught that the earth was flat in school 70 years ago, but they burned all the school books.
I must admit that we were taught that as well (in Europe or at least were I'm from lol) during the early school years and only later on learned that it was a victorian smear campaign
@@tom1644x - Or they are all Terry Prachett fans who don't want to admit it. (Fantasy writer whose "Discworld" books all take place on a flat planet supported by huge elephants standing on the back of a gigantic turtle.)
Honestly, I think part of the problem with Keller is that most school only give her life past the "wah wah" moment about a paragraph, so the story becomes "this girl was broken until a very nice teacher fixed her!" while the real story is closer to being "these two disabled women worked their asses off to succeed in a society that barely saw them as human" (which is less "feel good")
Oof! That rings a bell. For societies that don't seem to value teachers nearly enough, we do seem to be oddly fond of these "...and then the teacher magically fixed everything!" narratives, don't we? 🤔 (Dangerous Minds, anyone...?)
No disrespect to Ms. Sullivan at all, but that narrower narrative, to my mind, drastically devalues the incredible intelligence & strength of will Ms. Keller had in her own right...?
And the schools teach it this way on purpose, because Keller and Sullivan were strongly opinionated socialists. The narrowed baby version turns Keller into a good ol' bootstrapping American saint.
Same thing they do with MLK Jr. and pretty much everyone else in the entire civil rights movement.
It is really strange as it being deemed as a teacher-student situation when it was two intelligent women working together. Honestly I think if it was two men it would be seen as very different.
@@annastevens1526 I feel this so much as an educator. My country is one of the top scorers on the international PISA tests and we do a lot to be considerate of student's needs and differences. I honestly think we are at a point where every child who can do well is already doing pretty well and those who aren't doing well have external forces preventing them from doing well that we can't quickly fix like cognitive disabilities or severe trauma.
People love the stories like dangerous minds, hellen keller, and education by tara westover (great book about a girl raised in an abusive morman household who "escapes" by self-educating). They are all feel good stories but they are all about students who did not have opportunities who once given the smidgen of opportunity everyone else had by birthright went on to do great things. But people want that applied to every student even though it's a very unique situation. It's the difference between finally giving a person glasses who could barely see and trying to teach someone to see who is blind and everyone saying to you "well why can't you do what you did with that other kid who got glasses!"
I remember an interview between Bill Gates asking Tara Westover how we could improve the public education system and she confusedly says "i'm not really the best person to ask.. i didn't attend public school". People love the "quick fix" stories but don't want to do the long difficult work of getting to the root of these systemic problems.
Also she was a socialist
7:34 The reason why Colombus decided to go in the opposite direction to get to Asia was precisely because they already knew the Earth was round. he expected to eventually find Asia. what was new to Europeans back then was the realization of an entire continent being in the middle
And he believed he'd reach Asia/The Indies because he heard the circumference of the Earth from a guy who did the math wrong, abd had a nap that depicted Asia as being far bigger than it actually is, so he thought the distance from Europe to Asia was easily doable in ships of the day.
This in turn is why a bunch of the folks he asked to fund the expedition prior to the Spanish crown declined, because they did the correct(well closer to correct, margins of error and all that) math and figured that crossing the combined Atlantic/Pacific Ocean that seemed to cover that entire journey, would be completely impossible to cross(and considering how close Columbus's first expedition came to failing, they were quite right)
Correct. He wanted to find a different route to India after the Ottomans had blocked the land route.
@@RipOffProductionsLLCSo what I'm hearing is we'd have potentially avoided a lot of shit had those first folks asked him just how big he thought the Earth was, rather than merely assuming he was a dumbarse who knew how big it was and was vastly overestimating himself/the ships' capabilities.
Yep he was not laughed at because he thought the earth was round, but because he claimed it was 9,000km shorter circumference and the people laughing at him were correct
@@TVAVStudiosUnfortunately no. People tell him that the math was wrong, he just decided he was smarter and he was correct
"History is weird enough without relying on myths" THANK YOU
Fr we need more videos on "the great stink" or something. A giant cartoon-y stink cloud being the reason that people started learning about germs is so insane to me
Obviously not...lest we wouldn't need myths...
@@brettrobinson2901 i dont know what happened for you to become so indeferent to the weirdest shit humanity has done, but if youre that bored with western history try looking at ancient chinese history. it's buckwild to say the least.
@@brettrobinson2901ever heard of the story of a guy who lifted a rock then wrore a first person story in the view of the rock saying it was lifted by him, only for his head to be smashed by the rock?
One of the main reasons why I don't read much fiction.
Harriet Tubman: saves countless lives ensuring countless legacies, demonstrates incredible resiliance, courage and conviction and represents some of the best qualities of humanity.
Tiktok 2023: she punched babies.
I do eagerly await the day we as a society decide that it was actually racist for her to save slaves because they should have been able to do it themselves and her not letting them was oppressive.
After all we already decided it was racist to have a Native American on butter so we kicked him out and kept the land
@@creed8712please, learn anything about what people actually thought about that. You're furious at something you think happened, but didn't.
@@JJ-M so saying I can’t get land o-lakes but without the native dude on his land
@@creed8712 .... sigh, why do I try. You don't want to learn, you just want to be angry, even if it's at shadows in your head. You are on a history channel, complaining about a fake version of events that did not happen like that, and when told this, you double down. Needless to say, I see no reason to lead this particular mule to water.
@@creed8712 Wait... are you seriously bitching in the YT comments over a fucking butter mascot?😹A mascot you're allegedly so upset over that you forgot she was a woman? While also inventing an entirely unrelated and imaginary second scenario, just so you can passive-aggressively mald over that too? Publicly???
Try harder, tryhard.
“Harriet Tubman punched babies” is so funny but “Harriet Tubman gave babies opium” might be funnier
She would have a good career as a pharmacist today.
😂😂😂😂
Basically Harriet Tubman did the 19th century equivalent of giving a kid benadryl during a flight.
I do appreciate how she even acknowledges in the video with her chuckle. No no no harriet tubman was not elbow dropping babies to keep em quiet. She was drugging them with opium and other potent sedatives.
By modern standards and understandings, not great. But, for what was known at the time, brilliant.
"We need this baby to be quiet and calm for a long time. Here is a mix of plants we can feed them that will make them sleepy and tired so we dont get caught by people hunting down escaped slaves."
I was brought up on Gripe Water for wind as a baby, as were our kids. This contained alcohol (3.5%) until 1992! My grandmother used to buy cocaine and laudanum from the pharmacist for pain until it was made illegal in 1920. How times change.
The idea of Edgar Allen Poe shitposting with fake news is just hysterical to me.
I once had an argument with a TikTok "historian" who didn't know the difference between primary and secondary sources.
OK what's a secondary source? I only know of primary, people who were there (and could still be unreliable). Is secondary like contemporary newspapers?
@@matttran7161 A secondary source is a source created by people who did not experience the event or thing they're talking about. They are generally considered less reliable as the creator can only know what they have been *told* about the thing by others, which leaves room for bias, misunderstanding, and inaccuracy.
@@LollipopLozzy454545 actually primary and secondary sources both have their pros and cons. Secondary sources are less direct but may have more of a sense of perspective
@@matttran7161primary sources are firsthand accounts of the event, usually by people who were there as a witness; these are good for direct accounts of the action, but are ultimately accounts of people that can mistake things or just plain get things wrong. you're good using these as a way to get accounts and experiences of the time period, but stray away from making definitive accounts from them. iirc it also includes things like technical documents, blueprints, plans of action, memos, etc, which are generally more reliable but require augmentation from personal accounts
secondary sources are sources from people who weren't there directly, and are generally based on primary sources to draw a conclusion. unlike primary sources they're a lot more reliable if gotten from a reliable source since they tend to combine perspectives and draw facts and conclusions from there. this is because anywhere from small details ("it was at 12:33 pm!" when it was infact at 1 pm) to major details ("i knew for certain he was dead when he fell over", when he just tripped instead) could be wrong, and so multiple accounts have to be used to establish what actually happened. these have a drawback in that they're also prone to the bias of the author, who may have a favored narrative or not enough primary sources to draw the right conclusions
there's tertiary sources as well, which consist of multiple secondary sources: think Wikipedia or Britannica, which are good overall summaries of events and tend to be a bit less biased if made up entirely of reliable sources. hopefully this answers your question in a long-winded manner
@@matttran7161 I've always been taught that primary sources are from the people/era in question. Testimonials, letters, memoirs/autobiographies, artifacts, contemporary writings or art, etc. would be primary sources. Secondary sources are created after the fact by people who studied the event/era rather than living it, such as biographies, textbooks, essays, etc.
For example, primary sources for Marie Antoinette's life would include artifacts, contemporary letters/press/art, quotes she said or people then said about her, etc. Secondary sources about her life would include biographies, documentaries, reproductions of her artifacts, PhD dissertations, etc.
are you telling me the AI videos of biden and donald trump playing minecraft aren’t historically accurate???
But the ones of them playing Yu-Gi-Oh are definitely real
The ones with them eating concrete are also real!
No those are real
@@trash_bender420 I want to live in a world where that is the case honestly.
@@DarknessLiesWithinDepending on the circumstances, that could be good or really, really bad.
The amount of times I have face palmed when someone said a medieval or renisuance garment 'gave off Bridgerton vibes' is astonishing.
"this looks like a renaissance painting" walked so "bridgerton vibes" could run!!
I usually say “it has Morden recency vibes kind of like Bridgerton” when I see clothes
God bridgerton has doomed society for fashion historians.
Oh my god… and the idea that every woman in every era up until now was tightlacing. NOPE. I don’t even know tightlacing would be possible in a corset from the Regency period? I mean, perhaps, but it would not have the same waist-snatching effect of an Edwardian or Victorian era corset.
Or when you look up Victorian and Edwardian clothing/patterns/accessories and get a shitload of Bridgerton crap.
Just. No.
You could do a whole series on "inspiration porn."
As a disabled veteran who has been dealing with worsening medical issues over time, I'm often met with some form of "try harder, eat healthier, meditate, etc . . ." as a cure. Which then leads to my personal struggles with having to use a wheelchair most of the time because of my broken body.
And there comes another issue -- A majority of wheelchair users are ambulatory, meaning we don't necessarily have to use a wheelchair 100% of the time in 100% of the situations. And so many of us are treated like liars, or exaggerators, or whiners, or overly dramatic. Sadly, I've been accused of "milking" my disability, of lying, of being a hypochondriac, etc.
It's horrible and disgusting.
I absolutely second this. I'm disabled via a trifecta of mental illness/neurodivergence, infectious disease, and a congenital spine defect.
God, the "try harder"/"live up to my pre-existing concepts of who you should be" shit that people are put through. I feel for you deeply, and I'm sorry you have been and are being subjected to that. I want stronger words than horrible and disgusting to exist.
That fact about wheelchair users is so, so important. Disabled folks are judged for just about anything we do, any medications we take, and any devices we use to assist ourselves - I used to walk with a cane or a service dog most of the time. I no longer do, as my physical pain is finally under control. Thus, I must have been exaggerating and faking.
It makes me so, so angry.
As long as we live in a society that thinks "you don't look disabled" is a compliment and only values disabled people for either providing the public with inspiration porn via our lives, attitudes, and actions or being able to perform capitalism,
videos like the series that you've suggested are so important
(also - and I hope this is an okay thing to say - thank you for your service 💜)
I am in school for physical therapy, and the thought that someone who uses a wheelchair part of the time being called a liar has never occured to me. Of course it makes sense that people would say that when you think about it, but I guess it's just made more sense to me from the beginning that some people would be able to get around fine while at home or on really good days but would need some extra support when in the community or on worse days. Thank you for mentioning this so I can consider how to educate future patients in addressing this type of response
That's ridiculous! Do people really think it's an all-or-nothing situation, for a medical issue they probably know nothing about?
Yeah, it's pretty wild. I see it in all forms of disability. My best friend is blind but doesn't require a cane or guide dog, so apparently she's "faking it." Wild y'all.
@@trustytrest Yes. Yes, they do.
I have many of these all-or-nothing stories.
A classic for me: I was walking my mobility dog to the pharmacy, minding my own business...
when a woman stopped me, blocking my path,
asked me who I was training the dog for,
and when I said he was mine,
she looked me up and down slowly and asked what was "wrong" with me because I didn't look like her idea of what disability should be.
Invisible vs. visible,
not using a wheelchair or cane or service dog every day,
not being the "right" kind of disabled... the list goes on and on.
As a physically disabled woman, it makes me so annoyed when I have had people tell me that Helen Keller was a fraud, it always felt like they were diminishing me and what I and so many others are even capable of, just because I am a little person and sometimes I use a wheelchair to get around and have hearing aids, does not mean that I am less capable than anyone else.
I am so sorry this happens to you. I have read her book and she was a fantastic woman. She fought for civil rights and spoke out for women's suffrage. The story of her and Annie Sullivan is so great to me. She was not a fraud and you are valid!
BRAVO! Thankyou so very much for sharing. You're illuminating what you have to face every day
Edit: I LITERALLY paused the video 5 seconds before the Helen Keller part cause I spotted this comment and just HAD to ask about it cause what the fuck!?! Disregard my questions below! I'll leave this comment up so we can all laugh about what a huge derp I am! :D
Fraud? In what way? That Helen Keller was faking her disabilities? Is that what they're asserting?
absolutely infuriating on your and every other deaf and/or blind persons behalf
The reputation of one person who lived a hundred years ago should not have any effect on how you feel about yourself.
I became aware of the "Rome isnt real" woman when she responded to someone on Twitter with the claim that old paintings have that yellow discolouration not because of the aging varnish, but because the lack of sunglasses and greater amount of time spent outside meant most people were colourblind and couldn't tell the difference. I pointed out that it's awfully coincidental that removing the varnish (an understandably controversial practice!!) reveals more accurate colour rendering, that there aren't any other kinds of pervasive colour errors in art of the era, and that besides plenty of people don't wear sunglasses all that much and we dont have broad society-wide colour vision issues because of it. She blocked me.
I did start to wonder if it was all a troll; this video leads me to suspect it's something closer to a grift, albeit fishing not for money but rather for engagement.
EDIT: After some reflection on the nature of conspiracy theories, I think it's more a matter of motivated belief. I don't think the belief is insincere, but we all have a tendency to settle on beliefs (i.e. stop examining them for inconsistencies) which are somehow satisfying to us, be it that they're comforting, or that they conform with our preconceptions, or that they position us socially in some way we find appealing. The latter can be particularly relevant for conspiracy theories: people seem able to accommodate beliefs that are self-contradictory - and which in some cases go completely against the believer's previous values - because it places them in an engaged community with a strong sense of being party to something special.
For Donna, however, the social component seems to be more that of being an authority figure revealing profound truths: her asserted authority and insight is so great that it completely undermines significant portions of academia. I think she genuinely believes it, because we all want to believe that we're special and will have a significant impact on the world.
The claim that spending time outside without sunglasses can lead to "becoming colorblind" should be an instant sign that the speaker is an idiot. Colorblindness is a genetic condition, and is _absolutely not_ something that can be caused by "too much sunlight."
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
the "sticks your fingers in your ears and repeats 'I can't hear you, I can't her you....'" response to contrary arguments, a sign of someone who is surely confident in their position and can defend it using hard evidence (not)
Ohhhhhh, that's why I don't like influencers. They're modern grifters!!
@@AaronLitz too much sunlight? what does she think we are? blind salamanders from mexico?
the "rome was an invention of the spanish inquisition" thing made me so angry i learned everything i could about the OP's arguments so i could refute them and now im about to go back to school for anthropology
Classics major, and yeah those videos made me incredibly mad in a way that inspired me to learn way more about Roman culture. I have to say, if anyone was going to invent a language, WHY would they make it like Latin? That's a theory credibility knock off the bat I'd say.
Rome was an invention of the Spanish inquisition? What in the fuuuuuck? Have these fools studied any history?
@DJ Casheeel - So, a negative effect in that you challenged the assumptions and are now doing something about it. All the best in your learning experience!
Hey, find out about the first dark age. That'll blow your mind.
We DO need more teachers. Please do.
I think the Harriet Tubman tweet is def a misunderstanding of slang. It made instant sense to me bc I was always told she gave babies and toddlers meds that would keep them sleeping to keep them quiet.
I know countless ppl that say knocked out in reference to sleep all the time.
It’s almost funny though…I giggle at the idea of her decking babies for some reason.
Honestly, the reality of giving babies drugs is equally funny, they didn't have to lie about it for the bit.
@@falconstudios146i’m not even sure if the original poster was necessarily lying. i think they just got misinterpreted
no fr. i hate when people who aren’t familiar with slang and AAVE jump to conclusions with things. leads to a lot of issues. it’s not really their fault, but it’s really scary and disappointing when things get misconstrued to a large level.
That reminds me of the guy who had the police called on him because he said he would “blow up” the bathroom
The free bleeding one makes me so mad bc I write fanfiction and have had to research this very subject. There's literally physical historical evidence of how people took care of their periods before the invention of modern period products.
I feel you. Right now I'm takin a 5 minute break from working on a fanfic set in a fantasy version of the 1500's, and I still feel the need to add as much historical accuracy as I can. The only reason I made it clear that this is a fantasy world was in case I included misinformation.
Fanfic writers are unsung heroes in terms of historical accuracy. I deadass went down a rabbit hole for a good several hours to find out approximately when humans started using nets to catch fish and around when it could be observed that said information was reaching other coastal settlements. Then there's the stories set in fantasy late-1300s where I absolutely have to get the food they ate right or I will explode.
@@lolatulip3609 Me, up at 2 am, vibrating from all the caffeine: If I dont work out how to describe the clothes my characters have to undress for s m u t accurately in early 1800s I will _perish_
man, I cannot TELL you how much research I have done on *one specific historical family* to be able to reference them in a fanfiction centered around a fictionalized version of a real historical figure 😮💨 hours upon hours, months on an in-depth family tree, all just to not use most of them as characters
@@Just_CaII_Me_Jay oh i know that pain very well... But never throw away the notes! It may come in handy later
The problem with Momlennial was that if your debunking got enough attention, she'd pull up information on you, tell her fans you were a racist/misogynist/white supremacist and, in the case of a few, openly dox them (which is why we think her original tiktok was taken down).
I guess one shouldn't be surprised if someone who showed a total lack of ethics in their presenting of "information" also showed lack of integrity in how they dealt with those who challenged them...? 😢 That's tough to hear, though.
Glad they were taken down (at least temporarily! 🙄) But that sort of pattern is troubling because I feel like it discourages many who might otherwise speak up to challenge misinformation-spreaders? We've seen a similar pattern here with right-wing extremists physically threatening & digitally harassing those who step up to support the LGBT community. Doing the right thing isn't necessarily safe alas!
Well, that’s a special level of vileness.
These people make me want to go back when guillotines we’re still used
I followed her on twitch for a long time engaging and funny. But after the tik tok stuff, i guess they quit streaming.
I actually found the truth of the Harriet Tubman knocking out babies with natural medications bc that makes so much sense considering her access to those things and the fact that, yes, a crying baby is a bad thing when hiding from bloodhounds
If only Hawkeye Pierce had known that, he might not have had that psychotic break. (Spoilers for a 40 year old episode of MASH, I guess)
Yeah, I found out about that a long time ago. I thought that the literal knocking out people were making sketches of was some sort of pun, I had no idea that people actually believed in that…
Kind of like giving a kid Benadryl now. I mean, it's not great but considering the alternative...
@Wren Massey - Making a child sleepy is not exactly the same as "knocking them out".
@@MossyMozart yeah that is true, but the same wording, “knocking out”, can be applied to either literally knocking someone out through force or making someone go to sleep through natural medications.
Oh my god I knew a girl in high school who was ADAMANT about the Helen Keller conspiracy. She said she was going to make her senior quote “Fake it till you make it, just like Hellen Keller” (it got denied btw). My history teacher basically called this girl dumb and my Bible teacher just laughed.
Damn the Bible teacher getting in on that
When the history teacher and the bible teacher both agree that you're an idiot, you're probably an idiot. That or the "history teacher" isn't all that good at history. But in this case it's *definitely* the former.
What is a Bible teacher? Do they only teach about the Bible, or religion in general? I don’t think we have Bible teachers where I live so that’s the first time I hear that.
Tiktok only adds to the low awareness and intelligence in America
@DanAndHoe Its most likely a religious private school. In the US for instance we do not have religious classes where qe are taught that one religion is correct. At the most some schools may have a religious class where different religions are taught ans explored in a removed sort of way.. but this is pretty rare. Private achools are able to indoctrinate the kids into one religion and it costs money to go there while public schools cannot endorse religon bc it is publically funded. I hope this helped you underrstand a little. The commenter may not be from the US but if they were this woulld most likely be the case
I heard Helen Keller urinated on Harriet Tubman's underground railroad, so Harriet ran over her with a train.
Its true, i was there i saw it. Also im blind.
It's true I was the train
@@sourdropIt's true. I am Harriet Tubman.
Wow, that is fascinating. I had no idea. Now if you'll excuse me, I shall go spread this information to a massive audience. I trust you 100%.
This one made me chuckle
The Helen Keller thing bugs me so much. My elementary school was named after her, the inside of the building is lined with brail and, there's the alphabet in sign language along the walls outside the library. We have numerous books on her, we watched documentaries of her in class. I've learned so much about her, she's always been a special influential person for me, so it's really upsetting that someone I have always been inspired by is caught up in this conspiracy. I have a disabled brother, so even more so I love that there is someone like Helen Keller to look up to. It just makes me so sad.
To me, it feels like able bodied people can't fathom that a disabled woman could do things for herself and thrive. they can't understand that she could learn to read. The thing is, it would be like people who can hear and see learn for her as she knows no different.
They don't realise that disabled people don't work the same way as they do, so we accomidate our needs and find a different way to do things. like I use a walking stick and when I was little I taught myself how to button up my school Cardigans with one hand. These people have a very small minded way of thinking as they probably know nothing about disabilities or what disabled people do differently to live.
@@LJNorthey yes, that's really good input and a really good perspective. Society was not built with disabled people in mind. Therefore it's inspiring to see someone like Helen Keller beat the odds and succeed in a society that wasn't made to accommodate her disabilities. I feel like people who claim that Helen Keller faked it, both underestimate the abilities of disabled people, like you mentioned. But they also see them as lesser, just because they live in a world that does not cater to their specific disability. It's extremely problematic to view people that way, when much of the stigma around disability comes from our society. Either way, we should continue to celebrate women like Helen Keller, and combat the incorrect narratives about her
You can just look at Paralympics to see what disabled people can do. What about alpine skiing? Going 100 km/h..... on one leg! Or any of the sports people excels in despite having to work harder than able bodied. Actually, I would call people doing sports in Paralympics absolutely able bodied.
I still don't believe it
helen keller believed ur brother should be euthanized lol
I remember a girl in my psych class being SO deadset that Hellen Keller wasn't real. I always thought she was just an idiot. I don't say that about a lot of people, but it's disheartening to find out that it's not just her
Someone said that to me today. He was surprised when I told him she wasn't deaf and blind from birth, and couldn't fathom that someone could learn how to speak or comprehend a language of any kind through touch. I can't understand people.
@@z.amelius *I* admittedly have a hard time understanding how she did it, and that's what allowed the conspiracy to spread. People don't get how she did things, and the comfortable answer is to conclude that she didn't. Hearing that girl talk about it, her explanation was more or just "well, I guess she could do things, but... that's hard" and a little bit of "oh, well, she had help with some things, so therefore can we really say any of her accomplishments are hers?"
@@drewjay8940 - Helen Keller may have been blind and deaf, but she wasn't stupid. When Anne Sullivan came to teach her, she had fertile ground in Helen. Keller always acknowledged her huge debt to her teacher. And yes, it was very hard on Anne, Helen, and Helen's family.
@@MossyMozart exactly! I wasn't trying to say otherwise. I wasn't calling Helen Keller an idiot, that was about the girl who thought Hellen Keller wasn't real.
much of helen’s writings regarding her radical socialism were burned after her death. interestingly, her pro-eugenics writings were not. being deaf-blind is quite rare (only 1/20,000 if i remember correctly), and most people have no experience or knowledge about it beyond helen keller. so when someone spreads ableist lies, it’s easier for many people to fall for because they have no frame of reference.
Lol imagining flat-earthers as being less well-informed about science than medieval peasants makes me smile
To be fair, in the book "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians" it is noted that while educated people very largely held that the earth was round, there seemed to be a variety of views among peasants.
@@IsmailofeRegime Yeah us humans have always been a vast bunch, even in beliefs, views and opinions
@@devonmunn5728ESPECIALLY in our views, beliefs, and oinions
Just a point, there is a difference between round and globe.
@@user-oo7kg9ew8sWhat? Doesn’t negate their point at all. They knew the earth was a globe hundreds of years ago
As a daycare worker I am unsure whether to laugh or cry that people thought Harriet Tubman was giving these kids abusive head trauma. One would think her punching out a baby would cause there to be some form of noise in of itself. SHE WAS NOT ONE PUNCH MAN
We're all One Punch Man when our opponents are babies. Also, even if she had punched babies (I'm not saying that she did, I'm speaking purely hypothetically here), that wouldn't diminish all the good that she did.
@@itsaUSBline Harriet Tubman is one of the most amazing women in history no doubt. One of the other things she did was she made a cloth bag to put the kiddos in that held them on her waist, in a way she pioneered the idea of wearing a baby, to soothe them.
@@endergamer7483 pioneered? You can't honestly tell me she was the one and only person who put a baby on her body? She's an amazing woman but don't be like Tik Tok.
@@endergamer7483 Cavemen wore babies in bundles similar to inuit people's papooses. People all over the world have been wearing their babies for thousands upon thousands of years, there is anthropological evidence of this on literally every continent (from indigenous north Americans, indigenous South Americans, people from the arctic regions like the Saami people from Lappland, people in Qin China, and all over eastern Europe, Russia, etc.). Wearing a baby was not in anyway a new thing in the mid 19th century, nor was it pioneered by Harriet Tubman.
It's straight up movie logic. A quick little 《POW》 and the kid is out and quiet for hours, and not, you know, screaming as loud as they can because now they are scared AND in pain.
It's kinda like the old myth that I see perpetuated around that medieval people didn't brush their teeth, meanwhile (iirc), many of their skulls had perfectly fine teeth because sugar wasn't a huge part of their diet and there is evidence they had toothpastes and even mouthwash. I think it's pretty safe to say that despite time periods, people don't like to feel too dirty and will find ways to keep themselves as clean as one can...
kinda late also that the bread (and their diet overall) they ate are coarse as fuck like imagine a sourdough with hard unpopped popcorn inside, that shit's gonna girnd your teeth that they ACTUALLY grow properly (yeah that goes into the topic of how the prevalence of soft/sweet foods in general ruined our teeth which is a topic all to itself)
If anything the only people with bad teeth would be the nobles because the poorer population wouldn’t have had the money for sugar
God, I'm pretty sure my parents heard the Versailles bathroom thing AT a tour of Versailles. THAT'S how pervasive that particular bit of misinformation is!!
i was in another museum in paris and the tour guide fucking misgendered an artist even tho his pronouns were written on the fucking wall???? some ppl need to be fired
I heard it on an Absolute History documentary
@@madmagdelena absolute history keeps getting shat on by the costuming youtube friend group (abby cox, mina le, karolina zebrowska, bernadette banner etc) so im not surprised theyd day shit like this
@@melowlw8638 a fate worse than death, misgendering a painting 😂
@@Pixelkip an artist. Bro if you don't even know the pronouns of the person you're teaching about i don't trust you as a teacher
The fact that us English have spent centuries clowning on Napoleon for his height - even though it was perfectly average for the time - is the most damning proof that the pooing on the floor at Versailles is not true, cos ur right. English propaganda (especially in the Napoleonic era) would have been on it like locusts on grain.
The "He was average height for the time" thing makes the short jokes even funnier.
One thing about the Poe balloon hoax, he actually showed up at the place where he said the balloon would land carrying a sign telling everyone that came they'd been duped. Essentially the whole thing was an elaborate prank because he held a low opinion of the readers for the magazine he wrote for.
Makes me love him even more 😂
Iconic
what a dick hahaha
As a critic, Poe had a reputation that made rivals of other writers whose work failed to impress him.
This is how I feel as someone who is really, really into wildlife/nature and has been my entire life. I'm in school for it and I work in wildlife rehab. People make the wildest out of pocket claims about animals, usually some romanticized fact with little scientific backing. Then I get called a Karen or a liar when I correct it. So frustrating.
For real.
I also think the world would be a better place if the difference between "poisonous" animals and "venomous" animals was common knowledge, instead of them being considered synonyms.... 😭
@@alexw.7097 or if it was common knowledge that the vast, vast majority of snakes and spiders are not venomous and virtually none are inherently aggressive.
@@ivy7417 Eyep! Some of the shit I've heard people say when I mention I have snakes is.... Absolutely astounding.
@@alexw.7097 I'm in school studying wildlife ecology and conservation, and I have had peers say to me that they wish all snakes would die. Like dude please change your major what the hell 😭
OMG, it was so hard for me when I moved to Australia from Canada.
I was very used to just letting spiders live in the corners, because natural pest control. Now I have to triple check the spiders to make sure it's not a venomous species. Also, I loved finding snakes as a kid, now I have to be cautious of them😢
In regards to Versailles not having bathrooms at a level of a modern day convention hotel; if you are that rich (like multi-billionaire level), you can pay someone to follow you around all day with a chamber pot for when you need to relieve yourself. And positions like that were sought after, as they gave you access to a lot of information, which in turn made you valuable to a lot of other rich people.
Mr Putin has a secret agent always following Putin with a special suitcase that can be turned into a loo. Putin’s poo is carefully collected, not to leak onto the public.
@@zweisiedler. I think they actually used a form of toilet paper if they were that rich. "I'm so rich I can afford to have paper made specifically for ass-wiping."
The Hellen Keller myth makes me miserable, especially since it shows how little people believe in disabled people, and how little they want to challenge their beliefs about disabled people
Exactly! My friend who is a very avid Tik Tok user once brought the myth up and looked at me genuinely confused when I mentioned it was horribly disrespectful to Helen Keller and anyone else with terrible disabilities
Not excusing it, but i remember watching a video, and people doubt it because there was no known cases of surviving children being both deaf and blind
@@user-sg4ov7ng4h?? can’t tell exactly what you mean but if you mean what i think you do, that’s not true
@@user-sg4ov7ng4h Didn't survive? Why would they not survive? Neither of those are fatal. Go read the wikipedia page on deadblindness.
"In 1994, an estimated 35,000-40,000 United States residents were medically deafblind."
Ignorant people have become arrogant about their own beliefs.
My mom's been taking in a lot of Tik Tok misinformation since the covid vaccine became available to the public, now she just listens to anything from fake movie trailers to alpha males dissing women on their podcasts (not joking)
our parents went from telling us that you can't trust everything you can read online to believing everything they can read online 🫠
@@naurrr fr lmao, I just gave up trying to convince her
@@marveler8994 yeah that’s the sad part, you can’t convince them. My mom was like that with Facebook. If she’d gotten hold of TikTok, ooof
Chad mom
Ugh, I'm really sorry. 😢
I really appreciate Kaz pointing out that fact checking isn't a panacea; people at the time made stuff up or put a spin on the truth - worse, some documents may have been destroyed
@Sarah Watts - Victorians themselves have a bad reputation for fabrication.
that's right. the thing with human sciences (very arbitrary term -- exact sciences like maths and chemistry also rely on previous human made texts) is that it's a constant gamble wether what youre working with even happened or not. as long as there isn't someone alive who can tell you what that time was like, and even that isnt perfectly accurate, research is through a scratched lens at best.
im glad my tiktok history stuff is almost exclusively archaeologists looking at finds and crying abt them or them debunking weird people's misinformation
Miniminuteman is a hero lmao
Yet the algorithm can be tampered with to change that at any time.
@@chandranapier2259 i love being spyed on tbh (joking but it is rly convenient still)
@@naurrr this is the first time im hearing abt them!! idk their tiktok but i looked em up on ytb to check and they have a channel
thanks hehe
@@melowlw8638 I can personally recommend him as well
Regarding the Rome misinformation: I actually met a teenager in real life that was entirely under the impression that Catholicism was culturally appropriated from Mexico… I think she had said she was shown that conspiracy theory from a video much like you showed by a relative of hers, that I had the unfortunate experience of meeting multiple times in my life, and my God, she was consistently knee deep in xenophobic rants and conspiracy theories every single time.
She especially hates Catholic people, so she certainly didn’t get along with anyone in my family. 🤦🏻♀
Every day I live, I lose faith in my generation.
You need an entire scaffolding of other wrong knowledge to hold up that piece of wrongness.
thats so funny because you can critique the catholic church on so many things, especially regarding the forceful spread of religion, and yet,,, instead of getting mad at spanish colonization she got mad at imaginary cultural appropriation i am SOBBING
It's perplexing people not knowing that Catholicism is a big thing in South America due to the colonization from Spanish people, which were very big on it.
@@queertearss Literally this. We were talking about how the church had historically been compliant on the systemic torture at “schools” for indigenous children... Somehow she was angry about cultural appropriation from Mexico to Italy? Yet didn’t know Spain had colonized ANY countries at all.
She didn’t know America was a cluster of colonies from Britain either, she thought America and Britain had always clashed since the beginning of time. 🤦🏻♀
I hope she got away from that crazy relative, I can’t imagine being lied to about the whole world for that long. I do genuinely hope she’s ok, that is some serious abuse no one needs to put up with, family or not. 😕
I remember reading accounts of *one* noblewoman in Versailles who actually did just "go" wherever she wanted. The fact every account about her mentions this does lead one to believe it was very unusual behavior.
So many words and yet you say nothing of importance
@yossarian_ashina you're very self aware. why refer to yourself in the 2nd person tho?
@@bisexualantigoneIncredible.
Take my like.
@@John_Joel_Glantonfuck is your problem? Just wanted to be a douche for no reason or what
@@bisexualantigonepls don’t mind me as i steal this sick sick burn for future usage. I shall attempt to credit you but no promises!
I'd love to have time to run an ancient Egypt history account... but I can't bring myself to do it. Just thinking about fighting misinformation is exhausting.
That's the struggle. It takes half an hour of video time to refute and put into context five seconds of lies. Not to mention the actual research behind the scenes.
Actual historians in Egypt already suffer so much, I feel like ancient Egypt is the only culture/empire being appropriated by people on every continent
I've seen Thai people claim to be the original Egyptians
@@yeah5874 the amount of people who claim to be from somewhere else?? like hello??
also its rly weird that its thai ppl out of other ones bc they have been doing a lot of historical research especially the 90s and its so rich
Be wary of tackling Ancient Egypt. You'll get wrapped up in your work.
@Caleb Leland you'll be calling for Mummy in no time.
The Helen keller conspiracy really pissed me off with its underlying ablelism. Same with the people who say anne frank didn't actually write her diary
Well the second group of people have entirely different agenda for pushing that falsehood…
her dad censored and edited some of her diary if i remember correctly, people took that and decided they cant be sure she wrote any of it
@@warlordofbritannia Yes, but not entirely. Ableism was popularized by the Eugenics movement and Social Darwinism inspired Fascism and the holocaust.
@@evelynwright329given that she was a deeply pent up (on account of thr whole. Yknow.) teenage girl i can definitely imagine a few things hed feel should be cut
@@somedragonbastard and also tbh most parents wouldnt want random strangers reading about their underage (and dead) daughter's sexual fantasies.
This was the first I’d ever heard of the Helen Keller Conspiracy and it freaks me out. I’m a disabled person going into special education and currently working as a writing tutor at my college. We have DSS (Disabled Student Services) which provides accommodations and help to students with disabilities. As a tutor, I will sometimes gently suggest that a student visit DSS to get accommodations for say dyslexia or dysgraphia which is almost always met with disgust and denial. Systemic ableism is real. It is a problem. We do not need it to be enforced by random people on TikTok making lies up for clout.
Thank you Kaz! My elementary school history teacher literally said that in medieval times before Columbus people used to think that the earth is flat. It sucks to see how far some lies have propagated 😭
Same here! All the way up until high school I heard that they thought the earth was flat!
Every Columbus Day my spanish teacher would go on a racist rant about how the liberals want to cancel Columbs and he would always cite that and it was just so strange overall
I think the Gershwins bear some of the responsibility for that.
@@alexp.288 how the hell do teachers know what "cancelling" means now 😭 you musta went to fortnite high school or some shit
I was told that they thought the earth was flat too. I didn’t question it until this video - and I think I’m generally pretty on it with questioning dodgy sources.
I know there is a long running joke about historians calling gay couples ‘friends’ but I find the social change in platonic affection fascinating (especially between men) - it being historically more acceptable for male friends to hug, kiss or otherwise be physically close in a platonic way, much like women still do with their friends. Its kind of why people joke about the Hobbits in Lord Of The Rings being gay.
I sometimes see posts about photos of ‘historical queer couples’ and they’re almost always uncredited and lacking context - so there is no way of telling if a photo is of a genuine queer couple, friends, or even siblings. Which makes it even harder to find the real queer stories, and also enforces the toxic-masculinity idea that men cannot be affectionate without it being read as feminine or unmanly.
I mean, if these best friends never got married but are recorded to not only live with eachother but also share a bed I think it's safe to say they're more than friends.
There are circumstances where it's pretty obvious they are more than friends.
But I get what you mean, and I agree lol
(I feel the need to clarify that this was mostly a joke lol)
Men are incapable of empathy. We are literally sociopaths
I remember that on two sisters in law.
One was mad crushing over her but the other didnt really say much, apparently shr loved her husband very much tho
It's even more odd, that society actually endorses that platonic closeness when it suits them. Such as in WWI... But come home and cuddle the Bros and nope... Gheyyyy.
I mean.... there were absolutely times when historians pretend a couple is not gay when it absolutely was and they were doing a little more than just hugging and kissing. It's just not good to make a blanket assumption about every instance of friends being described.
You make a good point that I'd like to add to. Throughout the overwhelming majority of human history there was no "gay" or "straight." You did what was expected of you because you had to, but in many civilizations it wasnt super condemning or even seen as a big deal if you had a sexual or romantic relationship with the same sex, because you werent branded as another sexuality, anyone could do it. Therein lies the historical blurriness between best friends and romantic partners, it was not always clear even back then because it didnt need to be. Ofc all of this depends on when and where we refer to. In some societies homosexuality and bisexuality served some sort of social purpose, in others it would get you killed.
Tdlr: some societies didnt see any difference between friends and lovers if you gave your bestie some sloppy toppy because there was no us vs them dynamic - because sexuality was not an understood or defined thing
one crazy piece of misinformation i saw on tiktok is this video of a north korean girl singing and people saying that she messed up so the government killed her whole family. it took me two minutes to look up the video, find the girls name, and then look her up and see that shes kim jong uns fucking sister and shes a general in the army. another version was acknowledging that it was his sister but that she had to sing for her life because they couldnt both be named kim… forgetting the fact that kim is their last name… people piss me off so bad like bro it takes a few minutes to fact check before you post the video/comment.
Those are both jokes
@gracewsho
It's hard to tell sometimes because there's actually a big market for making stuff up about North Korea.
Like the time US news was genuinely talking about how everyone in NK was only allowed to have the same haircut.
If tiktok was the only place where westerners who've never heard the name Syngman Rhee just fabricate things about North Korea we'd be lucky
@@vazywazzya lot of those fake news about North Korea are made up by South Korean nationalists
So interesting hearing the historical inaccuracies. I’m in medical school and most medical Tiktoks are completely inaccurate to an insane level. Don’t believe someone online is a doctor just because they have a white coat! To the point I’ve heard some doctors that make content say they think the algorithm purposefully pushes inaccurate medical advice over good medical advice.
So a layman like myself can perform operations on another person, and not kill them? Interesting....
I don't think that the algorithm specifically pushes misinformation as much as algorithms based on some vague measure of engagement tend to end up favoring misinformation. Though sometimes it's also a platform maturity thing, new platforms just tend to have very few experts using them so the content on any given topic tends to be produced at best by laymen who have that topic as a hobby and predictably they don't make the greatest stuff. Like that's definitely what happened on youtube, history content on youtube when it was new was universally terrible and it's only in like the last five or so years that we started getting actual historians on here. The only content that was good from the start was some natural science stuff, math and computer science and that's because the experts in those fields were the early adopters of the internet.
@@hedgehog3180 I wonder how much is engagement with misinformation and being a new platform like you said. Vs how much of it is the fact Tiktok is run by China. On the Chinese version of TikTok, science experiments, education, history, and patriotism is pushed by the algorithm. Vs in the West the complete opposite is pushed. So I wouldn't be surprised if it's on purpose but who knows!
It’s not just medicine and history… it’s everything, and it scares the living jeebus out of me. I’m a car and motorcycle guy, and the sheer number of “heerz how 2 ryde a modorcicle in 5 minoots” videos I’ve seen, where they get the very basics of steering wrong, is insane. Same with Japan: there are so many videos about that wonderful culture made by Americans who think they’re an expert because they saw an anime once.
It's really all a goal by the powerful corporate people who run the world.
If they can revert the average person to thinking more stupidly and having less skills than a medieval peasant, they've already won the hardest war: the war for truth.
If everyone knew the truth, there would be no evil powerful people because no soldier would fight for them.
If no one knows the truth, then everyone is that mind controlled soldier who can't realize they're at gaurd next to Hitler.
As a person with a non visible disability, I confirm that people doubt you, “you are faking it”, damn I wish I was! Since my medicines are too expensive and also sold in black market, even on some pharmacies they refused to sell me my medicines claiming that I would re sell them, with the prescription, and a wristband that says my ID and condition, I just left that pharmacy crying out of frustration
😵💫😢 I feel ya!! So much gaslighting & frustration in this space. The "faking it" accusation is particularly bizarre to me. Like, why would anyone even bother...?? It's not like this $hit is FUN! 😳
I wonder sometimes how much we owe to the work of my beloved Jane Austen & others, who depicted women with chronic invisible illnesses that were treated by the writer as faked for attention due to lack of intelligence, or purely neurotic in origin...? 😬 Feels like we're still battling that 18thC stereotype to this very day!
What medicine is it? I’ve had similar things happen to me for certain adhd medications. :/
Same. Tired of being judged when I worked hard over 10 years getting my body as healthy as I am able so that what is left is my medical issues. I don’t look sick because hard work plus hiding illness. Most of us with a medical condition work hard to not be judged. I am sorry you had that happen to you.
Ableism is normalized and because it is normalized the world wasn't built with us in mind
I'm glad enough to have not really be accused of faking any of my shit by people, which is .. Honestly shocking, given I have like five separate major mental issues ... Maybe I'm just shit at masking.
Either way, I do wish you the best, hah
Related to the fake queer love story, a HUGE pet peeve of mine as an amateur historian and reenactor is people using the tales of various monarchs having multiple mistresses as evidence of polyamory.
YES there were some cases where this MIGHT apply (though the concept/terminology as we know it is pretty modern and I can assure you that folks like the Sun King or George I didn’t think of it as “polyamory”) but let’s be honest, the vast majority of rulers with a revolving door of mistresses were just cheating and getting away with it because DUH THEY’RE THE ABSOLUTE RULER. Obviously most elite marriages weren’t love matches and there was theoretically some wiggle room as long as heirs were made and alliances upheld, but that’s missing a huge feature in many of these stories: their wives didn’t have much say. In some cases they actively begged their husbands to stop flaunting their affairs and humiliating them, like Catharine of Aragon or several queens of France, but we know how well that usually worked out for them. These men are huge, over-powered jerks and yet, in several cases, I’ve seen modern poly people hold them up as poly historical figures and I just feel my head explode a little. I’m not even poly and I know that this ain’t it.
Oh wow 😵💫 I think my head just exploded a bit too?! There definitely are some good exemplars out there, but the super-over-privileged dudes who were essentially acting like the Epsteins of their era were, as you say, not it... 😵 I understand the strength of the urge to find oneself represented in history, but I feel like we need to be a bit more careful than that...? 😬
Not to mention the unhelpful obsession with Europeans. There are much more closely analogous situations to modern polyamory in steppe cultures and islamic cultures. None of these are directly analogous, either, just like ancient greek sexuality isn't analogous to modern homosexuality or bisexuality.
The most (and it's a really important thing) history can tell us about sexuality is that our modern conception of it, or the form of heteronormative conception from the last few hundred years, isn't the only way to operate a society.
@@alisilcox6036 yeah, the whole thing can backfire in all the directions if you don't consider cultural context (especially culture-specific attitudes around gender). Though I will say that Islamic polygyny might not be the best example, given how many people in Islamic communities are moving away from it and many younger Muslims view it negatively. I was recently present for a super awkward conversation between a few friends from Afghanistan and an acquaintance who is poly: poly person enthusiastically compared her relationships to polygyny in Afghanistan, and the Afghan folks were FURIOUS. They called the practice an embarrassment and a blot on their society (and Islam in general) because it is frequently done in such a way that young girls and women get trapped in very unequal relationships with controlling men. As with the examples in my original comment, there was no real choice for the women, and thus there is no comparison with healthy, egalitarian polyamorous relationships between consenting adults.
Having sex with multiple women who aren't happy with it to uphold patriarchal power is gross and definitely not what should be attached to polyamory.
I recently heard someone have the utter gall to actually say that they had "come out as polyamorous," as if being polyamorous was a sexual orientation beyond their control, rather than them just sleeping around on their girlfriend because they're too self-centered and inconsiderate to stay faithful.
I think one of the things that really gets me is expert opinion is seen as lesser than the opinions of the ignorant. It's like "no, no, no I've spent nearly tens years studying this field, but obviously this tiktok has the right answer" it makes me want to tear out my hair.
OMFG, I know, right?? 🤯 We truly seem to be living in a time when personal unfounded speculation or opinion is actively seen as more valuable (correct? trustworthy?) than an expert opinion based on extensive research &/or experiment! And that's frankly terrifying 😱
On the other hand, there also seem to be a whole slew of really good public educators working on UA-cam, in every field from historical dress to cosmology to paleontology? So I think there's some hope... If only the people that really need the education can find them!! 🙄
Gotta say, the notorious algorithms are NOT particularly helpful in that respect? If you strike a vein of nonsense, they're more likely to feed you more & more of the same.... 🤦🏻♀️ Wonder if algorithms that instead presented both "more like this" AND "here's the opposite" would be at all more helpful?
There’s a growing and pervasive anti authority attitude that’s spreading across the board. There’s so little trust in institutions nowadays that people assume they’re lying, and they instead think the ignorant randos must be the ones who uncovered the truth. It’s like a conspiratorial mindset for many people, as they’ll write off any real vetted info that conflicts with their views as flawed or fake news.
My brother does research related to poverty, and he’s had people argue that something as straightforward as census data isn’t real.
Oh no we're all corrupt parts of the postmodern neo-marxist conspiracy
This is the curse of the Internet; it has lead people to believe that their 5 minute search on the University of Google makes their ignorant opinions on anything worth just as much as experts who have spent decades studying the subject. Back in the '90s we thought it was going to be the greatest spreader of knowledge in human history... but now we realize it has instead become the greatest spreader of misinformation and lies, and almost no one cares about the actual truth anymore. Everyone thinks they know more than experts now, and the levels of ignorance and belief in harmful trash from conspiracy theories to astrology to ghosts and aliens has become greater than it ever was.
The problem isn't new, but it has reached levels far greater than ever before.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" - Isaac Asimov
Its this obsession with experts being elitist and the ‘everyday/common person’ being more trustworthy apparently because they’re untainted and more ‘relatable’. Same with the fact that conspiracy theories exist to make ppl feel special, unique, and give them a superiority-complex, that only they know what others are too ignorant to know. People want to feel like rebels and world-changers, something which any expert knows cannot be done without years upon years of hard research and falsification which even then undergoes long period of appraisal.
The "Ancient Rome was all a lie!" thing cracks me up every single time I hear about it. The level of denial it requires is monumental.
Hehe monument(al)
I know! It sounds like a joke!
I knew the Harriet Tubman thing was meant to be knocking out babies with medicine but I did laugh when I saw people thinking it was a yeetus the fetus type situation. I just didn’t think they were serious. I thought it was a joke! I wrote it down in my diary later that night!
Same!
“You need to be this tall to ride the Underground Railroad”
I know right?? My history teacher (bless that man!) taught my APUSH class that Harriet Tubman used medication (I think he said a substance like chloroform, although this video clarifies it is related to opium) to put babies to sleep. And even if I hadn't learned it in class, I feel it's so obvious from the phrase "knock out" that it's chemically-induced that claiming otherwise is absurd. I don't get how it could have been misunderstood to be physical "knocking out." Like what kind of person do you have to be to think that??
@@andrewfortmusic I mean, if someone faced a situation where baby KO was the only option, I wouldn't hold it against them
I know right like i read a lot about Harriet and it was very clearly stated she used drugs to make them sleep like where did someone get the physically knocked out punching thing from? And i feel like she wouldn’t want to ever punch children considering that as a child she had that iron thrown at her head (although ugh imagine the fact i just said is also fiction😅i hope not)
About 15 years ago I visited Versaille and did a tour there with a guide. I long believed the misinformation about the toilets to be true because even the tour guide told this story. It's disappointing that you can't even trust the "expert" to tell you the correct information. I hope the museum has done something about it.
I was there last fall. Not with a tour guide, just one of these audio guide thingies, but I don't remember that story being in there, so that's good I guess XD
A friend of mine is a tour guide as a side job to pay for university and he took me and a couple of others on a practice tour before getting his first real tourists.
It was nice but at multiple points he told us that he knows some of the stuff he says is either a myth or just incorrect but they will keep telling it that way because it just sounds better.
These people aren't experts. They memorise a script and a list of trivia. They are there to entertain not inform. And whatever is deemed more fun or interesting, what sounds more fun to hear, what sells better, will be what is told.
Remember there is a difference between tourist guides who are part of the tourism and travel “company” who show popular places to get tourist money and actual guide who has learnt about the topics and has actual knowledge.
The ancient Rome not existing hoax is so funny to me for the simple reason that in my latin class we have a running joke that our teacher is a time traveling witch who created latin just to spite us all.
It’s very Last Thursdayism
I'm a queer man, and I have a B.A. in History, and one of my biggest pet peeves from non-historians is when they apply modern terms in regard to LGBT+ history. People across time and space have conceptualized both gender and sexuality radically different from how anyone on Tiktok or even just the West would. Before graduating this May, I wanted to write, what amounts to an undergrad thesis, on gender ambiguity in kabuki and how onnagata passed through the use of makeup and fashion. Part of it would also deal with the tendency of Western historians towards applying modern concepts like transness onto Asians in the 17th century is a form of cultural imperialism. I explained this in depth to someone who I'd talk to often on social media, just for them to make a post perpetuating this same behavior. I explained that gender ambiguous was the term I preferred to use in cases like this, and yet... And don't get me started on the people who used "history" as a justification for being transphobic and/or misogynistic.
This might be because lgbt+ people nowadays are tired of (usually) old conservative historians denying ANY and all proof that a historical figure might have been anything but cishetero, you know, like the "historians will say they were really good friends". I think that what we may be dealing with now might be because we've gone too far into the opposite extreme, headcanon-ing historical figures as queer whenever they so much as breathed in the direction of a same-sex person. As a young queer myself, I can sympathize with people's yearning to see themselves reflected in people of the past, but it definitely is a tricky subject to cover.
She mentioned in this video a man from the 50s being bisexual, which sounds like that to me. People feel threatened by our modern categories of sexuality and gender not being universal and eternal, which is understandable, but awful. It’s a difficult and emotional push and pull between wanting to find connection with the past and establishing legitimacy and just forcing people into modern categories for our own ideological and emotional peace of mind.
I think understanding or conceiving of otherness is one of the most important and difficult things to do mentally. “Queer” history can be a great teaching tool for that. It’s so important and so fascinating!
@@sprotte6665 i appreciate your opinion but you do understand that the concept of bisexuality did exist in the 50s, right? like it was first used as a word to mean attracted to both men and women in 1892, and that meaning and the older meaning of “displaying sexual characteristics of both sexes” were both in use until the kinsey reports popularised the former over the latter. (the kinsey reports were published in 1948) like yes the conception of sexuality has massively varied throughout time and across cultures and using modern terminology for people who would have existed in a world with an entirely different conception of sexuality is anachronistic and a imposition of modern ideals backwards through time onto a period they don’t actually necessarily fit, however there were people in the 50s who would have considered themselves bisexual. i’m not saying that the particular example you’re mentioning is one or the other but i think it’s worth mentioning the context of the concepts of sexuality which were in use at the time before we outright reject the idea of a bisexual from the 50s, you know? like the 50s are within living memory, and while things were definitely different then vs now, the basic conceptions of sexuality have not actually changed as much as you seem to think within that time. this is 100% not intended as an attack, but just another factor to consider. foucault’s history of sexuality is a good primer if you want an overview (it’s one of the preeminent texts in the study of the history of sexuality) though it does have its pitfalls
I remember hearing people try to ascribe one Roman emperor as "transgender" just because he had a fetish. He also was a murdering, manipulative a-hole, so prolly not the kind of representation people want.
History M.A. here. I had a similar experience when I wrote a paper looking at the berdache of the Algonquin tribes- men who took on the social roles of women- and how the Europeans interpreted their role in Algonquin society. There’s an idea that the berdache were “just transgender,”and that’s kind of true but also not really. It was transgender in a society that had entirely different concepts of gender th Europeans, filtered almost entirely by European primary sources. Notably, there was no opportunity for women to become men, just men to become women. These societies saw masculinity as something to be earned, while femininity just was. The berdache evolved to account for young men who never “earned” their masculinity.
I’m a librarian (so I have taught critical information literacy), and also Jewish (so I have dealt with a lot of misinformation about Jews and Jewish history from so many different angles, all of them offensive). This video was simultaneously both deeply frustrating and incredibly validating and very heartening. Thanks for the work you’re doing, it’s so important. Fuck TikTok lmao
Misinformation, huh?
@@patrickbateman312yes. misinformation
Wait, are you telling me that the manifesto written by Russian secret police in order to justify further repression and violence against Jewish people isn’t an accurate representation of an entire ethno-religious group?!?
I volunteered one summer at my local jcc in a library dedicated to the holocaust and WWII to help reorganize it. I handled every single book. I personally knew some of the faces and names on those covers. I’d seen their numbers, I’d heard their stories from their mouths. People who can deny the holocaust ever happened must come from a place of extreme privilege and ignorance to have never had its gnarled, rotten reach brush upon their lives to be able to say it never happened.
@@patrickbateman312im so fucking glad all your other pos comments were deleted :D
This reminds me of the early 2000s chain email forwards my mom used to send to me that I would have to debunk. One that sticks out claimed that in Japan there was a trend for "bonsai kittens" ( kittens grown in jars to keep them small"). As I was living in japan at the time I was able to state with confidence that no, this was most definitely not a thing but I always wondered what drove people to make up these things, especially since there are so many real oddities to life in japan that are way more interesting.
It's amazing seeing these conspiracies from the business end, so to speak, isn't it?
During the pandemic, I saw Americans commenting online that NZ had set up concentration camps for anyone trying to enter the country. It was incredibly surreal... 😳 Really made me wonder what their media had been saying!!
@@annastevens1526 it was unfortunately our politicians lying more than the media
@annastevens1526 maybe a game of telephone from australia's response to migrants a few years earlier?
Wait, then what are Chia Pets?
It's been years but if i remember the Bonzai Kittens were either a fake site create to prank people or an art project, anyways it was related to students
The free bleeding stuff is just wild because if we accept that, we have to accept that women throughout history openly went around in bloodstained clothes (because eventual clothing staining would be unavoidable, even with good laundry techniques), or were naked/only wearing shifts for every menstrual cycle so as to avoid staining outerclothes. People have NO IDEA how long the process of manual textile production takes, and I guess aren't used to thinking of everyday clothes as an asset (and an inheritable one, no less).
Tiktok misinformation really does feel like a revamp of "linear history, they Cannot have done better than we do now", just like the Victorians did to the mediaeval era.
Or there's the inverse, where "the ancient [insert culture here] were SO much better then us today because they [insert political ideal the poster agrees with here]."
Usually in "Noble Savage" narratives about the poor innocent Indians who knew no evil until the vile White Capitalist Colonizer(trademark) came and corrupted them.
Yes, or just bc they personally cant imagine or understand a specific concept ppl living before them cant either, like physics/construction and the pyramids
This reminds me of the thoughts that people before just a few generations ago didn’t care about their children/saw them as objects to help with the work. When I studied child development I did some research into historical attitudes toward children and child rearing and found some pamphlets from the 1700s(?) about how to care for a new baby. It’s just weird to think that people didn’t have basic human feelings/connection to their own children until like 100 years ago.
Reminds me of a book I read in high school about the wives of many of the founding fathers. In one section, a woman had to tell her husband (who was away in the war) that she'd had a miscarriage. Her husband wrote back about his grief, describing the devastation he was experiencing for a daughter he would never meet.
I remember one such pamphlet from the 1500s, it advised parents what to do if their toddlers hurt themselves on the furniture and were crying. They were to playfully smack the object and scold it for hurting the child, making the child stop crying and laugh instead
@@hexenmotte5356 that’s so cute!
Well, Children yes but as soon you became double digit and didn't had a rich family you were pretty much expected to be newest cog in the machine. You feed your child today so they can work tomorrow. Of course paiting it like people were just evil is wrong but not long ago by the age 16 you were considered a young adult
@@ricardomiles2957 But that doesn't mean that parents back then didn't love their kids like we do today, or actually saw them as grown adults as soon as they were 12. It means that, during tough financial times, parents had no choice but to make their kids work in order for the family to survive. Just because a lot of people didn't have any other choice doesn't mean that they actually wanted to do certain things, or that they believed certain things.
William Shakespeare was one of the best at misinformation, rewriting literally and metaphorically the roles of Tudor kings and King Richard III. That last story threw out a lot of information that would make it harder to label Richard III a villain when you look at the actual information that didn't fully exonerate the Tudors. It still persists as a myth to this day, as told by the Yeoman Warders in the Tower of London.
Thank you for mentioning this! Many things today about King Richad III are based on mentioned by you Shakespeare or Moore who both lived long time later, also, Moore was writing for Tudors. You can see it was obviously made as an excuse for Tudors to take the throne from King Richard III. Showing him as evil was a way to show themselves as good or at least make people grateful instead of resentful towards them. At least Shakespeare's works are already labelled as fiction but still "based" on history. Moore is labelled as history while it was all made for Tudors. And we now base on mostly those sources or sources that are based on these. It's even worse with lack of sources if you research in foreign language. At leats here the main language of sources is English, so you can always find something translated to your language or most of people know English so you can just read it in English. I mainly research history of one group of people who lived and worked in Japan. So most of the sources are in Japanese. The only source in English are books by one really scary and biased person who portray them as evil even when it's sometimes obviously illogical. He claims he will show the truth about them, that now people like them, but all those good sides are lies and he will show who they really were. But all he shows are his opinions and his own ego. And there is only one, literally one, book about them in my language. It's a translation of the book by this scary person. I'm trying to learn Japanese to translate books about them and one day write books about them, both in English and my language, just to let people really research them. I already saw people researching them (something about how they are portrayed in fiction but mentioning who they really were) and citing this scary person books as sources, fully believing him. But because of my illnesses and just overall situation and my thinking I may either disappear/erase myself before doing it or I may just think I'm not worthy to write about them. On one hand I want people to know them, to love them, to see the truth, not only what this scary person wrote. But on the other hand I just don't know if I should or if I can do anything for them.
There is also a revisionist tendency that claims Richard III was some kind of saintly figure and They Don't Want You To Know, which is a bit tiresome. Second-option bias in full effect.
I mean it makes sense considering he was writing FOR the Tudors and later Stuart’s, and if he wanted royal patronage he’d big up the ruling family and cast their enemies as murderers and traitors.
The Tudors were ruthless bastards and so was Richard. They were medieval monarchs, you didn't survive by being a Disney princess. The whole revisionist woobification of Richard is utterly ridiculous. Any even cursory look at Richard's broader career even before he became king will tell you that he was a hard bastard. He even looks a hard bastard in his portraits. Though god knows the likes of Josephine Tey have looked at a guy with a hatchet face and a thousand yard stare and got the exact opposite impression.
@@anthroposmetron4475 Edward the Confessor was basically a Disney princess, Did not work out well for him
I saw a sketch about Harriet Tubman knocking out babies on Tumblr a few days ago and I didn't even think much about it; I just went "huh" and kept scrolling. That's one way misinformation can take root: you just see something somewhere, file it away, and gradually you start to believe it. P.S. I was literally going to look up John Crapper right around the time in the video where you were talking about the bathroom habits of the French aristocracy.
I saw a few sketches like that and I just thought that it was some weird joke. There are a lot of bizarre jokes like that, so I didn't really think much of it.
The idea that people are teaching/receiving it as fact is just another reason that the study of history fills me with existential dread
Edited to fix a typo
That’s a good point. Then you see it again, it connects with some fleeting memory in your brain and gets reinforced. Or it sounds true because it sounds familiar.
I think it's a confusion between "knocking out" != Punching, and knocking out = chloroform, stifling etc
The Hellen Keller Conspiracy makes me SO mad. As a disabled person, I have been accused of lying, faking, and exaggerating my disabilities so many times in my life. It's a legitimate source of trauma for me. And so often, whenever a disabled person accomplishes something, it's used to call into question whether they are 'really' disabled. The ableism is infuriating.
I work at a very small museum and we make TikToks to try to increase awareness of us.. . I really appreciate your content and take on this. As a platform it isn't a great spot for detailed nuanced history. But at the very least we can site our sources. Thanks for your efforts to inform and educate
I mean obviously don't knowingly mislead people... And site your sources
It's a major problem. Existing in the digital age means libraries, museums, galleries etc have to utilize the latest digital platforms to stay at all relevant to & accessible by the public... But the format of those platforms does have a real impact on the information we convey. Loss of context, complexity & nuance seems to be inevitable!
I guess all we can strive for is trying to lure viewers towards additional content that dives a bit deeper? Difficult in an era of content overload & massively reduced attention spans!! 😢 Humour, great visual images & engaging people's empathy (if we can manage it) do seem to have some effective impact, though...?
(But those can all be expensive!! Correctly citing sources can be too, because it takes time. All of those can be a resourcing &/or funding challenge for smaller institutions/organisations like the one you describe...?)
What’s your tiktok callef
I’ve come across the Versailles misinformation before and just instantly dismissed it as nonsense. Misinformation online barely even faces me anymore sadly enough, especially as someone who enjoys history. Most of it can be instantly debunked with just the tiniest shred of common sense which is the most frustrating part
Interestingly, I read this "fact" in a book decades ago.
@@jesshollowaydyker5 Because false information is perpetuated by amateur scholars that take "first accounts" to heart, not properly considering the context in which these accounts are written. As she said in this video, this was during the French Revolution, so play X for doubt anytime a Revolutionary talks about the monarchy and the rich, chances are there is way more exaggeration and/or straight up slander involved. Even back then, people were familiar with making bold faced lies for political propaganda.
@@Bionickpunk But this was a published book by a quite a notable historical biographer of Louis XIV, not some random online commentators and included references. My point is that these myths have been circulated by "professionals" long before they get picked up by TikTokers and the like. Print is just as fallible I think, it just takes longer for it to circulate.
*phases me
@@jesshollowaydyker5 And that somehow makes them beyond spreading lies? Always be weary of the information you are given. Chances are even the reputable historians can get something wrong, or just lie.
"It popped up on my Facebook Feed" I had to Facepalm myself immediately. It's like those wild stories that you and I heard as kids, a friend of a friends cousin once told to somebody... totally true. Billy definitely ate 50 frogs and became a frog himself.
it depresses me to no end that there's literally thousands of people who believe with all their hearts that the earth is flat and there's nothing anyone could say that would convince them otherwise. i just live in a wholly different reality from some people and it's been a struggle to come to terms with that
My dad has recently started getting way too into a bunch of conspiracy stuff from the internet, and completely believes the earth is flat. My whole family has pretty much shunned him from talking about it, but it’s really upsetting watching your dad go from explaining science to you when you’re little to trying to tell you the earth is flat. I guess I just resonated with your comment, it is hard.
This is why the only way that we as humans can hang onto our humanity is to begin go disengage from all algorithms we can.
If you think about the Harriet Tubman thing for more than a few seconds it's pretty obvious that something doesn't add up. Knocking an adult unconscious often leads to permanent brain damage. I can't imagine it's possible to beat a baby into unconsciousness without killing it. They're pretty fragile.
Someone else mentioned it so you may have seen it already but knock out is slang in certain areas for put to sleep. As funny as it is to imagine Harriet Tubman drop kicking a toddler it's more likely trying to say she gave them some sort of sleep aid to keep them asleep and quiet.
This just makes me think about the 'flip the table' arguments I've had with people about the Borgia family. Piecing together what was most likely the truth about that family is difficult enough, but to constantly have to throw aside rumors and weird ficton attached to them is exhausting.
You're telling me the Borgias didn't kill Ezio Auditores' family and was templars?? 🤦♂️
out of interest, what are the most commonly-known myths about them that you hear most frequently? i know little about the borgias and im just curious lol. ive seen like 2 episodes of that tv show with jeremy ironsand thats it
@@okayokayfineilldoit A lot of incest and murder. If you watched Jeremy Irons’ The Borgia you might’ve seen a toned-down version of The Banquet of Chestnuts, an alleged party where the Pope’s mistress Guilia Farnese invited Cardinals to a dinner with at least 3 witnesses hiding behind the wall and brought in sex-workers dressed as nuns. There was a game later on in the evening where the Cardinal who slept with the most women would win something. I don’t think I have to tell you about the rumors surrounding Cesare and Lucretia (or Lucretia and Rodrigo) and Cesare murdering his brother and later on his sister’s husband.
No matter if these rumors are true or not, I find the Borgias to be a very very interesting family.
What is the “flip the table” arguments?
@@metisellada2632 extremely heated/frustrating arguments, where one gets so agitated that they feel like they could through around furniture.
Tik Tok is the latest in a long trend of making content shorter and shorter. The less space you have to educate, the more context and nuance is lost. Learning takes a long time. The fact that long form video essays exist gives me hope that not all, well, hope is lost.
Edit: Helen Keller was a revolutionary socialist and an IWW member who fought for disability rights before the term existed. I literally cited her pro IWW (my union) speeches in my Master’s Thesis.
Personally I like long-form content more because I can just put it in and have one thing to focus on for the next 20 minutes to 7 hours. Meanwhile, shorter videos are bad for me because I can't handle changing focus that often, to the point that I'll still be focused on a clip from 10 videos ago, and getting the topics confused with each other
@@Gloomdrake i tend to watch youtube while i play video games and watching longer videos is more convenient for me bc i can let the video play in the background instead of having to pick a new one every 30 seconds
@Dr.Anarchy69 I feel like history, psychology, archaeology, science, you-name-it... They're ALL ABOUT the context & nuance!! 😆 But as humans, we just seem to consistently be really bad at those things...?
As you note, the constantly-further-compressed format of our comms channels makes it almost impossible to convey all that essential information, too... I wonder what on earth it must be like to be a teacher in this era, where there's simultaneously more information accessible than ever before, AND more misinformation, whilst students' attention spans become limited by habit to the length of a text or Tiktok post....? 🤯
The Harriet Tubman thing reminds me of when old texts say "gay" there are at least a few teens going "omg it's about LGBTQ+". 🤦🏻♀️ Like it doesn't help the cause and I've seen adults use it against the community.
Im glsd she didnt go saitama on the babies. But maybe im just a horrible person but Hearing she knocked em out with drugs made me think of the scene in my name is earl where darnell and his dad kept drugging earl on their spy missions and he kept waking up and getting drugged again.
Tbf it is extremely funny to do that as a joke.
@@jacobcousins4234 Okay are you another teenager? You should have learned in your history class by now that people back then didn't realize a number of drugs were bad for you and used them commonly in medicine, and meds being used to keep children asleep was a super standard practice no one knew was wrong for well into the nineteenth century. I learned that much when I was 13 and I'm not even 20. Where have you been?
@ThaUltimateHunter somebody's a weird troll insulting people randomly online but ok mr projector
Studying history with excellent teachers have cemented one idea in my head. Always, always, ALWAYS check the bias of your source, even primary sources, because they have incentive to spin the information to support their own cause. Historic documents ARE INHERENTLY BIASED, and I think a lot of people forget that. I don't think I've ever read a primary source document that doesn't have some extent of bias. This is why you find as many sources as possible, because that's when you find out what a reasonable truth is, because it helps you identify the bias and where the reasonable belief is without it.
Of course, I'm obviously commenting to someone who knows this information, because that's exactly what you do. There needs to be so much more content like this. Thank you for taking such an active part in dispelling the misunderstandings!
@Sarasyn Fox 💯 this!! 👏 I believe that academia has also historically been biased towards the supposed factuality of written resources in general, vs evidential (physical finds) or oral sources.
Written sources have been seen as inherently much more 'reliable', so I suspect this has perhaps tended to blind many researchers to the fact that ALL these sources are information filtered through a human, who has a complete set of their own biases & preconceived ideas affecting the information they convey?
Can be most problematic when those biases aren't even conscious ones, so the distortions get "baked in" at a level that can be harder for us to pick up, particularly with increased geographic, cultural or chronological distance...
My daughter was so high functioning that many times people were surprised to find out she was blind … she had in fact only a very small sliver of peripheral vision in one eye and none at all in the other. As many frustrated parents do, I once said to her “what, are you blind?!”. Yeah, imagine how I felt! Fortunately we could laugh at it later on.
You are such a great person on the internet as a mother I would say you are horrible laugh all you want when she takes your eye sight
@@John_Joel_Glanton I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
@amazinggrace5692 he's a sad troll. Ignore it
@@amazinggrace5692 Just ignore them. They've been replying to multiple comments trying to piss people off.
@@Kyurium Oh thanks, I appreciate that! 💕🐝💕
It's hurtful to learn about the story of the 2 soldiers only to realize it was fiction. That hurts as someone who is a part of the alphabet mafia. We were always here and faking stories like this whether it's with good intentions or not hurts us in the LGBTQ+ community who love history and want to see more of our history unfold. This is why I love your channel. As a fellow bi, I really want to thank you for making your wonderfully respectful and insightful video on James Dean
Edit: I didn't pay attention to the Sal Mineo part, but I appreciate how human you are by owning up to your mistakes
I cried so much reading Emil and Xaver story and I never saw the tweet referring to it as fiction. This actually hurts because we know of so many stories like them that they were actually true. He could have talked about any of those, or use the tombstone as a starter point to actually talk about gay couples of the past. Oh man, and I'm an archaeologist, and it never occurred to me to fact check. Great video, thank you so much 🙏🏼
The Procopius history is even weirder. He basically wrote two histories simultaneously, one in which he said Justinian and Theodora were amazing people who never did anything wrong; and the secret one where they were both literal demons who committed every sin in the book. The official book would be published to impress the emperor, the secret history would be recited if procopius realised a satirical jab at the emperor would amuse present company (and was lost for centuries till it was randomly found in a Vatican archive).
@CM Beadle It's a really good example of the huge impact created by what sources surviven huh... Imagine if we'd only had one or the other of Procopius' works today, not both! 😏
Bias tends to pile on bias to a certain extent too, so to speak? For example: the Spaniards basically trashed most of the indigenous societies of South America, whilst also recording those cultures in a way that was biased by their own religious & political beliefs. So now apart from surviving physical evidence & oral history, both pretty thoroughly fragmented by the invaders' actions, the slanted Spanish records are what we have to go off... And written records often tend to be considered "authoritative" purely because they ARE written?
It's a good example of that old saying of history being written by the winners - or at least based off their version of things 😬
You kinda have to take both while at the same time taking neither at face value. Works by ancient historians are such messes.
As you described the blue unicorns and bat people in the moon hoax, suddenly Princess Luna and her bat winged attendants from My Little Pony made sense.
As someone currently taking a whole class on fragmentation of historical items, I understand it's very tempting for people to reach out for answers that seem to give closure or explanation to something vague in history. There are so many things we will never get a complete picture of, and finding reliable sources is so hard. I can only hope that media literacy will become a mandatory class in schools since it's so desperately needed.
Thank you Kaz. The misinformation and disinformation that is rampant on social media is an informational plague on humanity. Maybe this will, over time, find a way to improve as we all learn to develop our critical thinking skills as online ‘netizens’…we must all learn to have a healthy skepticism and optimism for finding out humanity’s truth.
I hadn't heard about the Helen Keller conspiracy because I don't do tiktok. I was literally telling my nine-year-old about Helen Keller today because she asked if someone could be both deaf and blind, and I said yes, and Helen Keller was the first person who came to mind because when I was about the same age as my daughter, I read a biography of Helen Keller.
Laura Bridgeman is another one!!
Stay in school, don’t do TikTok
The Helen Keller conspiracy didn't start on TikTok and had been passed around almost as folklore for years before TikTok spread it even further. Also, I've heard some Nostradamus theories played on The History Channel started as email chains and weren't actually attributable to Nostradamus. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the more extensive American tradition of conspiracy theories and our ongoing love of them.
Did you mean YOU’RE love of them?
i recommend the book ‘republic of lies’ by anna merlan! an in-depth look at the power conspiracy theories have in the U.S..
@@lezliecarter3695 Your* Learn grammar before you judge others
@@lezliecarter3695* you're as in YOU ARE stupid
Reminds me of all of the “Confucius said…” things that were pretty much made up, or at best pastiched.
i have two younger cousins who "learn" a lot of stuff from tiktok and youtube shorts so every time i hear about yet another thing tiktok is doing badly i get stressed out that they're absorbing this stuff. luckily for me i tutored/partially home schooled them during covid quarantine and left enough of an impression as an "adult who Knows Stuff" that they usually come up to me first and ask if it's real (i think they just like feeling smart by saying they didnt fall for any of the fake stuff, unlike other kids). speaking of, watching channels like this helps me be educated enough that i can answer their weird or specific questions so thanks for all the vids!
Hellen Keller wasn’t a “fraud,” however she was a supporter of eugenics, although on a very moderate level for the time period, and she did re-evaluate this perspective later (she also notably did *not* support or believe in medical racism). This was probably due to internalized ableism and a desire to appeal to ableist ideologies. However, I do believe that the dangers of internalized bigotry are important to teach about in the classroom, especially to minorities vulnerable of being tricked into similar thinking patterns. Her efforts should not be invalidated, but she was not a perfect person and that’s okay. It’s also good to have a reason to establish that ableist infanticide is immoral early in the lives of students.
Sources: disabilities studies quarterly, PBS, International Socialist Review, Time Magazine.
The fact that you hold yourself accountable and correct yourself is WHY I trust you.
I was laughing at that part cause her errors were nowhere near as egregious 😂
idk if it’s just me but the color grading of this video is spectacular! you did a wonderful job.
FOOT OX FOOT OX FOOT OX WOOOOOOO
@@thefoxandthehound81 FUCK YEAH FOOT OX!!!!!!!
W pfp
You can literally visit the bathroom of Marie Antoinette in Versailles. Why would she have such a thing if she did not use it?
For it was not Marie, but versatile gives the historical information that the people at versatile would pee in the corners of the palace. Its literally true.
I think the hardest rule to stick to sometimes is to force yourself to scrutinize new information *especially* if you want to believe it. People tend to be great at debunking things they don’t want to believe but if it is something that aligns with their established views or ideals we are a lot more immediately accepting.
This is so true. I'm trying to reflect on my biases this way, too.
i study linguistics (should be writing my thesis rn haha) and the number of inaccuracies and harmful info being spread abt language is really saddening
dude the amount of times I’ve had to explain that AAVE (and other stigmatized dialects for that matter) isn’t “bad English” to people
Oh god yeah I'd say any video about linguistics gets people spouting such misinformation in the comments, even more than history videos oftentimes.
I'm a public history major. We have to take a research methods class and my professor used a fantastic article to teach us the importance of vetting our sources, even those that are in academic journal. It was about legitimate academic fraud where someone assumed multiple fake identities and there was a circle of these people citing each other as sources. One bad source 3 sources back in a chain can spread serious misinformation, even seemingly benign misinformation makes your job harder down the road as a historian (or really any researcher/writer/educator). If I manage to find the pdf, I'll link it below. It's a lengthy read but I thought it was interesting, and it isnt super dry academic language either!
That is.... More than slightly terrifying.
Please share the pdf info !
Yeah, as a historian I have had one too many run ins with things where because someone generally reputable said something once, everyone cites them, even if they are straight up wrong, simply because some historians don't question other historians nearly enough. Case in point: I was once trying to research a Civil War ironclad river boat, the USS. Ozark. According to one book, on the Colfax massacre, although she was sold for scrap she wasn't dismantled or disarmed and was instead chartered by the US Government to carry troops. Something about that... just didn't add up. I mean, the government wasn't just going to let a warship that was supposed to be scrapped sit around with active weapons! And although ironclads weren't easy to scrap, the iron plates were worth a lot of money, so there's be plenty of incentive to scrap her. SO... i checked the sources and... it became clear that no where in the orignal sources did they say it was the *USS* Ozark. Just a steamboat called Ozark! I did a very, very basic google search for all the steamboats registered called Ozark at the time. There were solidly a half dozen of them, none of them the former ironclad. I quickly figured out that somehow the author decided that the USS. Ozark was the Ozark the primary sources were talking about, probably because it sounded cooler and made it seem like the government cared more about the injustice that way, and then didn't bother to question if this assumption was right in spite of evidence to the contrary which required them to invent a non-sensical explanation to explain away the inconsistencies in their sources. And then since the rest of the book was good aside from this, that screw up has been repeated everywhere, mostly from Wikipedia and copies of Wikipedia. Historians, especially social historians, have kind of a bad habit of ignoring details that are outside their knowledge base instead of reaching out to actual experts. The result is some truly nonsensical stuff gets published, and cited by others, simply because nobody thought to call in an actual expert to factcheck them.
What was the article title? It sounds fascinating
This pattern of one historical or academic source making a mistake (or flat-out making stuff up) and then getting cited ad infinitum by other researchers, tainting the whole information pipeline, seems to be SUCH a common phenomenon!!
And even when that's not the case, one often has to be wary for how implicit bias affects the writer's reporting (cf. how Old Norse pagan myths were written down by Christian monks)... Or how contemporary sociopolitical interests can skew a historical source? (cf. academic erasure of LGBT folks in the 1900s)
Honestly, sifting through all that for actual facts can be so difficult, I can really see why so many people just kinda give up and get their ideas from movies or social media, or decide to mistrust every academic source on principle! 😢
Problem is, that has such serious knock-on effects in terms of shaping how we vote, how we treat other people, how we teach our kids...? I believe the search for complex facts, context and nuance is still worth it, no matter how exhausting it is at times!
Concerning not bathing in the Baroque era, the last info I had (at least from historians) was that while bathing really happened only for medical reasons ( bathing culture suffered since the Early Modern due to a combination of syphilis and bad science), people did wash and they rubbed down frequently with linen cloths. In the upper societal circles, these were soaked in perfume, the solvent of which was alcohol. Which means they essentially rubbed down with scented disinfectant wipes a lot. Which, while not being as pleasant as soaking in a tub, will certainly get you clean. Cleanliness was always a matter of status, just look at the ridiculously frilly white shirts that just scream "I can afford to keep this clean". A stinking hall does not a good impression make.
The Abby Cox video on historical periods is really good, btw.
“Pirates wore eyepatches to see in the dark” makes me so angry
The girl who went viral with her “Titanic was switched with the Olympic” theory made me so fucking angry, you can do the smallest amount of research and know that it’s not true. I’m glad that Titanic Guy is on TikTok to respond to these stupid theories with actual knowledge and facts
I first became familiar with Titanic trutherism via a video parodying it (though I wasn't aware of it being a parody because I was a kid at the time.)
This theory gets me SO mad
George Bush did the Titanic
So annoying especially those "European didn’t bathe until the native americans taught them".
Loved the video :))
Saw one Facebook short with the claim that medieval Europeans never took off their clothing and never bathed. I went into a mild rage.
omg here in russia we’re literally taught that “europeans didn’t know how to bath until russians taught them” this is insane 😭😭😭
Nah they mostly say moors educated Europeans and taught them how to bath. It's one of the common claim from either black afrocentrist and from muslim nationalists...
It’s indigenous, not Native American. That’s offensive, it’s like calling them Indians.
@@theghosthero6173 yeah and also native americans I've seen it on tik tok multiple times lol
The twitter-thread-fiction story reminded me of a random video I saw of a guy who goes by Metatron, about LGBT people in Ancient Greece. He was responding to an article saying that Ancient Greece was an "LGBT paradise" (without any sources, of course)-- and this guy just sorta ripped into it himself, and in a way rightfully so, because the article was a gross oversimplification, and pretty ahistorical... But then he went really hard on "actually it's just activist propaganda to say there was any sort of same sex affection anywhere, and it was seen with anything but scorn by anyone" down to saying that Sappho's amorous poetry directed to women is unambiguously not from a woman's point of view at all. In a way he does have a point: Ancient Greek ideas of sexuality and gender were very different than what is in place today, and in a lot of ways was pretty damn objectionable, and to call it an "LGBT paradise" is weird as hell-- but the way he presented this one shitty article to his audience made it seem like the entire idea of LGBT historical scholarship was completely without sources, without backing, and was all spin.
So LGBT people trying to make history "nicer" to us ends up just giving fuel to people like that to call any sort of LGBT research or interpretations of things as just ahistorical revisionism without basis.
Eek. That particular vid of his has been sitting on my YT homepage for several weeks, & I was delaying tackling it, out of concern it would be much as you've described...? 😣 Although I respect the level of knowledge he's achieved on many topics, I do feel like he lets his own biases slant some of his content (perhaps even without realising), and this sounds like a classic example. His opinion on Sappho sounds particularly odd...?? 🤔
I feel like that sort of diatribe is especially problematic, because creators like Metatron have positioned themselves specifically as debunkers and research-based educators. If they are instead just opining on matters, and doing so without giving backup sources, they need to be really careful about flagging that, IMO, because viewers won't know the difference otherwise...?
@@annastevens1526 That's sort of the thing, he DOES have sources, and that's what makes him more convincing than the article he was debunking. The thing is, they're somewhat cherrypicked because the Ancient Greek ideas of sexuality and gender were complex and decidedly different than what we have in this age.
Like, yes Plato in The Laws spoke derisively of men loving men, but that's also largely because his entire view of sex in general is that if you do it out of enjoyment or affection, then you are are too distracted from heady philosophical concerns, and too concerned with the body, which is bad. Plato also wrote a number of amorous epigrams addressed to men, and the dialogue Protagoras opens with Socrates and Crito talking about how hot young men with beards are.
He quotes a number of writers who are like "It is disgusting for two men to engage in sex", and noting that none of the Greek Gods had gay relationships-- while also not mentioning things like the Sacred Band Of Thebes, or the Tyrannicides, or Apollo's handful of male lovers, or Zeus with Ganymede (regardless of the problems of age), or the works by celebrated poets like Theokritos that talk with praise about Herakles and Pan having male lovers, etc-- as even in-passing counterexamples.
And he also brings up the old chestnut of bringing up how there would be one lover who was as young as 15 or 14 in these male/male relationships-- while failing to bring up that that age (or even younger) was the age that women were expected to marry as well, and that was seen as good and normal too. Every relationship was a little bit fucked up in Ancient Greece because they were mostly really obsessed with hierarchy, and any "equal relationship" was seen as odd at best.
And yeah-- he says that it is "ambiguous" if any of Sappho's amorous poems to women are from her perspective. But there are several that are clearly about her, and a group of women, addressing other women who are no longer in that group (due to marriage), as well as one addressed to Atthis, where she outright quotes Atthis addressing Sappho by name.
So if you aimed to tackle that video in some form, it'd be best to have some sources ready at hand yourself. The problem isn't that he doesn't have sources, it's that he's giving an oversimplified impression (while combating the even more simplified impression that "Ancient Greece was an LGBT paradise" (which, in his defense, IS a nonsense statement)).
@@NotJonJost @Z C Interesting! Sounds like a bit of a "cherry-picked examples to combat cherry-picked examples" situation there from Metatron, rather disappointing. Wonder if he's letting own personal convictions colour his research a bit there. As you note, anyone reading a little wider in the literature or examining the material culture as well as the written works (esp. the porno-pottery! 😏) would receive a rather different impression than he's giving...?
Great analysis, sounds like maybe you should do a "reacts to" video yourself!! 🤭 Seriously, though - really important point about how complex things were. We tend to think of Classical Greece as a cultural monolith, but it really wasn't, either over time or across the different regions?
With you 100% on the problematic power dynamics of their personal relationships! 🙄 At least, as they were legally structured. Makes one wonder how many people broke out of that mould, and strove for something more like what we'd call equality with their partner. Swimming against the cultural tide is always tough, but when you consider how much variation we have within our own societies' approaches to romance, and like us how many other cultures they had contact with, it seems potentially feasible...? & given how much some of the writers complained about uppity women & effeminate men, I suspect at least some people bucked the expectations a fair bit!
Great note re Plato's general over-all bias - so important to know these things when reading. Juvenal, for instance, should definitely be read knowing his work is meant to be highly satirical in nature, I reckon! 🙈
To us the age thing seems pretty awful, regardless of gender, but when one considers the pre-teen betrothals of Renaissance Italy & barely-teen pregnancies of Lancastrian England... 🤦🏻♀️ Not unusual for the area or the pre-modern era in general, although the erastes/eromenos thing was a bit more unique.
@@annastevens1526 That's pretty much it: He saw a train-wreck, and his solution was sending more trains. I want to give him some benefit of the doubt and think he's just got some un-worked-through biases or hangups, as he's generally good and scholarly-- but boy howdy his comment section attracts some special angy folks...
(And he does bring up the porno pottery, actually... but under the caveat that only outright penetration counts as "depicting homosexual affection"-- just being close and showing non-penetrative affection will not suffice, and so the number of gay depicting potteries goes down significantly in his eyes)
Considering the amount of Ancient Greek literature that is irretrievably lost-- it may be very likely that there are a lot more variations of thought and life than we currently have direct access to.
For even more oddness and "bucking the system" in a way: there is the less talked about subject of eunuchs in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle East (a surprisingly complicated subject, as at the time by and large eunuch meant "unable to consummate a marriage/reproduce" for any reason-- which included sheer unwillingness, not just castration. So, while still seen as a lesser caste in the general public's eyes, there was even a kind of "third sex" thing going on). Just mentioning that because it's yet another kind of odd thing that complicates the past.
So, yeah, the Ancient Greeks (and also Ancient Near East in this regard) had some different ideas of sex/gender/etc that I imagine Metatron, his weirdo commenters, and the writer of the "Ancient Greece was LGBT paradise" article all would find objectionable or at least odd.
@@NotJonJost Love your initial description of the situation!! 🤣 That's a classic!
Yeah, it feels like actual scholarly debate without inserting absolutes, bigotry or wishful thinking is sadly rare on this particular topic, within UA-cam or elsewhere? 😔
I did particularly like the vid Jimmy (The Welsh Viking) did on intersex people through history, because as usual he was comfortable with lots of nuance & uncertainty, whilst simultaneously presenting the firm facts we do have, and being open about his own personal position. Would've hoped to see something similar from Raphael (Metatron), but gosh. Sounds more like he's heading into personal rant territory with Shad...? 😒
Even his definition of what counts as homosexual sounds odd! 🤔 There's so many pieces depicting eromenoi being kissed or um... essentially groped by their erastes, & we're just going to handwave all that? But then maybe he also qualifies Greek pederasty as "not gay"? (!) Must make time to actually watch that vid...
Yes, eunuchry (in its various forms) is another space that seems to be not much spoken about! I think the fact it usually arose from child mutilation perhaps makes historical commentators uncomfortable to analyse it as a wider social phenomenon, or accept any positives in the later lives of the victims? But then we also have highly-religious adult versions like the self-castrating cross-dressing Galli, so as usual, the field is complex & interesting...
I've noticed a lot of them are American, who have never been to the places they are talking about, therefore can say bizarre things like Hadrians Wall is a road, when you can literally see it. I feel that they see them as fantasy lands where they can easily just make stuff up.
also says a lot about their education system lol. in terms of their history curriculum, and if/how they are teaching media literacy
@@brookejamieson1523 I'd agree if I hadn't seen just as much nonsense from non-Americans, it's just the sheer population of the U.S. makes it loom larger lol
I think the world of ARGs (and to a much lesser extent, creepy pasta) has a lot to answer for, in terms of presenting fictional stories as "real" in the digital space. I love the innovation of this kind of storytelling, but we really need to clearly label fictional work on Tik Tok, Twitter, and other media.
And dangerously fictional work, at that! 😳 (I'm looking at you, 5 min crafts...) There's a huge community of awesome debunkers in all sorts of fields on YT, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the algorithms necessarily work great at flagging them as "related content" to people who desperately need to see them, as opposed to their existing fans...? 🤔
And people need to start using their brains to distinguish easily dismissable bullshit from truth. So much of this crap is so _blatantly_ fake that only an active moron or a mentally disabled 12 year old would believe it to be true. So many people these days have apparently let their brains fall out.
Oh gosh, I just remembered people who have a poor grip on reality due to mental health issues could easily play an AR horror game and form strong paranoia and anxiety because of it. AR developers have a responsibility to make it clear at the outset that their games are fictional and just for fun.
Ehhh not... really. People are having this conversation since the case of the Slenderman girl but anynone with sensible grip on reality KNOWS these aren't true and nowadays people are more aware about args, less prone to believe in "internet urban legends" and most args disclaim they are a work fiction.
@@ricardomiles2957 I dunno, man. I think if you're an internet savvy person, that is true, but I know a lot of people who aren't Extremely Online who would struggle to sort truth from fiction.
I JUST did a college exam worth 50% of my grade yesterday on media literacy in social media and this video would’ve helped SO MUCH. As a fan I wouldve been able to study whilst enjoying it😞
As a library science student (who even wrote an essay on misinformation) I am so grateful for this video and all your videos. Information and media literacy are increasingly important but increasingly neglected in education and it's kinda scary. Also love that you acknowledge that no one is perfect, and mistakes still happen when it comes to sourcing info.
Tbh I'm not sure that they've ever been taught especially well? 😬
People's tolerance for written content was definitely a lot greater pre-digital age...-just check out the old wall-of-text ad copy! 😂 But I don't really believe general media literacy was ever that much better...? Think for example of the witch-hunting craze, the War of the Worlds scare, or how propaganda's been used through both world wars...