… the whole weeks-long saga, which featured urban protestors appearing alongside their Indigenous counterparts at road and rail barricades throughout Canada, tapped into a strongly held noble-savage belief system within progressive circles. Various formulations of this mythology have become encoded in public land acknowledgments, college courses, and even journalism. The overall theme is that Indigenous peoples traditionally lived their lives in harmony with the land and its creatures, and so their land-use demands transcend the realm of politics, and represent quasi-oracular revealed truths. As has been pointed out by others, this mythology now has a severe, and likely negative, distorting effect on public policy, one that hurts Indigenous peoples themselves. In recent years, Indigenous groups have finally gotten a fair cut of the proceeds of industrial-development and commodity-extraction revenues originating on their lands. And increasingly, they are telling white policy makers to stop listening to those activists who seek to portray them as perpetual children of the forest. It is for their benefit, as much as anyone else’s, to explore the truth about the myth of harmonious Indigenous conservationism.
***When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans — animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans — were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals — such as horse, peccary, and antelope species — were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us. The existence of these survivors, along with the relatively unspoiled forests, grasslands, and rivers seen by the first Europeans to enter the Americas, served to support the illusion that America’s first peoples had been maintaining what popular environmentalist David Suzuki calls a “sacred balance” with the natural world. Throughout history, however, humans killed animals that were tasty, numerous, and huntable. For kin-groups, staying alive meant making life-and-death cost-benefit calculations about where to send your berry-pickers and hunters. “Sacredness” had nothing to do with it.
This is not to say that the Indigenous peoples who migrated from Asia to the Americas were especially bloodthirsty (though Europeans typically reported that their hunting and fishing skills were excellent). In every known case where humans entered continents formerly uninhabited by our species, the bigger animals tended to disappear, since they provided the most sustenance per kill. The first humans to enter Australia some 70,000 years ago wiped out giant kangaroo species, rhino-sized marsupial herbivores, jaguar-sized marsupial carnivores, big flightless birds, and many other megafauna. The same thing would happen in Europe: After sapiens completed its occupation of that sub-continent some 30,000 years ago, the mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and lions they recorded in their cave paintings and carvings also disappeared.
Baz Edmeades, “The Myth of Harmonious Indigenous Conservationism”, Quillette, 2020-09-06.
December 31, 2020
QotD: The “noble savage” belief system
December 30, 2020
QotD: The sting in the tail of genetic research
Eric S. Raymond, “A Specter is Haunting Genetics”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-06-19.
December 23, 2020
Our “systemically racist and patriarchal society” which oppresses “people of color, women, and LGBT”
To hear some people (especially on social media in these locked-down pandemic days), there has never been a human society that more greatly benefits white heterosexual men and oppresses everyone else like the modern west. Here are some stats from Rav Arora to challenge that claim:
We are frequently told by commentators and theorists on the progressive and liberal Left that we live in a systemically racist and patriarchal society. The belief that Western societies privilege white men and oppress people of color, women, and LGBT citizens is especially popular within academic institutions, legacy media, the entertainment industry, and even sports. However, newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year — an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts. Furthermore, the income gap between both black and Latino men and Asian women is wider than it has ever been. The income gap between white and black women, meanwhile, is much narrower than the gap between their male counterparts.
These outcomes cannot exist in a society suffused with misogyny and racism. As confounding to conventional progressive wisdom as these new figures appear to be, copious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories — higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823). The report also finds substantial economic gains among minority groups. Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute reports that from 2018 to 2019, Asian and black households had the highest rate of median income growth (10.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively) of all main racial groups (although she cautions that overall disparities remain “largely unchanged”). On a longitudinal scale, Hispanics, not whites, had the highest income growth in 2019 relative to the start of the Great Recession in 2007 (although many of these gains have been reversed by the pandemic).
Rapidly rising female economic success is partly a product of higher academic representation. 2019 was the 11th consecutive year in which women earned the majority of doctoral degrees. Women accounted for 57 percent of all students across American colleges in 2018 according to the latest US Department of Education figures and earned the majority of associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. According to University of Michigan economist Mark J. Perry, “By overall enrollment in higher education men have been an under-represented minority for the last 40 years.” Sex differences in cognition can help to explain differential performance along gender lines — although men typically perform better on quantitative and visuospatial tasks, several studies have found that on average women perform better in verbal and memory tasks and on reading and writing tests.
December 17, 2020
Henry Ford and the Mass Marketing of Hatred | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.07 – Spring 1920
TimeGhost History
Published 16 Dec 2020Racist conspiracies are on the rise in America. But other hysterias are also lessening. Will there be a return to normalcy?
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Spartacus Olsson
Mikolaj UchmanSources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Portrait from Bibliotheque Nationale FrancaiseFrom the Noun Project:
– agreement by Vectors Point
– film camera by Chanut is Industries, TH
– cowboy man by Adrien Coquet
– Protest by Juan Pablo Bravo
– Immigrants by Luis Prado
– pair figure skating by Andrei Yushchenko
– singles figure skating by Andrei Yushchenko
– Letter by Mochammad Kafi
– speech by Juan Pablo Bravo, CL
– universe by Icongeek26
– Arrow by IconTrack
– Galaxy By VictorulerSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound
– One More for the Road – Golden Age Radio
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Slow Discovery” – Cobby Costa
– “Try and Catch Us Now” – David Celeste
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian AndersenArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
December 12, 2020
Pearl Harbor and the Global War Against Humanity – WAH 024 – December 1941, Part 1
World War Two
Published 11 Dec 2020December 1941 marks the shift to a new chapter in the War Against Humanity. New fronts open up, exposing millions more to the horrors of war. Other developments continue their path of continuous escalation.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources
—Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorized by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Klimbim
– Spartacus OlssonSources:
– Yad Vashem: 76CO9, 3150-122, J3065-2, 85DO1, 1427 83, 1007_31,
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– National Archive NARA
– Library of Congress
– Bundesarchiv
– Berlin Gestapo Museum
– United States Holocaust MuseumSoundtracks from epidemic sounds:
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “For the Many STEMS INSTRUMENTS” – Jon Bjork
– “Remembrance” – Fabien Tell
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “Moving to Disturbia” – ExperiaArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
3 hours ago
Before we get comments about the countries currently participating in World War Two: in December 1941 there are more countries that are still neutral than we list here, but that won’t last, or as Sparty said these are the ones that will REMAIN neutral. They are without a doubt not at war, not occupied, and not in a state of war. All the other ones are – more or less. Mongolia? Has been in a de-facto state of war with Japan since the Manchurian incident. Ethiopia and Iraq? Both occupied, or at least on the lines of contested territory. The South and North American states? They will mostly enter the war later – but we’d argue that already now the Panama declaration ties them to each other to an extent that the fate of the “neutrals” has been complicated by the countries joining the war in December ’41. Now that you know our reasoning behind this, we encourage you to offer any alternative or additional thoughts on this in the comments.
December 11, 2020
“Politically correct language … seemed like a nice, polite, and Canadian sort of thing to do”
Meaghie Champion discusses politically correct language in The Line:
Source: https://www.deviantart.com/blamethe1st/art/Statist-And-Anarchist-063-Political-Correctness-589944623
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. I have never lived in a world without what we now call “political correctness” — typically understood to mean using a kind of stilted and artificial language in order to atone for the disadvantages and slights suffered by marginalized groups and avoid inflicting new ones. Politically correct language required more effort to communicate, but it seemed like that effort was worth it to not offend people. It seemed like a nice, polite, and Canadian sort of thing to do.
I went along with political correctness out of a sincere desire to be accommodating to disadvantaged and dis-enfranchised groups. This became especially true after I learned about the “Sapir Whorf theory of psycho neurolinguistics.” The theory suggests that language shapes our perception of reality; that by altering the way we talk, we can shift the way we think — and, thus, collectively, we can shape reality itself. From this, it seemed logical to “de-gender” language or stop using stereotypes. It seemed like a small ask. Maybe I personally couldn’t solve big problems that concerned me as a good liberal … i.e. things like poverty or world hunger, but I could be nice in how I expressed myself and try to use language that everybody was using to be equitable and more fair.
What I didn’t understand, then, was that this precedent set a trap in which many good, well-intentioned liberals are finding themselves stuck. It’s no longer about ameliorating past sins: there is a project afoot to re-make the English language. The purpose of this project is to re-engineer how people think about certain subjects like gender, sex, and race, while skipping the necessary prerequisites of persuasion and logic. Conservative positions are declared off limits, even bigoted, simply by shaping the way we are allowed to talk about them.
Right now, even as I type this, there is a veritable army of academics hard at work on what they call “de-colonizing” and “de-gendering” language at many universities and colleges. There are tens of thousands of activists and academics in universities and online organizing and pushing for ever-changing rules to be enforced as it relates to the English language. It’s a multi-million-dollar industry in academia and woke corporatism. And it’s already starting to spill over into government regulations and enforcement.
I love the English language. I have been a voracious reader since childhood. I thrill at well-spoken and written prose and poetry. A finely turned witticism or fantastic mot juste can break my heart with its perfection. Further, I’m First Nations, and that love of the English language has also carried me into a love of the study of my tribal cradle tongue “Hul’qumi’num.” Shouldn’t I, as a First Nations person, be in favour of de-colonizing the English language? No. No, I do not think so. I have little patience or regard for any effort that makes language a less workable and functional tool of human endeavour. I identify strongly as a writer, and I take this assault upon the tool with which I conduct my craft very personally.
November 23, 2020
QotD: The social poison of hypersensitivity
And yet, this hypersensitivity is absolute and complete social poison.
Read that again, please. This is a poison pill. When you read Drew’s piece, you will notice how everything is colored through the lens of racism. He literally cannot see anything without suspecting secret racism behind it. And, furthermore, I have no doubt his friends are fully cognizant of this. They, not wishing to anger him or appear racist themselves (who does?), almost assuredly feel a constant social pressure to micromanage their words, gestures, and behavior around their friend. This, in turn, makes interacting with him less pleasant. This becomes self-reinforcing. Drew detects his friends act different about him, which fuels an assumption that the difference is due to racism, which in turn is detected by the friends, who now act even more different in an effort to avoid this very thing.
Everybody gets caught in a spiral of stupidity that no one can escape from.
All until somebody, in the heat of the moment, not thinking, breaks out a slur. Whether driven by bad luck, too much to drink, or some other mechanism, the micromanagement of offense is broken. And not even knowing how to handle this, the relationship of the man and his friends entirely breaks down, requiring him to write a letter to his friend, and considering abandoning the friendship altogether.
See how this works? Drew, like many American blacks, has a wall between him and the rest of us. Piercing that wall takes extra effort. He may even be entirely justified in how he arrived at the notion that the wall was necessary, just as a Jewish person is quite justified in worrying about pogroms and other such things, given the course of history.
However justified, though, the hypersensitivity works against healing and normalization of relations. It poisons relationships.
Thales, “Hypersensitivity and Race”, Declination, 2018-08-08.
November 21, 2020
Brendan O’Neill: My Beef With Millennials
Independent Man
Published 13 Aug 2017Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5Qv…
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November 19, 2020
White Lives Matter More – A Summer of Blood | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.04 – Summer 1919
TimeGhost History
Published 18 Nov 2020Technology promises a better and more connected world in the summer of 1919. But battles still rage everywhere over who will inherit it.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…
Like TimeGhost on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimeGhost-16…Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Miki Cackowski and Michał Zbojna
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Mikołaj Uchman
Spartacus OlssonSources:
From the Noun Project: bridge by Adrien Coquet, Delete by Kevin Eichhorn, Fire by Sweet Farm, Model T by Alex Valdivia, people by Anastasia Latysheva, peoples by Musmellow, revolt by Symbolon, Smoke by Krish, people by Nithinan Tatah, explosion by Aldric RodríguezArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
21 hours ago
Four episodes into this new series and we think it’s going pretty well. Behind-the-scenes we have been getting ahead with our planning to make make things as laser-focused as possible and we have some pretty fascinating pieces of history we want to talk about.But we know that there is always a learning curve with a new series and we care what our community thinks. It’s the TimeGhost Army who make our content possible so we’d like to hear from you what you think about Season Two of Between 2 Wars. What are you enjoying about it? Is there anything you think we should work on? How do you feel about Indy’s outrageous suits and ties?
November 17, 2020
QotD: Prejudice
Or just think about how much ink has been spilled arguing that it is unfair and unjust to assume that one black youth is a criminal or a threat just because he resembles in some way a negative stereotype. I’m not mocking this argument; I am agreeing with it.
As I’ve been saying until I’m blue in the face on my book tour, one of the greatest things about this country is the ideal — always in tension with the lesser devils of our natures — that says we should take people as we find them. My objection to identity politics is that it reduces millions of people to a single attribute or grievance. It assumes that, simply by accident of birth, some people are more noble or more evil than others.
If you think that all you need to know about an African-American person to size up his character or humanity is his skin color, then you’re a racist. […]
You can run similar thought experiments about virtually any group. If all you need to know about Oscar Wilde is that he was a gay dude, just like Richard Simmons or Milo what’s-his-name, you’re a bigot. If Meyer Lansky and Albert Einstein are merely two Jews to you, you’re an anti-Semite. If Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, and Lizzie Borden are just three chicks, you’re a sexist.
And again, historically, this is mostly a left-wing or liberal (both in the classical and modern senses of the word) insight. But for some bizarre reason, for many people, this idea evaporates like water off a hot skillet when you replace any of these categories with “white” or, very often, “male.”
Suddenly fancy words and phrases fly like sawdust from a wood chipper: “structures of oppression!” “decontextualized!” “ahistoricized!” etc. It’s all so clever and complicated. The same people who take to the streets at the slightest suggestion that Muslims can be judged by the evil deeds of other Muslims will lecture and harangue you for hours, mob you on Twitter, or condescendingly dismiss you for not understanding that all white people have it coming.
I am not denying the history of white racism in America. I’m more than eager to acknowledge it. But what these people are basically saying is that you can say bigoted things about all white people based on things other white people have done. And spare me the argument that some 70-hour-a-week truck driver in Appalachia has it coming because he’s a grand beneficiary of white supremacy.
Jonah Goldberg, “The G-File”, National Review, 2018-08-03.
November 7, 2020
Trump-supporting ethnic minorities were “enacting a form of white mimicry, or ‘white adjacency'”
In The Line, Kaveh Shahrooz looks at the accusations among the ultra-woke that members of ethnic minorities in the United States who voted for Trump can no longer be considered ethnic minorities and are guilty of variant forms of white supremacy:
Did self-hating racist Hispanic and Black people help Donald Trump? Did sexist women stop the promised Democratic blue wave?
Those may seem like bizarre questions, but according to the woke left, the answer is: yes.
A new narrative began to emerge on election night, after it became clear that Miami-Dade County — a heavily populated area in southern Florida — would go to Trump, thus preventing an early Joe Biden blowout. To the woke left’s chagrin, it was Trump’s significant support among Miami-Dade’s Hispanic voters, namely those in the Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American communities, that kept the state in the Republican column.
In a direct challenge to the widely held belief that Trump’s presidency is the result of a simple racist white patriarchal backlash, the incumbent president actually increased his support among Latinos, black males, Muslims, and Native Americans on election night. He also appears to have maintained much of his support among women.
To compensate for this cognitive dissonance, standard bearers of the woke left explained this phenomenon by implying that these ethnic minorities were enacting a form of white mimicry, or “white adjacency.” First out of the gate was the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, fresh off the controversy surrounding her 1619 Project, who tweeted that “white Cubans” should not be lumped in with “Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans.”
Insofar as ethnic communities should not be assumed to share political interests simply because they speak the same language and come from roughly the same broad geographic region, it is hard to disagree with her. But her point was not anything nearly so straightforward. As she made clear in subsequent tweets, she believes that the Miami Cubans should more accurately be viewed as white because they sit atop “racial hierarchies based on whiteness.”
November 6, 2020
QotD: When you use a racist lens, everything looks like racism
If DiAngelo’s friends had told her not to live in the neighborhoods because they had black and brown residents, she could call them out for overt racism. But even when her friends made no mention of race whatsoever, DiAngelo attributed their warnings to racism as well. There was no way for her friends to mention the neighborhood’s high crime rates without DiAngelo finding them guilty of racism.
DiAngelo also supports her theory that all white people are racist by interpreting ambiguous events to support her conclusions, despite other plausible explanations. In one anecdote, DiAngelo describes an incident in which a white female teacher had two black students at her desk. The teacher prefaced something she said with the word “girl.” One student felt that the use of the word “girl” was racist. The other student disagreed, saying that the teacher called all her students “girl” regardless of their race.
Any reasonable person would conclude that if the teacher called every student — white, black, Asian, Latinx — “girl,” the teacher’s use of the word resides somewhere between “not racist” and “open to interpretation.” But DiAngelo reached a different conclusion, demonizing the teacher’s lack of concern for the offended student’s feelings, and calling the teacher arrogant for thinking the use of “girl” was not racist. To be clear, while teachers should listen to their students’ concerns, there is no proof this teacher’s word choice was racially motivated. And ironically, DiAngelo is guilty of everything she criticizes the teacher for because DiAngelo arrogantly ignores the other black student who did not think the comment was racist.
David Edward Burke, “The Intellectual Fraud of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility“, The Logical Liberal, 2020-06-13.
November 5, 2020
America on the Brink of Revolution? | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.02 – Winter 1919
TimeGhost History
Published 4 Nov 2020There is revolution and fear of revolution throughout the world in the winter of 1919. But cultural and technological revolutions are also bringing hope to many. A new age of Jazz and Cinema is about to reach America and Europe.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Archive Research: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Mikołaj Uchman
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/Sources:
From the Noun Project:
– Money by Gilberto
– lightbulb By Maxim KulikovSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound and ODJB:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “The Last Journey” – Line Neesgaard
– “Tiger_Rag” – ODJB
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Please Hear Me Out” – Philip Ayers
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “I Won’t Give You Up” – Almost Here
– “The Charleston” – Macy’s Voice
– “Defeated” – Wendel SchererArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
As in life, this series will always be a curious balance of light and dark. In the winter of 1919, one Parisian might have tickets to see the Original Dixieland Jass Band while their neighbour lies destitute after the war, and a well-to do man in Glasgow might be at the cinema while tanks rolls into his city to quell industrial unrest.Troubled and fascinating times then and troubled fascinating times now here in 2020. All of us here at TimeGhost hope that all of you are healthy and staying safe. And hey, if you need some entertainment to pass the time, you can find plenty of Between 2 Wars episodes alongside WW2 In Real Time and BIO Specials!
October 30, 2020
Halloween Special: H. P. Lovecraft
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Oct 2018HAPPY HALLOWEEN IT’S TIME TO GET SPOOKY WITH HISTORY’S MOST PROBLEMATIC HORROR WRITER LET’S GOOOOO
While there’s something to be said for separating the art from the artist, I think there’s a lot of merit in CONTEXTUALIZING the art WITH the artist. Did Lovecraft write some pretty incredible horror? Sure! Was he also a raging xenophobe? Absolutely! Are his perspectives on life connected with the stories he felt compelled to tell? Duh! If you look at Lovecraft’s writing through the lens of his life, clear patterns emerge that allow us to pin down what exactly he built his horror cosmology out of. It’s an invaluable analytical tool that allows us to take apart his writings by getting inside his head. So before you yell at me for Not Separating The Artist From The Art, know that it was completely intentional and I’m not sorry.
3:20 – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
8:40 – COOL AIR
10:36 – THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE
14:38 – THE DUNWICH HORROR
19:32 – THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTHPATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…
From the comments:
Overly Sarcastic Productions
1 year ago
Hey gang! Can’t help but notice the comment section is a little bit on fire. That’s all good with me, but one recurring complaint I’ve noticed has started to get under my skin – namely that my explanation of non-euclidean geometry was insufficient, or even – dare I say – inaccurate. Now this is a fair complaint, because after a lifetime of experience finding that people’s eyes glaze over when I talk math at them, I concluded that interrupting a half-hour horror video with a long-winded explanation of a mathematical concept wouldn’t go over too well. I put it in layman’s terms and used a simple example to illustrate the point. However, since some of the more mathematically-inclined of you took offense, I now present in full a short (but comprehensive) explanation of what exactly non-euclidean geometry is.First, we axiomatically establish euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry has five axioms:
1. We can draw a straight line between any two points.
2. We can infinitely extend a finite straight line.
3. We can draw a circle with any center and radius.
4. All right angles are equal to one another.
5. If two lines intersect with a third line, and the sum of the inner angles of those intersections is less than 180º, then those two lines must intersect if extended far enough.Axiom #5 is known as the PARALLEL POSTULATE. It has many equivalent statements, including the Triangle Postulate (“the sum of the angles in every triangle is 180º”) and Playfair’s Axiom (“given a line and a point not on that line, there exists ONE line parallel to the given line that intersects the given point”).
Euclidean geometry is, broadly, how geometry works on a flat plane.
However, there are geometries where the parallel postulate DOES NOT hold. These geometries are called “non-euclidean geometries”. There are, in fact, an infinite number of these geometries, and because the only defining characteristic is “the parallel postulate does not hold”, they can be all kinds of crazy shapes. (As you can see, my explanation of “this is just how geometry works on a curved surface” is quite reductive, but at the same time serves to get the general impression across without going into too much detail.)
An example of a non-euclidean geometry is “Elliptic geometry”, geometry on n-dimensional ellipses, which includes “Spherical geometry” as a subset. Spherical geometry is, predictably enough, how geometry works on the two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional sphere.
In spherical geometry, “points” are defined the same as in euclidean geometry, but “line” is redefined to be “the shortest distance between two points over the surface of the sphere”, since there is no such thing as a “straight line” on a curved surface. All “lines” in spherical geometry are segments of “great circles” (which is defined as the set of points that exist at the intersection between the sphere and a plane passing through the center of that sphere).
The axiom that separates spherical geometry from euclidean geometry and replaces the parallel postulate is “5. There are NO parallel lines”. In spherical geometry, every line is a segment of a great circle, and any two great circles intersect at exactly two points. If two lines intersect when extended, they cannot be parallel, and thus there are no parallel lines in spherical geometry.
Since the Parallel Postulate is equivalent to Playfair’s Axiom, the fact that no parallel lines exist in spherical geometry negates Playfair’s Axiom, which thus negates the Parallel Postulate and defines spherical geometry as a non-euclidean geometry. Also, since the Triangle Postulate is another equivalent property to the Parallel Postulate, it is thus negated in spherical geometry. Hence, my use in-video of an example of a triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere whose inner angles sum greater than 180º.
Hope that cleared things up (and helped explain why I didn’t want to say “see, non-euclidean geometry is just a geometry where Euclid’s Parallel Postulate doesn’t hold – hold on, let me get the chalkboard to explain what THAT is-” in the video)
Peace!
-R ✌️
October 24, 2020
“So – a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in America?”
Arthur Chrenkoff responds to this tweet from Robert Reich:
In case you are unfamiliar with the term, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was instituted in the post-apartheid South Africa as a way of non-violently and non-punitively coming to terms with the painful racist past. It was a forum where the victims of human right abuses were able to testify about their experiences, and where some of the perpetrators could respond on record – ideally with some contrition – and request amnesty for their misdeeds. It was an exercise in “not forgotten, but possibly forgiven”, a way forward in transition to democracy that would not have to involve mass incarceration of those connected with the old regime. While criticised by many, this model of community healing is thought to have been quite successful in as much as it has been replicated in numerous other countries around the world as a way of dealing with the past and moving on. As the Good Book says, “the truth shall set you free”.
So – a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in America? You don’t have to have actually lived in a totalitarian society (even if, like with yours truly, it helps) to be taken aback at the insensitivity and the sheer tone deafness exhibited by a privileged member of the American elite (Clinton’s Labor Secretary, Berkley professor, 1 million Twitter followers) comparing the last four years in the United States to the four decades of South African apartheid or a quarter of a century of a military dictatorship in some coup-prone South American republic. Are these people really so lacking in self-awareness?
The answer is yes, and in turn it points to a more interesting socio-political phenomenon. For the past few decades, intellectuals (the great majority at various distances to the left of centre) have been looking at activists and dissidents outside of the developed, democratic “First World” – people like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, Ang Sang Suu Kyi in Burma/Myanmar, academics and trade unionists throughout Latin America fighting against right-wing dictatorships, and to a lesser extent those in opposition to communist dictatorships like the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, and Sakharov, Sharansky, Solzhenitsyn and others in the Soviet Union – and I think their main, if secret, reaction was envy and guilt.
Guilt because their own lives in the West were by and large safe, secure, privileged and prosperous, while their counterparts (intellectuals, artists, community leaders) in the Second and the Third World (now developing world) were putting their lives, freedom and livelihoods on the line for the principles and ideals they believed in. And envy because, as the stakes were so much higher “over there”, the lives of all these dissidents, oppositionists and human rights activists seemed so much more meaningful – and, yes, exciting. While you were pondering on the next New York Times op-ed you are going to write, while turning up to your monthly faculty meeting in your new Prius, somewhere in Africa or Asia or Latin America a prisoner of conscience was on a hunger strike, actually living the ideas you believed in and not just writing about them. Sure, it’s terrible, yet how much more interesting and consequential than your placid and predictable existence of mortgage repayments and the Monday morning undergraduate class in political theory?
