I've mentioned before that I have a rule of thumb when watching or reading anything to not watch anything made after 2014 without a trusted recommendation. I'm wondering if anyone has a similar kind of cutoff when reading about history? If so what is yours?
With the whole diversity obsession in entertainment it has thoroughly ruined period pieces and what is even more annoying is that the media shills will find some historian to claim that Victorian England was always very racially diverse, Vikings were multicultural, or we get the moronic stuff like League of Their Own/that GREASE prequel with lgbt stuff all over along with interracial relationships.
Funny thing is that I've never heard the argument about Victorian England or the Vikings until these shows started pushing this nonsense. It's as if they have some quack historian on retainer or they say something like "well the British Empire included parts of Africa so it makes sense for them to be in a show about upper crust Brits in the 1800s".
I had to stop reading modern science magazines a while back because I foolishly thought they surely wouldn't go along with the nonsense about transgenderism. I also looked up some information on the African slave trade and the essay grudgingly admitted that slavery existed in Africa but not as bad as American slavery. In America you had slaves that were treated very poorly and very well so I would assume that would be true across the world when slavery was commonplace.
So, sorry for the essay, but any rule of thumb y'all could recommend?
I don't trust anything from history. I think all of it has been rewritten many times and biases applied. Just look at the covid-19 situation. How do you imagine textbooks will teach about it in 80 years? That it was a mostly harmless virus in which the government overreacted and deadly vaccines were developed that killed millions of people or do you think it'll report the complete opposite government approved story? In time, only a handful of people will remember the truth of covid-19. Publishers won't publish the data in books because it's misinformation. Academic journals will remove anything that references a different narrative. You'll only have some .pdfs found on obscure websites in the darkweb that tell the truth and to people in 100 years from now, it'll look like some weird esoteric mythology rather than truth.
I imagine almost all of our history is similar to this. Even stuff you'd imagine no one could lie about. Moon landing? Uh huh... Steal of the presidential election? Uh huh...
I definitely think post-WWII the level of propaganda ramped up by an exponential margin though. So my general cutoff for anything for it to be somewhat accurate is pre-WWII; however, if it's too far from the past like ancient romans/greeks/mediaeval stuff, one has to wonder if these sources have been entirely fabricated perhaps recently or perhaps centuries ago and these sources are not accurate at all for what people say they are representing.
Even the bible translation in English people have are questionable. How much of that was rewritten or works people didn't agree with were destroyed never to be found again thus skewing the entire message?
Absolutely everything I read, no matter the supposed time it was written, is under scrutiny by me. If what I'm reading doesn't help to improve what I know to be best in life, then as far as I'm concerned, it is drivel.
Mostly agreed.
People are people. Is there any reason to think the censorious, dissent-suppressing leftists of today are inherently different from those who were authoritarian collaborators 100 years ago? Maybe, but generally evolution doesn't work that fast. I tend to think the tools have changed but the people haven't, meaning that all recorded political and social history has been decided by the powerful.
Great points all around
Between Covid and seeing history rewritten in real time during #GamerGate...yeah, I think it's safe to say that a tremendous amount of history is suspect now.
Lol
If a book said kill yourself because that would be better for you and the world, would you kill yourself?
Even if you laugh at my sentence, you do the exact same thing.
Nope!
Also nope!
Once again, your metaphors are bad.
No, my metaphors are amazing. You're just too stupid to understand.