History What are some of your most contraversial takes on history?

Skallagrim said:

Every point you raise has already been addressed in detail, @Morphic Tide. The "profound incomprehension" here is exclusively on your side. The fact that you fail to understand quite obvious explanations, and then just stubbornly act as if those explanations were never actually given, is likewise exclusively your problem.

I understand that you'd like to turn it into my problem, by treating me as a sort infinitely patient answering-automaton-for-dumb-and-dishonest-questions. That kind of attitude (shoving effort onto others and pretending they owe you something) is precisely what I'd expect from any maliciously-minded economic illiterate. It's basically socialism in a nutshell.

I'm not your monkey. I've been very patient in answering some of your really dumb questions, but frankly: you're clearly not trying to learn, and your questions aren't sincere. Typically, I get paid to educate people. If you're interested, I can contact you about my hourly fee. I'm not interested in doing this work for free, much-needed as it may be in your case.

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what is that hourly fee?

Cherico said:

what is that hourly fee?

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In practice, I make more doing my actual job (philosophy professor) than an economic tutor. Which means that I'd either have to spend my time inefficiently (doing work for a lower wage, when a better-paid work is available), or I'd have to convince students to take lessons at a substantially inflated fee. Obviously, neither is economically sensible: the former not for me, the latter not for any student.

Additionally, I find, there is a massive slew of educational material regarding economic available online -- much of it free. I'd urge people to have a look at the Foundation for Economic Education and the Mises Institute. Naturally, I'd hardly claim that those guys are right about everything -- so very few people ever are! But they are highly experienced at dismantling the more common misconceptions about economics...

In the case of this discussion here, of course, my point is actually that if someone is debating is bad faith, the whole exercise becomes a chore, and I'd wish to get paid for that. If I'm not, I won't do it. Debating people honestly is fun, but a 'rigged' debate is pointless. If someone is uninterested in getting closer to the truth, why would I expend a lot of energy trying to teach them something? It's pointless. Someone who wishes to learn will seek out knowledge -- and find it readily. ("For when the student is ready, the master will appear.")

So when someone is clearly dishonest, my advice is: treat them as such, otherwise they'll abuse your good will. In this case, I was debating someone who is demonstrably willing to go against his own stated arguments in order to keep arguing. To wit: he first argued that deflation would cause people to never work again, and then argued that deflation would basically be meaningless and so we shouldn't count on it being beneficial. These two statements are mutually exclusive. To anyone sane, it's clear that the truth lies between these extremes: deflation is beneficial, but not to absurd extremes. But he argues two contradictory extremes, and ignores the reasonable conclusion.

Why? Because he wants to argue. He actively rejects reason and logic in order to keep the argument going. Not an argument intended to produce insight, but an argument for the sake of arguing. Which means that no matter what reason I present, what logic I apply, or what evidence I offer... he'll never accept it. He'll just keep arguing, because that's what he is trying to achieve.

This is why I cease such discussions. Whenever it becomes clear that the opposite party is not interested in arriving at the truth, I stop all attempts to lead them to it. Let them figure it out for themselves.

TheRejectionist said:

Mussolini and his ideology could have benefitted the world had he not aligned with Hitler.

But the bald cunthead reasoned like a cretin in 1938-1945 so my country is the aircraft of NATO and slave to the banks.

Basically I detest Mussolini for compromising my country for a hundred years if not more. Not just because he invented fascism and the whole mess with that degenerate bastard of Hitler.

So, I hate him for not "the right" reasons according to mainstream leftists.

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Mussolini was responsible for Yekatit-12, the mass murder of Ethiopia's cognitive elites, so even had he not allied with Hitler, he would have still been pretty bad. But Yeah, nowhere near as bad as Hitler, I will grant that.

Skallagrim said:

In practice, I make more doing my actual job (philosophy professor) than an economic tutor. Which means that I'd either have to spend my time inefficiently (doing work for a lower wage, when a better-paid work is available), or I'd have to convince students to take lessons at a substantially inflated fee. Obviously, neither is economically sensible: the former not for me, the latter not for any student.

Additionally, I find, there is a massive slew of educational material regarding economic available online -- much of it free. I'd urge people to have a look at the Foundation for Economic Education and the Mises Institute. Naturally, I'd hardly claim that those guys are right about everything -- so very few people ever are! But they are highly experienced at dismantling the more common misconceptions about economics...

In the case of this discussion here, of course, my point is actually that if someone is debating is bad faith, the whole exercise becomes a chore, and I'd wish to get paid for that. If I'm not, I won't do it. Debating people honestly is fun, but a 'rigged' debate is pointless. If someone is uninterested in getting closer to the truth, why would I expend a lot of energy trying to teach them something? It's pointless. Someone who wishes to learn will seek out knowledge -- and find it readily. ("For when the student is ready, the master will appear.")

So when someone is clearly dishonest, my advice is: treat them as such, otherwise they'll abuse your good will. In this case, I was debating someone who is demonstrably willing to go against his own stated arguments in order to keep arguing. To wit: he first argued that deflation would cause people to never work again, and then argued that deflation would basically be meaningless and so we shouldn't count on it being beneficial. These two statements are mutually exclusive. To anyone sane, it's clear that the truth lies between these extremes: deflation is beneficial, but not to absurd extremes. But he argues two contradictory extremes, and ignores the reasonable conclusion.

Why? Because he wants to argue. He actively rejects reason and logic in order to keep the argument going. Not an argument intended to produce insight, but an argument for the sake of arguing. Which means that no matter what reason I present, what logic I apply, or what evidence I offer... he'll never accept it. He'll just keep arguing, because that's what he is trying to achieve.

This is why I cease such discussions. Whenever it becomes clear that the opposite party is not interested in arriving at the truth, I stop all attempts to lead them to it. Let them figure it out for themselves.

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Apologies for asking, Skallagrim, but are you tenured?

WolfBear said:

Mussolini was responsible for Yekatit-12, the mass murder of Ethiopia's cognitive elites, so even had he not allied with Hitler, he would have still been pretty bad. But Yeah, nowhere near as bad as Hitler, I will grant that.

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As for Yekatit-12, here you go:


And this otherwise Mussolini-friendly article also acknowledges this:

Skallagrim said:

This is why I cease such discussions. Whenever it becomes clear that the opposite party is not interested in arriving at the truth, I stop all attempts to lead them to it. Let them figure it out for themselves.

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I'm happy to see that you still feel some duty to shoot down the bad-faith arguments for the benefit of the rest of us.

To get this all a bit back on track, let's have an actual "controversial take on history". Okay, more of a controversial take on pre-history.



I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis warrants serious consideration. I don't think other factors, such as Lake Agassiz rapidly emptying, should be discounted as relevant -- but the evidence for one or more impact events (almost certainly involving a major airburst) does really stack up. In fact, this event may well have caused the break-through of Lake Agassiz (by flooding the lake with an immense influx of glacial meltwater as the ice sheet was impacted, thus causing the initial overflow, which carved a path to the ocean, and thus precipitated the rapid draining of the entire lake into the ocean).

It's quite reasonable to assume that the massive amount of meltwater affected the ocean's "conveyor belt" and thus had a role in the 1200-year return to far colder conditions... but the extent of this effect may be debated. An impact event as the intial cause strikes me as convincing, and impact winter as a major factor in the cooling seems at least quite plausible.

The hypothesised impact event is suposed to have caused major brushfires (like, "inferno" level!) across larges swathes of the Northern hemisphere, and particularly across North America. This is then reasoned to have been the key factor in both the very sudden extinction of a lot of North American megafauna and the equally sudden disappearance of the Clovis cultural complex. I find this very convincing, because the traditional theory ("evil humans killed all the poor animals!") doesn't really fit the evidence. Sure, it would fit, and it did happen aross the globe... but it happened very gradually. It happened gradually in North America, too. Until it suddenly became extremely rapid. Right at the same time that a collapse of the human population appears to have occurred. Those two factors don't add up to "humans did it". They do add up to "sudden mass extinction event bad enough to cause 1200-year-long return to ice age conditions".

So I'm pretty sure the notion of an impact event has considerable merit, and should be treated seriously.

I'm even willing to entertain the notion that the Younger Dryas period was later ended by an encounter with remnants of the same object, this time causing an oceanic impact, which caused massive tsunamis, the addition of a shit-load of water vapour to the atmosphere, and a subsequent rapid temperature spike due to that, which in turn resulted in very quick sea-level rise ("meltwater pulse 1b"). This is far more iffy, by the way, but one has to admit that it's poetically attractive!

Naturally, this whole view of the Younger Dryas is obviously highly controversial, because it doesn't make humans the Evil Bad Guys, and it doesn't even allow for "just" climate change to have caused all of this. This is a huge sign calling for attention right there. When the reasons to discard a hypothesis are politically motivated, then that hypothesis should be given extra consideration, just to correct for the bias against it.



Other examples of this can be found much later in North American history, too:

-- For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that the aforementioned Clovis culture was the oldest Native American culture, and that the Americas were uninhabited pre-Clovis. Critics of this view were literaly expelled from academia and structurally slandered. It has since turned out that the ancestors of the Native Americans arrived at least ten thousand years pre-Clovis. Some tentative hints have emerged that an earlier wave of migration (by peoples quite possibly related to the ancestors of the Australian Aboriginals) may have occurred before 40,000(!) years ago. Which would mean that when the Native Americans we know got there, they may have encountered a stone age population (whose numbers would be correspondingly low, and who would thus be either absorbed or exterminated in short order). In any event, there were people in the Americas long before "the experts" said there were.

-- For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that there were very few Native Americans (in the order of maybe ten million across the Americas). It has since turned out that there were far more of them. Like ten times more.

-- For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that evil Europeans had massacred the Native Americans in vast numbers. It has since turned out that disease was really the major killer, and did most of the work before any real European presence was established in any region. The America that most Europeans saw was quite literally a post-apocalyptic waste-land inhabited by the struggling survivors.

-- For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that the Native Americans lived in a fondly imagined "harmony" with nature. It has since turned out that the Native Americans (who were there much earlier than previously thought, and if far greater numbers) were geo-engineering on a massive scale. The thick forests that many North American settlers saw? New growth arising after >90% of the Native Americans had dropped dead, and were thus unable to keep maintaining the previously quite cultivated park-land environment. The huge herds of buffalo? Only ever existed because the Native Americans who previously hunted those buffalo and kept the population down had died from disease.

-- For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that the Amazon rainforest was pure, pristine nature, where only some glorified "noble savages" ever lived. It has since turned out that lots of the Amazonian basin was previously savannah-like, and actively cultivated. Millions of people lived there. The Amazon was home to cities. (The eco-crowd hated this revelation, and maliciously fought against it for decades. LIDAR imaging in recent years has revealed direct proof of immense human-built structures beneath the Amazonian canopy. Many a Cahokia lies hidden there, covered by the jungle in the centuries since Eurasian diseases exterminated the people who lived there.)

-- Speaking of Cahokia... For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that it was a natural formation. It has since turned out that it was very much built by humans, and that there was a whole Mississippian civilisation, with extensive trade networks covering vast regions of North America.



The experts aren't always wrong. They may not even usually be wrong. But they can be wrong, and we shouldn't ever forget that.

The idea of deep time is terrifying the idea that massive civilizations we're brought low and that is can happen to us as well is fucking scary and as the veil of history is pulled back we're seeing more of that

Skallagrim said:

For a very long time, the "experts" all argued that evil Europeans had massacred the Native Americans in vast numbers. It has since turned out that disease was really the major killer, and did most of the work before any real European presence was established in any region. The America that most Europeans saw was quite literally a post-apocalyptic waste-land inhabited by the struggling survivors.

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From what I understand the argument is more that Disease and Europeans together destroyed the native population. This is certainly what happened in the Caribbean but it dosent exactly hold water when you consider that even with the real brutality of the Conquistadors, there was still a lot of native people to rule over in south and Central America.

Earl said:

From what I understand the argument is more that Disease and Europeans together destroyed the native population. This is certainly what happened in the Caribbean but it dosent exactly hold water when you consider that even with the real brutality of the Conquistadors, there was still a lot of native people to rule over in south and Central America.

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For a very long time, the role of disease was severely under-rated, because (in a related point that I also mentioned) the number of Native Americans was also severely under-rated. To if you think there were maybe ten million native Americans, then whatever number of those that were killed by Europeans represent a certain percentage. If it turns out there were far more Native Americans, and >90% of them were killed by disease, than the maximum percentage of Native Americans acively killed by Europeans drops to a few percent of the populace at most.

It's still the same number that were killed by Europeans, but it leads to a very different understanding of the role of the Europeans.

Where it gets really troublesome, though, is the point where loads of lefty folks have accepted the high population numbers, but retained the supposed percentages killed by Europeans. So now they present it as if Europeans actively butchered millions upon millions in some deliberate super-genocide, which is... complete bullshit.

Skallagrim said:

Where it gets really troublesome, though, is the point where loads of lefty folks have accepted the high population numbers, but retained the supposed percentages killed by Europeans. So now they present it as if Europeans actively butchered millions upon millions in some deliberate super-genocide, which is... complete bullshit.

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And, then you get the Australian Aboriginals. The reason there are zero pure Tasmanian Aboriginals is because they sold their women to the new European colonists, until there was pretty much none left. As in, all women were slaves of the tribe.

Can't talk about that one, however. It's Racist.



There's a lot of this kind of thing in history. But, if we can't face it, we can't learn from it.

Simonbob said:

And, then you get the Australian Aboriginals. The reason there are zero pure Tasmanian Aboriginals is because they sold their women to the new European colonists, until there was pretty much none left. As in, all women were slaves of the tribe.

Can't talk about that one, however. It's Racist.



There's a lot of this kind of thing in history. But, if we can't face it, we can't learn from it.

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Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. No. It’s quite simple they fought a Insurrection and because of a incredibly small population they were wiped when they lost. Yeah Euros get overly focused on sometimes, but let’s not compensate by denying a actual genocide. A sort of accidental one but still, a Genocide.

Earl said:

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. No. It’s quite simple they fought a Insurrection and because of a incredibly small population they were wiped when they lost. Yeah Euros get overly focused on sometimes, but let’s not compensate by denying a actual genocide. A sort of accidental one but still, a Genocide.

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I haven't read that.

Last I heard, there were no mass killings. There were claims, a while ago, but the evidence didn't support it (Remains, but they didn't show signs of violence).

I know there were fights, and some deaths, but there were also a lot of selling their women, often for steel axe heads, and sometimes beads and the like. That was the biggest factor, last I heard.

Then again, this was the Tasmainian Aboriginals. They couldn't work out how to start fire, for crying out loud.



I haven't looked into this for a number of years, though.

Earl said:

From what I understand the argument is more that Disease and Europeans together destroyed the native population. This is certainly what happened in the Caribbean but it dosent exactly hold water when you consider that even with the real brutality of the Conquistadors, there was still a lot of native people to rule over in south and Central America.

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Might as well throw out one of my hot takes, the Conquistadors weren't so bad for conquerors. Yeah, I realize that's damning with faint praise and not being bad by the standards of colonizing invaders is like not being ugly by the standards of internal parasites. In popular media Spain tends to be portrayed as Always Chaotic Evil. But where the Spanish went, we still see surviving native populations in the majority. We see strong signs the natives survived rather handily, such as Mexico being named after the native Mexica tribe and their genetics containing a very healthy percentage of native DNA.

Where the French and British invaded, we see their descendants, and only scraps of the natives remain compared to Spanish conquests.

Bear Ribs said:

Might as well throw out one of my hot takes, the Conquistadors weren't so bad for conquerors. Yeah, I realize that's damning with faint praise and not being bad by the standards of colonizing invaders is like not being ugly by the standards of internal parasites. In popular media Spain tends to be portrayed as Always Chaotic Evil. But where the Spanish went, we still see surviving native populations in the majority. We see strong signs the natives survived rather handily, such as Mexico being named after the native Mexica tribe and their genetics containing a very healthy percentage of native DNA.

Where the French and British invaded, we see their descendants, and only scraps of the natives remain compared to Spanish conquests.

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still a buncha Mayan descendants in the Yucatan jungles and native languages are still widely spoken in more remote parts of south america

on the other hand, residential schools pretty much destroyed native culture and language in Canada

Earl said:

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. No. It’s quite simple they fought a Insurrection and because of a incredibly small population they were wiped when they lost. Yeah Euros get overly focused on sometimes, but let’s not compensate by denying a actual genocide. A sort of accidental one but still, a Genocide.

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Looking it up more, it seems I was too generous:


Article shows quite plainly explicit statement for genocide, and colonial authorities working towards it even after conciliationist policies were enacted (supporting extermination teams even after a truce/aid was declared) and working to cover up such activities (which shows conspiracy/denial because invariably that is always what Genocidaries do, except for Anceint Times). So yeah, very much intentional.

Earl said:

Article shows quite plainly explicit statement for genocide, and colonial authorities working towards it even after conciliationist policies were enacted (supporting extermination teams even after a truce/aid was declared) and working to cover up such activities (which shows conspiracy/denial because invariably that is always what Genocidaries do, except for Anceint Times). So yeah, very much intentional.

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There's been a war in Australian Uni's for decades. A war over how the colonisation of Australia should be seen.

The side who wants to blame the Brits for all bad things have been pushing the genocide line, often with scanty evidence, for decades.




So, given the lady who put that together? Who's in good with the Leftists running the Uni of Tasmainia? I don't trust it, not a bit.

(So, in theory, it could be true. However, it comes from the same lying scum that claimed "Massive Slaughter" without real evidence for decades, as well. Keith Windschuttle - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core is one of the people who looked into this stuff, and found zero forensic, and bugger all written evidence that it ever happened.)

Skallagrim said:

I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis warrants serious consideration.

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Also because of the implications, re needing an asteroid-deflection system set up yesterday.

I'm not sure if I have previously said this, but here goes:

I think that the Iraq War was the less bad alternative for Iraqis themselves if the most likely realistic alternative to this for Iraqis would have been an even larger Syria-style bloodbath. At least in real life, Iraqis shed somewhat less blood and also actually got a democracy of their own, albeit a severely corrupt and dysfunctional one.

Also, the 1947 partition of India was a good thing if it could have been accomplished with no or minimal bloodshed, like the 1993 Czechoslovak partition was. After all, this allowed India to remove a lot of Muslim radicalism:


But Bangladesh should have been made its own separate state immediately in 1947. This would have prevented the extremely massive bloodshed there in 1970-1971.

The Confederacy's temporary secession from the US was a good thing since it allowed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to be ratified, which would have otherwise been astronomically more difficult to do.

Simonbob said:

There's been a war in Australian Uni's for decades. A war over how the colonisation of Australia should be seen.

The side who wants to blame the Brits for all bad things have been pushing the genocide line, often with scanty evidence, for decades.




So, given the lady who put that together? Who's in good with the Leftists running the Uni of Tasmainia? I don't trust it, not a bit.

(So, in theory, it could be true. However, it comes from the same lying scum that claimed "Massive Slaughter" without real evidence for decades, as well. Keith Windschuttle - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core is one of the people who looked into this stuff, and found zero forensic, and bugger all written evidence that it ever happened.)

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Hey, they have the recipts. They have internal correspondences about it and explicit statements by the officers on the ground “if the only way to deal with this problem is by extermination, then I say boldly, exterminate them”’. This also isn’t exactly new. The reason they were going out of there way to hide there actions is because it would not be recived well, and indeed there were books “Last of the Tasmanians” and the like which were not favorable to them. Rapeheal Lemkin, the man who defined the term Genocide and wrote a history about it very clearly identified this as one of the clearest examples in his book. But I get it, you have a knee jerk need to reject all ideological positions, so instead of acknowledging a true thing which happened, your just going to deny it. I doubt a word I can say will change that.

Earl said:

But I get it, you have a knee jerk need to reject all ideological positions, so instead of acknowledging a true thing which happened, your just going to deny it. I doubt a word I can say will change that.

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I do have a bit of that.

I've been lied to, a lot, so it can be difficult for me to see some of this stuff without assuming that it's not just another lie.



As for Rapeheal Lemkin? I don't know anything about him. I just know a bit about the Australian academic community, and they're seriously untrustworthy when it comes to Australian history. Lots of political hacks, with axes to grind.