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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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"Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix has been a break out hit. Some of the reactions have been... interesting.

The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.

Boingboing says Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse"

So what's behind this?

Hitler famously cherry picked some ideas from archeology / anthropology to push his agenda. Post WW2 academics found that it was easy to push out rivals by claiming their ideas could result in a new Hitler.

As a result anthropology is filled with people who think that they have a vital role as guardians of society.

This mostly results in making historical narratives more dishonest and less cool. The Bell Beaker culture is often referred to as the Corded Ware culture. They claim it was spread as a peaceful diffusion of culture. Genetic testing that showed that as the culture expanded neighbouring Y-DNA haplogroups disappeared. This is dismissed as one of those great mysteries.

When a body is found carrying a spear and multiple hand axes, they are ceremonial trade goods instead of weapons. The arrows in the back of the body were presumably his change from the trading. That joke was stolen from an academic I can't track down.

Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.

funny but sad. graham hancock is old hippy left. pot DMT acid & shrooms loving limey. "all politicians should use psychedelics at least once" variety. totally harmless.

if he's right one or more oceanfaring civilizations were wiped out 12,000 years ago. this poses no threat to power unless anapoc of all things is the memetic force that makes the people prioritize getting off the rock above all else. doubt it.

The Bell Beaker culture is not called the Corded Ware culture. It is likely descended from the Corded Ware, but they aren’t the same.

I don't have an opinion about the content or Hancock, but the presentation/production of the series itself is absolutely atrocious. The copious sound effects alone render it unwatchable for me, add to that the rapid pacing and corny monologues and you get something that is truly terrible in my opinion as a piece of television. I was at least able to listen to the JRE episodes with Hancock. I think he's an engaging speaker, so I'm not biased on that front. The packaging of this show is just so offensive to my sensibilities.

The real psyop is baiting in right-wingers with the promise of based television?

The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.

OK, now I have to watch it. Hope it doesn't disappoint.

Up until this year most historians were claiming the Anglo-Saxon invasion never happened (until of course DNA studies finally proved that Anglo-Saxons did indeed migrate in significant numbers).

Most of contemporary archeology is driven more by academic fads than actual science.

https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/hating-the-saxon-the-academic-battle

I'm a little torn, the criticism seems overblown and likely in bad faith considering the sources but I do find it hard not to give "documentaries" about totally fictional prehistory a kind of side eye.

I haven't seen and and maybe I will now with the recommendation. It can be fun to explore weird ideas and why people believe them but there is a line where endorsement happens that can be blurred.

Is it about the Bronze Age Collapse?

No, earlier. His thesis is that the younger dryas sea rise wiped out an early agricultural society along the coasts.

The fastest sea rises back then were around 5 cm per year. A few generations of that plus the ensuing coastal erosion could wipe out fishing villages, and of course a few millennia of that redrew continents, but on the time scales of a society with agricultural technology it's nothing. Wouldn't some parts of that society have remembered to bring seeds with them, when they escaped the calamity by walking uphill slowly once every couple decades?

Is that the doggerland civilization, or something else?

I've only watched two episodes, but he touches on Sundaland. Looking at episode descriptions, it doesn't look like Doggerland will come up. Apparently there's a show, also called Ancient Apocalypse, from last year, which has an episode on Doggerland. That seems unrelated to Graham Hancock.

No. Atlantis.

Ah, so a dueling show with Rings of Power.

I've been told by a knowledgeable source that Conan the Barbarian (minus the magic) had a more accurate description of pre-history Europe than post-WW II anthropologists do.

Conan: Total war, might makes right, population replacement through violence. Post WW II anthropologists: Everyone lived in peace. What Hitler tried to do never, ever happened in the distant past and if you think differently you are a Nazi supporter.

Coincidentally, Conan also spent quite a bit of time gallivanting around lost continents.

The Independent goes a bit further still:

The Guardian branded the series “the most dangerous show on Netflix”, while historian Greg Jenner referred to it as “absolute nonsense which fails at the most basic level to present convincing evidence” – and yet the series has sat in Netflix’s Top 10 list for several days, currently resting at No 7 across all of film and TV at the time of writing. The documentary has raised concerns over Netflix’s own complicity in disseminating dubious or misleading information. More than this, however, it has made a compelling case for the value of the UK’s publicly owned broadcasters.

...

That’s not to say that the BBC and Channel 4 are completely without sin, of course. The BBC – in particular, BBC News – has been criticised for a perceived right-wing political bias in recent years; its handling of transgender issues has been condemned by LGBT+ rights activists on multiple occasions.

...

But who is holding it accountable for these decisions? As a streaming service, Netflix isn’t even subject to the same regulations that regular UK TV channels are: when viewers are offended by something on traditional TV, they can always complain to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom. Because Netflix is based in the Netherlands, it falls outside of Ofcom’s jurisdiction.

...

Perhaps Netflix jumping on the pseudoscience bandwagon was an inevitability. But it’s a stark reminder of exactly what’s being lost in television’s pivot to privately owned streaming services. It’s an issue that’s threatening to swallow social media platforms whole, too: how exactly the spread of (mis-)information is regulated. Modern companies must start drawing from the lessons of the past – it might help to understand why the BBC has lasted as long as it has.

Not only is this show bad and dangerous, it stands as an example of why we probably just shouldn't even allow private television production at all. If we're going to insist on having private television, we should probably at least turn curation of it over to the government to make sure that communication there is appropriately reviewed and approved for public consumption, less the public start getting into all sorts of wrongthink. It's impossible for me to not jump immediately to the control of information around Covid and the desire "fact check" all sorts of things that were branded "misinformation".

Anyway, all of the people telling me that the show is simply terrible and probably shouldn't even be allowed pretty well ensures that I'll give it a watch.

Soviet Union used to have only three TV channels. So, one day it is announced that the forth channel is now available. So, this guy comes home and turns on the TV, and on the first channel it's Leonid Illych Brezhnev reading one of his magnificent speeches. So he switches to the second one, and it's the same. He goes to the third channel - same. So he thinks - no problem, there's now a fourth one! - and switches to that. And sees a KGB colonel who looks at him sternly and says "This channel switching, comrade, will get you in trouble one day!"

In Russian, this joke sounds better because the last sentence can be expressed in a single word (well, two if you count "comrade").

I'm trying to wrap my head around what you are saying about the last sentence, you're saying that there is one word which expresses "switching channels will get you in trouble"? Or is the "switching channels" part just implied from context in the original Russian phrasing?

There is such a word. I don't remember this anecdote, but am inferring from @JarJarJedi's telling that it's "Допереключаешься" (doperekliuchaesh'sya). I have never used this word myself, but it's reconstructable from first principles.

Russian, line some other languages, allows for easily composing words. The prefix Do (literally the connotation of getting "to" some point) means, especially in the context of the rest of the word, that further/excessive performance of this action will lead to bad outcomes; prefix pere means changing (for example, "переходить улицу" is "changing sides/crossing the street", literally cross-go); kliuch[ать] is literally "key", usually included in words like "включить/выключить" ("turn on/off"), the 'esh' indicates that it's second person singular i.e. addressed to the listener and concerns his actions, and sya turns it to passive voice (...does it though?) and stresses that the consequences will be to himself. So the literal meaning of the word is, perhaps, "You will get in trouble from all that clicking/tuning to channel after channel". And it sounds rude.

Some extra humorous effect comes from this word being similar to the much more common doviyobivaeysh'sya, which is an obscene way to say... uhhh.... «keep swaggering/fucking around/acting like you're cool shit and you'll find out», I guess. Or something.

Naturally almost any verb root can be plugged into this construction to much the same effect.

you're saying that there is one word which expresses "switching channels will get you in trouble"

Yes.

Strictly speaking, the "channels" part is implied, but since the Russian word used in this context is pretty specific to what you do with the channels, the implication is clear.

Basically, he's right except he translator added "one day" and "comrade". (an example where translations go longer and feature meanings which original didn't have)

The word is допереключаешься.

-ся is the reflective suffix/ending (offtopic: cringe spelling, compare e.g. Polish cognate is written się, more letters and diacritic, so it must be better)

-аешь is the ending for verb 2nd person singular. The future time rather than present is obtained by that complete word is a finite verb by virtue of its first prefix

ключ is the root for key/switch. Needs both prefix and ending to become a verb (some nouns don't need a prefix to become a noun, but this does).

пере- is prefix, one of many which could produce switching verbs; unlike English "switch on" Russian uses prefixes

до ???

PROFIT

I don't know much about Quechua but I think Quechua has more grammatical categories for intent and completness of information, apparently Incas liked Quechua so much so they shifted from their native language to Quechua.

Would probably be допереключаетесь, unless the man had already допереключался and is now in the KGB torture room where he is addressed more rudely and informally.

No, допереключаешься is more frequent by far margin

Thanks for the detailed breakdown! I'm still not seeing where the sense of "getting in trouble" is coming from in your explanation though.

It's coming from the "до" part. Literally, this prefix implies arrival to a destination (like доехать = to arrive from до + ехать to go or to drive). However, when used with words that do not mean literal movement, especially when combined with the reflexive suffix ся, this prefix often means "there would be bad consequences if you keep doing this" - e.g. доиграешься (от играть - to play) means if you keep playing like that (or in general, acting like that) something bad will happen (the implication is it will happen to you, though you can also say it meaning it would happen to somebody else, but still will be your fault).

So what would be the literal translation of "допереключаешься"?

The future time rather than future is obtained by that complete word is a finite verb being finite by its first prefix

What does this mean? Did you accidentally a word here?

Literally it means something like "if you keep switching [implied: the channels] there would be bad consequences for you", or maybe "keep switching and find out". It's hard to say it in English any shorter because I don't know any constructs that do the same thing in English.

No idea, my command of English isn't that good, I helped with what I could.Maybe "you continue switching [and something happens] to you"

Yes, fixed that, s/than future/than present/

The Russian language has over two hundred words for being sent to the gulag.

I never counted, but I wouldn't be surprised.

What a strong endorsement. As an Ancient Aliens fan, this show seems like an amazing addition to the genre.

I googled this show to see the premise and ran into the same independent article. Glad you wrote this comment and saved me some trouble.

Netflix is teeming with programmes that fall somewhere between being knowingly pulpy and outright schlock.

I miss Deiseach. Her brand of sarcastic indignity would be the perfect response to such a claim. Who could believe that pulp entertainment is enjoyable, even popular?

Netflix too often seems to operate under the amoral ethos of the free market: if people will watch it, that’s reason enough to make it.

Well, at least it’s a capitalist critique rather than the Guardian’s crusade against racism.

I miss Deiseach. Her brand of sarcastic indignity would be the perfect response to such a claim. Who could believe that pulp entertainment is enjoyable, even popular?

Oh no, I guess we'll just have to make do with the other sarcastically indignant middle-aged Irish Catholic woman who hangs around SSC-related forums.

I legitimately have no idea who you’re talking about now that ###_###### is gone. At least on this particular forum.

Send me a DM or something, because I could use a bit of “obvious in hindsight” right now.

God, I feel like Feynman yelling, “Look at the water.” I even gave you all the clues.

You can do it. I believe in you.

Who???

As far as I can see, we are fresh out of vocal Catholics.

...This would be the perfect moment for a particular poster to interject with "There are dozens of us! Dozens!"

I miss Deiseach. Her brand of sarcastic indignity would be the perfect response to such a claim. Who could believe that pulp entertainment is enjoyable, even popular?

Y'all amaze me. I've been told by other mods that my spidey-sense for alts is more attuned than theirs, but sometimes I feel like the only person who sees the three kids in the trenchcoat trying to buy beer.

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Well, we don't require anyone to declare "I am the poster formerly known as ____." That's up to them.

And while I don't feel like we have an ethical obligation not to reveal alts, we generally won't unless someone's being a ban-evading turd.

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Hold on.

I knew about her long-running one but after the harassment debacle I hadn’t noticed another. I have no (plausible) ideas about who it might be.

Not the only one. I was just about to reply and say the same thing.

So...what’s supposed to be the problem with AApoc? White supremacy is pretty nonspecific. Is Hitler involved, or is that just a segue?

Also, wiki tells me Bell Beakers were “contemporary with and preceded by” Corded Ware-iors. I didn’t see any claims that it was peaceful, and the “renewed emphasis on migration” section is headed with a bow. A nice touch.

I’d be interested in reading more on the drama of this field, if you have any articles.

This article is a good historiography of thought in archeology and how DNA studies are overturning the post 1960s paradigm in remarkable ways:

“Along with these two papers came several more (Mathieson et al 2015 and Poznik et al 2015) which asserted that the Yamnaya invaders were fair skinned, much larger in stature and were predominantly male.

It is difficult to overstate the distress and anxiety these results caused in the archaeological world - a theoretical bomb had just removed the foundations from underneath the entirety of modern scholarship.”

https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/broken-open

In the same vein as my prior post on Zorro and being shocked that people I hate haven't tried [thing]; I've personally always been astounded that Neanderthal DNA isn't considered the foundational concept for HBDers and Hoteps respectively. It's actually a very neat way of slicing what a lot of HBDers want: 1-2% varied Neanderthal DNA in Asians and Europeans, 0% in sub-saharan Africans.

For modern HBDers, this is the motherlode, a neat way to slice Black people off as inherently different from both whites and Asians. Center the whole idea of civilization on the Neanderthal, whether that is the "higher human instincts" or the whole Atlantic/Lemuria complex of lost civilization ideas. There's the "science" saying exactly what they want it to!

For Hoteps, it's an even better find: white people are literally less pure humans than Black people. My distant European ancestors literally interbred with a dying outmoded pre-human hominid species, and my Nigerian friend can quite frankly state that his did not, that he's a pure human! Yakub vindicated! The white man's own science has found that the white man isn't a real human, but a hybrid chimera!

I've considered writing two giant effortposts on it, from separate accounts, one from each side, just to gage the relative reactions.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the popular marketing of Neanderthals as primitive grunting cavemen has been so successful for so long that it is unrecoverable intellectual property. Neanderthal just has no glitz to it, nothing people want to identify with.

White identitarianism has always relied on obscure historical theories, Aryan was the academic term used for the Proto-Indo-Europeans before Hitler made Aryan too icky*, and PIE was coined primarily as a euphemism to refer to what (until then) was the much catchier Aryan theory.** Before Hitler, Aryanism relied on all kinds of skull measuring and migration theories, from the pseudo-mystical Atlantis to the politically convenient "Maori and Japanese are lost Aryans, Australian Aboriginals and Chinese are not" to the academic study of word origins and linguistic analysis. What's been missing from this soup for a while is a useable marketing terminology. Enter Yamnaya! Yamnaya is catchy enough, and enough of a blank slate, that maybe it will catch on.

*Interestingly outside of Western Europe/America this taboo doesn't really hold. One of my favorite things I've seen over and over is like five Iranian friends have tried to explain at a party to a group of horrified SWPL white people how Persians are the "original Aryans"; understanding not at all why everyone is looking at them like that.

**As an aside, if we're going to do anti-Nazi education, rather than presenting Nazi archeology and history as "boo outgroup" wow look at what those wacky morons believed; we should start by presenting (smart) kids with the actual PIE/Aryan story, with the linguistic and mythological evidence, and present Aryanism as what it was: mythmaking, no different from the way we present the idea that the Lenape or the Greeks heard thunder and got scared and said "There must be a god of Thunder and he is angry!" 19th century Germans were presented with a confusing landscape, a world in which they were discovering these deep linguistic and cultural similarities across continents, and in which Europeans were absurdly dominant over the rest of the world, and in trying to explain it to the best of their abilities they produced myths, no better and no worse than those just-so stories of Ovid. This will help students to actually understand why Nazis believed what they did, and help to educate them to spot real life parallels to the Nazis, which is impossible if you just think Nazi=evil.

Of course, this will never happen, an even mildly sympathetic portrayal of Nazi ideas in education is considered "too dangerous." They fear it might seduce the children if they are exposed and asked to entertain the idea for even a second. I wonder why?

For Hoteps, it's an even better find: white people are literally less pure humans than Black people. My distant European ancestors literally interbred with a dying outmoded pre-human hominid species, and my Nigerian friend can quite frankly state that his did not, that he's a pure human! Yakub vindicated! The white man's own science has found that the white man isn't a real human, but a hybrid chimera!

Not actually correct though since Africans have between 9 and 19% DNA admixture from a ghost hominid population.

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.aax5097

For modern HBDers, this is the motherlode, a neat way to slice Black people off as inherently different from both whites and Asians. Center the whole idea of civilization on the Neanderthal, whether that is the "higher human instincts" or the whole Atlantic/Lemuria complex of lost civilization ideas. There's the "science" saying exactly what they want it to!

Perhaps your model of the HBD supporter is just wrong? We've said plenty of times here that we are not motivated by the desire to dehumanize populations that seem to perform worse on average. You'd think many of us not belonging to the top performing groups would have been the more obvious reasons to trust us in this but here you have discovered yet another way that our motivations are better in line with what we say they are than your uncharitable assumption and it seems more confusing than enlightening to you. What would it take to prove to you that we are not motivated by racial hatred?

Hoteps don’t read genetics studies and the discovery of Denisovan DNA in East Asians and Australo-Melanesians as well as relatively high percentages of archaic ghost DNA that diverged even prior to the split between humans and Neanderthals within African populations muddies the waters significantly.

I think it’s a subculture thing.

Writing/sharing articles about the pet topic signals membership and triggers those nice tribal feelings. Niche topics are even better because half the fun of Internet communities is diversity specialization of interests. Stone Age Pervert gets to be “that guy who knows what’s up with the Yamnaya.”

See also the dynamics around Internet antisemitism.

I hang out on /r/MawInstallation and occasionally answer questions or argue. I also take opportunities to shill for my pet theory. It’s not that expect to make “Star Wars planets are actually really small” mainstream; it’s just fun, and I wouldn’t mind being known as the Small Wars guy.

My guess is that it may be viewed as a general thrust against multiculturalism and the idea of peaceful coexistence and co-development of different cultures, religions and ethnicities voluntarily living next to each other and enriching one another.

The thing is that many of these stories over the centuries began as cooperation first: often the outside peoples were used by indigenous population in certain manner be it trade or even mercenaries. Once the other culture learned about the domestic population and its riches and strong/weak points, the invasion commenced. Think of stories like apocryphal story of Germanic people invited to England in order to fight Picts or Turkic Mamluks in Egypt or even in 19th/20th century story of Jews in Palestine. Not exactly poster cases for more immigration and multiculturalism.

The Globular Amphora people were even more fair skinned than the Yamnaya. The Bell Beakers we’re more fair skinned than the Corded Ware culture people despite their higher Early European Farmer ancestry.

From what I gather the issue is that the show notes that a lot of cultures have stories about wise men from the sea coming and bringing them things like agricultures and laws. eg Quetzalcoatl, Osiris. Graham theorizes that these may be memories of real events.

They are calling the implication that these societies didn't learn these things on their own racist.

The "white supremacist" charge seems like a real stretch because there's not even a hint that anyone involved was white.

I'm heard about the bias towards pacifism in "Before the Dawn" by Nicholas Wade. It's a great book, but it came out in 2007 so it might be dated about the state of the field. Also his 2014 book "A Troublesome Inheritance".

Articles like this made me think there's still some of it around: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/science/iberia-prehistory-dna.html

But skeletal DNA from that period is striking and puzzling. Over all, Bronze Age Iberians traced 40 percent of their ancestry to the newcomers.

DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.

To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.

“I cannot say what it is,” said Roberto Risch, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the new studies. But he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,” he said.

Instead, Dr. Risch suspects “a political process” is the explanation. In their archaeological digs, Dr. Risch and his colleagues have found that Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.

Oh and I got the names mixed up. The claim I read was that "Battle-Axe Culture" name used to be more common than "Corded Ware culture". Looks like it's still used in some cases.

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And further, "we see a lot of dead people buried together" doesn't strike me as a sign of egalitarianism, but rather of this. And mass graves are not signs of peace and egalitarianism, but lots of people dying at once, often due to violence.

"Buried together" is insufficiently defined to be properly analyzed by any of us. Certainly, it could mean a mass grave. Alternatively, it could mean something like this. I think you'll agree both have vastly different connotations.

And further, "we see a lot of dead people buried together" doesn't strike me as a sign of egalitarianism, but rather of this. And mass graves are not signs of peace and egalitarianism, but lots of people dying at once, often due to violence.

Presumably it can be determined how the people buried there died, i.e., whether it was violence or natural causes, and if they were buried simultaneously or over a longer period of time.

That "it is a mystery" line has to be subtle mockery from the NYT, surely, right? It's positioned and worded so perfectly...

Or this like the reactionary version of stoned people thinking everyone on TV is high? Do I just want to believe that everyone's walking around laughing at this stuff and only pretending to take it seriously so they don't get purged?

See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrationism_and_diffusionism

Not to put too fine a point on it, but an entire generation of anthropology was communist fanfiction with no grounding in reality, and this stuff still informs the prejudices of our educated class today.

But... it was peer reviewed! How could this be!?

Avoid low-effort sarcasm, please.

Duly noted.

From Boingboing:

If you research Graham Hancock and look at his books over time, as I have, one of the things that you discover about him is that he self-edits. He doesn't use the word Atlantis now except very sparingly. He has also edited himself since 1995, when, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he came out and said that it was an ancient white civilization. He no longer says the "white" part in the series. If you pay careful attention, he does talk about "heavily bearded Quetzalcoatl" who arrives, according to myth, to give the gift of knowledge, but he doesn't mention the other part of that trope, which all of us know about, which is that this visitor supposedly had white skin.

It's similar to the way that Donald Trump operates. He will get to the edge of something, but he won't say it, because he knows that his followers already know it. He can say, "I didn't say that," and he didn't say it, but everyone knew what he said because it was already known, right?

File under "demand for white supremacy continues to exceed supply".

So...what’s supposed to be the problem with AApoc?

Giving credence to a conspiracy-theory-oriented worldview and "alternative facts", I would imagine.

The wokes don’t seem overly preoccupied with alternative facts that are irrelevant, unlike previous versions of liberalism/progressiveism that were sometimes very concerned about generally non-relevant facts like the age of the earth.

The Guardian is more of a general left-liberal institution than a "woke" institution, and left-liberals tend to be very concerned with things like that, as you said.

I wouldn’t consider The Guardian left-liberal. They are socialists through and through, if more moderate than revolutionary socialists.

How do you mean?

I’d assume progressives, even “woke” progressives, still take the same stances on plenty of random trivia. The fact you don’t see it is more an artifact of the availability heuristic.

After all, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Yes, wokes by and large hold the same views about history and archeology and science that previous progressive movements did. I mean I’m sure if you looked you could find plenty of wokes that embrace weirdness about Yakub and the tribe of Shabbaz or Native American creationism or some other kind of non-white coded pseudoscience, but by and large it’s just… not a major focus, and it’s striking the extent to which wokes don’t care very much about factual accuracy wrt to these things. Like, bush era progressives might have been wrong about some of their scientific or historical views, but it wasn’t because they didn’t care.

This doesn't explain why they go after period with blackwashed historical figures, movies that portray slave raiders as abolitionists (The Woman King), or purveyors of hotepism in general.

Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.

Well, I read the linked Guardian article expecting to find what you claimed: accusations of white supremacism and fake history being pushed in its place.

That's not what I found. The show is hosted by Graham Hancock, so yeah: we're Discovery Channel Tomb of Jesus or History Channel All Hitler All The Time levels here.

Fun rubbish popcorn for the brain? Sure. But anything more serious than that, no. I've read some of his books from the 90s and he's been at this a long time. It's the Erich von Daniken version of prehistory, the Theosophist Ancient Lemuria and Mu Ascended Masters version. Cherry-picked narratives are indeed the problem here.

Most people won't take it as anything other than light entertainment. Some people may believe it's true, however. And I guess some of those might believe in some ur-Aryan white master race nonsense, but I can't be bothered to get het-up about that.

The danger is fake history, and yeah, it's on all sides of the divide today. Which is why it's better not to get your history from Graham Hancock, fun as it might be.

Most people won't take it as anything other than light entertainment. Some people may believe it's true, however. And I guess some of those might believe in some ur-Aryan white master race nonsense, but I can't be bothered to get het-up about that.

I'm reminded of when Paradox Interactive, a Swedish gaming studio who does historical strategy games like Crusader Kings (about the dynasties of the middle-ages) and the Victorian eras, started getting tarred for having too many white supremacist fans.

I have long been convinced that such complainers miss a rather critical point. If you believe someone is a awful white supremacist, what would you expect them to be doing if they weren't dumping hundreds to thousands of hours into video games?

You're thinking with consequentialist ethics, the complainers are thinking with virtue ethics.

The most extreme case of that I recall seeing was about 15 years ago, when Ron Paul was given $500 by some white supremacist, and Paul infuriated people by saying he didn't plan to return it. I would never have imagined you could get that many ostensibly liberal people to agree that giving money to fucking Stormfront was a moral imperative. But if you think one level up, the obvious "evil people wasting their time and money is good" might get outweighed by "what if they aren't wasting their time and money, what does that say about the supposedly non-evil people they're fans of". ... and then if you think two levels up you have to wonder "really, how high are the odds that the evil bigots are actually making a brilliant Machiavellian maneuver", and trying to thwart them by giving their money back seems foolish again, but for a minute there it made sense.

Not to come down too hard on what might be an off-hand comment, but exactly what salient or urgent "danger" does fake history present?

I can see how historical narratives (fake or not) could motivate conflict. For example, stories of dispossession can establish a deeply felt grievance that can be pointed to various destructive ends. But:

  • Not all dangerous narratives are in fact fake.

  • Those stories can just as easily be pointed at various constructive goals.

  • Most history isn't emotionally inflammatory.

  • Our understanding of history is constantly undergoing revision. Do discarded historical narratives count as fake? Are they prima facia "dangerous"?

  • The stories are open for (and usually attract) rebuttals.

When I was a kid, everyone read von Daniken's Chariot of the Gods, spent a few weeks mind-blown, then moved on to adulthoood.

Isn't the real danger here, the great, recurring theme of the internet era, the crisis of authority?

A well-deserved crisis, I'd say, but also genuinely dangerous to a great many people.

exactly what salient or urgent "danger" does fake history present?

None, but if "fake history" is dangerous then "real history" is important. Every field inflates the dangers of its own doctrinal enemies to inflate the importance of its own contributions to society. See how many extremely online dissident rightists blame everything on twitter Blue Checks and twitter Bluehairs; everything wrong with society is blamable on the people they fight with on the internet. Teachers blame lack of education, priests blame lack of religion, unions blame lack of unions, scientists blame lack of science, historians blame lack of history. Like clockwork.

This is all downstream less of a crisis of authority than it is the repudiation of historical materialism as a philosophy by both right and left academics, and the total lack of real life experience for so many of us. The superstructure and the spectacle are fought over, while the material base from which they grow is ignored. This severing of class conflict from our debates, class only reappears in the conscious output of our culture only in a mystified and racialized form for right or left, produces the idea that the war of ideas that one engages in online is the single most important war being waged.

I agree and see it as manifestation of iron law of beurocracy. Many fields you mentioned are ossified and require external financing. Hence the need to serve their own respective beurocracies. An ideal example is let's say intelligence communities: did we prevent some terrorist attack? See, it is working we need to do more. Did we not prevent a terrorist attack? We are underfunded and we need more resources. It also explains creeping of activism into sciences and by activism I mean one-sided single issue analysis of a given topic without any consideration given to any counterargument that can weaken the ultimate goal of getting more funds. Every study ends with "further research into this groundbreaking and important insight is needed".

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