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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 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.

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.

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.

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