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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.

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?

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