In other news

I'm not claiming I was the only one who saw it coming, but there was a substantial group of people arguing that Musk wasn't a nazi, which even if you ignored his blatant nazi salute, all you had to do was see his posting (which I made sure to post here for everyone to see) to see that he was deeply white nationalistic for YEARS before doing a nazi salute.

Now hes just full blown mask off white supremacist posting and none of those people are coming around to apologize for being wrong.

I dunno, its like every piece of blatant evidence gets defended here by an ever dwindling group of posters. Most of MAGA is gone, its just weird Canadians defending the administration now. This all was easily avoidable by paying attention occasionally

i also agree that you guys fundamentally misunderstand kelhus

imo he views himself as an ordinary guy who isn't swayed by emotional arguments and that gives him enough objectivity to cut through the wordy facades and dive down into what the data says

i think it's a leak that he does tend to swing in the direction of the right wing derposphere a lot and has too often mixed up things and mixed in derposphere nonsense into the equation (but i've never thought that was intentional)

but other than that i think he's objectively speaking one of the more level headed posters - more importantly, he's always happy to defend his positions with data - something most who debate him are unwilling to do

i don't necessarily agree with the long tail of his conclusions, but agree that he is directionally right far more than most and fact he's willing to defend and discuss his points rather than just insult and move on like most here is admirable

he's genuinely a top 10 poster here

I don't want to brag, but if I'm forced to, I will. 😀 You guys were both ahead of the curve of course.

The first time I heard Rush Limbaugh on the air as a teen, I was like... "If we're going to allow the BS on American air waves, this country is FKD!"

Everything has been about creating a false reality, and then drawing in people based on their biases and bigotries. Once you get people in agreement on their "dark little secrets", you can get full buy in to convince them about almost anything.

You just need to understand a little bit about historical cycles of fascism, to know where this would go. Plato laid it all out 2500+ years ago.

Plato describes a cycle in which political regimes decay alongside the human soul- aristocracy, governed by reason, gives way to timocracy, driven by honor, which degrades into oligarchy, ruled by appetite for wealth, then collapses into democracy, where all desires are treated as equal, and finally descends into tyranny, in which both the state and the soul are enslaved by fear and compulsion.

People are just ignorant, and don't want to use their minds or understand any of this. That's why we keep repeating this sht.

I would agree with most of this.

How is it possible to unintentionally mix "derposhere nonsense into the equation"?

That's what get me. It's always something like, "Well I'm not sure, but I've been hearing _______."

So they admit they have no idea if this info is true, but they're going to go ahead and spread the (mis)information around anyway.

I don't even see the bolded very often.

a basic tenet of propaganda is that if you repeat something enough it gets accepted as fact

i think he's just seen so many mentions of certain things such as "obama's chef was found naked at 3am" that at some point it just got etched into his mind as verified fact

i also think what most non right wing people fail to grasp is they see a curated list of the derposhere that makes it look a lot more insane that it is - when coordi posts something from one of them on twitter, it's not a standard run of the mill post they make but the most objectionable and batshit lunacy he's seen out of that person in quite some time

yes it's insane, but that insanity doesn't feel so crazy when it's surrounded by a lot more standard and mainstream content

much in the same way we all get annoyed with right wing portrayals of leftists as if anyone who voted for kamala walks around all day like this lady

Being able to prevent yourself from absorbing derp is part of what marks a thinking person and a good poster. You don't have to believe it just because you see it repeatedly on social media. And if you aren't capable of ignoring nonsense, then you shouldn't structure your social media feed in a way that results in you being firehosed with garbage. For adults, that is a choice.

I think most people are smart enough to understand this point. I find it hard to believe that Kelhus is too stupid, too naive, or too seduced by the less objectionable stuff in his feed to recognize that some of what he repeats here is obvious unsubstantiated horseshit.

lol, Kelhus is absolutely laughing his ass off at how gullible rick is.

As an aside, I hate photos like the one rick posted that are supposed to make people on one side or the other of the political spectrum appeared deranged, unhinged, evil, delirious, drugged, or whatever. As we all know from endless stills of "angry" Trump, HRC, Michelle Obama, etc., if you go frame by frame in a video or take a million photos of someone, it is trivially easy to find an image that dramatically mispresents a person's actual demeanor at the time the photo/video was taken.

That photo is especially egregious because shes actually very reasonable throughout the video

I don't even know the video. rick, before you jump in, I understand that you weren't posting the photo for the purpose of arguing that this woman was actually crazed with anger.

because if he bothered to spend the time researching it to find the link he'd see it was unfounded and just something he took for granted as genuine

i think you guys are way too unfair to him here. his point about there being very little saudi peninsula history without the koran is absolutely correct, and the response of “look at all the sources on the wiki” completely misses that those modern sources only exist because of koranic influence in the first place. if the koran laid out a different but still plausible timeline, we would have just built the narrative around that instead.

this kind of thing happens constantly in archaeology. for example, one of the criteria used in israel to identify a site as jewish is the absence of pig remains.

the problem is that this is a very weak marker once you look at the data. we have confirmed jewish sites with pig bones and confirmed non jewish sites without them, which already undermines the idea that this is a meaningful discriminator.

it also gets used circularly. no pig bones means it must be a jewish site, which then gets cited as evidence that jews did not eat pigs.

however, if you peel back the veil and look at nearby regions from the same time period and similar climate, including areas we know for a fact had very few jews residing in them, you again see similar rates of pig remains at settlements.

so the absence of pig bones is not unique in the slightest. if anything, finding them should be the surprise. we still use the marker because it provides some context despite being unreliable, and that is still better than flipping a coin.

In B4 the inevitable lozen response:

"very reasonable" lololol

legit lol

and yes i agree that kel's biggest blindspot is having a soft spot in his heart for the derposphere

he said we’re not allowed to question it due to progressive ideology which is complete horseshit.

lol, no it's not. That was the fucking golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate, they had libraries, histories, political writings, scientific writings, etc. Aren't you supposed to be a history major? JFC.

It's a perfect example of our resident racist crackpot making something up on the spot and you believing it instantly out of some kind of moron solidarity.

i wouldn't agree with that viewpoint - but that's also not his viewpoint

this is his viewpoint - and it's 100% accurate

he then uses arabia as an example and only barely touches on even hinting at what you interpreted his answer to be

you have a very hostile interpretation of "But in this case (and many others) political realities make any serious historical exercise impossible"

there's a lot of room to interpret that without it having anything to do with your assessment of what he meant - i personally don't see it - i think he's more talking about general inertia against systematically changing our interpretation

same way i am routinely poo poo'd whenever i point out to people "we don't even know if troy actually existed" or when i point out how unfairly commodus is treated in gladiator

or better yet, focus on something modern, when i point out that movies have lied to us and 95-98% of troops who landed on d-day survived - that it was indeed horrible and i'd never wish that fate on anyone, and yet it's nothing like the 10% survival rate you often see portrayed in film - and just watch how everyone hates you

go post that on reddit or quora and watch as they attack you for it because it doesn't jive with their memory of watching saving private ryan - people would rather insist that the lie they've been told is real than evaluate their position to see if it is accurate or not - this is why despite how easy it is to be a winning sportsbettor, almost none of my friends and colleagues who are interested, despite all the hand holding and training i give them, ever become winning bettors - simply because they are incapable of checking their biases

and in any case, even if he said what you accuse him of saying, it's a far better perspective than this post which came in response that you +1'd - which underlies that he is either posting in bad faith and hoping most of the thread won't see through the bs or he himself has no clue what he's talking about but is all too happy to argue about it anyway

good reminder of this

because the abbasid caliphate is a full century after the last event to occur in the koran - so we're clearly not talking about that but talking of events preceding that

again more evidence of confirmation bias, you're looking for angles of attack rather than truth - which is why you're such a pathetic worm

thanks for reminding me of why i have you on ignore, because you are the embodiment of confidently incorrect, you come in firing hot with racist personal attacks and all you are doing is showing to the world just how absolutely braindead and pathetic an individual you are

The Great Oracle

I am not a historian of the Islamic world, but based on five minutes of research, it seems like Trolly is correct that the Abbasid Caliphate was exceptionally well-documented by contemporaneous writing (at least by the standards of the time). Much of the history of the two preceding Caliphates seems to have come from writings that were done during the Abbasid Caliphate. I'm sure that a great deal of the documentation from the period was influenced by what the people in power wanted the history to be, but that phenomena has existed for the entirety of written history and continues to exist today.

and as mentioned above, there's no possibility that we could be using the koran to guide our understanding of that era since the koran has not been updated since 652 and the abbasid caliphate was founded in 750

so the point that there's ample records of abbasid history has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion

it has as much relevance as the 9/11 attacks had upon the war of 1812

appreciate you not calling me racist though

Kelhus specifically mentioned the Islamic world in the 8th century, try to keep up. But thank you for acknowledging that indeed there are plenty of primary historical documents from this era besides the Koran.

there's no shortage of scholarly writings from this part of the world from 600-800 AD either, FWIW. You picked an exceptionally bad time and place to argue that there's a lack of primary historical documents.

You guys are just repeating what I said in a different way. But yes.

I mean in the US today we see both the far left (1619 project) and far right (holocaust revisionism) retrofitting fake histories for contemporary political reasons.

And don’t get me started on the mostly made up history justifying “Palestinianism”