Today I learned +

[Whisper-Kitten]

I mean, Columbus was a monster. But they did not know what caused disease back then. Blaming them for that specifically doesn't actually make sense. Blame them for wanting to loot, subjugate and forcibly convert half the planet.

Still blaming him.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's listed under "other variations". A paper by sheridan and king.

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Ok, but as I said, it's not a replication, despite claims. If you read the paper it's appallingly conducted too, to the absolute lowest and most unscientific standards (again with the "reality TV" level stuff), like saying, because people volunteered on the basis of free course credit, they eliminated sampling/selection bias, which is literally the opposite of the case! It's a truly insane thing to claim - you'd be ridiculed for that today. Rather, they selected for a bunch of people who:

A) Desperately wanted to pass the course.

and

B) Didn't think that they could pass the course without help, i.e. getting free credit for doing this, so were willing to risk taking part in 1960s-era psychological experiments, which were pretty consistently messed up. Or were lazy opportunists willing to take risks (low conscientiousness in psychological terms).

and I guess that actually adds

C) People who were willing to do/accept messed-up stuff, because they want to be involved with psychological experiments in the 1960s - and that's not just backwards-looking, people at the time absolutely wrote at length about how messed-up psychological experimentation had been in the 1950s and 1960s, and it only got worse in the 1970s as far as I can tell! So that's a significant self-selecting bias that also applies to the other "reality show" attempts.

Any student with confidence in themselves and their own abilities, any student who was, well, studious, and a lot of categories of people would simply not have volunteered in the first place. So they got, frankly, the dregs and the desperate. Exactly like reality TV gets. Then acted like this was a normal sample of college students.

They also faked all readings for the amounts they animals were receiving, and anyone who like, the slightest, just slightest grasp on electrical physics must have rapidly become aware of this. 450v sounds scary because 240v or even 110v at 13 amps can blow you across the room (or rather cause your legs to spasm in such a way that that happens - it's happened to me lol). SPOILER COVERING as Trigger Shield for anyone who doesn't like to think about animals getting hurt! They were using 0.2 milliamps I mean, good, less cruel, because no permanent harm was done, but also I think bloody obvious when animals just dance around and bark/complain (rightfully!) rather being flung bodily by spasms or get similarly incapacitated - there's no doubt they could tell they weren't doing permanent harm. So contrary to the "real victims" claim, this was just another fairly obviously-fraudulent experiment.

If anyone ever wants to do this ever again, they need to survey the hell out of the "contestants", psychologically profile the naughty word out of them, and do it with like 1000 people, not 14, and further, they need to do it with a bunch of different people in charge, not just one guy who I think must have been insanely stern and patriarchal given the results this one got.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean, Columbus was a monster. But they did not know what caused disease back then. Blaming them for that specifically doesn't actually make sense. Blame them for wanting to loot, subjugate and forcibly convert half the planet.

Columbus was a monster according to people on his own ship. He literally enjoyed watching rape, horrific torture, and murder, and encouraged it. By the accounts of people on his own ship.

So let's be clear he wasn't just pushing a monstrous ideology of which he was only a cog - that's part of it - but he, personally, Columbus, the man, as an individual human being, was demonically evil. Not just "by modern standards", by the standards of other Europeans who worked with him.

(This is different to say, Clive of India, who arguably is responsible for even more deaths pushing the colonial machine, but was utterly screwed up by it all, tried to throw the brakes on the machine repeatedly, hurt his whole not-very-long life, and killed himself in a way that had to really suck because he was so fed up.)

 

[Reynard]

Columbus was a monster according to people on his own ship. He literally enjoyed watching rape and murder, and encouraged it. By the accounts of people on his own ship.

So let's be clear he wasn't just pushing a monstrous ideology of which he was only a cog - that's part of it - but he, personally, Columbus, the man, as an individual human being, was demonically evil. Not just "by modern standards", by the standards of other Europeans who worked with him.

Absolutely.
And to be clear, I'm not trying to give him a pass or anything. I am merely being pedantic about the early* intent -- or lack thereof -- behind the pandemics causes by Europeans. Even the people that just wanted to trade and explore ended up killing millions by the accident of where cows where found.

*Later, tho...

 

[Scribe]

TIL that seven sows were responsible for an estimated 1,000,000 deaths on the Isle of Hispanola when they (brought by Columbus) exposed the population to a virulent strain of swine flu against which the indigenous population had no defense. I had heart about small pox etc before, but not this specific thing.

I went on a bit of a dive into Canadian History, and yeah the scale of death is way higher than most are aware.

 

[Ryujin]

Columbus was a monster according to people on his own ship. He literally enjoyed watching rape, horrific torture, and murder, and encouraged it. By the accounts of people on his own ship.

So let's be clear he wasn't just pushing a monstrous ideology of which he was only a cog - that's part of it - but he, personally, Columbus, the man, as an individual human being, was demonically evil. Not just "by modern standards", by the standards of other Europeans who worked with him.

(This is different to say, Clive of India, who arguably is responsible for even more deaths pushing the colonial machine, but was utterly screwed up by it all, tried to throw the brakes on the machine repeatedly, hurt his whole not-very-long life, and killed himself in a way that had to really suck because he was so fed up.)

An example of an evil man, given power, then removed from any and all ramifications of his actions.

 

[Aeson]

An example of an evil man, given power, then removed from any and all ramifications of his actions.

I'm not sayin, I'm just sayin. Multiple felony convictions.

 

[MoonSong]

OOOKK...
YIL that Ulysses/Odysseus wasn't just pointlessly renamed by the Romans. The reason we have two names is that stories about him are so old that one version of his name fossilized on the written form (as part of the Homeric poems), but for the people at large the other remained/kept evolving.

And so is the case of Herakles/Hercules. The Romans name him Hercules because of phonetic evolution, not because they were fond of just renaming everything in every culture they met. In both cases, Hercules and Ulysses were names used by the Greek themselves.

 

[Cadence]

Michael Gambon and Roger Allam's voices were very similar. (Watching the 1992 Maigret now with the former and have seen the later in Endeavour and some others).

 

[Staffan]

Chris Dane Owens apparently managed to get funding to make a whole movie based on the Shine On Me music video.