My accusations of arrogance were aimed at the Enlightenment era that birthed the metric system, so not really about the dynamics of internet arguments you've seen. I should have been clearer.
And it's not to say that I hate the Enlightenment, but it was powered to a fair extent by an arrogant belief that everything done before which could not be synchronized with Enlightenment ideas of what made things legitimate (a basis in what fancy thinkers felt was "Reason") was utterly worthless and should probably be abolished, regardless of whether it was working just fine for normal people. The intellectual vibe was very much "shut up peasants, the Intelligentsia knows what's best for you".
And of course this all reached it's apogee in 1793 when some Enlightenment nerds got enough sway over actual government in that phase of the French Revolution to attempt to institute decimal timekeeping, abolish religion, and impose many other radical redesigns of society from the ground up. The Metric system, which had been rolled out a several revolutionary phases earlier was a less extreme case of this same way of thinking.
Of course if anything the fact that metric measurements endured and decimal time was a disastrous experiment is evidence of the prior having some actual quality to justify its staying power. And I think it does. But the usefulness is that the world had reached a level of globalization where having many different countries have different weights and measures was no longer viable, so something had to become an international standard. Metric was new and exciting, and more importantly because of its aggressively anti-traditional Enlightenment theory, was the most non-culturally specific option, even in spite of its heavy French Revolutionary association (and ugly "classical" nomenclature). It was the option countries could adopt while accepting the smallest amount of foreign imperial associations.
And good for the metric system. Where I take issue is that people just seem to accept the arguments of its creators for it being a good system as being valid because it won, whereas it's victory probably had more to do with happenstance, and at its core it is actually less elegant and more cumbersome than it appears.
At the very least the names are a travesty. Our fancy 18th century intellectual metric boosters just had to go greco-roman, and just had to combine it all in a system prioritizing rigid consistency over ease of use, or whether the sounds flowed well. And so even common units get absurd strings of syllables. Try writing a song or poem with metric units sometime... it's not happening, they are awkward, inhuman, and (in an ironic pun) don't conform well to meters. Is the centimeter intrinsically worse than the inch, I think it is a little to small to be as convenient for as many things... but it's certainly debatable. What is not debatable is that it takes 4 times as many syllables to do the same thing as an inch just so that someone, after a lifetime of using it, never forgets that it is one hundredth of a meter.
Sorry for taking so long to get back to this (work, life, etc.). I'm not going to come down as hard as others have on this. Firstly because I manage a group of people who would fit in well on this site, and this kind of response seems very familiar to me; secondly because there is some merit to both your position and points you raise. To the later, you did say good on metric for being in the right place at the right time, and there's truth to that. Also I agree, in part, with the notion that the arguments for it being good/preferable are sometimes overblown, and certainly levelled in contexts where they aren't actually compelling (for example those I mentioned upthread about often few instances where the average individual would run into the places where the benefits over something like SI units would come into play, barring home repairs or other adding two feet+inch+fractions together situations). And you did include a good example of a metric measure which failed to take hold.
That said, the rest of this seems to be having an axe to grind with the Enlightenment (and its arrogance), alongside some subjective opinions about whether words flow, syllable count, or sound pleasing*. That and apparent frustration over the contempt that the Intelligentsia apparently had towards the masses. This latter part I don't get, as the previous Roman-inspired measures would have been set up by and enforced by the social institutions of the nobility, which certainly weren't (in general) known for a better (less paternalistic), etc.) relationship with the masses. I'm left with the sensation that actually this pretty much is the same as my internet discussion example -- worrying excessively that someone (some long dead someones) else thinks too highly of themselves. Were the great movers and shakers of the Enlightenment, as a whole, an arrogant lot? Probably (minus those few who were more about the crippling insecurity, or the odd monk who revolutionized science and never knew it). Did they tell the peasantry and common folk what to do/what was in their best interest? As much as anyone else in charge ever did. Were they proponents of the metric system? I guess the ones pertinent to the discussion were. Does that say anything of substance about the metric system itself, and if so, what (and then why and how)?
*and using Greco-Roman word structure, which, well... why wouldn't they? Latin was the Western world's lingua franca of the time. If your goal was to get far-reaching adoption of the standards, using a universal common standard in the nomenclature makes all the sense in the world.
Lindy's researching has vastly improved over the years; that one wasn't one of his better ones. Nothing memorably wrong, but lacking significant bits. I saw it years ago, and in no irony, not by intent, it dovetailed with doing some contemporaneous coinage research. (I was repeating research I'd done previously during my history undergrad studies... specifically for a master's program assignment, and I was simply clicking on next video while reading various sources.)
It's a decent introduction.
Lindy was, early on, appearing to be an RPG-Realism advocate. His exemplar of Torches and how to use them is actually pretty good. He's turned more serious historian as time goes on... and me less of one. Oh, one of his early vids mentioned specifically RuneQuest. ISTR mention of Hârn, too.
Agreed. It serves the purpose of an overview, which is exactly what I would want from it.
Lindy, as a whole, is the middle of the pack of the Youtube arms & armor & related presenters. He has more knowledge to contribute than the Shad's, doesn't deviate from his wheelhouse (disastrously) as much as some of the others, but brings fewer receipts than Easton (who usually cites his sources) and less rigor to his experiments than Tod. I like him because he has a certain adorkable charm, but that disappears (along with his arguments getting sloppier) quickly if he thinks he or the things he represents are somehow the underdog, demeaned, or the like; or when he's explaining for the third time how he never cared what people thought of him.
As an RPG commentator, he's fine enough. He clearly has an axe to grind with D&D, and again that's when his arguments falter. His 'D&D of yesteryear were rubbish' video was basically re-hashing the Holmes dagger flaw*, which, I don't know, is valid but hardly insightful to TSR-A/D&D as a whole. His 'D&D of now is rubbish' boiled down to his 4e DM not letting him improvise a situation the rules didn't cover, which I think is an indictment of his DM than the system**. His RuneQuest (and Hillfolk) material is clearly more loving, and he doesn't then proceed to be sloppy in the other direction in the review of those.
*double rate of attack compared to swords, with no downsides. Widely acknowledged to be a error that it made it into the final product in that form.
**if there was an argument about how the system enabled or fostered that DM decision or inhibited the converse, it would be different; but there wasn't.
I did like his DMing advice with the torches and how to use them. Other DM advice videos have been less impressive. I remember there was one with a non-standard lock (using a stick and specific length of string as the 'key') -- that I remember being a situation where the prospective player would have no way to know how it worked; would receive no useful feedback from the use of the key that would tell them if they were on the right track; using the key in the wrong way would render the lock inactive (no longer openable using the key in the right way), inhibiting trial-and-error; and Lindy suggested that this should all be done with suspicious guards right there to come and intervene if the individual took too long trying to figure it out (and thus not the key's owner). If the goal was to make a situation where the PCs rightfully fail because they don't have enough information to resolve the situation, it would be a good example. However, it was presented as an interesting challenge to throw at your group, which IMO it failed thoroughly.
tl:dr, I find him hit-or-miss. He's knowledgeable enough, and when he's charming, he's charming.
