Thanks for the tips, decided to scrap King of Kings and started Prophets of Doom on the bus ride home. It took 15-20 minutes of rambling about books on medieval torture on his bookshelf or something, but he actually started talking about the Reformation and it sounds interesting! Hopefully tomorrow morning's ride will be meaty now that I'm past the intro.

Yeah, turns out people who went to school with him thought that was a funny thing to say he had founded. Probably no reason for it though.

I'm not sure what your point is. That we should hold the fictional club from high school against him?

As an elitist, this is elitist bs. It's not hardcore academic history but gets you 90% there and gives a wide audience a better understanding of history.

The thread I saw on r/AskHistorians they were mostly fine with him. They understood what he does. It's pop history to an extent but he always lets you know when he's only giving one version of a disputed topic or simplifying stuff. A lot of references to more in depth sources if you want to know more. A broad brush overview of subjects they know almost nothing about is what most of his listeners are after.

Academics disparaging a non-academic. How shocking.

there's a reason fox news/trump/deplorables everywhere keep bringing up violent protesters smashing windows and stuff. it helps them


https://twitter.com/kwcollins/status/829083399285592068

I blame Ron Paul and his brand of libertarians. They were the early adopters of completely fake news and it has metastasized to all political leanings.

Does denying a link between cancer and smoking or climate change count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pr...Elders_of_Zion

Fake news has a long and sordid history.

It predates that ldo. The 90s had tons of 'alt-right' style pamphleteers and low-range AM radio operators and **** like that. Ron Paul had one! But it pre-dates that; this is just what I remember from my own personal experience. Not the RP Newsletter but rags like The American Spectator covering the Vince Foster murders and third-tier AM radio shows in rural areas recreating the Ruby Ridge standoff were the Fake News of the last generation, just trading in completely fictional stories and conspiracies and other nonsense.

Like everything else with the contemporary media landscape, scale and scope/speed are drastically different but human nature hasn't changed.

I was thinking of my experience with facebook but agree nothing is new. The early republic had the pamphleteers.

Probably not, but if a lot of people think you're an ******* chances are you're an *******. It was in high school so doesn't matter much anyway but it would be better if they had called him the founder of the Constitution is Cool club instead.

The big change is not so much new technology or media, but that the derposphere has entered the mainstream. There've always been crazy AM radio shows and Web 1.0 sites, but that stuff was always treated as being on par with UFO abduction theories. If you thought Hillary killed Vince Foster, you didn't really talk about it at work or in polite society. Ikes loved to copy/paste Drudge Report headlines, but he was always too embarrassed to admit he was a regular reader.

The big breakthrough was Fox News setting itself up as a semi-credible alternative to CNN, which gave the derposphere an air of mainstream credibility. Now you can hammer to your coworkers about how the MSM is suppressing coverage of the Bowling Green Massacre or whatever bat**** crazy stuff is the story of the day.

sanders actually debated ted cruz yesterday on cnn on obamacare.

Interesting article on Syrian refugees finding mosques in Germany too conservative.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN12S0HE

As long as the west allies itself with the Saudis, peace will not exist.

Yep. All it takes is a few protestors out of thousands doing something stupid - and right-wing media will blast that **** 24-7. That becomes the whole story in their minds.

If it doesn't happy naturally just pay a couple agent provocateurs - which does happen all the time.

This is why I get so annoyed at liberals who are like "this **** isn't helping" when it's some tiny tiny fraction of the overall protestors. How the **** are you going to stop that. All efforts need to be focuses on getting the message out that this was not what the protest was all about.

I've posted this a bunch of times but it bears repeating, the whole thing is an essential read imo: https://www.facebook.com/simi.rahman...53153879381302

That is a good read. Thank you.

I hope people take more away from it than "islam needs to reform".

I think it's more like - Islam out of its cultural context has some issues. That's what I took away anyway.

I made this post below in the context of white Trump supporters living in segregated areas but the model is extensible to blacks in the US who believe in AIDS denialism or theories about the CIA engaging in calculated efforts to perpetuate black genocide. AND to Muslims in Europe who are segregated into places like Molenbeek and then produce a lot of violent radicals:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...php?p=51246093

Replace 'whites' in the post above with 'Muslims in many places in Europe.'

Muslims in Europe radicalize because they are culturally, socially and economically segregated and isolated. In ways they aren't in the Middle East. The resulting religious conservatism and fundamentalism and eventual radicalization is a predictable result to what happens when human populations aren't integrated. The exact same forces are what are driving lots of *white Americans* into the arms of Trump and right-wing authoritarian movements, paranoia, a growing and violent distrust of authority. Probably driving tons of our partisan rancor and antipathy and growing distrust and revulsion of each other, etc.

It's not healthy to not integrate, to live silo'ed like we do, to perpetuate wealth inequality and political geographies that contribute to that isolation and segregation.

The reason why Europe has, in many ways, an Islam that is often far more conservative, fundamentalist, apocalyptic than the Middle East is because Muslims in Europe are caught in the oppositional cultural death spiral.

JTM: "What about dinosaur bones?"
Public school kids: "God put them there when he built the earth"
JTM: "But what about radio carbon dating?"
PSKs: "God can put any ratio of carbon isotopes he wants into things. Do you think he can't? He's all-powerful."
JTM: "But why would he do that?"
PSKs: "To test our faith."

I am not sure what you are advocating, dvaut.