What's the most Cringeworthy take on Actual History/Archeology you've ever read?

Teen Spirit

Teen Spirit

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So this a bit of a counterpart to the Cringeworthy Alt History thread. Because I think we've pretty well established that there are plenty of ink spilled on bad alternate history. But what about bad takes on actual history? Stuff like Poorly written articles, badly done research, Pseudo-Archeological bullshit, youtube videos that argue the French Revolution was a mistake. What's the worst take you've seen on actual history?

Now ideally for this thread I want for us to hit meaty targets, bad youtube comments are easy pickings but let's not spend 50 pages going after them. We all know great man theory is bad.

For starters, the thing that kind of got thinking of this thread. Let me start with this article

Amazons were long considered a myth. These discoveries show warrior women were real.

Now if I'm reading this right, what the actual discovery is is actually important since it shows generations of Scythian women being trained for horse mounted combat. But uh the article itself is kind of massively WTF. It acts like these are the first warrior women ever discovered. This was pushed in late 2019, the Pandemic had already started, I'm pretty damn sure I knew there were warrior Scythian women years before this point, to say nothing of viking burials, and yet this article acts like they've discovered the first evidence of ancient women holding weapons. Then there's the beginning of the article and it's weird obsession with the Amazons. This kind of feeds into a general trend of reporting about archeology and actually archeologists themselves being really dumb about women but that's who discussion I don't have time for.

So what bad takes have you all seen recently?
 
Mopman43 said:
An article or the comment section?
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The article.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | Was Lenin a German Agent? (Published 2017)

For the Bolshevik leader, the ends justified his means. But if you asked any Russian in 1917, the answer was yes.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

This is just absolute garbage as a series of historical takes, including viewing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as proof of Lenin's betrayal of Russia rather than about as good a treaty as a country that had humiliatingly and totally lost a war to people as grasping as Germany could expect.[1] The whole article is just... trash, but it's also an Opinion Article, so it's not quite the same.

Also, the tagline. "Ask any Russian" which is why the soldiers en masse wanted to end the war and people just wanted a way out?

It's just garbage, and it transitions seemlessly into modern political nonsense.

E: Oh, it's by an American historian who has his own Wikipedia page. So yeah, it very much counts, even if he's also claimed that Stalin was responsible for the German invasion and other such... dubious claims.

[1] The October Revolution in part came about because the Germans had an open road to Petrograd and the government was just going to abandon it to its fate and evacuate to Moscow. Would the Germans have given easier terms if they'd been let advance on and conquer Petrograd? Which, mind, the Russians could not have stopped.
 
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Every article about early revolutionary history written by a Venezuelan socialist, not because they are socialist but because they are so biased to make a history that fits a narrative that it becomes so fucking cringe, you don't know how hard they make finding actual history on Venezuela written by people who aren't this incredibly biased.

Also Karl Marx's take on Simon Bolivar is so bad, I can understand he did it with a terrible source but still he really didn't know what he was talking about.
 
That one Jack Chick comic claiming that the Catholic Church sent Khadijah (Muhammad's first wife) , a secret covert Catholic, to influence Muhammad and set up Islam to disrupt True Christianity.
 
Mopman43 said:
Actually, do you know what people are referring to when they talk about Jack Chick comics?
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Comics made by a crazy religious recluse with such lovely messages as "Dungeon & Dragons is satanism", "the Pope is the Illuminati Antichrist", and "a child rapist that becomes a born again christian goes to Heaven yet an otherwise well meaning person that doesn't happen to be christian is going straight to Hell".
 
The Laurent said:
Hmm, is the NY Times actually any different from a Youtube comment section or more worthy of merit and discussion, because I did see a bad take there a while back.
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I mean Ideally I'm hoping for a large mix. The low hanging fruit to the more obscure stuff. Major articles to weird conspiracy theories, etc. I just don't want it to be nothing but going after easy targets.
 
Teen Spirit said:
I mean Ideally I'm hoping for a large mix. The low hanging fruit to the more obscure stuff. Major articles to weird conspiracy theories, etc. I just don't want it to be nothing but going after easy targets.
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Will we get to the based Tatarstan and the weird Balkan supremacy stuff in 10 pages? If so how much until an actual Balkan supremacist manages to find out and some to debate us?
 
I have to go with 1421, The Year China Discovered America and Jack Menzies in general. Yes, because it definitely makes sense that Zheng He's fleet circumnavigated the globe in 1421, reached Greenland and the northwest passage, founding colonies along the way. This one has real-world consequences, unfortunately, because, among the people who read it and took things from it, one of them was Donald Trump, apparently.
 
ExNihilo said:
I have to go with 1421, The Year China Discovered America and Jack Menzies in general. Yes, because it definitely makes sense that Zheng He's fleet circumnavigated the globe in 1421, reached Greenland and the northwest passage, founding colonies along the way. This one has real-world consequences, unfortunately, because, among the people who read it and took things from it, one of them was Donald Trump, apparently.
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That's, uh... interesting.

I've seen people assert that Zheng He went to California, which seemed like bull (I think we've got a decent idea of the places he visited?) but the description of the book on amazon is... wild.


On 3/8/1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" & unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. When it returned in 10/1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political & economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings. Most records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America 70 years before Columbus & had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed was how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans & transplanted in America & other countries the principal economic crops that have fed & clothed the world.

Unveiling incontrovertible evidence of these astonishing voyages, "1421" rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it's been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this landmark work of historical investigation.
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This is the video on a youtuber by the name of Emperor Tigerstar that's a pretty good summary in the madness that the book is and how terrible its history is.
 
Mopman43 said:
but the description of the book on amazon is... wild.
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Four and a half stars, 967 ratings, baby! Plus a 4.7/5 on Thriftbooks and a 3.6/5 on B&N and Goodreads.

Separately, seconding the Tigerstar video. I'd heard about it before I watched his video, but he does good work, here and in general.
 
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ExNihilo said:
Four and a half stars, 967 ratings, baby! Plus a 4.7/5 on Thriftbooks and a 3.6/6 on B&N and Goodreads.

Separately, seconding the Tigerstar video. I'd heard about it before I watched his video, but he does good work, here and in general.
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I'm just going to assume most of them were rating it as a work of fiction, to keep my sanity.
 
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