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TW1ZTY
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31 Oct 2019, 4:37 am

Is it just me? Or does it feel like everything we've ever been taught in school is now wrong? Everything from history to science...

When I was a kid we were taught about the Food Pyramid and how we need a balance of meat, grains, dairy, and fruits and vegetables and that we needed to avoid sweets. Now they no longer do the pyramid in schools and kids are taught to avoid everything but fruits and vegetable because anything else is supposedly so bad for you (and I strongly suspect there's a pro-vegetarian agenda behind this...)

That's not all. Basically everything we've ever been taught about history is now a lie. Elizabeth Bathory and Mata Hari were not dangerous women and were just poor victims of a patriarchal society that hated women. Our American Forefathers were all apparently evil racist slave-owning white men who did not give a damn about human rights, Emperors Caligula and Nero were not the crazy corrupt rulers who destroyed the Roman empire that history paints them out to be, etc.

There's also the fact that so many famous quotes were not actually made by the famous people who take credit for them.

Winston Churchill did not actually say: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've exausted all other options."

Mark Twaine did not actually say: "History does not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes!"

And Albert Eienstein did not actually say: "Only two things are infinite: The Universe and people's stupidity"

Also Pluto is no longer considered a planet.

So... what the hell is up with everything taught to us now being a lie? :mrgreen:



kraftiekortie
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31 Oct 2019, 6:31 am

It’s not that black and white.

Many of our Founding Fathers weren’t slaveowners for example.

John Adams
Benjamin Franklin
Alexander Hamilton

were not slaveowners.

Most of them from north of Maryland were not.



Last edited by kraftiekortie on 31 Oct 2019, 7:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

kraftiekortie
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31 Oct 2019, 6:36 am

We have to sieve the truth from the lies from the misinterpretations.

Therein lies the problem.

Thomas Jefferson hated slavery intellectually—but depended economically on slavery. A maze of contradictions was Thomas Jefferson.



kraftiekortie
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31 Oct 2019, 6:38 am

Read “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man” by Thomas Paine. He was the “progressive” of his time.

He was popular among the soldiers of the Continental Army.



TW1ZTY
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31 Oct 2019, 7:04 am

One thing I found interesting about Thomas Jefferson was the relationship he had with his black slave girl mistress-turned-wife Sally Hemmings.

On one hand it was nice that he moved her to Paris, France where she would legally be recognized at his wife. That way she and their children would have had a better life than they would have living in the states.

But on the other hand... this was a young 14 yead old slave girl with no rights who was pretty much coerced into this relationship by a much older man. Kind of creepy when you really think about it... I mean she was pretty much a kid, and she was a slave, so she would have had no say in what she herself wanted. :|



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31 Oct 2019, 7:16 am

Regarding food pyramid:
Well, it turns out that the food pyramid was heavily lobbied into shape by dairy and meat industry, rather than there being a 'vegetarian agenda' now. Disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian, but I am lactose intolerant.

Regarding presidents and history: well, it's only been 50 years since the civil rights movement, there's a lot of blood in American history that hasn't been addressed, and the descendants of the victims demand recognition - which they simply couldn't do any sooner.
But that issue will haunt most of the nations on earth for a while: that the story of the glorious inception of their nation isn't actually so glorious, that their nation wasn't created by god himself but is historically contingent, etc. Etc....
Coercive relationships with much older men were a thing in the past, and they aren't any more - a good reminder that we should not think we are holding the one universal truth in our hands NOW - as they did in the past.
The problem is obvious: can you ever act on anything you know, or will it appear barbaric in a few centuries from now?

And it's not that everything is wrong now - it just wasn't right to begin with, and there's room now to talk about other views, which there just wasn't before.

There's not just a history of items of knowledge - these items are imbedded into a larger framework of a narrative about the world. This narrative is currently changing, and that's why it seems all the individual items of knowledge are shifting at once.


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TW1ZTY
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31 Oct 2019, 7:30 am

It bothers me because I feel like I'm too old to relearn all these new facts (I'm almost 30 and already have grey hair). I'm not saying we should go back to accepting things that aren't true about science and history, but... I dunno. I just feel like it causes a lot of problems in society when you basically tell people "Everything you ever knew was wrong!", and I hate feeling like an idiot when I think I'm quoting something from Mark Twaine or Albert Einstein that sounds very clever and relevant to today only to find out that they did not actually say these things.

And the internet is NOT the best source of information. In order to get truly educated one has to go to the proper schools, and that costs money which people like me don't have. :|



TW1ZTY
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31 Oct 2019, 7:42 am

Maybe we're going back into the dark ages where only the wealthy elite have any real education and they exploit the ignorance of the illiterate commoners so they can be used and abused like slaves?



kraftiekortie
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31 Oct 2019, 7:46 am

We’re not going back to the Dark Ages.



Bradleigh
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31 Oct 2019, 7:53 am

Yeah, the whole food pyramid had been altered by lobbyists in its creation to encourage consumption in their industries. Getting people to eat more dairy than they really needed. You had a lot of pseudo science that could be controlled to whatever was the most comfortable to sell, whether a business, or whatever fit the national pride thing.

Some people think that there is a Left bias now, but that only works if you act like the truth is political, rather than it always was. And you only have to watch a reddit compilation of people calling out teachers having been wrong to see how learning is not infallible to myths. To learn about a wide amount of subjects, you used to have to get hold of an encyclopedia collection, and hope that it was up to date and accurate, so a lot of inaccurate information could make its way with what sounded nicest. Now most people have a device in their pockets where they access a large amount of reliably kept knowledge of any subject.


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TW1ZTY
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31 Oct 2019, 7:58 am

Bradleigh wrote:
Yeah, the whole food pyramid had been altered by lobbyists in its creation to encourage consumption in their industries. Getting people to eat more dairy than they really needed. You had a lot of pseudo science that could be controlled to whatever was the most comfortable to sell, whether a business, or whatever fit the national pride thing.

Some people think that there is a Left bias now, but that only works if you act like the truth is political, rather than it always was. And you only have to watch a reddit compilation of people calling out teachers having been wrong to see how learning is not infallible to myths. To learn about a wide amount of subjects, you used to have to get hold of an encyclopedia collection, and hope that it was up to date and accurate, so a lot of inaccurate information could make its way with what sounded nicest. Now most people have a device in their pockets where they access a large amount of reliably kept knowledge of any subject.


But not all of the knowledge kept on the internet is 'reliable'. It's so easy for anybody to build a website or a FaceBook page and spread misinformation and lies disguised as scientific facts. Like the people who said that forcing your child to drink bleach will cure their autism...



kraftiekortie
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31 Oct 2019, 8:08 am

Yeah. Of course

This is why people should make sure they read reliable, objective sources.



TW1ZTY
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31 Oct 2019, 8:30 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
Yeah. Of course

This is why people should make sure they read reliable, objective sources.


But how can one tell what is reliable? :huh:



Bradleigh
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31 Oct 2019, 8:36 am

Wikipedia allows you to list your sources, and most reliable places will have people who actually care about that stuff, that sources can be checked with ease. You can't just count that even experts are always correct, and everything seems to be more reliably catalogued than it used to be.

It is not like everything use to magically be correct. Who knows up to what point people still believed that carrots helped you see better in dark, something that was literal wartime propaganda to hide more advanced radar technology. As a kid, I used to read this mini encyclopedia book filled with interesting facts, and the carrot thing was one so called fact, despite totally unfound.

Sure toxic ideologies can find seemingly larger audiences now of people willing to believe into them, but it beats the broader ignorance that came before. Want to know what is reliable, find one that lists its sources, and won't have outside influence, such as oil funded research into climate change that have incentives to say nothing is wrong.


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31 Oct 2019, 11:24 am

Absolutely!

Everything you know is...WRONG!! !! !



minuteman2019
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09 Nov 2019, 9:20 pm

TW1ZTY wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
Yeah. Of course

This is why people should make sure they read reliable, objective sources.


But how can one tell what is reliable? :huh:



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