Originally published at: Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse" | Boing Boing
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So, white supremacy mixed with playing too much Assassin’s Creed?
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I thought the show might be interesting, until I saw Hancock was the one behind it. Well known crank who is pushing odious, dangerous ideas about pre-history with a specific agenda, one that is not merely racists like the ancient aliens guys, but white supremacist. Not going to reward Netflix by even hate watching it.
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Yeah, everything else aside, letting Peterson and Rogan interview you signals that you’re either absolutely clueless, some flavor of a right-wing nutcase, or quite likely both.
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This right here is the problem. If people would stop right there and realize how stupid they sound, the world would be a better place. “I have no qualifications in this complex field that experts spend their lives studying, but I know better than all of them….”
Lack of intellectual humility may doom us all.
Because unfortunately NetFlix is sliding pretty quickly down the same rabbit hole that caught Discovery, History, TLC, and all the other channels. Turns out there’s big money in nonsense and always will be until we start teaching critical thinking in a serious way.
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Also – spinning up bullshit is quicker, cheaper and easier than doing actual research or anything.
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Hancock sounds like this guy, with less interesting hair and more white supremacy and right-wing populism (and a son who can get him a TV deal).
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Perhaps someone is pushing them down the rabbit hole.
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The sad part is, they don’t even have to research anything. Just do your interview docu-pieces like this with better people. Plenty of real scientists and historians out there would love to talk about this stuff. However TV producers are not science literate, nor do they care to be. They look for popular personalities, and thus we end up with this lowest-common-denominator drivel.
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And they have the outsider/underdog appeal. They are common people, just asking questions that smug/snobbish elites don’t want to answer. For people who are convinced that they are being alienated by some powerful shadow group, these shows are fuel for what they think critical thinking is.
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It’s also a well honed BS technique. They aren’t an expert, so they personally aren’t open to the same scrutiny as an expert should be. They aren’t an expert, they just a curious person like you. They aren’t an expert so they encourage you to make “your own” decisions about what they feed you.
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Very well put. The classic “I’m just asking questions” dodge that is the foundation of the anti-intellectual and dark intellectual movements.
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This is exactly how people like this on traditional and social media often become a gateway to fascism as well as to garden variety conspiricism. It’s also one of the reasons that woo and pseudo-science usually gain footholds in fascist and Stalinist regimes.
[Jinx to @VeronicaConnor. Have a Coke!]
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Even a quick Google search finds Hancock and David Icke in the same arena. Shocking, isn’t it?
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“Do your own research!”
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Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. No? Then GTFO.
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This, but what happens is that in a situation where 99.9% of people in the field say X and 0.1% say not-X, the programme will dedicate the same amount of time to interviewing an X proponent and a not-X proponent, and viewers will come away with the impression that the issue is hotly debated by experts and either nobody knows who’s correct or the not-X person, having been interviewed last, is correct.
The usual argument in defense of the not-X people is that “Galileo was also silenced by the majority”. True, but the big difference between Galileo and your usual run-of-the-mill kook is that Galileo was right.
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