#columbusing

[sucka99]

[satellites-halo]

still crazy I mean neurodivergent to me that people keep tryna make new 'inclusive' 'non-problematic' terms for being in a privileged group and "mentally being an oppressed group". when are you guys gonna accept that no matter what you do to try and 'reclaim' trans-abled and trans-racial, it's going to be ableist and racist?

[peridot-tears]

Big smooch to my Lianluo people, Lian Hua Lou/Mysterious Lotus Casebook has been such a lovely little fandom to be a part of.

[racefortheironthrone]

Are you familiar with Peter Turchin’s work and if so, what are your thoughts? Is he considered a serious historian?

After researching this guy’s bio for a bit, I can say that he’s not a historian - his PhD seems to be in Zoology - and this whole cliodynamics business seems to be a discipline that he invented in a brazen act of academic columbusing/academic imperialism. Historians do not consider him a serious historian, and nor do I.

The problem with Turchin’s entire academic project is twofold: first, there is not enough data to do the kind of precision mathematical modeling that he purports to do. When it comes to pre-modern history, there are huge swathes of time and space and human experience for which we do not have records, either because the records didn’t survive to the present, literacy rates weren’t high enough to produce the desired types and levels of records, or the literate classes simply didn’t consider worthy of being written down. When it comes to modern history, things are a bit better because modern societies tend to produce written records at an incomprehensible volume, but here the problem is that the sheer mass of records plus certain specialized problems in library sciences that are too complicated to go into in this post (but I’ll explain if someone asks me) means that only a tiny fraction of these records are digitized, let alone digitized in a way that they can then be put into a database and modeled upon. As my old professor Eric Foner put it during new major orientation: “the difference between ancient history and modern history is that in ancient history you know all your sources but there aren’t any, and in modern history there are tons of sources but you don’t know them.”

Second, even if there was enough data, trying to accurately and meaningfully model all of human history is a futile endeavor. This is something that we discuss in introductory theory courses - the complex interplay of historical forces and individual agency/contingency, the literally infinite number of factors that influence human society and behavior, and so on. The historiography of ideas is littered with failed attempts to construct total theories of history - the Hegelians, the Marxists, the objectivists (which isn’t the same thing as Randian Objectivism, it’s complicated and I’ll explain in another post if anyone really wants to know), huge swathes of sociology but especially the structuralists, significant swathes of political science and psychology, and oh my god so many economists. It’s pretty much a cliche at this point for social scientists to say they were inspired to become social scientists by childhood dreams of becoming a psychohistorian like Hari Seldon. The problem is that psychohistory is science fiction, it’s not real, and it can’t be real because humans are too damn complex and contradictory. It is a massive red flag that Turchin has explicitly compared cliodynamics to psychohistory; it’s like when some Silicon Valley disruptor starts talking about how their latest project was inspired by their favorite sci-fi series.

So yeah, this guy seems like a total quack.

[siliquasquama]

Elon Musk ditched the Twitter trademark so it's mine now. Sili Twitter Squama. Tweet tweet chirp tweet.

[nobuverse]

"Tch! Him again-! And so many this time! D-don't worry, I've dealt with him before!"

[bitchy-peachy]

*wheeze* This is about as dumb as their made up "shifting police". These people make up the wildest shit to scare themselves stupid.

Some people have such shitty lives that they even police literal dream worlds I can't with this 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣.

I’m glad ppl on tiktok are doing ok

[julio-claudian-saberface]

Bird is the Word

“So to summarize: his True Name is Robert Stroud, he’s used a Holy Grail to turn Alcatraz into his private aviary, and we didn’t see much of him before the smell of bird poop got too much to handle but what we did see wasn’t poor meow-meow Burt Lancaster.”

Mash shuddered. Billy the Kid pulled a face.

“He shouldn’t have the birds at Alcatraz, actually.” Gudako brandished her tablet at the assembled Servants. “But Alcatraz isn’t supposed to even exist in 1783, so! Here we are! Once they manage to rayshift the respirators, Operation Attorney-At-Law is a go.

“Apparently he’s into theosophy so Helena, your job is to play visitor and talk Mahatma at him. Butter him up. Compliment his spiritual insight. Bring presents. Cigarettes maybe. I asked for them to send some along, you don’t have to break into your stash. Yeah, I know about your stash.

“Serenity, while Helena’s keeping him busy, you sneak in and look for the Grail in the canary crap. I know it’s gross even with toxin resistance. I swear I’ll make it up to you. Cuddles and headpats for days. Mash, sit down.

“And Billy, if all else fails… have him take a seat over there.”

Billy smiled and chambered a round in meaningful fashion. “Hello, Bob.”

[notreallyimportant]

White people have discovered the hot comb and is calling it a straightening brush.

I’m not joking

Hot combs are a staple in the Black community and they done Christopher Columbused it. And none of that “ Well a white French man invented it” we know, thats why I said it’s a staple in the black community. I just find it hilarious.

But do be carful because it can cause alopecia if you’re carful.

[limetimo]

*narrator voice* he did kill a Christopher Columbus, 1952-1999, Ohio

Bucky: I killed Christopher Columbus

Sam: No you absolutely did not

Bucky: Don’t tell me what I did or didn’t do I killed that man

Sam: Steve back me up

Bucky: Steve back ME up

[nero-draco]

Which is more shocking, finding a baby dinosaur at 1700s on Caribbean islands, or finding an army of Columbuses.

[mat2modblog]

Bruh, the mere existence of those mass-produced Columbuses are giving you a -15 sanity debuff and you're in the Nasuverse so there's no spells to buff it because the Nasuverse is insanity incarnate. The DC would be well above 20 with no advantage. There's no way you'd win that roll.

[rainbowfic]

One thing that changes with the decentralization of online media is that the original speakers can become more visible. While a white person in the sixties listening to Elvis might have had no idea that he was singing a style heavily influenced by black performers like B.B. King and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, it’s easier to see that mainstream America’s adoption of “on fleek” came from a post on Vine (a now defunct service for sharing short videos) by the user Peaches Monroee. Still, it’s tempting to mislabel the many words currently being appropriated into general American pop culture from African American English as “social media words” simply because they’re used by young people, and young people are on social media, without giving due credit to the words’ true origins. Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering America despite the millions of people who already lived there.

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

[nando161mando]

really annoying to see the young white commentariat columbusing that the New York Times is at its very core, a yellow propaganda rag.

that "All The News That's Fit To Print"? they took this motto on, all the while failing to report on the USA govt atrocities in the islands they invaded during the Sp-Am War; incl Puerto Rico.

NYTimes are masters at lying by omission. that's exactly what they did with the WMDs lies they sold to help Bush & Cheney invade Iraq