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Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

fakehistoryhunter.net

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Re: Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

#4
It really doesn't take much to get people outraged. The last 20 years or so of social media, and cultural politics has taught us that.

And enraged people are easily manipulated. Americans were enraged after 9/11, and that engagement was quickly weaponized into the Patriot Act and the "War on Terror".

The flip side of all this enragement is a callous apathy. Things that really should concern me (like the eradication of due process) are hidden behind nonsense (like 1930 chimney sweeps) or the exhaustion of being enraged all the time.

Re: Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

#7
post #4

It really doesn't take much to get people outraged. The last 20 years or so of social media, and cultural politics has taught us that. And enraged people are easily manipulated. Americans were enraged after 9/11, and that engagement was quickly weaponized into the Patriot Act and the "War on Terror". The flip side of all this enragement is a callous apathy. Things that really should concern me (like the eradication o…

this is an incredibly overlooked angle, I think I never actually thought of this. thanks a lot, this makes a lot of sense

Re: Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

#8
> But the pavement looked familiar to me, I’m specialised in Europe during the 1920s-40s and have worked on a project about daily life in Berlin in the 1920s and I’ve seen that pavement in other old footage and in countless photos.

I visited Jerusalem yesterday, and was struck by the fact that there are places in the world where people have been continuously walking for millennia, putting their feet on the same stones. I had a mental image of a historian who specializes in a single paving stone, putting a lifetime of effort into studying just this one large brick.

This part of the article felt like such a weird echo of that thought!

Re: Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

#9
There should be a name for the phenomenon where people upset about some injustice pick the least plausible example to use as the cause celebre of the injustice.

For a more modern take I can't understand why Daniel Shaver is not the face of police murder in the US. The video is on YouTube, you can find the unedited version with a Google search. There is no benefit of the doubt to give. It was straight up murder done on live cam. The more you read the worse it gets.

But it got buried in a week and no one remembers it.

Re: Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

#10

> But the pavement looked familiar to me, I’m specialised in Europe during the 1920s-40s and have worked on a project about daily life in Berlin in the 1920s and I’ve seen that pavement in other old footage and in countless photos. I visited Jerusalem yesterday, and was struck by the fact that there are places in the world where people have been continuously walking for millennia, putting their feet on the same stone…

The Guildhall in London is one of the old political centres of the city. If you go down into the basement there's the remains of a Roman ampitheatre!

Tucked away in an alcove on Cannon Street is an old block of stone. This is the famous London Stone. So old that nobody knows what it is originally famous for...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildhall,_London

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stone

That sort of oddity and connection with history is one of the fun parts when living in an "old" city (London isn't even that old by global standards).

That ampitheatre shows that street level in ancient times and now might be quite different, so the historical feet might not really have been walking in the same place. London Stone does suggest that you could reasonably invest a lot of effort into the history of a single slab though!

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