Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "TED-Ed" channel.

  1. Why does no one, these days, put the pieces together about Geoffrey of Monmouth. He comes from the Welsh borders to be educated among the English elites, where he will have experienced open prejudice and snobbery toward the Welsh, who were seen at the time as a bunch of recalcitrant savages by the people who were constantly trying to conquer them. He might have even been bullied for his accent and manners himself? He clearly decided to write something encouraging to his own people that ended with things as they are, but with the caveat that this Welsh King has supernatural powers that will bring him back one day, when he is most needed. It was propaganda to encourage his own people. He couldn’t have predicted the cognitive dissonance that would could the English to fall in love with Arthur whilst disregarding the fact that his return would spell their doom?
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  2.  @dishantgupta1290  : Depends on your preference of legend I guess? Malory tells it both ways, having the lake lady supply it, but Merlin is implied to be the one who put it in the stone for her, for Arthur to find. It’s all bollox anyway, but culturally significant bollox nevertheless.
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  3.  @arawn1061  : Don’t you mean, “Aurelius?”
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  4.  @derp3607  : Who? The name rings a bell, but I can’t place it. Don’t make me Google it?
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  5.  @osamaibrahim7267  : We get all of our, “alc’,” words from Arabic, as well as the alphabet and numbers we use to write them, apparently: words like, “alcohol,” (ironically) “alchemy,” and, “Al Qaida,” all have Arabic roots. And we wouldn’t have even heard of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Greek geniuses (having lost or burned all the western world’s records) had it not been for Arabic scholarship preserving them. So, I’d like to see their scholarship tributed. They were streets ahead of the west in science, medicine and philosophy in the Middle Ages.
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  6.  @TheBankai1407  : Interesting, but it begs the question as to why Arthurian scholarship has overlooked him? Is he mythical?
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  7.  @jdaywork2693  : Just put, “TED Ed Dracula,” in your search box, and you’ll find out.
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  8.  @guicard1970  : You’re gonna’ have to explain that one?
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  9.  @everythingsyndicate  : The deliberate use of Christian tropes in the story are to be expected from a monk’s creative imagination, don’t you think? Yes, I suspect he wanted to imbue his hero with a godlike sense, so as to encourage his own people and to put the wind up the English. He must have been disappointed when the English turned out to be the people who loved him and popularised the legend more than the Welsh? It wasn’t long before the legend became a political tool in the hands of unscrupulous kings, after all?
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  10.  @kevwhufc8640  : Yes. That would be good. There’s more scholarly meat on Robin’s bones for us to tuck into, even though there’s even less reliable evidence that the Robin of legend was ever any one man. To be a, “Robin of the hood,” in medieval times, was a pejorative term for a hoody wearing thug who stole from the rich and stole from the poor in equal measure, but there’s a lot going on there, historically speaking, nevertheless.
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  11.  @nowlater900  : Sure. Just wait a while. When the current monarch dies, her son will be king. Bingo.
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  12.  @djttx8254  : An astute request. He does have his own, separate legends after all.
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  13. It’s sad that TED has become the Wikipedia of YouTube, in that it cannot be sited in academe, or trusted to be 100% accurate. Would love it if TED tightened up its ship? If they vetted their speakers better, or set up categories, by which we could separate hard facts from speakers who . . . well? Let’s face it? Some speakers just can’t be trusted not to be corrupt or even criminals! That undermines everything about TED, which began as a gold standard. Recently, I saw a physics lecture in which the professor said, “You may have heard it on a TED Talk? But, no one takes TED as law, right?” And his panel of well known physicists all nodded along with him. That blew me away, so I looked into it. Some of the people TED has had as guests, were promoting scams dressed up to look like science! Some are in jail, while others are under indictment! You need to go through your back catalogue and put a mark of some kind by the talks which are not tainted in this way. It’s a responsibility which falls to you, unless you are happy as being taken as pop science / pop culture and nothing more? With a potentially, “dodgy,” reputation? It matters. It really matters. The phrase, “S/He gave a TED Talk,” doesn’t carry the weight it used to, and that’s just a shame. Especially since you could do something about that.
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  14. Ha hahhh . . . Physics gags. 🥴 He’s got them 😄👍
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