Comments by "mpetersen6" (@mpetersen6) on "Do Academics Hate Us Youtubers? Brace For Impact" video.

@clauricaune Probably slot of academic papers are read by the peer reviewers and that's the last time. As Harlan Ellison once said "95% of science fiction is crap. But the 95% of everything is crap". There are a number of fields in academia where one would think that they have been so thoroughly mined out that coming up with a PhD* thesis would be impossible. Piled higher and Deeper as a professor with a PhD in Psychology i knew used to say.
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Sir, thank you for your frank and honest appraisal of some academics. Academics are people just like everyone else. With all the attendant baggage. Pride, blindful or willful ignorance, arrogance and preconceptions. These go along with the admirable traits of honesty, humbleness and being able to concede when they are wrong. That said there are fair number of YouTube channels that deserve the ridicule that academics heap on them. Aside from the delusional Flat Earthers (aka flattards) a fair number of these seem to involve antiquity and some of the more outrageous ideas that have cropped from the minds of some people. Myself I do happen to think that some of these channels do bring up valid points. And ask interesting questions. But they can not seem to stop them selves and usually jump right off the cliff into the big steaming pile of woo at the bottom. The woo includes the usual suspects. I think you know who I mean. Also there are other factors in academia was well as other areas of society. Political correctness and the seeming refusal on the part of some people to even entertain ideas that they might find offensive. One example. The whole Solutrean Hypothesis. Were the original proponents and later on Dennis Stanford on to something? I'm not qualified to judge but on one hand it seemed the idea had to be rejected because it might offend some "First Peoples" groups. Also the seizure on the idea that some truely offensive people did latch on to the idea that "Europeans" were in the Americas first (1). I admit I do find Stanford's proposed methodology for how Solutrean hunters following seals along the edge of pack ice in the North Atlantic might have ended up in North America intriguing (2). But the first people in the Americas? I do not think so. We know people were in Alaska 40K years ago. There is one out of place artifact in that was found in th he Jamestown area as a surface find. So unfortunately dating it is pretty much impossible. This is a flint knife blade. When the flint was traced to its source it was found to be from a quarry in Southwestern France in the area the Solutrean Culture inhabited. Is the artifact genuine? A fake? An flint knife dropped by an English settler or farmer. 1) I suspect that in the end we will find that people have lived in the Americas longer than we think. How long is an open question. As to the origins of people in North America pre Columbus aside from a few Old World sailors or fishermen that somehow got driven across the Atlantic because of storms the evidence is overwhelming they originated in Northeastern Siberia. Which actually is part of the North American tectonic plate. The reason we give Columbus the credit or blame is that's when contact between the Old World and the New stuck. 2) Stanford never implied that the Solutreans were Europeans as we think of them today. It is my understanding that he felt they originated in Northwestern Africa.
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