Comments by "Itinerant Patriot" (@itinerantpatriot1196) on "Can YouTubers EVER be ‘Proper’ Historians? TIK history Q&A 22" video.

  1. I like your channel TIK. I have seen enough of your stuff to know you are sincere. I haven't always agreed with your assertions and /or conclusions and I'm not familiar with a lot of your sources but that is what makes it cool. I have a traditional liberal arts degree, roughly split 50/50 between history and political science. I think in order to get one you need to study the other. But I attended school decades ago and I went to a school that wasn't dominated by left-wing professors. We had em, but there were more conservative and professors who played it neutral so it wasn't hard to avoid the lefty's. That said, history is one of those disciplines you don't need a ton of formal training to be good at. It's story telling. David McCullough was a very good historian who had a degree in English. Based on what I've seen you prefer the more technical writers, guys who get into more into the weeds with the data. That is okay provided they don't just take their brain out for a walk and toss a bunch of useless facts out there to seem smart. I read a terrible book called The British are Coming where the guy actually broke down the number of knots on a British mooring line and how much cannon shot each ship held, ad nauseum. Then there was a book on Stalin where the author just assumed you knew all about the makeup of the Politburo in the 1930s and just tossed a bunch of names out there. It was so thick it actually injured my brain. As for the History Channel going Ancient Alien, I think that had more to do with production costs than anything else. The age of reality-tv killed channels like the History Channel and A&E. It killed politics too but I digress. Reality-tv was cheap and there was an audience for it. TV has been dumbing down western civilization for close to 80 years now. As time has gone on, attention spans have shrunk and sound-bites are all the rage. Then there is the built-in bias. People like information that affirms them and are less likely to listen to opposing points of view. And commentators on both side play fast and loose with the facts. You are just as likely to hear BS from Tucker Carlson as you are from MSNBC. I heard Tucker say, in absolute terms, no question about it, that the CIA killed JFK. Now, he has no facts to back that up, but I'm sure someone on his staff told him the demographic he was appealing to held that belief so he puts it out there and people are like: "Well, if Tucker said it it must be true." I call it "The Mr. Spock Affect." When I was a kid, anything Leonard Nimoy said was taken as gospel. He was Mr. Spock, the logical super-genius who bailed the emotion-driven Captain Kirk out of jams every week. So, if he was a genius there, he must be a genius in everything. I saw a film at a science museum in the 1970s that talked about tera-forming Mars. Now, you know NASA was behind it because people were bored with Apollo and funds were drying up. So they made up a bunch of BS and paid Spock to sell it like soap. Us kids were impressed that's for sure. Neil de Grasse Tyson is the latest version of Mr. Spock. He's a TV celebrity astrophysicist completely full of himself so he comments on everything from climate change to transgenderism, always falling on the side of the camp he belongs to because we are tribal. This has been a long rant and I know no one will read it but I say all of it because as Orwell said: "He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future." It's important that people fact-check what they hear, but information is so manipulated anymore it's getting tougher to do it, at least digitally. My advice, by books, hardcover books. They are the best reference sources and the way things are going they may be worth their weight in gold, at least if the ones calling themselves the elites get their evil grimy paws on power. Like I say, long rant, but keep up the good work TIK. We need more like you and less "professionals" and "experts."
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