What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
“Imagine if people had been going ‘don’t fight hate with hate’ back when Hitler was around.”
Fam…let me tell you bout Poland.
Let me tell you about how the entire rest of Europe sat ack and watched the invasion of Poland because they thought it would be “improper” to send military aid. How they were unwilling to enforce the treaties that Germany was breaking, because that would make them “just as bad.” They sat back and wrote strongly worded letters while fascists grew in power because they didn’t want to dirty their hands. They thought reasonable discussion and politics would be enough to stop a fascist dictator from rising to power.
• Banished (or beheaded) his first wife because she wouldn’t dance naked in front of his friends at a raucous orgy
• Found himself a new wife via a beauty pageant
• Prone to childlike fits
• Massive ego
• Terrible grasp of what’s happening in his kingdom
• Likes to tell people they’re fired (slash executed)
• Is totally cool with his highest-ranking advisor being a raging anti-Semite
I was going to be like “Wait, isn’t Trump Haman”, but you’re right, Trump as Ahasuerus does work. Except Trump is the name I want to drown out by twirling a graggaer whenever I hear it…
do you want to know something?? I always wondered what the hell kind of hairstyle the Ancient Egyptians were trying to portray with depictions like these
and this
until I did my hair this morning and
oh
welp
you can take the noses off our statues but until you find a way to take Egypt out of Africa we’re still going to find ourselves
I’m reblogging this post without all the salty, racist commentary because I’m sick of looking at it. please spread this around again in its pure form for posterity.
What’s funny is that white people thought they were hats/crowns 😂
And here’s some pictures of the Afar people, who still live on the horn of Africa today.
Cool, huh?
Beautiful
People thought it was Hats and Crowns? How could they not see hair?
The same reason archaeologists, upon finding a woman’s skeleton in the grave of a famous Roman gladiator, immediately wondered where the gladiator’s skeleton was: Old Straight White Man™ brand denial.
Same way they denied the Really Gay Egyptian Tomb, too. It’s kind of a Thing.
This post is amazing, I’m so glad it exists. I have learned.
so like it’s something something bce and israel/judea/whatever you wanna call it has been INVADED BY THE GREEKS. specifically, invaded by a bro named antiochus, pronounced aunt-eye-oh-kiss, who is a dick.
thing about hanukkah is that, like, there’s the Historical Story, which is important and worthy of study and shit, and then there’s the Hanukkah Story, which is more fun
so in Historical Story the invasion by the greeks was pretty slow and there was a lot of hellenization of jewish culture and blah blah blah
in Hanukkah Story the greeks SMASHED IN WITH A BUNCH OF SWORDS and were like FUCK YOUR TEMPLE. FUCK YOUR GOD. FUCK YOUR PASSOVER, AND ALSO, FUCK YOU. and they DESTROYED THE TEMPLE and let, like, pigs go running around in it? which, if you know literally anything about judaism: pigs in the temple. they set pigs on the fucking holy fucking temple.
ANyway, then a greek general was like “yo, okay, i am threatening you all with Death unless you sacrifice to zeus.” and everyone was very Stoic and Rebellious until one bro was like FINE!! I WILL SACRIFICE TO ZEUS, GIMME THE STATUE OF ZEUS, IMMA KILL AN ANIMAL AND GO YAY ZEUS. i’m not sure if this also happened in the temple, but i like to think of it happening in the temple, because sacrifices to an idol??? in the holy fucking temple???? and he is almost about to kill the animal WHEN
WHAM, here comes mattathias (a.k.a. matisyahu, a.k.a. no, not the rapper) and CUTS OFF THE BRO’S HEAD.
then he yells ANYONE WHO WANTS TO FIGHT BACK COME TO THE HILLS!!!! and FLEES to the hills along with his sons. their family name is MACCABEE and so they are known as the MACCABEES, which means THE SLEDGEHAMMERS, because this story was apparently NOT METAL ENOUGH ALREADY.
meanwhile the occupation continues. there is a chick named HANNAH, who i have loved for one thousand years because i can either identify with her or hannah-samuel’s-mother, who is boring.
hannah has SEVEN SONS, which is MORE THAN I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE. the greeks capture them all and go “EAT PORK. EAT IT. EAT IT.” hannah and her seven sons are like no!! wtf calm the fuck down with your pork
so the greeks, who have literally no chill, go “okay, we’re gonna torture son #1 until he eats pork.” which they do – except the son does not eat the pork?? and eventually he just like DIES and the greeks are like, WHAT THE FUCK, okay, TIME TO TRY THIS AGAIN.
so they try it with son #2 and it is EQUALLY INEFFECTIVE. NO PORK, NO EATING. the greeks are BEWILDERED, they go on to torture and kill sons #3 THROUGH #7. LITERALLY ALL OF THEM. NONE OF THEM EAT PORK.
the greeks are like “HANNAH. HANNAH. YOU HAVE JUST WATCHED ALL YOUR GODDAMN CHILDREN DIE. EAT THE DAMN BACON.”
but hannah is the most rad of all the jews. she goes “i will not eat your fucking pig because you KILL PEOPLE ABOUT IT. god DAMN calm the fuck down and LET US BE JEWISH LITERALLY WHAT IS YOUR DAMAGE.”
the greeks have an elephant!! the greeks have A HUGE ARMY!! the greeks have a Whole Fucking Empire! the jews have, like, matisyahu and his five kids. (one of them is judah maccabee, who i like to think of as Very Hot.)
and we win.
[intermission: NO-OT BY MI-IGHT AND NO-O-OT BY POWER (TAKE A SHOWER!!!) BUT BY SPIIIIRIT ALONE (RUACH) SHALL WE ALL LIVE IN PEEEEAAAAAAAAAACE.]
so we kick! the greeks! out! of israel/judea/palestine/whatever! and we’re like FUCK YES WE’RE GONNA KICK THE PIGS OUT OF THE TEMPLE WE’RE GONNA CLEAN THE TEMPLE WE’RE GONNA MAKE THE TEMPLE NICE AS SHIT
okay. quick note on the law, for gentiles: one of the most important things about synagogues is that you always gotta have a light in it. it represents god, and it can’t ever, ever go out. it can be electric or fire or anything, but it cannot go out.
so the jews get into the temple and the light is fire, obviously, because electricity has not been invented yet, and the light is almost out.
Oh Shit, say the jews.
there’s oil to keep the light burning. there’s enough oil to keep the light burning for one day. the nearest supply of oil is eight days away, round-trip.
Oh Shit. say the jews.
i mean. what are you gonna do. they send off a guy on a horse to go for the oil. they light up the remaining oil. they scrub the temple floors, and kick the pigs out, and sit, and recover, and wait for the fire to go out.
the fire doesn’t go out.
for one day, it lasts. then for another. for eight fucking days the oil burns, and the horseman returns with the new supply, and the fire is still burning in the temple. the fire never goes out in the temple. we survive the entire invasion and the fire never goes out once.
most jewish stories are stories about survival. this one’s about a little more than that. because we could have assimilated; we could have hellenized. we could have worshiped their gods and eaten pork, and we would have lived.
but we didn’t. we took the worst risk, and we won. and the fire didn’t go out.
This is everything I’ve ever hoped for in a retelling of the story of Hannukah. It fits exactly with the way that I like to tell stories from the Torah, and I shall be adopting its style next week.
this is so incredibly accurate. I love it.
Brilliant.
Hanukkah with Swears 2015 Oil on Canvas
.
I feel like I should do an audio recording of this for fun
DO IT DO IT DO IT
(also I feel like being at least tipsy, while not required, would enhance the effect.)
Lol you forgot I don’t drink but I’ll do the audio in a few
the cool thing about that song is it is a relic from when Christmas was bad ass before Washington Irving made it into the family-friendly holiday it is today. Before Irving created Christmas of today from nothing it was a drunken feast when rioting was common. Basically people would go out into the streets, get drunk, and throw snowballs at each other and shop windows. Sometimes the police would break it up but this would just make the celebrants escalate into riot.
In 1828, a particularly violent Christmas riot in New York led the city to institute its first professional police force.
Christmas celebrations in 1800 owed more to the midwinter worship of Saturn and Bacchus than to Christ. By the second century, the Romans were regularly feasting, drinking, and cavorting like satyrs from December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, to January First. They also decorated their houses with evergreen boughs.
In the fourth century, Christians began to celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25, the winter solstice on the Roman calendar. This was a partly way to meet the challenge of pagan cults. The church tacitly agreed to let the holiday be celebrated more or less as it always was. The Christmas celebration that arose in Medieval Europe was an occasion for excess and extravagance, public lewdness, and violations of social order. In medieval and early modern Europe, celebrants often elected a “Lord of Misrule” to preside over these annual revels. In one episode in 1637 in England, the crowd gave the Lord of Misrule a wife in a public marriage service conducted by a fellow reveler posing as a minister. The affair was consummated on the spot! No wonder, New England Puritans sought to criminalize this rowdy affair.
Puritans were particularly upset by two irksome Christmas practices: One was mumming, the exchange of clothes between men and women; and even worst was the outbreak of rioting, drunkenness, and fornication. It was this raucous celebration that the New England Puritans tried to kill.
But despite the Puritans’ best efforts, Christmas in America became an excuse for dangerous hell raising. At Christmastime, men drank rum, fired muskets wildly, and costumed themselves in animal pelts or women’s clothes – crossing species and gender. In New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities, they formed Callithumpian parades, which involved beating on the kettles, blowing on penny trumpets and tin horns, and setting off firecrackers.
Then, during the early 1800s, Christmas became a cultural battleground. During the early 1800s, evangelical Protestants challenged the popular Christmas. They called for a shorter, more refined, more family-centered celebration at the end of the year, one that would banish “what is sensual and low, and very close to vice itself in the existing Saturnalia.”
So in reality, the “war on christmas” was actually waged by Puritans and later by protestants who thought it was too wild and needed to be tamed and so invented whole sale bullshit to replace the drunken, sex-filled, riotous feast it once was.
Make Christmas Libidinal Again
The general tendency of folk holidays in the absence of external pressure is to develop towards “drunken anarchy festival” and I think that’s beautiful
My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up
this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?
Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”
so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76
Surya Bonaly, world renowned French skater whose trademark move is her backflip, where she only lands on one blade in order to keep the move legal. She’s amazing!
Yoooooo
it always amuses me when I remember the ice skating community banned this phenomanal move because a black person literally had raised the bar and white people were too bitter to do better so they banned a move that would add progress to the sport.
and then she raised the bar again
someone make this into a movie. fuck it, i’ll do it
ok ok so every time this post shows up on my dash, i get a little miffed because it presents this narrative that isn’t consistent with reality. it misrepresents surya’s career. first, there seems to be this implication that the isu banned the backflip because surya was the first skater to perform the backflip, and they didn’t like that because she’s black.
i mean, surya did not pioneer the backflip. she herself stated that her coach suggested that she start doing backflips on ice because of a skater named norbert schramm who was performing them in europe at the time. scott cramer pulled off 10,032 backflips over the course of his career, and he retired seven years before surya even began competing. surya is THE FIRST AND ONLY skater in history to perform a backflip and land on one skate in competition, but the most important part of it wasn’t the feat itself but WHY SHE DID IT.
and ok, the first person to successfully do a backflip on ice was skippy baxter in an ice show in the 1940s. there has only been one legal backflip performed in actual competition by terry kubicka in 1976. immediately after he pulled it off, the isu banned the move from competitions. please note that yes, terry kubicka was a white male figure skater. and for context, surya was born in 1973. i sincerely doubt that the isu was banning the backflip because of a THREE-YEAR-OLD.
the isu had very good non-racism related reasons for banning the backflip because well, figure skating is fucking hard. i think we frequently underestimate just how difficult it is because of how easy they make it look. i mean top figure skaters are still working on consistently landing quad jumps in competition. it’s so easy to flub a jump and get injured, and it’s super common for skaters to spend huge chunks of the off season not training because they’ve injured themselves.
SO DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA JUST HOW FUCKING DANGEROUS IT WOULD BE IF BACKFLIPS WERE ALLOWED IN COMPETITIVE SKATING???? if you mess this move up, you’re not just going to break an ankle or fuck up your muscles, you’d break your neck on the ice. you could FUCKING DIE. and this is by no means the first or last move to get banned by the isu for being too dangerous. (the one that comes to mind is the head banger death spiral because seriously what a name).
the reason why this is just so upsetting to me is because i feel like you guys are really simplifying surya’s narrative. yes, surya was a FUCKING BADASS. LIKE HER FIRST SEASON IN SENIOR COMPETITIONS, SHE LANDED A BACKFLIP DURING PRACTICE RIGHT IN FRONT OF MIDORI ITO, THE FAVORITE FOR THE 1992 OLYMPICS. IN THE SAME COMPETITION, SHE BECAME THE ONLY WOMAN TO EVER ATTEMPT A QUAD TOE LOOP IN COMPETITION, and the first time anyone had even successfully pulled that off was a mere three years earlier.
and yes, surya had to deal with A LOT of racism. because of her skin color and her build and her athleticism and her style, she didn’t fit into the “ice princess”. they pegged her as a rebel, and they treated her as such. the judges were constantly nitpicking her skating style and criticizing her artistry because she wasn’t this light and graceful skater that they thought female figure skaters should be. (black ballerinas suffer from the same plight). she was constantly pushing the boundaries, but she consistently got lower scores than her white counterparts. and despite that, she was A THREE-TIME WORLD SILVER MEDALIST, A FIVE-TIME EUROPEAN CHAMPION, AND A NINE-TIME FRENCH NATIONAL CHAMPION.
in the 1994 world championships, surya’s final score tied for first place with yuka sato’s. it came down to a tiebreaker vote, and the judges picked yuka because she fit in better with the ice princess image. surya knew why she the judges didnt pick her. during the awards ceremony, she refused to step onto the medals podium and took off the silver medal. she was crying, and the crowd was booing at her.
the 1998 olympics was going to be surya’s last hurrah. she knew that the 97-98 season would be her last. when the judges gave her a low score on her short program for surprise surprise racist reasons, she knew that there was no way that she could win.
so surya decided to make a point.
she hadn’t planned to do this from the start because she knew that the move was illegal and doing it could get her disqualified, but after seeing her short program score, surya basically on the spot decided to replace the triple in her free skate with the backflip landing on one skate. she hadn’t been training for this move specifically, she just pulled it off right then and there on the olympic stage. and while the backflip was banned for being too dangerous, another reason for it to be banned was because the skater would land on both skates, and jumps are always landed with one skate.
surya pulling off this banned move was basically her last FUCK YOU to the judges because they’d been screwing her over since the start of her career. she was challenging them by making a previously illegal move technically legal. the judges didn’t disqualify her, but they didn’t accept the move as legal either, and they deducted points from her score, so surya placed 10th overall. BUT THAT DIDNT MATTER. when surya finished her program, she turned her back on the judges (a huge no-no because it is highly disrespectful) because she didn’t care about their opinion at this point. SHE’D MADE HISTORY. their decision wouldn’t change that.
Kimchi and Justice 