Memes

Literally me, fr fr

This is a real issue though. A lot of the writings on the actual lives of random people are from the perspective of "look what these weird foreigners do, instead of being normal like us". And that's not the most objective source.

This is what I dislike about most historical dramas. They focus almost entirely on the pampered (thought no doubt dramatic) lives of the rich and privileged, and lettered, ignoring the great majority of humanity that 1) were engaged every day with the drama of survival, 2) did all of the labour that allowed for those frilly few to write their letters all day.

EDIT: I write from the comfort of my home office on break at my WFH job... >_>

…and could afford houses and food

And the… non-WASPs knew their place. They loved it too in fact!

(I’m paraphrasing some actual things that actual people have actually said about the good old days (but I can’t remember their actual euphemisms (dysphemisms) for non-WASPs))

The other comments are quite sarcastic and I want to give you a bit of a less antagonizing response why Steven Pinker is kind of a hack.

He more or less "cooked the books" when it comes to explaining how much good capitalism helped the people around the world by doing very selective data analysis. In the end he really advocates for being complacent with the status quo and basically argues for the argument of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (which has been disproven a lot by anthropologists.

These videos are quite long but go into more detail:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwXV71hF7cs

And if you prefer to read: I'd recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Yeah. Enjoy the meme. Don't buy the book.

Now fairy tales, that's where the brutality comes in. Ever heard of "The Death of the Little Hen" collected by the Grimm brothers? The last line is, I kid you not, "and then everyone was dead". Gotta get those kiddos used to pandemics and family sized tombstones.

Yeah nothing wrong with a bit of prescription mercury to clear up the old syphilis

Ah the good ole days when children and infants were dying left and right, a splinter could mean a slow painful death by infection, and the local doctor prescribes drilling a hole in your head to release bad spirits

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."

"He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink."

"Gift" is a German word that means poison

Life seems like the result of such an unlikely complex Rube Goldberg machine where everything was just right to let life start then survive for a very long time. Plus we are made of various elements that had to be created in some of the universe’s biggest explosions.

It seems then that life should be something to be cherished while we briefly have it. I try to do just that.

…then we get to watch people around the world working hard to make life worse for those around them.

Yeah how’s that return policy on white elephants going

Curses can be gifts

Those areas are also wildly romanticized. Let's not forget that one of the ways that some Europeans got established was by trading guns to indigenous people so they could go off and kill other indigenous people for their land.