It’s a collaborative site.
I like it, though there wasn’t a single one of the false facts that I was taught in schools.
“Dinosaurs shed their skin all at once like snakes”
“Girls are naturally not as good at math as boys”
I don’t mean to be rude, but If this was taught in your school, everyone around you is probably a moron.
Yeah, the concept is nice, but it tells me that the Big Bang doesn’t explain what happened before it (the leading hypothesis is that the Big Bang started time, so there is no “before”) and sources a Wikipedia article on spiders. Then, it cites the common myth about Daddy Longlegs being highly venomous, says that that wasn’t dispelled until 2020, and then cites a fucking BuzzFeed listicle.
Buzzfeed out here doing the real work
The fucking MythBusters did an episode on that like 20 years ago.
Just put in 2010 and most of everything it said is incredibly obvious. Plus some of the dates of updated sources seem really incorrect. For example, one of them is it is a myth that most oxygen comes from trees, but I very distinctly remember my math teacher of all people saying in 2006 or 2007 that when he was in school he corrected people that it’s mostly from plankton. And even if I’m misremembering this, he definitely said something about it being from plankton in those years, but it says the updated sources are from 2020.
It says that it is a myth that the big bang theory explains where the universe came from but in 2020 we found out it doesn’t explain what came before. Like… No? That’s always been what it is. Sure, it’s always been a Christian talking point to sort of say that, but then why say 2020?
But I guess it’s hard to really gauge what should and shouldn’t be included. I remember my 5th grade teacher telling me that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. I don’t really remember exactly what all she said and if she got deeper into Lost Cause rhetoric than that, but she definitely said Lee was a “good man.”
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I think it’s a neat idea but probably needs more contributors and for people to be a bit more critical with things. For example, an obvious one, I don’t see it mention that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. That would be a great thing to mention, especially if you talk about things we used to consider planets but don’t any longer. Ceres is another example of this. In 1801 it was discovered and considered a planet until sometime in the 1950s (it seems like it wasn’t an all-at-once shift) when it was considered an asteroid despite its planet like appearance. Now it is considered a dwarf planet like Pluto.
The very architecture of the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then) made it impossible to take over, and traffic would naturally route around any damaged links or nodes.
Google and CloudFlare have since proven that sonsabitches with enough money can subvert it completely, and it only takes a few dudes dragging an anchor from a boat to disconnect entire countries for weeks and months.
It took them a long time to get there. As corporate ISPs took over from the government and universities, the Internet got built around a few large pipes rather than several smaller ones. It’s cheaper to build and maintain, but more prone to failure.
Some of the redundancy from the old ARPANET is still around in the US. Everywhere else, it mostly got built as above. One ship laying an anchor somewhere they shouldn’t has brought entire countries offline.
The one that immediately springs to mind doesn’t exactly fit the criteria, because it wasn’t even true at the time that I was taught it in public school in Texas. But my history teacher taught me that no real historian called it the “American Civil War,” and that it was correctly called “The War of Northern Aggression.” And, of course, although the Confederacy did want to keep slavery legal, their actual central reason for seceding was “states rights.”
Like I said, both of those are simply lies. Only propagandists call it “The War of Northern Aggression”, and it was always explicitly about slavery.
The sad thing is that I believed and repeated these lies for years after that. Note that, like most people, I didn’t have access to the internet to easily check things myself. Since at the time I had zero interest in reading about history, it was difficult to correct my knowledge.
It has demonstrated, to me at least, the importance of keeping propaganda away from children. The more you lie to children, the harder it will be for them to become functioning adults.
“The atomic bombings were necessary” was something we were expected to internalize as an indisputable hard fact, like gravity and oxbow lakes.
AFAIK, historical documents show the Japanese government were ready to surrender, if they had been sure the monarchy would be preserved.
The bomb could have been replaced with properly worded surrender terms.
