The Stanford Prison Experiment. But it shouldn’t be taken seriously, it was terribly done, biased and unscientific

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

Could be interesting to run something similar under actual experimental conditions, if that was doable

Al-Masudi was a very able cartographer, and his 10th Century map of the world is really impressive. And yes, it includes a continent to the West of the Old World.

Obviously this doesn’t prove a genuine knowledge or discovery of the New World, but its a noted oddity.

The theory that a Muslim population discovered and settled in the Americas is widely discredited and shouldn’t been taken seriously, but it is a published theory and supported by at least some academics. Most though dismiss is as either ‘psuedo-history’ or even ‘propaganda’, so yeah…

This theory might be ahistorical, but how sinister it is is debatable (“Yeagley believed that Shabbas and the other authors were simply trying to gain acceptance for Arabs, further integrating them into American culture by making them ‘native.’”). The American myth making around Colombus might be more based in fact, but lets be honest, there’s a lot of fake history there too.

The word ‘admiral’ does come from the Arabic ‘amir’, - circuitously via medieval Latin and Old French.

So yeah the post is untrue, but I wouldn’t call it ‘insane’ necessarily. Its a reasonably common, and interesting, myth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masudi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/did-muslims-visit-america-before-columbus

If this is truly and legitimately where it ends - doorknocking - then its an annoyance and nothing more

But the real issue is that in the US the evangelical Christian scene has a lot of overlap with various racist/homophobic/right-wing/etcetc scenes

You can ignore ‘have you heard of our saviour Jesus Christ’ visits with a shoulder shrug, but I bet a lot of people have genuine safety concerns about this information being available to this crowd

I think Occupy was really interesting, and part of the reason was the lack of a clear and actionable message

I fully agree that the best and most effective protest movements are those with clear goals and demands, and Occupy wasn’t that

What it managed to do really effectively was bring all kinds of people and ideologies together - there were the active leftists and anarchists, but also liberals and the middle class and all sorts. I’ve read articles and accounts that talk of just every kind of person spending time in that main/original camp, and it spawned a lot of similar events here in the UK

Ultimately it had the same kind of energy as the ‘If you want it, war is over’ billboards of the late 60s. And absolutely thats frustrating from an activist p.o.v

But on the other hand, it did in a lot of ways shift public perspective. I’d stop short of saying it changed the paradigm, but it definitely contributed to an anti-neoliberal, anti-free-market normalization

So yeah, idk. It didn’t really achieve anything; the issues it tried to tackle are still omni-present. But maybe it did do something in some hard to quantify, nebulous ways. Its interesting at least 🤷‍♀️

But yeah really not a blueprint of an effective protest in a majority of ways

The last time I was in Berlin, the year before Covid, they had set ups in some of the parks which were like painted lines and ‘boxes’ on the floor

Weed dealers were allowed to sell within these lines (probably not actually legally, but with an understanding that the police would leave them be? Not sure of the specific rules) but not outside of them

This meant that people who weren’t interested wouldnt have their park time marred by shady people coming up and trying to sell them drugs, and people who were interested could just go to one of the dealers in the lines

It was just a better, safer way of doing things. Everybody won.

Actual legalisation is the next step of course. Criminalisation of something as minor of weed just creates crime and danger, it doesnt reduce it. So this is good news

100km (64? miles), for charity. It took 31 hours, so more than a day but it was all in one go

It was awful

Grabbed a chicken, plucked it turned it into a man, then threw it at a lecture

This just isnt true. I’m not saying this to defend Israel and their actions in Gaza - its just really important to not get swept up in falsehoods, particularly at a time when legitimate criticism of Israel is being portrayed as antisemitic.

There are allegations that Israel administered a birth control drug - which has to be readministered every three months - to Ethiopian immigrants without informed consent. The investigation into this was flawed, but there is literally no evidence to suggest that anyone was forced or coerced into taking this.

What does seem plausible and even likely based on the facts is that doctors often made little or no effort to overcome language and cultural barriers and make sure that consent was fully informed and patients were completely aware of the effects of the procedure.

This is definitely an issue in and of itself, and is a level of societal racism. But what it is not, is ideoligical forcible sterilization.

Further, when you say ‘Ethiopian Jewish women tried to invoke the Law of Return’ the implication is that Israel was really against Ethiopian immigration. In reality, the Israeli government worked with the US to actively enable this - in 1984 Israeli covert forces worked to evacuate the Beta Israel community from Sudan to Israel during the civil war there (this is known as Operation Moses).

Basically, there is so so much to legitimately criticise the Israeli government for right now. Repeating misinformation like this just straight up doesn’t help.

Spain did. Though only when Franco died of heart failure