Another meme that has been refuted but wont die is “Lord of the Flies” which not only is a fiction book, but in several real instances Kids being marooned did not act like that.
Next is “The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data”. Wrong and the guy who original did the meme sais just the opposite.
Not so much in the Franco-Prussian war, which lasted what- six months? Sure the Allies won the Great War, but not due to France.
The OSS etc did bot trust the French resistance at all, since some were communists, etc, and a number of agents dropped into france were surrendered to the gestapo.
Of course, they did manage to shave the heads of women who dated Germans, while ignoring those males who made $$ off them.
I am not saying the French Resistance did nothing, but there is a lot of hype and myth.
The courage of the French soldiers has never been the issue. There are many instances of bad strategic leadership but it’s not a matter of cowardice which the meme implies.
And a lot of the scraps we have are the equivalent of comic-book nerds attempting to No-Prize all of the inconsistent bits into a (somehow) consistent whole.
Then again, nearly all the stories, period, feature men. I’m not sure that women are any more underrepresented in the “clever” stories than in any of the other sorts of stories.
Including Romans trying to make work the transposing of Greek deity identities and lore to theirs, centuries later (“Our history begins with Prince Aeneas of Troy who was a son of Venus!”). But yeah, a lot of literature where the gods and heroes are characters . Not, well, canonical, Scripture about this is who you should worship and how and this is what you must believe the origin story is or else.
The Franco-Prussian War caught the French at the cusp of rapidly advancing military technology that the Prussians used that the French weren’t prepared for. FWIW, when in WW1 the Germans expected a repeat of the Franco-Prussian War on their western front, they discovered that the French had learned from their previous experience.
Though that is hardly evidence of the French surrendering easily as they effectively lost the war (and had their emperor captured) a month in, but kept on fighting regardless.
RE: the “Bystander Effect”:
How much of it is people thinking “With so many witnesses, surely *someone *has already called this in.” So not necessarily apathy but feeling–rightly or wrongly-- that action is not required on their part. I can see that number increasing with the number of witnesses.
One thing that’s taught in disaster-management classes is that you never say things like “Someone call 911”. You pick out some individual, by name if possible, and tell that specific person to call 911 (or whatever other specific task needs to be done-- “Go get the portable AED”, or “Go get the school nurse”, or whatever).
In less-disastrous situations, I’ve seen things like a bunch of students standing around outside the closed door to a classroom, because they all assume that it’s locked, but nobody ever checked, and it’s unlocked.
Back in highschool, I actually did that as an experiment one time. I was usually the first one to get to homeroom in the morning, so I’d check the door, and if it was looked, I’d sit in the hall and read a book until the teacher showed up. People started just lining up behind me when that happened. One day I wondered if anyone else would ever check the door, so even though it was unlocked, I sat in the hall. I had about half the class lined up before someone else even tried the door.
When I was a kid there was a refuted but persistent idea that everybody in Christopher Columbus’ time thought the Earth was flat, but he alone figured out it was round. The reality was that every learned person of the day knew the Earth was round. In fact, Columbus was the one who was wrong-- he thought the Earth was much smaller than the scientists of the day did (and they were pretty accurate in their estimation). If the North American continent hadn’t been there and it was all ocean, Columbus and crew would have died trying to cross over to India.
Of course, the really ironic thing is that there are probably more flat earthers now than in Columbus’ time
As an absolute number? Almost certainly. But as a percentage? I find it hard to believe. They’re just visible these days due to the internet. At least… I hope I’m right. The stupidity of human beings does seem to be growing lately.
Everybody knew that’s what wise men said, but how many people in the 15th Century could really wrap their head around the idea of a round world? It was kind of one of those things that needed to be physically proved (which it wasn’t until Magellan journeyed to the Philippines by going west).
Written circa 1321 A.D., no less a work of medieval cosmology than the Comedy of Dante Alighieri (a.k.a. The Divine Comedy) took as a pivotal plot point of the second book (Purgatorio) that in the “antipodes” (the southern/western hemisphere) it would day there when it night in Europe, the noonday sun would be to the north, etc.
The surviving members of Magellan’s flotilla were the first to experience a “date line” calendar inconsistency, when their log book was off a day from the calendar back at home.
The Magellan-Elcano Expedition was the first practical proof that the Earth is round, but we’ve known it to be round since the time of the ancient Greeks, and Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the earth with surprising accuracy in the 3rd century B.C.
It is hard to know what he really believed, some say he just thought Asia and Japan stuck out much further than they really did, He had heard of islands out to the far East os China, and when he ran into islands- there ya go.
Scholars generally accepted the idea, but remember, a lot of people were illiterate, and the Earth seems flat if you dont travel much.
Yeah, but remember, that is cherry picking because they were also dead wrong about many things. Aristotle said the visions is caused by rays from the eyes. They also thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Plato said a woman’s womb would move within her body. Lambs grew from trees. Altho Veins carried blood, arteries carried air. The Brain was a cooling device for your blood. etc
here are a few more-
So the fact that one ancient greek philosopher theorized that the earth was round, that doesnt mean it was an established fact.
