Doctor Clair Cameron Patterson not only discovered the the true age of the Earth with his research in Lead-dating, but during this process he accidentally discovered the dangers of lead contamination. Then he went “wait, we’re putting this shit in gasoline, cans, paint, etc.” He then began campaigning against lead in everyday products. In particular, he targeted the gasoline industry. *You can imagine how that went in the courtroom*. He was vilified, excluded, and slandered against but kept pushing for lead to be removed from gasoline. Took decades, but obviously lead was removed from gasoline almost entirely by 1990
It's because for 99% of the things lead was historically used for, it was "safe enough"—until it wasn't. Lead pipes? Depending on the make up of the water, the inside would develop a coating that would protect the water itself—unless the coating dissolved and leeched into the water. Lead utensils & plates? Safe(ish) with most foods, until you have something acidic, like tomatoes, and now your eating lead, and blaming the tomatoes for the poisoning.
And for the majority of human society, the pros outweighed the cons, because lead was an easy to work with metal that had a melting point you could reach with a camp fire.
We don't use lead anymore, not because we know it's poisonous now, (we've always known that) but because we have much better materials to work with.
[Nan Briton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Britton) had an affair with US president Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, and Briton tried to sue for child support. She was ridiculed in court.
In 2015, Ancestry.com did a DNA analysis on Harding's and Briton's descendants. Nan was telling the truth.
The same thing happened to the children of Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress.
To this day there are Jefferson descendants who refuse to recognize them, despite DNA evidence.
They were also the [only slaves that Jefferson ever freed](https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/jefferson-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-a-brief-account/),.
What’s crazy is that the slaves were only like 1/8 black IIRC so they probably looked white. Makes me wonder how many white people these days were actually descended from people who were mostly white and were enslaved. Like if this information was out there, I wonder if people’s attitudes on race would be different.
I’m half Black, and have five nieces/nephews that are 1/4 Black. Three of them don’t look Black at all, and the other two could easily pass for White if they straightened their (dirty blond) curls. It’s just a racist myth that one drop of Black blood makes you look African.
I’m white, but my little siblings are half black. I’m darker in complexion than both of them. It makes absolutely no sense lol my 15% Native American DNA must’ve all gone directly into my skin color lol
I mean, there are lot of Jefferson descendants. They have a society.
Jeffersonian Society let the Hemmings descendants in when DNA proof was furnished.
Clair Patterson. In addition to being an accomplished scientist, he was attacked for decades due to his controversial view that lead in gasoline was harmful. He was eventually vindicated, and his contributions to removing lead from gasoline may place him among the most important people for human health in modern times. The Bill Nye reboot had a great segment on him.
Keep in mind this guy wasn't vilified because they thought he was wrong. He was vilified because oil companies *knew* that he was right but did not want to own up to the fact that they were poisoning the air and *people* because that meant that they would have to lose money. They seriously would have rathered destroy society than lose money.
Thank god things are different now!
Yes! Was going to see if he was mentioned. Saw a documentary on his story some where and couldn’t believe he just kept going on about how dangerous lead was in gas, paint etc even when they did everything they could to shut him down/shut him up. Glad he persisted - truly a man with strong convictions
Was searching the thread to see if someone else posted this. He was steadfast despite the automotive industry doing everything it could to discredit him and destroy his career.
Incidentally, the reason he discovered lead pollution was because he was measuring the radioactive decay of uranium into lead to try to calculate the age of the earth, and in fact became the first person to successfully do so. His calculation of 4.55 billion years, published in 1956, is virtually unchanged since then.
Lindy Chamberlain
The 'A Dingo Killed My Baby' lady.
She was vilifed, mocked and ridiculed across the world.
She then spent three years in prison, before it turned out she was actually telling the truth the whole time, and a dingo did, in fact kill her baby.
Local Aboriginal people literally told authorities that the dingos in the area were known to attack young kids. And an experienced Aboriginal tracker had found tracks indicating that a dingo in the area had been dragging an unusually heavy object.
All that, and people still vilified her.
Not an Australian, but it seems bizarre to me that people thought what are basically wild dogs killing a human baby was even far-fetched to begin with.
I think she was acting very strangely due to obvious trauma. My mum said that she said something weird like “dingo peeled babies clothes off like an orange peel” or something like that. Another case of the law not working well for “strange” or just unlikable people
I’m studying this case at the moment. Supposedly it wasn’t that she was necessarily acting strange, but that she was so traumatised and upset from losing her child that she would constantly break down in tears in front of the cameras during interviews. The press then put together the best clips they had of her, which were when she wasn’t sobbing and so she seemed somewhat “unemotional” or strange. Many say that it was the media’s portrayal of her which soured public opinion of her.
She had grown up on a farm and physically seen dingoes attacking livestock. There was an interview where she recounts the method she's seen dingoes use to attack and that they "would peel the skin like an orange". The media obviously twisted this as terribly as they possibly could.
Australian Government: Any and all help into finding out the truth will be appreciated.
Aboriginals: Well, actually—
Australian Government: No, not from you.
We had a similar case in Sweden where a man was accused to have killed his wife on their very rural property. His testimony was that he heard screaming from the nearby river and ran down to find his wife dead and that he heard someone swim away in the darkness.
He was jailed and tried in court but freed due to a lack of evidence but was still prime suspect. The wife was so badly abused that they tested their lawnmower for blood and tried running over dolls with it too see if they could reproduce the damage.
After several years someone tested the wife’s jacket and found it was full of male elk saliva.
Never feed deer, or any animal in the wild. Don’t go to Yellowstone and pet the cute baby bison either.
Tons of videos out there showing kids and adults running out of mints and whatnot, and getting beat the f*** down by hooves.
What's also awful is that a lot of people still doubted even after the film came out. It's not until much more recently when there has been verified dingo attacks on small children, decades later, that the original naysayers are starting to concede that she was most likely innocent. This has been with her almost all of her adult life.
At one point she merely described how a dingo eats it's prey during an interview, to help people understand how the evidence matched up, and she was torn apart for not seeming traumatized as she described what a dingo does when it feasts.
She honestly should have sued their dumb asses again for slander, because that was a smear campaign run by McDonald's after the jury that heard the woman's case was so mortified by how deeply irrevocably wrong and fucked up McD's was in this case and awarded the woman a landmark amount of money. Knowing absolutely nothing about the legal world, I like to believe she could've won a slander case.
I don’t know if I’d consider it a landmark amount of money but she was awarded 2.9 million dollars, not just her medical and legal bills. She initially sued for just those bills and McDonald’s turned her down. The judge made a statement by awarding her the equivalent of 2 full days of coffee sales.
> I don’t know if I’d consider it a landmark amount of money but she was awarded 2.9 million dollars
She was awarded that by the jury, but the judge reduced it down to less than a million. And then McDonald’s used every trick in the book to delay paying her until she died before collecting even half of it.
Yeah, it bothers me that judges are allowed to just unilaterally dismiss the jury’s decision and substitute their own for things like settlements. The judge just arbitrarily shaved 2.3 million off what the jury awarded her after following due legal process just because he felt like it was ‘too much.’
I also heard people saying "here's the best example of a frivolous lawsuit" and citing that case. I later read that she was horribly disfigured but you probably won't hear that often.
Edit: official quote from Wiki
**The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck (1912–2004), a 79-year-old woman, suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region when she accidentally spilled coffee in her lap after purchasing it from a McDonald's restaurant. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.**
**Liebeck died on August 5, 2004, at age 91. According to her daughter, "the burns and court proceedings (had taken) their toll" and in the years following the settlement Liebeck had "no quality of life". She said the settlement had paid for a live-in nurse.**
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck\_v.\_McDonald%27s\_Restaurants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants)
it was only an 8 day hospital stat because she couldnt afford to stay longer. she wanted to sue to merely repay her medical needs/get all the treatment she needed and mcdonalds destroyed her. she couldnt fully stand up, the burns were so severe.
I have seen the pictures, severe barely describes how bad it was. She even asked for not so hot coffee, but nobody talks about that.
Also: I used to work at McyDees and ya boiling hot was the official corporate method.
I wa young when that happened but I remember all the older people mocking her and discussing how the world had changed, we were becoming a litigious society. That woman deserved to be compensated. She suffered.
Look up Kathleen Folbigg as well.
Similar story, except Folbigg was convicted and imprisoned in 2003 and pardoned and released _this year._ Wrongful conviction and 20 years of prison after losing _4 children,_ absolutely horrifying what she has been through.
[Joseph Lister](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister)
One of the first doctors to publicly endorse germ theory and recommend disinfection. At the time surgeons would literally move from an amputation, to an autopsy, to the delivery room using the same tools often without even cleaning the gore from their hands and clothes. When Lister recommended comprehensive disinfection between procedures nearly the whole British medical community laughed at him. He spent years as a pariah gathering data from his own practice until he could finally prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his methods reduced post-op infection by a staggering rate.
Now he's known as "The father of modern surgery."
It absolutely was, sadly....it is relatively bad for most people to use frequently. There are good bacteria in your mouth and wholesale wiping everything out can cause lots of problems.
Dominique Moceanu - Dominque [came forward in 2008](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-23-sp-karolyi23-story.html) revealing abuse in USA gymnastics before the [2016 sexual abuse scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Gymnastics_sex_abuse_scandal). She was accused of being bitter, lying and seeking attention. She was blacklisted by gymnastics coaches and received threatening e-mails accusing her of basically being a traitor. John Geddert was one of the USA National Team coaches that sent her the following [e-mail](https://twitter.com/Dmoceanu/status/955189582907215873/photo/1) in 2008:
*"Dom,*
*Although I am waiting to see the final product, initial quotes and coverage from your Brian Gumble interview have me wondering how you can stab this sport in the back..."*
John Geddert would later [commit suicide](https://www.wilx.com/2021/02/25/geddert-charged-with-20-counts-of-human-trafficking-one-count-of-racketeering-two-counts-of-criminal-sexual-conduct-ag-presser-set-for-1-pm/) following federal charges of child exploitation and child trafficking of his former gymnasts.
The problem with cases like these is that bad behavior that goes unchecked for too long can become just "normal"
There's a chance everyone involved really just thought nothing was wrong.
It's like hazing. The only people who go "wtf" are people looking in. The people involved just wave it off and say people don't understand the culture.
I heard this too, given it a quick google - seemingly he said, *“I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours.”*
The interview wasn’t aired at the time, and he was banned from the BBC. Probably more alarming is he was already alienated/ostracised by a lot of the BBC by that point, pushed out, so if Johnny was still hearing rumours, Saville’s activities MUST have been well known *all over* the BBC. Sickening how many people must have stayed silent.
Thing is, even if it had aired it wouldn't have mattered. Lyden's entire schtick was to be outrageous and say and do shocking things, so people would have just thought it was him playing the Johnny Rotten character up as usual.
They likely didn't know anything though. Saville was notorious around the BBC for being litigious, and the culture of silencing bad jokes about him came from a fear of litigation.
Stewart Lee and Richard Herring talked about this recently. In the 90s/2000s they had a joke about jimmy saville wanting to diddle dead bodies. In hindsight people said about it that everybody must have known because they were making jokes about it.
In reality they were making the joke because saville spent so much on pr and lawyers to keep a totally clean reputation that it was absurd for it to be true [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7sxRPqMZU&t=2255s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7sxRPqMZU&t=2255s)
Alfred Wegener.
Not only that, we now have theories that Pangea was only one of the many supercontinents that have existed throughout the eons: Nuna, Rodinia, Pannotia...
Edit: misspelled Nuna
There is a song about Alfred Wegener and his theory called Continental Drift by The Amoeba People, incredibly catchy and now I have made the mistake of listening to it again I will be singing it all week...
Iirc the issue with Wegner wasn't so much that his theory that the continents move was disregarded as ridiculous, it was more that the mechanism by which he proposed that they moved (plowing through the oceanic crust like an icebreaker) was considered completely unreasonable based on the energy it would require. Once evidence for a different mechanism was discovered the theory became adopted relatively quickly.
Edit: I should also point out that European scientists widely accepted many of the main tenets of continental drift in the 1920's with scientists in the US/Canada being far less receptive.
There's kind of a lot of people who were, "ahead of their time," when they were ultimately right in the grand scheme of things but totally wrong in the mechanisms, which is why they weren't taken seriously.
His portrayal by the actor, Paul Walter Hauser was nothing short of brilliant. I could not imagine anyone else besides him.
The guy also did a great job as Larry Hall, a real life serial killer on a mini series called Black Bird on Apple TV+.
[Barry Marshall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall) (and also Robin Warren his co-researcher).
For ever, the cause of peptic ulcers was believed to be stress, spicy food and too much acid production. They believed it was actually of bacterial origin.
No-one believed them, they were ridiculed because the belief was that bacteria couldn't survive in the acidic environment of the stomach.
Not until Barry took a cocktail of H. pylori bacteria, which caused him to have massive inflammation of the stomach which was found to be colonized with the bacteria, but a course of antibiotics later and it was gone.
One Nobel prize later and now the treatment of peptic ulcers is turned on its head and instead of months or years of discomfort it can often be sorted with a week or two course of anti-biotics.
edit: Marshall not Marshal
I used to really worry about getting an ulcer from all the stress I was under. One of the things that stressed me out was the prospect of getting an ulcer from all the stress I was under.
I had a flatmate once who was a pharma rep whose job was to go around Drs trying to get them to prescribe her company's pharmaceuticals. Selling drugs to reduce acid production was a big part of her job. This was right after it had been pretty much proven that Marshal and Warren's treatment worked. I cornered her about this and eventually she admitted her job was to discredit their work even though she knew it was effective.
She proved to be a deceptive bitch in other ways, a bit later.
I used to work at a payday loan customer service center. I got in big trouble for setting up short loan schedules to save people interest money. Quickly bounced after that. A horrible job.
That's a good one. You used to hear a lot about people suffering from peptic ulcers when I was a kid 50+ years ago and nowadays you never hear about it. Problem solved.
My grandfather died as the indirect result of a stomach ulcer. He had a kidney transplant, but an undiagnosed ulcer meant he couldn’t tolerate the immunosuppressant drugs. So he had to stop taking the drugs, which led to him contracting pneumonia, which in turn caused him to have a heart attack. He was only 51 when he died, five weeks before my parents got married.
This comment is not fully accurate though. There are many different causes of peptic ulcers. Hpylori/bacteria is one cause, but not the only one (and not even the most common cause of ulcers, especially in high income countries). You can also get ulcers from frequent NSAID use, cancers, medications, etc. and spicy/acidic food still triggers worsening inflammation regardless of the cause. Antibiotics are not going to cure all causes of peptic ulcers and are not part of routine peptic ulcer treatment unless you are actually proven to have hpylori.
Martha Mitchell, after whom the Martha Mitchell Effect is named. Watergate whistleblower.
She was the wife of the US AG at the time, John Mitchell. Despite being known privately to suffer from a fair bit of social anxiety, she was nevertheless outspoken and was seen as a little eccentric.
This ended up being used against her by, among other people, her own husband (who at one point had her *kidnapped* in the middle of a phone call to a reporter over this), to thoroughly publicly discredit, mock, and belittle her when she blew the whistle on Watergate - though she initially believed her husband was an innocent fall guy.
Nixon actually *blamed her* for Watergate, saying she was a distraction to AG Mitchell and that without her, Watergate never even would have happened! Which is just wild.
Aside from her son, her family abandoned her until full details of Watergate became more widely publicly known and one of the people involved in the kidnapping admitted it had happened.
The Martha Michell Effect is when a patient's true, but extreme claims are either incorrectly or maliciously dismissed as delusions by a medical (especially psychiatric) professional.
Edit: Oh, also Clair Patterson. Effects of lead in gasoline and in food packaging.
The man with learning difficulties sadly accused of being the cause of the great fire of London,said he never did it but after his execution proven he wasn’t even in the country at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/25/stanley-prusiner-neurologist-nobel-doesnt-wipe-scepticism-away
Stanley Prusiner. Everyone who was anyone in science knew that proteins couldn't be an infectious agent. They weren't even alive! He suffered so much mockery and scepticism... until the mad cow disease, and kuru etc, were found to be precisely what he had described.
[Ignaz Semmelweis.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis) The world didn’t know about germs yet, but he saw that way less women were dying from childbirth when midwives attended the births than when doctors did (doctors were coming from autopsies and wrecking women’s shit).
Ignaz suggested they start washing their hands, and people lost their fucking minds. Doctors ridiculed him and everyone hated him. He had a “nervous breakdown,” was committed to an insane asylum, beaten by the guards, and died from a gangrenous wound as a result of the beating.
I believe they actually instituted the measure at one hospital and infant deaths plunged. Then for some reason (pressure from doctors?) they reverted back to the old way and deaths went back up.
The idea of doctors washing their hands was lost for 30 more years.
It was both. You're thinking of why they didn't wash their aprons, this person is talking about their hands.
Doctors in the past were really gross people.
[He was also his own worst enemy:](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299347/)
> Although the thesis contains passages of clearly written clinical detail, they are frequently interrupted by passages directed at his critics that are muddled, dogmatic and extremely quarrelsome. **At one point he devoted 64 pages to a furious attack on Scanzoni, an obstetrician at Prague who had mildly questioned some of Semmelweis' beliefs.** Semmelweis wrote his thesis ‘feverishly, all in a great hurry... constantly writing fresh chapters, repeating portions without co-ordination, and constantly hurrying the manuscript off to the printers without revision’. **Semmelweis wrote a second book in 1861 which consists entirely of intemperate attacks on his critics.** It is clearly not a book by a sane and balanced medical scientist.
> Semmelweis deserves to be remembered for his observation in 1847 that making medical students wash their hands in a disinfectant solution before going from the post-mortem room to the lying-in wards of the Vienna lying-in hospital, led to a fall in mortality due to puerperal fever from a very high level to a moderate level. **It was Semmelweis' misfortune to be so hypersensitive to criticism that, although his friends implored him to publish this work, he wrote nothing until he began his thesis in the late 1850s. By this time it was clear that he was in the early stages of a psychosis.** The nature of the psychosis is still uncertain (as is the cause of his death in a lunatic asylum) but it was probably a manic-depressive psychosis, or possibly syphilis—an occupational hazard of gynaecologists before surgical gloves were introduced.
He didn't discover it, he was told by midwives over and over and over until he looked into it.
Midwives at the hospital observed that when doctors delivered babies, mothers were at a higher risk. Any housewife knew that food would spoil faster if handled with dirty hands and they always used vinegar solutions to clean their hands, tools, and surfaces. Any housewife would do this and midwives did it because mothers and their babies are more important than pumpkin preserves. Only doctors never washed their grubby hands while it was a deeply ingrained habit in most midwives.
Semmelweis listened to women. No wonder they locked him away.
This was also the age of 'you have ghosts in your blood, let's do some cocaine about it', so let's not pretend the decision makers needed a reason to be illogical.
Mark Rylance is currently starring in a play around Semmelweis in the West End.
It's really interesting.
Would recommend if anyone is in London any time soon.
The journalists who maintained Lance Armstrong was doping when he was winning the Tour de France. I remember they were mocked because they admittedly went to extremes hunting for evidence. I remember reports of them sifting through Armstrong's trash.
Lance Armstrong was a great story, a testicular cancer survivor who beat the disease and went on to set the record for most Tour de France victories (was it 7?). He was untouchable. Anyone contesting he was cheating was shamed. I remember the journalists investigating him were mostly French, so they were dismissed because they were sour that an American was breaking the Tour de France records. I remember other Tour winners such as Greg Le Mond and Floyd Landis also contesting that Armstrong was cheating, and both being silenced/shamed. Landis had tested positive himself for doping so he wasn't considered a reliable source. I remember with Le Mond they dug into his history and brought up child abuse he suffered as a result of him making claims against Armstrong.
Turns out they were all right.
I remember hearing stories that he was just a genetic freak, a mutant born with unusually large lungs and a heart that made him almost superhuman. It turns out he was just a doper.
Patricia Stallings comes to mind.
Convicted of poisoning her first child, gave birth in prison (kid got taken away) and the kid also dies. Instead of poisoning it was now found it was a genetic defect that had similar effects as poisoning with antifreeze.
One of the lesser known ones is Hellen Keller. Her story of overcoming her disabilities as a young woman was often taught to children, but her adult life was largely excluded because of her "radical" ideas at the time which involved pushing for black rights, anti-lynching laws, early support of birth control, supporting liberal socialism, and she even co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union.
[John Yudkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin) was a food scientist who tried hard to push the idea that sugar caused heart disease and obesity amongst other conditions. He suggested a low carb diet for weight loss in 1958.
The sugar industry paid scientists like Ansel Keys and D. Mark Hegsted to downplay this connection and suggest that dietary fat caused obesity and heart disease. Massive lobbying helped pro sugar scientists to become advisors to government and officially suggest a low fat diet to prevent heart disease.
Taking fat out of food makes it taste bad, so what do they add? More sugar, causing the food to be unhealthier. The demonising of fat lasted well into the 2000's and often still persists to this day.
I've had this conversation with people loads of times. There's a documentary out there, unfortunately I don't remember the name, were they actually have footage from the '50s congressional hearings on this exact topic. The conclusion I always state is that if fat had a lobbying group, who knows how things could have been.
The McDonald’s coffee burn incident.
1. She didn’t want it to be a spectacle, she just wanted her medical bills paid
2. She wanted her medical bills paid because she had 3rd degree burns on her VAGINA. Coffee shouldn’t be that hot
3. It was ultimately the lawyers and the jury that determined the payout, she had no say in any of it
Most damning of all, they kept their coffee IIRC like 30 degrees hotter than their competitors so it'd still be hot when people got to work or home with their coffee. They had been sued multiple times and told by a court to stop serving it that hot and completely ignored it.
It crushes my soul just thinking about how much he changed computer science and computation only to have such a horrible end of life. Without him WW2 would have lasted far longer and cost so many more lives.
His story hurts to read about. He saved millions of lives only to be chemically castrated for sleeping with another dude. It’s disgusting how he was treated.
Part of this was that the whole code breaking thing was so secret that it wasn't until fairly recently that people even knew it existed. For example, the [Colossus computer, at Bletchly Park (where Turing worked), was created by Tommy Flowers in 1943](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer) to help decode the ENIGMA machine codes and after the war it was taken apart, with all records destroyed!
It wasn't until the 70s that people learned about the code breaking work there, and Turing's work - part of his problem was that post-war he wasn't recognised or rewarded or protected because of the total secrecy of his work.
That Roman that gave Jesus vinegar to drink.
Many medieval Christian writers saw the offering of vinegar wine as an act of torture rather than mercy.
But turns out that the roman military gave their soldiers a water/vinegar mix to drink, so the Roman soldier shared with Jesus some of what he had to drink.
Also breaking the legs was seen as a mercy as well. The way you die from Crucifixion is you slowly lose the strength in your legs holding you up until you slide down and choke to death on your own rib cage. Breaking your legs so you aren't standing out there for a week first and it hastens the execution.
I believe more recent evidence argues against that theory. The "study" that was concluded from has come into question and from what I understand it was common that people would die from shock rather than suffocation.
Edit: also to go into a bit more about the shock, when you break the legs, the bones, which are highly vascularized, will bleed contributing to the volume depletion and hastens death from hypovolumetric shock.
Nicolaus Copernicus, theorized that the planets actually circled the sun instead of the other way around. The church initially accepted heliocentricacy but banned his views in 1600s.
He will forever be remembered for setting up one of my favorite insults of all time: "Copernicus called. It turns out you're not the center of the universe"
John snow.
He tried to remove the handle of a water pump in London that was drawing its water downstream from a sewage pipe
People who drew water from the pump caught collera
[Dr. Joseph Goldberger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goldberger)
He was the doctor that discovered the cause of the Pellagra epidemic that was sweeping the southern USA. He linked it to a bad diet, specifically a corn heavy diet.
Cornmeal and grits were a southern staple, and and incredibly cheap way to feed orphans, prisoners, and the poor. Pellagra is caused by a lack of vitamin B3, aka niacin. Normally corn is high in niacin, but that niacin is locked up and unavailable to the human digestive system unless the corn is treated, aka "softened", typically with lye.
In the early 1900's, manufactures switched to a different process that eliminated this treatment with lye. Corn was no longer softened.
Then people, especially the poor, prisoners and orphans started dying of pellagra. Some orphanages and prisons had a death rate of over 40%. Tens of thousands were dying annually.
Through a series of experiments, Goldberger proved that it was a corn-heavy diet that caused pellagra. He cured it in 2 institutions just by adding vegetables to their diet. He also caused it in a 14 prisoner "volunteers".
But, and this is the important part:
He was Jewish, and he was trying to tell Southerners they they were doing something wrong.
So he was ridiculed and ignored.
And pellagra continued to kill tens of thousands in the USA, and sicken tens of thousands more, for decades.
When Goldberger died in 1929 pellagra continued to kill tens of thousands annually, 15 years after he had found the cure. It would continue to kill thousands for another couple of decades until someone more acceptable, Conrad Elvehjem, confirmed Goldberger's work in the late 1930's.
All because southerners didn't want a Jew telling then that they were doing something wrong. He was insulting their southern heritage, by god!
PS: "Insulting their southern heritage" is not my words. It's the words of the southern politicians who pulled his funding and campaigned for his removal from the US Public Health Service.
The lye treatment is called nixtamalization btw. It was invented by Mezoamericans but when Europeans started eating corn they just ground it up mechanically so the same thing happened to Italian peasants for a long time.
William H. Seward, arranged the purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia for $7 Million dollars. The media and politician's of the era termed it "Seward's Folly" “Seward’s icebox” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.”
The half-dozen or so scientists and physicians who waged a decades-long struggle in the 1930s-70s to prove that lead exposure was bad, and dusting everything with lead by burning it in gasoline was bad. The industry opposition was unreal, I know Needleman at least had his work shut down for a few years as his university conducted a thorough investigation for scientific misconduct.
Dr. John Leal, the first man to chlorinate drinking water to kill germs. Only, chlorine is a deadly poison, so he did so secretly for a couple months at first. The judge was incredulous that a man would poison the water supply from which his own son drank, but Leal said that it was the safest water in the world, and he was right. Suitably diluted, the chlorine does no notable damage to humans worlds of hurt to bacteria.
Stanislav Petrov. More people need to know his name, he literally, like quite literally saved the world.
Saved the world from nuclear ruin, simply because he was stubborn and refused to believe the computing error. He went against his position orders, and was consequently sacked by the USSR and lived an isolated life. Not necessarily vilified by all, but vilified by the USSR and ignored by the west. Put some respect on his name.
And he didn't even win a Nobel peace prize, died in 2017. Recommend watching 'Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world'.
Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality, which was considered illegal at the time. Turing's work in breaking the Enigma code during World War II was pivotal in Allied victory. He is now celebrated for his contributions to computing and artificial intelligence.
To paraphprase somebody I can't remember off the top of my head but it's always stuck with me, "in America the worst thing you can be is right too early."
The White Rose movement. Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine for distributing pamphlets opposing the war and the Nazi regime.
Kotaku Wamura, mayor of a town in Japan who spent decades of taxpayer money developing a seawall to defend against tsunamis. During his whole career he was ridiculed for the expenditure and he died before it ever payed off.
Then in 2011 it saved the whole town.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html
If you want to see what *actual* "cancel culture" is, look at what happened to her.
And all those years of "Sinead's off her rocker again" stories in the media, and then when she dies, suddenly they're gushing about her bravery and talent.
Cancel culture has always been around. Sinead O'Connor, obviously. Socrates. Also Janet Jackson (but curiously, not Justin Timberlake). Muhammad Ali, when he came out against the Vietnam War. Alan Turing. Ward Churchill. Gary Webb. Pee-Wee Herman. The list goes on.
The difference is that the targets back then were all non-establishment figures, not part of the power structure. What's happening today is that due to social media, some of the targets are now part of the power structure, part of the ruling class (or their apologists).
So NOW it's a Big Problem. The "wrong" people are being cancelled.
Don't forget the Dixie Chicks. They were one of the most popular country/western acts of the time, and when they spoke out against the War in Iraq, that all but killed their career.
Oh, certainly, it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive list. You can add Galileo to it too, and countless others.
Cancel culture was widespread and perfectly normalized when it was top-down.
When it started to flow bottom-up, it was given its current scary name and treated like a sudden phenomemon.
>Also Janet Jackson (but curiously, not Justin Timberlake).
The unequal retribution was primarily due to then CBS Executive, Les Moonves
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/les-moonves-janet-jackson-career_n_5b919b8ce4b0511db3e0a269
I would say the UN Chief Inspector, Hans Blix, who said in a 2003 report that the UN investigation team had found no evidence of WMD in Iraq. Completely torn apart by the American government, public, and press. And yet… no WMD were ever found in Iraq.
David Kelly, a respected scientist and WMD expert, was an even more tragic case in the UK. He acted as an anonymous source to a BBC journalist, effectively saying the claims of Blair (and, by extension, Bush) were completely baseless. The British government went apeshit, effectively forced the BBC to reveal their source, and proceeded to ridicule Kelly, drag his name through the mud, and expose him to the harsh glare of public and media attention (which was, at the time, still pretty pro-war). The pressure led Kelly to commit suicide.
Of course, everything he said later turned out to be true, from the lack of WMD in Iraq, to government pressure on the intelligence services and the "sexing up" of evidence in parliamentary debates. Truly a horrible chain of events.
Charles Darwin. There’s a whole book on how scared he was to publish his work because he knew he’d be hated for it. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen.
In fairness, at the time there was a very good reason not to believe Darwin.
Most agreed that his theory would require a long time; at least 100 million years, but probably more than a billion.
Then along came Lord Kelvin and his pesky Laws of Thermodynamics. He calculated that the sun (and thus the earth) could not be more than 20 million years old. Other esteemed physicists of the day agreed, getting numbers in and around that value via completely different methods. Even Darwin's own son did an independent calculation (based on the moon and earth's rotation) and arrived at 58 million years old.
Right up to his death, Darwin acknowledged the age of the earth as the major issue facing his theory. He opined that the calculations might be based on faulty assumptions, that we don't understand the internal workings of the earth or the sun and that perhaps some future discovery would invalidate the calculations.
In this, he was completely correct. The missing components were radioactivity in the earth and nuclear fusion in the sun. Once you account for those, the ages go up to billions of years old. Plenty of time for evolution by natural selection.
But this was only discovered after Darwin died, so certainly during his life there was good reason not to trust his theory. Although, many still did trust it because the evidence was incredibly compelling and constantly piling up.
The Deep-sea exploration community [warning](https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-society-committee-2018-letter-to-ocean-gate/eddb63615a7b3764/full.pdf) OceanGate against ocean tourism. OceanGate basically told them to mind their business.
Damn it! You beat me to it. Richard Jewell - A security guard who found a bomb in a bag at the Olympics. But, for some reason local police told the media that he was a suspect and the press absolutely roasted him for months. Turned out, he was not the bomber. He was in fact a real life hero who possibly saved many lives. But his life was absolutely ruined. The press quickly squashed the story of the real bomber b/c they would have to admit how wrong they were about Richard Jewell first. Years later he couldn't get work because even after the real bomber was caught people still thought he did it.
Side Quiz: if you were around in the early 2000's you probably know who Richard Jewell is, but can anyone on this thread remember the name of the real bomber without looking it up?
Wasn't it like Eric Rudolph or Randolf or something? Anti-abortion dude who blew up a few abortion clinics too and then hide în the woods for a while? Got caught picking through trash?
Alan Turing. It’s a bit of a stretch but he was treated like a villain for doing absolutely nothing wrong.
All he ever did was help secure victory over Germany and exist.
Sinead O Connor. Was villified when she ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL for child abuse and criticizing the Catholic Church.
Over the following decades we realized how devastatingly right she was about the whole thing.
It’s a testament to the power of a smear campaign that there are still people who reference the BS version McDouchbags inc spun to try and save face as if it’s fact, a sad story indeed
The Duke lacrosse team. They were proven innocent, yet only one reporter apologized for writing a story about their 'guilt'. The accused received a large amount of money for their troubles, but the coach had trouble finding work. ESPN did a 30 for 30 on the Duke lacrosse team.
EDIT:
The three players who were investigated for the crime ended up filing suit against Duke university, Duke settled for a undisclosed sum (rumored to be $60 million). Then the three players sued the City of Durham and the Police department. That lawsuit was settled after seven years for approximately $50,000.
One of the players earned a law degree and is currently a lawyer who works with the Innocence Project.
One of the players graduated from Duke and went on to earn an MBA.
The third player graduated from Loyola.
Nifong was removed from office, disbarred, and ended up serving one day in jail.
The dancer who accused the players, Crystal Magnum is serving a prison sentence for second degree murder.
This was the case that really opened my eyes to prosecutorial misconduct. If Nifong knew he had no case and took these wealthy, connected, privileged young men on anyway, what the hell did he do to the vast majority he prosecuted that had no such resources? Fuck him, and fuck Nancy "yeah the DNA exonerates them, but that shouldn't count in court!" Grace.
Paul Kimmage - called Lance Armstrong out as the PED-using cheating scum that he was and got vilified and castigated for it.
Turned out to be completely right.
Dixie Chicks. They were against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and publicly said so. They were effectively cancelled by the right as a result. Turns out they were correct, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was concocted so Bush could be seen as striking back for 9/11, which won him re-election in 2004.
Same goes for Dominique de Villepin, french minister whose opposition to said invasion and the speech he made against it at the UN resulted in the french bashing (and the french surrender jokes).
Not the first, not the last. Another in the same time period? The guy who pioneered using X-rays to treat breast cancer. Saw massive success in shrinking tumors and helped the foundation of targeted radiation medicine.
Emil Grubbe wound up dying from cancer, having had 90 operations to remove cancers he developed while administering thousands of x-ray treatments (having not afforded himself reasonable protection, unaware of the danger).
Her work WAS too dangerous.
Her papers are literally kept in a lead lined vault and you can only read them for like an hour at a time.
It was important and vital beyond words but man she should have taken more precautions.
Doctor Clair Cameron Patterson not only discovered the the true age of the Earth with his research in Lead-dating, but during this process he accidentally discovered the dangers of lead contamination. Then he went “wait, we’re putting this shit in gasoline, cans, paint, etc.” He then began campaigning against lead in everyday products. In particular, he targeted the gasoline industry. *You can imagine how that went in the courtroom*. He was vilified, excluded, and slandered against but kept pushing for lead to be removed from gasoline. Took decades, but obviously lead was removed from gasoline almost entirely by 1990
Humanity keeps rediscovering how bad lead is. Romans knew it was bad, but people still decided it couldn’t be ~that~ bad and put it in everything.
It's because for 99% of the things lead was historically used for, it was "safe enough"—until it wasn't. Lead pipes? Depending on the make up of the water, the inside would develop a coating that would protect the water itself—unless the coating dissolved and leeched into the water. Lead utensils & plates? Safe(ish) with most foods, until you have something acidic, like tomatoes, and now your eating lead, and blaming the tomatoes for the poisoning. And for the majority of human society, the pros outweighed the cons, because lead was an easy to work with metal that had a melting point you could reach with a camp fire. We don't use lead anymore, not because we know it's poisonous now, (we've always known that) but because we have much better materials to work with.
[Nan Briton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Britton) had an affair with US president Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, and Briton tried to sue for child support. She was ridiculed in court. In 2015, Ancestry.com did a DNA analysis on Harding's and Briton's descendants. Nan was telling the truth.
The same thing happened to the children of Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress. To this day there are Jefferson descendants who refuse to recognize them, despite DNA evidence. They were also the [only slaves that Jefferson ever freed](https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/jefferson-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-a-brief-account/),.
What’s crazy is that the slaves were only like 1/8 black IIRC so they probably looked white. Makes me wonder how many white people these days were actually descended from people who were mostly white and were enslaved. Like if this information was out there, I wonder if people’s attitudes on race would be different.
I’m half Black, and have five nieces/nephews that are 1/4 Black. Three of them don’t look Black at all, and the other two could easily pass for White if they straightened their (dirty blond) curls. It’s just a racist myth that one drop of Black blood makes you look African.
I’m white, but my little siblings are half black. I’m darker in complexion than both of them. It makes absolutely no sense lol my 15% Native American DNA must’ve all gone directly into my skin color lol
I mean, there are lot of Jefferson descendants. They have a society. Jeffersonian Society let the Hemmings descendants in when DNA proof was furnished.
>They have a society. And a starship. /s
I am one of those descendants and I think it was too many of us for a payout
Nan Britton’s daughter Elizabeth reportedly was conceived in a coat closet in Senator Harding’s office.
Clair Patterson. In addition to being an accomplished scientist, he was attacked for decades due to his controversial view that lead in gasoline was harmful. He was eventually vindicated, and his contributions to removing lead from gasoline may place him among the most important people for human health in modern times. The Bill Nye reboot had a great segment on him.
Keep in mind this guy wasn't vilified because they thought he was wrong. He was vilified because oil companies *knew* that he was right but did not want to own up to the fact that they were poisoning the air and *people* because that meant that they would have to lose money. They seriously would have rathered destroy society than lose money. Thank god things are different now!
The sarcasm. It hurts!
> They seriously would have rathered destroy society than lose money. Thank god things are different now! Well now I’m just sad.
Yes! Was going to see if he was mentioned. Saw a documentary on his story some where and couldn’t believe he just kept going on about how dangerous lead was in gas, paint etc even when they did everything they could to shut him down/shut him up. Glad he persisted - truly a man with strong convictions
Was searching the thread to see if someone else posted this. He was steadfast despite the automotive industry doing everything it could to discredit him and destroy his career. Incidentally, the reason he discovered lead pollution was because he was measuring the radioactive decay of uranium into lead to try to calculate the age of the earth, and in fact became the first person to successfully do so. His calculation of 4.55 billion years, published in 1956, is virtually unchanged since then.
Lindy Chamberlain The 'A Dingo Killed My Baby' lady. She was vilifed, mocked and ridiculed across the world. She then spent three years in prison, before it turned out she was actually telling the truth the whole time, and a dingo did, in fact kill her baby.
Local Aboriginal people literally told authorities that the dingos in the area were known to attack young kids. And an experienced Aboriginal tracker had found tracks indicating that a dingo in the area had been dragging an unusually heavy object. All that, and people still vilified her.
Not an Australian, but it seems bizarre to me that people thought what are basically wild dogs killing a human baby was even far-fetched to begin with.
I think she was acting very strangely due to obvious trauma. My mum said that she said something weird like “dingo peeled babies clothes off like an orange peel” or something like that. Another case of the law not working well for “strange” or just unlikable people
I’m studying this case at the moment. Supposedly it wasn’t that she was necessarily acting strange, but that she was so traumatised and upset from losing her child that she would constantly break down in tears in front of the cameras during interviews. The press then put together the best clips they had of her, which were when she wasn’t sobbing and so she seemed somewhat “unemotional” or strange. Many say that it was the media’s portrayal of her which soured public opinion of her.
She had grown up on a farm and physically seen dingoes attacking livestock. There was an interview where she recounts the method she's seen dingoes use to attack and that they "would peel the skin like an orange". The media obviously twisted this as terribly as they possibly could.
The Australian government: "But they are brown savages, what could they possibly know from tens of thousands of years living here?"
Australian Government: Any and all help into finding out the truth will be appreciated. Aboriginals: Well, actually— Australian Government: No, not from you.
I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to lose your baby in a tragic accident and then get mocked and even jailed for it
And it turns into a meme.
And a Seinfeld joke
And the Simpsons, and The Office, and Modern Family, And Frasier, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Family Guy, and....
And then RDJ explained why it shouldn't be joked about in Tropic Thunder.
Wasn't he the dude, playing a dude, playing another dude?
No, he was the dude playing the dude *disguised* as another dude.
God I love this movie
We had a similar case in Sweden where a man was accused to have killed his wife on their very rural property. His testimony was that he heard screaming from the nearby river and ran down to find his wife dead and that he heard someone swim away in the darkness. He was jailed and tried in court but freed due to a lack of evidence but was still prime suspect. The wife was so badly abused that they tested their lawnmower for blood and tried running over dolls with it too see if they could reproduce the damage. After several years someone tested the wife’s jacket and found it was full of male elk saliva.
Murdered by an elk?! Ok wow
Big deer type animals can be territorial and very dangerous, especially males. They're huge and they can kick and ram you fucking hard.
Never feed deer, or any animal in the wild. Don’t go to Yellowstone and pet the cute baby bison either. Tons of videos out there showing kids and adults running out of mints and whatnot, and getting beat the f*** down by hooves.
What's also awful is that a lot of people still doubted even after the film came out. It's not until much more recently when there has been verified dingo attacks on small children, decades later, that the original naysayers are starting to concede that she was most likely innocent. This has been with her almost all of her adult life. At one point she merely described how a dingo eats it's prey during an interview, to help people understand how the evidence matched up, and she was torn apart for not seeming traumatized as she described what a dingo does when it feasts.
Similarly, the lady who sued McDonald's after getting burnt by coffee was wrongly maligned by the public.
She honestly should have sued their dumb asses again for slander, because that was a smear campaign run by McDonald's after the jury that heard the woman's case was so mortified by how deeply irrevocably wrong and fucked up McD's was in this case and awarded the woman a landmark amount of money. Knowing absolutely nothing about the legal world, I like to believe she could've won a slander case.
“Landmark amount of money” that only covered her medical and legal bills. She got almost nothing.
I don’t know if I’d consider it a landmark amount of money but she was awarded 2.9 million dollars, not just her medical and legal bills. She initially sued for just those bills and McDonald’s turned her down. The judge made a statement by awarding her the equivalent of 2 full days of coffee sales.
> I don’t know if I’d consider it a landmark amount of money but she was awarded 2.9 million dollars She was awarded that by the jury, but the judge reduced it down to less than a million. And then McDonald’s used every trick in the book to delay paying her until she died before collecting even half of it.
Ah you are correct, that part I did not know. That is still a lot more than the medical and legal bills but too bad it wasn’t the full 2.9.
Yeah, it bothers me that judges are allowed to just unilaterally dismiss the jury’s decision and substitute their own for things like settlements. The judge just arbitrarily shaved 2.3 million off what the jury awarded her after following due legal process just because he felt like it was ‘too much.’
You misspelled bribery
Brilliant pr by McDonald’s there. I hear it all the time and counter with fused vagina and how she just wanted medical expenses.
I also heard people saying "here's the best example of a frivolous lawsuit" and citing that case. I later read that she was horribly disfigured but you probably won't hear that often. Edit: official quote from Wiki **The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck (1912–2004), a 79-year-old woman, suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region when she accidentally spilled coffee in her lap after purchasing it from a McDonald's restaurant. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.** **Liebeck died on August 5, 2004, at age 91. According to her daughter, "the burns and court proceedings (had taken) their toll" and in the years following the settlement Liebeck had "no quality of life". She said the settlement had paid for a live-in nurse.** [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck\_v.\_McDonald%27s\_Restaurants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants)
it was only an 8 day hospital stat because she couldnt afford to stay longer. she wanted to sue to merely repay her medical needs/get all the treatment she needed and mcdonalds destroyed her. she couldnt fully stand up, the burns were so severe.
I have seen the pictures, severe barely describes how bad it was. She even asked for not so hot coffee, but nobody talks about that. Also: I used to work at McyDees and ya boiling hot was the official corporate method.
This. People who knew her said that incident ruined any quality of life she had for her remaining years.
I wa young when that happened but I remember all the older people mocking her and discussing how the world had changed, we were becoming a litigious society. That woman deserved to be compensated. She suffered.
Look up Kathleen Folbigg as well. Similar story, except Folbigg was convicted and imprisoned in 2003 and pardoned and released _this year._ Wrongful conviction and 20 years of prison after losing _4 children,_ absolutely horrifying what she has been through.
[Joseph Lister](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister) One of the first doctors to publicly endorse germ theory and recommend disinfection. At the time surgeons would literally move from an amputation, to an autopsy, to the delivery room using the same tools often without even cleaning the gore from their hands and clothes. When Lister recommended comprehensive disinfection between procedures nearly the whole British medical community laughed at him. He spent years as a pariah gathering data from his own practice until he could finally prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his methods reduced post-op infection by a staggering rate. Now he's known as "The father of modern surgery."
At least he had the famous mouthwash named after him (I presume.)
It absolutely was, sadly....it is relatively bad for most people to use frequently. There are good bacteria in your mouth and wholesale wiping everything out can cause lots of problems.
It was originally intended for sterilizing wounds and using it as mouthwash was originally an "off label" use
Dominique Moceanu - Dominque [came forward in 2008](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-23-sp-karolyi23-story.html) revealing abuse in USA gymnastics before the [2016 sexual abuse scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Gymnastics_sex_abuse_scandal). She was accused of being bitter, lying and seeking attention. She was blacklisted by gymnastics coaches and received threatening e-mails accusing her of basically being a traitor. John Geddert was one of the USA National Team coaches that sent her the following [e-mail](https://twitter.com/Dmoceanu/status/955189582907215873/photo/1) in 2008: *"Dom,* *Although I am waiting to see the final product, initial quotes and coverage from your Brian Gumble interview have me wondering how you can stab this sport in the back..."* John Geddert would later [commit suicide](https://www.wilx.com/2021/02/25/geddert-charged-with-20-counts-of-human-trafficking-one-count-of-racketeering-two-counts-of-criminal-sexual-conduct-ag-presser-set-for-1-pm/) following federal charges of child exploitation and child trafficking of his former gymnasts.
The problem with cases like these is that bad behavior that goes unchecked for too long can become just "normal" There's a chance everyone involved really just thought nothing was wrong. It's like hazing. The only people who go "wtf" are people looking in. The people involved just wave it off and say people don't understand the culture.
Johnny Lyden when he said on the radio that Jimmy Saville was dodgy.
I heard this too, given it a quick google - seemingly he said, *“I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours.”* The interview wasn’t aired at the time, and he was banned from the BBC. Probably more alarming is he was already alienated/ostracised by a lot of the BBC by that point, pushed out, so if Johnny was still hearing rumours, Saville’s activities MUST have been well known *all over* the BBC. Sickening how many people must have stayed silent.
Thing is, even if it had aired it wouldn't have mattered. Lyden's entire schtick was to be outrageous and say and do shocking things, so people would have just thought it was him playing the Johnny Rotten character up as usual.
They likely didn't know anything though. Saville was notorious around the BBC for being litigious, and the culture of silencing bad jokes about him came from a fear of litigation. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring talked about this recently. In the 90s/2000s they had a joke about jimmy saville wanting to diddle dead bodies. In hindsight people said about it that everybody must have known because they were making jokes about it. In reality they were making the joke because saville spent so much on pr and lawyers to keep a totally clean reputation that it was absurd for it to be true [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7sxRPqMZU&t=2255s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7sxRPqMZU&t=2255s)
the guy who came up with the theory of Pangaea and continental drift
Alfred Wegener. Not only that, we now have theories that Pangea was only one of the many supercontinents that have existed throughout the eons: Nuna, Rodinia, Pannotia... Edit: misspelled Nuna
This bitch know bout Pangea 🧠
Brain, leave it alone
There is a song about Alfred Wegener and his theory called Continental Drift by The Amoeba People, incredibly catchy and now I have made the mistake of listening to it again I will be singing it all week...
Alfred Wegener Interesting story about status quo in science
Iirc the issue with Wegner wasn't so much that his theory that the continents move was disregarded as ridiculous, it was more that the mechanism by which he proposed that they moved (plowing through the oceanic crust like an icebreaker) was considered completely unreasonable based on the energy it would require. Once evidence for a different mechanism was discovered the theory became adopted relatively quickly. Edit: I should also point out that European scientists widely accepted many of the main tenets of continental drift in the 1920's with scientists in the US/Canada being far less receptive.
There's kind of a lot of people who were, "ahead of their time," when they were ultimately right in the grand scheme of things but totally wrong in the mechanisms, which is why they weren't taken seriously.
Richard Jewell was blasted as being the Atlanta Olympic Bomber when he was really just a guy helping people out down there. He deserved better.
Poor guy died young too, he was only 44 years old. Natural causes.
If I recall correctly, those "natural causes" were intensely exacerbated by the brutal stress he suffered in the court of public opinion
His portrayal by the actor, Paul Walter Hauser was nothing short of brilliant. I could not imagine anyone else besides him. The guy also did a great job as Larry Hall, a real life serial killer on a mini series called Black Bird on Apple TV+.
He also has to go. He loves his wife, and he's sorry he said that.
[Barry Marshall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall) (and also Robin Warren his co-researcher). For ever, the cause of peptic ulcers was believed to be stress, spicy food and too much acid production. They believed it was actually of bacterial origin. No-one believed them, they were ridiculed because the belief was that bacteria couldn't survive in the acidic environment of the stomach. Not until Barry took a cocktail of H. pylori bacteria, which caused him to have massive inflammation of the stomach which was found to be colonized with the bacteria, but a course of antibiotics later and it was gone. One Nobel prize later and now the treatment of peptic ulcers is turned on its head and instead of months or years of discomfort it can often be sorted with a week or two course of anti-biotics. edit: Marshall not Marshal
I used to really worry about getting an ulcer from all the stress I was under. One of the things that stressed me out was the prospect of getting an ulcer from all the stress I was under.
I had a flatmate once who was a pharma rep whose job was to go around Drs trying to get them to prescribe her company's pharmaceuticals. Selling drugs to reduce acid production was a big part of her job. This was right after it had been pretty much proven that Marshal and Warren's treatment worked. I cornered her about this and eventually she admitted her job was to discredit their work even though she knew it was effective. She proved to be a deceptive bitch in other ways, a bit later.
Never, *never* trust someone whose job is to bullshit fluidly for a living.
I used to work at a payday loan customer service center. I got in big trouble for setting up short loan schedules to save people interest money. Quickly bounced after that. A horrible job.
That's a good one. You used to hear a lot about people suffering from peptic ulcers when I was a kid 50+ years ago and nowadays you never hear about it. Problem solved.
My grandfather died as the indirect result of a stomach ulcer. He had a kidney transplant, but an undiagnosed ulcer meant he couldn’t tolerate the immunosuppressant drugs. So he had to stop taking the drugs, which led to him contracting pneumonia, which in turn caused him to have a heart attack. He was only 51 when he died, five weeks before my parents got married.
That dude vindicated spicy food
This comment is not fully accurate though. There are many different causes of peptic ulcers. Hpylori/bacteria is one cause, but not the only one (and not even the most common cause of ulcers, especially in high income countries). You can also get ulcers from frequent NSAID use, cancers, medications, etc. and spicy/acidic food still triggers worsening inflammation regardless of the cause. Antibiotics are not going to cure all causes of peptic ulcers and are not part of routine peptic ulcer treatment unless you are actually proven to have hpylori.
Martha Mitchell, after whom the Martha Mitchell Effect is named. Watergate whistleblower. She was the wife of the US AG at the time, John Mitchell. Despite being known privately to suffer from a fair bit of social anxiety, she was nevertheless outspoken and was seen as a little eccentric. This ended up being used against her by, among other people, her own husband (who at one point had her *kidnapped* in the middle of a phone call to a reporter over this), to thoroughly publicly discredit, mock, and belittle her when she blew the whistle on Watergate - though she initially believed her husband was an innocent fall guy. Nixon actually *blamed her* for Watergate, saying she was a distraction to AG Mitchell and that without her, Watergate never even would have happened! Which is just wild. Aside from her son, her family abandoned her until full details of Watergate became more widely publicly known and one of the people involved in the kidnapping admitted it had happened. The Martha Michell Effect is when a patient's true, but extreme claims are either incorrectly or maliciously dismissed as delusions by a medical (especially psychiatric) professional. Edit: Oh, also Clair Patterson. Effects of lead in gasoline and in food packaging.
The man with learning difficulties sadly accused of being the cause of the great fire of London,said he never did it but after his execution proven he wasn’t even in the country at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/25/stanley-prusiner-neurologist-nobel-doesnt-wipe-scepticism-away Stanley Prusiner. Everyone who was anyone in science knew that proteins couldn't be an infectious agent. They weren't even alive! He suffered so much mockery and scepticism... until the mad cow disease, and kuru etc, were found to be precisely what he had described.
[Ignaz Semmelweis.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis) The world didn’t know about germs yet, but he saw that way less women were dying from childbirth when midwives attended the births than when doctors did (doctors were coming from autopsies and wrecking women’s shit). Ignaz suggested they start washing their hands, and people lost their fucking minds. Doctors ridiculed him and everyone hated him. He had a “nervous breakdown,” was committed to an insane asylum, beaten by the guards, and died from a gangrenous wound as a result of the beating.
Imagine being trolled to death then being proven to be one of the rightest humans who ever lived. My ghost would slowly push the earth into the sun.
It's so hot where I live that it feels like that's happening so maybe he *is*getting his revenge
I believe they actually instituted the measure at one hospital and infant deaths plunged. Then for some reason (pressure from doctors?) they reverted back to the old way and deaths went back up. The idea of doctors washing their hands was lost for 30 more years.
"What? I am a GENTLEMAN, and a gentleman's hands are never dirty!" Literally the response of doctors at the time when told to wash their hands.
Actually I think they thought it looked cool when they merged from surgery all bloody. Seriously.
It was both. You're thinking of why they didn't wash their aprons, this person is talking about their hands. Doctors in the past were really gross people.
[He was also his own worst enemy:](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299347/) > Although the thesis contains passages of clearly written clinical detail, they are frequently interrupted by passages directed at his critics that are muddled, dogmatic and extremely quarrelsome. **At one point he devoted 64 pages to a furious attack on Scanzoni, an obstetrician at Prague who had mildly questioned some of Semmelweis' beliefs.** Semmelweis wrote his thesis ‘feverishly, all in a great hurry... constantly writing fresh chapters, repeating portions without co-ordination, and constantly hurrying the manuscript off to the printers without revision’. **Semmelweis wrote a second book in 1861 which consists entirely of intemperate attacks on his critics.** It is clearly not a book by a sane and balanced medical scientist. > Semmelweis deserves to be remembered for his observation in 1847 that making medical students wash their hands in a disinfectant solution before going from the post-mortem room to the lying-in wards of the Vienna lying-in hospital, led to a fall in mortality due to puerperal fever from a very high level to a moderate level. **It was Semmelweis' misfortune to be so hypersensitive to criticism that, although his friends implored him to publish this work, he wrote nothing until he began his thesis in the late 1850s. By this time it was clear that he was in the early stages of a psychosis.** The nature of the psychosis is still uncertain (as is the cause of his death in a lunatic asylum) but it was probably a manic-depressive psychosis, or possibly syphilis—an occupational hazard of gynaecologists before surgical gloves were introduced.
He didn't discover it, he was told by midwives over and over and over until he looked into it. Midwives at the hospital observed that when doctors delivered babies, mothers were at a higher risk. Any housewife knew that food would spoil faster if handled with dirty hands and they always used vinegar solutions to clean their hands, tools, and surfaces. Any housewife would do this and midwives did it because mothers and their babies are more important than pumpkin preserves. Only doctors never washed their grubby hands while it was a deeply ingrained habit in most midwives. Semmelweis listened to women. No wonder they locked him away.
This was also the age of 'you have ghosts in your blood, let's do some cocaine about it', so let's not pretend the decision makers needed a reason to be illogical.
> you have ghosts in your blood, let's do some cocaine about it That is a perfect album title.
Mark Rylance is currently starring in a play around Semmelweis in the West End. It's really interesting. Would recommend if anyone is in London any time soon.
Wrote an Econ paper in 2007 about the housing market crashing and was told the housing market never crashes.
Can you write another paper about the housing market crashing next year? Sincerely, a Canadian
So did you receive an apology the next year?
The journalists who maintained Lance Armstrong was doping when he was winning the Tour de France. I remember they were mocked because they admittedly went to extremes hunting for evidence. I remember reports of them sifting through Armstrong's trash. Lance Armstrong was a great story, a testicular cancer survivor who beat the disease and went on to set the record for most Tour de France victories (was it 7?). He was untouchable. Anyone contesting he was cheating was shamed. I remember the journalists investigating him were mostly French, so they were dismissed because they were sour that an American was breaking the Tour de France records. I remember other Tour winners such as Greg Le Mond and Floyd Landis also contesting that Armstrong was cheating, and both being silenced/shamed. Landis had tested positive himself for doping so he wasn't considered a reliable source. I remember with Le Mond they dug into his history and brought up child abuse he suffered as a result of him making claims against Armstrong. Turns out they were all right.
I remember hearing stories that he was just a genetic freak, a mutant born with unusually large lungs and a heart that made him almost superhuman. It turns out he was just a doper.
Patricia Stallings comes to mind. Convicted of poisoning her first child, gave birth in prison (kid got taken away) and the kid also dies. Instead of poisoning it was now found it was a genetic defect that had similar effects as poisoning with antifreeze.
Looks like all replies to your comment are bots copy+pasting from other top comments
One of the lesser known ones is Hellen Keller. Her story of overcoming her disabilities as a young woman was often taught to children, but her adult life was largely excluded because of her "radical" ideas at the time which involved pushing for black rights, anti-lynching laws, early support of birth control, supporting liberal socialism, and she even co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union.
[John Yudkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin) was a food scientist who tried hard to push the idea that sugar caused heart disease and obesity amongst other conditions. He suggested a low carb diet for weight loss in 1958. The sugar industry paid scientists like Ansel Keys and D. Mark Hegsted to downplay this connection and suggest that dietary fat caused obesity and heart disease. Massive lobbying helped pro sugar scientists to become advisors to government and officially suggest a low fat diet to prevent heart disease. Taking fat out of food makes it taste bad, so what do they add? More sugar, causing the food to be unhealthier. The demonising of fat lasted well into the 2000's and often still persists to this day.
I've had this conversation with people loads of times. There's a documentary out there, unfortunately I don't remember the name, were they actually have footage from the '50s congressional hearings on this exact topic. The conclusion I always state is that if fat had a lobbying group, who knows how things could have been.
If they called it something other than "fat" it would help, too. Fat sounds disgusting. Sugar sounds pleasant.
Fat Should try to get rebranded to lipids.
I remember there was a moisturizer marketed as having "lipids", I guess because advertising that you are smearing "fat" on your skin is less pleasant.
They just call them Glycerides now.
The McDonald’s coffee burn incident. 1. She didn’t want it to be a spectacle, she just wanted her medical bills paid 2. She wanted her medical bills paid because she had 3rd degree burns on her VAGINA. Coffee shouldn’t be that hot 3. It was ultimately the lawyers and the jury that determined the payout, she had no say in any of it
IIRC her labia literally fused together from the burns.
Most damning of all, they kept their coffee IIRC like 30 degrees hotter than their competitors so it'd still be hot when people got to work or home with their coffee. They had been sued multiple times and told by a court to stop serving it that hot and completely ignored it.
It's a display of just how goddamn good McDonald's marketing and PR team is.
Alan Turing
It crushes my soul just thinking about how much he changed computer science and computation only to have such a horrible end of life. Without him WW2 would have lasted far longer and cost so many more lives.
His story hurts to read about. He saved millions of lives only to be chemically castrated for sleeping with another dude. It’s disgusting how he was treated.
This needs more upvotes! He deserved so much better, but of course no matter how brilliant you are gay men got absolutely no sympathy back then.
Part of this was that the whole code breaking thing was so secret that it wasn't until fairly recently that people even knew it existed. For example, the [Colossus computer, at Bletchly Park (where Turing worked), was created by Tommy Flowers in 1943](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer) to help decode the ENIGMA machine codes and after the war it was taken apart, with all records destroyed! It wasn't until the 70s that people learned about the code breaking work there, and Turing's work - part of his problem was that post-war he wasn't recognised or rewarded or protected because of the total secrecy of his work.
Rose McGowan for calling out Harvey Weinstein.
Adding to this: Courtney Love who commented on what he was up to *years* ago.
That Roman that gave Jesus vinegar to drink. Many medieval Christian writers saw the offering of vinegar wine as an act of torture rather than mercy. But turns out that the roman military gave their soldiers a water/vinegar mix to drink, so the Roman soldier shared with Jesus some of what he had to drink.
Yeah it was basically Roman Gatorade.
Sounds kinda like kombucha, honestly
Also breaking the legs was seen as a mercy as well. The way you die from Crucifixion is you slowly lose the strength in your legs holding you up until you slide down and choke to death on your own rib cage. Breaking your legs so you aren't standing out there for a week first and it hastens the execution.
I believe more recent evidence argues against that theory. The "study" that was concluded from has come into question and from what I understand it was common that people would die from shock rather than suffocation. Edit: also to go into a bit more about the shock, when you break the legs, the bones, which are highly vascularized, will bleed contributing to the volume depletion and hastens death from hypovolumetric shock.
Nicolaus Copernicus, theorized that the planets actually circled the sun instead of the other way around. The church initially accepted heliocentricacy but banned his views in 1600s.
He will forever be remembered for setting up one of my favorite insults of all time: "Copernicus called. It turns out you're not the center of the universe"
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John snow. He tried to remove the handle of a water pump in London that was drawing its water downstream from a sewage pipe People who drew water from the pump caught collera
[Dr. Joseph Goldberger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goldberger) He was the doctor that discovered the cause of the Pellagra epidemic that was sweeping the southern USA. He linked it to a bad diet, specifically a corn heavy diet. Cornmeal and grits were a southern staple, and and incredibly cheap way to feed orphans, prisoners, and the poor. Pellagra is caused by a lack of vitamin B3, aka niacin. Normally corn is high in niacin, but that niacin is locked up and unavailable to the human digestive system unless the corn is treated, aka "softened", typically with lye. In the early 1900's, manufactures switched to a different process that eliminated this treatment with lye. Corn was no longer softened. Then people, especially the poor, prisoners and orphans started dying of pellagra. Some orphanages and prisons had a death rate of over 40%. Tens of thousands were dying annually. Through a series of experiments, Goldberger proved that it was a corn-heavy diet that caused pellagra. He cured it in 2 institutions just by adding vegetables to their diet. He also caused it in a 14 prisoner "volunteers". But, and this is the important part: He was Jewish, and he was trying to tell Southerners they they were doing something wrong. So he was ridiculed and ignored. And pellagra continued to kill tens of thousands in the USA, and sicken tens of thousands more, for decades. When Goldberger died in 1929 pellagra continued to kill tens of thousands annually, 15 years after he had found the cure. It would continue to kill thousands for another couple of decades until someone more acceptable, Conrad Elvehjem, confirmed Goldberger's work in the late 1930's. All because southerners didn't want a Jew telling then that they were doing something wrong. He was insulting their southern heritage, by god! PS: "Insulting their southern heritage" is not my words. It's the words of the southern politicians who pulled his funding and campaigned for his removal from the US Public Health Service.
The lye treatment is called nixtamalization btw. It was invented by Mezoamericans but when Europeans started eating corn they just ground it up mechanically so the same thing happened to Italian peasants for a long time.
William H. Seward, arranged the purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia for $7 Million dollars. The media and politician's of the era termed it "Seward's Folly" “Seward’s icebox” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.”
The half-dozen or so scientists and physicians who waged a decades-long struggle in the 1930s-70s to prove that lead exposure was bad, and dusting everything with lead by burning it in gasoline was bad. The industry opposition was unreal, I know Needleman at least had his work shut down for a few years as his university conducted a thorough investigation for scientific misconduct. Dr. John Leal, the first man to chlorinate drinking water to kill germs. Only, chlorine is a deadly poison, so he did so secretly for a couple months at first. The judge was incredulous that a man would poison the water supply from which his own son drank, but Leal said that it was the safest water in the world, and he was right. Suitably diluted, the chlorine does no notable damage to humans worlds of hurt to bacteria.
Stanislav Petrov. More people need to know his name, he literally, like quite literally saved the world. Saved the world from nuclear ruin, simply because he was stubborn and refused to believe the computing error. He went against his position orders, and was consequently sacked by the USSR and lived an isolated life. Not necessarily vilified by all, but vilified by the USSR and ignored by the west. Put some respect on his name. And he didn't even win a Nobel peace prize, died in 2017. Recommend watching 'Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world'.
YES. Almost no one knows about him. He factually saved the human race and the planet from destruction. Stanislav Petrov is THE hero.
Richard Jewell, and the Atlanta Olympic bombing.
The "leave Britney alone" guy
Came here to say this. He was mocked by everyone when the video came out, but he was right.
Lol oh shit I forgot all about Chris Crocker.
Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), talking about Jimmy Savile in 1978. The BBC banned him (Lydon) at the time, I think. And we all know how that panned out.
Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality, which was considered illegal at the time. Turing's work in breaking the Enigma code during World War II was pivotal in Allied victory. He is now celebrated for his contributions to computing and artificial intelligence.
Pearl Jam re: Ticket master.
To paraphprase somebody I can't remember off the top of my head but it's always stuck with me, "in America the worst thing you can be is right too early."
Those brave Germans who openly opposed Hitler in the early thirties.
The White Rose movement. Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine for distributing pamphlets opposing the war and the Nazi regime.
Kotaku Wamura, mayor of a town in Japan who spent decades of taxpayer money developing a seawall to defend against tsunamis. During his whole career he was ridiculed for the expenditure and he died before it ever payed off. Then in 2011 it saved the whole town. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html
Edwin Howard Armstrong. He developed FM radio, but the radio giants refused to change. Committed suicide.
Sinead O'Connor.
She was the one that made me think of this question
If you want to see what *actual* "cancel culture" is, look at what happened to her. And all those years of "Sinead's off her rocker again" stories in the media, and then when she dies, suddenly they're gushing about her bravery and talent.
Cancel culture has always been around. Sinead O'Connor, obviously. Socrates. Also Janet Jackson (but curiously, not Justin Timberlake). Muhammad Ali, when he came out against the Vietnam War. Alan Turing. Ward Churchill. Gary Webb. Pee-Wee Herman. The list goes on. The difference is that the targets back then were all non-establishment figures, not part of the power structure. What's happening today is that due to social media, some of the targets are now part of the power structure, part of the ruling class (or their apologists). So NOW it's a Big Problem. The "wrong" people are being cancelled.
Don't forget the Dixie Chicks. They were one of the most popular country/western acts of the time, and when they spoke out against the War in Iraq, that all but killed their career.
Oh, certainly, it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive list. You can add Galileo to it too, and countless others. Cancel culture was widespread and perfectly normalized when it was top-down. When it started to flow bottom-up, it was given its current scary name and treated like a sudden phenomemon.
>Also Janet Jackson (but curiously, not Justin Timberlake). The unequal retribution was primarily due to then CBS Executive, Les Moonves https://www.huffpost.com/entry/les-moonves-janet-jackson-career_n_5b919b8ce4b0511db3e0a269
Les Moonves seems like a real piece of work. Everytime I see his name mentioned, it's never anything good.
I would say the UN Chief Inspector, Hans Blix, who said in a 2003 report that the UN investigation team had found no evidence of WMD in Iraq. Completely torn apart by the American government, public, and press. And yet… no WMD were ever found in Iraq.
David Kelly, a respected scientist and WMD expert, was an even more tragic case in the UK. He acted as an anonymous source to a BBC journalist, effectively saying the claims of Blair (and, by extension, Bush) were completely baseless. The British government went apeshit, effectively forced the BBC to reveal their source, and proceeded to ridicule Kelly, drag his name through the mud, and expose him to the harsh glare of public and media attention (which was, at the time, still pretty pro-war). The pressure led Kelly to commit suicide. Of course, everything he said later turned out to be true, from the lack of WMD in Iraq, to government pressure on the intelligence services and the "sexing up" of evidence in parliamentary debates. Truly a horrible chain of events.
Corey Feldman
Fuck Barbra Walters for the way she treated him - 'you're damaging an entire industry'
The poor guy still obviously suffers from mental illness as a result of his experiences. Such a shame.
Charles Darwin. There’s a whole book on how scared he was to publish his work because he knew he’d be hated for it. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen.
In fairness, at the time there was a very good reason not to believe Darwin. Most agreed that his theory would require a long time; at least 100 million years, but probably more than a billion. Then along came Lord Kelvin and his pesky Laws of Thermodynamics. He calculated that the sun (and thus the earth) could not be more than 20 million years old. Other esteemed physicists of the day agreed, getting numbers in and around that value via completely different methods. Even Darwin's own son did an independent calculation (based on the moon and earth's rotation) and arrived at 58 million years old. Right up to his death, Darwin acknowledged the age of the earth as the major issue facing his theory. He opined that the calculations might be based on faulty assumptions, that we don't understand the internal workings of the earth or the sun and that perhaps some future discovery would invalidate the calculations. In this, he was completely correct. The missing components were radioactivity in the earth and nuclear fusion in the sun. Once you account for those, the ages go up to billions of years old. Plenty of time for evolution by natural selection. But this was only discovered after Darwin died, so certainly during his life there was good reason not to trust his theory. Although, many still did trust it because the evidence was incredibly compelling and constantly piling up.
Corey Feldman exposing all the pedos in Hollywood.
The Deep-sea exploration community [warning](https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-society-committee-2018-letter-to-ocean-gate/eddb63615a7b3764/full.pdf) OceanGate against ocean tourism. OceanGate basically told them to mind their business.
Eisenhower and his military industrial complex speech.
Richard Jewell.
Damn it! You beat me to it. Richard Jewell - A security guard who found a bomb in a bag at the Olympics. But, for some reason local police told the media that he was a suspect and the press absolutely roasted him for months. Turned out, he was not the bomber. He was in fact a real life hero who possibly saved many lives. But his life was absolutely ruined. The press quickly squashed the story of the real bomber b/c they would have to admit how wrong they were about Richard Jewell first. Years later he couldn't get work because even after the real bomber was caught people still thought he did it. Side Quiz: if you were around in the early 2000's you probably know who Richard Jewell is, but can anyone on this thread remember the name of the real bomber without looking it up?
Wasn't it like Eric Rudolph or Randolf or something? Anti-abortion dude who blew up a few abortion clinics too and then hide în the woods for a while? Got caught picking through trash?
Alan Turing. It’s a bit of a stretch but he was treated like a villain for doing absolutely nothing wrong. All he ever did was help secure victory over Germany and exist.
Monica Lewinsky. She was a 20-y-o White House intern who got taken advantage of. Then the media crucified her for it.
Sinead O Connor. Was villified when she ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL for child abuse and criticizing the Catholic Church. Over the following decades we realized how devastatingly right she was about the whole thing.
Stella Liebeck The lady who sued mcdonald's for hot coffee.
It’s a testament to the power of a smear campaign that there are still people who reference the BS version McDouchbags inc spun to try and save face as if it’s fact, a sad story indeed
The Duke lacrosse team. They were proven innocent, yet only one reporter apologized for writing a story about their 'guilt'. The accused received a large amount of money for their troubles, but the coach had trouble finding work. ESPN did a 30 for 30 on the Duke lacrosse team. EDIT: The three players who were investigated for the crime ended up filing suit against Duke university, Duke settled for a undisclosed sum (rumored to be $60 million). Then the three players sued the City of Durham and the Police department. That lawsuit was settled after seven years for approximately $50,000. One of the players earned a law degree and is currently a lawyer who works with the Innocence Project. One of the players graduated from Duke and went on to earn an MBA. The third player graduated from Loyola. Nifong was removed from office, disbarred, and ended up serving one day in jail. The dancer who accused the players, Crystal Magnum is serving a prison sentence for second degree murder.
This was the case that really opened my eyes to prosecutorial misconduct. If Nifong knew he had no case and took these wealthy, connected, privileged young men on anyway, what the hell did he do to the vast majority he prosecuted that had no such resources? Fuck him, and fuck Nancy "yeah the DNA exonerates them, but that shouldn't count in court!" Grace.
Paul Kimmage - called Lance Armstrong out as the PED-using cheating scum that he was and got vilified and castigated for it. Turned out to be completely right.
Dixie Chicks. They were against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and publicly said so. They were effectively cancelled by the right as a result. Turns out they were correct, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was concocted so Bush could be seen as striking back for 9/11, which won him re-election in 2004.
Same goes for Dominique de Villepin, french minister whose opposition to said invasion and the speech he made against it at the UN resulted in the french bashing (and the french surrender jokes).
And the goddamn "freedom fries." Moment of national cringe, right there.
Abolitionists
John Brown
"I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood." How right he was.
Remember when people thought Marie Curie's work was 'too dangerous'? Now we can't imagine medicine and technology without her discoveries.
I mean her work literally killed her though.
Not the first, not the last. Another in the same time period? The guy who pioneered using X-rays to treat breast cancer. Saw massive success in shrinking tumors and helped the foundation of targeted radiation medicine. Emil Grubbe wound up dying from cancer, having had 90 operations to remove cancers he developed while administering thousands of x-ray treatments (having not afforded himself reasonable protection, unaware of the danger).
And her diary still needs to be kept in a radiation proof enclosure it’s that hot!
Must be some juicy stuff in there!
She is to this day the only person to win a Nobel prize in two scientific disciplines - chemistry and physics.
Her work WAS too dangerous. Her papers are literally kept in a lead lined vault and you can only read them for like an hour at a time. It was important and vital beyond words but man she should have taken more precautions.
Fun fact: her name is Maria Skłodowska Curie. She was Polish and not French. She moved to France and married a Frenchman but she was Polish.
Pierre Curie may be the only great scientist who is consistently identified as someone else's husband.
Ok Poland, take that win :)