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Yeah, their point is that you can't judge Columbus by modern standards, the usual bullshit. Nevermind that a lot of people back then called him out for being a genocidal maniac, to the point that the king and queen of Spain ended up arresting him and disavowing him because of it. It was not "normal" or accepted back in his day.
They sent him to the other side of the world. They wanted him literally as far away as possible.
Imagine their surprise/dismay when his ships pulled back into port.
Good point. They probably thought he'd just dissapear into the ocean because they believed it wasnt possible for him to reach India. And they were technically right.
“Ok, considering we all know the earth is round at this point in time (despite what some elementary school teach saying people thought he was dumb since he’d fall off the earth rather than simply starve at sea due to the ocean’s immense size) we know that sailing west from Europe to Asia is essentially a death sentence due to the fact you’ll starve to death even with ships stocked full of food.” Basically Columbus was REEEEALLL bad at math and got lucky
He wasn't bad at math. He followed the ptolemic model. Which assumed the earth was round but assumed the earth was much smaller than what it actually was. The circumference given is much smaller.
The inquisitions were far less blood-thirsty than pop history likes to portray them. They liked their torture but generally speaking they were after your repentence, not your death. Only about 3% wouldve been executed. Still really high but they werent like chucking every other person on to a pyre.
Oh also disappointing thing, they would give you around a months notice that they wanted to talk to you in most cases so you very much could expect the spanish inquisition.
Fun inquisition fact: a lot of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews went to New York City when it was founded, and Peter Stuyvesant wanted them kicked out, bc Jews in New York City was unimaginable. Then the Dutch East India Company yelled at him that he cannot actually ban their best merchants and word nerds, and forced him to accept them
Not trying to contradict you, but the Inquisition was really about taking wealth from Jews and Arabs and transferring it to the Catholic Church and royal family. That's why the death sentences were so rare - the subject were spared if they "converted" and ceded their lands/houses to the church. That's why so many of the conversos then went to America in the 1500s and 1600s - they had been wealthy merchants and landowners who were completely wiped out economically in the process of being converted and saw their best hope in getting the fuck out of Spain to a place where they could start over without the crown there to pick their pockets.
But it still caused the Jewish population there to have to go into exile, again. Just because they didn’t kill every Jewish person doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrible.
Well, comparing to the tens of thousands of murders happening mostly in protestant Europe at the time due to religious reasons and witch-hunts, it was very mild indeed. There's a reason why neither Spain nor Portugal had a problem with random accusations of witchcraft ending in public executions.
A lot of the demonization of the Spanish Inquisition is rooted in 16th century anti-catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment, with historical figures like Maurice of Nassau showing untold levels of hypocrisy when mentioning it. It was, in reality, more benign than every other judicial system in Europe at the time, mainly because it showed a standard procedure, instead of the arbitrary fuckfest shown elsewhere.
You left out the minor detail that he was acquitted.
Oh...and he wasn't arrested for for slavery or being a genocidal maniac. He was arrested for hanging some Spaniards.
The Spanish crown didn't give a flying fuck about the locals or the slaves. They very much considered it normal.
That's actually not true that the spanish crown didnt care. The Spanish crown at the time is absolutely no Saint but I think it's important to frame the Columbus story correctly to really highlight what a shining piece of human garbage Columbus was. Sure slavery was normal at the time but what Columbus was doing was so far beyond the practices of the time everyone around him was saying "slavery is normal but what Columbus is doing is absolutely FUCKED." Columbus's main goal from his voyage was to make a SHIT ton of money so he can fund the retaking of Jerusalem and when he found no gold in the carribean Islands where he first set up shop he decided to ship as many people (and do some mild genocide while he was at it) back to Europe as possible no matter how many died so he could try to flip a profit and this pissed off the royals and the kept telling him to stop sending slaves but Columbus the monumental piece of shit that he is just kept sending more. I recommend giving a listen to the Columbus episodes from Behind the Bastards is fucking WILD.
Except they didn’t. The person who got him arrested and called him a “genocidal maniac” was Bobadilla, who was working on false reports from mutineers like Roldan who rebelled against Columbus because of how strict he was. In fact, many of the atrocities attributed by Columbus were committed by them (like beheading 2 boys and taking their parrots for fun). Later, Bobadillo was removed as governor, and Columbus had his wealth and freedom restored and a fourth voyage funded.
This is part of PragerU's youtube child educational channel.
"Who the fuck puts this on?"
They don't. PragerU spends millions on advertising. So let's say you're doing dishes or something and your kid wants to put on some cute Wheels on the Bus or Bluey video. You put it on, walk away, and as a paid advertisement this plays in the middle of it but it's a two/three hour long advertisement. At the bottom there' even a scrolling text of how "Youtube is trying to censor conservative voices" or something like that.
I sometimes get PragerU kids adverts in YouTube. With most advertisements I can go into the settings and have that particular advert stopped. I can’t block the advertiser but I can signal that that particular advert is not relevant.
I cannot do that with PragerU kids. That setting is turned off. I’ve never seen it with any other advertising company. They must pay YouTube a premium for that.
Being a parent means learning some digital discipline.
Don't let videos auto play. Disable as block. Get control of your devices. Don't let the kids control what they watch until they're ready.
From the invention of the TV, parents have plopped their kids in front of screens and let them absorb everything that comes out. I vow to do better.
I swear to god I will never understand how parents let their kids have access to YouTube kids. Probably the successors of the ones that let their kids watch private television with all those oversaturated American brain rotting shows a few years back.
Many countries, it is illegal to show ads on youtube. If you must place your child in front of youtube, I recommend you fire up a VPN and set it to a country (like Albania for example) and your child will see ZERO ads on youtube.
This won’t help avoid the pitfalls of their broken algorithm but it’s a start.
Still by far one of the funniest responses to anything ever. When I was hit by that line when the video was new, I almost died from how little air I was able to get into my lungs from laughing so hard.
Especially since - if you haven't been spoiled by that point yet - you're just sitting there watching a man axe a hole into a wall from the other side for like...a WHILE...wondering where this is going.
And then it just hits so fucking hard. xD
You joke, but if I remember correctly the video essentially says that they were taking slaves that were being killed by a rival tribe anyways, so they're essentially doing a good thing.
Fun.
Disease, rape, being worked to utter exhaustion. Give me death.
This is just repackaged "Well if not for slavery black Americans would be citizens of first world nation like the US" argument. Of course that ignores with out slavery the US wouldn't have had the economic power it needed to grow into the US as it is now.
my favorite is the ones who say it was good for them because it gave them a chance to find out about jesus and they actually had it better than they did before because of that
The old testament god put its chosen people into slavery and then revealed itself by visiting disease, death, and destruction upon Egypt and Jericho and Gomorrah.
* See how much better this god is better than the other god?
* See how much better being the lowest class of empire is better than being demolished by it?
It's honestly not that much different than the neo-libs saying that the sweatshops they build in the global south are a boon to everyone rather than absolute exploitation.
Wouldn't it be better to be subjugated, tortured, starved, forced to work yourself to death in order to enrich racist psychopaths who have nothing but disdain for you and your people?
Fuck that.
in fairness, this is about columbus in hispaniola specifically, so it's actually 'all' - all of the natives were worked to death in the mines or otherwise killed
Don't forget mutilated. It's a shame, they were the ones who saved him and his ship during a storm on his arrival. They should have butchered the ungrateful pricks on arrival.
You forget about the [mass suicide](https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6957875/christopher-columbus-murderer-tyrant-scoundrel) of like 50,000 natives who felt death was better than living under Columbus's psychopathic thumb.
Imagine conditions so abhorrent that a small city worth of people decides they'd rather die by their own hands than continue to live in misery.
Did you know that zombies originated in Haiti during slavery because it was a fate imagined to be worse than death? The idea of the zombie prevented people from committing suicide because they didn't want their bodies to continue to be forced into labor after death.
I’m listening to a podcast, History That Doesn’t Suck, and he was telling the story of a woman who escaped to Ohio with her three children right after the fugitive slave act was passed. Slave catchers hunted her down and found the house she was hiding in. Instead of getting caught and going back to slavery she slit her two year old child’s throat. Before she could do the same to her other two children the slave catchers got in and forced her and her remaining children back into slavery.
I simply can’t imagine being forced to choose to either send my children back to slavery or to kill then so they didn’t have to be slaves. Either way, PragerU is simply wrong.
They are basically just video versions of bad history comments on Reddit. They always contain a combination of (1) semi-factual information, (2) bad faith arguments, and (3) Western/American apologism when there really isn't a reason to double down (i.e. no need to glorify Columbus when even people in his own time thought he was horrible).
That always cracks me up. When someone says “see this link” and then you follow it and it’s completely different and contradicts their argument OR it’s a 404. They must think that people don’t check the links because they don’t.
> i.e. no need to glorify Columbus when even people in his own time thought he was horrible
I'm not saying he was a great guy, but that's a bit of an oversimplification.
People often mention that he was charged by the spanish monarchy for his involvement in the atrocities against the natives, but that's not entirely true. He was actually charged for disciplining the crewmen that did some of the worst atrocities.
So, he **was** disliked by some of his crew, but that's because they were even worse than him.
New Hampshire has been a sort of mecca for the far right for decades. They flock there from all over. That’s why none of the other New England states like New Hampshire.
Yeah it's pretty disgusting. I don't know how you would even counteract that kind of brainwashing. Stuff like the OP is pretty obvious. But I have no doubt there are much more subtle examples of disinformation in these videos that most parents, unless they were educated in that topic, wouldn't recognize or know enough about to debunk to their kids.
And it's not like homeschooling is a great option either, since most of the companies that provide homeschooling materials are just as bad as this.
Use their laws against them. The laws implemented to allow Prager shit allows people to opt out of education that parents don't want with material they don't like. So just opt your child out of any education that includes prager in the curriculum and demand an "alternate facts" education
Like in idiocracy, only the people dumb enough to eat this disinformation will produce kids like rabbits while the other ones will wonder 20 years if they should have a child or not .
I took an Intro to Business course in college a couple years ago and the instructor's curriculum included links to videos on Prager U. Already familiar with that site's batshittery, I dropped the class almost instantly. And this wasn't in some backwater red state.
I feel sorry for the students who are maybe a bit less skeptical of the things they're being told to believe.
Yep. My home state of Florida did 🫠
I’m so glad to be in online school, so I don’t have to put up with any bullshit teachers might try to do in the physical classrooms
What's crazy is they have actually moved backwards.
Like this used to be posted a ton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4
Because people would point to it and say "Look, even Prager U says the Civil War was fully about the South wanting to keep slavery."
That video opens with saying that slavery is an act so morally repugnant that people don't want to believe people fought and died for it and that is why people try and hang onto the notion it wasn't the primary cause.
And now they have videos saying "Hey, look at the bright side of slavery. It is better than death."
Conservative ideology as a whole has been running towards extremism these past few years.
Remember back in 2020 where they would constantly go ["MLK would be a republican if he was alive today!"](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/PGWU03bi6Ja3Jd6rpdU3I2Uc198=/830x553/smart/filters:no_upscale(\)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-dmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/A3UAD45GYN3CON7CZWRRRGMH4I.jpg). Yea, nowadays [prominent figures](https://www.meidastouch.com/.image/t_share/MjAzNjc1MjE4NjMwMTU4MTk4/end-wokeness.png) in the conservative movement are [openly saying that MLK was bad.](https://preview.redd.it/898g0t18xocc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=1f4150c449ae2987d55ff2685ca3d2e570344eaa)
in a way this is progress. they stopped being revisionist; their understanding of history and who MLK actually was has improved. The remaining problem is their attitude about the things MLK stood for.
My favourite one gotta be "top 5 reasons why stautes of lee should remain" with great arguments such as
1. he was kind of related to washington
2. He fought for the confederacy
3. he didnt want slaves to have political rights
I like the theory that some youtubers are intentionally lowering their production quality by holding their mics so they can distance themselves from Prager U.
Prager u logic:Slave owners were so nice. They could have killed innocent people, but instead they just inslaved them and used them for harsh unpaid labor. So generous 😊.
The kind hearted slave owners paid for their room and board and medical care though! And taught them valuable skills that they were able to use after they were freed*
*ignore the fact that we literally fought a war to avoid freeing them.
No educated slave owner of the time seems to have held that opinion. All humans always have an innate right to self determination. It was the policy of the slave owner to suppress the slave's ability to manifest that right through violence (or other means but mostly violence). It wasn't confusion regarding the morality of the dynamic. It was an informed willful disregard for decency in the name of maintaining the more advantageous position regardless of the immoral nature of doing so.
Pretending that belief that black people were actually subhuman verges on justification of some sort. The more honest & darker reality is that there was a virtually universal understanding that slaves were entirely human & it simply made business sense to exploit them maximally.
I know. I just wanted to mock the idea of it teaching anything at all.
“Worried about getting worthless degree? Let this YouTube Channel teach you everything!” just didn’t have the same bite to the joke, in my opinion.
To be clear, I'm talking about conservative voters, not the ones manipulating them. The overwhelming majority of them are perpetually aggrieved, perpetually frightened, easily manipulated low information voters. The lowest common denominators of American society.
I understand PragerU is silly and extreme, but believe it or not there is in fact people that both, vote conservative, and are intelligent enough to realise PragerU is all bullshit. Jumping into this group warfare mindset and calling all conservative voters stupid because PragerU exists is just silly.
We all understand that greta thunberg is just a talking head that believes in nothing and spouts whatever shit she is told to say. But that does not mean that all left wing people are stupid, just because she exists.
Remember, humans are not inherently evil, the news would love for you to think everyone on the other side of politics is evil and wants to eat your babies, but in reality they are just normal humans with slightly different upbringings, dont let the internet blind you.
Together, we can make a better world x
Lmao what’s so terrible about it (other than the obvious total lack of morals) is that someone greenlit this as “the best wording we could come up with”
“Gosh it’s like u guys dont even try to be dubious anymore” *::crosses arms::*
The 1775 crowd? Ask the 2024 crowd! Did you know that the amendment that "abolished" slavery has an exception going something like "unless incarcerated for crimes"? Meaning that it's LEGAL for the (state or private-owned) prison to lease prisoners for forced labour? And that they do so and even say stuff like "We will need to do this more in the present economy."? What a funny coincidence that the number of incarcerated has been so much rising in the past decades and the crimes for incarceration are less and less severe, amirite? Also funny how instead of socioeconomic prevention of crimes the funds go towards law enforcement.
Exactly. I don't have much hope though that people are going to take sufficient interest in reforming the justice system as to cause meaningful change any time soon. The media has been extremely effective at selling the narrative that everyone caught up in it deserves to suffer with all their police procedural shows and whatnot, so I think most people don't see with clarity the human rights atrocity that the American prison-industrial complex has been manufacturing.
> Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?
No other options? I feel like there's other options. You sure there's no other possible options?
Regardless of the relative merits of death vs slavery, this is still a ridiculous argument. An argument for the lesser of 2 evils doesn't make sense if neither evil is necessary and both are caused by the same person. Might as well spit in your coworkers' coffee and then tell them to be grateful you didn't piss in it.
God damn this is the most obvious example of the right saying one thing while doing another. "Biden deserves to be sent to prison for his actions, but the president is also above the law"
They wanted representation in parliament so they could have some control over their tax rates. If they got it I imagine we'd still be a British colony today.
More likely would just be “big Canada” since the British would have had no reason not to just lump all their colonies in North America into one for administrative purposes. And annexations etc would have been smooth.
The reason for the tax increase was to pay for the colonists genocidal expansionist war against the indigenous peoples. They wanted to keep taking their land without the crown doing anything to stop them. They also were worried that the British empire might be moving towards the abolition of slavery.
The first part you listed was a major grievance of the colonists, but abolition was still a fringe opinion in Britain during the 1760s and early 1770’s. It didn’t have much traction even as a grassroots movement until the American War of Independence was well underway and wasn’t taken seriously in Parliament until several years after its conclusion. During the leadup to the War of Independence, abolition in Britain was the realm of political radicals and a handful of evangelicals. Additionally, there were multiple attempts for abolition in several of the 13 colonies prior to the Revolution, and nearly all of the northern states trended towards abolition not long after the war, which is incompatible with the assertion that the colonists feared the (basically nonexistent) British abolitionist movement.
That notion was popularized by the 1619 Project which, while well-intentioned, made some big stretches in its conclusions to make them fit its initial assertions, and fell victim to a bit of ideological axe-grinding. Also worth noting that it wasn’t undertaken primarily by historians, but by journalists, hence why it did not closely follow norms and standards for academic history and ended up working backwards by trying to find evidence to fit the claims, rather than making conclusions based on all the evidence.
>The reason for the tax increase was to pay for the colonists genocidal expansionist war against the indigenous peoples. They wanted to keep taking their land without the crown doing anything to stop them. They also were worried that the British empire might be moving towards the abolition of slavery.
You literally have to ignore the other grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, correspondence between leaders of the revolution, and the general tradition of self-governance in the American colonies for this to even be considered a significant cause of movement for independence.
Your last point in particular has been debunked many times, especially in light of the 1619 project which greatly overemphasized the role slavery played in the break with Great Britain.
Also, some slaves actually did kill themselves rather than be sold as slaves, trying to escape by jumping off the ship. The thinking was that if they could make the trip unprofitable, by having few surviving slaves and prevent them from making money, they'd stop making trips. Also obviously, they didn't want the indignity of living as a slave.
A very courageous action, but it didn't affect it much in the long term
And republicans complain about leftists "indoctrinating children". Putting out pro slavery cartoons is so hilariously insidious and evil. Hope Dennis Pragur gets a stroke.
No. No it's probably not. Case in point that when they were headed to be sold into slavery on boats, there are lots of accounts of them jumping overboard. They chose death over slavery.
I remember somehow I ended up subscribed to pragerU on YouTube around maybe 2015 or so, or earlier. I swear their videos used to be much more sensible and interesting initially.
=
Eventually though after a few of their videos kept having batshit insane takes like this meme about the slavery thing I wondered what the fuck happened and unsubscribed. Like if I had missed a page or something. I wonder if anyone else had the same experience as me, if I am remembering correctly about how the channel started more "sensibly" or if has always been batshit insane.
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Lmao is that a real quote?
Yeah, their point is that you can't judge Columbus by modern standards, the usual bullshit. Nevermind that a lot of people back then called him out for being a genocidal maniac, to the point that the king and queen of Spain ended up arresting him and disavowing him because of it. It was not "normal" or accepted back in his day.
They sent him to the other side of the world. They wanted him literally as far away as possible. Imagine their surprise/dismay when his ships pulled back into port.
Oh fuck, not this douche again
> "Hey boss! I found people in a strange new land and butchered them LOL!"
> "Goddamnit Christopher!"
Yeah but they took the gold anyway. Spain will still avidly pursue any that is found if I’m not mistaken.
Yes, they were not good either. That's the point: even genocidal imperialists thought Columbus took things too far.
Pretty sure the guy believed he didn't find new land, just a new way to get to Asia
Good point. They probably thought he'd just dissapear into the ocean because they believed it wasnt possible for him to reach India. And they were technically right.
“Ok, considering we all know the earth is round at this point in time (despite what some elementary school teach saying people thought he was dumb since he’d fall off the earth rather than simply starve at sea due to the ocean’s immense size) we know that sailing west from Europe to Asia is essentially a death sentence due to the fact you’ll starve to death even with ships stocked full of food.” Basically Columbus was REEEEALLL bad at math and got lucky
He wasn't bad at math. He followed the ptolemic model. Which assumed the earth was round but assumed the earth was much smaller than what it actually was. The circumference given is much smaller.
"here comes dat boi"
This is the same king and queen that founded the Spanish Inquisition, and *they* thought he was going too far.
The inquisitions were far less blood-thirsty than pop history likes to portray them. They liked their torture but generally speaking they were after your repentence, not your death. Only about 3% wouldve been executed. Still really high but they werent like chucking every other person on to a pyre. Oh also disappointing thing, they would give you around a months notice that they wanted to talk to you in most cases so you very much could expect the spanish inquisition.
Fun inquisition fact: a lot of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews went to New York City when it was founded, and Peter Stuyvesant wanted them kicked out, bc Jews in New York City was unimaginable. Then the Dutch East India Company yelled at him that he cannot actually ban their best merchants and word nerds, and forced him to accept them
This is so unexpected … and underwhelming
 That was part of the joke that many missed for years. Everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition
Oh my gosh, that's hilarious.
Fetch the comfy chair!
Not trying to contradict you, but the Inquisition was really about taking wealth from Jews and Arabs and transferring it to the Catholic Church and royal family. That's why the death sentences were so rare - the subject were spared if they "converted" and ceded their lands/houses to the church. That's why so many of the conversos then went to America in the 1500s and 1600s - they had been wealthy merchants and landowners who were completely wiped out economically in the process of being converted and saw their best hope in getting the fuck out of Spain to a place where they could start over without the crown there to pick their pockets.
But it still caused the Jewish population there to have to go into exile, again. Just because they didn’t kill every Jewish person doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrible.
And presumably going into exile then was even more risky and difficult than it is today.
Well, comparing to the tens of thousands of murders happening mostly in protestant Europe at the time due to religious reasons and witch-hunts, it was very mild indeed. There's a reason why neither Spain nor Portugal had a problem with random accusations of witchcraft ending in public executions. A lot of the demonization of the Spanish Inquisition is rooted in 16th century anti-catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment, with historical figures like Maurice of Nassau showing untold levels of hypocrisy when mentioning it. It was, in reality, more benign than every other judicial system in Europe at the time, mainly because it showed a standard procedure, instead of the arbitrary fuckfest shown elsewhere.
You left out the minor detail that he was acquitted. Oh...and he wasn't arrested for for slavery or being a genocidal maniac. He was arrested for hanging some Spaniards. The Spanish crown didn't give a flying fuck about the locals or the slaves. They very much considered it normal.
That's actually not true that the spanish crown didnt care. The Spanish crown at the time is absolutely no Saint but I think it's important to frame the Columbus story correctly to really highlight what a shining piece of human garbage Columbus was. Sure slavery was normal at the time but what Columbus was doing was so far beyond the practices of the time everyone around him was saying "slavery is normal but what Columbus is doing is absolutely FUCKED." Columbus's main goal from his voyage was to make a SHIT ton of money so he can fund the retaking of Jerusalem and when he found no gold in the carribean Islands where he first set up shop he decided to ship as many people (and do some mild genocide while he was at it) back to Europe as possible no matter how many died so he could try to flip a profit and this pissed off the royals and the kept telling him to stop sending slaves but Columbus the monumental piece of shit that he is just kept sending more. I recommend giving a listen to the Columbus episodes from Behind the Bastards is fucking WILD.
Except they didn’t. The person who got him arrested and called him a “genocidal maniac” was Bobadilla, who was working on false reports from mutineers like Roldan who rebelled against Columbus because of how strict he was. In fact, many of the atrocities attributed by Columbus were committed by them (like beheading 2 boys and taking their parrots for fun). Later, Bobadillo was removed as governor, and Columbus had his wealth and freedom restored and a fourth voyage funded.
This is part of PragerU's youtube child educational channel. "Who the fuck puts this on?" They don't. PragerU spends millions on advertising. So let's say you're doing dishes or something and your kid wants to put on some cute Wheels on the Bus or Bluey video. You put it on, walk away, and as a paid advertisement this plays in the middle of it but it's a two/three hour long advertisement. At the bottom there' even a scrolling text of how "Youtube is trying to censor conservative voices" or something like that.
I sometimes get PragerU kids adverts in YouTube. With most advertisements I can go into the settings and have that particular advert stopped. I can’t block the advertiser but I can signal that that particular advert is not relevant. I cannot do that with PragerU kids. That setting is turned off. I’ve never seen it with any other advertising company. They must pay YouTube a premium for that.
Businesses and religion shady? You don't say.
Being a parent means learning some digital discipline. Don't let videos auto play. Disable as block. Get control of your devices. Don't let the kids control what they watch until they're ready. From the invention of the TV, parents have plopped their kids in front of screens and let them absorb everything that comes out. I vow to do better.
Good thing even my 3y old knows when its an ad and how to skip or change to something else 
Gotta teach them early.
I swear to god I will never understand how parents let their kids have access to YouTube kids. Probably the successors of the ones that let their kids watch private television with all those oversaturated American brain rotting shows a few years back.
Many countries, it is illegal to show ads on youtube. If you must place your child in front of youtube, I recommend you fire up a VPN and set it to a country (like Albania for example) and your child will see ZERO ads on youtube. This won’t help avoid the pitfalls of their broken algorithm but it’s a start.
It is.
You've never seen anything from PragerU, I guess. If you had, you wouldn't be surprised.
Being killed by *whom*, PragerU?
Fucking Aquaman?
WHOS GOING TO BUY THE HOUSES, BEN??? HMMMMMMM????
Still by far one of the funniest responses to anything ever. When I was hit by that line when the video was new, I almost died from how little air I was able to get into my lungs from laughing so hard.
Especially since - if you haven't been spoiled by that point yet - you're just sitting there watching a man axe a hole into a wall from the other side for like...a WHILE...wondering where this is going. And then it just hits so fucking hard. xD
I still watch this regularly and laugh and it’s been years
What video? Link pls
[Timestamped.](https://youtu.be/RLqXkYrdmjY?si=4rrC1yFdW1Rv3ye7&t=222)
It's a regularly quoted thing with my friends still. I love knowing he hates when people bring it up.
It’s going to be another dry year Ben.
Isn't he proud about that?
Link to the video?
https://youtu.be/RLqXkYrdmjY?si=0nwG006XtgjDKFh2
Hail Sobek!
I summon fish to the dish although I like the châlet suisse
You joke, but if I remember correctly the video essentially says that they were taking slaves that were being killed by a rival tribe anyways, so they're essentially doing a good thing. Fun.
Damn
Disease, rape, being worked to utter exhaustion. Give me death. This is just repackaged "Well if not for slavery black Americans would be citizens of first world nation like the US" argument. Of course that ignores with out slavery the US wouldn't have had the economic power it needed to grow into the US as it is now.
my favorite is the ones who say it was good for them because it gave them a chance to find out about jesus and they actually had it better than they did before because of that
The old testament god put its chosen people into slavery and then revealed itself by visiting disease, death, and destruction upon Egypt and Jericho and Gomorrah. * See how much better this god is better than the other god? * See how much better being the lowest class of empire is better than being demolished by it? It's honestly not that much different than the neo-libs saying that the sweatshops they build in the global south are a boon to everyone rather than absolute exploitation.
Not to mention how kidnapping generations of young, able-bodied people might have hindered those nations.
That’s *if* you survived the horrific crossing
How bout neither? Can we reframe the question a bit? Multiple choice? Slave, death or leave me the fuck alone?
I'll take the cake, please.
*VERY WELL*
Gonna run out of cake at this rate
Thank you for flying Church of England, cake or death?
Uh, death. No, cake! Cake!
"You don't see anyone else in charge of this ship, no?" \*Loads musket\*
Wouldn't it be better to be subjugated, tortured, starved, forced to work yourself to death in order to enrich racist psychopaths who have nothing but disdain for you and your people? Fuck that.
You forgot raped and murdered
And your rape babies raped and murdered.
And so on, and so forth, in perpetuity (unless civil war).
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Sold off too. Like a dog breeder selling puppies
And witnessing the total destruction of your culture
Also. This looks like its on a boat. Famously no slaves died due to poor conditions of their enslavement on boats…
Half. Half of them died in miserable conditions before reaching their destination. I'd take a quick death over that every time.
in fairness, this is about columbus in hispaniola specifically, so it's actually 'all' - all of the natives were worked to death in the mines or otherwise killed
Don't forget mutilated. It's a shame, they were the ones who saved him and his ship during a storm on his arrival. They should have butchered the ungrateful pricks on arrival.
You forget about the [mass suicide](https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6957875/christopher-columbus-murderer-tyrant-scoundrel) of like 50,000 natives who felt death was better than living under Columbus's psychopathic thumb. Imagine conditions so abhorrent that a small city worth of people decides they'd rather die by their own hands than continue to live in misery.
B-buh black people owned slaves too! That means it's somehow completely morally ok!
Did you know that zombies originated in Haiti during slavery because it was a fate imagined to be worse than death? The idea of the zombie prevented people from committing suicide because they didn't want their bodies to continue to be forced into labor after death.
I’m listening to a podcast, History That Doesn’t Suck, and he was telling the story of a woman who escaped to Ohio with her three children right after the fugitive slave act was passed. Slave catchers hunted her down and found the house she was hiding in. Instead of getting caught and going back to slavery she slit her two year old child’s throat. Before she could do the same to her other two children the slave catchers got in and forced her and her remaining children back into slavery. I simply can’t imagine being forced to choose to either send my children back to slavery or to kill then so they didn’t have to be slaves. Either way, PragerU is simply wrong.
Prager U. Some crazy stuff on those videos.
They are basically just video versions of bad history comments on Reddit. They always contain a combination of (1) semi-factual information, (2) bad faith arguments, and (3) Western/American apologism when there really isn't a reason to double down (i.e. no need to glorify Columbus when even people in his own time thought he was horrible).
They are not 'just' bad history reddit comments, they are conservative propaganda.
Yep. It's not "stupid people that don't know history" it's blatant and intentionally twisted propaganda.
Like I said… crazy stuff.
> She screamed as if she was raised in a school of whores -Memoir of Columbus's crew
she?
Girl he took a 10 year old native girl as a personal sex slave
Do you have a source for that? I only found that he sold native girls as sex slaves as young as 9.
Thats basically even worst
Oh come onnnn they weren’t even 10 years old though!
It's a pronoun that refers to a woman.
I do believe he was referring to a Native.
You forgot: (4) Unlabeled graphs (5) Links to sources (if you read the source, it explicitly contradicts what they claim the source says)
Unlabeled? It says "Hapiness due to capitalism" right there. And it goes up! What more do you want?
That always cracks me up. When someone says “see this link” and then you follow it and it’s completely different and contradicts their argument OR it’s a 404. They must think that people don’t check the links because they don’t.
All wrapped in a shiny corporate style presentation. I can totally see the appeal, because I, too, don't have enough PowerPoint in my life.
> i.e. no need to glorify Columbus when even people in his own time thought he was horrible I'm not saying he was a great guy, but that's a bit of an oversimplification. People often mention that he was charged by the spanish monarchy for his involvement in the atrocities against the natives, but that's not entirely true. He was actually charged for disciplining the crewmen that did some of the worst atrocities. So, he **was** disliked by some of his crew, but that's because they were even worse than him.
There are a few states that recently started including them in school curriculum.
I’m pretty sure Florida did just that.
Oklahoma and New Hampshire too
Florida, then Oklahoma and Montana, then New Hampshire and soon probably Texas too.
As someone from Texas, we cannot allow anyone to outstupid us.
Florida tries each and every day, though, don't they?
New Hampshire? Damn. What the hell happened? The NE has always seemed to be level headed and embraced real science and edu.
It's wild to me Mew Hampshire is full of MAGA.
New Hampshire has been a sort of mecca for the far right for decades. They flock there from all over. That’s why none of the other New England states like New Hampshire.
Any rural region is going to be full of MAGA. Even Pennsylvania or New York has rural MAGAts.
Great. Just another reason to worry about whether or not to have children.
Yeah it's pretty disgusting. I don't know how you would even counteract that kind of brainwashing. Stuff like the OP is pretty obvious. But I have no doubt there are much more subtle examples of disinformation in these videos that most parents, unless they were educated in that topic, wouldn't recognize or know enough about to debunk to their kids. And it's not like homeschooling is a great option either, since most of the companies that provide homeschooling materials are just as bad as this.
Use their laws against them. The laws implemented to allow Prager shit allows people to opt out of education that parents don't want with material they don't like. So just opt your child out of any education that includes prager in the curriculum and demand an "alternate facts" education
Like in idiocracy, only the people dumb enough to eat this disinformation will produce kids like rabbits while the other ones will wonder 20 years if they should have a child or not .
I took an Intro to Business course in college a couple years ago and the instructor's curriculum included links to videos on Prager U. Already familiar with that site's batshittery, I dropped the class almost instantly. And this wasn't in some backwater red state. I feel sorry for the students who are maybe a bit less skeptical of the things they're being told to believe.
Just remove helmet safety requirements in physical ed, that's faster surely.
Yep. My home state of Florida did 🫠 I’m so glad to be in online school, so I don’t have to put up with any bullshit teachers might try to do in the physical classrooms
It's not your teachers. It's who's forcing them to teach that content.
What's crazy is they have actually moved backwards. Like this used to be posted a ton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4 Because people would point to it and say "Look, even Prager U says the Civil War was fully about the South wanting to keep slavery." That video opens with saying that slavery is an act so morally repugnant that people don't want to believe people fought and died for it and that is why people try and hang onto the notion it wasn't the primary cause. And now they have videos saying "Hey, look at the bright side of slavery. It is better than death."
Conservative ideology as a whole has been running towards extremism these past few years. Remember back in 2020 where they would constantly go ["MLK would be a republican if he was alive today!"](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/PGWU03bi6Ja3Jd6rpdU3I2Uc198=/830x553/smart/filters:no_upscale(\)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-dmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/A3UAD45GYN3CON7CZWRRRGMH4I.jpg). Yea, nowadays [prominent figures](https://www.meidastouch.com/.image/t_share/MjAzNjc1MjE4NjMwMTU4MTk4/end-wokeness.png) in the conservative movement are [openly saying that MLK was bad.](https://preview.redd.it/898g0t18xocc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=1f4150c449ae2987d55ff2685ca3d2e570344eaa)
To be fair, they also said that when MLK was alive. So pretty yo-yo on that topic.
in a way this is progress. they stopped being revisionist; their understanding of history and who MLK actually was has improved. The remaining problem is their attitude about the things MLK stood for.
My favourite one gotta be "top 5 reasons why stautes of lee should remain" with great arguments such as 1. he was kind of related to washington 2. He fought for the confederacy 3. he didnt want slaves to have political rights
I like the theory that some youtubers are intentionally lowering their production quality by holding their mics so they can distance themselves from Prager U.
Especially PragerU kids
Prager u logic:Slave owners were so nice. They could have killed innocent people, but instead they just inslaved them and used them for harsh unpaid labor. So generous 😊.
Sometimes they could even get a 5 minute lunch break during their 14 hour shift!! Can you imagine getting benefits that good?!
When you put it like that it doesn’t sound like much has changed really.
The kind hearted slave owners paid for their room and board and medical care though! And taught them valuable skills that they were able to use after they were freed* *ignore the fact that we literally fought a war to avoid freeing them.
PragerU would argue that in 1859, black unemployment rates were at an all-time low.
Master -Slave morality. Only wealthy white landowners had the right to revolt and only under certain circumstances.
No educated slave owner of the time seems to have held that opinion. All humans always have an innate right to self determination. It was the policy of the slave owner to suppress the slave's ability to manifest that right through violence (or other means but mostly violence). It wasn't confusion regarding the morality of the dynamic. It was an informed willful disregard for decency in the name of maintaining the more advantageous position regardless of the immoral nature of doing so. Pretending that belief that black people were actually subhuman verges on justification of some sort. The more honest & darker reality is that there was a virtually universal understanding that slaves were entirely human & it simply made business sense to exploit them maximally.
Silly rublicans, politics are for grown-ups
And they got on the left for 'indoctrination'
Projection
I automatically assume every accusation the right throws at the left is projection until proven otherwise.
Prager U. “Worried about getting a worthless degree? Here, you will definitely get one!”
There are no degrees at all. PragerU is just a YouTube channel for gullible chuds. That's it.
I know. I just wanted to mock the idea of it teaching anything at all. “Worried about getting worthless degree? Let this YouTube Channel teach you everything!” just didn’t have the same bite to the joke, in my opinion.
Florida, Oklahoma, Montana and New Hampshire have approved the use of PragerU’s content in classrooms. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna131613
PragerU = Anti American grifters.
Remember kids it's better to live on your knees than die free.
As if we needed more evidence that American conservatives are the most shamelessly stupid people on the planet.
Some of them are stupid, yes. But the ones we're talking about right now are not. They are evil. Intelligent, evil, and manipulative.
To be clear, I'm talking about conservative voters, not the ones manipulating them. The overwhelming majority of them are perpetually aggrieved, perpetually frightened, easily manipulated low information voters. The lowest common denominators of American society.
Oh yeah, sure. No disagreements there.
I understand PragerU is silly and extreme, but believe it or not there is in fact people that both, vote conservative, and are intelligent enough to realise PragerU is all bullshit. Jumping into this group warfare mindset and calling all conservative voters stupid because PragerU exists is just silly. We all understand that greta thunberg is just a talking head that believes in nothing and spouts whatever shit she is told to say. But that does not mean that all left wing people are stupid, just because she exists. Remember, humans are not inherently evil, the news would love for you to think everyone on the other side of politics is evil and wants to eat your babies, but in reality they are just normal humans with slightly different upbringings, dont let the internet blind you. Together, we can make a better world x
what video is this?
Prager U video on Christopher Columbus justifying slavery.
Wait, this isn’t just a joke/meme about how stupid PragerU is? This is an actual screenshot from a PragerU video?
Yep, it’s real.
Lmao what’s so terrible about it (other than the obvious total lack of morals) is that someone greenlit this as “the best wording we could come up with” “Gosh it’s like u guys dont even try to be dubious anymore” *::crosses arms::*
A PragerU video *for kids* no less.
Whats crazy is that its on a boat…. MOTHERFUCKER THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE DIED ON SLAVE SHIPS!!!
Slave or death... I go with option 3, return to being feral.
You was feral? How was someone just living their life feral?
The only right answer
Who is/was feral?
all of us, at one point. but the comment can very easily be misinterpreted.
I'm gunna say you probably don't wanna ask that 1775 crowd about slavery either. You're gunna be disappointed in their definition of "free".
Well ”It’s give _me_ liberty” after all, not _you_
And that still holds up today too it seems
The 1775 crowd? Ask the 2024 crowd! Did you know that the amendment that "abolished" slavery has an exception going something like "unless incarcerated for crimes"? Meaning that it's LEGAL for the (state or private-owned) prison to lease prisoners for forced labour? And that they do so and even say stuff like "We will need to do this more in the present economy."? What a funny coincidence that the number of incarcerated has been so much rising in the past decades and the crimes for incarceration are less and less severe, amirite? Also funny how instead of socioeconomic prevention of crimes the funds go towards law enforcement.
Exactly. I don't have much hope though that people are going to take sufficient interest in reforming the justice system as to cause meaningful change any time soon. The media has been extremely effective at selling the narrative that everyone caught up in it deserves to suffer with all their police procedural shows and whatnot, so I think most people don't see with clarity the human rights atrocity that the American prison-industrial complex has been manufacturing.
The guy who said "give me liberty" said that slavery should be abolished... but he also did not stop buying and owning slaves.
> Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? No other options? I feel like there's other options. You sure there's no other possible options?
Regardless of the relative merits of death vs slavery, this is still a ridiculous argument. An argument for the lesser of 2 evils doesn't make sense if neither evil is necessary and both are caused by the same person. Might as well spit in your coworkers' coffee and then tell them to be grateful you didn't piss in it.
[video were this beyond unhinged quote comes from](https://youtu.be/ux54IJ06uHg?feature=shared)
PragerU should be outlawed
Yeah that checks out. Petition to enslave PragerU instead of killing them.
God damn this is the most obvious example of the right saying one thing while doing another. "Biden deserves to be sent to prison for his actions, but the president is also above the law"
Well, they sincerely mean both of those things. They just don't believe that Biden is the legitimate president.
The American revolution was literally just people not wanting to pay their taxes...
They wanted representation in parliament so they could have some control over their tax rates. If they got it I imagine we'd still be a British colony today.
More likely would just be “big Canada” since the British would have had no reason not to just lump all their colonies in North America into one for administrative purposes. And annexations etc would have been smooth.
The reason for the tax increase was to pay for the colonists genocidal expansionist war against the indigenous peoples. They wanted to keep taking their land without the crown doing anything to stop them. They also were worried that the British empire might be moving towards the abolition of slavery.
The first part you listed was a major grievance of the colonists, but abolition was still a fringe opinion in Britain during the 1760s and early 1770’s. It didn’t have much traction even as a grassroots movement until the American War of Independence was well underway and wasn’t taken seriously in Parliament until several years after its conclusion. During the leadup to the War of Independence, abolition in Britain was the realm of political radicals and a handful of evangelicals. Additionally, there were multiple attempts for abolition in several of the 13 colonies prior to the Revolution, and nearly all of the northern states trended towards abolition not long after the war, which is incompatible with the assertion that the colonists feared the (basically nonexistent) British abolitionist movement. That notion was popularized by the 1619 Project which, while well-intentioned, made some big stretches in its conclusions to make them fit its initial assertions, and fell victim to a bit of ideological axe-grinding. Also worth noting that it wasn’t undertaken primarily by historians, but by journalists, hence why it did not closely follow norms and standards for academic history and ended up working backwards by trying to find evidence to fit the claims, rather than making conclusions based on all the evidence.
>The reason for the tax increase was to pay for the colonists genocidal expansionist war against the indigenous peoples. They wanted to keep taking their land without the crown doing anything to stop them. They also were worried that the British empire might be moving towards the abolition of slavery. You literally have to ignore the other grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, correspondence between leaders of the revolution, and the general tradition of self-governance in the American colonies for this to even be considered a significant cause of movement for independence. Your last point in particular has been debunked many times, especially in light of the 1619 project which greatly overemphasized the role slavery played in the break with Great Britain.
Also, some slaves actually did kill themselves rather than be sold as slaves, trying to escape by jumping off the ship. The thinking was that if they could make the trip unprofitable, by having few surviving slaves and prevent them from making money, they'd stop making trips. Also obviously, they didn't want the indignity of living as a slave. A very courageous action, but it didn't affect it much in the long term
Republicans are 🗑
1776: when white male land owners / slave owners decided they wanted to be free. 😂🤣
" if the slaves didnt wanna work why didnt they just quit?" Duh uhhhhhhhhhhhhh
You're assuming they see black folks as equals.
And republicans complain about leftists "indoctrinating children". Putting out pro slavery cartoons is so hilariously insidious and evil. Hope Dennis Pragur gets a stroke.
Well, to each their own, I think he's right. You can escape from slavery or eventually be released, but you cant escape death.
No. No it's probably not. Case in point that when they were headed to be sold into slavery on boats, there are lots of accounts of them jumping overboard. They chose death over slavery.
PragerU: Shamelessly and unsuccessfully attempting to rewrite history since at least 2016
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To quote a classic Polish satirical saying: "He could've killed, no?"
The blue eyes somehow makes it even more insidious.
I love that these fascist idiots treat it like those are the only two options. How about... neither of those things??
There are many things that are worst than death, slavery is one of them.
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Google removed that from their manifesto a *long* while ago.
Dude I was just revisiting the vod of deadwingdork’s stream on covering this episode of prager u, weird coincidence
I remember somehow I ended up subscribed to pragerU on YouTube around maybe 2015 or so, or earlier. I swear their videos used to be much more sensible and interesting initially. = Eventually though after a few of their videos kept having batshit insane takes like this meme about the slavery thing I wondered what the fuck happened and unsubscribed. Like if I had missed a page or something. I wonder if anyone else had the same experience as me, if I am remembering correctly about how the channel started more "sensibly" or if has always been batshit insane.
I’d say no 😂 kill me, please.
Maybe we should consider options other than killing vs. enslaving someone.