Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

dovetc t1_ja7sbk2 wrote

Reply to TIL a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English sent their own Armada to Spain, leading to similar losses of ships and men, and an ignominious English defeat by malektewaus

From reading the comments you would think there was some conspiracy of silence surrounding this tidbit. The truth is that it's simply not the important part of the story upon which history did or did not turn.

The failed English expedition wasn't a part of a larger invasion of Spain that presented an existential threat to the Spanish governing apparatus.

The status of the new church in England was far from a settled question at the time of the SA. This represented a real potential turning point or historical counterfactual had the monarchy been placed back in the hands of a Catholic. There was no such tension underpinning the English counter-raid.

Your history teachers didn't hide this from you. They curated the curriculum to fit highlight the more important bits because there's only so many hours in a school day.

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foo-jitsoo t1_ja7s4pn wrote

Reply to comment by Mammoth-Mud-9609 in TIL John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was arrested and tried for merely teaching the theory of evolution in 1925. by JesusLikesHisCheezIt

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

​

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1996

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DanYHKim t1_ja7s2jy wrote

Reply to TIL: The concept of steganography which is the hiding of messages in plain sight. For example, Phyllis Latour Doyle (British spy) parachuted into France to spy on Nazis before D-day. She used knitting to record messages. by Geek_Nan

Shortly after the 9-11 attack, I read that intelligence services were concerned that secret messages were being concealed within pornographic images. The article started that the investigators had not yet found such messages, but they were committed to redoubling their efforts by downloading and analyzing even more porno to find them.

I so wish I had downloaded the article!

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foo-jitsoo t1_ja7rrjq wrote

Reply to comment by No-Owl9201 in TIL John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was arrested and tried for merely teaching the theory of evolution in 1925. by JesusLikesHisCheezIt

Ok, not to be an asshole, but your comment ironically displays a lack of understanding of what evolution actually means in order to make a rather tired and overused joke about rejecting the theory of evolution in favor of a religious explanation for life.

I say this as an atheist and somebody who is probably on "your side" politically - that's dumb.

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DanYHKim t1_ja7qs4f wrote

Reply to TIL: The concept of steganography which is the hiding of messages in plain sight. For example, Phyllis Latour Doyle (British spy) parachuted into France to spy on Nazis before D-day. She used knitting to record messages. by Geek_Nan

171228_Madame-DeFarge_Weaving-a-Revolution.txt

"Vanity Fair Admits Video Telling Hillary Clinton To Take Up Knitting “Missed The Mark”" National Memo. December 28, 2017

With a screenshot of Madame DeFarge, I wrote:

"It's an un-hackable database of political criminality, after all!"

=== to further explain, I wrote:

It's a picture of Madame DeFarge, from the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities".

DeFarge is a woman bent on revenge against the aristocrats, particularly those of one family that destroyed her own. As part of the French Revolutionaries, she knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Thus, as she sits and witnesses the crimes of the French Aristocracy, she bitterly knits the names and crimes into a tapestry, to be used against them after the revolution.

=== to elaborate, I wrote:

There is much symbolism surrounding DeFarge, since the three Fates of Classical mythology are women who spin the thread of life, and cut it when a mortal life is at its end. In another way, she is a type of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who weaves a tapestry shroud for her father-in-law in order to hold off the petitions of her suitors, who claim her husband must be dead after so long at sea. Penelope famously unravels the tapestry every night, so she is never finished with it, putting off the suitors for an indefinite time.

The act of weaving the tapestry shroud is supposed to be her last act as a daughter-in-law and member of Odysseus' family and household. The burden of the shroud is symbolic of her duty as a married woman, and its cultural importance makes the labor inviolate in the face of her suitors and their demands, as well as the demands of her clan. Being a woman, Penelope has no authority of her own by which she can choose to remarry or wait for her husband's return, and so she cleverly uses her weaving as a way to use the rigid gender rules of her society in her favor.

Similarly, perhaps, DeFarge conceals her important role in the Revolution behind a different kind of tapestry. The domestic labor of knitting cannot be suspected to be 'political' or 'revolutionary', since it is a 'woman's work'. Thus, the death list of the Revolution is never revealed to the Aristocratic forces.

In a final parallel, though, we have seen this year a third act of fabric-making as a concealed act of empowerment. Millions of women marched in cities, towns, lonely roads, and isolated fields around the world in protest against Donald Trump's inauguration as President. On their heads were the pink knitted hats, pointedly named after the object of one of Trump's many transgressions against human decency. While the sight of multitudes of protesters crowding streets and parks and plazas worldwide was powerful in itself, the "pussy hat" provided a colorful punctuation to the crowd, making a statement as straightforward as an upraised fist: 'Donald Trump is the enemy, and I will oppose him'.

03/28/2020

And now, we have yet another act of fabric craft, largely by women, as a consequence of this horrifying election. Because of short-sighted mismanagement, petty vindictiveness, and now-familiar stupidity, medical protective equipment must be hand-crafted in homes across the country. The cloth mask is a public and visible sign of the failure of the Republican-dominated government to accomplish even the most basic of functions in an emergency.

Wear yours proudly in public. It is the "Phrygian cap" of American resistance against incompetent kakistocracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-masks-sewers.html "A Sewing Army, Making Masks for America"

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