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Oh how the writer was trapped by the TikTok trap. Nothing on there is real. If you heard it on TikTok, it’s probably made up. Now comes the saddest part: an entire generation thinks it’s real, it’s true, and is being manipulated by made up sh&t like culling of cats caused the Black Death. The likes drive engagement, because it seems plausibly true, it must be right? So I’ll like it too so I don’t look dumb. (trick: you’re dumb by liking it). So in the end, it’s a giant echo chamber of bad advice and made up scenarios and dance videos (because a pole would be low class) for likes and money. There’s some legit channels, like there are on YouTube or other platforms, but that’s not what GenZ is watching. They are learning bogus history, bogus politics, bogus math, and bogus job skills, through TikTok. (Maybe even intentionally, to dumb us American’s down). Who knows. I do know that more BS has come from “I heard it on TikTok” than ever in history. Even reporters are getting their “source” from “I heard it on TikTok”. It’s ridiculous. No wonder wars are raging, people are fighting, and all while making cute videos of cats while spreading 3rd grade history plausibilities.

Kudos for calling them out that nowhere, in the histories, did any of that happen.

Example of made up scenarios: You’re a singer. You recorded a song. How do you get people to listen to your song? You make up a scenario where your S.O. is just some random person and you play the song while doing something that shows attraction. Whether it’s hitting on the girl, or vice versa, or it’s puppies or something that invokes primal responses. Meanwhile the audio plays or you say “This is my song” and you have a dozen of your friends also promote it. Sit back and watch. A few people I know did this to break into the country music scene.

Guy in Truck: “Hey, you wanna hear something?”

Girl running: stops (pulls ear buds out like she couldn’t hear) “Sure” (confirming it was BS the whole time).

Music plays

Girl: “wow this is really good!”

Guy: “Thanks”, can I get your number?”

Girl: blushes and gives him a blank piece of paper because they are actually secretly married.

It’s a con as old as medieval cats. Not new.

Other examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

I can't stand these arrogant generalized "the current generation is wrong / dumbed down by the media / trapped by lies" takes, you know very well every generation has said this about the one after, and it's never true, you are wasting your energy shaking your fist at the kids, they are fine.

> No wonder wars are raging, people are fighting, and all while making cute videos of cats while spreading 3rd grade history plausibilities.

No, the current wars are not caused by TikTok.

> Even reporters are getting their “source” from “I heard it on TikTok”.

I wonder what you are getting your source from for this claim.

“No, the current wars are not caused by TikTok.”

But the propaganda is being spread on there, fueling hate crimes and more.

“I wonder what you are getting your source from for this claim.”

Ask any 20-something where they get their news. Sure some are getting it from legit sources like NYTimes or WashPost or the like but a lot are getting it through their feeds on TikTok.

I know it sounds like a “kids these days…” rant or a “get off my lawn” but I’m being dead serious. Every single young person under 20 I have spoken with (and I speak to a lot) gets their news from TikTok or a site like BuzzFeed or Newsweek that often will run TikTok stories.

I’m not even that old and I see it. So yeah, be angry, but don’t be angry at me for calling out “Lazy Girl Jobs and how to get one” reporting. Because it happens and you know it.

People making up ahistorical shit about the medieval period to make them seem like backwards religious fanatics is far older than tiktok. Every medievalist or early modernist I know has to start their classes by dragging their students through the basics of "no, the world wasn't backwards and then suddenly reasoned because of the renaissance."

It is a general problem with a lack of respect for historians.

"to dumb us American's down"

We have literally been doing that to ourselves, for about 30 years now. We've absolutely been steadily handicapping our education system for decades.

"wars are raging"

Um who starts wars? Politicians, exclusively. What is the average age of politicians? Let's put it at 60's to be charitable. You do the math.

It seems that TikTok, which you state, and GenZ, which you imply, don't have anything to do with the major issues that you attribute to them. This whole ranting incoherent comment kind of highlights the kind of behavior that has caused those major issues; complete rejection of reality in favor of screaming at scapegoats. Actually sounds a lot like someone who was in court today.

I was not implying GenZ is responsible for the wars. TikTok isn’t helping though, either. Misinformation being spread (on all sides) and being eaten up (and parroted) by our youth.

So you can be obtuse and read what you wanted to read, you can equate me to someone you hate to justify your anger, but again it’s not me you should be angry with. I completely agree it’s politicians who start wars. These same idiots are watching the same crap their kids are showing them - on TikTok. Why else would there be a congressional hearing over Chinese spying over an app about dancing and narcissistic behavior?

So who is rejecting reality? Here’s the reality. There are two (2) wars being fought. Both of which are being fueled by propaganda and misinformation being spread causing reactions, counter-reactions, and 3rd parties to pick sides. One of these wars has been brewing off and on for 50 years, with no path forward. Now there’s talk of occupation. The other, fueled by misinformation and lies. This isn’t some guy on HN crying about kids these days, it’s a genuine warning that if we (the hacker/coder/inventor) community don’t stop it, we won’t have a community because Russia or North Korea or some idiot with a spray tan will nuke the reality in which we have known all our lives.

I don't think we need the "China's doing it to us" conspiracy theories, humans have been doing this to themselves forever.

I once got a good deal on a house because a significant number of people in the 21st century still believe in ghosts.

Chinese officials have made public statements in support of US accelerationism. There’s also a well documented history of Bytedance in China. It is not a conspiracy theory that China used TikTok to further erode US society. I wish I could recommend a specific YouTube video to link, but there are many now that cover the reality of China and TikTok. I’d recommend watching a couple.
I never mentioned China. It could be ByteDance, it could be “The Algorithm”, it’s definitely humans.

I would have only passed on the deal of the house if it was across from a cemetery. Haunted AND on location? I don’t believe in ghosts but that’s just bad juju. Anywhere else and I’d sign those papers.

> Oh how the writer was trapped by the TikTok trap.

They weren't, the entire article is about disproving the video. They literally say "So anyway, the cat video is wrong.".

I'm not sure why you extrapolate from one account with inaccurate cat videos to bashing the whole platform. E.g. on YouTube there are similar video accounts and worse.

This is probably a bad example, in that is this is an old, _old_ piece of bad history. I think it's probably Victorian at least? "Oh, in the Middle Ages, Europeans hated/feared cats" is one of these untrue factoids that's been doing the rounds for ever; it's part of the general set of "dark ages" fantasy about the Middle Ages.
An entire generation thinks Santa Claus is real yet we’ve survived.
Nothing new under the sun. Plenty of people always believed everything they saw on Oprah.
Interesting that the story of cats being persecuted in the middle ages is false. This article doesn't try to trace the origin of the story. This one : https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/11/05/were-cats-reall... Traces it to a book by Donald Engels, but that was only written in 2001 and I've definitely heard the story before that. I think I recall it being in 'Catwatching' by Desmond Morris which was published in 93 (but it may have been some other book from that time period). I doubt if Morris originated the story either, as he's a naturalist, not a historian. So I wonder where it came from.
I believe I have Catwatching somewhere. If I manage to dig it up I'll report back in.
Is it fake? I guess this was the early modern era, not middle ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre
See the concerns at the bottom of Methodology; I think all you can _really_ read into this is that the idea was in the aether by 1984.

(Even _if_ the event described happened, it was clearly exceptional, and _even with that in mind_ doesn't support the idea that people in The Olden Days (TM) were afraid of cats; the printer is _keeping_ cats).

In Blackadder 1 (early 80s) it's already a part of pop culture enough to be referenced. I think it's pretty old, I suspect 19th century (which is where a lot of modern pop culture ideas about the 'dark ages' solidified).
Aha, I have found it in "The Golden Bough", which takes it back to 1890. It doesn't contain all elements of the story though - it doesn't have a priest calling for cats to be exterminated. Rather, it suggests that patterns of behavior similar to druid sacrifices persisted under christianity, and were there re-interpreted as driving out witches in cat form.
There’s something about the images here that makes me feel a more direct human association with the time–the silly doodle of a cat dressed as a monk, the drawing of a cat waiting expectantly for scraps from a dining table. I’ve always liked learning about the distant past, but often it can feel a little abstract, hard to comprehend just how different life was, but I love little details like this that make it feel like I can relate to people from hundreds of years ago at some basic level.
The whole idea of medieval era as the dark ages is also profoundly uninformed.
Annoyingly, the term "dark ages" is so vague and bandied about that it's hard to rule this statement as true or false.

The term originally refers to the idea that it's an age of ignorance by Renaissance scholars essentially having a massive Classical Antiquity appreciation binge. This gets amplified by Protestants as an attack on Catholicism. Some more modern people get even more zealously anti-religious and view it as something pushing back the industrial revolution and other things back by 1500 years or so. This especially gets intertwined with things like unilinear cultural evolution models [1], where the Middle Ages end up getting classified as going backwards in culture. Most of these beliefs are basically complete and total hogwash in terms of actual evidence.

Archaeology can trace a rough outline of the economic history of Europe. We see a peak of economic activity in the first and second centuries AD, a decline in third century, which stabilizes somewhat in the fourth and fifth century, before plunging. It hits its nadir in the eighth century, and then starts recovering, surpassing its pre-collapse highs sometime between 1000-1300, depending on which metric you're looking at. If you want to refer to the time from ~500-1000 as a "Dark Ages" on the basis of poor document preservation and general economic collapse, that's actually a reasonable, grounded definition.

But if you're trying to use the term to indicate a loss of knowledge somehow, well, it just doesn't work. Even during the absolute worst depths of the post-Roman collapse, you would still be speaking Roman, learning from Roman textbooks (if you're fortunate enough to be learning), practicing Roman religion, obeying Roman laws. And there's a decent chance you might be doing that despite your village never having once been part of the Roman Empire.

[1] Or, more simply, Civilization-style tech trees.

The idea that knowledge didn't disappear during the "dark ages" is blatantly wrong. Entire swaths of knowledge disappeared simply because the Christian monks only preserved matter favorable to Christianity.

If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved.

Hell, that's why the capture of libraries in Spain in the 15th century was still important to the renaissance. Muslim scholars preserved a bunch of Greek and Roman material that had COMPLETELY disappeared during the European dark ages.

Perhaps we can call it the Really Really Great Five Century Long Depression.
To what degree did this event contribute to “the dark ages”? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
Absolutely. So many people believe that:

1) ius primae noctis was a thing (it wasn’t)

2) witch hunting was a medieval thing (very late medieval thing, maybe, but mostly it was in 15-17th century)

3) flat earth as a widespread belief for wise men (it wasn’t, and both Columbus and the Council of Salamanca knew that)

We’re willing to believe that for about 1000 years Europe collectively abandoned reason, while before and after it was there. Sure, sounds logic.

The flat earth one is super annoying, because the argument against Columbus was actually correct - they didn't say he'd fall off the end of the world, they said it was way further than he thought and he'd run out of food.

They were right, he just happened to run into a giant continent instead of dying.

(re1) while ipn wasn't a law, we have to keep in mind, the lord was also the judge. so if your lord raped you, good luck finding justice.
It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly distributed.

Btw. nice trivia about cats and plague: Venetians caught cats from the mainland and took them to their islands to catch mice and rats that they knew were responsible for the plague. Therefore it was prohibited to feed the cats but there was a special rain water collector for the cats to have enough drinking water next to each Venetian rain water cistern.

Maybe. But it is difficult to say to was _less_ dark than either the Roman empire before or the Renaissance and modern era later. So it certainly appears to be _more_ dark. And so it is, perhaps, not that uninformed an opinion after all.
I also have heard the stories of “the church thought cats were evil”. It always seemed a little too weird and simple to believe it was a was a wide spread teaching.
There may have been complaints here and there, but in general cats were an accepted facet of life, including religious life. Stories abound about monastery cats, and you can find them in illuminated manuscripts: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2022-12-23-cats-in-the-middle-...
ISTR that there are some mentions of cats in Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer Against Witches) to which that idea is frequently traced, but, its worth noting Malleus Maleficarum was condemned by the Church (the Inquisition, specifically) shortly after it was written, and was largely written in frustration by its author—an inquisitor, himself—at his failure to get others (local ecclesiastical authorities, ecclesiastical courts, etc.) to take his crusading seriously, only becoming influential through its revival largely much later during the Renaissance, from whence it influenced witch trials.
Maybe renaissance generation just cancelled their medieval ancestors to feel superior with themselves and now we are missing a treasure trove of culture? Plus they had a huge pandemic that screwed up their economy.
A pandemic of truely apocalyptic proportions at that.
Some of those cats work in my editorial team! https://tidings.potato.horse/team
i wish i could understand how cats became so popular, given -> Fleas. As far as i can tell, anti-flea treatments have existed for about 50 years. I get that catching mice is a huge plus, but a house full of fleas also kinda sucks.
It doesn't suck as much as starving to death, which could happen if the rodents went crazy on your food supplies.

Anyway, if your house is loaded with mice and rats, you will also have fleas. Unlike the rodents, your cat will even let you comb it.

Also people weren't necessarily clear on fleas or whatever being something you caught. They were more seen as things that just showed up under certain circumstances.

Cats kill rodents, protecting stored grain. And parasites were a fact of life.
Indoor cats is a newish thing. Farm cats were outdoor creatures that slept in the barn or another enclosure. Outdoor cats catch rodents and have basically no downsides.
Rats, like cats, have fleas that bite humans, too, and while cats mostly don't kill rats the way they do mice, they do drive them away.
What kind of super-hygienic environment are you imagining they had in those times that fleas would be a major annoyance?
Two points:

1) I think you underestimate how bad a rodent problem can get, and how quickly.

2) Healthy cats are decent groomers, and also flea magnets. Fleas go to them preferentially. If the cat isn't a lap cat and doesn't sleep on your bed, it's going to be doing most of the interacting with fleas while you relax in your mouse-free study.

It's so funny how people are shocked at disinformation and how well it works. We're still the same stupid hairless monkeys in hats that we were a thousand years ago. We still believe in imaginary all-powerful father figures living in the clouds, silently judging you. We believe in and fund huge markets for homeopathic (i.e. fake) "medicine", to the point that we grant the title "doctor" after being certified for "Osteopathic Manipulative Therapy", a pseudoscience. We believe that politicians we vote for are actually going to do what they say they're going to do, and every time, we're surprised when they don't.

Humans are fucking stupid, and it's very easy to get them to believe bullshit. We are only slightly harder to trick than a dog.