A Conspiratorial Theory of the Renaissance (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A Conspiratorial Theory of the Renaissance (2015)

nybooks.com

15 pointsdiodorus13 comments

Looks like an interesting piece, but any paragraphs after the first few are for subscribers only.

this is only tangentially related but the wackiest theory of history i (or anyone else probably) has ever seen is Fomenko's "new chronology"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)

fomenko was a famous mathematician (geometer) that believed all historical data prior to 1600 had been falsified and that no written history exists prior to 800.

Oh yes, I remember reading that work. It was a fascinating example of how someone competent in their field can go wildly wrong outside of it. Among other things, asserting that because Renaissance paintings represented various earlier tales in contemporary clothing, that showed that those earlier tales were actually contemporary with the Renaissance.

But that is very tangential, because the Annales school of historians as the very opposite of lunatic fringe. Marc Bloch's 'Feudal Society' remains a really fascinating read.

Thanks for that reference to Fomenko, I wonder how that relates to the questions being asked by JonLevi on youtube [0].

Not sure what to believe, but I have to admit the questions the guy is asking while showing satellite pictures and old photos are really intriguing. Never mind the possible farfetched explanation, at least you should wonder what possible explanation conventional history and science can provide.

|0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5vXBfxN7rxKeJHJxS8dNDw/vid...

is this some kind of guerilla marketing strategy for a youtube channel? not sure this has anything to do with fomenko except that they were both conspiracy nuts.

Nope, I have nothing to do with that guy. I'm just intrigued by all the questions being raised in these videos. Perhaps you would have preferred a link to single video instead of all of them. Hard to single one out, but I'll try: https://youtu.be/TsZFE7CUrYY

As I said, I still doubt some of the explanations brought forward (e.g. the mining activities in the video I just mentioned) but when you see so much visible stuff from satellite imagery in the middle of nowhere in North America it really makes you wonder what was there, what do our history books say?

It's really funny the things you can believe if you're really convinced of something. He really is looking at dirt roads criss-crossed by more dirt, and claiming they are ancient roads criss-crossed by ancient railroads. Or looking at artifacts of how Google maps are built (being stitched together from photographs from different days, different cameras, and a combination of satellite and airplane imagery as you zoom in and out etc) and getting convinced that they represent both doctored images AND signs of artificial construction on a massive scale).

It looks like they are both conspiracy nuts who believe that the entire world history up to some point is an elaborate forgery. Fomenko seems to believe that it was done to suppress knowledge about the Russian empire, while the creator of the videos above seems to believe that everything up to modern history is a forgery and that it was done to obscure the truth of Noah's flood.

The reasons why they believe these things are also different - I haven't read Fomenko, but the videos above seem to focus on a belief that oldish-looking buildings can't be relatively new (they know this becaude they can't find examples of large oldish-looking buildings being built literally today in their area) , so they must have all been dug up from a much more advanced prior civilization, after they had been buried by the flood of Noah.

Here's a related video

https://www.bitchute.com/video/4yaWXbBF7lYd/

It's very interesting how history becomes muddled over time.

Awesome! I thought chemtrails was comedy gold, but this is really funny to see! To think you'd know so little of the world that you could convince yourself 'old' buildings (50 years ago! as in the old Eddie Izzard joke) are basically impossible to build, so they must just be discovered.

It's really incredible what you can believe in with the right mix of bad education, lack of experience in the real world, and childlike thinking about how the world hasn't changed. Reminds me of when I was 5 years old and wondering how come some people are bor. children like me, while others were born as adults, or as old people!

Thanks for the comedy video!

It was particularly funny when he got to the Parliament Palace in Bucharest, whose construction my parents remember well, and which you can find so many pictures of (not to mention pictures of how the location looked before everything on it was torn down to start work on this).

Basically, it looks like the author starts with the assumption that humanity can no longer build old-style buildings (as if it's hard to use columns) and builds their world-view from there. It is really quite funny.

> the wackiest theory of history i (or anyone else probably) has ever seen is Fomenko's "new chronology"

Sounds like somebody has yet to behold the protong.

It could be that all our historical records are modern forgeries to prop up the current zeitgeist. It all comes down to how much we can trust anything beyond our immediate sense perception and reasoning. But then if you go down that rabbit hole, how much can we trust our own sense perception and reasoning?

On the other hand, who has the time, or inclination, to construct such an elaborate conspiracy? And if they were brilliant and powerful enough to concoct such a thing, why would they bother going through the effort to control a bunch of much inferior beings?

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