He’s got a show on Netflix called The Midnight Gospel that’s a pretty good watch - it takes conversations he has with various people (I think the first or second one is Dr. Drew - don’t let that put you off, he just talks about drugs, nothing problematic) and sets them to animation.
Without spoiling too much, the final episode is a conversation with his mother, who was dealing with a terminal illness. The conversation between them is really beautiful.
It’s a good show if you want to sit and ponder your emotions, and maybe get some good cries in.
The progenitors of ancient aliens theories don’t have to mean harm for it to do real damage. Asking why it’s racist to talk about aliens building the pyramids is in the same category as wondering why it’s racist to call a black man boy. My friends and I call each other boy all the time. What’s the big deal? Sure it’s not inherently racist on it’s face, as long as you come from a place of naive ignorance, ignoring the historical context of how that kind of language was used for centuries to remind a whole class of people to know their place.
Their are 10 million indigenous Maya. Until a few decades ago they couldn’t even teach their language in school. The whole reasoning behind that is that they were a primitive culture who needed to be dragged into modernity. If you admit that their ancestors were doing stuff on par with ancient Egypt, and writing their histories down at a time when even the royal courts of Europe were illiterate, it throws the whole equation out of whack.
When scholars started deciphering the Maya script, the local Maya came running to them to learn their history that they were never taught in school. Start letting them take pride and ownership in the great national treasures, and you could have a real problem on your hands. Better to say it was the Phoenicians or the Lost Tribes of Israel. Aliens is just the modern version of that.
The theory did not come out of the blue. It has deep roots back to the origin of anthropology as a discipline. This history has a well documented racist branch that proposed all kinds of things to minimize non-white culture and it’s role in history. The ancient aliens is just one small twig of this branch.
Most early cultural and physical anthropology typologies assumed white culture at the top. Ancient aliens is just this same idea wrapped in post H.G. Wells understanding of the cosmos.
I ask again, why do none of the ancient alien theories ever talk about Greece, Rome, or other European ancient cultures? Hint, it’s the amount of melanin in their skin.
My mom’s Peruvian husband, who is most ways a great guy and not a wack job or a moron, really enjoys the Ancient Aliens shows. Peru and the Incas are another people that were supposedly visited by aliens. My mother’s go to question to him is “if the aliens taught the Incas about architecture why didn’t they teach them about arches?”
As I recall, on the JRE it wasn’t about aliens though. It was about lost civilizations before recorded history. Like Göbekli Tepe. Evidence that changes the human timeline.
According to the podcast I linked, Chariot of the Gods is about nordic looking master race aliens doing some eugenics and enlightening the primitive Egyptians and others.
Sure, and one of those idiots will most definitely migrate to stormfront and possibly end up shooting up another Synagogue. We live in a world now with unlimited access to what ever suits your fancy. We are not going to ban Joe Rogan just like we are not going to ban everything that has potential to change folks minds of climate change or anti vaxxing. You could spend a lifetime battling venues worse than Joe. This is just what we have now.
I’d rather just enjoy a good episode weird ass Egyptian pyramid shit while I can.
But I do agree that Joe Rogan isn’t benefiting society, obv.
I mean, obviously it wasn’t aliens and obviously a whole big part of it is racist as shit but it’s a little funny that the counterargument amounts to saying, no, it’s actually the white people who were stupid and primitive, which, no argument there, but it’s the same argument the racist archeologists were accidentally making (we didn’t build pyramids therefore these browns couldn’t have either).
Bonus points for how if the Mayan kingdoms existed today you’d all want them wiped off the map for crimes against humanity.
The alien theories are boring anyhow. Haven’t you all heard the one about how white people actually learned slavery from the brown and black people kingdoms? That’s some heady shit right there and I’m glad the neo-nazi types haven’t caught wind of it yet (they’re fundamentally stupid and unimaginative and incurious so they stopped at ‘those kingdoms also had slaves therefore… something…’)
