9 ms·

Its a Chinese equivalent of the phantom time theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_con

by graemep 2mo ago

Its a Chinese equivalent of the phantom time theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister.

wongarsu 2mo ago
That wikipedia page lists four points speaking against the phantom time conspiracy, and in those four points relies on the Tang dynasty twice. Which doesn't exist. Checkmate /s
culi 2mo ago
And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not more
- tialaramex 2mo ago
  AIUI the Conspiracy Theory isn't that birds don't exist, but that they are not real. All the birds you've seen were actually government spy cameras. This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
- Apocryphon 2mo ago
  Since it's popular among youth on social media, maybe this is like Helen Keller skepticism? https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-accomplishments/ https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...
  - edgyquant 2mo ago
    The video of the girl crying about Hellen Keller being fake was hilarious regardless of how true or not any of it is
  - mrguyorama 2mo ago
    My step sister came out of no where at a family gathering to swear Helen Keller was a fraud. I was fairly put off by this, so I pressed her to explain. After much back and forth, she finally got down to what had convinced her of this: "Helen Keller flew a plane. Clearly she was a fraud" Oh wow, Helen Keller once flew a plane? You definitely cannot fly a plane while blind and deaf, at least not ethically and safely! That's so weird, whether it's true or false, better look it up! In fact, Helen Keller at one point, for activism, was brought up in an airplane in the second seat, handed the controls, and allowed to "Fly" for a while. By this metric, I have also flown a plane. It was a PR stunt. But importantly, this one odd fact, presented purposely stupidly, was all it took to seed doubt of a known person. All of social media is someone taking a singular fact, pulling it out of context, and framing it to make a huge narrative unsupported by the basic facts of the original story, spoon fed to morons who will then adopt the full narrative rather than just taking this new information as new information to investigate and update your understanding with. I don't know why people are so bad at spotting the "Wait, but you didn't dig deeper?" problem with all this shitty content though. It's normal on TikTok to just kind of say words and people believe them for some reason.
- reaperducer 2mo ago
  CNN is just doing straight up orientalism If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
1-more 2mo ago
Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) which I thought was the same as this but actually compresses a whole lot more time into less than 1000 years and does word magic to imply that King Solomon = Suleiman the Magnificent.
- nl 2mo ago
  Yes I was going to point to the Fomenko chonology too. I believe that has adherents in some minor Russian nationalist circles: > In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society" And related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire
  - AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
    "A reliable support for the formation of modern ideology"? That pretty much screams that any connection with the truth is... optional. It's not being considered on grounds of truth, but on grounds of being good for ideology.
    - nl 2mo ago
      Well... yes. I mean it's a nationalist ideology - any connection with reality is coincidental.
- graemep 2mo ago
  I knew about the Tartarian Empire theory but not Fomenko's new chronology. its amazing, and one of the most thorough and clever conspiracy theories and it has no lack of scope and ambition. Jesus was made up based on a 12th century Byzantine Emperor is almost as good as Suleiman being Solomon, and lots of otherwise reasonable seem very ready to believe conspiracy theories about Jesus (Dan Brown made a lot of money out of people who thought the Da Vinci Code theories were plausible). Kasparov was a proponent!
Tuna-Fish 2mo ago
The version I've had argued to me didn't change any chronology, they just insisted that the Song dynasty started earlier so the Tang shouldn't be counted. The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?
guyzero 2mo ago
Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms.
- EA-3167 2mo ago
  Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen.
- rsynnott 2mo ago
  Plate tectonics was super controversial at one point. Would be a common one for conspiracy theorists of a certain vintage.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
  Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine.
  - guyzero 2mo ago
    oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory.
- NotThatFast 2mo ago
  Was he reading Neal Adams? I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk! I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong. Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard. Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport
doginasuit 2mo ago
Maybe it is healthy for society in the long run to have pockets of divergent belief. Most of the time it is groundless and fades away. Every so often it gains traction. If it is based in reality, we gain a better understanding. If it is misleading, it vitalizes a competing and more correct understanding. The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.
- MBCook 2mo ago
  How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
  - macintux 2mo ago
    That’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics. It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
  - edgyquant 2mo ago
    Does this stuff really matter when you get down to it? How much does it being true or false change the average persons daily life?
    - j4yav 2mo ago
      Eventually the misinformed mob gets together and elects an RFK jr type.
    - libertine 2mo ago
      Oh boy... I think you will find the answer in George Orwell's Animal Farm. But to help you understand, rewriting the past to sustain power is the type of thing that degenerates into genocide for example. In the short term it might look innocuous, but if corrupting truth and suspend basic moral and ethic values on something as basic as History, what other basic human values are you willing to suspend because you don't like how something feels? This is the breeding ground for racial supremacists, ethnophobia, etc. Terrible stuff. And you don't need to go into the past to see the consequences, Ukraine is fighting for their existence because a group of people in Russia don't want to acknowledge that a ethnic group they deem inferior can have better chances at thriving than them, to the point of denying Ukrainians existence all together.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
riffraff 2mo ago
I was going to say that it seems the equivalent of the "Belgium does not exist" meme (ante litteram) from a few decades ago.
NotThatFast 2mo ago
I just read the theory and I’m now a believer. It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean: Come on ye lads!
etc-hosts 1mo ago
welcome to Russian equivalent New Chronology https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-bizarre-conspiracy-theory-that-might-be-driving-russia https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-bizarre-conspiracy-th... https://chronologia.org/en/nch4_1_russia/index.html https://chronologia.org/en/nch4_1_russia/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)

by graemep 2mo ago

wongarsu 2mo ago

That wikipedia page lists four points speaking against the phantom time conspiracy, and in those four points relies on the Tang dynasty twice. Which doesn't exist. Checkmate /s

culi 2mo ago

And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not more

tialaramex 2mo ago
AIUI the Conspiracy Theory isn't that birds don't exist, but that they are not real. All the birds you've seen were actually government spy cameras. This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
Apocryphon 2mo ago
Since it's popular among youth on social media, maybe this is like Helen Keller skepticism? https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-accomplishments/ https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...
- edgyquant 2mo ago
  The video of the girl crying about Hellen Keller being fake was hilarious regardless of how true or not any of it is
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  My step sister came out of no where at a family gathering to swear Helen Keller was a fraud. I was fairly put off by this, so I pressed her to explain. After much back and forth, she finally got down to what had convinced her of this: "Helen Keller flew a plane. Clearly she was a fraud" Oh wow, Helen Keller once flew a plane? You definitely cannot fly a plane while blind and deaf, at least not ethically and safely! That's so weird, whether it's true or false, better look it up! In fact, Helen Keller at one point, for activism, was brought up in an airplane in the second seat, handed the controls, and allowed to "Fly" for a while. By this metric, I have also flown a plane. It was a PR stunt. But importantly, this one odd fact, presented purposely stupidly, was all it took to seed doubt of a known person. All of social media is someone taking a singular fact, pulling it out of context, and framing it to make a huge narrative unsupported by the basic facts of the original story, spoon fed to morons who will then adopt the full narrative rather than just taking this new information as new information to investigate and update your understanding with. I don't know why people are so bad at spotting the "Wait, but you didn't dig deeper?" problem with all this shitty content though. It's normal on TikTok to just kind of say words and people believe them for some reason.
reaperducer 2mo ago
CNN is just doing straight up orientalism If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

1-more 2mo ago

Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) which I thought was the same as this but actually compresses a whole lot more time into less than 1000 years and does word magic to imply that King Solomon = Suleiman the Magnificent.

nl 2mo ago
Yes I was going to point to the Fomenko chonology too. I believe that has adherents in some minor Russian nationalist circles: > In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society" And related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire
- AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  "A reliable support for the formation of modern ideology"? That pretty much screams that any connection with the truth is... optional. It's not being considered on grounds of truth, but on grounds of being good for ideology.
  - nl 2mo ago
    Well... yes. I mean it's a nationalist ideology - any connection with reality is coincidental.
graemep 2mo ago
I knew about the Tartarian Empire theory but not Fomenko's new chronology. its amazing, and one of the most thorough and clever conspiracy theories and it has no lack of scope and ambition. Jesus was made up based on a 12th century Byzantine Emperor is almost as good as Suleiman being Solomon, and lots of otherwise reasonable seem very ready to believe conspiracy theories about Jesus (Dan Brown made a lot of money out of people who thought the Da Vinci Code theories were plausible). Kasparov was a proponent!

Tuna-Fish 2mo ago

The version I've had argued to me didn't change any chronology, they just insisted that the Song dynasty started earlier so the Tang shouldn't be counted. The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?

guyzero 2mo ago

Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms.

EA-3167 2mo ago
Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen.
rsynnott 2mo ago
Plate tectonics was super controversial at one point. Would be a common one for conspiracy theorists of a certain vintage.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine.
- guyzero 2mo ago
  oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory.
NotThatFast 2mo ago
Was he reading Neal Adams? I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk! I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong. Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard. Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport

doginasuit 2mo ago

Maybe it is healthy for society in the long run to have pockets of divergent belief. Most of the time it is groundless and fades away. Every so often it gains traction. If it is based in reality, we gain a better understanding. If it is misleading, it vitalizes a competing and more correct understanding. The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.

MBCook 2mo ago
How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
- macintux 2mo ago
  That’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics. It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
- edgyquant 2mo ago
  Does this stuff really matter when you get down to it? How much does it being true or false change the average persons daily life?
  - j4yav 2mo ago
    Eventually the misinformed mob gets together and elects an RFK jr type.
  - libertine 2mo ago
    Oh boy... I think you will find the answer in George Orwell's Animal Farm. But to help you understand, rewriting the past to sustain power is the type of thing that degenerates into genocide for example. In the short term it might look innocuous, but if corrupting truth and suspend basic moral and ethic values on something as basic as History, what other basic human values are you willing to suspend because you don't like how something feels? This is the breeding ground for racial supremacists, ethnophobia, etc. Terrible stuff. And you don't need to go into the past to see the consequences, Ukraine is fighting for their existence because a group of people in Russia don't want to acknowledge that a ethnic group they deem inferior can have better chances at thriving than them, to the point of denying Ukrainians existence all together.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

riffraff 2mo ago

I was going to say that it seems the equivalent of the "Belgium does not exist" meme (ante litteram) from a few decades ago.

NotThatFast 2mo ago

I just read the theory and I’m now a believer. It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean: Come on ye lads!

etc-hosts 1mo ago

welcome to Russian equivalent New Chronology https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-bizarre-conspiracy-theory-that-might-be-driving-russia https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-bizarre-conspiracy-th... https://chronologia.org/en/nch4_1_russia/index.html https://chronologia.org/en/nch4_1_russia/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)