Resurgent Doubts Of Helen Keller’s Authenticity. - Are the zoomers on to something here?

I am convinced by the amount of users in this thread who are getting her history blatantly wrong (ie; saying that she was born blind, and deaf, that she was retarded, that she was Jewish, that she contributed nothing to society, etc) that zoomers are doing the same, and that's why they don't believe her.
 
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Bunny Tracks said:
I am convinced by the amount of users in this thread who are getting her history blatantly wrong (ie; saying that she was born blind, and deaf, that she was retarded, that she was Jewish, that she contributed nothing to society, etc) that zoomers are doing the same, and that's why they don't believe her.
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Correction: she contributed nothing good for society
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Dropsies said:
This is cool and all, but I'm still baffled by the fact that nobody ever questions the facts surrounding the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Supposedly they would fly in flocks of literal billions and somehow people shooting at them with guns from the ground drove them to extinction in only a few decades.
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I can understand why you're skeptical, but it wasn't just people shooting them with guns from the ground. People trapped them, employing complicated arrangements of nets and lures to capture thousands of pigeons at any one time. Also, the conversion of the oak and beech forests of the Midwest to farm fields massively decreased the food sources that these birds depended on, severely limiting their ability to fatten themselves up for reproduction, and the draining of southern swamps restricted their locations for overwintering.

But of course these same things happened to many other species. Black bears are dependent on acorns and beechnuts to fatten themselves up, have restrictive hibernation requirements, have been aggressively hunted and trapped by people, and never numbered in the multiple billions that passenger pigeons did, and yet they are still around today. Why, then, did passenger pigeons go extinct when so many other bird and mammal species did not? The answer is a quirk of passenger pigeon ecology. Black bears, like mourning doves and whitetail deer and many other species - including humans - are relatively evenly distributed across their range. Sure, there's a few more here where there's a lot of food, and a few less there where hunting pressure is high, but in general they exist in a broad smear across the landscape. Not so passenger pigeons. The very fact that was most remarkable about them, that they traveled in gigantic flocks the size of a thunderhead, was also their doom. These giant flocks were concentrated across the landscape, and so could be easily located and destroyed, whether accidentally or on purpose. If a farmer happened to clear the one forest a flock was nesting in, that might mean tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands who failed to reproduce that year, annihilating the next generation. And hunters were wise to this, seeking out and targeting these particular forests so they could engage in a systematic and industrial slaughter of the birds. To give but one example, there's a record of just such a slaughter in Michigan in the 1870s, where 50,000 birds were killed each day every day for nearly 5 months. 7.5 million birds gone, their progeny, gone, just like that. It is grimly ironic that this ecological quirk probably evolved in part, like the schooling of fish, to decrease the risk of predation on individual birds, but left them vulnerable to these new, invasive predators.

We think of hunting today as something done in small quantities by what are, essentially, hobbyists, but this is a result of an effective conservation movement. In the 19th century, the combination of the new industrial power and an old view of nature resulted in many such giant massacres, and frankly it is a testament to nature's power that more species did not suffer the fate of the passenger pigeon.
 
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DDBCAE CBAADCBE said:
They claim she flew a plane. I think that’s interesting considering she was supposedly 100% blind and deaf. I looked that up by the way. Wasn’t entirely sure she was which would have been a perfect way to explain the inconsistencies but no, everything I found claimed she was entirely blind and deaf, yet somehow flew a place across The Mediterranean.
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They also claim that Emilia Earhart flew a plane, too. LMAO even.

Despite her having full sight and hearing, she was still a friggin' broad. She was a passenger on her famous flight across the Atlantic and when she actually took the controls, she fucking crashed, killing herself and Freddie Noonan.
 
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Harbinger of Kali Yuga said:
A socialist? While I already knew that, I wonder--did Helen Keller even have a goddamn job in her life?
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I dunno. She seemed made for "Activist", which seems to be a job title. Fuck, if the President of the United States can start off being a "Community Organizer" than anything is possible.
Being blind and deaf has got to be a niche market though, in terms of employment.
 
InspectorJappOfficial said:
To give but one example, there's a record of just such a slaughter in Michigan in the 1870s, where 50,000 birds were killed each day every day for nearly 5 months. 7.5 million birds gone, their progeny, gone, just like that.
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The same thing happened with the buffalo. Company, and government issued hunting parties would go out, and kill thousands of them at a time. They went from having millions upon millions of them to just a few hundred in a little over a century because of humans overhunting them since they were relatively easy to kill, numerous, lived in giant herds so you could kill a ton of them at a time, were good sources of meat, fur, hide, and bones, were considered pests by farmers, and because the government actively endorsed it, and paid people to do it. The loss of habitat helped, too.
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That is a literal mountain of buffalo skulls. Anyone who thinks that humans can't wipe out a species numbering in the millions, if not billions, in just a short amount of time is fucking retarded. Humans are fucking killing machines. Christ.
 
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Chuck McGill said:
I did always think it was a bit weird that the technique was never replicated again. I think Keller might have been involved with some push to get Braille books in libraries, but it never sat right with me that whatever Anne Sullivan did was never replicated, and there is no "Keller/Sullivan technique" that we still use today. If I was going to be as optimistic as possible, I still wouldn't be able to look past the fact that Sullivan devised an entirely new technique to speak with the blind and deaf and permitted this knowledge to die with her.
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I seriously doubt you could teach a deaf-blind person of average intellect how to speak. I can't remember the details, but Hellen Keller managed to understand people by feeling the vibrations in their throat and her handwriting is very.. interesting. Generally I think Ms. Keller isn't a fraud.
 
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Bunny Tracks said:
The same thing happened with the buffalo. Company, and government issued hunting parties would go out, and kill thousands of them at a time. They went from having millions upon millions of them to just a few hundred in a little over a century because of humans overhunting them since they were relatively easy to kill, numerous, lived in giant herds so you could kill a ton of them at a time, were good sources of meat, fur, hide, and bones, were considered pests by farmers, and because the government actively endorsed it, and paid people to do it. The loss of habitat helped, too.
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That is a literal mountain of buffalo skulls. Anyone who thinks that humans can't wipe out a species numbering in the millions, if not billions, in just a short amount of time is fucking retarded. Humans are fucking killing machines. Christ.
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Fun fact: The American West isn't supposed to look like this:
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By killing off all the bison and putting up fences, there were no large herbivores around to eat at the shitty scrub so it went wild and fucked up the soil. In a way the Tranch was just continuing the tradition of fucking up the land through misuse.

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NoReturn said:
Fun fact: The American West isn't supposed to look like this:
View attachment 5475757
By killing off all the bison and putting up fences, there were no large herbivores around to eat at the shitty scrub so it went wild and fucked up the soil. In a way the Tranch was just continuing the tradition of fucking up the land through misuse.

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Tumbleweeds are an invasive species like Spanish Moss and fucking Kudzu. What I wouldn’t give to see what this land looked like before we fucked it up.
 
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Mnutu said:
Tumbleweeds are an invasive species like Spanish Moss and fucking Kudzu. What I wouldn’t give to see what this land looked like before we fucked it up.
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It gets even more interesting when you realize a lot of the Americas are the remains of "gardens".
People will look at the plants in the Appalachians and think that's 100% natural, but those were cultivated by the people who lived there before. Similarly, when you hear stories about the rivers teeming with fish, those too were cultivated.
Imagine if suddenly every single chicken building in the midwest - along with the people who ran them - suddenly disappeared, leaving the chickens behind. Anyone who came along for the next 100 or so years (not knowing the history of the region) would just assume chickens are native to Missouri.
 
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