Anonymous asked: why is crash course human geography getting hella dislikes?

A combination of factors.

1. It’s very early, and it seems to have been a mistake to start out saying “Environmental Determinism is wrong because it’s way more complicated than that” without being explicit about the fact that the entire rest of the course was going to be about why it’s more complicated than that. People seem to think we’ve set ourselves up as the “Environmental Determinism is wrong and we debunked it” show when, in fact, this is the “Pure Environmental Determinism is not the whole story and we’re tired of people pretending like it is” show.

2. I think people aren’t used to seeing young women as credible sources of information, even when they are. I think if it was me saying those words, there would be pushback, but not anything like we’re seeing. But I also don’t think we’re going to move past that mindset by never giving young women a chance to be the purveyor of credible information. We picked Miriam because she knows what she’s talking about and she’s comfortable in front of the camera.

I had the following thought several times, “People aren’t going to see her as credible.” But then I thought, “Is that because she isn’t” and the answer was “No, it’s because of how people will see her, not because of what she knows.” So we went with it.

3. I think it’s weird how defensive and angry people have gotten, and that’s likely about the anchors a people have formed around discussions privilege and prejudice. We had the same thing happen when discussing how language can be dangerous in both overt and subtle ways on CC Philosophy. There’s just a lot of tension and frustration and even anger about that stuff right now.

EDIT: We took a deeper look at this and have decided that the problems with the second episode in particular (conflating Jared Diamond with racist colonial geographers, and not making it clear that environment is an extremely important part (just not the only part) of human geography) set the series off on very shaky footing. We’ve decided to re-work the series and take down the first episodes. It’s a bummer, but we think it’s the right thing to do.