And Fox is, as she sees herself, supremely well-positioned to take on such a task: having no background in, interest in, or understanding of the processes or role of evidence in disciplines such as history and archaeology: “I haven't spent my entire life building a career in academia so I don't have to worry about my reputation or being rebuked by my colleagues, which allows me to push back on the status quo. So much of our history needs to be re-examined.” I.e., her lack of understanding, knowledge or background makes her more qualified than the experts. In fact, Fox’s credentials stem not only from her lack of background in archaeology or history: Fox “just hated school, period. I wasn’t interested and I wasn’t getting anything from it. I’ve never been a big believer in formal education,” she says, and “to get caught up in something that you don’t feel totally right about or that doesn’t make sense to you is a really, really bad idea.” Her status as a maverick outsider – a veritable Galileo, even – should in other words be ensured. (It does admittedly seem correct that she didn’t get anything from her stints in formal education and that the contents didn’t make sense to her.) And though she doesn’t fancy ‘formal education’, she has ostensibly been long obsessed with “the history of ancient cultures, people and places, always questioning their ‘documented’ story,” according to a Travel Channel spokesperson, and she is a great fan of shows like Ancient Aliens.
The series, “an epic and personal journey across the globe” that will challenge “the conventional wisdom that has existed for centuries”, was apparently set to delve into silly and nonsensical questions like “whether Amazon women really existed or if the Trojan War was real” – the target audience presumably being in particular people who would assume that the fact that her journey was “personal” adds credibility to whatever nonsense Fox comes up with.
We admit that we cannot be bothered to watch the results – they seem, based on reports from people who actually bothered to watch them, to have been rather blander than they were initially supposed to be, but still full of misinformation, nonsense and desperate attempts to portray well-established facts as somehow novel and game-changing.
Diagnosis: Being uninformed and a know-nothing doesn’t make you a loon. But when you add in some self-delusion and delusions of grandeur, like the idea that you nevertheless (or, in this case, because of your status as uninformed) have anything to contribute are in a special position to reject the claims and views of those who really do know something, things change. And Megan Fox certainly combines her complete lack of insight or understanding with serious confidence in the value of her perspectives on issues.
Hat-tip: Sciencealert
I never watch the Travel Channel since they have so much bullcrap on that channel, is Megan Fox's show still active? Or has it been canceled?
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