Historical ASMR ~ my favourite concepts from first year :) (soft-spoken/whisper ramble)

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:01]Hey there everyone.

[00:00:05]Hello and welcome back to another ASMR video.

[00:00:14]I was struggling to get to sleep because in the UK right now it is 34° and my room my room feels it. So, I thought because it's coming to the end of my first year at university, I should make a historical facts video on my favorite things I've learned this year because I think all the Reddit facts are overused.

[00:00:52]I say that as if my last two videos were primarily constituted out of Reddit facts that I thought were niche and they were not niche. But we move.

[00:01:07]So I'm going to be talking about kind of weird things, disjointed bits of history.

[00:01:13]And I don't in tend to perpetuate the idea that everyone's going to find it interesting.

[00:01:26]I think it's interesting and at the minute you can just listen and maybe you'll find it interesting too.

[00:01:39]So the most the current thing that I'm researching this is for my last project of the year is of the HIV AIDS crisis.

[00:01:57]HIV first appeared in 1981.

[00:02:03]It wasn't called HIV. Then they identified this group in both New York and I believe it was LA who presented with a very rare form of cancer.

[00:02:19]They were young gay men who had no other known risk factors.

[00:02:25]And so HIV began with the acronym grid.

[00:02:36]which was meaning gay related immuno deficiency along that lines. So HIV wasn't called that first. It was only after HIV began to appear in drug users and hemophiliacs and other groups that it got called something else. Um, which is interesting and I probably can't divulge exactly what my question is because I think the uni would go insane.

[00:03:13]But I think one of the more interesting things that you can apply to things like that is a concept called bio power which is by this guy who the historians think is a saint.

[00:03:31]Michelle Fuko.

[00:03:33]He was this uh French philosopher, historian, sociologist.

[00:03:40]You can kind of call Fuko, whatever you want to call him. And you think this guy was a saint. I think this guy called David Halper and he actually wrote a book called St. Vo. That's how big this guy is. I go.

[00:03:57]Um and so the concept of bio power it works on this other concept that uh Fuko called subjectification.

[00:04:11]So if we take the French revolution as an example or things like that, maybe even Henry VII, Henry VII doesn't like his wives.

[00:04:23]He doesn't like people. So what does he do? He guillotines them. So rule and power was articulated directly through like shows of violence.

[00:04:35]So you you kind of forced into submission if you didn't like if you didn't like the ruler. Tough luck.

[00:04:43]You rebel against the ruler. You get your head chopped off. It's pretty simple. But Fuko says that with the decline of this direct power, it's become more implicit in our society. So power is still there, but it works instead of through the guillotine.

[00:05:03]It works in the background through subjectification which is where you an individual a thinking individual become the subject of the state.

[00:05:19]you are instilled with social norms and ideas of ideal behavior like uh in AIDS crisis like heterosexuality, abstinence, not having sex before marriage, stuff like that. Um and those norms make you a subject and you're kind of like controlled, not not outright. You still have free will but your actions are kind of controlled subtly by the state instead.

[00:05:53]Anyways, that's subjectification explained in very simple terms.

[00:06:01]Um so bio power is the argument that the ultimate expression of power is to decide who lives and who dies.

[00:06:15]So it's where the states power has become invested into living bodies.

[00:06:21]So for instance we say that people who are innocent should live and some criminals should die. Or in the context of HIV and AIDS we say all the straight people are all moral. They are abiding by the social norms. They should survive.

[00:06:46]And the gay people and people who aren't white should die.

[00:06:51]That's by it groups people into like distinct biological groups.

[00:07:04]Obviously homosexual homosexuality isn't like debatable whether it's biological but you get the gist.

[00:07:16]And so each group is like separated biologically and power differentiates them in a hierarchy which is interesting.

[00:07:28]Very interesting.

[00:07:32]Very very interesting.

[00:07:35]So those are random things I've learned from I'm only I'm only like a week into reading for this course work. I have another two weeks to do. Um but we'll move on. Another thing is another thing that I think a lot of people will find interesting is wars.

[00:07:56]So before Napoleon so before 1800 wars were traditionally conducted by the aristocracy.

[00:08:07]So between the wars of religion which were in the I believe 16th to 17th centuries things like that didn't have any rules about like just war or like prisoners prisoner of war rights because states would hire foreign mercenaries they'd hire from places like Switzerland or um Germany. England hired lots and lots of troops I believe from Saxony to fight in the American Revolution.

[00:08:49]So it wasn't exactly British.

[00:08:53]It might not have been from Saxony. It was definitely from Germany. Um so yeah, mercenaries were hired from foreign countries. So the state felt it didn't need to protect them cuz they were already not state citizens and so there was no rights or anything.

[00:09:14]And it was only with the French Revolution that I really that this began to change because when the war was fought by the aristocracy in the French Revolution, this big guy, one of the biggest names names I believe Emanuel CZ um and he was a revolutionary leader and he published this pamphlet titled what is the third state.

[00:09:52]So France in the before the French revolution was structured into three classes or three orders. You had three estates even the first state, second state, third estate.

[00:10:09]First state I believe was okay. The first and the second states were the clergy nobility and they made they basically made all the decisions.

[00:10:22]Clergy no ability. They have all the power. Imagine our billionaires. That's that's the first and second estate.

[00:10:29]Third estate was made up of like the best tree workers.

[00:10:33]And the revolutionaries believe that the third estate should be the one that had all this power had the power because they represented the masses they represent the norm people. So in what is the third estate CZ said that aris everyone is we should renounce all privilege. No one could be more privileged than another.

[00:10:59]And the aristocracy by virtue of being privileged were a danger to society. They were a danger to society and they were not part of the third estate.

[00:11:18]So essentially CZ kind of banned the aristocracy from France.

[00:11:23]And so when Austria, Britain, France's neighbors, Prussia begin to see that um France is revolting. France is weak. France is open. We can steal the land. We can get all the money. We can get all the riches.

[00:11:49]France has no one to protect them.

[00:11:50]They've just got rid of the aristocracy.

[00:11:52]Who are they going to have to protect them?

[00:11:56]So the revolutionary leaders come up with a big idea.

[00:12:02]The le and mass which is essentially mass conscription.

[00:12:09]Originally it was meant to be a kind of voluntary thing. It was everyone was meant to be instilled with the revolutionary spirit and everyone would want to volunteer for the nation and protect the nation and then they realized that rhetoric wouldn't work. Then they realized that rhetoric would work and they had to make it mandatory.

[00:12:36]So the least that all Frenchmen it's important Frenchmen they tied it to nationality. So to be a citizen you have to be French. It got rid of the foreign mercenaries and it's claimed as the rise of nationalism.

[00:12:56]All Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the armed forces of aiding armed forces. Men were sent to fight. Women were sent to like help in industry.

[00:13:13]Old men were meant to stand in the market square and pedal stories about French successes.

[00:13:21]Children were meant to help make cloth.

[00:13:24]It was they were pretty intense and pretty industrial.

[00:13:34]So everybody was included.

[00:13:37]It was a national level.

[00:13:40]They say that's the rise of nationalism.

[00:13:43]So nationalism didn't just come because everyone just decided to be patriotic.

[00:13:47]It was mainly because the French kind of shot themselves in the film and they need people to protect them.

[00:13:56]Or at least that's how I interpreted it in my readings.

[00:14:04]My two favorite topics of the year were actually to do with plants. And that sounds really boring but the first one was how like if you know colon so you came up with binomial nomenclature so homo sapiens like that love to name you see in species that's that's colon it was about how his naming system erased indigenous knowledge because we imposed kind of western system of representation onto indigenous people. Um so it's like how language is a medium of imperialism and it was applied to plants like the bread fruit.

[00:14:54]The bread fruit is a very interesting history because um essentially when the American Revolution happened um or before the French the Brit American Revolution, Britain wanted to quell the spirit of liberty in the colonies and so they passed a series of acts to restrain colonial self-government and isolate economically.

[00:15:25]But slave owners on like the islands of St. Vincent in kind of like peninsula, they complained that these economic things, economic restrictions made it expensive for them to feed their slaves.

[00:15:43]And so they asked Joseph Banks, who was one of the um directors of Cute Gardens, um let me just check that. I swear I swear he was. Anyways, they asked Joseph Banks and they go, "Joseph Banks, can we get the bread fruit, please?"

[00:16:07]Cuz it was meant to be a superfood.

[00:16:11]both banks and this guy called John Ellis had falsely betrayed the um Oh no, sorry. Joseph Banks was um leader of the president of the Royal Society and advised King George on Q. It was her that was My apologies, guys.

[00:16:44]I'm a bit rusty. The exams were like a month ago. Um, anyways, they kind of changed like indigenous perspectives on the bread fruit and they were like, "Oh, the bread fruit's the best thing ever.

[00:16:59]It's so nutrientdense." Even though the indigenous people were like, "It'll kind of make you full." They're like, "No, the bread fruit is the best thing ever.

[00:17:08]It's going to fill everybody up. You can just eat bread fruit like it's a fruit of Eden. You don't have to do any work.

[00:17:15]The bread fruit which always be obviously fake news. Um and they sent out this ship called the Bounty to get the bread fruit and transport it from Tit all the way to America.

[00:17:30]And then the people in the bounty mutinied. There's like a famous film about it that I haven't watched. Um, I don't watch any films really. I'm too lazy.

[00:17:41]Um, so I had to send out another ship.

[00:17:47]But in I believe it's in Tahesian mythology, the bread fruit comes from a man who like sacrifices himself for his family.

[00:18:00]In Vanutu, it comes from the the the breast of a daughter who like sacrifices and it turns into a bread fruit to feed her mother and sister and then in Hawaii comes from it comes from someone's testicles, a dead man's testicles.

[00:18:18]So while Joseph Banks and all these like colonial people are like, "Wow, the bread fruit's great.

[00:18:30]the the people want to eat tea in Valatu in Hawaii are not are not convinced which is probably why when the bread fruit was finally introduced the the slaves didn't eat it um cuz why would they just been imposed on them the final thing I could tell you a lot Well, this is my best topic this year was the great divergence.

[00:19:04]So why Europe or specifically Britain went so far ahead in the world than China in the early modern period and it was about energy availability.

[00:19:20]So before coal everybody had to use um energy generated from the lands. The only way that you could make energy was through photosynthesis cuz there was no coal.

[00:19:38]It just so happened that Asia produced four times a hector of land to what Europe could produce, which meant they could sustain a very large population and much less land, which meant that in their economy because they had such a high population, it was so easy to intensify agriculture because one field could feed a family whereas in Europe you needed 15.

[00:20:11]um they had so many people that they they relied on labor intensive modes of production whereas in Europe they relied on capital intensive which is like machinery animals which kind of move them structurally like they were more inclined to industrialize cuz industrialization doesn't always mean progress and it was also because of this argument called those stakers.

[00:20:42]Britain was able to expand into the Americas and virtually like steal American production and make it their own. So they could like symbolically extend Britain's industrial potential and they could break free of the limits of photosynthesis which only converts not 4% of energy at its maximum like usefully.

[00:21:08]So photosynthesis sucks.

[00:21:11]And sustainably if it was to cover the whole of Britain, which is 60 million acres or so in woodland, you could produce 2.5 million tons of iron.

[00:21:29]China in 2008 used to 500 million.

[00:21:33]>> So you can't do anything sustainably without gold.

[00:21:38]So, it was it was really Cole was the big player.

[00:21:42]But, okay, I think I've yapped for enough weird concepts now. Um, it's a very different type of historical kind of facts video. I suppose it's not facts, it's just historical ramble, but I hope you enjoyed it.

[00:21:59]Hasn't cooled down at all. I'm still not going to be able to sleep, but at least I have a fun video out of it. Thank you very much for watching. Good night.