I heard she played a mean pinball.

Didn't mean to trigger you.
Attached File

Are you a Greg Valentine lookalike slut too?

I went to college with a girl who'd been struck by lightning twice. Her laptops and phones always died after a few months of use.

So, i followed your link and went down the rabbit hole a bit. Watched her TED talk.

The first red flag for me is how well she speaks. She is either not completely deaf or she didn't go deaf until a later age. Or both.

But that little detail doesn’t make for a good story.

Didn't Keller outlive her?   And continue to communicate after her death?

Was reading up on her and it’s really weird.

Articles are very top level and usually just say how amazing the California school system is.

She is “legally” deaf and blind, but far from deaf and blind it seems.

My understanding is the “serious communication” stopped. Kind of hard to find out what actually went on regarding that after her death.

Would like if someone had info that spelled it out.

You're the one making the extraordinary claim.   Keller outlived Sullivan and continued to communicate.   She learned to speak out loud.  
Hell, she pulled a Brandon and plagiarized a story she had been told by her caregivers 3 years earlier. You can see the fraud they are worried about is plagiarism, not her ability to read and write.   Article from American Annals of the Deaf Vol. 37, No. 2 (APRIL, 1892) https://www.jstor.org/stable/44461452?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Everything I've read confirms she was a rarity, but that she was not a fraud.

So far you have used "she has the same opinions as her teacher" and "the majority of blind and death people never duplicate her success" Neither of those are evidence of anything.  We bitch about colleges indoctrinating our children.  The same person taught her from her childhood hears until the teacher's death, if I'm doing my math right that is about 50 years of indoctrination.   The majority of people who play basketball will never duplicate the success of Lebron James (many argue he will never duplicate the success of Jordan).

If you have actual evidence, it would be on you to provide it.

I've never believed the hellen keller story as told.

It is exactly that.  

Can’t wait for the next “outrage” edition where Socrates taught Plato and Plato taught Alexander….they’re identical and inauthentic.??

I will absolutely look this up.

If true, then this whole thread is false.

Not sure how I will find that though. Can you link? Are there any sources other than that or is it the sole source?

No it’s not.

It’s discussing something.

As I posted, please provide the evidence you listed.

If it’s legit, this thread will be bull.

sorry somehow the link got deleted

I readded it there as well.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44461452?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

doubletap

I would recommend reading the whole article.  It's pretty good and addresses some of the claims repeated in this thread.

From those 4 pages, it doesn’t seem to address much at all in any sort of concrete way. Will read more tonight.

We're nitpicking now.   We could also discuss the evidence for the moon landings being fake and it would be a discussion.  About a conspiracy theory.   This seems like typical internet edgelord stuff.   I'm not saying you're the edgelord, I'm saying the guy/gal who originally came up with it is.  I, like you, obviously found it interesting enough to discuss.  Hell I find the moon landing stuff interesting to discuss too.   I draw the line at flat eartherism though.  

Merry Christmas to all in this thread and on Arfcom!

is this some extraordinary claim we are supposed to accept without evidence in order to call it extraordinary when we doubt it and demand evidence that it is untrue?

It's not a conspiracy theory. This isn't questioning the scientific method or official historical events. It's OK to question anything, but it's very OK to question legendary anecdotal stories like this one. Is there any current, verified, from birth blind and deaf person today that is communicating in the way they claim Hellen Keller did?

@nightstalker

If it is a "new low" to believe the truth, what does it make those who believe lies?

Bwahaaaahahhahhaaa….

I recall saying it’s probably not.  
Deaf/Blind just seem to be an easy target right?

This thread and specifically the post about children born dead and blind made me look up some vids of parents trying to teach kids born deaf and blind how to communicate and after seeing that shit it made me sad as hell. That must be like what hell is like.  No sense of time, of anyone around you other than something occasionally touching you.

You can’t talk to yourself cause you don’t know what talking is.  You can’t even daydream about something pleasant.

I'm not sure why that is important?   I have no idea if someone caught scarlet fever at 18 months, was rendered blind and deaf, and then had the same success she had.  
She wasn't deaf and blind from birth.  

Keller made use of a personal sign language before her teacher arrived.   She learned Braille.  She learned to speak.   All of this is in the historical record.

If the thesis of the thread is "she wasn't deaf and blind from birth" then I misunderstood.   It's well known she lost her sight and hearing at a very young age.  

My daughter is 18 months old and advance for her age.

She can’t form sentences.

Thanks. It has been a really long time since I heard the story.

Blind/Deaf from birth may be different from blind/deaf from 12 mos. or 19 mos.  Maybe we can stipulate the difference in having “some” language history.  People are arguing past each other on this.

OP, I think you are wrong about this, but I appreciate the unique topic and your willingness to engage with differing opinions.

That probably does make a huge difference.

Same guy has another video where he proves Einstein was a fraud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcIL4kUBZfA

The historical record?  You mean a person told someone that something and it was later told to other people and written down?

What else do you believe?

There are lots of things in the historical record that aren't true but we're reported as fact.

I'm legally deaf now, [congenital]  born partially deaf, over the years I've learned to read lips, [It's not what you think it is]  so that is likely what's going on with her.  you link sound with facial movement as each word and letter has it's own form. I absolutely hate these stupid masks with a passion.

I mean I've watched video of her talking.   She died only a few years before I was born, it's not like this claim is from 2000 years ago.
I'm still not completely sure what the fraud claim is about.

Hopefully the OP will clarify how she was a fraud.

I've gone down the rabbit hole on reddit threads on this and there are different versions
1) she was simply playing finger games the whole time and her handlers used her as their cash cow.    I think this one is obviously false as she did learn to speak, but her "accent" was so atrocious it made her hard to understand.  I have a special needs cousin who is the same way.   The family understands him fine, but others have a hard time.
2) she was either sighted or could hear, but pretended otherwise.   I don't have any way to disprove it, but it can't be proven either.   She was examined many time by medical doctors, so if she was a fraud she was a good one.
3) She did learn to communicate, but her level of communication was at a very low level and her handlers were either fraudulent or true believers who read too much into what she could communicate.   Again, hard to prove or disprove.   The spotlight she was under makes that unlikely imo.   I could be wrong.
4) she didn't exist at all.   Since there are pictures and videos, not sure how anyone can believe that.

eta:  wow people are really fucking crazy.   Found a guy who thinks she was in intelligence agent for socialism and was funded by rockefeller.  He claims to detect an English accent in her speech.   We truly live in clown world.

Good post; neat graphic-quote pair.

I'm not seeing a lot of good info in that article you shared.

The article starts off with lots of verbiage that does nothing but paint her in a good light.

"Veracity is the strongest element of her character."  "She said with great intensity "I love the beautiful truth", not exactly a thorough cross examination.  

Followed up with a "A most rigid examination of the child of about 2 hours, at which eight persons were present and asked all sorts of questions with perfect freedom, failed to elicit in the least any testimony convicting either her teacher or anyone else of the intention or attempt to practice deception."

Well what questions exactly were asked?  What were the responses and how did she respond?

Did they just ask her "Are you lying", or other questions that would really just be softballs?

We don't know, because its not recorded.

I read the rest of it as well, and there really isn't anything that sticks out as, "hey that's a pretty good point, she's probably being upfront about this"

The biggest thing that keeps me from buying this, is that this isn't a case of "most kids don't learn to communicate" but a case of ONLY this kid has learned to communicate.  Is there ANY record anywhere of another child with her handicaps at such a young age learning to communicate as she did? If there was repeatability, I'd buy it, but there isn't.  There are other kids out there who are deaf and blind who learn to communicate, but being blind and deaf are... spectrums.  You may have someone is only partially deaf, or partially blind, or lost their sight at an older age than 19 months, but NO one else has Helen's supposed situation has been able to repeat what she accomplished.  If it HAS happened, please link it.  Not some who's partially deaf and blind, or lost it an older age, but someone with Helen's EXACT situation.  Totally deaf, Totally blind, 19 months old or less.  

Basically this is what I'm saying:

She wasn't 100% deaf and blind.  She was still handicapped mentally, and this was used by Sullivan to espouse her views.  The story of a deaf and blind person becoming able to communicate creates a lot of excitement.  That excitement becomes a platform.  It's happened before, and it its happening now with Greta Thurnberg.  People like to to have symbols, and Helen was a great symbol. That's all it was.

No one knocked any smarts into her???

Your argument would apply equally to anyone who has done something no one else has ever done.   There are people with similar stories, but no exact matches that I am aware of.

The reason we know her name is because the achievement was extraordinary.   She's the blind/deaf Michael Jordan.

The closest I am aware of is Laura Brigman, who lost her sight and hearing at the age of two.   The problem is if you can claim HK is a fraud, you can simply say LB was a fraud as well.  The guy in the video did....

Someone has to be the person who went blind and deaf at the youngest age and still learn to communicate with language.  Afaik, that is HK.

Out of curiosity are you saying she was a puppet and the fraudster was her teacher?   Or that she either had some sight or some hearing and was in on the fraud?    Or something else?

Teacher was the fraudster.  I think she had some awareness of her environment that involved sight and sound as well, but I don't think she was in on the fraud.

Your fingers broke?

Being blind and deaf is probably the only good excuse for being a socialist.

So GD hates Helen Keller now?
What next, "Dinosaurs not real?"

My field is developmental psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and I have worked with congenital deaf blind children. None of them ever developed speech or language. A child who has normal hearing for the first two years of life and then becomes deaf has a tremendous language advantage over one born profoundly deaf. They will have vocabulary and syntax to be tapped into when they lose their sight and hearing.

I have interpreted with hand signs for deaf-blind adults. Everyone of them had become D-B after learning speech and language. All of them were poor signers because they never saw signs while being sighted. It’s quite difficult to learn to move signs in space without reference points.