BIGGER Kentucky James XXL said:
Some of his worst and most misinformative videos are built around the idea that you can just brute-force common sense logic your way to the answer when doing history. He made a similarly terrible video where he claims that towns in medieval Britain had no nearby natural forests because they were all cultivated or coppiced. He ignores all the clear evidence to the contrary just because he likes the thrill of the whole "thing you assumed/liked was WRONG!!!1!" thing that guardian readers jack off to. It also doesn't help that he's just a modern middle class larper and thinks this equates to front line experience in the battlefield. The cavalry sabre video and the overarm spear video are some of the worst, but he's surely made even worse ones since then.
He gets a lot of things wrong, that he could've easily gotten right just by doing a little bit more research. Like his video about how Chinese dictionaries work. He just made something up and argued against it, when even if he had just done a simple google search he would've realized he was completely wrong. Or his video about legionary soldiers not using two pila, and said he couldn't find any sources or information about it. He didn't read Polybius, which is where we even get the idea from? He didn't read Caesar's Gallic Wars? He didn't look up the grave steles that depict soldiers carrying two pila?
You even mention his overarm spear video, what makes it even more hilarious is that one of his pieces of "evidence" that the Greeks used their spears underarm is the Boeotian shield, yet says that artistic depictions of overarm spear usage is fantasy/artistic license, despite the fact that there are no archaeological finds of the Boeotian shield and it only exists in art.
He's good at talking and sounding authoritative, but he uses his own modern logic a lot more than he looks for evidence, and then presents his thoughts as something more than just being his ideas and questions about a specific thing that more often than not could be answered by looking at the sources more (or in some cases in his videos, at all).
