unironically can't bring myself to hate her though because she was one of the people who made me start to see some of the cracks in capitalist realism
As a kid it was fun to see so many people lining up at the book store and then to talk about how many chapters you read with your friends the next day. If you were a certain age, literally everyone that you knew read these books. I think your average politically illiterate Potter-head is just nostalgic for the last time they felt like they felt a sense of shared culture.
It got signal boosted entirely because a publishing company chose to, not on any of its own merits.
And then Chris Columbus colonized their imaginations with the first few films
Seems good, 20 minutes in though because I can't watch these things all in one sitting. I will be continuing it later. Skipped ahead a few times to peek at a few things and enjoyed her teardown of Vaush, good to see she's not putting up with him either at least, our campaign made him utterly unlikeable even to libs like Contra.
Hard to support Ian "Who among us hasn't stumbled into child porn in a masturbatory haze" Kochinski
Oh yes absolutely he is hard to support, but I'd wager a tonne of fuckers out there are just as unsupportable but nobody has taken the time or effort to truly dig their skeletons out and publicise them extremely widely like we did. Honestly the most successful thing this community has achieved was making sure Vaush was completely marginalised among both the real left and anyone wanting to not ruin their reputation by association such as libs like contra.
My main hobby on :reddit-logo: before I quit was reminding people on any post about him that he threatened to SA a girl who had been a victim of it because she wouldn't fuck him.
enjoyed her teardown of Vaush, good to see she’s not putting up with him either at least, our campaign made him utterly unlikeable even to libs like Contra.
:sicko-fem:
How is this not pt. 1 of a series she'll never finish?
Anyway, i'll give this a try. I have a ton of gripes with her, especially when it comes to her opinions about transness and how to deal with transphobes, but i'm also a sucker for fancy costumes and somehow she still manages to make me laugh.
Edit: TIL that orange juice unironically used to be super homophobic, would not have expected that.
You know, I feel like people focus a lot on concision to the point where it becomes self-defeating. Maybe that's just because I'm a blowhard, but the way some people stress brevity above all other qualities makes me think they want a world where you ask the computer for a readout and it prints a summary like something out of Neuromancer (or, you know, Google Chatbot or whatever it's called). Sometimes you need the longform to make or refine your point. Sometimes a book is better than a pamphlet. For instance I wouldn't change a word of Shaun's videos on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the other hand, I have watched a lot of youtube videos that clearly need an editor. That could have been just a couple minutes long instead of a half an hour. Or that might have been better as a ~500 word blog post somewhere. I haven't watched this video, and I probably won't because I feel like I'm up on the ongoing controversy that is JK Rowling, so I'm not judging its quality. And I've seen Contrapoints' stuff before, liberalism aside she does good work, if perhaps a little bit self indulgent(but she is a professional YouTuber, so I suppose that comes with the territory). So maybe every second of its one hour and fifty-five minutes is justified. Or maybe it doesn't need to justify itself because it is transformative or artistic in someway, beautiful on its own merits so what does it matter if it's not perfectly 'useful'.
I started off wanting to complain about the length of the vid (that I've no intention of watching, so good on me) and argued my way around to "actually it's great that it's two hours." But when I said that I've seen videos that needed an editor, I guess I wasn't necessarily thinking of creators like Contra, or Philosophy Tube, or Folding Ideas. Well, maybe sometimes, but they're far from the worst offenders. I guess what I was really thinking of are those videos that are like "3 hour retrospective on Mass Effect Andromeda 5 years later", or an hour long video that's basically just the phrase "The Witcher 3 is really good" over and over, or a lot of the amateur film video essays (and sometimes even the not so amateur ones), which just don't seem to have a lot to offer, critically. Then again, they seem to find an audience. Hell, maybe I'm just cranky.
I can't tell if you wrote this 3 paragraph essay to drive your point home, or if it was an ironic subversion
that obnoxious elder scrolls youtuber that makes 3 part morrowind reviews that are 8 hours each :screm-a:
i watched one when he first started getting recommended, not very good and def cant justify the length, but it was okay for background noise
thats true but this dude was just self-sucking giving an "analysis" of the game (just a review where he discusses every single part of the game and his all-important opinion of it)
lore vids are cool, but true lorebeards read UESP and The Imperial Library
He even admits that most of this stuff keeps getting retconned one game later anyways
i think its cool that a lot of these retcons get explained by bethesda. there's the common explanation "there are different accounts by unreliable narrators" and then they have the occasional "Talos achieved CHIM and then retroactively changed the landscape of an entire region, so the region was simultaneously always plains and at one time jungle"
All the "X old game is GREAT actually" videos where half of the "essay" is a step by step story recap with very little input beyond a lazy joke here and there come to my mind when I think of overly long videos with no purpose. At least Contra and the like try to have more substance, even if I don't personally enjoy it.
This has some interesting stuff on the 1970s anti-lgbt movement and is probably more interesting for that and it's direct relation to JK, rather than any commentary on her proper.
I have a few gripes, but it's better than her previous videos.
i get it, i couldn't be bothered to watch more than 10 minutes of it myself anyway
i will continue to watch zero contrapoints and everything philosophy tube puts out. abigail thorn >> natalie
dunno, don't care tbh. i think philosophytube basically does the same thing contra is trying to do as a project, but better, and without having insane takes on trans people.
She's too liberal for this site and she has that smugness to her that, if you don't 100% agree with what she's saying, can be really annoying.
I unfollowed her a while ago but I recognize what she has done for the online left, she was my introduction to left-wing ideas and led me down the pipeline and I know I'm far from the only one.
Yeah I have linked her videos a few times to specific libs in my life for that purpose.
Maybe because she's consistently had dogshit takes about non-binary people or how we're taking "transness" too far:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FALanv5X0AAKFV8?format=jpg&name=large
https://i.redd.it/ajbynqy3f1k31.jpgBefore anyone jumps in with the, "But she's made x y z videos claiming she supports these people," you can claim whatever you want all day. Doesn't really matter if your actions don't back that up. Just how my mom's a lib that keeps insisting she's my ally, but in the next sentence will go on about how it/its pronouns are dehumanizing and refuses to use them.
✅weird trans gatekeeping (I have never seen someone say you “don’t have to be trans to be trans”, the closest I’ve ever seen is just basic anti-transmedicalism, this entire take tastes like transmedicalism)
This is literally transmedicalism. She platforms transmedicalists.
exclusionary of sex-positive ace people, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what ace people are (they lack sexual attraction, not libido)
really makes you think
What does a person without sexual attraction, but with libido, jack off to? Architecture?
Every top comment in that thread has a different definition for "sex positive ace" in it. Top comment says that "sex positive" means you want sex despite not being attracted to anyone in particular, top reply says that it actually means you don't want sex but you're willing to do it if your partner wants it, third comment says that the "sex positive" part actually means that you're fine with other people having sex. Then there's "allosexual" which apparantly means "you can like sex and you can be attracted to someone (except when you aren't)", which is such a broad fucking definition I would say that it applies to the entire human race.
I'm not trying to "gotcha" your identity, I'm just pointing out that saying that "I'm asexual (but sometimes I'm sexual)" is a pretty blatant and obvious self contradiction.
saying that “I’m asexual (but sometimes I’m sexual)” is a pretty blatant and obvious self contradiction.
Except that asexuality is a spectrum and most people who aren't constantly horny fall somewhere in an area one could describe as a "blatant and obvious self contradiction" if we write off such grey areas as paradoxical. There's asexual orientations that are so normal most people never even get the idea that there could be a label for how they feel, like demisexual. It's actually really productive to let go off the notion that asexuality = robotic Mr. Spock kind of person. I mean, it's also a whole lot less offensive to ace people, but it's also kind of a prerequisite to understand the full extend of human sexuality and i don't mean that in a "understand a low single digit percentile of people who never get aroused and never have relationships" kind of way, i mean that in an "understand how the majority of people feels and frequently doesn't feel sexual desire" kinda way.
Those strike me as extremely mild posts that make sense for a trans person in their 30s who has to constantly interact with significantly younger ppl to make but clearly mileages vary
she lost her compassion ticket when she repeatedly doubled down on her bullshit and tried to gaslight everyone and then spent 2 years whining about being canceled.
that was so frustrating. she literally got genuine academic criticism of her work and she lumped it all in with the trolls, in order to justify ignoring it.
So, basically what I figured https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
also the only YouTubers that don't meet with scorn here generally shun aesthetics I've noticed
or, you know, it's actually the stuff RedMantis mentioned instead of the minor aesthetic quibbles you're trying to sell as the problem?
philosophy tube is much more widely respected here and she leans ultra-heavy into aesthetics and theatricality.
Then she flirted with some transmedicalist arguments? Or maybe people just thought she did idr
It's one of the big issues with the Theater Kid Artsy Fartsy styles that all of these YouTubers keep going into is that it can be incredibly unclear what they actually mean by things and when you start getting into implications, well takes on what is meant are always going to differ.
But yeah, I've yet to see a good reaction to "being cancelled". I guess that's because the good reaction to it is to just ignore it entirely or put out a statement saying "Sorry, I don't actually think X, misunderstanding I communicated poorly." because it never seems to actually affect their stardom most of the time until they themselves make it an issue.
But yeah, I’ve yet to see a good reaction to “being cancelled”.
Just convince yourself that being right and posting harder will let you win stupid online arguments with stupid birdapp fascists, like BadEmpanada does
There's a lot of good responses to being cancelled online. You just don't hear about it because it doesn't make the news. People reupload videos with adjustments when called out.
Then she flirted with some transmedicalist arguments?
Well i wouldn't call her an actual transmed, but her reaction to the whole Buck Angel controversy was extremly disappointing to say the least. To me, she mostly came off as a stubborn fangirl unable to admit that her favorite porn star nowadays spends all day kissing the asses of terfs (i'm serious, he's palling around with Sal Grover and the likes). It was an incredibly inconsiderate and dumb decision to feature him in one of her vids, and it was even dumber and more inconsiderate not to remove that tiny segment of platforming one of the worst traitors to our community. That she built most of her career on whining about cancel culture after that debacle rubbed further salt into the wound.
I wouldn't go as far as calling her transmedicalist herself. She has to my knowledge never come forth in favor of medical gatekeeping of trans healthcare, she's never tried to be one of the good ones for terfs, she's never been clearly enbiephobic or questioned the validity of other trans people, she's very openly and thoroughly spoken out about transhomophobic concepts like AGP, so she does not tick any of the obvious transmed boxes.
She does have the awful, self-defeating hangups of a former /tttt/ poster, tho, which is hardly surprising given that she lurked that hellsite early in her very public transition when users there would take apart her looks in every new vid she dropped. So she's to a degree stuck in pathologizing views of transness and i also constantly get the impression that she plainly does not get the concept of gender identity, which would explain a ton of things. I'm not gonna go into further detail here, this part of the topic isn't a conversation i'm having in spaces where cis people are present because they'll inevitably take flawed, incomplete assumptions away from that conversation due to having zero experience navigating dysphoria and the pressures of performing transfemininity, i'll just say that some of her views are dogshit and that her approach towards the trans experience is not one i would recommend baby trans to emulate.
I agree with this, it's frustrating how every time she gets mentioned we have to veer wildly between "she's a transmedicalist who hates enbies" and "people hate her because she's pretty".
there's also very clearly a lot of transmisogyny lumped in with it as well, even here (see the comment misgendering her). but she's also got pretty shitty views on NBs and comes a little close to the transmedicalist line for comfort. (+ liberalism, obviously)
Yeah, it's a messy, difficult situation. It's why i'm always very skeptical when online drama focusses on trans people, especially trans women. We're not above having crappy takes and we shouldn't be exempt from criticism, but people have this habit of immediately getting more vitriolic when the crappy take comes from a woman, and that goes doubly for women who are also marginalized in other ways. On one hand i'm like "there's millions of white cishet dudes with the same opinion and thousands of them have bigger reach than this girl, why not dunk on them instead?", but ofc you can raise criticism of public-facing women that aren't soaked in transmysogyny.
In regards to her "whining about cancel culture", I don't disagree that she handled it poorly but I don't think people here have perspective for what happened to her.
The community lost their collective minds over the controversy and overnight she went from the online left's darling to an enby-hating transmedicalist, I can't imagine how much shit she got from her community and everyone else. Haters affect literally every online figure that isn't a complete sociopath, especially left-wingers whose entire ideology is built on empathy and caring about others. The community reaction was completely disproportional to the mistake that it was, and for the love of god there are still people calling her a transmedicalist because of it, which is a conclusion you can only reach if you twist reality with as much bad faith as you can muster. Imagine thousands of people suddenly declaring you an enemy of the trans community, people which you have dedicated your career advocating for.
Contrapoints deserved backlash for platforming Buck Angel, but she did not deserve the ridiculous shitstorm that she got and I don't think any of us could handle the sheer amount of vitriol that was thrown at her. Hasan sounded like he was about to cry after people harassed him during his charity stream for the earthquake in Turkey, and he's a macho himbo not a terminally online transwoman. It's a lot easier to deal with "cancel culture" when you're a right-wing grifter who doesn't give a shit about anything, but if you actually care about these issues and other people in general, I have to imagine this can really fuck you up.
it started well before this. her video on the Aesthetic got a lot of good faith criticism and she ignored all of it, lumping genuine academic criticism in with trolls.
it seemed to me at the time that buck’s turn for the terf was not well known (or maybe early in the process of even happening) before that vid came out, and has since gotten much worse
idk how much worse it's gotten since then, but i rewatched her canceling vid some time ago because i had only seen it before my egg cracked and wanted to take a new look at it now that i understand that part of the debate. And well, she posts a collage of his tweets and ... they're just awful. Not as bad as the Sal Grover bootlicking i saw recently, but still inexcusable. I'm definitely holding it against her that she doesn't want to judge him on things like literally confirming the "transtrender" concerns of moms who try to keep their kid from going on HRT.
maybe its for the best, but it makes me sad that we can’t have these conversations openly even here.
To clarify, i don't think people here would take it in bad faith, but i have some very strong opinions on certain ways of living with dysphoria and the odds a cis person would misunderstand them and say something dumb and hurtful to a trans person are very real and just not worth it. I'd only have that discussion on our queer boards where it would happen entirely uncoupled from any debate about streamer drama. Today's Contra vid actually has a good example of what could happen when it shows that clip from V*ush where that slimy fuck weaponizes Natalie's substance abuse problems when he's telling his fanbase to harass her. She seems to be in a lot of pain cis people cannot understand and will never be in a position to criticize, and that's different when you've walked a mile in her shoes and can tell her in good faith "girl, you're hurting yourself when you think about your transness like that. Don't do that to yourself." Cis people need an incredibly high amount of second hand experience with trans people to make a call like that, i'm talking stuff like having been in a longterm relationship with a trans person or being a competent gender therapist.
That video was pretty clearly doing the western philosophy thing of "let's put the clearly wrong extremes in dialog to see if we can find truth." So she was making transmedicalist arguments as one character while also making strong-antiessentialist arguments as another character.
Ever since that video she's done less character work and more saying exactly what she means into the camera.
I think her work suffers for it because she's a better artist than philosopher. Like, if you let her explore something as theater and it's ambiguous theb it can be thought provoking and resonant even if her starting place was a tepid lib take.
But when she's talking into a camera, then she just says things like "the problem with capitalism is it's symptoms" or "Biden is the lesser evil go vote for him" and she can't find anything that goes beyond her own mediocre takes.
I used to enjoy her stuff, in spite of her dumber takes. Then I got on and saw her 15 hour "cancelled" video and gave up forever lol.
She helped me come to terms with being trans and helped me be a communist. But she herself is not a communist and she has shitty takes towards nonbinary folks. I kept learning past her videos and learned to hate her for refusing to learn past herself as well.
she got too popular, too pretty, and too rich too fast. it's less to do with anything she says and more to do with how she handles peoples' expectations.
fuck off, she's an NBphobe and doubled down on it and cried about being canceled instead of stopping being shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY0iZTwfqFA
this is immensely bad faith, to the point of being beyond worthless. i don't really have the energy to get into yet another contra debate but you should be able to say you're a fan without pretending everyone who isn't is just an evil jealous hater
if she was just a dumbass lib with bad takes, i really don't see how she'd provoke this kind of response. there's thousands of those. there's clearly something else going on here.
yes, there very clearly is. it's just not what you said because that was a blatant attack on people who don't like her from an obvious fan rather than a genuine attempt to understand why that might be the case. :shrug-outta-hecks:
i'm not saying it's jealousy, i'm saying there are factors that make her considerably more insufferable to the rank and file twitter head. i've read enough of her detractors saying essentially the same thing i'm saying that i don't see what i'm missing.
i’m not saying it’s jealousy
i'm going to take this as the god's honest and level with you: i never would have known that were the case if you didn't say so here, specifically because
she got too popular, too pretty, and too rich too fast. it’s less to do with anything she says
this absolutely screamed "the people who don't like her don't have a valid reason" and i took your stance as such. if that's not how you feel then you have my apologies. in general i haven't noticed this trend in criticism of her on this site and i don't use twitter. add to that the lack of specificity in your original comment and you can see how i potentially misinterpreted your statement.
I'll cop to the fact that I'm a complete simp tho, you got me there.
she's got some bad takes on non-binary people and her politics are pretty lib. like it's fine to watch her stuff and enjoy it, but her tendency to lump good faith criticism in with the trolls makes her pretty unwatchable for me. also like how can someone be so unaware of the consequences of her actions?? she went on a podcast with Hilary Clinton and got rightfully lambasted for it and this video is about the extremely predictable backlash to her agreeing to a "discussion" with JK Rowling, with a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church as a moderator. the only thing that could have ended worse for her was actually going through with it.
occasional cringe and almost doing something bad just not enough to get me raging these days idk
It's a good one. I watch almost everything at 3x speed so I'm not complaining about the length
It's so annoying to have to watch literally everythingt at 1x for what ever dumbass boyfriend I'm dating who somehow also knows English better than me.
It's 2 hours? I guess I can understand why it takes so long to make them.
Contra's frustrating because the concept of her videos is really good but it gets ruined by bad politics and internet drama. Maybe this one will be a return to the good old days.
Contra’s frustrating because the concept of her videos is really good but it gets ruined by bad politics and internet drama. Maybe this one will be a return to the good old days.
ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
On one end of the scale you have ContraPoints-style production, on the other you have Noah Cardwell-Gervais
he's such a treasure. I'd put those videos up against On The Road or pretty much anything else written by the beatniks. genuine art.
edit: oh my god there's a new one I haven't seen
capitalist realism
lol you are literally using the ideas of a PMC art critic, sorry but you are lacking in historical materialism just like Contapoints
Actually Homo Economicus wouldn't be susceptible to false consciousness, so it must not exist
Not a good look to misgender her. And yes, using they/them for people with she/her pronouns absolutely is misgendering, and this crap happens every time we're having a thread about a trans woman with controversial takes. Can we please cut this bs out?
Referring to everyone as the singular they to avoid any sort of prejudicial connotations is prejudicial, actually.
This is not "referring to everyone", this is not talking about an unspecified mass where they/them is the safe choice, this is referring to a particular trans person not using they/them. In a situation like this, where you can't look up her pronouns in her bio and therefore misgender her accidentally, it's obviously a different story than when you're misgendering her on twitter or w/e, which is why i'm commenting directly instead of just reporting for transphobia. And yes, i do that immediately when somebody they/thems me on here, and that will usually result in a ban. Because my fucking pronouns are right next to my name. Always using they/them is not "avoiding prejudicial connotations", it is refusing to use somebody's actual pronouns. It is misgendering with an air of deniability and it always happens when trans women piss somebody off. As soon as we have a take somebody disagrees with, we stop being women for them. idgaf if pointing that out inconveniences somebody, idgaf if it runs counter to the intuitions of people who misunderstand what gender abolition means, it needs to be said because it keeps happening even on here.
singular they is for when you don't know someone's pronouns
or if they prefer them, like meI'm going to give OP the benefit of the doubt, and assume if OP meant to misgender contra, OP would've used masculine pronouns.
(And not self evidently clear, to me at least, that contra would use fem pronouns.)
Terfs do the they/them misgenderinjg thing all the time when they want plausible deniability, it's incredibly naive and completely removed from reality to assume that transphobia, especially lowkey internalized transphobia that people are in denial about, always has to be blatantly obvious.
Regardless of that, the only reasonable and not inherently transphobic reaction to misgendering somebody is to politely correct yourself. Getting snarky or starting a debate about this where you argue why it was ok to misgender a trans person means you have issues with this that you need to work through.
she's a very public trans woman on the record about how much she/her pronouns mean to her. unless you're going to do this to cis people as well, don't do it to binary trans people.
ah yes ofc misgendering trans people is now something we can shrug off passive-aggressively as long as they're libs. :PIGPOOPBALLS:
What's your counter argument because this is a really bad look.
thread #2 of the same tl;dw content creator made a day later at 100+ comments
Jesus Christ
