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PewDiePie Calls Out the 'Old-School Media' For Spiteful Dishonesty
New submitter Shane_Optima writes: After losing his Youtube Red show and his contract with Disney, the owner of the most subscribed channel on Youtube, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (aka "PewDiePie"), has released a video response to the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream news outlets, who have labeled his comedy videos variously as racist, fascist or anti-semitic. In it, he accuses the mainstream media of deliberately fabricating and misrepresenting the evidence used against him because they are afraid of independent content producers such as himself. In the video, PewDiePie discusses the recent actions of the Wall Street Journal, whose reporters sent nine cherry-picked and edited videos to Disney, which led directly to Disney's decision to terminate their relationship with him. These video clips and others used to "prove" PewDiePie's guilt have been edited (he claims) to remove all context, to the extent of using a pose of him pointing at something as a Nazi salute and using a clip where other players are creating swastikas in a game and editing out the part where he is asking them to stop. The most-cited video in the controversy involves seeing if he can use the site Fiverr to hire someone to create a video containing an over-the-top message for a mere $5. After a couple of laughing males unfurl a sign saying "Death to All Jews," he recoils with widened eyes and sits, apparently dumbfounded, for another thirty seconds before the video ends, without him uttering another word.
PewDiePie's video comes several days after a Tumblr post where he attempted to clarify that the videos were intended to be comedy showing "how crazy the modern world is." He has not yet used the phrase "fake news" in his response to the controversy, but given the current trends surrounding that phrase, it isn't surprising that his supporters are resorting to it frequently. Is this all just another unfortunate instance of collateral damage in the war against far-right political movements, is it a campaign of malicious retaliation by old media that is terrified of new media (as Felix claims), or was J.K. Rowling correct when she called out PewDiePie as a Death Eater? Err, I mean, ...as a fascist?
Update: Apparently, canceling his Youtube Red series was deemed an insufficient response. Youtube has now removed the mirror of PewDiePie's "Death to All Jews" video because it "violates Youtube's policy on hate speech." The original posting of the video had already been marked private by PewDiePie shortly after the controversy erupted. A quick check of Vimeo and Daily Motion came up empty, so you're on your own if you wish to find out for yourself what the controversy was all about.
PewDiePie's video comes several days after a Tumblr post where he attempted to clarify that the videos were intended to be comedy showing "how crazy the modern world is." He has not yet used the phrase "fake news" in his response to the controversy, but given the current trends surrounding that phrase, it isn't surprising that his supporters are resorting to it frequently. Is this all just another unfortunate instance of collateral damage in the war against far-right political movements, is it a campaign of malicious retaliation by old media that is terrified of new media (as Felix claims), or was J.K. Rowling correct when she called out PewDiePie as a Death Eater? Err, I mean, ...as a fascist?
Update: Apparently, canceling his Youtube Red series was deemed an insufficient response. Youtube has now removed the mirror of PewDiePie's "Death to All Jews" video because it "violates Youtube's policy on hate speech." The original posting of the video had already been marked private by PewDiePie shortly after the controversy erupted. A quick check of Vimeo and Daily Motion came up empty, so you're on your own if you wish to find out for yourself what the controversy was all about.
Which is totally BS. Chomsky got blacklisted as antisemitic while defending the freedom-of-speech of a French university professor. Just the same way people calling out black-on-black violence are being tainted as "racist". Just the same way people calling out the abuse of "feminism" are being called "misogynist".
Jews haven't had a "homeland" in more than 2000 years. Putting natives population in camps so that you can move somewhere your great-great-great-("...-"*100)-great-grand-father lived is just plain wrong.
Ben Shapiro
In his own words:
Donald Trump’s nomination has drawn anti-Semites from the woodwork.
I’ve experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump’s candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They’ve blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children to be thrown into a gas chamber.
And here's a breitbart piece on the subject...
He has started playing the victim on Twitter and throwing around allegations of anti-semitism and racism, just like the people he used to mock.
Ben, no one hates Jewish people.
" I don't care if he stomps kittens in his spare time"
to each his own but animal abuse is on my list of psychotic behavior. wouldn't want anything to do with such a person.
But that's the goddamn point! I'm not "having anything to do" with PewDiePie! I mean, I'm not offering to mow his lawn or perform oral sex on him. This is about ideas and institutions and honesty and intellectual honesty.
We are going to play the my-user-id-is-lower-than-yours-so-I-am-right game? Ok, I'm in.
The problem is that he is right. And it's not even about nazi jokes. And, for the record, until a week ago all I know about that guy was that he is one of the "big" YouTubers. I neither knew nor cared just what he showed on his channel, all I knew is that I spend a lot of time watching YouTube and that I haven't seen a single one of his videos, so our interests apparently don't overlap too much.
Sadly that guy has now become the topic of channels I DO watch. Which in turn meant that I got way more information about the whole shit than I wanted. So what does go on here?
Apparently that guy made some "funny" videos. YMMV and it sure ain't hitting my particular style of comedy, but it seems that he's making some rather crude and not-too-PC comedy. At least that's what I got so far. And he's had his run-in with various "traditional" news media before who in turn don't report too favorably about him.
What caused the whole shit now was some webpage where you can pay people so they do what you want them to do and they make videos about it. According to him, all he wanted to do is show people just what kind of crap people will do for just 5 bucks. Was it tasteless? You bet. But what it also was is a commentary on our overly materialistic society where people will do anything for a quick and easy buck. That much he proved.
What happened next was the WSJ doing a montage of some of his earlier works by cutting it in such a way to make him appear like he was actually a Nazi. I took the time to actually watch the footage they took the snippets from, and what I can say is that they were taken WAY out of context. By the logic they applied they could turn Bruno Ganz into a Nazi because he played Hitler in The Downfall.
There is something very, very wrong going on here, and by that I don't mean that guy paying those other two guys to present that "death to all jews" banner. This is being taken way, WAY out of proportion, and I'd really like to know why. What did that guy do that made the WSJ so afraid that they go out of their way, even throwing their journalistic integrity into the gutter, just to destroy him?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If he was truly horrified by what he and they did
Your posts and others like it are rather like the arguments that seek to conflate the contents of leaked documents with the personalities of Assange, Snowden and Manning. All three of them could turn out to be cynical trolls or just plain horrible people, but that wouldn't make their revelations worth ignoring.
Likewise, PDP could be a troll and it wouldn't change one iota the underlying gravity of the situation. Youtube and other social media have been slowly clamping down in recent months, the Wall Street Journal was an active participant in getting Youtube and Disney to act against PewDiePie here, and in the aftermath they are openly and brazenly talking about it all in the context of online media giants needing to crack down on free speech everywhere.
[trimmed ad hominem attack]
Insults found in in the conclusion of an argument (in the "then") cannot, by definition, be an ad hominem. Only insults in the premise or logical induction of an argument (in the "if") can qualify, and they do not automatically qualify simply by being insults. On a simpler note: an ad hominem is not an "attack"; it is an informal logical fallacy. The rules of politeness are entirely orthogonal to the rules of factual or logical correctness.
Sorry, but this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
But let me clarify what I said in that "ad hominem" a bit: yes, PewDiePie could have been acting with those facial expressions. That's entirely conceivable. What is not up for debate with anyone who understands human emotion is that that reaction presented (fake or real) was, in fact, one of shock and horror. You can't plausibly twist it around to make it out to be a neo-Nazi slyly winking at the camera. There's no undercurrent of that sort whatsoever. Someone pretending to by anti-semitism (or the ease with which it can be produced) is, in the absence of evidence establishing ulterior feelings and motives, more or less as good as someone who really is offended.
Consider The Producers, where there is a scene celebrating Hitler and Nazism and then a shot of an audience looking horrified at the scene celebrating Nazism. Except, the audience wasn't *really* horrified. They were actors pretending to horrified. Does it then follow that Mel Brooks and/or the audience were anti-Semitic? Does it then follow that the movie as a whole contains an anti-Semitic message?