They bought jackets for all the male staff, but didn't for the females. That's blatent discimination and sexism from a company. Who gives a fuck what it costs? Buy them the fucking jackets, they earnt them as much as the boys.
She explicitly said they had the option to get a "male" jacket. I don't know off the top of my head what makes a leather jacket feminine vs. masculine, but I've seen a woman wearing a leather jacket from the men's section and, as long as the size is right, it looks fine. Feminine versions of clothing generally consists of being tighter or having frivolous trim or something. There's no functional reason to have a separate female version of a leather jacket except to pander to gender stereotypes. Which is itself supportive of a mild form of sexism, not a remedy for sexism. I mean granted, you can make an argument that they should get all female jackets and the men should have to adjust to those, except as I just pointed out male clothing tends towards the more utilitarian[1].
if it makes the employee's work place a nicer place to come to
That has nothing to do with anything. The issue is whether or not it is sexist to not specifically cater to a separate, stereotypical feminine aesthetic. One that's not shared by all females, for that matter. If the women showed up for their first day at work and their computers had the aforementioned hot pink with glittery flowers (without them asking for it) and their male counterparts had normal looking computers, I bet she'd be crying sexism. But it's the same thing in principle. Equality means equality, not asking for special treatment because you're been sociologically conditioned to hate leather jackets if they don't have a fringe or the buttons on the left side or come in pastel colors or whatever the hell it is that's supposed to make a leather jacket feminine.
1. Well, at least as far as jackets go. Women have a clothing advantage in most warmer contexts.
A boss making a pass at an subordinate is not sexism. It's a big problem, yes, and it doesn't sound like Uber handled it very well if the woman's account is accurate, but there wasn't any trace of sexism throughout the entire story that I saw (I was skimming) except for the meeting with the HR woman she briefly described at the very end.
The bulk of her story seemed to be just vague conspiratorial stuff, implying her poor performance reviews under another manager on under team was due to the original boss's evil influence which... I don't know, anything's possible, but it doesn't seem like a reasonable default assumption. In the crazed and cutthroat culture she describes, it seems more reasonable to assume it was normal bullshit, not evil anti-woman bullshit.
Oh yeah, and she seemed to think that the company's refusal to order a special feminine version of the special leather jackets they had bought constitutes sexism. Just let that sink in a moment--*not* pandering to arbitrary social conventions that insist a female's jacket has to have a slightly different cut and styling is sexism. Why stop there? Why not insist it's sexism to not give all of the women hot pink keyboard, perhaps spangled with little glittery flowers?
The first step to getting people to take sexism seriously: don't conflate normal (if inappropriate) sexual advances as sexism. That's fucking stupid, and a lot of people will instantly tune you out after they realize that's what you're implying. It's only sexism if there's discrimination involved and, unfortunately for this woman, she's not describing any documented discrimination that I can see. I don't know what I'd tell her except to look up California laws on hidden audio recording, maybe. The HR woman at the very end sounded like she was saying sexist shit, but everyone else, by her own admission, had excuses for her performance evaluations.
Were they bullshit excuses? I'm sure they were. But that's par for the course for performance evaluations in a cutthroat environment; you can't just assume that it's sexism, just because a *former manager on a different team* once made a pass at you.
I think the Producers seems to have done rather well.
My broader point was that mainstream tastes and anointment by Hollywood elites was being used to unfairly elevate mediocre works while the same people are only too happy to tarnish a work by a solo creator that is obviously more thoughtful and less sensationalist than the all-singing, all-dancing Nazis with hippy Hitler. Quoting mainstream accolades rather proves my point. Hollywood thought that the tediously formulaic "Crash" was a brilliant movie, too.
If you removed the admittedly hilarious, but also relatively short sequences showing the play-within-the-movie and the audience's reaction to it, the rest of The Producers--the conspiracy leading up to the play and the climax of the story afterwards with the scriptwriter getting pissed--was pretty mediocre. Certainly, it was nowhere near as good as Young Frankenstein.
It is a difficult subject.
The Great Dictator was a much more difficult and (taken as a whole) a better work than The Producers. And it was released just a year after the invasion of Poland.
They can watch the videos for the themselves, you know.
Have you *ever* worked a white collar job in your life, let alone interacted with HR or PR? You are overestimating competence whilst simultaneously underestimating paranoia.
The contents of the videos are strictly secondary to the fact that the Wall Street Journal, the largest newspaper in America (and also the one with the strongest ties to big business), made it clear to Disney that they were going to write a series of articles on PDP's alleged antisemitism. This would be enough to rattle anyone, but Disney has long attempted to quell rumors about its (and Walt's) antisemitism, so they were almost certainly going to avoid the smoke regardless of whether or not there was any fire.
I've heard someone mention the WSJ has posted a compilation of the nine videos they sent (and have admitted to sending) Disney. No idea if that's true; go look for yourself if you want. I am being pragmatic with my time here; I will wait for the WSJ to circle the troops and put out a more robust response and for more enthusiastic people to put together comprehensive lists of links to the relevant videos and articles and relevant quotes with verifications so we don't have to deal with paywalls.
The WSJ hasn't denied it that I've seen. I have no reason to doubt it. If you doubt it, so be it. But I'm not your Google monkey.
one is a comedy where two awful people are trying to be offensive by making a musical about Hitler
No, that's incorrect. The plot of the movie is they are trying to make a play that will be a box office flop.
"Surely, Mel Brooks could have chosen a more socially responsible but still hilariously bad subject for his fictional producers to make a play about!"
the other is a jackass who thinks it's edgy to pay poor people 5 dollars to do something politically incorrect
So just to clarify, you think it's OK to pay privileged white Americans thousands of dollars to do something politically incorrect, but not give $5 to some Indians.
Don't give me that "they didn't know what they were saying" bullshit; those guys spoke English (or at least someone on their end did) and World War 2 and Israel are both pretty well known in India (news/history of the latter is of interest to them because the Hindus are dealing with jihadi problems) so I'm pretty sure they knew what Jews are, it's just that the taboos are very different there. Which actually makes the video all the more interesting and meaningful, albeit not necessarily something PDP was thinking when he made it.
One is comedic genius, the other is tasteless attention whoring.
This is the crux of the matter right here. Limousine liberalism; pure, unadulterated, self-absorbed elitism. It's ok if Hollywood does it, but if it's a simple one-man operation without the glitter, it's held to an entirely different standard. Polish dictates acceptability. I hate it when it's wall street criminals getting away with no jail time for the same crimes that would send an individual away for decades, and I hate it just as much when the example set by the rich is set as the untouchable center of the cultural compass. Which is what you *are* doing, whether you realize it or not.
The Producers, incidentally, was (as I recall; it's been a while) a fairly shitty, unfunny movie apart from the play-within-the-movie with hippy Hitler and the spinning swastika the immediate reaction to it. All of that stuff with the scriptwriter getting pissed afterwards was meh, as I recall. Mel Brooks has done a lot of legendarily good stuff, but consistency or pacing have never been his strong suits.
PDP's Death to All Jews, on the other hand, was a solid piece, with nice contrast between his normal persona leading to an ending that felt very much like something out of a Louis CK's show. I'm sorry if your brain has been
I believe my nose and hair look sufficiently Native American, though I don't have the eyes or the skin. If you want to pay for a genome sequencing, I'd be happy to provide you with something more concrete. But more to the point, I grew up in the lower middle class as a fairly direct result of my ancestors growing up in the lower classes, ultimately stemming at least in part from some of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents experiencing racism and the associated reduction in economic opportunities.
There is so much here, so much connected to this story I'm interested in following (as well as a projects of my own taking no small amount of time) that I can't verify this all immediately and present you with a tidy package of links, but multiple people (not just his fans) appear to be confirming PDP's claim that the WSJ edited his videos, including using one video that had a non-PC bit and subsequent joke (and point / message) about how the media takes things out of context--and then the WSJ edited out the bit where he was was talking about how the media takes things out of context and used only the non-PC part for one of the nine videos they sent to Disney.
Call me credulous if you must, but I have a finite amount of time here on Earth and there are more interesting things to look at right now than laboriously verifying all of this for your benefit. I have my eye on the people still speaking out against PDP; if his claims about the WSJ fabricating evidence are lies, someone should point this out soon enough. Or if you think he's lying you could do it yourself, post a Youtube video on it, become famous. This would be the adversarial principle at work.
But strangely enough, none the of the people and organizations who appear to stand against PDP have done this. From what I've so far seen, they are largely interested in dismissive, two-word descriptions of the content in question instead of examining and talking about it at length. The traditional media is largely oblivious and parroting each other's talking points, but then Young Turks, supposedly[1] Youtube's number one news channel, in their quest to make asses out of themselves every chance they get have openly admitted they didn't watch all of the nine videos.
You do realize that J. K. Rowling re-tweeted an article about how PDP and others "just joking around" about racism, is enabling racists to normalize their views, right?
I grow weary of trotting out The Producers as a counterexample, but it's the most crystal clear one I've found. The parallels between it and the supposedly most offensive video ("Kill All Jews") are very strong. Both contained an over the top candy-coated celebration of a horrible idea, and then showed a reaction shot of someone(s) looking on in horror. The difference is, people think they have made some terribly clever point when they claim PewDiePie's horror was just acting. Well, let's say that's true... guess what the actors in The Producers who were playing the audience watching "Springtime for Hitler" were doing?
Go on and claim in public that The Producers normalizes Nazism; I dare you.
And yet, it's actual people in the alt-right community who think that PDP might be one of them
The same exact "alt-right community"[2] that previously was praising PDP now claims that they are the number one fans of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe, just *maybe* they're trolling you? Maybe they never actually thought that PewDiePie was one of them? If you want to argue otherwise, you need to explain why they are not equally serious now when they claim the WSJ as one of their own.
From what I've seen so far, I've no problem assuming PDP is telling the truth when he explains whom he doesn't support, instead of believing a pathetic group of people people whose entire sad lives revolve around pretending they're more important, hip, popular and respected than they are.
PDP might as well yell "I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling [reporters]"
Again, you keep pretending that PDP has lost. He has not, and it will not be long before the WSJ is wishing that they could've gotten away with it. In a way, this whole response has been a waste of my time because I could simply wait a year or two and you'd realize it all on your own.
However perhaps due to political climate change in the US, the current expansion seems to be actively hostile to those who are not physically able to play at an arbitrary level.
I seriously cannot figure out where your logic is coming from. If PDP is an actual troll (as you seem to think), there's no reason he couldn't pull a Milo except with a much, much larger starting audience and a more easily believable victim card to play.
Or do you even concede/realize that Milo's public exposure has only grown by leaps and bounds since his Twitter ban?
It's only fascinating if you're somehow obsessed with making a non-story into a widespread conspiracy of monumental proportions.
It's not a conspiracy. The WSJ has been very, very open about their wider motives here. Click the link I included last time. It's not paywalled.
Like it was a setback when Milo was banned from Twitter? Or when his speech had to be canceled due to rioting? Granted, the loss of PDP's Youtube Red series hurts a bit, but he's not hard up for money and I'd be shocked if he couldn't get another big name to bite. Amazon's video service, for example, had no qualms about snatching up Clarkson for one of their flagships.
It's a pretty boring story if you ignore PewDiePie's outrage at actually being held accountable for his actions.
These is a *fascinating* story to anyone who remotely cares about where the media is headed. You don't have to be a PDP fan (I'm not) to find it fascinating. There are multiple facets here, and I'm most interested in the stuff that involves the larger ecosystem. I've already linked to this a half dozen times at least, but this article shows pretty clearly the WSJ's motive in all of this. (That one shouldn't be paywalled.) Don't forget, they didn't just "write an article" that started all of this. They didn't just hire three reporters to comb through his videos and edit them. They sent their edited results directly to Disney. They had an explicit agenda in getting PewDiePie's platform trimmed down a bit. Why is that? WSJ isn't a progressive-leaning paper. Well, see the above link.
If that is completely boring to you, if you've nothing but shrugs when faced with an internet ecosystem that is completely dominated by a handful of walled gardens that are explicitly, openly seeking to strictly control independently-produced content for their own ends, with not a single viable Youtube competitor on the horizon as the enforcement of their opaque and capricious content policies (that sees videos banned or de-monetized without warning) grows ever stricter and more capricious... well, I guess that's fine. As someone with a ~200k ID, I suppose you probably have other concerns [resisting the urge to pen a Depends joke] instead of worrying about the ecosystems that millions of relatively tech-ignorant millennial use in their daily life as their primary method of both mass and one to one communication.
But another facet, built on the above, is the role of advertisement moving forward. As Youtube slowly clamps down, they may slowly cede ground to services without advertisers, including Amazon video, HBO, Netflix, etc. There's a huge, irrational disconnect between advertisers who fear controversy and boycotts and consumers who, when faced with advertiser-less services like Netflix or HBO, generally prefer fully uncensored, politically incorrect content. I mean, just consider this for a moment: videos with nudity on Youtube cannot be monetized due to advertiser fears. HBO, on the other hand, became popular precisely because they weren't afraid to include nudity, politically incorrect content (Bill Maher), and other controversial stuff that consumers obviously wanted and weren't going to boycott over, but advertisers were terrified of. And Youtube has taken an extremely non-nuanced view here. They don't offer advertisers the chance to opt-in for content they've flagged as unsuitable. If an advertiser WANTS to show commercials for a video that Youtube de-monetized, they can't. It's a binary switch. And I'd be surprised if Youtube didn't implement it this way at the explicit request of their biggest advertisers.
This is a totalitarian, all or nothing power play that big media / old media is attempting, and there's also ample evidence it will backfire--again, look at the skittishness of the advertisers vs. what consumers actually want (and will tolerate the existence of) from Netflix or HBO or other places that don't have to worry about advertisers. There's huge, bizarre disconnect here between the business practices and actual demand and it will be very interesting to see how th
I don't swing for the fences every time, and there's been a lot to respond to today.. Let's just call it a "not serious" statement, then.
Interesting. Could you provide a reference link to support that?
Start with whatever Wikipedia has and try to fully absorb it. I'm not proposing anything new here. The purpose of the informal logical fallacies is to point out flaws in premises and reasonings. By their very nature, they don't address conclusions. Which isn't to say that all insults are automatically valid; merely that their existence cannot be used as a shortcut in debates except in fairly specific circumstances along the lines of "You are wrong because you're a moron", and even then it's often possible to modify the argument being presented to be logically valid, if still subjective: "You are likely to be wrong because you're a moron."
1. I've watched hardly any of his back catalog at this point, so I don't know how he uses 'em, but a hangup on "epithets" is silly. You need a hard and high wall between stuff like that and actual racism. As I've expounded elsewhere, the concept of "insensitivity" needs a rebirth. Saying aloud a word like the n-word (a self-censorship I'm engaging in only because the lameness filter is finicky about these things) does not make one racist. It doesn't matter if it's uttered one time or a hundred times. Racism has a real, actual meaning and that meaning does not include "using words I don't like".
The accusation of "insensitivity", on the other hand, is perfectly applicable to a host of impolite and/or corrosive behaviors that the progressive left seeks to remedy. More importantly, using this milder category of chastisement doesn't dilute the power of the word "racist", thus making it easier to call out actual racists and not senselessly desensitizing tens of millions of presumably left-leaning kids to the label.
2. It's a bit amusing, but moreso deeply worrying to see you and so many other people view this as a major setback for PewDiePie or a victory for the forces of anti-racism. Uh, no. This is Pearl Harbor, and the mainstream media and the progressive left (two very distinct players here; I'm not conflating the two) are the Japanese.
I'm not bragging or boasting or laughing; this is serious shit. How do you think his tens of millions of subscribers are going to react? "Damn, I guess he was a racist, the WSJ said so" ? How many of those people are kids? How many of those kids are (like most kids) currently left-leaning? And how many of those kids have never felt the rush of arguing on the internet, of calling out (what they think is) stupidity, of actually fighting for something before?
Exit stage right a chastened PewDiePie, then tens of millions of teens and college students cast down their eyes and murmur quietly to themselves? Give me a fucking break. I don't quite know what to expect next, but this is the beginning of something, not the end of something.
Have you ever actually worked in a white collar environment? You think that PR is going to care about scrupulous due diligence after the WSJ has just shown you these vids and made it clear that they are about to embark on a multi-article smear campaign against him?
Except that's not what happened at all. He paid them to say words that they had no understanding of.
That very much remains to be seen. Nazism isn't a taboo thing in much of southern and SE Asia, from my understanding. The holocaust isn't commonly taught in schools. There may well be a cultural difference here, but I don't think it's a given that they had no knowledge whatsoever of what they were saying, even if that's now what they are (understandably) claiming. *Someone* involved in this operation had to speak English on their end.
were just a couple of poor guys in india
Whom PDP made $5 richer. He cannot be blamed for the hysterical overreaction of other people.
He didn't point the finger at them and say *they* were horrible, not in the video that I saw. It was just shock (be it real or faked) and silence. I can't say for absolute certain what the moral of the story is, because that was left intentionally open-ended. It was a pretty good low-key delivery, like something I would expect to see on Louis CK's show. The only thing that was clear was that he was not laughing about the end product, or winking to any neo-Nazis that might be in the audience.
I'm fully prepared to dig up citations if he starts first. I don't Google on command for people who've yet to show that they are able and wanting to engage in a protracted, bare-knuck brawl of a debate.
And the fact that so many people are assuming that people are alt-right because of their conditional, highly-qualified support of PewDiePie... I don't know. This is fucked up. I keep thinking I've got a grasp on how fucked up things are and then it's taken to the next level.
This is a multifaceted story. If the Disney pulling sponsorship bit isn't interesting to you, perhaps you could address the other parts. You know, the stuff about the lying, the attempts at shaming witch hunt campaigns, and the fact that the WSJ has suddenly taken an interest in deliberately attacking the biggest Youtuber--not just printing an article, but actually sending compiled and edited video clips directly to Disney and then bragging about it. Or you could mention the more distantly related (but extremely important) issues of Youtube content creators trying to come to terms with an ever-tightening, opaque acceptable content policy and the de-monetizations or deletions that come out of nowhere when that policy is enforced.
There are all these fascinating facets to this story, but instead you focus on the facet you believe (correctly or incorrectly) to be the non-issue.
The difference is no one was harmed in the making of the video. In fact, they profited from him. Now yes, they were harmed when everyone went apeshit after the fact, but PewDiePie, whatever his faults, can't be held responsible for other peoples' lack of humor, nuance and insight.
I don't say he's never done shock tactic or trolling videos (I'm not going to go on a 5 week PDP bender just to conclusively determine this question); I'm saying THAT VIDEO had no trace of a trolling vibe, a shock-for-shock's-sake vibe, nor a Nazi/anti-semitic vibe.
That is an idiotic claim from popular science magazines that don't understand how genetics works.
It's not true that the expression of recessive genes will dwindle in an environment where there is extensive interbreeding with a much larger number of people with a dominant gene? it's not true that darker haired/eyed people have higher birth rates than those of Nordic complexion?
Yes yes, I understand that if you are starting from an assumption that neither gene affects (nor is statistically correlated with) survivability or reproductive chances then no gene will be increasing or decreasing in prevalence. Except to the extent that population bottlenecks have a larger chance of wiping out the rarer-gene.
Slashdot Mirror
Have fun in your lazy leftist solipsism, old man.
They bought jackets for all the male staff, but didn't for the females. That's blatent discimination and sexism from a company. Who gives a fuck what it costs? Buy them the fucking jackets, they earnt them as much as the boys.
She explicitly said they had the option to get a "male" jacket. I don't know off the top of my head what makes a leather jacket feminine vs. masculine, but I've seen a woman wearing a leather jacket from the men's section and, as long as the size is right, it looks fine. Feminine versions of clothing generally consists of being tighter or having frivolous trim or something. There's no functional reason to have a separate female version of a leather jacket except to pander to gender stereotypes. Which is itself supportive of a mild form of sexism, not a remedy for sexism. I mean granted, you can make an argument that they should get all female jackets and the men should have to adjust to those, except as I just pointed out male clothing tends towards the more utilitarian[1].
if it makes the employee's work place a nicer place to come to
That has nothing to do with anything. The issue is whether or not it is sexist to not specifically cater to a separate, stereotypical feminine aesthetic. One that's not shared by all females, for that matter. If the women showed up for their first day at work and their computers had the aforementioned hot pink with glittery flowers (without them asking for it) and their male counterparts had normal looking computers, I bet she'd be crying sexism. But it's the same thing in principle. Equality means equality, not asking for special treatment because you're been sociologically conditioned to hate leather jackets if they don't have a fringe or the buttons on the left side or come in pastel colors or whatever the hell it is that's supposed to make a leather jacket feminine.
1. Well, at least as far as jackets go. Women have a clothing advantage in most warmer contexts.
A boss making a pass at an subordinate is not sexism. It's a big problem, yes, and it doesn't sound like Uber handled it very well if the woman's account is accurate, but there wasn't any trace of sexism throughout the entire story that I saw (I was skimming) except for the meeting with the HR woman she briefly described at the very end.
The bulk of her story seemed to be just vague conspiratorial stuff, implying her poor performance reviews under another manager on under team was due to the original boss's evil influence which... I don't know, anything's possible, but it doesn't seem like a reasonable default assumption. In the crazed and cutthroat culture she describes, it seems more reasonable to assume it was normal bullshit, not evil anti-woman bullshit.
Oh yeah, and she seemed to think that the company's refusal to order a special feminine version of the special leather jackets they had bought constitutes sexism. Just let that sink in a moment--*not* pandering to arbitrary social conventions that insist a female's jacket has to have a slightly different cut and styling is sexism. Why stop there? Why not insist it's sexism to not give all of the women hot pink keyboard, perhaps spangled with little glittery flowers?
The first step to getting people to take sexism seriously: don't conflate normal (if inappropriate) sexual advances as sexism. That's fucking stupid, and a lot of people will instantly tune you out after they realize that's what you're implying. It's only sexism if there's discrimination involved and, unfortunately for this woman, she's not describing any documented discrimination that I can see. I don't know what I'd tell her except to look up California laws on hidden audio recording, maybe. The HR woman at the very end sounded like she was saying sexist shit, but everyone else, by her own admission, had excuses for her performance evaluations.
Were they bullshit excuses? I'm sure they were. But that's par for the course for performance evaluations in a cutthroat environment; you can't just assume that it's sexism, just because a *former manager on a different team* once made a pass at you.
I think the Producers seems to have done rather well.
My broader point was that mainstream tastes and anointment by Hollywood elites was being used to unfairly elevate mediocre works while the same people are only too happy to tarnish a work by a solo creator that is obviously more thoughtful and less sensationalist than the all-singing, all-dancing Nazis with hippy Hitler. Quoting mainstream accolades rather proves my point. Hollywood thought that the tediously formulaic "Crash" was a brilliant movie, too.
If you removed the admittedly hilarious, but also relatively short sequences showing the play-within-the-movie and the audience's reaction to it, the rest of The Producers--the conspiracy leading up to the play and the climax of the story afterwards with the scriptwriter getting pissed--was pretty mediocre. Certainly, it was nowhere near as good as Young Frankenstein.
It is a difficult subject.
The Great Dictator was a much more difficult and (taken as a whole) a better work than The Producers. And it was released just a year after the invasion of Poland.
They can watch the videos for the themselves, you know.
Have you *ever* worked a white collar job in your life, let alone interacted with HR or PR? You are overestimating competence whilst simultaneously underestimating paranoia.
The contents of the videos are strictly secondary to the fact that the Wall Street Journal, the largest newspaper in America (and also the one with the strongest ties to big business), made it clear to Disney that they were going to write a series of articles on PDP's alleged antisemitism. This would be enough to rattle anyone, but Disney has long attempted to quell rumors about its (and Walt's) antisemitism, so they were almost certainly going to avoid the smoke regardless of whether or not there was any fire.
I've heard someone mention the WSJ has posted a compilation of the nine videos they sent (and have admitted to sending) Disney. No idea if that's true; go look for yourself if you want. I am being pragmatic with my time here; I will wait for the WSJ to circle the troops and put out a more robust response and for more enthusiastic people to put together comprehensive lists of links to the relevant videos and articles and relevant quotes with verifications so we don't have to deal with paywalls.
The WSJ hasn't denied it that I've seen. I have no reason to doubt it. If you doubt it, so be it. But I'm not your Google monkey.
one is a comedy where two awful people are trying to be offensive by making a musical about Hitler
No, that's incorrect. The plot of the movie is they are trying to make a play that will be a box office flop.
"Surely, Mel Brooks could have chosen a more socially responsible but still hilariously bad subject for his fictional producers to make a play about!"
the other is a jackass who thinks it's edgy to pay poor people 5 dollars to do something politically incorrect
So just to clarify, you think it's OK to pay privileged white Americans thousands of dollars to do something politically incorrect, but not give $5 to some Indians.
Don't give me that "they didn't know what they were saying" bullshit; those guys spoke English (or at least someone on their end did) and World War 2 and Israel are both pretty well known in India (news/history of the latter is of interest to them because the Hindus are dealing with jihadi problems) so I'm pretty sure they knew what Jews are, it's just that the taboos are very different there. Which actually makes the video all the more interesting and meaningful, albeit not necessarily something PDP was thinking when he made it.
One is comedic genius, the other is tasteless attention whoring.
This is the crux of the matter right here. Limousine liberalism; pure, unadulterated, self-absorbed elitism. It's ok if Hollywood does it, but if it's a simple one-man operation without the glitter, it's held to an entirely different standard. Polish dictates acceptability. I hate it when it's wall street criminals getting away with no jail time for the same crimes that would send an individual away for decades, and I hate it just as much when the example set by the rich is set as the untouchable center of the cultural compass. Which is what you *are* doing, whether you realize it or not.
The Producers, incidentally, was (as I recall; it's been a while) a fairly shitty, unfunny movie apart from the play-within-the-movie with hippy Hitler and the spinning swastika the immediate reaction to it. All of that stuff with the scriptwriter getting pissed afterwards was meh, as I recall. Mel Brooks has done a lot of legendarily good stuff, but consistency or pacing have never been his strong suits.
PDP's Death to All Jews, on the other hand, was a solid piece, with nice contrast between his normal persona leading to an ending that felt very much like something out of a Louis CK's show. I'm sorry if your brain has been
I believe my nose and hair look sufficiently Native American, though I don't have the eyes or the skin. If you want to pay for a genome sequencing, I'd be happy to provide you with something more concrete. But more to the point, I grew up in the lower middle class as a fairly direct result of my ancestors growing up in the lower classes, ultimately stemming at least in part from some of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents experiencing racism and the associated reduction in economic opportunities.
Call me credulous if you must, but I have a finite amount of time here on Earth and there are more interesting things to look at right now than laboriously verifying all of this for your benefit. I have my eye on the people still speaking out against PDP; if his claims about the WSJ fabricating evidence are lies, someone should point this out soon enough. Or if you think he's lying you could do it yourself, post a Youtube video on it, become famous. This would be the adversarial principle at work.
But strangely enough, none the of the people and organizations who appear to stand against PDP have done this. From what I've so far seen, they are largely interested in dismissive, two-word descriptions of the content in question instead of examining and talking about it at length. The traditional media is largely oblivious and parroting each other's talking points, but then Young Turks, supposedly[1] Youtube's number one news channel, in their quest to make asses out of themselves every chance they get have openly admitted they didn't watch all of the nine videos.
You do realize that J. K. Rowling re-tweeted an article about how PDP and others "just joking around" about racism, is enabling racists to normalize their views, right?
I grow weary of trotting out The Producers as a counterexample, but it's the most crystal clear one I've found. The parallels between it and the supposedly most offensive video ("Kill All Jews") are very strong. Both contained an over the top candy-coated celebration of a horrible idea, and then showed a reaction shot of someone(s) looking on in horror. The difference is, people think they have made some terribly clever point when they claim PewDiePie's horror was just acting. Well, let's say that's true... guess what the actors in The Producers who were playing the audience watching "Springtime for Hitler" were doing?
Go on and claim in public that The Producers normalizes Nazism; I dare you.
And yet, it's actual people in the alt-right community who think that PDP might be one of them
The same exact "alt-right community"[2] that previously was praising PDP now claims that they are the number one fans of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe, just *maybe* they're trolling you? Maybe they never actually thought that PewDiePie was one of them? If you want to argue otherwise, you need to explain why they are not equally serious now when they claim the WSJ as one of their own.
From what I've seen so far, I've no problem assuming PDP is telling the truth when he explains whom he doesn't support, instead of believing a pathetic group of people people whose entire sad lives revolve around pretending they're more important, hip, popular and respected than they are.
PDP might as well yell "I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling [reporters]"
Again, you keep pretending that PDP has lost. He has not, and it will not be long before the WSJ is wishing that they could've gotten away with it. In a way, this whole response has been a waste of my time because I could simply wait a year or two and you'd realize it all on your own.
However perhaps due to political climate change in the US, the current expansion seems to be actively hostile to those who are not physically able to play at an arbitrary level.
#thankstrump
Watch it happen.
Watch it not happen.
I seriously cannot figure out where your logic is coming from. If PDP is an actual troll (as you seem to think), there's no reason he couldn't pull a Milo except with a much, much larger starting audience and a more easily believable victim card to play.
Or do you even concede/realize that Milo's public exposure has only grown by leaps and bounds since his Twitter ban?
It's only fascinating if you're somehow obsessed with making a non-story into a widespread conspiracy of monumental proportions.
It's not a conspiracy. The WSJ has been very, very open about their wider motives here. Click the link I included last time. It's not paywalled.
The only one who can stop a bad guy with a ramble is a good guy with a ramble.
Well, Youtube has apparently gone a step further and has taken down the mirror of PewDiePie's video because it violates their policy on hate speech. A quick search on Vimeo turned up nothing, so I don't have a more durable link handy.
This is, uh... an interesting escalation.
Well, it is a setback for PewDiePie.
Like it was a setback when Milo was banned from Twitter? Or when his speech had to be canceled due to rioting? Granted, the loss of PDP's Youtube Red series hurts a bit, but he's not hard up for money and I'd be shocked if he couldn't get another big name to bite. Amazon's video service, for example, had no qualms about snatching up Clarkson for one of their flagships.
It's a pretty boring story if you ignore PewDiePie's outrage at actually being held accountable for his actions.
These is a *fascinating* story to anyone who remotely cares about where the media is headed. You don't have to be a PDP fan (I'm not) to find it fascinating. There are multiple facets here, and I'm most interested in the stuff that involves the larger ecosystem. I've already linked to this a half dozen times at least, but this article shows pretty clearly the WSJ's motive in all of this. (That one shouldn't be paywalled.) Don't forget, they didn't just "write an article" that started all of this. They didn't just hire three reporters to comb through his videos and edit them. They sent their edited results directly to Disney. They had an explicit agenda in getting PewDiePie's platform trimmed down a bit. Why is that? WSJ isn't a progressive-leaning paper. Well, see the above link.
... well, I guess that's fine. As someone with a ~200k ID, I suppose you probably have other concerns [resisting the urge to pen a Depends joke] instead of worrying about the ecosystems that millions of relatively tech-ignorant millennial use in their daily life as their primary method of both mass and one to one communication.
If that is completely boring to you, if you've nothing but shrugs when faced with an internet ecosystem that is completely dominated by a handful of walled gardens that are explicitly, openly seeking to strictly control independently-produced content for their own ends, with not a single viable Youtube competitor on the horizon as the enforcement of their opaque and capricious content policies (that sees videos banned or de-monetized without warning) grows ever stricter and more capricious
But another facet, built on the above, is the role of advertisement moving forward. As Youtube slowly clamps down, they may slowly cede ground to services without advertisers, including Amazon video, HBO, Netflix, etc. There's a huge, irrational disconnect between advertisers who fear controversy and boycotts and consumers who, when faced with advertiser-less services like Netflix or HBO, generally prefer fully uncensored, politically incorrect content. I mean, just consider this for a moment: videos with nudity on Youtube cannot be monetized due to advertiser fears. HBO, on the other hand, became popular precisely because they weren't afraid to include nudity, politically incorrect content (Bill Maher), and other controversial stuff that consumers obviously wanted and weren't going to boycott over, but advertisers were terrified of. And Youtube has taken an extremely non-nuanced view here. They don't offer advertisers the chance to opt-in for content they've flagged as unsuitable. If an advertiser WANTS to show commercials for a video that Youtube de-monetized, they can't. It's a binary switch. And I'd be surprised if Youtube didn't implement it this way at the explicit request of their biggest advertisers.
This is a totalitarian, all or nothing power play that big media / old media is attempting, and there's also ample evidence it will backfire--again, look at the skittishness of the advertisers vs. what consumers actually want (and will tolerate the existence of) from Netflix or HBO or other places that don't have to worry about advertisers. There's huge, bizarre disconnect here between the business practices and actual demand and it will be very interesting to see how th
I identify with my native american ancestors, so check your own privilege... you genocidal piece of shit.
Interesting. Could you provide a reference link to support that?
Start with whatever Wikipedia has and try to fully absorb it. I'm not proposing anything new here. The purpose of the informal logical fallacies is to point out flaws in premises and reasonings. By their very nature, they don't address conclusions. Which isn't to say that all insults are automatically valid; merely that their existence cannot be used as a shortcut in debates except in fairly specific circumstances along the lines of "You are wrong because you're a moron", and even then it's often possible to modify the argument being presented to be logically valid, if still subjective: "You are likely to be wrong because you're a moron."
Two things:
1. I've watched hardly any of his back catalog at this point, so I don't know how he uses 'em, but a hangup on "epithets" is silly. You need a hard and high wall between stuff like that and actual racism. As I've expounded elsewhere, the concept of "insensitivity" needs a rebirth. Saying aloud a word like the n-word (a self-censorship I'm engaging in only because the lameness filter is finicky about these things) does not make one racist. It doesn't matter if it's uttered one time or a hundred times. Racism has a real, actual meaning and that meaning does not include "using words I don't like".
The accusation of "insensitivity", on the other hand, is perfectly applicable to a host of impolite and/or corrosive behaviors that the progressive left seeks to remedy. More importantly, using this milder category of chastisement doesn't dilute the power of the word "racist", thus making it easier to call out actual racists and not senselessly desensitizing tens of millions of presumably left-leaning kids to the label.
2. It's a bit amusing, but moreso deeply worrying to see you and so many other people view this as a major setback for PewDiePie or a victory for the forces of anti-racism. Uh, no. This is Pearl Harbor, and the mainstream media and the progressive left (two very distinct players here; I'm not conflating the two) are the Japanese.
I'm not bragging or boasting or laughing; this is serious shit. How do you think his tens of millions of subscribers are going to react? "Damn, I guess he was a racist, the WSJ said so" ? How many of those people are kids? How many of those kids are (like most kids) currently left-leaning? And how many of those kids have never felt the rush of arguing on the internet, of calling out (what they think is) stupidity, of actually fighting for something before?
Exit stage right a chastened PewDiePie, then tens of millions of teens and college students cast down their eyes and murmur quietly to themselves? Give me a fucking break. I don't quite know what to expect next, but this is the beginning of something, not the end of something.
Have you ever actually worked in a white collar environment? You think that PR is going to care about scrupulous due diligence after the WSJ has just shown you these vids and made it clear that they are about to embark on a multi-article smear campaign against him?
What can I say; I'm a perceptive person.
Except that's not what happened at all. He paid them to say words that they had no understanding of.
That very much remains to be seen. Nazism isn't a taboo thing in much of southern and SE Asia, from my understanding. The holocaust isn't commonly taught in schools. There may well be a cultural difference here, but I don't think it's a given that they had no knowledge whatsoever of what they were saying, even if that's now what they are (understandably) claiming. *Someone* involved in this operation had to speak English on their end.
were just a couple of poor guys in india
Whom PDP made $5 richer. He cannot be blamed for the hysterical overreaction of other people.
He didn't point the finger at them and say *they* were horrible, not in the video that I saw. It was just shock (be it real or faked) and silence. I can't say for absolute certain what the moral of the story is, because that was left intentionally open-ended. It was a pretty good low-key delivery, like something I would expect to see on Louis CK's show. The only thing that was clear was that he was not laughing about the end product, or winking to any neo-Nazis that might be in the audience.
Is there a psychoanalytically-bent AC living up to his surname who doesn't understand sarcasm?
I'm fully prepared to dig up citations if he starts first. I don't Google on command for people who've yet to show that they are able and wanting to engage in a protracted, bare-knuck brawl of a debate.
And the fact that so many people are assuming that people are alt-right because of their conditional, highly-qualified support of PewDiePie... I don't know. This is fucked up. I keep thinking I've got a grasp on how fucked up things are and then it's taken to the next level.
That said, the fact that he included any anti-semitic/nazi content at all, context-be-damned, is enough to be guilty of spreading hate speech.
So do you or do you not believe that John Cleese should have been prosecuted for hate speech for creating the funniest scene in the history of television ? Serious question.
Incidentally, I have some follow up questions involving some other comedians you may have heard of.
This is a multifaceted story. If the Disney pulling sponsorship bit isn't interesting to you, perhaps you could address the other parts. You know, the stuff about the lying, the attempts at shaming witch hunt campaigns, and the fact that the WSJ has suddenly taken an interest in deliberately attacking the biggest Youtuber--not just printing an article, but actually sending compiled and edited video clips directly to Disney and then bragging about it. Or you could mention the more distantly related (but extremely important) issues of Youtube content creators trying to come to terms with an ever-tightening, opaque acceptable content policy and the de-monetizations or deletions that come out of nowhere when that policy is enforced.
There are all these fascinating facets to this story, but instead you focus on the facet you believe (correctly or incorrectly) to be the non-issue.
Why is that?
The difference is no one was harmed in the making of the video. In fact, they profited from him. Now yes, they were harmed when everyone went apeshit after the fact, but PewDiePie, whatever his faults, can't be held responsible for other peoples' lack of humor, nuance and insight.
I don't say he's never done shock tactic or trolling videos (I'm not going to go on a 5 week PDP bender just to conclusively determine this question); I'm saying THAT VIDEO had no trace of a trolling vibe, a shock-for-shock's-sake vibe, nor a Nazi/anti-semitic vibe.
That is an idiotic claim from popular science magazines that don't understand how genetics works.
It's not true that the expression of recessive genes will dwindle in an environment where there is extensive interbreeding with a much larger number of people with a dominant gene? it's not true that darker haired/eyed people have higher birth rates than those of Nordic complexion?
Yes yes, I understand that if you are starting from an assumption that neither gene affects (nor is statistically correlated with) survivability or reproductive chances then no gene will be increasing or decreasing in prevalence. Except to the extent that population bottlenecks have a larger chance of wiping out the rarer-gene.
And yes yes, I appreciate that you were just giving me tips for further brevity.