Link Roundup: December 2023

Just a short link roundup this month, a few days late.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) | H. Bomberguy (video, 3:51 hours) – It’s alright if you don’t watch this one, I’ll give a quick summary.  Harris demonstrates the extensive plagiarism of a few specific YouTubers: Illuminaughtii, Internet Historian, and James Somerton.  Somerton is the big one because he was an established gay youtuber.

This drama has been all over the internet and back again at this point, but I thought I’d highlight a few other responses I’ve seen.  Todd in the Shadows (normally a music critic) had another long video about Somerton’s made up lies.  Verity Ritchie talked about Somerton ripping off their video without quite copying it.  The Ace Couple talked about donating to Somerton’s bogus film production, and dealing with his ignorance on asexuality.  I also recommend this (text) article on Plagiarism Today, which provides further expertise on plagiarism.

Harm and Justice | Leftist Cooks (video, 2:04 hours) – It’s a video about restorative justice, basically consisting of a series of shorter video essays about each step in the process.  I particularly like the part about unrecognized rape (“Naming the harm”).  I guess most people wouldn’t remember me talking about it, but that happened to me a long time ago, and it’s very much on point.  I also love the part about apologies, and then later about how forgiveness isn’t an obligation.

Youtubes I didn’t like

Since it was revealed that gay youtuber James Somerton was engaging in extensive plagiarism in his videos, many of us are reflecting on how it relates to us personally. My first reaction was that I never liked Somerton to begin with. His videos were very disjointed, and they took forever to get to the point, or never got to the point at all. I also spotted one or two factual errors that made me think he didn’t know anything.

But I feel for his former fans, and I don’t blame them for liking and trusting Somerton. How could they have known?

And I never said out loud that I disliked Somerton, and why would I? I just thought he was a bad essayist, I didn’t think he had actually done anything wrong. Maybe if more people spoke up, stuff like this would come to light sooner?

I’m grasping at straws, I’m not convinced for a minute that this is the right answer. But let’s try it for a moment. Let’s talk about a few youtubes I didn’t like and why.

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Critiques of Train

cn: Discussion of Holocaust media, while avoiding discussion of the Holocaust itself.

Train (2009) is a board game slash art installation by Brenda Romero.  It’s the most famous game in her series The Mechanic is the Message. There is only one copy of the game. In the game, players are tasked with transporting meeples by train. Over the course of the game, the players learn that they are in fact taking the role of Nazis transporting people to concentration camps.

Train makes a provocative and valuable statement, and I am by no means outraged by the game. However, I do have a few bones to pick with it.

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Origami: Wave

Wave

Wave by Ilan Garibi, in turn inspired by Goran Konjevod

This model is created by pleat tessellations, which I discussed in another post.  It’s easier to make than it looks, since it’s just folding the paper back and forth over and over.  And over and over and over.  I’ve made several of these.

The Friedman Doctrine and alternatives

One of the big criticisms of capitalism is that corporations are purely profit-seeking. If there’s ever an opportunity for a large corporation to work towards a social good, or to benefit the environment, the corporation won’t do it, except insofar as it benefits their stockholders. The corporation is practically obligated to be as greedy as possible. There’s a name for this: the Friedman Doctrine.

The Friedman Doctrine was coined by a 1970 article by economist Milton Friedman. Friedman argued that the social responsibility of a business executive is solely to increase the business’ profits. To prioritize anything else is to unilaterally take money from stockholders, employees, and/or customers, and spend the proceeds on whatever the business executive thinks is good. As a business philosophy, the Friedman Doctrine is considered to have been dominant from the 1980s to today.

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Link Roundup: November 2023

In case you missed it, last month, I wrote an article on the mystery genre in ace fiction.  And the Ace Journal Club read a chapter about intersectionality with race.

Purity culture made me feel trapped.  Finding asexuality set me free. | LGBTQ Nation – As regulars know, I track articles on asexuality for my other blog, but I thought I’d highlight this for the godless audience.  Tyger Songbird describes their story of growing up in Christian purity culture.  At first it seemed to align with their desire to remain single, but it was revealed to be a lie, as he was expected to get married before 25.  Tyger Songbird also wrote several other good articles last month about virgin-shaming, and being sex-repulsed, and Black masculinity.

Evil Lost Media: Dr Phil’s House of Hatred | Big Joel (video, 39 min) – Dr Phil briefly created a disaster of a reality show that brought together people who hated each other.  You know, a white supremacist, a black person who hates white people, etc.  Dr. Phil seems to expect a simple narrative of two sides coming together, but there’s an obvious asymmetry between the oppressors and the oppressed, and it also isn’t long before intersectionality rears its head.  It’s hilarious to watch Phil’s naive centrism beach itself on the shores of reality.

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Consent culture and fitness

In gay fiction, the nerd/jock romance is a very common trope. In the standard take, the jock is an attractive closeted high school boy with homophobic friends. The jock archetype works well in these stories, because he’s an object of desire that comes with a source of conflict and character arc for free. The jock archetype is emphatically not the same as jocks in real life.

I recently had occasion to read a gay romance (see review) that was allegedly true and autobiographical. So while it might be described as a nerd/jock romance, he’s a real jock, not the fictional archetype that I’m accustomed to in this context. He is not in high school, he does not have homophobic friends, rather he just spends a lot of time working out and being concerned about his appearance.

I was shocked how disagreeable it was to me, and why. The sticking point was that jocks (in the novel) do not observe consent culture.

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