As is customary, I got up to a cacophony of demands and insults and questions on my computer. Among them was this odd thing:
@pzmyers I'm curious, why do you automatically defend people with ideas so obviously poorly thought out that they turn off YouTube comments?
— Bryan Leger (@MyBiAss) February 10, 2015
I’m curious, why do you automatically defend people with ideas so obviously poorly thought out that they turn off YouTube comments?
It’s a striking remark, because 1) I don’t think he’s curious at all, but is merely taking a poorly executed poke, 2) that I automatically defend certain people is not in evidence, and seems to be another stab at me, by suggesting that I don’t think, and 3) who on earth considers the presence of youtube commenters to be an indicator of a worthy argument?
It was dumb. Really dumb. But before I hit the block button on Twitter, I usually take a quick scan of their posting history; maybe this was a one-off error. Maybe I’m misreading their intent.
But no, in this case, he really does seem to be an idiot. Here’s a video he claimed was a “Beautifully written fictional short-story about the power of women”, titled “The Terrifying Future of Social Justice” by Sargon of Akkad. It was enlightening — these MRA/MGTOW types really are horribly deluded.
It’s a painful poor-pitiful-me story about a man in the future who has a boring dead-end cubicle job with lots of demanding make-work, who is being lorded over by fat (they’re always fat), lazy, bossy women on flex-time who get bonuses and promotions on the basis of his work. It’s not even well-written. It’s kind of an anti-Mary Sue, in which the obviously superior male being is ignored by everyone, and eventually commits suicide. It’s entirely fictional, but the guy uses it as a justification for his feelings of oppression, and, supporting my opinion of my twitter interlocutor, the comments are equally insane.
Blocked.
I’m reminded by this of A man in black’s explanation of chan culture with regards to the demands that daring to not be harassed by every yahoo is somehow a sign of the greatest moral failing possible.
It also smacks of entitlement. These individuals who are so used to being regarded by society as more valuable feel entitled to the time of “lessers” and to be catered with a personal chance to express their totally unique and not at all hackneyed beliefs and have a “debate” (if it’s actually a debate the individual gets pissed because what they really want is to “win” against the person they’ve decided is beneath them in order to feel justified in viewing themselves as more intelligent and overall better).
I mean how dare some uppity woman or POC dare not make time and space for this special snowflake to demonstrate how much better than them he is! As if that minority member’s time and mental energy were more valuable than his right to show his dominance wherever he goes and never ever encounter inconvenience.
But, but … evidence! One commenter under the video said they had *exactly* this experience themselves! Obviously this is the dystopian future all Sexy Jumping Witches and Feminasties want!
If you consider YouTube comments to be a fair and decent peer review, then I think you better take a good, long look at the crowd you’re hanging out with.
In other words, it’s a story of a male version of a pink ghetto. Except that real women in real pink ghettos tend to go on living and working and raising their kids.
[Capt. Obvious, here:]
So, there is NO other reason to turn off YouTube comments, than presenting a pisspoor argument in one’s YouTube video? Ever think that YouTube Commentors can be so insulting and degrading and pisspoor themselves that one might not want to sully their YT account with all the trash comments resulting from their exquisite video on the nauseating Youtube channel? Do you really think YouTube comments are enlightening and full of Rational thought, in order to convey Constructive Criticism to the Video there? If so, I think your definition of “Constructive” is different than mine.
There are people who read the comments on youtube?
Anyone who claims to be Sargon of Akkad should be required to explain -in cuneiform- the difference between the Atra-hasis Flood story and the Utnapishtim Flood story.
— — — — — — —
BTW the cubicle he is working in has walls of Euphrates reed. In the first draft of his story, he hears a spooky voice calling “Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall!” *
*cuneiform reader joke
What a pathetic display PZ, blocking on first sight. Maybe you are the idiot.
Regarding that dystopian youtube video:
I found the characters so poorly voiced, I could hardly tell them apart. I do a better job reading Harry Potter to my kids.
The dialogue was wooden and delivered without emotion (ditto Harry Potter).
Based on that, I couldn’t finish listening.
I suggest redoing with multiple voice actors, or possibly live action. I hear Mila Kunis isn’t busy. You might be able to get her in that green face paint she wore for the Oz movie, which would be about appropriate for an excessively juvenile piece of work like this.
You know, people who obviously mistake YouTube comments for peer review are not worth arguing with
Thanks to Ophelia for the reminder
(Posted blind thanks to iPhone fuckuppery)
Fuckit. http://xkcd.com/1357/
oh222: you’re well on your way to joining the stupid brigade. Did you even read the post? The part where I mention that I routinely scan people’s posting record before blocking them?
Of all discourse on the internet, I had always thought that it was generally acknowledged that Youtube comments are the slime on the bottom of the barrel.
And I’m utterly sure that our latest visitor is a disappointed longtime reader, and in no way related to the person PZ blocked, nosirreebob.
More importantly, what good reason is there not to turn off Youtube comments?
So, in short form: Misogyny is a good bias! If men are busy keeping women in their proper place, there is no oppression at all, nope, none.
=8)-DX @ 2:
Except for the fact that the character in the story commits suicide…
birgerjohansson, “…explain -in cuneiform- the difference between the Atra-hasis Flood story and the Utnapishtim Flood story”
Amusing, but doubtful this Sargon knows either name. Probably doesn’t even know his connection to Moses.
Yes I’m always suspicious when my textbooks and other scholarly books don’t have a digital comments section physically grafted to them that 14 year olds can comment on. Must be bad arguments.
The thing about all these supremacist movements–be they predicated on race, gender, religion, etc.–is that their adherents invariably refute their basic premise. White supremacists, MRAs, “alpha males”…they almost invariably inhabit the portion of the intelligence bell curve that is shallow and gently rising.
The obvious conclusion, of course, is that white/male/straight/etc. privilege is the only thing they have going for them.
@brucegee1962 #14
Oh come off it! The slime on the bottom is 4chan/b/, followed by large parts of reddit and comments sections under large major news stories.
@hoku #16
If you have a community of fans you want to allow to interact/with and provide feedback? This also presupposes you have the guts and the time to wade through mountains of shit to properly administer the comments – same with vlogs as with blogs – and that you don’t get popularly unpopular, because then the comments are usually 90% abuse.
The actual Sargon of Akkad would be amused by the notion of fearing the power of women.
That does kinda make me wonder who they would choose for a moderator and what the ground rules would be. I mean, as long as we’re talking “debate” rather than “harassment”.
Ya know how the MRAs and related people are always complaining about women doing things “for attention”? That’s yet another case of projection: these assholes clearly feel entitled to anyone’s/everyone’s attention, as evident by the degree to which they flip their shit if they get banned, blocked, or encounter a space without a comments section. It must be weird going through the world with such a huge sense of entitlement. Even as a straight White dude, one would inevitably be constantly disappointed by the lack of genuflection, which I suppose goes a long way toward explaining how they can occupy positions of privilege along some of the most relevant axes and still feel disempowered and oppressed.
YouTube comments may not be the bottom of the internet, but they are the worst part that we are likely to stumble over. I mean, watching kitten vids is something that we all might do, but getting to /b/ by accident is unlikely (I used to visit some other 4chan boards, but never clicked /b/.) My current browser hides YouTube comments unless I click an arrow, which makes it safe to show my dad videos of airplanes.
I got deep into the comments on a video that supposedly showed how to charge an iPod by sticking a USB cable into an onion soaked in Gatorade. I was trying to point out how it could not work, and how the video was easily faked. All the responses that I got were asking how I could know without actually trying it – but not really asking, just dissing the idea that I could know. There was one other person trying to be scientific, and getting nowhere. Many commenters were asking if they could use the idea for their science project, not noticing the thousands of others who had asked and got no response. A lot were saying that they had tried it and it had worked. Many pointed out how it was like running a digital clock off a potato, therefore it must be true – which was what the hoax was based on. The vid makers let it run for months, then finally posted a disclaimer saying that it was a joke.
I should have made my own vid, but didn’t have the tech. Wasting around in the comments was completely pointless, as has been the case in nearly every other YouTube video. Once in a while, yeah, there is a good comment that carries new information. But on any video that is not about something dry and technical, turn the comments off.
Ah, yes. YouTube comments… the trivial case of Godwin’s Law. Each discussion starts with a Nazi analogy.
Also where a car review video becomes the ideal place to argue whether an atheist Bach could have made good music, whether Kashmir belongs to India or to Pakistan, or whether Obama or Bush is responsible for bad things happening anywhere from now on.
Menyambal @26:
But if you do that, millions (hundreds even; possibly thousands) of MRAs, anti-feminists, MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way, for those who don’t know), victims of the woman-led misandry-driven global conspiracy group the Illuminati will have the sadz.
Caine @ 18
Caine
He got better…
This person calls himself an aspiring comedian. Here is one example of him aspiring to be funny.
Not very funny. Though to be fair, it is a sample size of one. But I really do not want to spend much more time finding the comedy gold.
It’s amazing how turning off youtube comments has totally shielded Anita Sarkeesian from any and all criticism. So many MRAs were left without any possible way to communicate their opinions on the subject, and freeze peach wept. . .
Worse, the writer of this story has never worked a day in the corporate world. You do not get promotions or awards based upon ‘demanding make-work’. Make-work is work giving to stiffs incapable or doing actual, meaningful work. The writer’s boss, the women is giving the writer ‘demanding make-work’ in order for her to be free to do the important shit in the office. She is getting promoted and awarded based on the important shit, but the writer has the delusions that the ‘demanding make-work’ is actually useful.
Of course, I could be reacting to PZ’s summary and not the actual content of the dreck, since I will not read it. However, I will take PZ’s summary as accurate because I place more importance on PZ’s summary than some MRA/MGTOW types delusional hubris.
toska
10 February 2015 at 2:36 pm
I would not say amazing. i would say that the standard, garden variety MRA/MGTOW is only capable of forming opinions based upon 140 characters of text or short, Youtube comments. Following along the lines of my previous post, hosting a website, and make blog posts clearly articulating your thoughts / reasons, is actual hard work.
Conversely, screaming into a YouTube video, writing ignorant, spittle drenched 140 character-assassinations, or short YouTube comments is a simple ‘make work’ type of response. Which is why Thunderfoot, Diarrhea boy Elam, and others can scam a lot of money off of the MRA/MGTOW types. They put effort (used loosely) that the other MRA/MGTOW types cannot do. Good racket, I guess; if you have no morals, ethics, or values beyond your own self-pity?
Donnie,
Sorry, I should have used a snark tag. Turning off youtube comments has not prevented any criticism or even harassment (and loads of it) toward Anita Sarkeesian. It’s silly for the person in the OP to suggest that turning off comments has or was meant to prevent rebuttals of the ideas in her videos.
Well, there *is* a correlation between closing your YT comments and being a cook or a religious apologist (funnily enough, PZ doesn’t “automatically” defend them…)
These are people that don’t want to see *their ideas* challenged.
The difference with Saarkesian is that the internet is boiling already with challenges on her ideas, and most importantly fucking personal attacks on her.
There’s so many different things wrong with that tweet, and the mindset behind it. The one that bothers me is this idea that “debate” is some sort of path to truth rather than a rhetorical contest. In debate classes, you often defend ideas that are obviously wrong and you can still win the debate by presenting your case better than your opponent does.
Granted, what they call “debate” is them declaring that they’re right in more and more obnoxious ways until you block them, and then they declare victory because your patience ran out.
“O hai! Have I mentioned I’m megalomaniac today?”
/Internet diagnosis
#35 toska : Got the snark, I was adding onto your snark ;)
#34: Donnie
Granted. Writing a post/blog requires a level of rationality and organized thought that very few of them seem to possess.
#1 Cerberus: QFT!
If you turn them on, do they send you flowers?
Mayby that’s old fashoned.
Youtube comments are legendarily stupid, of course. The format is also fucking terrible and makes it very difficult to read any debate that might, for whatever reason, even be worth reading. Most comments go off on a tangent. Or are just regurgitation of memes. And of course there are the group of relentless assholes. Two simple examples from the Video Game Review world:
1. Spoony of the Spoony Experiment had been doing less and less reviews over time. This led to a fanbase who constantly, incessantly whined about not enough videos. He took on a Patreon campaign, meaning he would get monthly donations from fans to give him the resources to make more and better videos. He wound up getting around $4 grand a month or so. Which is playing with fucking fire, because this made the fanbase even more loud, angry, and entitled. They don’t understand how money works, or how the money is supposed to be invested, and how this doesn’t always mean immediate results. All they know is they sure would like that much money, and they howled with righteous indignation and fury until Spoony finally shut down all comments on youtube and his personal site. He had tweeted that he had been sick for a while, came back and read some of the comments built up and was feeling like he was having an emotional breakdown.
2. On a more humorous note, there is projared. He posts Nuzlocke challenges, which are runs through pokemon games in which he puts restrictions on himself that make the game harder and also possible to actually lose. The first run became bombarded with jokes about Nuptup, his Vileplume that was the only pokemon that wound up surviving to the very end from (almost) the very beginning. For his second run, on almost every goddamn video there were people constantly complaining and backseat driving about “that was a stupid decision”, “you should have done more grinding”, etc. etc. He made several references to these comments in other videos. As a kind of “be careful what you wish for”, a more recent video was made that just showed him fighting weak pokemon to level up, unedited, while ranting randomly about pokemon he hates, as a nod to all the “grind more!” gripes.
So yeah. Youtube comments are worthless, more or less. Even when they are useful, they are mostly only useful to hold up for mockery.
…a man in the future who has a boring dead-end cubicle job with lots of demanding make-work…
Wow, that sort of horror NEVER happens in places ruled by men, amirite?
…how to charge an iPod by sticking a USB cable into an onion soaked in Gatorade.
There y’go — who needs tar sands?
I love that “cubicle job” is some sort of culturally stigmatized word. “Cubicle jobs” are so boring, and mindless, and soulless, and horrible, and oh god, how could you spend your whole life doing it?
Somehow, in people’s minds, “office job” or “cubicle” is just a dirty word.
I blame Dilbert. And possibly Office Space.
In reality, those jobs are damn cushy. People fight for that shit. And it requires mental effort, often involves a lot of tasks that keep things varied, but you also have your own space you can control and can, to a degree, work at your own pace. And on top of that, they generally don’t pay too poorly.
Contrast with fucking retail jobs. *shudder*
Perhaps they are stigmatized jobs entirely because they involve brainpower and are comfortable jobs? Because in our culture, men need to be Rugged Individualist, either using your musclepower or using your brain power only if you have an MD or working with big shiny machinery. Or you need to be suffering, working incredibly hard for pennies, instead of sitting and getting well paid, like some sort of slacker.
If the above is anywhere near the thought process involved, it certainly would explain why that trope would be invoked in a histrionic What-If story about the horrible matriarchy.
anteprepro @46:
…or service industry jobs…
::whistles innocently::