Extra Credits

That was very informative, thank you.

@Jetyl: Thanks so much for sharing! It's always great to get first-hand experience.

@Spooky Mask: I've never met James or even looked at his social media, so I'm just speculating here.

Let's define terms.

A hypocrite is a person who espouses and endorses a worldview and knowinlgy acts in a contrary manner. For example, a man who loudly proclaims that sex outside of marriage is wrong but who himself has sex outside of marriage is a hypocrite.

This should not be confused with a double standard, which is holding different groups of people to different standards. For example a man who proclaims that women shouldn't have sex outside of marriage but that it's OK if men do it who then has sex with a bunch of women who he's not married to and condemns them as harlots is not a hypocrite, because his actions are consistent with his worldview; however, he clearly holds a double standard regarding sexual activity.

The knowingly part of the definition of a hypocrite makes me iffy on referring to James as one. We all have blind spots when it comes to recognising negative traits in ourselves; indeed, social scientists have measured how we judge our own actions by intention and the actions of others by outcome. I suspect that James honestly means it when he condemns harassment, but is unable to recognise his own actions as harassment. Thus, it's a failure of perception rather than hypocrisy per se.

Heck, the fact that he went to the trouble of hiring an external HR auditor suggests that James might even be aware of this on some level. Maybe he genuinely did want to make sure he wasn't missing something in himself, but when the firm gave him a pass, he concluded that his actions must have been justified.

From what I've seen said about him, it seems to be that he's just convinced he can do no wrong. He may well genuinely condemn harassment and bullying, but he doesn't consider what he does to be harassment or bullying, because in his situations, the other person is at fault, so that makes his behavior okay.

Hey. Sorry to interrupt your argument over James Portnow's questionable social conduct, but seven pages back (the last post on page 77, ugh I can't post links yet) somebody mentioned how the source for his Suleiman series was "Orientalist bullshit". What was that source, and how did people find out about it?

edited 19th Jun '18 5:01:02 PM by Delphisage

People over at r/badhistory cross-compared their statements with known sources and when one of them pressed the EC guys on that, they actually confirmed having used said (questionable) sources.

Same redditor also got a lengthy response from James later which basically boiled down to "We're not historians, we're entertainers, so using questionable sources is just fine".

It's why I personally always treated Extra History as entertainment, not as education.

edited 19th Jun '18 8:06:58 PM by DrunkenNordmann

That's an unsettling response that really feels like it deflates the entire concept of what Extra History's supposed to be.

That's...

quite a contrast from what I had assumed to be the attitude that spawned the "lies" segment of this whole thing.

Well, I guess this helps to let me make a clean break. If the source and the content of the channel are both questionable, I got no reason to stick around.

I have a friend who's a history teacher who's always found their history work to be very questionable.

At the risk of stirring the pot further, why does the TV Tropes article for EC say that they address their innacuracies in their Lies episodes? I’ve watched most of them, and all I can remember them ever saying is an recitement of letters/edits that were said in or around each series, and then a little skit about trying to tie things to the Walpole family because injoke. I don’t think they even address incorrect flags or borders in them.

And if that question turns out to be me making faulty assumption on my own faulty memory, then my alternative question is what other innacuracies have showed up in any EH series. My best recollections are of petty things, like mixing up Tzar Alexander II with Nicholas II, calling an inter-triumvirial dispute for Constantine a “civil war”, and painting Simon Bolivar and Karl XII as heroic Great Men.

edited 19th Jun '18 9:31:12 PM by Delphisage

You're 100% Right to.

It shouldn't be unsettling if you've watched any of their episodes and have even a passing familiarity with the topic of any of their episodes. It's pretty dang clear that EH is has always been about entertainment first and accuracy and education a distant second. It's been my long running beef with the series. Their obsession on "Great (Wo)man history" and their use of often apocryphal if not outright wrong sources to tell a tale with more theatricality all stem from the desire to entertain.

I'd not call them bad necessarily, but be aware that EH isn't that different from, say, a movie dramatization of historical events.

They do generally address some of their errors in their lies episode. Though they'll often skip over stuff that's a "core" of their story telling. The errors they tend to pony up to generally tend to be wrong pictures for things, or the script using a wrong term here and there. Small, more nitpicky errors and rarely the big stuff.

I dislike the Lies Segment. I don't mind EH doing "Entertaining history", that's fine. But the Lies segment feels like an attempt to paint a veneer of accuracy the show doesn't have, by addressing small nitpick or issues and making it feel like the show's more accurate than it is.

There's a lot, too many to go through this late at night, but the WWI segment contains a lot of apocryphal or unconfirmed facts, notably that Gavrilo Princip was at a sandwich shop eating a sandwich following the failed first attempt when he saw the Arch-duke and killed him.

The recent episode on The battle of Thermopylae runs with the myth of Spartans being trained from childhood in a training from hell that some of them didn't survive. As I pointed out a few pages earlier (With sources), that's not true. That's very much an image the Spartans gave themselves after the fact (In no small part thanks to Thermopylae) instead of focusing on the actual stuff that made Spartan Military impressive.

edited 19th Jun '18 11:23:56 PM by Ghilz

Which is weird, since one can see a consistent refutation of Great Person theory in their work; many of their stories reduce down to "Important Person X focused on getting their country Y to conquer Z, didn't quite succeed in that task, then watched country Y fall apart due to famine and/or disease and/or a succession crisis." You'd almost start to wonder if conquering places wasn't that important in the long run.

edited 19th Jun '18 11:18:38 PM by thok

Great Person theory doesn't require the person to succeed. It's making history all about great people making great decisions for better or for worse, and downplaying the societal, economic and cultural forces at play.

Considering how many of their episodes are about "Person X shaped country Y"...

Why do people always keep romanticizing stories into Great Man narratives, even after contemporary philosphers have learned better? Isn’t telling a story as historically accurate as you can entertaining enough without adding crazy stories about how a nation’s leader personally led his troops into giant battles against evil empires, took on entire hordes of demonic monsters in personal unarmed combat, and survived hundreds of things combined that individually should’ve killed any normal man?

edited 20th Jun '18 12:16:09 AM by Delphisage

Except Extra Credits always sold itself as a educational channel. Yes, they aim to be entertaining *as well*, maybe even "primary", but all their videos in the main channel are about teaching. Hell, they are even doing politics videos now. So it is not comparable to movie dramatization, unless that movie sells itself as "the real history" or something like that (which some do, and deserve to be criticized for it). Not to mention the whole "Lies" thing that explicitly tries to make the series more legitimate by pointing out minor mistakes (if it was pure entertainment, they shouldn't care).

You are right people should regard them as pure entertainment and doing so is the best way to enjoy those videos. But most people won't. And most people won't because EC deliberately muddles waters. It is their fault for doing that and they need to be criticized for it.

This is the sort of stuff I am less likely to criticize them, though. That sort of minor, irrelevant, detail is clearly there to be dramatic. It could be total fabrication of them and I wouldn't care much. It is the many big picture things that bother me.

edited 20th Jun '18 2:36:28 AM by Heatth

I think it's relevant at the moment that, thanks to the ever-expanding side projects, the Youtube channel page's header now has a more generalized version of the motto: "because learning matters".

Wow, that response posted on Reddit.

Jesus.

Ah, but you see, I do take offense, coz their entire narrative on the start of WWI is how WWI seemingly happened because of a series of small coincidence, like a Rube Goldberg Machine that just happened to get the perfect result for war. That's the entire running theme of their videos. And it completely ignores that for years before the war, MANY people in Europe in knew a global conflict was a possibility and even a likely outcome in years to come (Though EH being fan of Great Man History like to credit Bismarck as the Only Sane Man who saw it coming, when it's not accurate). Some people were even calling for a war to happen as a way to cull the poor and curtail the rise of unions and workers' rights movements in Europe. Sure, no one would know how devastating that war would be, but stuff like the "sandwhich shop" factoid is an element EH cherry picked, knowing it wasn't accurate, to build their narrative that WWI was a series of coincidence and strokes of luck. Like a roll of the die, and not the results of decades of policies, rising nationalistic sentiments and super powers arming themselves and rearing for a fight.

It's a symptom that EH is more about telling a story than telling history, so they'll pick events and anecdotes that make the videos more narratively interesting.

edited 20th Jun '18 4:31:48 PM by Ghilz

So what exactly is the timeline for this whole extra credits debacle

See NativeJovian's post

edited 20th Jun '18 4:35:18 PM by Ghilz

I agree with that. But that is more of a problem with the overall framing of the videos. It is more a structural problem with the whole series, not with that factoid. If they hadn't put so much emphasis on how the war was a sequence of minor events, that one minor event, that is there just to create narrative flavor, then it wouldn't be a problem.

So, I don't think we disagree much. I just think EC could do this whole little embellishments things for the sake of entertainment if they wanted, as long as they made clear this is exactly what they were doing. And didn't expand them to encompass the whole thing. And probably then mention them on the Lies videos, as that was supposed to be pretty much the whole point of those.

Telling a story is a good way to tell history. You just need to make sure you are not compromising the later for the sake of the former.

Incidentally, the post I made on the EC Patreon regarding why I felt I could no longer support them. It has since been deleted. Even though I cancelled my subscription, I still have access to their Patreon feed at my previous tier level until the next billing cycle, so it's not something like "only current patron's posts show up" or anything like that. They just deleted it — it doesn't even show up in the "comments you've made" section of my Patreon profile anymore.

Here's a screenshot of it I took after posting it◊. I really wish that level of foresight hadn't been necessary. But yeah, thanks for confirming my decision to stop supporting you, EC. I was giving you money because I genuinely supported what you were doing, and when you did something that made me not want to give you money anymore, you respond by deleting my post and pretending my concerns don't exist instead of dealing with them in good faith.

This is the exact wrong way to go about it reassuring the community that you're trying to do the right thing rather than just cover your own ass.

That post actually made me feel a bit sad. I think it was the "ten years".

so far they've lost about 324 patrons and 1.3K in donation thanks to the controversy (A loss of 7% in patrons and 8% in donations). It's clear the strategy isn't "lets reassure the community" but instead "Lets limit the exposure and ride this out". Which seems to be working out for them. Unlike the Channel Awesome debacle, there's not a bunch of videos being made to cover this controversy by other Youtubers the way CA did. So my bet is they will just delete posts about it on the Patreon itself and bank on most of their patrons not hearing about this.

edited 21st Jun '18 5:17:27 AM by Ghilz

So you're saying there should be Youtube callout videos?

I think there's a spectrum between youtube calling out and videos that talk about controversies or events in a calm and reasonable manner.

That if people don't know someone they support is a shithead, it doesn't prompt change.

In this case, James' behavior hasn't really prompted much coverage, so there's no real incentive for him to behave differently.

edited 21st Jun '18 10:13:56 AM by Ghilz