Shaun

An edited re-upload of an old video he made about The Amazing Atheist (he edited out some personal attacks on TJ), with some caveats about some of the language he used back then.

The fact that TJ used a picture of soccer players to represent "primitive" Africans is an irony of irony's.

Ya know I've never actually heard TJ talk before, but after hearing this...why do people watch him? He has an incredibly yell-y, whiny tone like a petulant child. It's pathetic.

In the past his ruthless takedown of fundamentalists gave him a strong following. As time went on and the online culture war came in full swing he was one of the many heralds that the alt-right rallied behind.

The alt-right's footprint on Youtube is quite large, so reachin a million subscribers is a semi-realistic feat.

Hasn't TJ also talked against the alt-right?

Maybe but that doesn't mean they won't parrot his viewpoints or that he doesn't align with their message.

He advertises himself as a centrist but he constantly recites alt-right talking points. He's a "useful idiot".

More like he's an idiot period. The man is dumb.

He's basically a borderline alt-righter, he doesn't identify with the movement but he parrots many of their talking points and is generally an ignorant, sanctimonious, slimy edgelord bigot. I heard that he used to be a bit more level-headed but after his divorce he got really sour and doubled down on all his previous misogyny/racism/transphobia/etc.

I mean apparently Sargon of Akkad doesn't think he's alt right either but he's still the leading voice for them and a complete and utter scumbag. Just because you don't think you're aligned with the Nazis doesn't mean you aren't complicit in spreading their ideology and influencing them.

That's generally what's so ridiculous about people complaining that the left tries to smear anyone who disagrees with them as nazis and why I'm inclined to dismiss people parroting that argument. It ignores that

a) Actual bona-fide, dyed in the wool nazis are on a resurgence and their views are becoming more common. Rarely do I see anyone genuinely calling someone a nazi if they aren't one. Outside of public figures like Richard Spencer, places like YT, 4chan and reddit are infested with alt-right trolls spewing out nazi apologia and antisemitic bullshit.

b) You don't have to be a nazi yourself to be a useful idiot or otherwise complicit in their terrible behavior or rhetoric.

It's essentially the classic mistake of centering the conversation solely around them and their personal feelings/inner life, while ignoring the overall social effect of their actions.

So, to recap, AA is one of those "I say I'm centrist but I side with the far-right in every position except maybe gay rights and religious fundamentalism"?

And yeah, I agree with Adric, he sounds so obnoxious I don't see why people like to watch him.

A weird thing about those types is that they only care about text without reading between the lines...when it suits them.

Karlgon has claimed on several occasions that Black Lives Matter is a racist organization and yet is perfectly fine with people puttin up posters sayin "It's okay to be white".

Yes, it is okay to be white, but to actively deny the people who put up these posters and parrot this message don't want an ethnostate is baffling.

A lot of these people get so hung up on (supposedly) literal readings and single definitions and forget that words have multiple meanings and that context can change the meaning of something.

Well, they do sort of acknowledge context, but they appear to make it up? It's like they watch someone or something...and then immediately toss out their memory of it and make something entirely new up. (Like Stefan Molyneux saying that the Wonder Woman movie is a metaphor for overcoming an abusive childhood and it's extremely anti-male. Uh, no. The movie isn't even remotely about either of those things and I have no idea where the abusive childhood thing even came from.) I have a feeling that a lot of these people might actually be capable of being smarter than they come off, if they didn't spend all their time and energy twisting their thoughts into pretzels trying to justify the incoherent and bizarre way they see the world.

edited 15th Nov '17 9:42:21 AM by Zendervai

What about Teal Deer?

His approach seems to be chopping the thing he’s reacting to into bits and not really paying attention to how the bits fit together while being weirdly sarcastic. And yes, being super nit picky about terminology to a ridiculously pedantic degree.

To be honest, I don’t really understand the appeal of Tl;dr or Bearing or those types. Weirdly sarcastic reactions to barely contextualized fragments of videos mixed with incredibly blunt and nasty insults do not seem like a winning combination to me. Especially when mixed with attempted debunkings of ideas and concepts when they don’t actually know that much about the topic. Also, the strange fixation on Anita Sarkeesian which is still a thing for some reason?

Personally, my theory on why people like that get big is because the people they attract don’t actually have any experience with the other side of the argument. So people like Tl;dr and Bearing look like they’re shredding someone’s arguments, but when you look at the actual argument or video they’re responding to, it doesn’t work. I mean, shaun did that video on Tl;dr a while back, right? In it he has a brief reference to Bearing where be brings up how difficult the random insults are to respond to and then moves on, almost immediately, to Tl;dr and doesn’t mention Bearing at all. But then the Bearing fans flooded the comments making it really obvious that someone had mentioned an attack on Bearing, but they never watched the actual video.

People feel smart for following someone they think is smart. You know what’s actually smart? Looking at the evidence (all of it, not just the evidence that agrees with you) and properly thinking through it and coming to your own conclusion, not just parroting some guy who doesn’t appear to realize what his own avatar either means or comes off like.

edited 16th Nov '17 9:51:59 AM by Zendervai

And anyone can use select research, studies and fact checking as long as it makes their case look credible, just like Teal Deer?

Teal Deer just seems like a thoroughly miserable, humorless person. Kinda like an SJW, really.

Without making this the Teal Deer -thread, it does seem to me that he does point out some flaws in how some leftists approach things. For one example, he's talked against false rape accusations.

He could do better, though. In one video, Laci Green mentions protecting the falsely accused and Teal Deer just shows news articles about the false accusers getting away with meager justice and laughs, as if that somehow disproved the need to do anything about the whole thing. That's pretty disingenuous of Teal Deer. I mean, really?!

Shaun pointed out in Outrage News (Shaun's video) how Teal Deer had fallen for a poorly sourced piece of news and failed to include the correction that had come before Teal Deer made his video.

Teal Deer cites his videos a lot, but so do many others.

I use hbomb's google plugin to block people like him and I have a separate thing fo Firefox that blocks channels I add to it.

I don't waste my time with these kinds of people. The only time I watch them is when they are included in a video by someone I like, such as Shaun's verbal beatdowns of them. Or maybe Kevin Logan's Descent of Man-o-sphere series that highlights how these people are all garbage.

edited 16th Nov '17 7:36:56 PM by Nikkolas

What exactly do false rape accusations, which are all but nonexistent, have to do with "flaws in how some leftists approach things".

False accusations do happen and they can have disastrously bad consequences but they are the once-in-a-blue-moon minority of cases. My understanding is that they are most likely to happen in situations where the victim was not able to see the perpetrator clearly and misidentifies them after, which is itself an entirely different problem from the implication of "they made it up" that comes up with the subject.

the only case I can remeber was duke university(or something like that) were a women said she was raped by three students, things really turn ugly before the whole thing turn she was lying...and them she was accused a yearh leater for stabing his boyfriend, yeah.

But other than that, never really hear false acusastions.

I'd like to hear more specific examples of where Teal Deer is wrong, pointing to specific videos of his and things cited by him. Him being a "miserable, humorless individual, kinda like an SJW" only tells me vaguely about the kind of person he is.

At what point? I don't remember seeing a glimpse of Teal Deer. Must've missed him skipping ahead randomly?

edited 3rd Jan '18 6:53:39 AM by MerryMikael

• continues to ignore stuff about Teal Deer (because everything I know about him is from that hbomberguy vid on Bill Nye, and it doesn't give him a good look, I don't feel like bothering to look further)*

THE CUPHEAD CONSPIRACY (or not): Shaun discusses outrage about fake outrage