Shaun

Wow, that Cuphead video is great. It really is alarming how you can get swathes of angry people to agree with anything you say as long as you blame it on "SJ Ws" or something.

edited 25th Nov '17 9:56:41 AM by Danthefish

Finding that Cuphead video elsewhere is exactly what got me interested in Shaun (didn't know about him until now, actually). Really good video, and while I sadly don't find it unsurprising, it's still incredibly disturbing how easy it is to whip up these anti-SJW types into a frenzy over something that isn't even real.

Unrelated to that topic, seeing him tear Cinema Sins apart is so satisfying, and I say that as someone who enjoys (or rather, used to enjoy) their videos. I just don't find most of their videos funny anymore, for exactly the reasons Shaun gave.

Last night I made the mistake of watching his video on that Stefan Molyneux guy's response to Star Wars: The Force Awakens and... I knew that guy was a piece of work, but I was not prepared for that. And this guy has a daughter? My god... It's probably for the good of my sanity that I don't delve further into the mind of Stefan Molyneux, even if it's in the context of someone explaining why he's wrong.

edited 25th Nov '17 3:56:02 PM by MisoraMiyazaki

Didn't Shaun say in his Curiouscat not-too-long-ago that the "Tealskull" would return?

Shaun's back and so much sooner than expected! His target this time is a lady who "interviewed" Richard Spencer and concluded he was a "moderate Ceentrist."

Fairly straightforward takedown of the usual bullshit you hear from ignorant people online. I'd be interested in hearing a response to his video from RM (he invites her to try and counter his arguments) but I doubt she'll do it because she's not exactly an intellectual. She's just one of the Racist Barbies on YT who feed all the right wing crap three.

At first, I groaned when she pulled up the "dictionary definition". But then I laughed with bemusement, as I noticed the dictionary definition didn't even support her main point.

Really, what is the point of pulling the dictionary if you are not even pay attention to it?

When a big chunk of the argument boils down to “black people aren’t discriminated against, they’re just genetically predisposed to crime” yeah, there’s no leg to stand on.

Especially when you think about it and realize that if you think that black people are just predisposed to crime...who gets to define what a crime is? In the US, generally white people. So black people are predisposed to certain behaviours that white people decided to criminalize...sounds a lot like oppression and discrimination to me!

(Obviously the whole argument is just garbage, but when you can screw with it entirely within the limited and quite frankly stupid framework of the scenario and break it, it’s really not a good one.)

edited 30th Nov '17 5:35:26 PM by Zendervai

Yeah, her whole line of argument is nonsense. But these are such common arguments and she sounds so well meaning and normal saying them that I think it was an excellent idea for Shaun to do that video. That line of thinking is common among privileged people who never bothered thinking through it for more than 2 seconds. And it being said by someone who is not an nazi bird or a condescending asshole gives it some appearance of credibility. Even if Roaming Millennial herself is just being disingenuous^note which, I mean, she probably is Maybe Shaun arguments will allow some people to actually think through this kind of logic.

That said, it would be great if Roaming Millennial is just as clueless as she appears to be and make a 180 once she hears arguments that cut through her paper thin logic. I wouldn't count on it but, still, it would be great.

Shaun also touched on this point in the video, but to bring it even further:

There are events and people from hundreds, if not thousands of years ago that still have a profound effect on the culture, politics and economy of the world. Everything about the state of the world today is a result of something else that happened before.

Given that, it's extremely naive to think that a population being systematically and institutionally enslaved and exploited for centuries, not to mention being second class citizens until only just 6 decades ago, wouldn't still have significant consequences that could be felt in the present day.

Teal Deer's maligning Shaun and his followers again. Apparently Teal, in total honesty, somehow ended up on Twitter and somehow, via a series of convenient retweets, ended up on Shaun's tweet. Teal didn't go looking after Shaun actively, no. He has no idea what Real News stands for and this can't be checked easily, it seems. He's never even heard of them. It's leftists like Shaun, who are to blame for feeding this beast that Teal doesn't know what it is. I believe this all without questioning. Why anyone would suggest this is a transparent smear is beyond me.

Shaun makes a video about how we can reach people who are susceptible to falling into the alt-right, and discusses how he himself broke free of the "anti-sjw" mindset.

Some of the things he mentions:

- It's completely ok if you're not willing to spend your time trying to change these people's minds. You don't owe them anything, and most of them will act like petulant assholes.

- Straight white cis men are much more likely to listen to other straight white cis men, which is why if you are one this can be something you're more equipped to handle than people who aren't. It might actually be important to do this because straight white cis guys are more likely to be conservative, so by exposing some of these people to new ideas you are not only gaining a potential ally but also removing an opponent.

- Regarding his own history, Shaun himself is a straight white cis guy but he came from a poorer background and as a youth was very insecure about himself and responded poorly to people implying he was privileged in any way, adopting many of his views at the time more out of inertia and passitivity than hatred, but they were still ignorant and bigoted (sexism and racism are over, etc). He comments how he falsely clung to an inflated sense of intellectual superiority). Due to his exposure to the Something Awful forums (which aren't perfect by any means, but at the time were more progressive than many other places) and having his assumptions challenged, he gradually started to become more conscentious of what he was doing and how he was treating women.

Essentially, he concludes that change is something that often happens privately, piece-by-piece over a long period of time. You'll rarely, if ever, reach someone right away, the important thing is just planting the idea in their heads. Secondly, being exposed to the fact that a movement you think is monolithic actually isn't and in fact has many debates and points of contention is really illuminating because it introduces nuance where one previously thought there was none.

- He takes some time to also mention some people within the social justice sphere who are legitimately terrible people (TERF's, white feminism, male feminists using the movement for their own purposes, etc), but mentions how cherrypicking them as the face of the movement is dishonest.

- He advises not using labels. He doesn't apply the label of feminist to himself both because he doesn't feel comfortable self-ID'ing (an opinion I agree with) and also because it just leads to tiresome debates about what those labels mean, rather than discussing the ideas behind those labels. Not to mention if they don't recognize those labels, it makes them feel unintelligent. It's often best to pitch them ideas as simply as possible, and seemingly devoid of any particular allegiance, but just as ice-breakers because you need labels eventually to properly define things.

- Don't fall into traps. If you care about changing these people's minds at all, making jokes about majority groups gives those people the idea that they consider them enemies by default and that they shouldn't bother trying to understand them. Shaun doesn't personally get offended by them, but he does worry about the implications on permanently shutting the door, saying that while it isn't anyone's job to educate anyone unless they're teachers, that teaching will have to be done by someone else if those people refuse to do it themselves.

- He states that it's important for potential leftist YT'ers to establish their own narrative and not just respond to antifeminists/antisjws exclusively (not the exclusively here), because the desire for leftist content on the platform is there and the scene is going to grow in the next few years.

edited 15th Jan '18 9:55:24 PM by Draghinazzo

and so Shaun tells us of his Edgy Atheist Phase.....

Shaun video:

The video examines the results and failures of the privatization of the British Railway system.

A tidbit from Shaun:

If you've seen Shaun's "White Men/2018 Plans" from last month, he mentioned he'd later do a video about helping people get into youtube, and here is that video:

As the title implies, it's Shaun giving a bit of advice on how to start a channel, first some technical advice... that mostly boils down to "google things", and then some creative advice ("what should you make videos about?" or some note-taking habits for example).

edited 16th Feb '18 5:38:56 AM by IFwanderer

To summarize: Shaun refutes a lot of the talking points right-wingers have been bringing up and how supposedly there's a double standard about how Wakanda is celebrated for being an "isolationist, anti-immigration ethnostate" but white nationalists are vilified for wanting that same thing for themselves.

Not the least of which is the movie says Wakanda was wrong to be an isolationist society.

Shaun's new one is in the works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcoYKuoiUrY

I've apparently forgotten markup altogether and the help tab isn't working, but there's the link. It's about the Charlottesville riots.

edited 2nd Apr '18 11:21:53 AM by achilles_heel

Here ya go:

Within your double brackets put in "youtube:(insert youtube_id here, which in this case is zcoYKuoiUrY)" NO SPACES

edited 2nd Apr '18 12:44:59 PM by Pachylad

At this point, I really wonder if there are people out there going "BOTH SIDES" and "Antifa's the real fascist!!1!" who are not Nazi themselves. And to think these are actual people, who are probably out there freely planning their next move, I feel sick.

Saying that "there are assholes in any group if you look hard enough" just reeks of Captain Obvious at best, and generally a flimsy deflection of critcism.

I think there are to be honest. Some people are very insistent on not knowing what they don't want to know, so they will promptly ignore any association with nazis and honestly believe they are just honest, non awful right wing people. Like, I am pretty sure my great aunt voted for Trump and she most certainly not a nazi and likely believe he won't actually be that terrible to all latinos such as herself. She is not very politically conscious doesn't go looking for news who prove her wrong, and the ones that do are probably just lies or even genuine mistakes.

This anecdotal, of course, but I believe there are plenty people like that. Innocent Bigots, essentially. Of course, that doesn't excuse their awfulness, and at some point it doesn't even make them materially different from literal neo-nazis, at last on practice, but it is not quite the same thing. It is why education is important, and why at last some doors need to be always open^note though this responsibility shouldn't ever befall into the victims of oppression. These "Innocent" Bigots, sometimes do take their heads out of the ignorance hole and try to educate themselves, and realize how awful they have been^note and often they just double down and actually become literal neo nazis, which is why it shouldn't ever be the duty of oppressed people to interact with them.

edited 3rd Apr '18 3:23:45 PM by Heatth

Shaun talks about The Last Jedi.

I love Shaun, he's very brave tacking some of these guys, some of them have very nasty followers but he always manage to prove their cherry picking and other falacies by using reason and solid arguments.