|
Post by Zarnium on May 28, 2019 8:05:28 GMT -8
So, just thinking out loud here: I'm a big fan of YouTuber PeanutButterGamer/Austin Hargrave, PBG for short, who has a long-running series called "Hardcore" where he gets together with a rotating cast of several other YouTubers and friends who simultaneously play a video game together. Problem is, as much as I love the show, so many people involved in it have turned out to be... uh, problematic, that it's now very awkward to watch at best, and very likely cancelled at worst.
So, to begin with, JonTron/Jon Jafari was a frequent guest in early episodes, who later turned out to have some very nativist anti-immigration views, among other things. He was never invited back after this went public, but he's still in the old ones, which makes them a bit awkward to watch if you're like me and just couldn't find him funny anymore.
Next, I found out from reading his Twitter page that PBG's brother, Stewart Hargrave/"McJones", who was in nearly every episode until he quit the show a little over a year ago, is a massive alt-righter and Trump supporter. Again, makes it a little awkward to go back and watch the old videos knowing that behind all the silly jokes, the guy making them is making snide remarks about awful people like you are elsewhere.
The thing that really puts the nail in the coffin is the recent drama with Jared Knabenbauer/"ProJared", who allegedly cheated on his wife and traded nude photos with underage fans. (To be fair, he claims that he and his wife had an agreed-upon open marriage, so there's not really a way to verify which one of them is lying, but he definitely sent nudes to underage fans.) This has resulted in PBG removing every episode from his channel that Jared is in, which effectively renders half of Hardcore stricken from the record.
I mean, I can't really blame him for doing that; profiting off of the appearance of someone like Jared would look bad for his image, and on a personal level, I'm sure he both feels betrayed by his longtime friend and feels that this is the morally right thing to do. (He seems like a good guy, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.) But it makes me wonder, are collaborative projects like this just a poor idea all around? I mean, if you have eight people on a project, chances are at least one of them's going to be a creep or a racist, apparently. With TV and film, it's a little different because the people you see are employees playing characters. With YouTube productions like this, it's a little different because no one is acting, they're just being themselves, so if the people turn out to be jerks it ruins the whole thing.
|
|
|
Post by Jeremy on May 28, 2019 16:50:40 GMT -8
To start with, I get not wanting to watch YouTube vids from controversial creators, and that it's different from more mainstream TV/film productions. I still haven't watched any Nostalgia Critic in recent months, despite the fact that Doug Walker was never directly implicated in the Channel Awesome idiocy I brought up a few pages ago.
However, I think we should address the phrase "problematic," since it's popped up a few times on the forum lately. To me, a content creator can be viewed as problematic (i.e. unpalatable for the mainstream) if he/she engages in activity that is generally viewed as immoral, or if they contextually express views that are harmful/discriminatory. The problem is that in our current age of extremism, it's become harder than ever to know where to draw the line.
While there's little question that ProJared's actions were immoral and creepy, I've grown wary of deplatforming creators based on supposedly harmful political views. Perhaps because there have been too many recent instances of content creators expressing even moderately right-of-center views and getting their videos demonetized or removed, or worse, getting faced down by the unruly Twitter mob.
I can't speak for JonTron or McJones specifically, since I essentially know nothing about them. (Though from what a quick search has told me, JonTron seems to lean left in a lot of his politics.) But nowadays, I just don't know if I still trust the Internet culture to tell me who's "alt-right" or not.
(Also, it's probably not helpful to judge a person by their Twitter page. I've found that plenty of celebrities can be reasonable in real life, or even on their YouTube pages, but they turn into absolute partisan jerks on Twitter for the sole purpose of getting attention. I have had to mute several famous writers/actors whose work I enjoy because I find their social-media personalities to be gross and toxic.)
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on May 28, 2019 17:26:28 GMT -8
Well, strictly speaking, JonTron wasn't really "de-platformed", as such. He was kicked out of his YouTube network, but his association with the network was never really necessary for his career. He's continued to be successful on his own. My avoidance of him is less out of moral obligation and more due to the fact that I just don't find him to be funny and amicable like I used to, with him apparently thinking that the refugees looking for a safe place to live after fleeing a warzone are ruining our nation, complaining that he's being made to be "a minority in his own country" and whatnot.
McJones is more of a personal case, in that there's never really been a public backlash against him, likely due to the fact that he's not nearly as famous as JonTron is, and doesn't really have any following or internet presence outside of Hardcore itself. It's just... one day I ran across his Twitter account, and it was just page after page of snarky, mean-spirited remarks about how stupid and evil liberals are. I was never quite able to forget that when watching him again.
I dunno, I don't approve of all the Twitter shaming or genuine de-platforming that goes on, but I can't deny that on a personal level, I have a hard time enjoying the work of someone who thinks I'm an idiot snowflake.
EDIT: Case in point, I just went to look at McJones' Twitter page again, and this is his bio:
"Evangelical Christian. Conservative. 2nd amendment advocate. Trump supporter. If those labels trigger you, you probably won't like what I post."
I mean, fair enough, it's true, I don't like anything he posts. His most recent string of non-reply tweets is a long anti-transgender rant. He's not just a bit right of center, he's a fully committed, unapologetic Trump supporter who has aggressively gone out of his way to make that abundantly clear. It just kind of ruins any enjoyment I ever got out of watching his antics.
EDIT 2: While continuing to scroll through his feed, I came across several tweets that lament the fact that no one gets along or has open dialogue in politics, but then came across other tweets that say things like "The only thing twitter is good for is retweeting pro-Trump tweets and laughing as people get mad about it." Just, ugh, I'm done with this guy. Don't claim to be an intellectual while simultaneously bragging about how you make tweets just to get a rise out of people.
|
|
|
Post by Jeremy on May 28, 2019 19:02:33 GMT -8
I mean, that sounds fair. A look at his Twitter page shows him retweeting a few reasonable conservatives, but there are definitely a lot of "Trump 4eva" folks in his timeline, and a lot of their posts are unreasonably antagonistic. I don't know if that necessarily makes him a bad person, but I understand not wanting to watch his videos after seeing that timeline.
(Side note: I hate how Twitter drowns out the more reasonable folks with the loud, angry extremists. One of the worst aspects of the whole website.)
I guess I'm just bugged by the ever-continuing shaming of Internet folks who have released so much as a single, possibly controversial tweet. The most recent example of this is Nathan Pyle, the cartoonist behind the hilarious Strange Planet webcomic. Pyle has a lot of followers and has been able to successfully merchandise his cartoons in recent months. But a few weeks ago, someone dug up a tweet of his that was vaguely pro-life. This led to a Twitter backlash from folks who were horrified at the idea that a man whose cartoons they enjoyed might politically disagree with them - and, worse still, that money from merchandise they had purchased from his website might (so they assumed) be donated to pro-life organizations. Pyle was inundated with angry tweets and replies, and he finally issued a statement to say that he supported the Democratic Party and did not wish to be associated with the GOP.
The whole thing just sickened me, and it's one of the more egregious examples of how Twitter has become a destructive weapon, and how our culture has become so insular that people freak out at the slightest chance that someone whose work they support may not fully agree with them. (Not that you're doing this; I'm just venting in general.)
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on May 28, 2019 20:12:08 GMT -8
Yeah, I don't really like it when people flip out about someone having just a couple disagreements or a couple old distasteful comments that they've since retracted. That's a bit absurd.
At the same time, some people seem to think that anyone should be able to say whatever they want, without it having any consequences in any way. Like, a lot of the viewers that JonTron lost were brown people who have been having a hard time in recent years. If you're going to state that you don't want brown immigrants coming into the country, then you'll have to live with the fact that a lot of those brown immigrants won't like you anymore.
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on May 29, 2019 5:04:34 GMT -8
BTW for anyone who wants to suck up even more of this drama, here's an interesting video I came across about how Asagao Academy, a fan-made dating sim starring all the members of the Normal Boots network, has aged extremely badly and, in hindsight, was always a very poor idea to begin with: youtu.be/vrFDhMV9VnQ
|
|
|
Post by Jay on May 29, 2019 10:28:58 GMT -8
I'm not sure how deep I want to wade into this as one of the forum lefties, but one thing I find, bizarre? fascinating? is that even though JonTron's work was for a long time apolitical, when he came out with his views, I found that a lot of people I knew who watched him thought and felt similarly. There are, of course, exceptions, like another friend and I sometimes talk about coming of internet age on the Something Awful forums and having the majority of that being absorbed by the alt-Right, despite its creator actually being a leftist. This is out of my domain even as a literary theorist, but I wonder if ideologies revealed themselves in some way or another that we've failed to account for. I'm sure someone has made the arguments for it, but it strikes me as a lot of entrail reading.
To a different point, I've been having conversations lately with a friend about "cancel culture." Personally, I do make certain media choices based on political affiliations-- the announcement of a new Earthworm Jim prompted a lot of jokes about stretch funding goals to eliminate Douglas TenNappel from the team-- but there are limits to it, especially when dealing with more historical material. For our contemporaries, some issues inherent to it are 1) the inevitable virtue signalling and conscientious consumerism that quickly devolves into a holier-than-thou attitude and 2) cancel culture de-incentivizes growth and learning by insisting that you did something wrong once and therefore must always be wrong, which becomes more alarming the further back people are drawing on examples.
|
|
|
Post by otherscott on May 29, 2019 13:50:49 GMT -8
I think this idea of "cancel culture", which at its most extreme point is basically tuning out anyone who disagrees with us, is a pretty dangerous state to be in. In some ways, twitter and the internet which in theory would have brought people together, have instead given people an opportunity to only affiliate and listen to opinions of those who already agree with us politically and has increased the divide.
For instance, abortion is a good example. I'm pro-choice and I do think that it's the "right" overall mindset to have. However, villainizing anyone who is pro-life and taking exception to them as a person because they believe that life starts at conception to me is somewhat ridiculous. It's a complicated issue and for some reason all both sides want to do is uncomplicate it to make their argument more definitive.
Let's take transgenderism as another example. It's very hard to comprehend for a cis-gendered person what transgenderism even is. So a lot of the discourse about it is getting shut down because people are sticking together against it rather than actually listening for themselves on what the issues are. People just stick in their own echo chamber and shut out anyone who disagrees with them.
|
|
|
Post by Jeremy on May 29, 2019 15:59:03 GMT -8
I have many issues with "cancel culture," some of which Jay and Scott have already noted. Another real problem is that I'm not comfortable with a loud, anonymous group of angry people dictating what is "right" and "wrong" in our culture, particularly given how malleable their so-called standards are. Letting the angry portion of the Internet police the rest of the world based on whatever they happen to be liberal about at a particular moment is asking for (and often receiving) trouble.
It gets even dicier when it comes to actual political issues that most people (i.e. the ones who interact with others outside the social-media bubble) know aren't definitive and one-sided. My issue with the Nathan Pyle backlash wasn't that his tweet was controversial (it was about as anodyne a pro-life comment as you can imagine), but that the people who responded to it couldn't seem to grasp the concept that someone could be pro-life and a decent human being at the same time. The Twitter standards for what is an "acceptable" viewpoint apparently no longer include views held by roughly half the country. And eventually, those standards bleed off Twitter and into the real world, which is why we are where we are now.
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on May 29, 2019 17:09:00 GMT -8
Another tidbit about the ProJared situation that's bugging me; a lot of the "ProJared disgraced" videos and memes going around are using a particular image of him in a Sailor Moon outfit as a thumbnail or lead-in, because I guess he did some cross-gender cosplay at some point. This is like those political cartoons that portray Trump and Putin as being in a homosexual relationship, or that meme that uses a photoshopped image of Trump wearing makeup and a wig. Because if you're socially liberal enough to object to Donald Trump or ProJared, clearly the right thing to do to portray them in a negative fashion is to promote sentiment that being gay or feminine is a silly, stupid, or villainous thing to be. Just... please, if you're going to make a take-down video of someone under the auspices of liberal moral justice, don't throw other people under the bus with them. ProJared crossdressing doesn't have anything to do with his bad behavior, and going "har har, look at how stupid he looks in girly dress" is pretty backwards and lowbrow.
Regarding transgenderism and co-existing with people who disapprove of it, while I do think it's important to tolerate political differences in public discourse because we need have at least a basic practice of civility and cooperation to function as a society, this is extremely difficult to do with the subject of transgenderism because many people who are dead set against it will make that abundantly clear in every interaction they have with or about a trans person. It's relatively easy for a gay person to interact with a homophobe or for an atheist to interact with a super-fundamentalist Christian in a neutral setting like a public university or place of work, because nothing relevant to sexual orientation or religion is likely to come up when talking about math class or the marketing department. With transgenderism, however, someone who disapproves of it is likely to refuse to use the preferred pronouns or names of a transgender person, and that's clear every time they talk to or about a transgender person. It's not really possible to ignore. It's like if homophobes found a way to insert their disapproval into every single sentence they said about a gay person, even when sexual orientation is not the topic of discussion.
From here, we get all those cases of college professors refusing to use the preferred pronouns and names of students even when everyone else around them is, and then claiming "religious freedom" when they risk being fired. And if they still refuse, there really isn't any morally correct path forward except to fire them, which seems harsh, but it's the same treatment that someone would face if they insisted on using racial slurs constantly or something. You simply can't habitually address a group of people disrespectfully and expect to be tolerated in polite society. I'm fine with anti-trans people being college professors or co-workers and having jobs, but they need to show some level of basic respect in their interactions with trans people.
|
|
|
Post by Jeremy on May 29, 2019 19:46:16 GMT -8
See, I don't know if I buy that a majority of anti-trans people refuse to use preferred pronouns. They may not agree with it, but it's probably easier to use a few pronouns than to risk starting a conflict which may not end well for them in many social circles. (Besides, it's not like a one-on-one conversation with a trans person involves a lot of "he" or "she" usage about them, anyway.) Though I've questioned and criticized a lot of aspects of trans ideology over the years, I'm fine using preferred pronouns, because I still believe that people can have these discussions without being passive-aggressive jerks.
(Caveat: If a trans person is antagonistic and/or disrespectful to opposing viewpoints - as a handful of popular ones on Twitter are - I might not feel like using the pronouns they want me to. I can respect others' beliefs and philosophies, but only if they respect mine.)
As for the college professors issue - I do see where you're coming from, but I tend to agree with Jordan Peterson's view that pressuring professors and students to use preferred pronouns does violate free speech (not freedom of religion, which is a different field). I know it's a tricky situation, but the same First Amendment that allows trans people to express themselves also allows other people to refer to trans people as they feel comfortable. But if it's any consolation, college campuses are generally among the most pro-trans public environments in America.
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on May 29, 2019 20:10:45 GMT -8
I don't know if most anti-trans people refuse to use the correct pronouns and names or not, but some certainly do, and those are the ones that are difficult to peacefully coexist with.
And I'll have to disagree with you that refusal to use the correct pronouns or names is a first amendment right. We limit how college professors can use racial and homophobic slurs, even though it interferes with their free speech. There are always limits. This is an issue where there's not really a "coexist" option, unfortunately. I mean, would you be ok with allowing a professor to refer to a butch lesbian cisgender woman as "he", because they thought she looked too mannish? Using the pronouns that the person you're speaking to or about want you to use isn't optional.
|
|
|
Post by otherscott on May 30, 2019 3:19:40 GMT -8
Yeah I definitely agree with Zarnium here. At most, what the first amendment would state is that you can’t legislate someone into using preferred pronouns. But that’s very different from the moral imperative to use them, and if you don’t typically you’re just being a jerk and I’m okay with someone being treated as such.
I do think that if you do have preferred pronouns different from what would be expected, let’s say, you shouldn’t expect people to use them unless they are aware of them (which I don’t think is really an issue except in extreme cases) and also give quite a bit of latitude for misremembering and innocent slips.
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on May 30, 2019 4:24:07 GMT -8
Yes, making mistakes is fine, that's going to happen. Willfully ignoring names and pronouns is different. The first amendment also only protects people from being prosecuted for a crime for their speech, for the most part. It doesn't really apply to being protected from being fired from a job. (That doesn't necessarily mean that there should be zero legal protection for free speech in relation to employment, just that the Bill of Rights doesn't really apply.)
For some more context, part of the problem with purposeful misnaming and misgendering in a college class is that if a professor is requiring a student to respond to a role call under an old name, that effectively outs them to everyone else in the class, which they probably don't want.
|
|
|
Post by Jeremy on May 30, 2019 4:38:01 GMT -8
I think we should make a distinguishing factor here: Treating college professors as jerks because they won’t use preferred pronouns is okay. Firing them (as Zarnium suggested in her earlier comment) is not.
Because most colleges are state-run entities (as opposed to private), they are legally expected to remain apolitical. A college or university board which fires a professor for not using preferred pronouns could face a serious legal headache for undermining the professor’s individual speech rights. (A fast-food restaurant or other private entity, on the other hand, would not.)
To use a different example: A few months ago, a college professor and CNN contributor gave a speech at the UN where he used an infamously anti-Semitic phrase while discussing Israel. CNN immediately fired him, but the university did not. Why? Because they had no legal grounds to do so - his statements were fully protected under free speech, and thus protected from state-owned entities. CNN, being a privately-owner entity, had no such problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the guy is a jerk and a bigot. But the law protects his rights just as it would protect non-jerks and non-bigots in his position.
|
|