Dawgstar posted:

https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/1740519962400510413

Exciting times.

In the interests of edification, this apparently comes from a video from somebody called 'thealmightyloli' who did a big thing on the CA movies which I did not watch and you probably shouldn't either.

DeathSandwich posted:

You don't say?

The darwinism vs Karl marx video is pretty explicit in separating Darwin and darwinism, Malthusianism, and Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism. At no point does the video ever conflate the three or claim that Darwin was a fascist or eugenicist or whatever the gently caress stupid hot take you have rolling around in your head.

As far as the fat phobia, I'm assuming you mean the food and beauty episode? I don't know what you think is fat phobic in that episode but I listened to it fairly recently and it reads to me less as someone who doesn't like fat people and more so someone talking about their experience having essentially an eating disorder through a combination of social pressures of gender roles and an acting career they have to maintain.

Like, you can decide you just don't like philosophy tube and that's fine, but if you make up stupid bullshit to justify yourself don't be surprised when people call you a dipshit.

trilobite terror posted:

trilobite terror posted:

Anyway while we’re on the subject I love that Abby Thorn made one video that rests on the vague but sort of noncommittal thesis that evolution by natural selection is kinda fascist “because Darwin was a Malthusian” (he really wasn’t, but ok. And then it doesn’t go anywhere from there and doesn’t try to even touch the following 150 years of science except to be like “Sam Harris is bad. Social Darwinism is bad”)

trilobite terror posted:

Darwin’s complicated-rear end and changing beliefs and scientific/sociological/theoretical publications and ideas have a lot more in common with people like Marx than she’s willing to give credit for until maybe the very end of the video, and the broader framing device of “Darwin vs Marx” ultimately forces her to sideline all of those details in service of two main theses: that Darwin was a Whig and that Darwin was a eugenicist inasmuch as his Whig beliefs would direct, contrary to a popular notion that Darwin’s notorious eugenicist cousin Francis Dalton independently perverted the noble and humanist Darwin’s theory to his own depraved and racist ends ultimately culminating in the Holocaust and humanity learning the error of their ways. She presents this with an effectively conspiratorial framing (“this is what I was taught but reality is more complicated”) and uses it to present us with the real meat and intended message of her video: that the ideas and ideologies of eugenics remain all around us and are all infused in the neoliberal politics and economics of today much like they informed the Whig politics and economics of Darwin’s day.

This message slaps and I have no beef with it, even if I have a problem with the framing device she uses to get there.

quote:

Ok, I just watched the whole video like one and a half times. I take back my original apology. Terrible Opinion is an idiot, and you're all a bunch of schmucks and jabronis for jumping up my rear end in a top hat. I don’t fully stand by my original critique, and I think I’ve identified the elements that stuck out so sharply in my mind from three years ago, but I sure as poo poo don’t fully retract my criticism either.

The 7th Guest posted:

this thread is about watching essays, not writing them

trilobite terror posted:

Ok, I just watched the whole video like one and a half times. I take back my original apology. Terrible Opinion is an idiot, and you're all a bunch of schmucks and jabronis for jumping up my rear end in a top hat. I don’t fully stand by my original critique, and I think I’ve identified the elements that stuck out so sharply in my mind from three years ago, but I sure as poo poo don’t fully retract my criticism either.

The video's message and thesis are all in the right place, but using the framing device of Darwin ultimately does people’s understanding of evolutionary theory and Darwin himself a disservice, in my opinion, and she makes a bunch of definitive statements about Darwin's beliefs and character that aren't really as conclusive or true as she makes them out to be.

The film does a very British thing of more-or-less assuming that you're familiar enough with evolution and natural selection and that you fundamentally believe in them (or at least that biologists know about them and believe in them, and that you believe in biologists). The bits of bioscience that she sprinkles throughout demonstrate a solid grasp of undergrad bio, but the lack of a stronger scientific editorial or narrative voice in those places would have made them much punchier and strengthened her overall argument.

I think she really would’ve benefitted from talking to an evolutionary biologist and also to a Darwin historian. They would’ve helped elaborate and meaningfully flesh out things that were said and also provided a more detailed and nuanced context for some of the comparisons that she tries to make between Marxism and (social) Darwinism by using Darwin’s own purported beliefs as the narrative glue. Darwinism has a massive influence on Marxism, as she mentions multiple times, and especially at the conclusion, but she doesn’t really discuss or explore that, instead preferring to frame him as a Whig, which is functionally like the 19th Century version of a neoliberal, and the body of his scientific thought as fundamentally Whig thought.

Darwin’s complicated-rear end and changing beliefs and scientific/sociological/theoretical publications and ideas have a lot more in common with people like Marx than she’s willing to give credit for until maybe the very end of the video, and the broader framing device of “Darwin vs Marx” ultimately forces her to sideline all of those details in service of two main theses: that Darwin was a Whig and that Darwin was a eugenicist inasmuch as his Whig beliefs would direct, contrary to a popular notion that Darwin’s notorious eugenicist cousin Francis Dalton independently perverted the noble and humanist Darwin’s theory to his own depraved and racist ends ultimately culminating in the Holocaust and humanity learning the error of their ways. She presents this with an effectively conspiratorial framing (“this is what I was taught but reality is more complicated”) and uses it to present us with the real meat and intended message of her video: that the ideas and ideologies of eugenics remain all around us and are all infused in the neoliberal politics and economics of today much like they informed the Whig politics and economics of Darwin’s day.

This message slaps and I have no beef with it, even if I have a problem with the framing device she uses to get there.

At the same time, credit must be given for her commitment to the 45 minute-to-one hour runtime in a field where people are dropping videos as long as entire seasons of TV.

Halfway through, she thematically connects Darwin’s Whigness (his family were Whigs and he started out fairly Whig and Malthusian like in college and on the Beagle, but pretty quickly moved away from those schools of thought, literally going through a loss of faith with regards to the latter) into explicitly saying that the Whigs were successful in eliminating social safety net programs and deregulating the state.

Darwin’s beliefs in things like Whig economics/politics and natural hierarchies changed pretty radically over the course of his life, and it’s honestly pretty hard to pin them down to one “left” or “right” viewpoint for very long. He started out rabidly anti-slavery but somewhat paradoxically fine with the conditions of the British poor. But also staunchly pro-electoral reform. As he worked on what would become Origin and especially Descent those views would become complicated enough to where somebody could use a very similar bibliography to Abby’s and make an hourlong video calling Darwin a Socialist or “proto-Leftist” or whatever by the time the 1860s roll around.

There’s earlier work of his with various indigenous groups like the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, where he simultaneously debunks various racisms about purported intellectual and emotional/expressive superiority in white people and also tries to apply a natural selection order/quasi-justification to colonialism and genocide, basically arguing that it’s natural for “fitter” societies to displace and overtake “less fit” ones. By 1850, however, he’s a lot less confident in the idea that groups like the Yaghan (of whom he famously studies their language, scientific understandings of ecology and astronomy, and their collective dictionary) are at all inherently unfit, just less resourced. Ultimately Darwin’s personal concept of “survival of the fittest’ as applied to people” by the time of his death acknowledges a sort of reality of the strong overtaking the weak while not celebrating or championing it. He also explores ideas of nature vs nurture around the time he writes Descent, arguing that environmental conditions like education, access to nutrition, being oppressed/enslaved or not, etc (you know, what Marxists call material conditions) probably have at least as much influence if not more on outcomes as inherited traits.

It’s important to also look at Darwin’s equally foundational work on kin selection, co-operation, and even explicitly applying evolutionary significance to human traits like empathy, charity, etc. He was just about the earliest proponent of the idea that humans helping other humans out is literally an evolved trait and spent years saying “it’s our best trait” and even going so far as to say that it should never be sacrificed or undermined in an effort to willfully direct human evolution.
On the topic of eugenics, he did call it "the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race”, which is a quote that gets thrown around a lot when ppl like Ben Stein want to say Darwin=fascism, but then also strongly opposed any eugenicist policies and politics. He spent the latter third of his life pretty vehemently arguing that ideas about natural selection shouldn’t be used to guide policy or breeding. Ultimately if you look at his writings his thoughts on eugenics pretty much amount to “yeah you could probably selectively breed humans like pigeons for specific traits and potentially do that in a way that results in those people having like longer legs or maybe even like less disposition to alcoholism or whatever, but also there’s no way to do that without directly circumventing empathy and taking away everybody’s free will and both of those are unacceptable. The most we should do is educate the public on negative heritable traits as we come to understand them (which in the 19th Century is piss-poor)”.

Maybe I'm nitpicking because teaching biology is literally my job, but I would've liked to see the video be twice as long and include that missing science angle and historical/technical context when the entire framing device is "Darwin vs Marx". If the video were "Marx vs Spencer" or "Marx vs Malthus" I wouldn't be as frustrated by it, but it's intentionally framed around Darwin and Darwinism, probably for the sake of making a punchier video that would get people’s attention but also because it is truly an interesting framing device, and I suppose it makes it easier for her to segue into the final quarter of the video where she connects eugenics and bioscience to product/commodity fetishism and alienation in a genuinely interesting way.

By the end though, she comes around to connecting Darwin to Marx, quoting Engels’ eulogy of Marx that called him the “Darwin of Politics” and going into a finishing monologue about how they both went on to influence the world massively and people would try to do good stuff and bad stuff in both their names and so on and so forth. And here is where I really think a more accurate depiction of Darwin could’ve really helped, albeit one that wouldn’t fit as tidily into a one hour runtime and hit the points connecting eugenics to commodity fetishism to surveillance and bioscience.

You can see the way her message is received across a more global audience in the comments section, with some people reiterating the distinctions between natural selection in biology and social Darwinism and others saying poo poo like “I studied biology in school and my first year of university and I now see that my education was a lie”. I think that she kind of takes for granted that people are as bought-in on evolution, etc as she is.

I never accused her of fat-phobia. Quite the opposite. I said her video goes too far in trying to discredit the scientific/medical consensus on obesity in a way that would've been avoided if she'd properly done the diligence and maybe talked to an expert instead of trying to unskew the data by herself based on the pre-existing argument that doctors and experts are fat-phobic and that the literature itself is fat-phobic. All of this can be broadly true to various extents, and arguably is, and her interpretation and use of that data and her defiant comment of “I’ve looked at the data and it doesn’t hold up” can still be wrong. You should re-read my original post and address it properly

dmboogie posted:

god forbid someone writes paragraphs in a forum thread

The 7th Guest posted:

i'm not reading a giant post that starts with "i take back my apology and all of you suck. now i WAS wrong, however i also wasn't"

trilobite terror posted:

Ok, I just watched the whole video like one and a half times. I take back my original apology. Terrible Opinion is an idiot, and you're all a bunch of schmucks and jabronis for jumping up my rear end in a top hat. I don’t fully stand by my original critique, and I think I’ve identified the elements that stuck out so sharply in my mind from three years ago, but I sure as poo poo don’t fully retract my criticism either.

The video's message and thesis are all in the right place, but using the framing device of Darwin ultimately does people’s understanding of evolutionary theory and Darwin himself a disservice, in my opinion, and she makes a bunch of definitive statements about Darwin's beliefs and character that aren't really as conclusive or true as she makes them out to be.

The film does a very British thing of more-or-less assuming that you're familiar enough with evolution and natural selection and that you fundamentally believe in them (or at least that biologists know about them and believe in them, and that you believe in biologists). The bits of bioscience that she sprinkles throughout demonstrate a solid grasp of undergrad bio, but the lack of a stronger scientific editorial or narrative voice in those places would have made them much punchier and strengthened her overall argument.

I think she really would’ve benefitted from talking to an evolutionary biologist and also to a Darwin historian. They would’ve helped elaborate and meaningfully flesh out things that were said and also provided a more detailed and nuanced context for some of the comparisons that she tries to make between Marxism and (social) Darwinism by using Darwin’s own purported beliefs as the narrative glue. Darwinism has a massive influence on Marxism, as she mentions multiple times, and especially at the conclusion, but she doesn’t really discuss or explore that, instead preferring to frame him as a Whig, which is functionally like the 19th Century version of a neoliberal, and the body of his scientific thought as fundamentally Whig thought.

Darwin’s complicated-rear end and changing beliefs and scientific/sociological/theoretical publications and ideas have a lot more in common with people like Marx than she’s willing to give credit for until maybe the very end of the video, and the broader framing device of “Darwin vs Marx” ultimately forces her to sideline all of those details in service of two main theses: that Darwin was a Whig and that Darwin was a eugenicist inasmuch as his Whig beliefs would direct, contrary to a popular notion that Darwin’s notorious eugenicist cousin Francis Dalton independently perverted the noble and humanist Darwin’s theory to his own depraved and racist ends ultimately culminating in the Holocaust and humanity learning the error of their ways. She presents this with an effectively conspiratorial framing (“this is what I was taught but reality is more complicated”) and uses it to present us with the real meat and intended message of her video: that the ideas and ideologies of eugenics remain all around us and are all infused in the neoliberal politics and economics of today much like they informed the Whig politics and economics of Darwin’s day.

This message slaps and I have no beef with it, even if I have a problem with the framing device she uses to get there.

At the same time, credit must be given for her commitment to the 45 minute-to-one hour runtime in a field where people are dropping videos as long as entire seasons of TV.

Halfway through, she thematically connects Darwin’s Whigness (his family were Whigs and he started out fairly Whig and Malthusian like in college and on the Beagle, but pretty quickly moved away from those schools of thought, literally going through a loss of faith with regards to the latter) into explicitly saying that the Whigs were successful in eliminating social safety net programs and deregulating the state.

Darwin’s beliefs in things like Whig economics/politics and natural hierarchies changed pretty radically over the course of his life, and it’s honestly pretty hard to pin them down to one “left” or “right” viewpoint for very long. He started out rabidly anti-slavery but somewhat paradoxically fine with the conditions of the British poor. But also staunchly pro-electoral reform. As he worked on what would become Origin and especially Descent those views would become complicated enough to where somebody could use a very similar bibliography to Abby’s and make an hourlong video calling Darwin a Socialist or “proto-Leftist” or whatever by the time the 1860s roll around.

There’s earlier work of his with various indigenous groups like the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, where he simultaneously debunks various racisms about purported intellectual and emotional/expressive superiority in white people and also tries to apply a natural selection order/quasi-justification to colonialism and genocide, basically arguing that it’s natural for “fitter” societies to displace and overtake “less fit” ones. By 1850, however, he’s a lot less confident in the idea that groups like the Yaghan (of whom he famously studies their language, scientific understandings of ecology and astronomy, and their collective dictionary) are at all inherently unfit, just less resourced. Ultimately Darwin’s personal concept of “survival of the fittest’ as applied to people” by the time of his death acknowledges a sort of reality of the strong overtaking the weak while not celebrating or championing it. He also explores ideas of nature vs nurture around the time he writes Descent, arguing that environmental conditions like education, access to nutrition, being oppressed/enslaved or not, etc (you know, what Marxists call material conditions) probably have at least as much influence if not more on outcomes as inherited traits.

It’s important to also look at Darwin’s equally foundational work on kin selection, co-operation, and even explicitly applying evolutionary significance to human traits like empathy, charity, etc. He was just about the earliest proponent of the idea that humans helping other humans out is literally an evolved trait and spent years saying “it’s our best trait” and even going so far as to say that it should never be sacrificed or undermined in an effort to willfully direct human evolution.
On the topic of eugenics, he did call it "the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race”, which is a quote that gets thrown around a lot when ppl like Ben Stein want to say Darwin=fascism, but then also strongly opposed any eugenicist policies and politics. He spent the latter third of his life pretty vehemently arguing that ideas about natural selection shouldn’t be used to guide policy or breeding. Ultimately if you look at his writings his thoughts on eugenics pretty much amount to “yeah you could probably selectively breed humans like pigeons for specific traits and potentially do that in a way that results in those people having like longer legs or maybe even like less disposition to alcoholism or whatever, but also there’s no way to do that without directly circumventing empathy and taking away everybody’s free will and both of those are unacceptable. The most we should do is educate the public on negative heritable traits as we come to understand them (which in the 19th Century is piss-poor)”.

Maybe I'm nitpicking because teaching biology is literally my job, but I would've liked to see the video be twice as long and include that missing science angle and historical/technical context when the entire framing device is "Darwin vs Marx". If the video were "Marx vs Spencer" or "Marx vs Malthus" I wouldn't be as frustrated by it, but it's intentionally framed around Darwin and Darwinism, probably for the sake of making a punchier video that would get people’s attention but also because it is truly an interesting framing device, and I suppose it makes it easier for her to segue into the final quarter of the video where she connects eugenics and bioscience to product/commodity fetishism and alienation in a genuinely interesting way.

By the end though, she comes around to connecting Darwin to Marx, quoting Engels’ eulogy of Marx that called him the “Darwin of Politics” and going into a finishing monologue about how they both went on to influence the world massively and people would try to do good stuff and bad stuff in both their names and so on and so forth. And here is where I really think a more accurate depiction of Darwin could’ve really helped, albeit one that wouldn’t fit as tidily into a one hour runtime and hit the points connecting eugenics to commodity fetishism to surveillance and bioscience.

You can see the way her message is received across a more global audience in the comments section, with some people reiterating the distinctions between natural selection in biology and social Darwinism and others saying poo poo like “I studied biology in school and my first year of university and I now see that my education was a lie”. I think that she kind of takes for granted that people are as bought-in on evolution, etc as she is.

I never accused her of fat-phobia. Quite the opposite. I said her video goes too far in trying to discredit the scientific/medical consensus on obesity in a way that would've been avoided if she'd properly done the diligence and maybe talked to an expert instead of trying to unskew the data by herself based on the pre-existing argument that doctors and experts are fat-phobic and that the literature itself is fat-phobic. All of this can be broadly true to various extents, and arguably is, and her interpretation and use of that data and her defiant comment of “I’ve looked at the data and it doesn’t hold up” can still be wrong. You should re-read my original post and address it properly

RareAcumen posted:

The Shrek movies are entertaining but it is a shame that Fiona is fractionally a character in 2 and 3 and then a bit better in 4 and then that's it.

dmboogie posted:

look genuine props for going back to make the effortpost but

is very different and more accusatory than

i dont think Terrible Opinions was out of line to give you some pushback for that? you were still posting like a dick lmao

Terrible Opinions posted:

I feel like given how much of this thread and SA at large is arguing with your twitter opponents, this is someone remembering the various fat hating subreddits which may or may not have been closed by now.

quote:

the lack of a stronger scientific editorial or narrative voice in those places would have made them much punchier and strengthened her overall argument

John Murdoch posted:

I have no horse in this race otherwise, but let's not be too quick to throw stones, GBS once had its own weird fat hate thread.

Metis of the Chat Thread posted:

I too think weaker science and less of a narrative voice punches up an argument

Mr. Lobe posted:

To be fair jotaro is depicted as a dysfunctional father figure

trilobite terror posted:

ZenMasterBullshit posted:

You still seem dumb as heck.

mycot posted:

https://twitter.com/jojo_wiki/status/1688884009047379968?s=20

Shinji2015 posted:

Yeah, doesn't Jolyne hate him at the beginning of Stone Ocean because he wasn't around?

Mr. Lobe posted:

To be fair jotaro is depicted as a dysfunctional father figure

trilobite terror posted:

and you post in ADTRW

hell you get probated in ADTRW

Lady Radia posted:

adtrw has the utena thread and it got its tractor. your move

trilobite terror posted:

every subforum has its bright spot

trilobite terror posted:

GBS has the RLM thread

trilobite terror posted:

and you post in ADTRW

hell you get probated in ADTRW

trilobite terror posted:

RLM thread is currently at war, through no fault or action of their own, with the Zack Snyder CD thread that is a Snyder fan cope zone (so they prolly extra hate Maggie Mae there, since she dissed their boy)

trilobite terror posted:

every subforum has its bright spot

GBS has the RLM thread

trilobite terror posted:

RLM thread is currently at war, through no fault or action of their own, with the Zack Snyder CD thread that is a Snyder fan cope zone (so they prolly extra hate Maggie Mae there, since she dissed their boy)

The Saddest Rhino posted:

Please, please stop

Arc Hammer posted:

I didn't realize we were at war with anyone.

Just post videos and talk about poo poo, no need for this cross forum slapfight

trilobite terror posted: