Most of the YouTubers I’ve mentioned are by themselves interesting and entertaining. This one… to be fair he’s *kinda* interesting, but he’s no Doomcock. But what makes his videos worth watching are the absolutely bugnuts whackos he features in his videos. Hollow Earthers, Apollo deniers, a guy who believes that powerplants are hoaxes.
You will not come away from these videos enlightened or in any way intellectually improved. Indeed, you may well lose a statistically significant number of brain cells due to vastly enhanced entropy. Your lower intestines may in fact leap up your neck to throttle your brain to keep you from watching more. But if you are interested in madness or intellectual depravity or you are doing research for an academic paper or a horror novel on the depths to which the creative human mind can descend – and if you have a strong constitution – then these might well be for you.
Somewhat similar to Doomcock in that he’s all about the anger, but instead of the supervillain aesthetic The Rageholic presents more of an old-school metalhead with a whole lot of NSFW language and a bucket more video editing than Doomcock. Also a lot more video game stuff, but from the couple videos I’ve seen so far, the feller’s a hoot. This spoilerific review of “Death Wish” is all kinds of entertaining.
This guys channel is devoted to one thing: showing you how to pick locks. I view it less as a how-to tutorial on how to be a criminal than a “look at what a piece of junk your lock is” expose. There is some really neat stuff here, married with “who thought *that* was a good idea??” and some innovative thinking.
I posted one of his vids a few days ago, but I recommend many more of them. The schtick here is that “Dicktor van Doomcock” is an old-school Evil Genius living in the center of the Earth, plotting planetary conquest… but in the meantime he’s going to review and critique movies and TV shows and culture in general. And… he’s distinctly non-PC. Not only does he employ expletives well, he has no use for SJWs and the cultural rot they represent and implement.
Initially I was a little put off by the format (goofy mask, altered voice, theatrics). But after watching a few of his vids, I find that it actually works really well. Who better than a supervillain to get angry and lose his sh!t when discussing how, say, Star Trek Discovery craps all over Star Trek, how “Solo” forgot to actually be interesting, how those who try to tear down “Iron Man” in order to build up “Black Panther” are craven nincompoops? It’s like an angry version of MST3K.
Give him a watch. There are shockingly few views on these. Gotta love a guy who has Cthulhu as a sidekick.
If you want uncritical videos about goofy subjects like monsters and UFO’s, YouTube will hook you up. Look at all the “Flat Earth” videos. Look at them. But if you want skeptical takedowns, you might have to dig a little further, and if you want skeptical takedowns that are well researched and explained, you have to dig a little further still. But Trey The Explainer does the job nicely.
Many of his videos are about paleontological subjects, but many others are about various “cryptids” (i.e. mysterious animals that people “know” to exist but can never seem to prove… Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Honest Politician, that sort of thing). Some are better known than others, but two vids I found quite good are on the Black Knight Satellite and the Ropen. Both are relatively recent inventions; both are manifestly silly; both are easily and quite adequately explained away with clear video evidence showing them to have mundane explanations; and yet, both are readily believed by many.
Professor Tosspots commentaries on a wide range of subjects are NSFW (often *very* NSFW) and generally insightful and hilarious.
The “2017 Year In Review”… well, beware. There’s some stuff in there that’s just plain Not Safe For Work or Eyes or Minds. And yet it’s still a good takedown of postmodernism.
The world is full of places that have fallen into disuse and despair. Sometimes it’s because some idiots got likkered up and started messing around with an ancient nuclear reactor designed by Socialists, and they wind up trashing the countryside. Sometimes it’s a formerly vibrant auto manufacturing city that got wiped out by unions, politics and recovering post-war foreign auto manufacturing capabilities. And sometimes it’s a shopping mall that was once the hub of activity and is now abandoned and empty, because shopping malls have fallen out of favor, or because the local economy tanked, or because the people running the joint were idjits. Fortunately, there’s the Dead Mall Series on YouTube to show the world some of these dismal, empty reminders of times gone by. Some are truly abandoned, empty shells left to nature and vandals; some are still functioning, but on life support with only a tiny fraction of their stores still open.
If you are of my generation, the shopping mall was The Place To Be back in the day. It was where all the cool kids hung out. But of course if you have the misfortune of actually being like me, you weren’t one of the cool kids, so you didn’t actually hang out at the mall. And of course today a lot of the official function of a shopping mall has been taken up by WalMart, CostCo and Amazon; the socializing function has been taken up by Facebook and such. So there are a *lot* of malls that are now ghosts of what they once were, while still being perfectly decent enough structures. I’ve often wondered what could be done with a shopping mall to turn it, at minimal cost, into something else. Schools and hospitals and museums seem obvious choices, but I doubt there’s enough call for such. Some sort of office complex, maybe. Senior citizen or other assisted living facility with built-in gathering places, amusements, shopping (greatly reduced in scope, of course).
The Dead Mall Series gives tours of some of these places along with commentary, added music (the music *always* seems to fit right in with my 30-year-old recollection of 80’s malls) and often enough added vintage commercials with a few minor tweaks to make them a little more interesting. (The woman in the “Tan Perfect” commercial who doesn’t want wrinkles in this one, is, ummm… yeah.)
The AlternateHistoryHub YouTube channel runs through some interesting “what if” scenarios. A recent one – which the guy had the bad timing to release just after the national socialist LARPer in Charlottesville ran into the crowd of international socialist LARPers – discusses the scenario of what America might be like if the African slave trade never happened. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but a difficult one. The roots of the issue go back so far that even if somehow history could be altered so that the European powers never sailed down to Africa and bought African slaves for use in the New World sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations, so much time has passed that the number of alternate divergent timelines is uncountable.
But what he comes up with basically ends up with Europe being somewhat poorer, because they didn’t make as much profit from sugar and such, and the industrial revolution takes a little while longer to kick in. And the USA? Assuming it still comes about, it doesn’t have the same nasty racist history… but it also doesn’t really have any black folks, either.
It’s impossible to say that any one proposed timeline is impossible, barring the sudden use of AND THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENED, but one of his assumptions I disagree with: that the industrial revolution would be delayed. The European powers would still want to grow sugar cane and sell the sugar back home (and cotton, etc.), but without slaves they’d have to actually *pay* people. Which means the exercise would be less profitable. That much we agree on. But it seems to me… that would actually *spur* innovation. Slave-based economies tend to not be terribly innovative because they don’t really *need* to be, and because innovation can cause all kinds of social havoc. So I’d suspect that in this alternate history, if we assume the USA is still formed more or less on schedule, the Revolutionary War *might* be fought with some early steam-powered ships. Perhaps some terribly crappy locomotives are running around hauling cargo and troops. The American colonists *might* have had a substantial technological lead over the Brits for the simple reason they would have *had* to. Instead of the North being the unquestioned center of innovation compared tot he agrarian South, perhaps the South would have been industrialized early on in order to make plantations economical.
So by the time the Civil War would have broken out, the alt-USA has no need for a Civil War. The tech level in the alt-USA would be substantially higher than it was in the real-USA at the start of the war… but a few years later, with the pressures of the war, the real-USA might have done a job of catching up. But I dunno… I still think it’s quite possible that in the alternate timeline with the greater economic pressures to be an innovation nation, by the 1860’s the USA will be brightly lit with electric lights and telephone lines cross the land.
In the real-USA, the antebellum South was more-or-less broken down into a few really rich white folks, a lot of dirt-poor white folks, and a lot of dirt poorer black folks. In the alt-USA, the South would have broken down into some kinda rich white folks and a bunch of kinda poor white folks… and essentially no black folks. The poor white folks would be unlikely to be anywhere near middle class… the north, after all, didn’t have slavery in its industrial factories, but instead paid employees… and they were hardly living the high life. Still, the poor whites of alt-South would have been better off than the “poor white trash” of real-South. In the real-USA, small southern farmers were pretty well screwed; how could they compete against plantations using slave labor? In the alt-USA, that wouldn’t be an issue. Instead, they might be faced with the prospect of having to compete with plantations that are early adopters of mechanization.
Without the history of black slavery, the alt-USA wouldn’t end up with the Klan and Jim Crow laws and all that garbage. Probably wouldn’t have had laws against “race mixing” and all that. The alt-USA would have wound up almost certainly being a *really* white country; where the real-USA imported millions of black slaves, the alt-USA would have had to import a roughly equivalent number of European workers. The alt-USA would not have had the blatant racism… but maybe it would have had a more “comfortable” racism against, say, Hispanics and Asians and such. African slavery necessarily made the USA a “multi racial” society. But the alt-USA would at least in principle have had the option of being Europeans-only. *Perhaps* the alt-USA would have blocked the immigration of Chinese, Mexicans or perhaps even Italians… recall that back in the day, the likes of Italians and Irish were considered “non-white” for reasons we’d today find pretty laughable.
Or perhaps without the history of Unpleasantness, the alt-USA would turn out to be a perfectly accepting nation when it came to ethnicities, with none of that racist stuff.
—
Another recent video is “What if the War On Terror Never Happened?” Here I largely agree with the guy… the world would have turned out much the same, with the Middle East explodey as usual. However, one thing he missed when he assumes the US doesn’t invade Iraq and topples Saddam: the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Yes, the WMD program that the worlds intelligence services largely though was A Thing in Iraq turned out to be a lot of misdirection by Saddam. But the experience and intelligence and industrial base was still there; all Saddam really needed to do was wait out the UN inspection regime. And as memory serves, that would have ended circa 2005. So alt-Saddam, rather than being dead, would have restarted the Iraqi nuclear program, potentially with the assistance of the Pakistani and/or North Korean programs. So then when Iraq does eventually go into civil war sometime in the two-thousand-teens, the alt-ISIS is armed with if not actual nukes, potentially with dirty bombs, chemical weapons, weaponized pathogens. Greeeeeaaaat.