YouTuber Worth Watching: the Social Inequality Crusader

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., religion, science, youtube, YouTubers worth watching, ಠ_ಠ  3 Comments
Dec 022018
 

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.

Sir Sic The Social Inequality Crusader

 

 Posted by at 12:06 pm

“On Being Accused”

 Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  6 Comments
Dec 022018
 

Neil Degrasse Tyson is the latest celebrity to end up on the #MeToo list, accused of being both handsy and rapey. As usual, there’s no evidence of the accusations being presented for incidents that are supposed to have occurred many years ago. Did he do it? Dunno. Some of the accusations (that he drugged & raped someone) he is denying outright; others (that he put a hand someplace inappropriate) he says are down to misunderstandings. He has issued a lengthy statement about the accusations on his Facebook page where he explains his side.

In that statement he says this, which demonstrate the incompatible world views between STEM and #MeToo:

In any claim, evidence matters. Evidence always matters.

Sorry, Neil, that’s not true. Evidence not only doesn’t matter sometimes; sometimes a complete absence of evidence  is evidence of guilt.

The most interesting bit is what he wrote about his most serious accuser:

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd. Meanwhile, according to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember.

Yikes. Assume his summary is accurate: what rational person would credit accusations from such a basis?

On the one hand, NDT is a celebrity, and history has shown that celbrities tend to be rather squirrely with regards to the truth, personal space and basic morality. Something about fame and power leads people to lose their friggen’ minds. On the other hand, if we are to have a functional society, evidence *should* matter.

 Posted by at 11:45 am

An objectively terrible movie

 art, blather, history, science fiction, youtube  1 Comment
Dec 022018
 

… with a rather remarkable opening scene.

“Billions dead, kids! Make sure to buy our toys!”

The movie was a cynical cash-grab, make no mistake. Every decision was calculated by uncaring suits to create a more effective toy commercial. The existing Transformers toys were slowing down, so they needed to bring in an all-new line. How did they do that, plot-wise? By on-screen *murdering* almost all of the original characters. In 1986, that was something kinda shocking to us younguns.

The movie as a whole is a bit hard to watch now due to the cringe-inducing dialogue and a lot of the half-assed voice acting and the quarter-assed animation and the full-assed mid-80’s metal soundtrack… but at the time it was that rarest of things: a cheap cynical product that *worked.* That the Big Bad of the movie was a creature *nearly* out of cosmic horror only made it better.

 Posted by at 1:46 am

An odd “Star Wars” thing

 art, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  2 Comments
Dec 012018
 

Disney is trying *anything* to gin up interest in Star Wars in hopes of recouping their costs (as previously discussed, they are a *long* way from making their money back). The latest schtick is “Star Wars Kids,” a YouTube channel that will be populated by short (slightly over one minute) animated sequences. The first few have been posted; some are redone scenes from the movies, some are all new tiny little stories, but all use dialogue cribbed directly from the movies. Some are interesting, some are odd. One of the odd ones shows a still-on-Tatooine Luke being introduced to the lightsaber; in the original movie, his response to it is to, essentially, go, “huh, interesting,” turn it on and wave it around a little bit. In the new animation, it blows his hair back and he turns into a gymnastic ninja. I disapprove of that: the whole point was that Luke started off as an innocent chump nearly devoid of combat skills; it is a lot of hard work and training to get him to the point where he could face Vader. That made the payoff worthwhile, unlike with Rey… she was roughly equally skill-free at the beginning, but with no training whatever she was able to best a trained former Jedi with a weapon she’d never wielded before.

But one of the most head-scratching inclusions in this series – which has the explicit purpose of trying to introduce Star Wars to children – is a recreation of the penultimate scene in “Rogue One” where Vader slaughters everyone in a hallway. Kids! Amirite? Even odder, Vaders dialogue here is taken from “Empire Strikes Back.”

 Posted by at 12:00 am
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