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Contra Innuendo Studios On "Didoing"
Today, another video from Innuendo Studios in their "Alt-Right Playbook" series just dropped, and it describes a move in an argument where Person A will propose a small gesture that they assert will make things better for some group, and Person B counters by essentially agreeing that society is unfair around the issue being discussed, but that it is such a minor problem that it is not worth addressing. Innuendo Studios' preferred word for this move by Person B is "Didoing" (after the Dido song Thank You which features the lyrics "[...] it's not so bad"), but he also points out that some people have called this issue "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness", which I prefer as a name for this, since it doesn't rely on knowledge of a song from 1998 to explain.
According to Innuendo Studios, Person B's hidden premise is that "it is okay for things to be unfair, within a certain tolerance." That "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us."
My own politics lean towards social democracy, and aside from some anti-woke skepticism, I am far from "alt-right." But to the above I have to say, isn't Person B obviously correct?
Innuendo Studios initially frames the discussion around content warnings, so let's start there. I want to set aside, for a moment, the question of whether content warnings are actually successful at addressing some alleged unfairness in society. Let's grant for the sake of argument that they are 100% successful at addressing the issue of people with PTSD or anxiety attacks having their conditions activated as a result of media they are consuming.
That still doesn't answer at what level society should be trying to deal with this issue. As I see it, there are four basic levels a coordination problem can be solved in society:
Now I believe the question becomes, assuming that content warnings work, at what level should we try to solve the problem that they solve?
None of these options are without downsides. If we create a new government bureaucracy to do this, how do we stop it from trying to seize new power or misusing the power it was given? If we enshrine a new social norm, are we prepared to accept the ostracism of people from polite society for its violation? If a private organization tries to solve the problem, how can its limited reach be solved so the maximum number of people possible enjoy the benefits of the solution? And doubly so for individual actions.
We already live in a world where there are a ton of voluntary systems for content ratings, from the MPA film rating system to the United States pay television content advisory system to the ESRB. All of these systems are being done by private industry, and don't have the force of law.
We also have successful examples of crowd-sourcing trigger warnings with sites like Does The Dog Die.
I don't think it would be unreasonable for a person to think that this level of dealing with the problem is more or less acceptable. We haven't delivered a perfect solution to all people, but we've achieved reasonably good coverage at a tolerably low cost to society in terms of money and resources invested. Sure, some people might find this incomplete resolution unsatisfying, or on the other side believe that even the level we're currently investing in it is too high.
All discussions are going to end up like this in the end, whether we're talking about whether the government should have programs to pay for eye glasses for people, or whether we're talking about whether we should force private companies to build handicapped spaces in parking lots.
If we have a list of societal interventions we're considering implementing, I think it is obvious that you should do the ones that have the highest impact with the lowest cost of societal resources to implement. It doesn't mean that the problems that you don't focus on aren't problems, but they might be small enough problems that you don't actually need any larger coordination to solve the problem.
I think it would be worth prioritizing relatively cheap interventions like eyeglasses, which can have huge positive impacts on people depending on the level of impairment they started with, over more untractable problems that tend to be the focus of woke bellyaching.
No matter how you try to solve a problem in society, there will always be trade offs. You're always compromising between bigger interventions in Area A and Area B since every resource that matters is finite, and I think most people find it acceptable to leave many small problems unsolved. We're okay with saying, "suck it up, everyone has to deal with some level of unfairness, and the current status quo already solves most of the most important issues you have to deal with." Or alternatively, "The status quo is indeed unacceptable, but we should focus on solving big, important issues X, Y and Z, and we won't be getting to your tiny issues any time soon, if ever."
There has to be a Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, whether you're "alt-right" or not. Most of the argument is about where the line should be drawn.
I think you're overthinking it. The entire purpose of that guy's propaganda is to provide attack vectors for leftists confronted with counter-arguments to their demands; post the video and go "look everyone, this guy did didoism! Ban him!" Just do a site:reddit.com search for the video titles to see how they're meant to be used.
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Talking about it like it has actual "ideas" is critiquing the finish on a knife that's being used to stab you.
I always roll my eyes when people's idea of debate is to use a Bingo card and immediately discard one's argument if they vaguely fuzzy pattern-match to an item on the card. It's why I'm not a big fan of simply citing fallacies, like "that's an ad hominem", at least not without elaboration on how exactly what their interlocutor said is fallacious in that manner.
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...What did they do to internet historian and wendigoon? I like both of those people rather a lot.
Hbomberguy's plagiarism allegation against Internet Historian(25 mins).
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He's been accused of plagiarizing his man in a cave video from some mental floss article. No clue how legit the accusations are, given the source is bread tube I'm taking them with an enormous grain of salt and hope IH makes the rubble bounce.
Don't let pointless internet tribalism cloud your thinking - IH absolutely plagiarised the article without citation, then had to rewrite afterwards. I don't think the other attacks on him needed to be included in the video, but the man in cave accusation actually had legs. Furthermore, the biggest target of the video was actually someone ostensibly on Hbomberguy's team (Somerton).
I doubt that this is Hbomberguy just acting without bias, since he more-or-less gives Hasan Piker (and other react streamers) a pass despite react streamers committing arguably worse plagiarism, and Hasan is another BreadTuber friend. Around the same time his video came out, a couple other videos attacking James Somerton also came out. It's really hard to not see these videos as coordinated.
What videos apart from his were attacking Somerton?
Secondly, why does there need to be coordination. The accusations against Somerton were first discussed openly on Twitter long before this video.
Philosophy Tube's, for one.
I think there's a chance of coordination because an independent attack would be quickly refuted with accusations of homophobia and bigotry, but if everyone in the community agrees, then the attack becomes okay.
Which PT video are you referring to?
Secondly, as far as I know, the issue with the initial Somerton accusations was that he had much more clout than the person accusing him. His fans can't send HBomberguy off the internet with death threats or whatever, the dude is much bigger and isn't going to succumb to such attacks. That probably has more to do with why this attack stuck and previous ones didn't.
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Null of Kiwi Farms seems to agree that blatant plagiarism was perpetrated.
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While I don't discount that it wasn't random happenstance that Hbomberguy looked into the particular creators that he did, you're sort of ignoring that the fact that the main target of the video (indeed the person to whom the last 2 hours is entirely devoted to) is James Somerton - a leftist, queer content creator broadly on the same "side" as him.
I don't think you need an excuse to not spend 4 hours of your life watching a drama video (even if it is a thoroughly researched, well-presented drama video.) However, I don't think Hbomberguy's political commitments left him unable to mount his attack. On the contrary, because he's doing a bit of an own goal with the main target of the video, I'm inclined to give greater weight to his claims that James Somerton engaged in plagiarism and therefore wronged the community he belonged to.
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You can go and look at the LTT subreddit and their forums, people were openly expressing the notion that the botched benchmarks didn't really matter and the only thing that did was the prototype GPU or whatever that the other company had provided and LTT had given away.
Moreover, HBomberGuy literally called out a gay YouTuber on his own side, to the point that the guy literally deleted his social media and patreon page.
Why is it impossible to believe that other people can care about this for the stated reasons?
Just to be clear, "given away" is a huge understatement. First, Linus Media Group told Billet Labs that they were going to give the prototype cooler back to them. Then they slept on it for a long period of time without giving it back. And then they sold the prototype at auction.
I didn't remember all the details, but yeah, that sounds about right. It really is bizarre that people think this isn't enough to motivate the response to LTT.
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Have to agree with /u/Testing123 here. Hbomberguy's evidence that Man In Cave was plagiarized from a single article was fairly convincing. For what it's worth, I also think Internet Historian and James D. Rolfe came out looking the best of all the plagiarists in that video. For Internet Historian, it seemed to only be a single case of blatant plagiarism, while for Rolfe it seems like he is mostly guilty of selling out (all of the actual plagiarism done without his knowledge by his scriptwriter.) Meanwhile, it looked like iilluminaughtii's entire career was built off of sloppily plagiarizing documentaries, and James Somerton just compiled and read essays from other thinkers in the space, including entire books.
I wouldn't be too sure on IH only doing it once. Some people on his subreddit have started digging into Cost of Concordia and think he might have done the same there. It's not obviously bullshit on the face of it.
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Cool, but why is everybody and their dog calling the guy a Nazi?
From what I understand, IH has multiple videos covering 4Chan drama/stories, but he was never highly critical of 4Chan, which would have been evidence against him being a Nazi. He also unironically likes Tucker Carlson and has stated on his subreddit that his politics aren't exactly welcome online, though that obviously covers anyone to the right of Stalin in some circles. Lastly, there are comments which don't appear to be ironic anti-Semitism on his channel from others, which HBomberguy accused him of having because he "cultivated that audience".
It's ultimately a lazy smear, but the actual critique of him plagiarizing stands apart from that, nor was the jab at his audience more than a throw-away line in HBomberguy's video.
That's nice, the accusation of plagiarism is fair game. I don't really care since, from what I understand, he worked it out with the author of the plagiarized article, but knock yourself out. But trying to smear someone through n-th degree guilt by association is garbage, and in itself a valid thing to criticize.
I didn't say you couldn't criticize it, I read your message as asking why anyone was calling him a Nazi. I was just explaining that, that's all.
Sorry for being unclear. My point was that "look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today" referred to slandering them as Nazis, not accusations of plagiarism.
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Because it's easier to kick a guy when he's down? Enough of Internet Historian's fans are sufficiently distasteful of his plagiarism, and his clumsy attempts to cover it up that they're not willing to go to bat to defend his edgy humor and imputed political stances. That leaves a clear path for those who always hated him to mount their attacks.
It's just a bit odd to fixate on the plagiarism, when talking about "what they did to Internet Historian", and you know he's being slandered as a Nazi.
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Can you elaborate your thoughts on the Internet Historian? I though the Hbomber video convincingly demonstrated that he committed plagiarism, albeit not as badly as the other subjects in the video.
https://twitter.com/legotrillermoth/status/1731734318287052993
It's not about "plagiarism," it's about making lists of people they want to hurt and then finding ways to hurt them.
There's always going to be people online who care less about principles than scoring a point against the other team. Even so, I think it is a strange way to defend someone, by saying, "You're only pointing out this bad thing they did because it gave you a chance to own a member of the out group." Essentially, it's the same playbook from the other side: the bad things people on your team do don't matter, because they weaken your team's position.
The only time your principles matter is when you're applying them against members of your in group, otherwise it goes without saying that you'll happily see your enemies torn down for their violations.
I think it's okay to say, "I'm not happy with Internet Historian for plagiarizing his Man In Cave video, but this one smoking gun of plagiarism is not enough for me to discount his larger body of original, properly cited work, which I still enjoy and will continue to support."
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It’s fair game. You shouldn't close ranks over bad actors out of partisanship. What you gain in fanaticism, you lose in credibility. If the NYT published an article with credible evidence that Trump was The Serial Killer of Times Square, should you ignore it because it’s partly politically motivated? And as vorpa says, hbomber's main target is a gay queer theory popularizer(although hbomber still dings him for misogyny and insufficient wokeness, like everyone else).
If the past twenty times Joe Biden was a serial killer the Times never mentioned it, yes, I should ignore it, because in the hypothetical world where the Times did this, serial killing just wouldn't be such a serious thing. Of course, this won't happen in the real world precisely because serial killing isn't that way.
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This is one person expressing this viewpoint, and no one was coming after IH until it was clear that he had plagiarized the Mental Floss article.
It is absolutely not one person, it's the entire breadtube ecosystem this morning. Pretending it's just one person (and they deserved it anyway!) is a bad attempt at damage control.
How is it the entire breadtube ecosystem? Even in the responses to this person, there are people disagreeing with them.
If you're gonna present this as "breadtube/the left is out to get IH", you need stronger evidence than this.
I was going to link you to the new thread, but noticed you've already seen it and have now switched your position to "and he deserves it."
This was entirely predictable, because it's about making lists of people they want to hurt and then finding ways to hurt them... And relying on their fellow travelers to make excuses for it.
The only thing predictable is how you leapt to idea that I was doing the "it's not happening, but if it is, he deserves it" meme. This is behavior that must be downloadable from somewhere, it's so rote and repetitive. No one can criticize a person you like in good faith, can they? No, they must be part of a left-wing conspiracy.
More to the point, that thread isn't proof of your claim. You didn't argue that they thought he was a Nazi, you argued that they were, in concert, coming after him before the plagiarism accusation.
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