He was always a scientist and also did debunking of crowdfunding projects that promised physically impossible stuff.
And while I agree about his toxic tone - he has some points regarding feminism. For example his critique of Feminist Frequency podcast was on point ("in this game women can be killed therefore it's sexist" meanwhile in that same game you kill thousands of men and that's fine).
He debunks a lot of stuff, but debunking feminist-gone-crazy is very controversial so now he is considered sexist :/
As a guy living in conservative country where women actually are discriminated and have to fight for their rights I find it very sad that this pseudofeminist bullshit becomes the face of the movement.
It is very harmful to have a constant stream of "pacman is sexist" or "kill all men" from the west used by alt-right to point out "see this is where this whole feminism thing leads to - that's why you can't have legal abortion or civil partherships or anti-family-violence legislation".
I know there are always fringe groups in every movement, my problem is that you cannot criticize them without getting a label that instantly destroys your credibility for a lot of people. It's not sustainable, eventually this will discourage people from talking about women rights at all, even in the west.
It sounds like your description of those feminists came from his videos. You should try watching them so you have a more accurate take. Anita isn't nearly as much of a radical as she's painted.
I watched several podcasts of Anita and they were all pretty much the same. A game shows half-naked women = sexism. The same game shows half-naked men but that's ignored. A game shows tortured women = objectification. The same game shows tortured men (including by women) but that's ignored. The game allows you to kill women = sexism. The same game allows you to kill men, but that's fine. Now support us at ....
In my opinion if a game worked like they want it to (you can only kill/torture and see naked men) - only then it would be sexist.
Can you imagine that perhaps there are factors that make a man killing and torturing a man different from a man killing and torturing a woman? Surely you can, sexual dimorphism is a thing! What if I told you there is a type of sexual dimorphism that exists in society wherein women are treated entirely differently than men?
In fact, what if equality didn't mean murdering an equal number of men and women in video games, and instead that is just a silly distraction? I promise you no serious people are discussing the ratio of sexes killed in video games to do anything impactful.
> Can you imagine that perhaps there are factors that make a man killing and torturing a man different from a man killing and torturing a woman?
Sure, there's even a name for that kind of factors: sexism. That's the reason pay gap is a problem that is talked about but life expectancy gap isn't.
Feminism was supposed to fix sexism not to reinforce it, though.
> that is just a silly distraction
Well, yes, in the end it's just art critique. But even that should be a topic that you can discuss without being labeled as chauvinist the moment you disagree.
Yeah -- he called it right. After her appearance on the Colbert show she started getting in to scamming people. Which was a very odd turn that I didn't see coming at all.
thunderf00t is usually spot on / correct, but his videos are extremely demeaning to the people that are wrong.
It gives off an extremely elitist feeling, which usually gets everyone just to double down on their opinions.
He's just not actually trying to teach people why things don't work, he instead does long videos showing how dumb various people are to believe the bullshit they believe in.
I wish some of the people that valued musks corps would watch some of them, as their presentations are usually pure scify that's not doable with current technology, as can be shown by literally all their product launches.
(Tesla's arent going to be self driving cars. Not 3 yrs ago when he said he'd deliver it, nor anytime soon - remember how musk said each Tesla would earn their owner $30k per year? Vacuums for Hyperloops remain impossible at scale and the solar roofs are plain uneconomical, which is why they never shipped them.)
Ah, thanks. To get some sense of scale: If you have any experience (or anyone else who has, please chime in!), how much more down-putting is he than, say, SciManDan; how bad is he "on a SciManDan scale"? :-) An appropriate comparison IMO, seeing how Dan is also famous for debunking dumb stuff.
N.B: I think Dan is pretty darn nice, even when he's being what for him is snarky. As I recall, I was much more of an arrogant a-hole myself when I was younger. (Yup, that's my exc^H^H^Hstory: I've mellowed out now, all that was only when I was young.)
Follow-up: FWIW, now that I've seen a few of his videos, he doesn't seem all that mean to me. Could be that I watched the "wrong" ones: I saw two or three of the "Why do people laugh at creationists" series, but they were very old, some 12-13 years IIRC. Maybe he's gotten meaner since? But then I also watched a couple other ones -- also not totally new, but some two, three years old I think -- and they weren't particularly "toxic" in tone either, IMO.
Either I just happened to randomly miss his most typical toxic videos, or I have a very different -- higher -- threshold for what I consider toxic than you do.
Idunno... I guess what I was trying to say was that if it's just the "delivery", but the actual contents are actually correct, then can that really be called "toxic"?
I mean, if what he is saying is not "Black people / women / poor people are all inferior, and deserve to suffer!", but just "Hey assholes, black people / women / poor people are not inferior, and don't deserve to suffer just because they're black / women / poor!", then "toxic" doesn't feel like the right word to describe it. IMO. To me that feels like it should relate to the actual content of the message,as in "White supremacists are spreading their toxic views online" etc.
But but, guess I'm just arguing semantics, YMMV, so never mind.
And while I agree about his toxic tone - he has some points regarding feminism. For example his critique of Feminist Frequency podcast was on point ("in this game women can be killed therefore it's sexist" meanwhile in that same game you kill thousands of men and that's fine).