My life is just one sex scandal after another, apparently.

This one is on "Eisel Mazard" the youtube channel, and "Everyone Hates Eisel Mazard" the podcast, but not on à-bas-le-ciel.

LINK: https://youtu.be/bJk8AJde9uY

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Yxrut6tXDOoCI3uaWKV1J

Youtube is dead: the lost avant garde of intellectual dissent on the internet.

Now on youtube as never before…

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsTs-Lw_oPI

The Monolingual Polyglot: Learning a New Language for All the Wrong Reasons.

An imperfect parallel to my "dramatic return" to ASOIAF youtubing, I'd point out that quite a few of you started following me for precisely content of this kind… EVEN IF YOU'D RATHER NOT ADMIT IT NOW, IN RETROSPECT. ;-)

Escapism, political engagement and the alternatives: to what extent am I learning a new language just to escape from a cycle of imitation within my own life… to what extent am I learning something new to overcome "the aesthetics of substitution"? Too often, something truly new is desired only as a replacement for something already familiar, instead of being engaged with as genuinely unknown, studied for the sake of pressing into the unknown.

LINK: https://youtu.be/fr3AHEGmmeQ

Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere that podcasts are "sold": https://open.spotify.com/episode/5CsFwhDypV5oi9C4q37B86

On obeying a liar for the sake of a lie.

[Coryintheboof8730 writes:]

Would you at minimum say that the only value in reading bs or being lied to (if only extremely minimal) is learning the ins and outs of psychological deception/lies/twisting narratives? Yes you can learn that elsewhere, but if learning new nuances=value there’s that. But I feel like you’ll tell me I’m wrong here for that. But yes, we agree more value is found in 100 other places and situations.

—————

[And I reply:]

Most people I've known, face to face, are damaged for decades by very simple lies that were told to them: I seem to be an unusual person in noticing and dealing with lies rapidly —but most people I've known (99%?) can't cope with them and can't "get over" them.

I realize, BTW, that this reply has relied on extremely idiomatic, colloquial English, and many of my ESL viewers won't really know what I mean.

Even in workplace situations, even in university classroom situations, not getting into the emotional entanglements of family and romantic relationships, the vast majority of people can't cope with the lies they've been told: it's possible this is just stupidity, and it's possible there are psychological aspects that can be usefully pinned down.

Those who think it's a virtue to be trusting and faithful suffer when they realize they would have been more virtuous through suspicion and doubt. Those who think it's a virtue to be obedient suffer when they realize they've been obeying a liar for the sake of a lie.

Austin Vegan writes in to the channel.

[Austin Vegan writes:]

I’ve been vegan for over 9 years and into environmentalism/ecology for even longer. Being in those spaces, I’ve interacted with many people on the left and far left while considering myself more “moderate” or “apolitical.” That said, my political leanings are not only considered “right wing” by the majority of vegans, but often far right, or even treated as if they’re akin to being a “nazi.”

The reality is, my views have remained largely consistent over those years. I’m still vegan. Still an environmentalist. Still an atheist. What has changed is the ideological climate around these spaces. The nature of this certain brand of leftism that has taken hold is to continually move the goalpost as to what is deemed “moral,” and of course acceptable. Views that would have once been seen as normal, nuanced, or just outside the dominant current are now framed as evil, dangerous, or beyond discussion.

I’m at the point of really trying to distance veganism from leftism as far as possible, even refraining from alluding to discrimination and speciesism in educating people. Not because those concepts are totally without value, but because they immediately pull the conversation into a broader ideological framework that I don’t think is necessary, and often does more to alienate than persuade. The case against exploiting animals does not require buying into an entire left-wing worldview, yet veganism is constantly packaged that way, to its own detriment.

In the context of comedy, leftism is virtually incompatible at face value. Comedy provides relief from the suffering in life. It makes light of the absurdity of reality. It plays with tension, contradiction, and discomfort in a way that allows people to process what would otherwise just crush them. A worldview that moralizes everything, polices tone, and treats irreverence itself as suspect cannot coexist comfortably with real comedy. Comedy requires room to breathe. It requires a tolerance for imperfection, for offense, for things landing badly sometimes. Without that, you don’t get comedy, you get sterile ideological performance masquerading as humor.

And what makes it worse is that these same leftist comedians will often feel emboldened to join in the jew-hate only when it aligns with the group-think of the day, “Israel bad,” “free Palestine,” and the like. Not because they arrived there through careful thought, principle, or moral consistency, but because it is socially rewarded within their circles. Their morality is shaped far less by independent reasoning than by mimicry, social pressure, and a constant need to remain aligned with whatever emotional and political consensus is dominant at the moment. Criticizing Israel is one thing. Sliding into outright hostility toward Jews because it has become fashionable in certain circles is another.

—————

[My reply, FWIW:]

Re: "I’m at the point of really trying to distance veganism from leftism as far as possible…" —there's a significant precedent in the rise and fall of New Atheism as an internet phenomenon. It's difficult to remember this now, but the people who identified as atheists (during a brief period of time when money and fame could be had through talking about atheism) really could not deal with the separation of atheism from Communism, specifically, and leftism, generally. I don't think this example has predictive power for what happens next in veganism, it's just an instructive example from the past. https://youtu.be/PjjiQDDQFZA

Antisemitism in Stand Up Comedy: Emptying Out the Left.

LINK: https://youtu.be/Yz8Bhqj5rYA

Available both on Youtube and as a podcast, not just on Spotify but… wherever podcasts are "sold".

Falling Birth Rates and the Fallacy of Composition. #feminism

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0D-b7ilgT8

ChatGPT Ruined Stand Up Comedy: A.I. Kills the Creative Writing Process.

LINK: https://youtu.be/ASSKl0fHHnk

How would you live your life if men and women were equal? #feminism

"Men and women can be equal if they want to be equal…"  

LINK: https://youtu.be/chK0oZlQFJE

Alcoholism and environmentalism are one.

Torn from the comment section of my own youtube channel.

—————

[SolarSolWaves writes:]

Yeah basically 95% of my observing of people referencing the Dunning Kruger effect is just like any other thought terminating cliche. 

Examples include in discussions like, "I wonder why X person did Y action?" response: "Dunning Kruger effect" ( = discouraging curiosity / cognitive emapthy / true understanding). 

Or often times people act like they mic‑dropping an reductio ad absurdum with the, "this argument is stupid dude you got the Dunning Kruger effect".

Regarding the stuff about people being competent enough to read, etc…

I think it starts with the fact that we intellectually trust way too much. When I was a kid, I genuinely thought medicine was basically “solved.” That’s how it was presented to us. The whole cultural vibe was: we know everything. 

And then you actually get hit with a real medical issue that isn’t run‑of‑the‑mill, and suddenly you see what’s really up. Doctors aren’t curious, doctors don’t like saying “I don’t know,” so they default to “it’s psychological” or whatever. Boom, the illusions start breaking.

Anyway, seems like we instill that same blind trust into all of science (really, pop-scientific journalists). So when people read a headline, they assume it’s true. That’s where it begins. Instilled intellectual trust.

Then we grow older, values emerge, stiffen, etc... then it becomes about biases and what we want to be true. A headline is assumed correct if we like what it says. If we don’t like it, then suddenly we’re “critical thinkers” again... we read the article, try to debunk it, or just throw some generic phrases in the comments to dismiss it.

Then some people become anti-science and have a blind trust in the anti-science people.

Yesterday there was this awful study posted on Reddit about how “eating eggs actually improves your good cholesterol,” and it had tons of upvotes. So I’m like… okay, interesting, let me read this. I’m vegan, but not for health reasons. Fact: veganism is healthy. Is it the healthiest diet ever? I don’t know, I don’t care. Point is, I don’t feel attacked when evidence comes out that some animal product might be healthy. I’m open-minded. People smoke cigarettes. Veganism being the healthiest diet in the world isn't going to move it forward. 

So I read the article... not the actual study, just one of those shitty website summaries (because that's what was linked / posted), and it took me maybe 30 seconds to see the massive flaw in the study design. […] [Details omitted.]

Simple shit. Yet the post had tons of upvotes, and the comments were like, “Yeah I eat 3 eggs a day, my LDL is fine.”

I dunno, it’s like, the average person is incompetent at reading scientific studies, but at the very least, why can’t journalists be competent? Why do we have journalists pumping out garbage like this? I know the answer, it’s rhetorical, but still, I feel like the solution has something to do with journalists and holding them accountable... fuck like uhh, in Mexico they have this new law where children's cereal cannot have colorful characters and avatars like Tony the Tiger and Captain Crunch on the boxes if it passes a sugar threshold. Boxes gotta be empty, ugly (like cigarette carton laws in Canada, except without the deathly images), or they can have the saturated graphic designs but only if its a low-sugar version of the cereal. Let's get some anti-click-bait anti-sensationalism laws going!!! Not sure if thats an idea worth taking too seriosuly, just thought of it now...   

I have friends who can’t read scientific papers or evaluate methodology or statistics. I can’t expect them to. I don't think this is a run-of-the-mill skill, and I don’t think it ever could be. Most people don't have the time  / cognitive energy left to. I'm lucky enough that I enjoy reading. Maybe I’m not giving people enough credit, but something about scientific journalism needs to change. I’ve made like seven Reddit comments in the past year debunking crap articles that people in the comments were eating up. One was pro-vegan but still a terrible study. One was about language sonority and humidity. One was about pole dancing being a mental-health miracle. A few more I can’t even remember.

—————

[And I reply:]

I'm surprised that you and I agree about so many things (we are in a minority within the vegan movement, you and I… and the vegan movement itself is a tiny minority to begin with) but it all comes down to a question of, "What now, what next?"  I chose _NOT_ to spend my life debunking antidepressants, I chose _NOT_ to spend my life denouncing the excuses made for smoking marijuana, two examples that rely on similar pseudoscience, two examples that show the extent to which people who are ruining their lives with self-inflicted brain damage will self-righteously insist that you are morally evil for making them aware of this inconvenient truth.  There is very little scientific complexity to carbon PPM measurements, and very little political complexity to the question of what must be done to redress them.  The species, on the whole, is stuck in a cycle of living a lie, eventually dying for the sake of that lie.  Alcoholism and environmentalism are one.