Richard (Vegan Gains) judging me by the standards of his own morality, in three minutes or less.

 My own comment posted below the video reads as follows:

The irony is that these people complain that I'm lying, and then proceed to criticize and complain about my content with the assumption that I'm telling the truth: indeed, it's my honesty that they're offended by —while condemning me for supposedly being dishonest and manipulative. And the reality is that all of those videos are really honest, and that's exactly why shallow and simple-minded people (Richard included) can't cope with them.

Without being needlessly profound in response to such a shallow and mean-spirited video: Richard does not hesitate to condemn honesty as dishonesty and, in close parallel, he condemns humility as narcissism. Weeping on camera, for example, he interprets as a clear sign of deceptive, narcissistic behavior; concealing heartbreak and regret from the public would be the very opposite of deception and narcissism, I suppose? What if I were laughing, with cruelty, in the same video, instead of weeping: would that be a symptom of narcissism? Simply not weeping on camera, simply pretending not to be upset at all —would that be deceptive? Would that be narcissism?

Admitting your unhappiness is interpreted as grandiosity rather than sorrow, admitting your failure is interpreted as boasting rather than humility —without the slightest hesitation to reflect on the paradox, or what the implications of such fallacious reasoning might be if the same principles were applied to other examples, equally. Melissa admits that she lied and reflects on the harm caused by the lies she told, but Richard is willing to immediately overturn all this evidence and claim that I am the one lying: I have somehow fabricated the whole situation, and shifted the blame onto her, no other explanation is possible. He has become accustomed to this way of thinking. As soon as people have learned this habit of blaming someone for being a narcissist, the most surreal inversions of reality seem possible, in order to buttress the theory: from their perspective, there is no longer any difference between the truth and a lie —nor even a difference between weeping and laughing.

I assume this commentary from Richard was recorded prior to his own divorce —but it could not have been very long before his divorce, foreseen or unforeseen at the time.

I don't think anyone could interpret what he has to say about sexual function and dysfunction as anything other than jealousy; if he were less shallow, he'd be jealous of the book review videos instead. Yes, he really should be jealous that Melissa and I read Thucydides and Aristotle together. He can't be. And he can't be happy for us, either.

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

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wFSB1chYtTpJmWwVuWYxr

Implicitly, this is a significant contrast to my old "manifesto" titled On Community, although it does not address the thesis of that video, directly, in any way: if you regard this as a manifesto, it is addressed to the youtuber (or podcaster) as a solitary intellectual dissident, cultural critic, commentator and comedian --not as the center of an incipient community, pulling together like-minded people (as per "the spirit season one") with an ambition to accomplish something more than they could ever attempt alone.

Black Hammer's Long Shadow, or: Growing Old Gracefully with Commander Gazi.

It was, perhaps, a sign of incipient insanity when Augustus Romain decided that he preferred the stage name Commander Gazi: his parents really had given him a name worthy of Plutarch's Lives to begin with. I could find just one source reporting that a long list of criminal charges against him had been dropped…

[Source 1 of 3:] https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2025/01/29/augustus-romain-uhuru-st-petersburg-black-hammer-party-gazi-kodzo/

…while a separate court proceeding accused him of knowingly working as a Russian agent, with one possible interpretation being that his whole political movement was little more than an attempt to disrupt "politics as usual" in America as a service to their Russian paymasters.

According to prosecutors, the four carried out a number of actions in the US between 2015 and 2022 on behalf of the Russian government and received money and support from Aleksandr Ionov, the president of the Moscow-based group Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.

Mr Ionov used the APSP, Uhuru Movement and Black Hammer to promote Russian views on politics, the Ukraine war and other issues, they said.

[Source 2 of 3:] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624ppg14jpo

The BBC might mislead you into assuming that he was sentenced to five years in prison, but no: merely five years' probation is reported by MSNBC.

The Justice Department said that in addition to protesting Meta on Russia’s dime [i.e., objecting to Facebook censorship policies on what could be said about the War in Ukraine], Romain posted Russian propaganda to social media at Ionov’s direction and sought Ionov’s input on a news release from their organization that condemned President Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine. […] This case is a prime example of why voters must be wary of ostensibly radical activists whose rhetoric closely mirrors Russian far-right rhetoric.

[Source 3 of 3:] https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/russia-propaganda-black-americans-augustus-romain-jr-rcna183843

On the contrary, this is a prime example of how utterly meaningless "far right" and "far left" have now become, in the careless parlance of our times. If Commander Gazi can be described as "far right" instead of "far left"… ?

I do not know if there is a single injured party uploading anywhere on the internet to reflect on the long list of crimes that Gazi will (apparently) never be punished for, as most of the charges against him were inexplicably dropped. These were not victimless crimes —and, of course, in a more abstract sense, I would assume that many of the people who donated money to support him now feel that they were victims of a kind of hoax, in retrospect.

In terms of what youtube does best, here's a purely personal set of reflections from a woman who knew him before he was corrupted by money, fame, power, respect and sex: https://youtu.be/TMMDqlsIWKs?si=DluJ99-hyFK80YTQ

The barbarity of political discourse in our century. It's enough to make a man learn Ancient Latin, quite honestly.

And I will leave no ghost when I am gone: torn from the comments section.

Like "the younger man," I also started watching EM as a teenager. I always knew he was abnormal, and I guess I should have "put the pieces together" more after hearing him talk so much about the world of folly and ignorance, but it still disappointed and surprised me how much more drab and thoughtless and passionless the world seemed to be once I started to grow up. I expected more people (at university, for example) to be more like Eisel, so much more brave, passionate, creative, silly, vulnerable, brilliant. It's weird for me to watch EM now, after not having been here in a few months. It's like he's living on another planet from everyone else I know, and that world is equal parts brighter and darker, it is so much bigger and it is so much more vividly realized, and it is so much more youthful but it is also so much more mature. EM is a man who was alive when most of us were already ghosts, and he is a man who will leave no ghost when he is gone.

Censorship and the strange fate of à-bas-le-ciel… with or without Youtube.

 

[Note that the numbers shown for the "watch hours", in the image above, concern a period of 365 days in which my channel was banned (and thus inaccessible to any audience) for the vast majority of the time. So those are just the "watch hours" for a few months prior to the banning, and short period time after the ban was lifted. The discussion that ensues, below, is —of course— concerning whether or not my channel will now be banned again.]

9:48:49 PM  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZMBWEewOamE

9:49:06 PM  ^ This is an example of a video that was deleted as "hate speech".

9:49:13 PM Charles: Okay.

9:49:23 PM  ^ When I challenged the decision, I was told that the video (specifically) encouraged violence.

9:49:25 PM  This is a lie.

9:49:36 PM  ^ That "short" (video) in just a few seconds proves that this is a lie.

9:49:41 PM  Specific employees within youtube are corrupt:

9:49:58 PM  there are specific youtube employees who are not following youtube's rules and guidelines.

9:50:06 PM  This is a real problem: I have real evidence.

9:50:29 PM  Yes, in theory, the community guidelines should be enforced against me: instead, I am looking at totally fictional charges of "hate speech".

9:50:38 PM  ^ That one example (shown in just a few seconds) really does prove my point.

9:51:05 PM Charles: I am sorry if you feel that way but you were given the option to appeal if you think we made a mistake.

9:51:10 PM  In that video, I am discussing quantitative evidence that veganism has become less popular. (I am a vegan: for me, this is sad news, by the way.)

9:51:27 PM  So the video is (at that time stamp) discussing these numbers on a chart.

9:51:40 PM  This was categorized as "hate speech", and on appeal I was told that it is promoting violence.

9:51:48 PM  Right now, Charles, I am appealing: this is my appeal.

9:52:02 PM  What are you going to do with this information?

9:52:13 PM  I cannot fill out a form, so I am explaining the situation to you.

9:52:34 PM Charles: Aright, I will forward the information to our internal team.

9:52:41 PM Charles: I will convert this chat to email.

9:52:48 PM  (1) Dishonest and corrupt people within youtube have (repeatedly) categorized my videos as hate speech. (2) I can present evidence that the videos do not contain hate speech, in general, and they do not promote violence, in specific.

9:52:52 PM Charles: Is this the best email to reach you at [EMAIL ADDRESS]?

[…]

9:53:11 PM  Here is the evidence, in two links:

9:53:18 PM Charles: Sure, go on.

9:53:21 PM  (1) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZMBWEewOamE

9:53:45 PM  (2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcgy9PNWAEA

9:53:56 PM  ^ Those two videos present very real evidence of youtube employees lying.

9:54:23 PM  My channel has been a victim of these lies: my experience with youtube show [sic] evidence of misconduct by youtube employees.

9:54:52 PM  Okay, Charles, when do we deal with the other aspects of the appeal "form"?

9:55:29 PM  [Quoting the webpage:]

—————

• A form will load on this page. Use this to write your appeal.

• Tell us about your channel and how it doesn’t violate the feedback above.

• Add links of your videos (particularly the most viewed).

—————

9:55:55 PM  ^ Am I allowed to provide some other kind of positive statement about my youtube channel?

9:56:07 PM  ^ Should I provide links (as suggested) to my most popular videos?

9:56:27 PM Charles: You can share details to your appeal here.

9:56:48 PM Charles: Just so you know that each appeal is carefully reviewed by our experts.

9:57:14 PM  Right: and experts are human beings. They can lie, too. They can be guilty of misconduct. They can be biased.

9:57:15 PM Charles: As for the option to appeal, I am requesting you to share a screen recording for this to be checked.

9:58:20 PM  "You can share details to your appeal here."

^ This is the instruction you've provided for me to follow.

9:59:33 PM Charles: As a Manager, I have thoroughly reviewed your concern and this final.

10:01:45 PM Charles: Are you still there?

10:02:05 PM  Yes, I am writing my appeal.

10:02:22 PM Charles: I thought the appeal that you have shared started a while ago?

[This is not a masterpiece, but you can see precisely how many (or how few) minutes went into the composition (with the time-stamps indicating the California time zone).]

10:06:41 PM  My channel has a ten year history of dealing with some of the most important political, religious and ecological controversies of our time: sometimes seriously and sometimes satirically. My most recent videos (uploaded to youtube) show this same mix of the serious and the satirical. Today, I uploaded a short parody song…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z28bs-184Ss

…whereas three days ago I uploaded a serious discussion of contemporary politics (lasting about sixteen minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp32EaA8jDA

The video immediately prior to that is over an hour long, and is comedic, but the comedy deals with a tremendous variety of serious political issues (including climate change, repeatedly).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBVGeH2B0hQ

I think that this mixture of the serious and the satirical has made my channel difficult for youtube employees to evaluate and, frankly, "difficult to censor":

obviously, the serious videos and the satirical videos can't be held to the same standard.

I have also, repeatedly, encountered the problem of youtube employees attributing opinions to me that I criticize (or satirize) in others. To use a real example, I have quoted racist statements from Kanye West, but I was excoriating Kanye West: my own video was anti-racist, but did quote and deal with racism.

I understand that many of the political issues I deal with are shocking and disturbing, from the critique of the vegan movement to the critique of modern religion, BUT THIS IS YOUTUBE: this website, Youtube, really was created to give people like me a voice.

This is a place for dissident intellectuals to challenge the presuppositions of members of the audience. Youtube should not silence someone like myself, who criticizes Jordan Peterson, while giving Jordan Peterson the right to speak unopposed. Thank you.

[…]

10:08:55 PM Eisel Mazard: I infer that you will now re-format this information, so that it can be transmitted to someone as an appeal?

10:09:23 PM Charles: Thanks for confirming.

10:09:44 PM Charles: No, I will forward your exact words.

10:10:02 PM Charles: Please expect an email within 24 hours.

No More PhD: Mike Israetel and Me.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z28bs-184Ss

Posted, in parallel, to my comedy channel, under the significantly different tile, "Academic credentials are a joke: bro science is serious business." And here's the link to that version of the video if you want it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBCDUo1zSBc

Jordan Peterson is still a Nazi: Lindsay Shepherd is still a Nazi.

 

If you're watching this anywhere other than Canada, you probably can't imagine the extent to which these people have redefined political discourse (left and right) in this country: I realize J.P. is merely one voice among many in London or Los Angeles, but he's both Julius Caesar and Joe Rogan in Canada.  Meanwhile, Lindsay Shepherd uploaded one video two days ago, and two videos two years ago: this video is, in part, a response to all three. Link to her videos: https://www.youtube.com/@lindsayshepherdess

And the link to my own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp32EaA8jDA