#breadtube

Why do I still subject myself to it? I’ve chosen to, it would be far easier to broad brush banish it all from my view but I simply don’t want to.

The topic of today is Abigail Thorn’s (PhilosophyTube) new video on birth rates and its fallacies (linked below). As a critic of Israel’s policies and especially those policies about aid, I am no stranger to having legitimate disagreements with what has been done. So I’m gonna let slide some discussions about created famines, etc. for the sake of my sanity and expediency. This is info-tainment, and i can’t do it all.

But I’m gonna zero in on the concepts of phantasms. Which Abigail explains are like prisms that reprocess facts to be in line with your feelings. She then gives 3 phantasm examples to illustrate at 31:51

1. “I feel like old people are to blame”

2. “I feel as if pro-Palestine sentiment is antisemitic”

3. “I feel as if imprisoning immigrants makes me safer”

Did you catch that? A phantasm in a phantasm. We can play this game both ways. By presenting #2 alongside two other obviously false phantasms, we’ve now laundered the idea that pro-Palestine sentiment can ever be antisemitic when we know demonstrable facts to the opposite. Do we think the person who wrote “fuck Israel” and “(((They))) hate you” outside my building on a sign isn’t antisemitic? (Picture below the link) I assure you they clearly have pro-Palestine sentiment, it just doesn’t come from a squeaky clean moral place of justice. It’s at least partially motivated by antisemitism.

You cannot banish people who are a part of your movement and claim “well they are not truly pro-Palestinian” anymore than I can claim likudnics aren’t pro-Israeli. They can be both. Nuance means that you can have complexity. You cannot paint all pro-Israelis as heartless racists nor all pro-Palestinians as blameless revolutionaries or vice versa.

I’m so tired.

My picture

Liberal critic: "you are dumb and hurtful and one of these days I (or the free market) might do something about it!"

As someone who writes, and as someone who went through the churn-em-out of the modern university degree system and all the plagiarism anxiety that comes with that, the topic of copying and mimicking other creatives is a heavy and ill-understood topic in so many spaces. The education system, at least in my country, went from encouraging rote-learning and copying by rewarding those who best memorised answers previously learned (e.g. exam answer schedules, memorising the wording of pre-practiced essays) to encouraging original thought in extensively-written about topics for essays. It’s very hard not to feel like you’re plagiarising when you’re one of 300 first year law students writing about a a topic from one very in-depth source that you’ve studied in class and three smaller ones, and Turnitin has put in your mind that the MOST important thing you can do for this essay is not to pass it, but to reword it well enough not to get caught up in this plagiarism detector. And I can recognise my behaviours in what Hbomberguy identifies - I remember minute-before-the-deadline essays where I was guilty of padding out my biography with sources from my sources, and can think of phrases or techniques of writing I’ve read in books that I sometimes worry might come through in my writing in a way that feels like stealing.

Plagiarism anxiety is real, and it’s fed by a lack of understanding around what plagiarism is and where it comes from. Hbomberguy is so right for complimenting a bunch of lame youtubers for the enthusiasm with which they openly bounce off of other people’s ideas. This collaborative method of creating where ideas are taken and passed on due to love of the craft can feel derivative eventually - but taken within a body of work where the creator is riffing or paying homage to and not merely regurgitating others success is at the heart of where any meaningful success and love for the medium lies. Creators need to be coming from a place of genuine enthusiasm and respect - it’s when they dont, when they’re looking down on others, that we see these behaviours emerging.

The Kavernacle discusses the fact that a lot of prominent "breadtubers" not talking about the genocide in Gaza, with an especial focus on Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube, and Hbomberguy. There is also a general discussion of how "breadtube" has dropped in its influence and relevance since it began in the mid-2010s.