#rhetoric

I feel like the Hbomberguy plagiarism video has a lot of really good lessons about building an argument. Like, the thesis of the video isn't just "Plagiarism is rife on Youtube", although that point was certainly well made, it was specifically about James Somerton, who isn't mentioned until about halfway through the video. Before then, Hbomb goes through several creators who are already widely discredited as plagiarists, and in each section he introduces concepts that are later incorporated into the final takedown of Somerton, but each section also stands on it's own. Like, he starts with Filip, the game reviewer, which he uses to introduce the format of how he will discuss and expose plagiarists. Specifically, the graphic of displaying the source material while the plagiarist's voice plays, and marking up said source material every time the plagiarist changes some wording slightly. This is the method that Hbomb uses across the entire video. With Illuminaughtii, Hbomb introduces a few major concepts 1) The idea of Insufficient citation. Illuminaughtii "Cites" her sources by putting a plaintext pastebin link in her video descriptions with no indication of how each source was used. Technically, her source is CITED, but not in any relevant or useful way. She has a big list of stuff she read, and a random youtube link in there happens to be the source that she stole 90% of the video from. 2) He introduces the profit motive behind this approach. Putting out a lot of content very quickly is how one builds an audience, and therefore an income, out of making stuff on youtube. Plagiarism of this sort is a way to produce content very quickly and build a following. The Internet Historian section introduces two new concepts:

I do fully unironically believe they are doing this to prevent communists and anti-war activists from organizing on their platform though. This is one of the only large websites that has a significant communist/anarchist presence and also no mandatory algorithm that can be easily used to dissuade users from finding each other. The way people do political discourse on here is by going into the notes and looking at other people's reblogs. As much as the discourse side of this website sucks shit sometimes it's also home to some pretty elaborate and interesting conversations. Some real grade A class consciousness type shit (and grades B, C, D, and F, but 90% of everything is crap).

There's a lot you can say about caregiver fatigue, the ways society expects abled partners to unsustainably care for disabled partners, and the intensely vulnerable situation disabled partners are in, but "Dump Your Puppygirl" does absolutely none of that. The text itself does not engage with disability scholarship and to read disability scholarship into it is doing analysis that Knight didn't do. The tone, framing, and title lead the reader to a very specific conclusion about the "puppygirl." It's a pure motte-and-bailey to then claim it was written with care for the puppygirl. The defenses rely on analysis that the text doesn't support. (The revised version pulls back from a few of the facially worst aspects but doesn't address the fundamentals of the piece.)