Yeah, if you don't know someones pronouns and they don't have it listed anywhere easily visible(assuming this is online) then they/them is pretty much always appropriate.
Its always good to make a quick effort to check though if you are unsure.
Huldra
joined 4 years ago
I mean shit like "The revisionist party officials, particularly those that Mao and his followers deemed to be corrupt, revisionist, or capitalist rotors(shitty subtitles misspelled roaders)" is just horrible biased writing for something like this.
Dangerous to comment just halfway into the video but man the credited quote readers list made me expect much more, the whole thing just feels very off, massive broad statements are made about state propaganda and censorship that are given no examples, and while the videos narrative is fairly exploratory towards Mao being "authoritarian" or "anti-authoritarian", it seems completely uncritical in repeating narratives about party establishments and "party elites" being primarily interested in maintaining their own power for powers sake, without giving a lot of grace to the perspective of "hey this could actually fucking collapse the whole country and leave us open to imperialism."
Edit: Finished the video and I feel pretty safe, this is far from "the full story", its pretty literally half the story, or even less, given that it centers so much around Mao on the side for the GPCR, and the forces opposing/restricting the GPCR are rendered as basically a blob that takes cynical and coldly intentional actions to sabotage it in the name of keeping power. While Mao by contrast is given a very large amount of grace in terms of how he didnt intend for violence to affect random teachers or descendants of landlords, it just happened anyways because of the way that he phrased things.
Season 4 is definitely very serious and not particularly light hearted, its the most dense and difficult season to listen to for me in terms of parsing the timeline and involved figures.
Part of that is of course that unlike the previous seasons there is no core party in Afghanistan who events center around, all the previous seasons focus on long running parties and governments, while Afghanistan is characterised by inflicted instability on the country.
Most of the manifesto is just a rabid reactionary screed, I cant recall any mention of this stuff specifically but he certainly thought that modern sociology and psychiatry is leftist and bad.
I would personally interpret that episode as part of his general identity crisis and process of radicalization more than it being emblematic of his core identity and person. Sure trans people can repress pretty hard but I feel like I gotta go with his perspective here in him denying there was anything to it and apparently never pursuing it again or even writing particularly about it afterwards.
Ted K is the authority on Ted K.
In essence he was subjected to traditional interrogation tactics, he was never dosed with any hallucinogens or other drugs, the actual experiment he was part of was that he had to write an essay on his ideological convictions under the false premise that he was going to debate other students, then instead in regular sessions a guy came in and ruthlessly mocked and belittled every aspect of the essay.
He himself dismissed the alleged effects of this and I'd be inclined to agree that I think the main effect of it would just be radicalizing his already held views and positions.
He should have named the video "Youtube plagiarists(these specific guys)" instead!
Im just some fuck on the internet but my main idea for how this could have been paced better is to center the whole thing around the specific ways that they plagiarize, then use examples for each of that.
Like both Illuminaughtii and Somerton do the bisexual lighting to avoid copyright detection thing, so instead of one segment about the former then one segment about the latter, have a segment about bisexual copyright dodging, point out where each do it, then go to the next method of plagiarism.
The length isnt the problem, the problem is that its like 8 videos of the same concept repeated one after another without a framing device or throughline besides "and heres this other plagiarist!"
It wouldnt be better if its was just half the length cause then its just a shorter badly paced video, it either should just have been a series of videos about each individual plagiarist, since each segment is paced individually, or it should have been one video about the broad trends of plagiarism in youtube.
A good video essay never feels too long while a bad one can never be short enough.(adapted from quote about film I read once)
The research is genuinely good but fuck me this is literally like just a full video about Filip, then a full video about Cinemassacre, then 3 segments about Illuminaughtiiiiii, and then a full video about Internet Historian, and then presumably theres gonna be several more full videos about individual cases.
This shit needs a throughline.
Edit: Finished it all and this is 4 better than average yet still relatively petty drama videos, then one 2 hour documentary about James Somerton that is much better but also is fucking exhausting because you've had the exact same pattern and pacing repeated 4 times just before it.
None of the non-James segments are actually particularly critical to the core point that gets made at the end except for just indirectly making the point that this is a trend.
Watching the new Hbomber video makes me appreciate that guy who makes 12 hour videos on Elder Scrolls more, cause this one is just 4 hours and the one single hour I have gone through so far has been fucking miserably paced by comparison.
Its like I put on a playlist of independent videos about specific people doing plagiarism rather than one overarching video about youtube plagiarism.
Tbh I am HIGHLY pessimistic towards any MKULTRA shit just because of how much annoying dumb bullshit conspiracy shit has spawned from it, but yeah that is also a pretty plausible possibility that it could totally fuck him up like that since the people running all this shit didnt give a fuck if it ruined people.