I never had much use for Pitchfork, which always struck me as the peak of tedious music hipsterdom, but the news that it’s being shuttered and absorbed into GQ is bad nonethless. As full of shit as it may have been, I still dislike people being forced out of work. Some people are, frankly, not sorry to see it go and maybe they have a point, but even so (plus GQ is an odd magazine to merge it into). And whatever its flaws, it was quite correct about some things:
The anti-woke backlash has, if nothing, exposed a bunch of absolute numpties for what they are; all these people getting uptight about Doctor Who treating trans people like normal human beings and so forth, well, clearly they’ve never watched the fucking thing or they’d have known the show’s generally progressive tendencies over the decades. This is how I know Emily Compagno here knows bugger all about Star Trek (quite apart from getting the Vulcan salute wrong); Fox were malding about the next Star Wars film having a female director, and she said that’s why she watches Star Trek instead. You know, Star Trek, that un-woke, un-feminist TV franchise. The one whose original series admittedly had no female directors but did have a number of female writers including D.C. Fontana, some of whose episodes are among the best of the series; meanwhile, Next Gen did bring at least one female director on board (who did a bunch of episodes on that, plus some on DS9 and Voyager), and the more recent iterations of Trek have had even more female directors, like Hanelle Culpepper who’s not only female but BLACK. Political correctness gone mad, obviously. To say nothing of the multi-ethnic and multi-gender casting of the show, and the fact that Number One in “The Cage”—you know, the very first produced episode of the show—Number One, second only to the ship’s captain, was female. Emily, I’m not even a Trekkie and I know all this, which is more than I suspect you do. Fucking clown. No wonder you’re on Fox, a REAL network would never have hired you…
EDIT (a few hours later): And if you won’t hear it from me, hear it from someone who REALLY knows what he’s talking about:
So the Internet villain du jour is Substack, self-described “new economic engine for culture”, largely because of the above comment. Substack has a Nazi problem, to quote the title of an article on the subject by Jonathan Katz:
At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.
This resulted in something called Substackers Against Nazis, an open letter published by dozens of Substack writers unhappy with the Nazi situation; this was in turn answered by another open letter saying the problem’s overstated that was co-signed by a number of… interesting names like Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss, Julie Bindel, Konstantin Kisin, Matt Taibbi, Paul Kingsnorth, Peter Boghossian, Richard Dawkins, and various others I’m not familiar with (plus Ted Gioia, who I otherwise thought was and is cool from what I can see). I decided to click one of those names I didn’t recognise and got… whatever this fuck this is:
Have you ever noticed the Substackers Against Nazis post is on a blog called The Racket by Johnathan M. Katz? It’s full of things that read as very Antisemitic to me, and it gets famous just as the Israel-Palestine Conflict is at its worst with October 7th! Forget Substackers Against Nazis, it should be called Antisemites Against Nazis! It’s also all related to The Atlantic wanting to demolish our independent platform by calling us Nazis, especially the Jews and the people who support Israel. Not that calling Jews Nazis is anything new.
Katz is Jewish himself, it should be added. Calling Jews antisemites… THAT’s something you don’t often see. Another of Katz’s critics is his self-avowed friend Ben Dreyfuss (you may know his dad), for whom the problem isn’t Nazis but the unserious liberals trying to deplatform them:
I don’t know that anything has made me more annoyed by this debate than last weekend when I saw an earnest, relatively offline, old Jewish writer make the mistake of thinking that the “Nazis on substack” open letter was using the term “Nazi” in any way that had to do with their understanding of the term. They were sad and scared and horrified! But also confused and looking for an explanation. They hadn’t seen any of the people who had killed their parents here.
I didn’t respond to them because I have a horse in this race and felt like someone who is as earnest as they and more unbiased than we should help them out. But what I would have told them is: don’t worry. They don’t mean actual nazis. They mean unreconstructed conservatives who could have any number of beliefs.
That isn’t how that dude understood the term “Substack Nazis.” That dude thought there were real popular Nazis on here putting Jews in camps.
I shouldn’t have to tell Ben this, but the Nazis didn’t start with death camps. They started with a newspaper. You know… words. Words they used to promote their ideas before taking direct action. Curious, too, that several of these “unreconstructed conservatives” would choose specifically Nazi imagery and iconography, or call themselves a “National Socialist newsletter”, if they weren’t at least Nazi-sympathetic. Just because they’re only talking about the JQ rather than personally spraying Zyklon-B at every Jewish person they see doesn’t mean they’re not Nazis. Or are they only “real” Nazis if it was before 1945 or something?
Anyway, the anti-Nazi open letter finally provoked Substack’s founders to respond, part of which response is cited in the picture up top… basically, “we don’t like Nazis either but they don’t bother us enough”. Which… was, frankly, far from the best answer they could’ve given. Business Insider is not having it, noting that, because Substack gives users the option to monetise their writing, in return for which they take some amount of what you make from doing so, they’re making money off the monetised Nazi blogs too (maybe not much, but any is too much). And The Verge were even less charitable:
I mean, maybe the problem isn’t as bad as some of the critics of the Substackers Against Nazis seem to think it is. Maybe there’s actually not a lot of Nazis on Substack, and maybe they don’t have a big audience, and maybe they don’t make much money, maybe we don’t really have much to worry about. Maybe. The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei had only a few dozen members when it was founded in 1919; by the end of 1920, NSDAP (as it was by then) membership was around two thousand. Who can say what we should or shouldn’t be worried about.
Anyway, I actually considered Substack myself as an outlet when I was considering becoming a blogger again near the end of last year. In the end I decided it wasn’t really suitable for what I wanted to do (though, ironically, a long post like this would’ve been ideal over there). And though I’m sure WordPress has issues of its own, I think I still made the right decision in the end. For once.
Interesting interview with Hbomberguy over THAT video:
For Harry, the shocking success of his four-hour video has itself brought a few internal issues surrounding a pledge he made to give away a portion of its profits to those who had been plagiarised.
“We said we were going to give away all the ad revenue that video raised and now because ad revenue’s higher in December, the video is four hours so there are more ads, and a lot of people have watched it, it’s an order of magnitude higher than we expected it to get.”
This means that the payouts Harry and the Hbomberguy team promised have increased dramatically, and, coupled with Somerton’s reaction, things have become much more hectic.
“Now, like, taxes are involved,” Harry says. “This is a substantial amount of money to be taxed on before we give it to people. It’s actually made it harder for me to do the intended purpose of the video.
“My wonderful producer, Kat, has had to set up a database to keep track of all of the things that were stolen from just to make sure we have everything correct… This isn’t like 300 bucks, which is what we expected it to be, this is a lot more.”
Good to know that something worthwhile has come from the debacle. The REALLY unexpected outcome from the whole thing, though, is surely this:
I will indeed be DAMNED. James Somerton returned just two weeks after he was blasted off the Internet to… apologise? And to reactivate his Patreon, too, but this video is what’s drawing most of the attention. Understandably so. And… YIKES.
These last two items raise an important point. I did try and watch Somerton’s video, and he basically started by talking about, frankly, having been hospitalised since Harry’s video came out. And I couldn’t watch it beyond that point, not because that’s, you know, grim as fuck (I’m assuming he’s telling the truth about this, I find it believable and I feel the people I’ve seen questioning this point are being unnecessarily uncharitable), but because I knew what the tone of the rest of the video would be if this was how he was kicking it off. From what I can see, I don’t appear to have missed much.
You may have noted, though, that my first screenshsot was of a reupload of the video… that’s cos not only did James upload what appears to have been one of the worst Youtube apology videos ever (a truly cursed subgenre), he also removed it a few hours later. Unsurprising, given that all the comments I saw before he whacked the video were bracingly negative. Alas for him, it’s so easy to download YT videos these days, and Somerton’s well enough known now, that someone was bound to save it in case he did that. Mind you, I’m still not going to watch it. I feel somehow that even watching someone else’s save and reupload of his video is just going to encourage him…
Needless to say Hbomberguy’s now-famous plagiarism video has provoked a lot of discourse on Youtube, some of which I’ve watched, but this particular example offers a different perspective on James Somerton: where Harris looked at Somerton’s plagiarism and Todd Nathanson looked at his misinformation and lies, Courtney and Royce look at, frankly, giving him money:
This video’s more about Somerton’s business practices with his production company Telos Pictures, which seem to have been as shitty as anything else. These creators have further particular beef with him over what they consider his poor showing when it came to asexual representation (I did rather enjoy the bit where she says how they gave him a bunch of potential resources and he never plagiarised any of it), but their more obvious problem is that, frankly, they put money into Telos, a fair bit thereof, and the return rhey got from doing so was… well, bugger all.
The more I hear about this character, the less I like him, and the detail about him literally calling the cops on some of his critics for “harrassment” makes me lose that rather pointless feeling of vague sympathy for him I had after watching Todd’s video. I can’t do it. He’s brought all this shit on himself and HE FUCKING DESERVES IT. And his Fandom page that I linked previously has been updated with some new bullshit, looks like he may have engaged in catfishing and some sort of scam on Patreon and he may never have got those business degrees he started out his career with (having sold himself as a media expert before YT). I’m kind of glad I never watched any of his stuff now…
Were the Middle Ages really like a popular fantasy book and TV series whose creator was, per his own acknowledgement, inspired by the Middle Ages and events of that time, particularly the Wars of the Roses and the Capetian dynasty in France leading up to the Hundred Years War? Who can tell? I post this mostly because I’m puzzled by one thing… the ABC turns off comments on the majority of its posts on Facebook, cos if they don’t the posts will often get hammered by complete shitheads who still think the ABC is a progressive shill. And I’ve seen how nasty the ABC’s commenters can be before whoever moderates their FB page steps in and shuts things down… and they closed off comments on this post before anyone had in fact commented at all. I just don’t understand why. Were they worried about dickheads like me swarming the comments section saying “well yeah it kind of WAS like that back then…”?
YIKES. Honestly, if that Hbomberguy video hadn’t already driven James Somerton off the Internet, this one would’ve ended him on YT; as it stands, this serves neatly as the final nail in the coffin. It comes from a channel called Todd in the Shadows, and Todd Nathanson doesn’t usually do this sort of thing, his channel’s more about music, but he was sufficiently offended by something Somerton posted that he felt the need to make this… and he acknowledges knowing Harris was doing his video about Somerton and that it was something of an inspiration, but the two videos take separate approaches so they’re both worth watching.
Todd’s video is more about the facts than the knocking off of other people’s work, and the sheer amount of things that he’s caught James being verifiably wrong about is just… oy. Why, though, would James lie about something like this that can be, you know, independently verified? (I use the word “lie” because Todd assumes malice rather than incompetence in almost every case here.) Well, he has a Fandom wiki entry that currently reads in part:
He generally has left leaning political views, although has made multiple statements condemning a group he calls “straight white women.” This is likely a masking of misogynism: focusing on their race and sexuality in an attempt to deemphasize the gender aspect, and thus, making it appear acceptable him to make statements that would be hateful and bigoted if these qualities were not brought up. James has also misgendered transgender creators in some of his videos, as well as erasing mentions of the word transgender when covering transgender specific topics. He has also described the queer community at large as “LGB,” a transphobic dogwhistle.
So there’s a certain propensity, as noted by both Harris and Todd and various of their commenters, towards James promoting himself as a champion of the LGBT but arguably only really caring about the G and trying to paint the L, the B, and the T as historically having had an easier time of things than gay men have had. Haven’t seen enough to really confirm that for myself, but that seems to be the broad consensus about how he works as a queer creator.
It still begs the question of why he’s telling these bullshit stories. I can kind of understand him calling The Rocky Horror Picture Show the film that saved 20th Century Fox if he’s trying to push queer art and history (despite it not actually being history, cos RHPS was bugger all of the sort). I don’t even remotely understand his retelling the origins of messrs Gaiman & Pratchett’s Good Omens, which has been told by Gaiman at least (not sure how much Pratchett wrote about the subject), and Somerton’s telling is… kind of entirely different from Gaiman’s, and Gaiman strikes me as the sort of creator who’s actually honest about these things; what’s the point, therefore, of James spinning his bullshit narrative?
I don’t understand a lot of this stuff, and consequently I’ve had great difficulty articulating that lack of understanding, I’ve cut and/or rewritten huge parts of this post while writing it since last night. What is the point? Cos these details are all things James Somerton could’ve verified before stating them as fact, we know cos Todd managed to verify them; James not doing so makes him look kind of grossly incompetent at best. That should be enough to end whatever credibility he had on YT. And what if it was deliberate…? Was he just hoping no one would fact check him? Why did he do it at all?
Having given more thought to the situation, I find myself increasingly perplexed by it, but also oddly sympathetic somehow towards James Somerton. I sense some sort of sad personal flaw that makes him feel like he’s less than he wishes he were—a feeling I know myself better than I’d like, to be honest; I’m sure it’s a thing that drives a lot of people really—but it also made him try to be something in a way that he really shouldn’t have done. So whatever sympathy I might feel really is wasted, cos this shit is something he’s ultimately brought on himself. And there’s still something kind of sad about it.
Oh, and one final irony: The Algorithm suggested one of Somerton’s videos while I was watching Todd’s as something I might like to watch next. I decided against it.
GODFUCKINGDAMN, I’ve long wished that Harris would make videos more often than he does cos they tend to be really interesting, but when he springs a nearly FOUR HOUR extravaganza on us, I can’t accuse him of slacking off. (And the fucking thing’s already had two and a half million views…) Most of this is about one creator in particular, a guy called James Somerton, who was sprung by one of his own fans when she caught him plagiarising her work. I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually watched anything by the latter (I might’ve seen one or two but can’t remember offhand), but I have had him recommended to me by The Algorithm quite a lot and I think I’ve got quite a few of his videos in my YT watchlist. Think I might be removing those now, much like he seems to be removing himself:
Woof. I know Harris tells him “delete your channel” at one point in the video, but I didn’t expect Somerton to actually go to ground quite so hard so soon. And that’s not the only video about him that’s just appeared on YT in the last couple of days; I’m just going to watch the other one now…
It’s been rather pleasing over the last day or so to watch a couple of major figures on the right do what the left has always been good at, i.e. trying to tear strips off each other. Ben Shapiro has apparently been very unhappy with some of Candace Owens’ comments on the current Israel debacle:
…like that one. Incendiary stuff! And no, her boss did not like it, and this is where the discourse went:
I mean, Ben Shapiro has been unhinged for a while, Israel’s war against Palestine has just made him a bit more so than usual… but apart from that Candace has no place calling anyone unhinged; it was her, after all, who said Hitler would’ve been fine if he’d just limited his efforts to Germany. And that’s a concept that requires a special sort of fuckwit to express it seriously.
And Ben Shapiro knew that she was that special sort of fuckwit when he hired her. Which he did in 2021, two years after she said that thing about Hitler. Two years after it was known that she said it. Two years after a recording of her saying it was played at a Congressional hearing. In short, Ben Shapiro had to know that Candace had said this idiotic thing when he hired her. He must know now, cos if he didn’t at that time I’m sure he was duly informed. And he clearly hasn’t cared about that enough to, you know, get rid of her or NOT FUCKING HIRING HER TO BEGIN WITH.
Now that she’s dared to defy the official line about Israel being above reproach, though, suddenly Ben’s not happy with her (curious, though, that he’s telling her to quit rather than fire her). He was clearly OK with her being, you know, OK with Hitler if only he hadn’t presumed to conquer the rest of Europe. He’s not OK with her criticising the activities of the nation state of Israel. Apparently that bothers him more than the heinous treatment of Jews in the Third Reich. Almost like the state of Israel matters more to him than Jewish people…?
Maybe. I don’t know. But we do know he’ll only stand up for Jewish people up to a certain point:
Points to Ben for criticising Kanye’s antisemitism, but he was willing to look past it even so; Kanye being a pro-life conservative mattered more than him being a racist piece of shit who probably doesn’t think Ben is a real Jew. And when the orange cunt said this about American Jews, he agreed it was not only not even antisemitic but perfectly true.
And Ben being “Israel rather than the Jews” kind of would be in keeping with the American Christian right, which is all for Israel cos their book tells them the world has to end there, so Israel has to survive. The Jews don’t, of course, they have to convert, but Israel has to be looked after so Armageddon comes like the book insists it must. I can envisage Ben Shapiro being OK with that, maybe not so much the conversion thing, but again he’ll find a way to ignore that so he can keep in with the cool kids…
Until the crunch comes and both him and Candace realise they were never more than useful idiots for these scumbags and the Christian right they love so much hates them both and will cast them aside the minute they no longer need them. That day will hurt. And it should, because both of them will have thoroughly deserved it.
Saw this on Bluesky, and thought it had to be some sort of horrible fake or something… but no, that’s an actual article in the Jerusalem Post. Dr Raz Hagoel is a specialist in obesity and weight loss, from what I gather, and possibly a sociopath as well. Cos, frankly, losing weight due to the stress of the Israel business would be one of the last things I’d be thinking of if I were a normal person…
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