There's a reason they only let us see him speaking in German
March 28, 2025 3:12 AM Subscribe
I just watched five minutes of it. I'll watch the rest. I want to believe.
Also:
MetaFilter: It's a big club, and you ain't in it
posted by chavenet at 3:39 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
Also:
MetaFilter: It's a big club, and you ain't in it
posted by chavenet at 3:39 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
Nah, much sharper and funnier than Curtis.
posted by eustatic at 4:05 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
posted by eustatic at 4:05 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
I think you can drop in later in the video at the chapter headings
posted by eustatic at 5:06 AM on March 28
posted by eustatic at 5:06 AM on March 28
I stopped watching most internet videos of young people explaining things and expressing their opinions about stuff - especially about conspiracies - years ago. But I’m 10 minutes into it and it’s cute, and interesting.
Who’s she? I’m diving in.
posted by growabrain at 5:07 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
Who’s she? I’m diving in.
posted by growabrain at 5:07 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
Who’s she? I’m diving in.
Follow the Contrapoints tag on the post for previous work by Natalie Wynn. Fans of Wynn might also enjoy her appearance on Adam Buxton's podcast a few months back. [Edit: October 2023.]
2 hours 40 is a big commitment but on past form it'll be worth it, so that's my evening's viewing for the next night or two sorted.
posted by rory at 5:17 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
Follow the Contrapoints tag on the post for previous work by Natalie Wynn. Fans of Wynn might also enjoy her appearance on Adam Buxton's podcast a few months back. [Edit: October 2023.]
2 hours 40 is a big commitment but on past form it'll be worth it, so that's my evening's viewing for the next night or two sorted.
posted by rory at 5:17 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
Growabrain, she started out having just jumped ship from neuroscience undergrad to a philosophy PhD, then jumping ship from the insanity of a PhD to doing videos critiquing mid-2010s culture (notably alt-right and conservative ideology) and breaking down philosophical concepts for a very online audience. She's since enjoyed having a strong enough Patreon support base that she can do obsessive research and dramaturgical work to put out roughly yearly documentary-length videos on a range of topics.
posted by wakannai at 5:19 AM on March 28 [11 favorites]
posted by wakannai at 5:19 AM on March 28 [11 favorites]
Philosophy tube has a pair of "is Nietzsche Woke?" and "Is Nietzsche MAGA"? That are a nice compliment to this one.
All of these videos make me nostalgic for this "Don't be a sucker" video from when there was an ideal of the "free world"
In which a Hungarian educates an American kid
posted by eustatic at 5:20 AM on March 28 [8 favorites]
All of these videos make me nostalgic for this "Don't be a sucker" video from when there was an ideal of the "free world"
In which a Hungarian educates an American kid
posted by eustatic at 5:20 AM on March 28 [8 favorites]
Really lays out the foundations for the basic premise that the human brain wants things to happen for a reason, and projects any injury (from internal shame to external happenstance) onto a deliberate, evil other, and how that results in so much madness. The bit towards the end about how many of the big conspiracy influencers today had some instigating event of mass public shaming was revealing. Some lines that stood out:
- One function of the Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy — it denies the banality of sexual violence by making sexual violence exotic.
- Populism escalates into violence when tensions in society reach a breaking point, always a risk in a culture lacking an established ritual of sending a sin laden goat out into the desert once a year.
- There's a saying that antisemitism is the socialism of fools. It appeals to people who sense that something is wrong [...] but they don't know enough about any of those things to criticise it intelligently.
- You just can't force feed someone blue pills. That's what we have 5G towers for.
- A lot of men in particular feel humiliated by modernity itself. [...] conspiracy investigation can be a way to reclaim heroic masculinity from the comfort of your desk chair.
- A lot of women get into conspiracies via alternative health and wellness, often after frustrating or humiliating experiences with mainstream medicine.
- Conspiracists don't think in terms of systems. To them, oppression is always an intentional act of evil.
- When you deny the humanity of the oppressors, you also conceal the potential oppressor in yourself and in all people.posted by lucidium at 5:23 AM on March 28 [19 favorites]
- One function of the Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy — it denies the banality of sexual violence by making sexual violence exotic.
- Populism escalates into violence when tensions in society reach a breaking point, always a risk in a culture lacking an established ritual of sending a sin laden goat out into the desert once a year.
- There's a saying that antisemitism is the socialism of fools. It appeals to people who sense that something is wrong [...] but they don't know enough about any of those things to criticise it intelligently.
- You just can't force feed someone blue pills. That's what we have 5G towers for.
- A lot of men in particular feel humiliated by modernity itself. [...] conspiracy investigation can be a way to reclaim heroic masculinity from the comfort of your desk chair.
- A lot of women get into conspiracies via alternative health and wellness, often after frustrating or humiliating experiences with mainstream medicine.
- Conspiracists don't think in terms of systems. To them, oppression is always an intentional act of evil.
- When you deny the humanity of the oppressors, you also conceal the potential oppressor in yourself and in all people.posted by lucidium at 5:23 AM on March 28 [19 favorites]
It's excellent, I'm glad Natalie hasn't gone reactionary in response to her own moment of being targeted - her 'mass public shaming' - from the left. I'm enough of a conspiracy theorist to think that targeting was orchestrated by enemies but she's got more grace than me and doesn't go there in the video.
Hbomberguy has a video that famously starts off being about flat earth, and midway through pivots into being about qanon as he realizes with horror that all the flat earthers are into Q now.
This video is about a range of things, mostly about the psychology of conspiracist thinking, but one of the things it talks about that stood out to me is where the Q anon movement went, after it fizzled out. And the answer is Nazism. A certain group of conspiracists online are just straight up Nazis now.
posted by subdee at 5:27 AM on March 28 [5 favorites]
Hbomberguy has a video that famously starts off being about flat earth, and midway through pivots into being about qanon as he realizes with horror that all the flat earthers are into Q now.
This video is about a range of things, mostly about the psychology of conspiracist thinking, but one of the things it talks about that stood out to me is where the Q anon movement went, after it fizzled out. And the answer is Nazism. A certain group of conspiracists online are just straight up Nazis now.
posted by subdee at 5:27 AM on March 28 [5 favorites]
Natalie's videos are always great, very informative, but what I really like is her humour. This video had me guffawing a couple of times!
posted by Pendragon at 5:54 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]
posted by Pendragon at 5:54 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]
I've listened to most of this, and it a decent summary. I'm not sure who the target audience is. Certainly not actual conspiracists. Unfortunately there really is no way to reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into to begin with.
posted by hankmajor at 6:18 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
posted by hankmajor at 6:18 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
Hbomberguy has a video that famously starts off being about flat earth, and midway through pivots into being about qanon as he realizes with horror that all the flat earthers are into Q now.
Slight correction. That was Dan Olson (Folding Ideas), In Search of a Flat Earth.
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 6:28 AM on March 28 [11 favorites]
Slight correction. That was Dan Olson (Folding Ideas), In Search of a Flat Earth.
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 6:28 AM on March 28 [11 favorites]
Some of my friends caught QAnon. We drifted apart. I've wondered how they were doing. This post gives me a likely answer
posted by otherchaz at 6:31 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
posted by otherchaz at 6:31 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
My favorite bit is that conspiracy theorists don't want answers, they want mysteries.
Also, some of her "being evil" costumes are her best.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:38 AM on March 28 [7 favorites]
Also, some of her "being evil" costumes are her best.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:38 AM on March 28 [7 favorites]
On the whole "you can't reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into" thing, David McRaney of the You Are Not So Smart podcast recently interviewed the creators of DebunkBot, an AI for arguing with conspiracists, who claim surprisingly positive results. It'd be interesting to see whether it makes a difference whether the conspiracists know they're talking to an AI, I can't remember whether that was addressed in the podcast.
posted by pw201 at 6:49 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
posted by pw201 at 6:49 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
David McRaney of the You Are Not So Smart podcast recently interviewed the creators of DebunkBot, an AI for arguing with conspiracists, who claim surprisingly positive results.
This is interesting. I could imagine it cutting either way. On the one hand, the conspiracist wouldn't have to give one of the "sheeple" the satisfaction of getting one over on them. On the other hand, nobody wants to be outwitted by a machine.
posted by hankmajor at 7:13 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
This is interesting. I could imagine it cutting either way. On the one hand, the conspiracist wouldn't have to give one of the "sheeple" the satisfaction of getting one over on them. On the other hand, nobody wants to be outwitted by a machine.
posted by hankmajor at 7:13 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
Thanks for the correction Laura Palmer's CDK, I did get them mixed up.
posted by subdee at 7:33 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
posted by subdee at 7:33 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
I'm feeling it for the couple who flank Wynn during part four, The Ritual. That is commitment to a bit.
posted by chavenet at 8:19 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 8:19 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
One of the things no one was ever reasoned into is reason itself — and by the very dictates of reason, a valid argument for being reasonable cannot rely on reason because that would be arguing in a circle.
posted by jamjam at 8:32 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]
posted by jamjam at 8:32 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]
Conspiracy theories take hold much younger than we'd like to think. Kids ask questions around 8-9 years old, to form a world image, including their circumstances and prospects. Then their minders spoon feed them bitterness.
posted by Brian B. at 10:07 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
posted by Brian B. at 10:07 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
fladablet shared this a few days ago in the Rogan thread
it's good, I'm shy of the finish line by 40-some minutes but chunking it in the evening has been worthwhile
posted by ginger.beef at 10:15 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
it's good, I'm shy of the finish line by 40-some minutes but chunking it in the evening has been worthwhile
posted by ginger.beef at 10:15 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
I'm about an hour into this and loving it so far, hope to finish it later today.
One tangential thought I've had so far is about how much World War 2 towers over the rest of history in terms of the cultural imagination. And it's easy to see why - it's still (for the moment, at least) in living memory, there are Bad Guys and Good Guys, larger-than-life leaders, big plans coming to fruition, and just about everything that happened in it feels like it went according to someone or other's design. There are countless records, facts and figures to dive into, a generally agreed-upon narrative, and an endless rabbit hole to burrow into if you're interested in contradicting that narrative. It's an outsized, world-changing event that invites fascination and is, in short, history as best befits the conspiracy-theorist worldview through the lenses of, to use Wynn's triad: Intentionality, Dualism, and Symbolism.
Which makes me wish that World War 1 got more attention, because it seems to me to be the antidote to so much of this worldview. Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the result of a conspiracy that we now know a great deal about, but not one from the highest echelons of society, and it was both misguided (FF was probably the best friend that Princip and his cause had within the Austrian nobility) and an utter clusterfuck that only succeeded due to astronomical dumb luck. The powers that be recognized the pointlessness of the upcoming war and spent the following month or so trying to prevent it, their efforts stymied by a mixture of more stupid happenstance and systemic failures, where the system in question was a web of alliances built up in an attempt to preserve peace, but which inverted to cause the opposite in part because of outsized egos and general incompetence. Germany's grand plans for a quick first-mover-advantage push to achieve their goals and end things quickly fell immediately on their ass because they assumed that Belgium would be fine just letting German troops march through unimpeded, and the whole conflict came to be epitomized in the futility of trench warfare that lasted interminably, costing countless lives and accomplishing virtually nothing. (And also in utter disasters like Gallipoli.) And through the course of it all, the modernization of warfare which would in turn modernize the world, and at the end, the powers that be divvying things up without having any real regard or foresight as to the consequences.
That, to me, feels like a greater object lesson in how history operates: random chance, systemic failures, intractable egos, people in power playing the hands that they're dealt, short-sightedness and, somehow, progress marching on in the background.
But that doesn't make for a very tidy narrative, unfortunately.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:23 AM on March 28 [16 favorites]
One tangential thought I've had so far is about how much World War 2 towers over the rest of history in terms of the cultural imagination. And it's easy to see why - it's still (for the moment, at least) in living memory, there are Bad Guys and Good Guys, larger-than-life leaders, big plans coming to fruition, and just about everything that happened in it feels like it went according to someone or other's design. There are countless records, facts and figures to dive into, a generally agreed-upon narrative, and an endless rabbit hole to burrow into if you're interested in contradicting that narrative. It's an outsized, world-changing event that invites fascination and is, in short, history as best befits the conspiracy-theorist worldview through the lenses of, to use Wynn's triad: Intentionality, Dualism, and Symbolism.
Which makes me wish that World War 1 got more attention, because it seems to me to be the antidote to so much of this worldview. Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the result of a conspiracy that we now know a great deal about, but not one from the highest echelons of society, and it was both misguided (FF was probably the best friend that Princip and his cause had within the Austrian nobility) and an utter clusterfuck that only succeeded due to astronomical dumb luck. The powers that be recognized the pointlessness of the upcoming war and spent the following month or so trying to prevent it, their efforts stymied by a mixture of more stupid happenstance and systemic failures, where the system in question was a web of alliances built up in an attempt to preserve peace, but which inverted to cause the opposite in part because of outsized egos and general incompetence. Germany's grand plans for a quick first-mover-advantage push to achieve their goals and end things quickly fell immediately on their ass because they assumed that Belgium would be fine just letting German troops march through unimpeded, and the whole conflict came to be epitomized in the futility of trench warfare that lasted interminably, costing countless lives and accomplishing virtually nothing. (And also in utter disasters like Gallipoli.) And through the course of it all, the modernization of warfare which would in turn modernize the world, and at the end, the powers that be divvying things up without having any real regard or foresight as to the consequences.
That, to me, feels like a greater object lesson in how history operates: random chance, systemic failures, intractable egos, people in power playing the hands that they're dealt, short-sightedness and, somehow, progress marching on in the background.
But that doesn't make for a very tidy narrative, unfortunately.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:23 AM on March 28 [16 favorites]
breaking down philosophical concepts for a very online audience
Most importantly, Natalie finally answered the age-old question: Are Traps Gay?
posted by pullayup at 10:29 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
Most importantly, Natalie finally answered the age-old question: Are Traps Gay?
posted by pullayup at 10:29 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]
I became a new fan. This performance-monologue was most fascinating, and I'm going to deep-dive into her other essays.
posted by growabrain at 10:40 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
posted by growabrain at 10:40 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]
growabrain: Who’s she? I’m diving in.
ContraPoints is one of the more prominent members of the cluster of youtubers who were sometimes called BreadTube in the 2010s, along with channels like Hbomberguy, Folding Ideas, Philosophy Tube and Lindsey Ellis. Originally grouped by their leftist politics, they've also notably moved to making longer and more involved videos with increasing production values over time.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:18 AM on March 30 [2 favorites]
ContraPoints is one of the more prominent members of the cluster of youtubers who were sometimes called BreadTube in the 2010s, along with channels like Hbomberguy, Folding Ideas, Philosophy Tube and Lindsey Ellis. Originally grouped by their leftist politics, they've also notably moved to making longer and more involved videos with increasing production values over time.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:18 AM on March 30 [2 favorites]
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posted by 3.2.3 at 3:33 AM on March 28 [2 favorites]