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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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What's wrong with philosophy tube?
I'm not OP and wouldn't put her in the same group as Vaush, but I feel that a lot of her videos, specially the newest ones fall a lot into the trap of being like "Isn't this problem interesting? Let's talk about how interesting it is!" without actually proposing solutions or challenging the pre-established "left" liberal narratives. I don't personally feel any contempt for her as that could even be some defence mechanism since now she's basically the most notable trans youtuber for politics, so to me it's understandable to be selfishly careful.
There's always the issue of pretending that a celebrity/personality is the best available source for information. Like sure, it's useful to people who don't have time to research because they work 8hrs/day (maybe we could change that ;) ), but lots of reddit "left" liberals like to pretend they're the most educated on any subject because they watched one or two hourlong video essays on it, brought to you by skillshare.
I think she actually had two very good but low viewcount videos (Solitary Confinement and Housing Crisis ones) back in the olden days, but don't watch her now unless it's about my pet interests.
Edit: Also I think it's detrimental to make it about individual youtubers, as if this is not a pervasive issue of the entire "edutertainment" industry that has only grown exponentially since the printing press.
Why do you feel the need to be told the solution? Her videos are often meant to provoke thought. The video on stoicism for example is very well made and teaches how harmful such a philosophy can be. It is an educational channel. The goal was never to fight prevailing political narratives.
Imo, what she does is very good for educating a broader audience and that already is not an easy task to say the least. The videos have to be made the way they are, because otherwise the audience would become an echo chamber of like-minded people, which would be counter-productive to the goal of broaden people's views on the world.
Also, if some people misinterpret the videos and/or use popular youtube video essays as their main source of information, they are just ignorant. It might not work wonders, they won't change their whole set of opinions after watching one video essay, but it is a step in the right direction, even if there are still some issues.
Oh yeah, I do actually agree with most of your points and think this meme is rather counter-productive to just group all of these youtubers and label them all as garbage. IMO some of these, like Lindsay Ellis are rather harmless, and others like Shaun and Philosophy tube seem to be a net positive to me, while I think Vaush is just a COINTELPRO infiltrator. Her video on stoicism is actually my favourite in a while as a mentally ill "treatment resistant" Rome nerd.
On the point about solutions, it's not that I need her to give me some, as I already have some for the issues that I care enough about (and lots of them would break YT TOS lol), and a 40 minute video essay is never gonna be enough to understand enough of a subject to propose new ones anyway. Lots of the things she talks about don't even have "solutions" because they're more philosophical explorations or broad complex things rather than tangible societal issues. But I think it's very easy for the "tangible societal issues" thing to become a kind of "wallowing in smartypantness" for liberals, who love talking about things like police brutality while being oblivious (often not by their own fault) to solutions that have already been provided by people for a very long time. I liked it more when she went "in his seminal work Capital..." on her older videos.
Either way, I still do agree with you (and disagree with the meme posted here) that she's a net positive and nobody should feel bad about watching her. We should actually "yes and" her viewers a bit, a bunch of them might even not be aware of lefter ideas. I do really pettily dislike contrapoints for deleting her old stuff and paywalling all her new content because dollars are expensive, and I'll die on this petty hill.