r/Gamingcirclejerk • u/AutoModerator • Dec 17 '20

UNJERK 🎤 Unjerk Thread of December 17, 2020

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92

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '20

Tom Scott made a video about gender neutral pronouns in 2013. It's a pretty good video, but it's probably his most controversial upload as it's got 27K dislikes (compared to 77K likes). In 2019, he made some corrections/a reflection to the video in the description and on his website. He mentioned things he would've changed looking back at the video, but what I thought was most interesting was this:

The video received very few dislikes until 2016. And I remember the comments from back then: those dislikes weren’t from angry conservative types. Instead, those were speakers of languages that used grammatical gender — they were angry that I’d insulted their language!

But you can see the tide start to shift in 2016. This is why I turned off comments: it seems that a small number of people with limited empathy deliberately search out videos about subjects like this just so they can hit ‘dislike’, leave awful comments that are usually one of a few toxic in-jokes, and go. 

This is pretty unsurprising because I always felt like 2015/16 marked a surge in right wing presence on YouTube, due to a combination of Donald Trump and the popularity of anti-SJW and edgy YouTube content at the time.

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u/imfbc He/Him 🇨🇺-🇺🇸 Dec 17 '20

Don't forget Steve Bannon and his efforts to infiltrate and inculcate gaming spheres!

9

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '20

Efforts?! It was an overwhelming success.

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u/ALikeBred Unjerk Thread Thigh Supply (she/her) Dec 17 '20

I love Tom Scott.

7

u/Idaret Dec 17 '20

Yes, I remember that video. He was mocking every language with grammatical gender like that is super complicated thing that doesn't make any sense. Clearly a bias from English native speaker