YouTube Rewind Reality Check 2017
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War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads
by Zeynep Tufekci
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Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash
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This misuse of ‘professionalism’ to refer to the faux Victorian mannerliness fashionable amongst lesser suits is just one more troubling aspect of loss of conceptual resources inculcated by corporate culture.
Modern Western culture seemingly has entered a failure-mode unprecedented in history, where we have nobody willing to go first, to stand out, to do what needs to be done, to enact the changes everyone else wants. We've run out of empathetic iconoclasts—people who see the suffering of distant/distributed others, and for whom that aggregate suffering outweighs the risk that might come to the comfortable-life-in-obscurity of all their closer companions. The people with hearts that bleed for their fellow citizens, but then don't shrivel back at the thought of their companions being the ones who end up bleeding.
The State of Hawaii announces action to address predatory practices at Electronic Arts and other companies
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"a policy regulating access by children" you say
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/business/media/disney-and-youtube-make-a-video-deal.html
And the article ends with this... you couldn't fucking make this up:
YouTube hopes to gain something from the Disney brand as well, namely credibility among parents, many of whom aren’t thrilled at setting their younger children loose on a site where the videos can be ragged and provocative and the comments even more so. The company wants to compete with cable television for ad dollars by adding more professional videos.
[..]
Disney is an important ally for YouTube, which walks a careful line when it comes to attracting children; the site's Terms of Service require users to be at least 13 years old to watch videos and register for an account, though younger children routinely access the site. YouTube also needs Disney because it remains locked in a legal battle with Viacom, which owns the other major player in this arena, Nickelodeon, and keeps its videos (aside from some promotional material) off YouTube.
And the article ends with this... you couldn't fucking make this up:
Correction: November 9, 2011
An article on Monday about an online video series being developed by Disney and YouTube referred incorrectly to YouTube’s position on the use of the site by children. The company’s terms of service specify that users should be at least 13 years old to watch videos and must register for an account. It is not the case that YouTube lacks a policy regulating access by children.
nature of the videos
From what I've seen, what is below is mostly accurate and more understatement than anything. Now, compare that with how people rationalize and dismiss all of this out of hand. The question isn't just why is YouTube being flooded with victim grooming videos glorifying abuse and violence, but why are SO many people instinctively attacking those calling attention to it, while just offering the most shallow and blasé explanations for all of this -- something they don't even have the guts to properly look at.
We do live in a societies that keep normalizing abuse and psychopathology more and more. There is no excuse. More than anything, ElsaGate holds up a mirror. Not because of bullshit like "these videos are generated by AI based on popular keywords" (for which exactly as much real arguments are given as for aliens having made them), but because of how we fail to deal with this. In June 2016, the Guardian called it a genre. Now people shifted to "disturbing and weird", an umbrella phrase so useful you can use it for mass murder, experimental music and everything in between. Oh, "creepy" is another good one.
We do live in a societies that keep normalizing abuse and psychopathology more and more. There is no excuse. More than anything, ElsaGate holds up a mirror. Not because of bullshit like "these videos are generated by AI based on popular keywords" (for which exactly as much real arguments are given as for aliens having made them), but because of how we fail to deal with this. In June 2016, the Guardian called it a genre. Now people shifted to "disturbing and weird", an umbrella phrase so useful you can use it for mass murder, experimental music and everything in between. Oh, "creepy" is another good one.
Adult themes repeat themselves throughout these videos. They're subtle, and require interpretation which makes our analysis vague, but they are too pervasive amongst videos of different channels, countries of origin, and even advertised content that I cannot help but suspect a correlation.
-Imagery of fear and life-threatening circumstances.
- Medical play, roleplay or real, involving pregnancy and needles.
- Ideas of dominance and power, submission.
- Magic, wands, spells being used negatively on others.
- Acting on an unconscious party, non-consent.
- Visual innuendos and gags and even inappropriate touching.
- Naughtiness and misbehavior conducted in secret.
- Showers and bathroom imagery.
- Colored plastic balls! In every video, regardless of content.
- Kids eating inordinate amounts of things for no reason.
There seems to be a trend in these videos of controlling/hypnotizing/enslaving women. The last few I've seen all feature a woman who's not interested in another characters advances, and they're then hypnotized and then it turns into softcore porn.
Networks of hundreds of youtube channels spanning 10,000's of high production quality videos have been found in English, Russian, and Spanish so far. All using the exact same color schemes and the exact same condition cues
Youtube key words:
- Spiderman and elsa
- Bad baby
- Ugly baby
- Finger Song
Recurring themes that have been identified:
Childrens Icons:
- Spiderman (red)
- Elsa (blue)
- Joker (purple)
- Hulk (green)
- Maleficent (black)
- ? Oriange
Shock Value - anxiety
- Spiders / Scorpions / Other bugs
- Injections
- Gore (cuts, decapitations, severed arms/legs/tongues)
Disorientation
- Camera work (disorienting angles, shaking camera, closeups)
- Irregular sizes (giant babies, tiny humans, small humans with huge heads)
Body dysmorphia
- Belly inflation
- Stretched out limbs
- Amputated limbs
Sexual
- Kissing
- (partial) nudity
- simulated pornographic acts
Fetish
- Scatalogical
- Urination
- bondage (tied up)
- belly inflation
- ball busting
Violent / Nasty Criminal behaviour is encouraged (often accompanied with laughter and happiness)
- Theft
- Assault
- Sexual assault
- Murder
- Cannibalism
- Dismemberment
Colors tied to different identities
- turning the brain into different colors
- having multiple instances of the same baby with differently colored masks
- A girl giving birth to colored eggs out of which the respective icons are born (red - spider man, green - hulk, etc)
- Headswapping" *(could also be considered body dysmorphia)from 4chan, as reposted here
I watched those Elsa, Spider-Man, The Joker and Maleficent videos for over 4 hours and I lost count how many had steady themes of kidnapping there were, normalizing being tied up and injected with REAL SYRINGES. One especially disturbing video showed a live girl no older than 6 being held down against physical discomfort while a blurred out syringe seemingly penetrated her butt while she lay on her stomach. Mind you all of this is taking place while cheery music is being played couple with laughter and the actual live screaming of the child present in many of the videos.
99,9% of all videos that I’ve watched that can be classified as “elsagate” feature a fucking needle. And/or: spiders, jokers, enemas, bright colors, random noises, incoherent plots, nudity, violence, popular brands, bad kid - good kid - reward - punishment dynamic, gore
Anyone can list all of the intended behavioral patterns, because those are obvious. Don't forget the abortions, random object crushing, and playing with poop. The subliminal and hypnotic triggers that teach the children these behaviors are far more important to study. The repetition of familiar color patterns and melodies is what helps to produce the behavior modification.
All the guys at the bar, Jimmy, all the girls; they don't show up at your wake. Not because they don't like you. But because, they never knew your last name. Then a month later, someone tells them, "Oh, Jimmy died." "Jimmy who?" "Jimmy the Cop." "Ohhh," they say, "him". And all the people on the job, all those people you spent all the hours in the radio cars with, the guys with their feet up on the desk, tellin' stories, who shorted you on your food runs, who signed your overtime slips. In the end, they're not gonna be there either. Family, that's it. Family, and if you're lucky, one or two friends who are the same as family. That's all the best of us get. Everything else is just..."The Wire"
This drug thing, this ain't police work. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun to a corner to jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon, the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. You follow this? [..] Okay The point I'm making is this: Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing. And before we went and took the wrong turn and start up with these war games, the cop walked a beat, and he learned that post. And if there were things that happened on that post, where there be a rape, a robbery, or a shooting, he had people out there helping him, feeding him information. But every time I came to you, my DEU sergeant, for information, to find out what's going on out on them streets... all that came back was some bullshit. You had your stats, your arrests, your seizures, but don't none of that amount to shit when it comes to protecting the neighborhood, now do it?"The Wire"
All this death, you don't think it ripples out? You don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about. I was a few years ahead of you at Edmondson, but I know you remember the neighborhood, how it was. We had some bad boys, for real. Wasn't about guns so much as knowing what to do with your hands. Those boys could really rack. My father had me on the straight, but like any young man, I wanted to be hard too, so I'd turn up at all the house parties where the tough boys hung. Shit, they knew I wasn't one of them. Them hard cases would come up to me and say, "Go home, schoolboy, you don't belong here." Didn't realize at the time what they were doing for me. As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Nobody, no victim, who didn't matter. And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you."The Wire"
I'll swallow a lie when I have to; I've swallowed a few big ones lately. But the stat games? That lie? It's what ruined this department. Shining up shit and calling it gold so majors become colonels and mayors become governors. Pretending to do policework while one generation fucking trains the next how not to do the job."The Wire"
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