Here is the current AMA (ask me any question) on reddit w/ Kurzgesagt
https://www.reddit.com/r/kurzgesagt/comments/b0bgvj/ama_2_can_you_trust_kurzgesagt/?st=jt68rms0&sh=52f61d1f

and here are the complete emails https://imgur.com/a/UfrXBWq

After reading a bit of the AMA and the emails i'm not comfortable keeping this video posted. More digging than i want to do to try and figure what is what exactly.

None of the random words I got were fit for publication. Apparently the Austrian village isn't the first association people make with that word.

p.s. Tried again, and got Random words: either, advertisement, decadence, graduated, comfortable

Allow me to demonstrate your bias in this situation.

Q: if instead of bacon, what if they had 800 studies showing that, say, carrots cause cancer. Would you be arguing about the stats, or would you stop eating carrots?

I'm pretty sure you'd stop eating carrots. But because you enjoy bacon so much, it's having a impact on your reasoning. That is your bias.


I can prove this further by asking you what it would take to make you give up bacon. And I'm quite sure you would say nothing. Perhaps short of some instant effect, I know you would never stop eating it, no matter strong the evidence. In fact many people don't. They rather go blind and hav their legs amputated from preventable diabetes than give up their instant comfort foods. They are so biased they lose their own limbs, and still refuse to accept the reality.

You also you like to claim that me being vegan makes me biased. But the truth is that the Science made me vegan. And not the other way around. The reduction of animal cruelty is just a bonus.

(edited )

From what i can tell he does this because he's passionate about it and how getting feedback from his videos is what brings him the most joy (his reddit comment). I think it has very little to do with anything financial. Although the yt ad revenue for this video is easily into the thousands (1.6 million views). One of these a week, with those numbers, could easily make him a comfortable living.

Funny, I started watching this thinking the same thing Destin did.... "I'm an experienced diver... I'm super comfortable being underwater, even upside down and in enclosed spaces"

and then they talked about letting your sinuses flood... and my brain went "nope, not having that".

*quality video about not panicing in a tough situation.

Also, I had kind of assumed that being able to swim was a prerequisite for a MARINE!

@ChaosEngine

I fully agree with you that rape/sexual assault is a bigger problem (in magnitude and frequency) than false accusations. And that being an actual victim of sexual assault would be worse than being falsely accused of sexual assault, although it seems a bit pointless to debate the relative extent of how much these things could fuck up lives when they are both horrendous.

That being said, there's a reason that presumption of innocence and requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt are the law of the land. And assuming that we follow through on those things (which I think we largely do), that's all well and good. BUT, that's all pretty strictly just in the legal realm.

False accusations of sexual assault don't need to get as far as the actual legal system to seriously fuck up a person's life. Employers, partners, friends ... these connections might choose to sever ties without requiring the same rigorous proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that the legal system does.

As much as I personally tend to believe Ford as opposed to Kavanaugh, I think that given the span of time since the incident it is nigh on impossible to prove that her version of events is true beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the hearing put his current demeanor and partisan/biased attitude on blatant display in a way that seemed to me should be disqualifying with regards to the sort of standards we require for Supreme Court Justices. Apparently the GOP disagrees, and we can hold them to account for that at the ballot box.

That's rather cold comfort given that Justices serve for life. There'd be some constitutional crisis drama if Agent Orange gets removed from office as a result of some proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt of misdeeds. Robert Kennedy's quote about the ancient Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" seems apropos. Things have been entirely too "interesting" for my taste for the past 2 years...

I'm an atheist and will always be one of the first in line to suggest that religions should be subject to criticism and the rule of law just like any other organization.

That being said, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that congregations are complicit in the misdeeds of the institution itself, whether or not they are aware of verified instances of misdeeds. ...Pretty slippery slope.

Expand that to, say, nations. In the history of the US, the government has committed some pretty indefensible atrocities. Genocide, mass relocation, and other offenses against Native Americans in the name of "manifest destiny". Enslavement of a race of people based on skin color, with disenfranchisement and continued abuse well after slavery was abolished, with elements that certainly persist to this day. Funding and supplying extremist organizations because they happen to have a short-term enemy that coincides with ours, which frequently comes back to bite us in the ass later. Using underhanded tricks including false-flag operations to justify wars and other offensive actions. Attempting to assassinate democratically elected leaders of foreign governments. And on and on.

Are all US citizens complicit in those misdeeds, merely by an accident of birth? But those things were in the past, you might argue. Given the depth of dirt you can find on our past with a little digging, I'd say it is reasonable to expect that there's things that the government is doing now that we may or may not be aware of that would be similarly difficult to defend.

Many/most Catholics can either remain intentionally blissfully ignorant about these problems, or will be able to go to great lengths to rationalize their way around them. Just like most US citizens don't lose much sleep over our government's past and present misdeeds. In either case, indoctrination puts the blinders on -- and can be incredibly difficult to escape.

For the religious, "love the sinner, hate the sin" is an oft-repeated phrase. As an atheist outraged by these scandals and the decades/centuries of intentional cover-ups by the Church itself, I might be tempted to turn that on its head. "Accept the religious, hate the religion." By all means, be outraged towards the institution itself. By all means, fight to end the protections that have allowed this kind of abuse to go unchecked. But perhaps try to keep some (Christian?) empathy for the average Catholic congregation members who have been brainwashedindoctrinated their whole lives and are likely in too deep to escape. Reserve that hatred for the clergy that abused their positions of power and control to commit these crimes, and the organizational system that systematically allowed it to happen while covering it up. They deserve every bit of hate you throw their way.

Almost *eia. Too Close for Comfort! (not that 80s TV sitcom)!

I appreciate this guys video for introducing me to Sarah Jeong. It has inspired me to obtain a modest position of NYT. Among the debris that rambled out of his mouth I did take note of a few points he tried to make.

"they will not stop until they've silence everyone on the right.."
"they hate us, they want us erased.."

On the bright side white male republicans can take comfort in knowing that they comprise the majority of the 30% of americans that own all the guns.

Sadly gun stocks haven't been performing well ever since President Obama left office. (Plays tiny violin)

Almiqui feels dejected and is off to comfort himself by not having a bath.

http://animal.memozee.com/view.php?tid=3&did=23578

Thanks. I'm not yet comfortable with my newfound royalty. ;-)

This person is not actively an asshole, they are simply just unaware. They think when they get in their 3K lbs killing machine they are driving an appliance, a toaster. They are comfortably unaware of their surroundings and secure in the fact that they are the only people on the road that matters. They are idiots. Idiots that don't understand that their actions can end lives. To be an asshole, you need to be aware of such facts and drive like that anyways. I posit that they are just to oblivious to be aware. IMHO, that is worse.

To me, the video sorta oversells the difficulty in identifying / escaping from "ridiculous claims", at least in comparison to my personal experiences.

I grew up in a very religious (Christian, Methodist) family / city / state / country. I was questioning the indoctrination at an early age (younger than 10), and rejecting it due to never receiving satisfactory answers to those questions by ~12. Actually, one of the most significant pushes for me was the ultimate reward/punishment thing. Zero consistency and open contradictions between different religions / sects / sources, etc. In symbolic logic, contradictions mean that one of your premises is wrong. Reconsider what you "know" and try again.

With regards to atheism vs (a)gnosticism, technically I'm an agnostic because I don't know with absolute certainty that there is no god / gods out there. However, in practice, I easily and comfortably would rather self-identify as an atheist. Why, when I don't know for certain? Because I also don't know that there isn't an Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Loch Ness Monster, or Leprechauns, yet I don't feel compelled to tell people that I'm "agnostic" about those things. No. They are pretty clearly human-invented bullshit, with readily apparent human motivations behind their invention. Sounds like religion to me.

That's basically Russel's teapot.

It's not even as much that BLM disrupted the Pride parade, but that one of their demands was to ban the police from participating in the parade in the future. That's actively destroying years and years of hard fought progress to bring people together, and I can't fail to call that a bad thing. Again, I hope the US chapters are different in that much, and in many states there is also much more justified outrage against the police, which is very much unlike up here in Canada.

Canada's BLM held sit in protests demanding to meet with the chief of police and then repeatedly abandoned the meetings before they were supposed to happen. They then went on to condemn the police chief for having zero interest in protecting black civilians in Toronto. FYI, the chief of police of Toronto at the time was a black man.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mark-saunders-police-black-lives-matter-1.3587533

A BLM toronto co-founder railed at how our Prime Minister, who makes Barack Obama look like very right -leaning, is a white supremacist terrorist. Rhetoric that just means absolutely nothing and looks like little more than gross false victimhood.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/nzd4px/black-lives-matter-toronto-called-justin-trudeau-a-white-supremacist-terrorist

And then for good measure another co-founder squeezed in a quarter million dollar 'overtime' payment on their last week with the University of Toronto's Student Union. When the Student Union sued to get that money back as their was no documentation justifying paying out that kind of money all of a sudden the Student Union were racists. Eventually the case was settled with an undiclosed amount returned.

https://thevarsity.ca/2017/07/31/the-breakdown-the-utsus-lawsuit-against-former-executive-director-sandy-hudson/


BLM Toronto has done enough harm I am pretty comfortable saying I oppose them. The goal of making race relations better is of course good. Correcting injustices is of course good. I just don't see that coming from a group taking the actions I've seen, IMO they are actively making things worse, not better.

Again, that is specific to up here in Canada, I can't imagine that the US chapters can be as bad without it having been all over the media where I couldn't miss it. That said, up here I would likely have altogether missed everything but the parade as well save for having personally witnessed a just disgusting racist attack on someone at a an event. That led me to discover the attacker was tied in with BLM Toronto and suddenly seeing that as perhaps not an entirely isolated event .

It clearly says "He could appear" as in he hasn't said it, but could say it. It is following his own example of how he said he could shoot somebody. I know reading compression isn't his strong point, hell, we all know he can only read comfortably about a 4th grade level (though I have no doubt he could read at the typical 9th grade level with a bit more effort on his part), but I'd expect more from some others...

Trump won because Christians hate Democrats, despite the fact the Democratic party is closer to Christ's teachings than the Republicans are. Hell, we almost got a child molester as a Senator because the Christians didn't care if he was a child molester being true, they'd vote for him over the Democrat, who is also notably a Christian man... just doesn't act inappropriately around little girls. The only reason Roy More lost in the end, was because he went the extra mile to say America was last great when we had slaves, and we should get rid of all the amendments but the first 10, like the ones that allowed women and blacks to vote. Now they'll soon have the ability to persecute others for sinning differently than they do, which is modern Christian's goals. "How dare that person be gay, my sin is nothing, their sin is gross, and I don't give a fuck what Jesus said about loving one another, or not tossing stones, or treating others the way I'd want to be treated, I'll treat them with bigotry and hatred, but I'll tell them I love them, I just hate everything about them, because I'm Christian after all, love the sinner, hate the sin." Again, not a direct quote, just what one has to be thinking when they say they don't want equal rights under the law for LGBTQIA+ people, and won't bake them a cake for a wedding, because there can be no other thought process to ignore the golden rule and everything else Jesus taught. Recall, I used to be a hardline Fox news, GOP voting fool, but couldn't reconcile the teachings of Jesus with the GOP... and eventually, because only I seemed to have had that revelation, lost faith in the ass, and even if he is real, I'd still rather burn in hell than be around my family and the rest of the far right for all eternity.

It also has to do with a severe lack of education. 40 some percent of American's believe the universe is 6,000-10,000 years old because their Bible says so. A large number doesn't accept the science of climate change... too many idiots believe Fox news is honest and truthful, because they don't care to learn how to properly vet news and information.

Also has to do with greed. Pure unadulterated greed. People caring more for their pocket books, their job situation, than what will do the most good for the most number of people.