Talk:Thunderf00t

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[edit] Phil is a dad

I'm just gonna let that sink into your brain for a moment. Video. Notice he said "Made this for the kids." and in the video is a "Dad" mug. Zero (talk - contributions) 03:37, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

[edit] Rational?

Hello, RationalWikiers. I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that open dialogue and well-reasoned debate is what the RW community wants to see. That said, there are some serious issues with the Thunderfoot wiki page. TL;DR at the end.

For the sake of time and timeliness, I'll focus on Thunderfoot's involvement in the gamer-gate controversy and Rational Wiki's coverage thereof. Not only has this been the most heated topic of Thunderfoot's YouTube career, but the story has been picked up by the mainstream media and people are paying attention to the culture of this hundred-billion dollar industry and how it moves forward.

So, when confronted with a profile of Anita Sarkeesian in Businessweek or about someone like Starcraft 2 player Scarlett in The New Yorker, a diligent reader may want to do some extra homework on the issue. A quick search reveals that Sarkeesian and her allies have some opponents, among them a YouTuber named Thunderfoot who attempts rebut their claims. What does this hypothetical reader find upon a Google search of "Thunderfoot"? A nice, tidy wiki page about him as the second result.

This hypothetical reader was me a few months ago when I first stumbled upon this wiki. I had recently come across Thunderfoot's videos in the wake of gamer-gate and I wanted to see a quick rundown on what the guy was interested in, what his education was and if any concrete rebuttals had been made to his views. "Oh good," was my first reaction. "A site called Rational Wiki should have a fair rundown on this." But then I discovered an article so laden with weasel words and unsubstantiated claims that it was a failure to launch before the intro was even done with.

I was a little salty at the time to see a bunch of sloppy ad hominems being thrown around in the name of rationality, though I didn't have the time to respond. But this article became like a bad song that would pop into my head during a long drive.

One point that really stuck with me comes at the beginning of section 3 of the wiki ("Ongoing crusade against feminism"... seriously, the heading title itself is designed to taint your impression of Thunderfoot before any argument is made or evidence provided) is case in point of how this tied up this article is in preconclusions about Thunderfoot the Big Mean Jerk.

"Rather than move on gracefully," it begins, "Mason has continued to make ill-informed comments on feminism...". Move on gracefully from what? His encounter his feminism? The making of YouTube videos? The academic arena as a whole? If Thunderfoot has a conviction, and can provide a compelling argument to back it up, then there is nothing graceful or rational about backing down, even if the issue is so provocative that it caused him to split with a group among whom he had probably expected to find like-minded people. Also, what specifically about his comments are ill informed?

Point by point on this section of the article: "Although such a commitment to "free speech" is admirable, most people regard YouTube comments as being one of the lower points of human achievement, and not as a template to be reused anywhere else at all." ---Umm, yes? I agree? That's why when Anita Sarkeesian holds up hateful social media comments and anonymous e-mails up as proof of a conspiracy among male gamers to bully and silence her, you can safely call BS. These trolls do not reflect a representative sample of any gaming demographic and there is no way to prove otherwise. I'm guessing Thunderfoot's reply policy evolved from responding to the feedback he got on the "Why Do People Laugh at Creationists?" series. Once you've explained something like, "Well yes, carbon dating is in fact reliable" and the person doesn't budge at all, I imagine you'd quickly come to see the futility in going further with the conversation. Also, his comment sections tend to be more civil than most.

"...they misrepresent feminists' arguments to an extent that is either grossly naive or wilfully disingenuous..." ---The claims Thunderfoot is tackling here are so disingenuous to begin with that I can't imagine much opportunity to make them more misleading. Consider Sarkeesian's claim that in the Hitman series, players are incentivized to brutalize helpless women. Thunderfoot correctly rebuts that the game actually disincentives that kind of behavior and points out that of all the videos available of the "offending" game segment, the only one that featured sexual violence was the one that Sarkeesian recorded herself. "...series of bitter and increasingly unhinged videos attacking feminists within the atheist community, typically full of strawman stereotypes and anally literal misinterpretations of their comments..." ---Again, where exactly are the strawmen and "anally literal misinterpretations"? When you have somebody like Rebecca Watson saying that a fellow conference-goer asking her to his room for coffee (after talking with him at the bar until 4 a.m.) is proof of unchecked male sexual agression in the gaming culture, there is no need to come up with a weaker version of that argument to attack. It fails fine on its own.

"He tends to go off on a tangent, repeat points previously made in other videos about other people and quote mine them, taking things out of context." ---Thunderfoot, from what I can see, repeats points that have not been responded to. Since so few of his rebuttals ever do see a response, he ends up looking like a broken record. Seriously, the Feminist Frequency-style response has consistently been designed to divert attention to the alleged backlash against the feminist incursion while offering nothing in the way of a response to those who . Sarkeesian wants to be treated as an equal, but in the intellectual marketplace, being treated the same as everyone else incurs an obligation to substantiate one's claims and defend them against critics. There's no rule that says you have to let people off the hook for unanswered questions.

Ironically, the author uses the same kind of misdirection/listen-and-believe tactics that Thunderfoot is dismantling in his videos about Sarkeesian. I'll leave my tinfoil hat in the closet and not go any further into that.

TL;DR The feminist claim in question is a strong one: the content of video games, they say, has a significant impact on the way that men view women, on the way that women view themselves and on the prevalence of sexual violence. Strong claims require equally strong evidence. Meanwhile, the only available evidence says that as video games have become more common, sexual violence has declined (obviously lots of factors to account for there). Additionally, this type of behavioral influence was thoroughly debunked back when video games were targeted by people like Jack Thompson. Thunderfoot is calling about the overwhelming smell of bullshit, but no one is home

On this talk page, I read this comment from Weasloid: "This isn't a neutral site & doesn't need to seek balance for its own sake or hold back from criticism." Teaching creationism in the classroom is an example of balance for its own sake, this Thunderfoot controversy is not. This is about unpacking two sides of an argument and seeing whose premises actually lead to the conclusion offered. I guess the subjectivity is fine, but how about some academic rigor?

(1) Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement. (2) Documenting the full range of crank ideas.

There you have Rational Wiki's first two stated goals. With no data to support her claims, doesn't that put someone like Sarkeesian in the camp of pseudoscience? Gamergate was originally a story about the incredibly incestuous relationship between gaming journalists and the people whose work they cover, a crippling problem not limited to gaming journalism, but endemic of mass media in general. Yet Sarkeesian managed to hijack the whole thing and used the momentum to fuel a separate agenda, which then became the focus. Does this not make her a crank? — Unsigned, by: Hiphop / talk / contribs

Hi there. We generally disagree with almost everything about your assessment of what Gamergate is, the validity of Sarkeesian's points and in particular the simplistic comparison to Jack Thompson. You might want to check out the articles on Gamergate and Anita Sarkeesian on this wiki as well as the heated discussions on the respective talk pages to get an idea of the extent of disagreement. Also, do you have evidence to prove that she recorded that Hitman segment herself? Last time I checked she took all her video game footage from other people's video playthroughs (albeit rudely, without asking them) under fair use. Nullahnung (talk) 10:24, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

[edit] Hmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRjkEZKQatQRyūlóng (琉竜) 03:22, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

He...spent 20 minutes not exactly saying much. He keeps leaving information and stories out. Zero (talk - contributions) 05:47, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
I think it's in order to protect his friend or this got posted somewhere on reddit as a rebuttal.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 10:36, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
Well, I'm sitting through Phil's latest verbal nonsense which is a response to this guy and sofar the only thing I can say about it is the premise is just...strange. Apart from the usual diversions of attacking Anita like a broken record, he does completely miss the point as he found ONE GUY with violent(ish) threats against him whereas a quick search of the word GamerGate can find tons of threats from different people. Incidentally, this is the first video in which he flat out admits his primary income is youtube. So there is that. Zero (talk - contributions) 18:10, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
Wait. More than his obscenely overinflated Patreon? Ikanreed (talk) 18:13, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
People actually pay this guy to make unwatchable YouTube videos? Oh Gods... Wait, doesn't that make him the exact thing Sarkeesian is accused of being? 141.134.75.236 (talk) 18:25, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
Does he still have his day job as a scientist? - David Gerard (talk) 19:00, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────He turns out videos longer and faster. The difference being that Anita also has other things that need doing, like actually playing games, writing scripts, editing and soforth. I can get through maybe two or three video games start to finish per month. I would think Anita's pulverizing my pace. And yes, he still has the scientist, as he says he does it out of charity. Zero (talk - contributions) 19:02, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

So... uh, has he put out more hours of complaining about tropes vs. women than there are hours of tropes vs women yet? Ikanreed (talk) 19:53, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
Yes. By a longshot. Zero (talk - contributions) 20:08, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

[edit] Weird sentence

In the "At Freethought Blogs" section, the following sentence appeared:

"He polled his vlog's subscribers as to whether he was right or not was a good way to do that; perhaps unsurprisingly, they agreed with him."

It might make sense if it said:

He polled his vlog's subscribers as to whether he was right or not, thinking this was a good way to do that; perhaps unsurprisingly, they agreed with him.

without the italic emphasis, of course. In the meantime, not being a time-traveling telepath, I trimmed it to say:

He polled his vlog's subscribers as to whether he was right or not; perhaps unsurprisingly, they agreed with him.

Mountain, or molehill? You decide... Alec Sanderson (talk) 19:40, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

The original of the sentence did make sense, then this happened. The sentences in the original also made sure to point out which of TF's post they were describing, now any distinction is lost.--ZooGuard (talk) 19:45, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
OK, I will leave it alone for now. It can stay in its present trimmed state, or if someone restores it to resemble the status quo ante, that would be nice too. Alec Sanderson (talk) 19:56, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
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