User:Penguinjoy0/Nightmare Fuel

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Like and subscribe
YouTube
Icon YT bullshit.png
Up next

Nightmare Fuel (a.k.a. Reece) is a prominent YouTube skeptic and atheist, currently having around 7,000 YouTube subscribers and 712,786 YouTube views[1] as well as almost almost 4,000 twitter followers[2] as of 15th September 2017. He has stood out among his fellow skeptics for being actively critical of Trump and the right wing (unlike other skeptics[3]).

The good[edit]

Dave Rubin[edit]

A tweet targeted at Dave Rubin:[4]

Your show exists for conservative confirmation bias. No one evwr[sic] thought this was a free speech platform where every view would get a go.

Nightmare fuel has done numerous videos criticizing Dave Rubin, mainly pointing at Rubin's apologetics for Donald Trump,[5][6][7] his rampant liberterianism[8][9] and for his lack of commitment to atheism.[10]

Antitheism[edit]

Nightmare Fuel has done a number of videos in support of Antitheism.[11][12] [13][14]

Trump[edit]

Nightmare Fuel has made an active stand against Trump, not only criticizing him, but firmly saying that Hillary Clinton would've been better than Trump (which sounds obvious but to the Skeptic community this is a highly controversial thing to say).[15]

Rebel Media[edit]

Nightmare Fuel has made multiple videos targeting rebel media. This includes videos where he accuses Rebel Media of having "smeared" individuals[16][17][18] as well as other videos responding to their dumb shit.[19][20][21]

Rebel Media is the TYT of the right. The problem is as now the only people calling them out are @thunderf00t and myself.[22]

The meh[edit]

Iran[edit]

Nightmare Fuel made a response video to Rebel Media called Death To America, Fuck America,[23] where he makes a lot of provocative claims.

He states that the Shah of Iran was a good and that Iran was "objectively better" under his command as he crushed dissenters to the Regime (which Reece dismisses by calling Islamists) and Jihadists, gave women more rights and modernized Iran. It didn't matter to Reece that he wasn't elected, as he says:

it's not like they're just going to get elected in Iran

However, this ignores that:

  1. The person the Shah overview was Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a defender of secular democracy and introduced progressive reforms like the Shah, and unlike the Shah was democratically elected to Iran, contrary to Reece's claims of it being impossible for Iranians to do so.[24]. Mosaddegh also didn't have to use a secret police force unlike the Shah[25], probably because he actually had the consent of the people to rule and not just the consent of the British and American secret services.[26]
  2. The Shah's secret police, SAVAK, did indeed imprison Islamist and jihadist dissenters, but they also tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents, a lot of whom were democrats who were rather upset at not having a democracy anymore.[27][28]

Reece blames the Iranian revolution entirely on Islam, saying it has a "track record",implying it regularly creates authoritarian states. This is highly ironic since Reece proclaims himself to be a "war hawk" on his Twitter description and the U.S government has a similar track record of also toppling governments and installing for it's own ends.[29] I guess if your the good guys then doing the exact thing the bad guys are doing is okay.

Although Islam certainly played a role in the Iranian revolution, blaming it entirely on Islam ignores that

  1. Mohammad Mosaddegh and other politicians before the Shah's coup were Muslims and were members of non Islamist parties that were secular,[30] and that actual Islamists such as Khomeini before or during the Shah's regime had little success until the general mood swung against the Shah.[31]
  2. There were economic problems (which Reece sarcastically referenced to in the video, "widened the gap between the rich and the poor) and social repression (which totally only targeted Islamists) that made the Shah's government highly unpopular, among both those were wanted a more Islamic state and those who wanted a secular one, as well as people who were just pissed off at the economic woes and blamed the government's white revolution. There was a revolutionary fever in Iran; the Islamists just took advantage of it, rather than all the Iranian's turned or were already Islamists.[32]

Reece states that "the people of Iran view us (the west) as infidels", which although is true that most Iranian's view the U.S. government poorly (they did overthrow a democratic government and suffered no punishment for it), it is not the case that Iranian's hate the average person living in America (since anyone who doesn't practice Shia Islam is an infidel, does he really think Iranians hate everyone in the world who is not there particular brand of Shia? This is Team America logic). There isn't even a hegemonic dislike of America or it's policies, especially among the young (which will replace the old, more staunchly conservative figures in the future).[33][34]

He equivalents Jay Fayza criticizing the U.S army for not minding their own business and for propping up an autocrat who protected western oil interests[35] and was so unpopular people preferred a theocrat instead to "self flagellation" and compares it to saying "fuck america[sic]" (holy shit this he must be doing a parody of a war hawk....oh wait he's not). He justifies the U.S intervention because there were "Jihadists in Iran" (using this logic the entire middle east, including Israel, should be militarily intervened. I mean Israel and Iran both had Islamists within their countries with neither Islamist groups within these countries being anywhere close to ruling them so....). He also sarcastically says "let them drag their society back to the dark ages", which sounds like a sinisterly gruesome bit of Neo-con rhetoric, suggesting that if a country isn't satisfactorily modern or is potentially going to go back on modernization, we have the moral authority to invade it (this ignores how, ironically, intervention wars can be so destructive that the war itself sends them back to the dark ages.[36]

He mocks the fact that there could be any justification to the 1979 Iranian revolution, which suggests an unhealthy authoritarian streak (maybe he should've worked for the USSR, after all, they seem to both like to justify secret police, social repression and economic inequality and stagnation).

Views of RationalWiki[edit]

Reece is flattered by our positive coverage of him in another article]].[37]

References[edit]