Yes, that is correct.

Because there is more human curation of automated recommendation that most people realize, because automated recommendation doesn't actually work very well. Trust me, research and curation of "automated" recommendations for one of the most old and successful technology providers in the industry was my job for over 7 years. It's a farce. passable automated recommendation on really became even vaguely acceptable in the past few years and that's largely because of a huge amount of human labor (mostly unpaid, I was a rare exception) put in to creating the raw data that is fed in to the algorithms to get "personalized" results.

My point is, it's very likely that Google's algorithms love to recommend this stuff because there are people telling it that this stuff is one of the things that people should be paying attention to. And even beyond direct human manipulation, algorithms aren't neutral at all, and they are most definitely designed to favor results that are either statistically likely to elicit a strong emotion from the person who sees them (Youtube doesn't care if you agree or disagree as long as you click, and rage is probably the best way to get someone to click) or have a lot of marketing clout behind them. Even with a truly "neutral" algorithm, these patterns would develop, though, maybe even more quickly.

On the other hand, this video

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=138763

has been in my top 5 Youtube recommendations every single time I've logged in since the day I watched it, so they're doing SOMETHING right anyway.

Saragon of Akkad survivor checking in. Very annoying to see his shit and other YouTube debate club members popping up in my recommended videos list.

Protip for YouTube: If I downvote a video or click the little 'x' next to recommended that means I don't want to see anymore videos from that user. The only exception of course is Davis Aurini because it's fun to make fun of him.

What's fucked up about the current Men's movement is that it has decided to blame feminism for a whole bunch of stuff that feminism has nothing to do with, If men are discriminated against in divorce court, if their value as persons is unfairly defined as economic, if they're being stereotyped as tit-obsessed boors, if it's unjustly considered all right for a woman to hit a man, that's called SEXISM.

Making feminism the enemy reinforces the false dichotomy that you can't be a feminist and care about the rights of men (which is why "feminism is only concerned with women's issues" is perceived as a bad thing) and it makes constructive criticism of feminism (which, make no mistake, is badly needed) impossible.

I believe that most REAL feminists, including men and women who choose to not use the word, understand that, because of progress, the parameters of the problem have changed. We've gone from living in a formal PATRIARCHY to a more egalitarian society, but one whose traditions and perceptions are still often PATRIARCHAL. (From the noun to the adjective) Women as a group are no longer formally oppressed wholesale by men as a group, although women are routinely devalued by the media and treated like shit in certain situations, like online for example. The truth is complex. A man is not unlikely to find himself with a woman for a boss, but a woman who has a man for a boss is not unlikely to be treated in a demeaning way because of gender.

Overall gender politics are less about OPPRESSION that they used to be, and more about DYSFUNCTION than they used to be. Feminism needs to change its terms in order to address this shift in reality. These are valid criticisms that I'd be making a lot more often if feminism's whole existence wasn't being attacked every time someone who is perceived as a feminist says something that is perceived as negative.

HOW DARE YOU

Part of the problem is that the actual meaning word "Feminism" has been so diluted since it became a marketing buzzword that it's impossible to to have a meaningful conversation abut it anymore. PRetty much everything she has complained about in this video is something that does actually exist, but by using the term "feminism" to describe it people are lumping in a vast majority of reasonable people with reasonable beliefs with a tiny but loud and media savvy minority of extremists, and it does nothing to advance any kind of dialogue about real issues that should be talked about, it just poisons everything.

And the left is just as guilty of doing this as the right is (although to be fair, the conservative establishment tends to have a much worse track record as far as empowering their extremist fringe, though the left is not off the hook there either).

Another part of the problem is that feminism became a significant marketing demographic before it should have, there was still a lot of important progress to be made and it's hard to do that when it becomes a business.

Also so much of mainstream Feminism seems to have fallen into this trap of seeing equality within the existing economic paradigm as the goal when the existing economic paradigm is fundamentally incompatible with equality, gender or otherwise.

Exactly, and Google has monetized this form stupidity, because, in the YouTube MarketPlace of ideas, dumb ideas are worth more money. The reason why I hate Thunderf00t more than any other youtuber is because, as an actual scientist, he's got to know how terrible it is to pretend to use logic to "prove" that because a feminist apparently said something stupid once "FEMINISM POISONS EVERYTHING".

>>Also so much of mainstream Feminism seems to have fallen into this trap of seeing equality within the existing economic paradigm as the goal when the existing economic paradigm is fundamentally incompatible with equality, gender or otherwise.

I'm sick of "equality". In the 21st century, every racist and misogynist is all about "equality". People apply the word with a compulsive literalness that border on Alzheimer's. There are guys on the internet who are outraged that MEN DON'T GET MATERNITY LEAVE!

Feminism became a cog in the capitalist machine as soon as it was branded and turned into a college course. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would wonder if women were covertly persuaded to become good little worker bees by the same capitalist patriarchy they thought they were rebelling against. Since I'm not, the only conclusion I can come to is that second-wave feminists were more interesting in becoming the cigar-smoking fat cats who game the economic system that crushes both men and women under its iron heel than they were in fixing it.

I don't agree that there was anything of significance left to fight for by the time this happened in the late '60s. As I've said before, I think the real work was done by women like Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Sanger decades before what they were doing had a name. In other words, the second-wave feminists were the Poison to the first wave's Black Sabbath, and the third wave is like Steel Panther minus the the self awareness. They're posing as the original posers, but they aren't smirking while they do it.

JHM, Thunderf00t is a scientist the way Donald Trump is a businessman. Just because they managed to fall ass-backwards into something approximating that career doesn't mean they have any idea what they're doing.

But yeah, second wave feminism is kind of a useless dinosaur at this point. It's trying to shoehorn gender equality into a system that is built to prevent gender equality, and it tries to do this while pretending that middle class white women are the only women who exist, and that trans women are SECRET INFILTRATORS from Man Headquarters.

But the younger third wave group seems to get that you need to change shit in order to fix it, and that minority women are people who exist. So good on them.

Either group, though, is preferable to the nonstop parade of high-pitched whining that is the anti-feminist/MRA "movement," which consists mostly of attention-starved idiots like this lady, and people who think Mad Max 4 is a threat to human society.

"There are guys on the internet who are outraged that MEN DON'T GET MATERNITY LEAVE!"


Wait, you don't think men should get maternity leave?

To clarify, I mean "equality under the law" and equal opportunity, not some wishy-washy "equality of outcomes" business.



Also I don't get why everyone keeps talking about "third wave feminism" as if it's something that's actually going on right now. That was, like, 1992. Third Wave is, like, Riot Grrl era. Realistically, we're on 4th Wave now, which is "make vaguely inflammatory statements that will be countered by misogynists making equally vague inflammatory statements, Youtube ad revenue all around and maybe a mid tier lecture tour if you're lucky."

I totally agree with the characterization of 3rd wave Feminism above, although I do think that its academic adherents often suffered from the excesses that ALL postmodern cultural criticism was prone to (not that it didn't also make a lot of really good points, it just tended to get to self-referential to actually have any practical application).

Susan Faludi wrote a good editorial about it a while back, and hit most of the points I would plus a whole lot more:

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/facebook-feminism-like-it-or- not

There are two big problems I see with social movements in general in a capitalist society.

First, a social movement by its very nature should be working toward its own obsolescence. A social movement that has succeeded is a social movement that is no longer necessary (yeah I know it's an ongoing process, but at a certain point a successful movement will have accomplished all that it is able to accomplish and no longer serves any purpose). The problem is, as they approach their goals, social movements become career paths for the people who are most deeply active in them. Suddenly the very goals of that movement become threats to the livelihood of its elite.

Second, as a social movement approaches its goals its followers become a valuable commodity to be marketed to. Because they are presumably united by a common set of values and goals already, the bulk of the marketers' demographic research has already been done, they just need to identify and artfully exploit the correct pressure points. Becoming a market demographic is a good indicator that a particular incarnation of a social movement is nearing the end of its useful life, but it also represents a very serious risk of slowing, halting or even reversing the movement's progress in all sorts of ways, by selling people the feeling of press being made where it isn't, by selling people the feeling that progress isn't being made where it is, by manufacturing outrage, by working to create and perpetuate a stalemate so that the movement can be marketed to for as long as possible without having to adapt to changes, and so on.

In my opinion, both of these situations are playing out in contemporary Feminism right now (Internet feminism in particular) and despite the fact that there is a lot of good, smart, important work still being done I feel like in the big picture it has been regressing for probably a decade. Which sucks, because it HASN'T gotten us to a point where it's no longer necessary, despite all of the progress that was made during my lifetime, much less the past 100-150 years. I keep seeing an unwillingness for people to look honestly and critically at the problems within their own movement and a tendency to blame easy (and valid, to no small degree) scapegoats like the MRA's when that really accomplishes nothing but perpetual stalemate. Feminist criticism is not going to change MRA minds. MRAs are a factor that is out of the feminist movement's sphere of control, and is a distraction from the important (but also difficult, humbling and not particularly profitable) work of self assessment and adaptation that is absolutely crucial to the success of any social movement.

I also see a lot of well-worn that would have been solid B to B+ sophomore paper material 40 years ago being sold as cutting edge to a willing audience that seems to be largely ignorant of the rich intellectual history of their nominal movement, but that's really a reflection of larger issues with filter bubbles and the social impact of the Internet that nobody really understands yet.


I identified as a Feminist for a long time but at this point it just doesn't even seem to be a calssification that actually means anything, it's a buzzword. And that is sad and vaguely ominous.

Well, that and by the time I was in my late 20s I'd pretty much figured out that ANY formal ideology is essentially myopic and gets in the way of the business of doing your best to see the world as it really is (and no I'm not pulling out some Zizek business here, I agreed with him on ideology for at least a decade before I'd even heard of him and in general haven't paid a bit of attention to contemporary philosophy because, I mean, why bother?)

tl;dr FART FART BUTT FART OPEN BAR AT THE AFTER HOURS WORK MEETING TONIGHT

Tell TFL Bill hi for me.

THERE ARE NO CATS IN AMERICA