I know all of you must have your own personal YouTube censorship stories.

Here's mine: one of my favorite & one of the most important YouTubers, antinatalist diANe,
I discovered today her account was terminated for trivially unimportant bullshit "reasons"
by YouTube.

Yup. It's happening to everyone. People losing their entire channel and sometimes they can't even get an explanation.

I know, muddoug. No excuse for it.

Just think of it as YouTube deciding her channel shouldn't have been born in the first place.

Freedom of speech is no longer popular. Just ask Canada, they passed a little compelled speech law called C-16. It gave rise to rather large movement due to a clinical psychologist that opposed it.

With respect, I would argue that freedom of speech is popular, as long as you're not talking about an unpopular topic.

YouTube has always been bad about this, because the "community" could essentially vote something into obscurity. That means, if you're a woman strutting in a bikini, you could be as sexy as you wanted. However, if you were a cross dresser doing the same thing, you wouldn't last a week.

Since Google took over, and the number of channels/videos has grown astronomically (unrelated to Google taking over), the less popular videos have been relegated to the back alleys of obscurity, and if you don't monetize, you can get away with a little more, although you'll have a very limited audience.

More recently, the scandals and advertiser pressure have caused Google to start censoring content by keywords, subject, and who knows what else? They've also made it much more difficult to monetize your content.

Google makes their money from advertisers. They don't care about content producers.

Free speech is a complex issue, especially given our changing media landscape, but this isn't a reasonable example. Few practicing law professionals share Jordan Peterson's concerns about the Bill, and there are plenty who care about personal liberties like freedom of expression.

As an aside, Peterson's expertise is in a narrow slice of personality psychology. Everything he says on every other topic has to be double-checked. e.g., Peterson claims that witches are real and that they live in swamps.

Oh, he is sooooo right! I run into them all the time.

I think he means magic witches, not sexy witches. But it's hard to tell with that guy.

/shrug He's pretty straightforward in his books and classes.

Never encountered the "witches in swamps" thing until you mentioned it. It's pretty easy to make anything read in a snippit or out of context into anything you want. It's rather clear this is being taken within superordinate place within folklore, which he seems to use a lot of analogies to regarding the human past before "science" was developed.

I dunno, I find him fascinating and honest. Rather than dealing with the ideological far left, and out right hateful far right, seems to care more about the individual becoming aware, and competent.

Sounds like a cool guy.

Or a bargain-basement libertarian sociopath/huckster.

The context was an article with the New York Times where he says that witches exist and live in swamps. And then when asked to clarify, he said they don't exist the way other things exist. Even with the qualifiers, that's some silly shit.


Oh, there's no doubt that he's interesting. But so were Madam Blavatsky and Alastair Crowley. (And I'm not taking pot-shots: crazy is par for the course when you're talking about a Jungian who takes himself this seriously.)

Anyway. On the politics thing, I don't know if the solution to crazy leftism and crazy fascism is to carve out a space for crazy centrism. But I could be wrong.

Uhhhh yeah bud that's cool and all... but.... uhhh.... clean your room?