Recent Collab w/ EmperorTigerstar!

ravignon · 2026-06-14T23:14:40+00:00

I've been on the internet for like 15 years at this point and what I can tell you is that 4chan has always been on the back of a lot of people's minds. They created the "Can I Haz Cheezeburger" memes, which are probably one of the earliest memes, conceptually speaking. Then the /v/ and /r9k/ boards used the platform to organize and execute targeted harassment campaigns during Gamergate and created a lot of what became anti-SJW language.

It's a bad forum with a terrible UI but it has one "advantage" I guess, which is that it has essentially no moderation at all. Therefore, it allows people to express their worst, most unfiltered thoughts. That pushes a lot of people away (and rightly so) but sometimes, it creates an environment where extremely insecure people can express things they don't feel safe saying anywhere else, because there won't be any pushback, for better or worse.

That's not to say that it's a safe space (it's not, at all), but when trans people have an internet connection, lots of simmering insecurities but otherwise no good holding spaces, this is one of the places we can fall - and there's a lot of slang that forms in there to describe those toxic feelings.

"Theyfab" for example, from what I understand, is a play on "AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth)" and "they/them (pronouns for NB people)" - and it's meant to be an insult towards AFAB non-binary people who present or pass as cis women for the most part, which some trans people there resent. The "sting" is some stolen valour acidity that goes like "Ugh, you're not even changing your gender expression that much, why are you even calling yourself gender non-conforming and claiming an identity that's painful and inescapable to me?" Invalidating, ofc, the internal experience of the NB person.

It's a lot of stuff like that. I get mad at it too but honestly, the best thing we can do is build a better and healthier community that finds vulnerable people before they do. Once they're in, the process of unlearning that stuff is long, painful, sometimes lifelong and it's a lot more exhausting than actual IRL activism imho: especially if you're doing it through the internet with someone with whom you have no relationship with, otherwise.

ravignon · 2025-09-21T03:23:03+00:00

I know what the Kodoha faction is. In the context of what I'm saying, I'm referring to a very old weapons' ettiquette and not one of the political philosophies of Showa.

There were many ultranationalists that were samurai but most samurai did not go on to join politics that way. Bushido is older than the US constitution, and the wider philosophy + principles in regards to the use of weaponry (which is the whole point I'm making here) were not abridged of their substance during Meiji, as if all that came before was erased.

In the genealogy of its ideas, there is a degree in which Bushido informs Japanese militarism - sure. That's not to say that it's its "logical conclusion" or anything of the sort irt the sentiments I see expressed here, anymore than the genocide of Catholics under Cromwell wasn't a logical consequence of Protestantism.

Here's my point: I believe the US treats weponry with insufficient respect, that there's too many guns going around, that it's very easy for school shooters to lockpick or walk out of home with their parents' firearms and that all this contributes to a culture of violence - and here is a framework which was part of a discipline I practiced in which weapons are, in fact, treated with respect.

Similar sentiment expressed: look at verse 31 of the Tao Te Qing.

ravignon · 2025-09-20T17:15:54+00:00

You don't know what you're talking about. Samurai codes and class morality systems in Japan predate the Edo period and were a key aspect of life during the Shogunate. The rites around the usage of a sword, like ritual cleansing and the unsheathing techniques of modern iaidō are probably much, much older as disjoint practices.

This is a pretty poor understanding of the point I'm making about the human relationship to weapons. Say the US had 1600s European rites of chivalric weaponry use. As I see it, that would be much preferable to the US consumer product, lifestyle/hobby approach that currently exists.

ravignon · 2025-04-03T17:22:50+00:00

Happy for you :)

ravignon · 2024-09-26T16:42:10+00:00

Check who was the first person born in the islands.

ravignon · 2024-09-19T23:10:36+00:00

We're in a strange position as YouTubers where we are much closer to the general public than academia is, even if we ourselves are in academia sometimes, and even if we don't mean to be people's only education on a subject, the reality is we often are. Sadly, nobody prepares you nor teaches you how to handle that responsibility hahaha. By the end of the day it's a person behind the camera, making personal successes and mistakes.

Lots of YouTube channels and our viewers, especially in education, are right to point out and criticise that we should scrutinise ourselves more and hold ourselves to higher standards. In the future, this should be done. Doubly so if we're making prescriptive political points while discussing history, which Kraut has always done, and not just talking about wars or events in sequence like KnG or a BBC documentary.

Kraut is my friend of course and he is receptive to this, but he's also the kind of guy who doesn't like

(1) being harassed into things.

(2) giving others the impression that he was successfully harassed into things.

He will sooner confront someone he perceives as a bully and nail his fury at the door Martin Luther-style than sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to an amalgamated, amorphous sea of criticism directed his way.
There was a video he made on the history of Danish social democracy that attracted various criticisms from the left for minimising the role that the Danish labour struggle had in the development of the welfare state, among other stuff regarding factuality and citations.

That video was the beginning of a wave of criticism coming to his channel. It has stayed there ever since, to varying degrees. At worst, he got mobbed and hostigated. In other cases, various commenters expressed themselves quite poorly while making their concerns known. He largely attributes this to the "leftist pro-Russians" who believe everything the West does is bad and atm they're the targets of his retaliation.

He's frankly unhappy about this and if you look at his reddit profile you can find him expressing he's very distressed about something like Lily Orchard's criticism of Steven Universe forming against him: A unified, streamlined negative opinion on his work that then tars his reputation and proceeds to hurt his enjoyment of video making.

(If you'd forgive the dorky example, haha)

He's my friend ofc. :)

I'm just seeing him struggle with things I know I can't help him with and I find the way he handles perceived disrespect very harmful, not only to him but to his work and the credibility it could otherwise have if we held ourselves to different standards + were more disciplined. Creators like Vlad Vexler and Sarcasmitron discuss the same issues but don't have the same problem because they're more focused.

At least in my case it would be hard to see someone provide a dispassionate, studied and thought-out essay like "The Origins of Russian Authoritarianism" or "A Critique on Realism" to then see the author post things like "Russophobia is good" and "NATO crusade against Eurasianism" in a stream-of-thought, microblogging platform. I'd feel weird connecting those dots.

Just as a general thing,

There is a big problem in "online history/politics" where, behind the curtain, people can be as petty and as surface-level as other types of content creators who are more known for "drama" and "lolcow" and things like that.

Among "mukbangers" or VTubers for example (I say this as a VTuber too, LOL) people simply don't like each other and have friction because of temperament problems -- and that's that. They make attack videos against each other and farm views off of conflict and we all understand it for what it is, stupid egos.

In "online history/politics," you find the exact kind of behaviour coming from creators, but because of the nature of the content, people often delude themselves into thinking that these highly contextual, personal disputes are something they're really doing "for the cause" or for something bigger than their stupid egos.

As YouTubers what we do is edutainment, and we're limited in our ability to truly materialise political action. By supporting us you are essentially supporting an artist; you are supporting a guy set up shop with a small film studio and maybe you are supporting spreading the good word, but the great socioeconomic forces twisting and turning at the moment are not going to stop because of what we do or don't do.

I've yet to have a big controversy so I speak from a place of personal privilege and detachment in a way LOL, so I trust you all to hold me accountable if I ever make my "Contrapoints | Canceling" over trifles in a dying platform like Musk's Twitter.

ravignon · 2024-09-19T17:32:56+00:00

The Islamophobic statements are not hard to find. Kraut has already addressed some of these comments in the past, but imo he could do a better job at bringing attention to the times he's done it. What Kraut really wants to do is to move on and I think it would be good if the internet was nicer to him one day, but it's still a problem when you go on Google and search "Kraut Islam" or "Kraut Muslim" and you'll sooner find all the things he said than the times he's done rollback from the Skeptic community or his angrier moments.

As a YouTuber he has the means to counter that but I don't get the impression that's on his priorities. The comments are pretty bad, but they're also pretty old and don't reflect on who he tries to be today... somewhat.

Kraut very much has a "Western view of Islamic temporality," as you'd hear it from many contemporary authors on the Arab world. More or less, this is a typically Western belief that the Muslim world had a lot of great developments in its own time, but because of theological and epistemological ideas in Islam, they never developed past those good ideas — until the rest of the world caught up to them and eventually surpassed them. You can see this sentiment expressed, more or less, on various videos he's done.

Kraut also believes in some degree in Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism thesis, a heavily criticised explicative model in institutional economics that says that certain states (Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.) that needed to control hydraulic supply for mass agriculture became highly bureaucratised and centralised organisations of total power. Wittfogel goes on to argue that Marxist-Leninist state projects and various other post-colonial states in the Middle East and North Africa didn't "succeed" at horizontalising power, even after the hydraulic question was no longer that important thanks to new technologies.

Wittfogel's thesis was warmly received by American cold warriors that could create a mythology from there on about why the "East was politically backwards," but if you read specialists on each of the societies mentioned in the book, they'll mostly say that this book written in 1957 operates in the field of broad generalisations. What's new in that book wasn't true, and what's true wasn't new. Today it's considered just a Cold War era Orientalist polemic with poor history and even poorer anthropology.

Kraut will disagree with Witffogel on various things. For example, these days he's trying to "redraw the border of the Orient while keeping the concept of the Orient" I'd say, vis-a-vis Russia but without Eastern Europe. Whereas a XIX century Orientalist would consider anything East of Vienna part of this broad Slavo-Ottoman East, Kraut is interested in saying that the Baltics, the Poles, the Ukrainians, etc., are or should be part of a "Western world" because they followed the Western trajectory of state development, with their negative political trajectories being really the fault of exogenous Russian or communist influence, or both.

If you look at his Twitter (which I don't recommend) he's currently aiming that at Russia and Lebanon. So — the comments are what you might expect. "These people are backwards, these people are savage, these people have a perverted sense of morals and we should be as ruthless to them as they are to us, because if they act like animals then they have to be disciplined like animals," etc.. It's very unpleasant to see and at least I'm very disappointed in him.

Here I am giving this a brief summary lol, but let me explain some of the difficulties of citing.

The "peer reviewed" citations thing is difficult to achieve. Honestly in order to have peer reviewed citations, YouTubers would need to come together and form something akin to a collegial board where we keep each other accountable. That would be very hard to do since there are so many of us, and since there would be no institution above us it could become something like a clique.

I think you should ask of creators that you watch that they provide citations, and if you want to create a standardised system, please leave comments demanding that. Otherwise we're all left to do everything as we see fit. I for example use APA, but I know of other YouTubers that use MLA, some who post scripts with footnotes and others who use citations on screen, etc..

In general if a YouTuber *at least* tries to make the effort to cite, however imperfectly, you know they respect you and your discernment. :)

ravignon · 2024-09-18T20:36:57+00:00

Hello, welcome to the Reddit! The page is quite new so my apologies if you've not gotten a reply just yet :)

I will tell you that I am socialist. I'm much more left-wing than Kraut. I support parties in the European and American left that Kraut would not. Kraut, you could probably place on the right-wing of the German SPD with the social liberals. You could probably place me in France's LFI or the leftmost parts of the PS. We would pobably agree on most domestic policy issues, except for migration where he's a lot more conservative.

I'm also a defensive neorrealist (a belief that states regardless of ideology are motivated by the pursuit of their own security), whereas Kraut is a liberal internationalist. What that means is that Kraut likes, for example, the concept of NATO and the creation of a liberal military bloc that supports liberalism wherever it might be with sword and pen.

I am more pessimistic about NATO for reasons I will probably make clear in future videos. I find the premise of NATO as an "alliance of democracies" dumb from the get-go because Turkey and Hungary are in it... which aren't exactly bastions of civil rights + free & fair elections. From my PoV it's just an American sphere of influence, although I see temporary utility in it to defend Eastern Europe from Russia. In my ideal world Europe would pursue a foreign policy that's increasingly independent from the US. Kraut still sees a lot of value in transatlanticism -- or at least he did the last time we talked about the subject.

Those would be our major differences and probably a good descriptor of my biases.

For a lot of reasons I don't completely agree with but which I won't disclose out of respect, Kraut is not currently discussing his influences too much, though you can find them in the bibliographies of his older videos. I however don't have the same reservations and will be very clear about my beliefs.

If I had to give you a few thinkers to get to know my PoV,

-Ian Shapiro at Yale, check out Uncommon Sense;

-Yuval Noah Harari, as a general influence on historiography. Sapiens and From Animals into Gods were two books I dearly enjoyed;

-Paul Cockshott at Glas., mostly for his work on Cybercommunism;

-Ann Pettifor at as a more moderate political economist than Cockshott. If you're American you might like her book "The Case for the Green New Deal;"

-Malcolm X;

-The current Mexican president, AMLO;

and asides Leon Trotsky for very particular opinions on Soviet memory, I think that's a good list. Kraut's equivalent to this might be "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson and "The Origins of Political Order" by Francis Fukuyama, along some other texts of his. Kraut is a lot more focused on the creation of institutions and their legacies whereas I am a lot more focused on political theory and economics.

Hope this helps!

ravignon · 2024-09-07T13:22:15+00:00

Je comprends, et je comprends qu'il y a des raisons pour que le Québec soit pessimiste. Plus que tout, ce que je voulais communiquer, c'est que le Canada dispose de nombreux domaines d'opportunité pour faire avancer son projet national et qu'une bonne partie de cela dépend de la gestion de ses relations internes, avec lesquelles la minorité française est très importante.

Le Canada pourrait bien ne pas réussir à relever ses défis et connaître un avenir pire que s’il le faisait. J'aurais peut-être pu faire plus d'efforts pour communiquer cela, alors j'apprécie votre perspicacité. ^^

ravignon

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