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Contrapoints - Opulence
- Thread starter CoolOff
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Also you don't need to have your friends publicly criticize you when they can do it in private if they so desire.
That was a good read. It helps bring things into a broader perspective. Edit: the Sarah twitter
People really need to get off the 'cancelling' aspect of this. I'm pretty sure most people like a lot of Natalie's work and think that she does a (mostly) great job in the Youtube space.
At the same time she's said some pretty thoughtless comments towards non-binary people on multiple occasions and always responds in the same way; says she's fucked up without showing any real remorse or signs that she's grown, deletes her Twitter specifically to prevent her from starting another backlash without rethinking her positions as to why she caused one (I also think it's important to state she herself has said the Twitter deletion has nothing to do with harassment or people trying to 'cancel' her), then within a month she'll be back on Twitter, then some time after that she'll make the same mistakes.
The Sarah Zedig thread obviously does a much better job of this, but let's not make this topic about 'outraged' people trying to senselessly 'cancel' her here.
At the same time she's said some pretty thoughtless comments towards non-binary people on multiple occasions and always responds in the same way; says she's fucked up without showing any real remorse or signs that she's grown, deletes her Twitter specifically to prevent her from starting another backlash without rethinking her positions as to why she caused one (I also think it's important to state she herself has said the Twitter deletion has nothing to do with harassment or people trying to 'cancel' her), then within a month she'll be back on Twitter, then some time after that she'll make the same mistakes.
The Sarah Zedig thread obviously does a much better job of this, but let's not make this topic about 'outraged' people trying to senselessly 'cancel' her here.
Sure but glibly talking about people cancelling you isn't the look of someone criticizing in private.
Like Sarah said in her tweet, it's entirely possible that some of these people didn't know he was problematic before this. I honestly learned it from this thread.Sure but glibly talking about people cancelling you isn't the look of someone criticizing in private.
I don't know. I still agree with Natalie's original statement and I've talked to a lot of non binary people NOT on outrage Twitter to get their perspectives and to them it basically boils down to "that totally makes sense to me because she's a woman and wants to be treated as a woman...and non binary people may not be". This performative stuff on the Twitter left is too much.
By the way, I thought the wider thread would be interested in this. She's going to attempt to address this in her next video:
By the way, I thought the wider thread would be interested in this. She's going to attempt to address this in her next video:
this kinda bullshit drives me nuts. i'm not sure where you're seeing this but the threads posted ITT and most others pertaining to this that i've come across are people patiently explaining their issues with CP and the tone is usually one of disappointment, and not rage. people are allowed to be upset with people you might otherwise assume 'unproblematic' and calling people who are carefully detailing the reason they take issue "performative" is obnoxiously dismissive
What aspect or sentiment do you agree with specifically?
What are you considering performative here?
It was posted on the first page - wider thread might be more interested in people reading it.
Getting close with someone like Buck Angel shouldn't be a "I have my reasons, let me get back to you in a month" situation unless you lack zero foresight. Consider just not featuring shitty people innocuously for no apparent reason if you don't want people turning around and going 'uh, what's up with what?'. I also think her attempts to paint it as Natalie Wynn & Patrons vs. Twitter are pretty poor. It's not a clear cut group and telling Patrons to wait another month before explaining is kind of obnoxious.
I don't know. I still agree with Natalie's original statement and I've talked to a lot of non binary people NOT on outrage Twitter to get their perspectives and to them it basically boils down to "that totally makes sense to me because she's a woman and wants to be treated as a woman...and non binary people may not be". This performative stuff on the Twitter left is too much.
By the way, I thought the wider thread would be interested in this. She's going to attempt to address this in her next video:
What's performative about it?
What are you trying to say about nonbinary folx? It's not clear to me.
This would be a useful thread to get up to speed with:
Huh. They actually did lol - apparently because it has the term "scum" in it 👀. Back-pedalled on it after two days. Wild.
clearly us trans folk are a monolith and must always agree with the loudest voice. the loudest trans voice online can't possibly actually be kind of a shit about some things. noooooo we're just cancel culture outrage twitter performative left cuck soy boys mobbing people for woke points. being anything less than uncritical of her is heresy. worship. we must worship, like the peons of old. worship, and repent, for we are unworthy of her grace. unworthy of the power and strength of her voice. in criticizing her we have tarnished naught but ourselves and must bow down at an altar or forever be a part of the "out" group. she is perfect and we are mere dust falling upon her shadow, invisible to all who may observe. we may be many but she is one; one so powerful and insightful that she is right all the time. there is nothing we can say or do before her towering, godlike form. she is so unwrong that we should give her money to find out just how unwrong she is, because we will regret our words and our deeds. ah, but we are fools, for we should already regret our words and deeds, no? we are, of course, nothing before her. in fact, we are such nothing, that as members of the Trans Community, we are one with her and secretly agree with everything she says. because we are assimilated, you see. there is no individuality with us, and thus no objection. so there must be some other motive, and the readers of our nonextant thoughts and feelings are imagining our presence. for what do we offer our thoguhts? for who should read them but the lost souls of the whispering wasteland, whereupon series of tubes all struggle to find meaning in their pitiful lives but realise that they are as hollow as the casing surrounding the wires which give them life? repent. repent. we must repent, for it is the only course of action. there is no color in this drab, monochromic world; no life, no balance, no nuance-- all that once was fell upon the desert of the void. it was like that at the beginning, and so too shall it be at the end. we have naught but one another; and one another is naught but one; for all who observe see us as one, and therefore, what existance do we really, truly have? if we are seen as the monolith we so clearly are, then that monolith we are indeed, because a body is nothing without the minds through which they are observed. and if the minds observing see us as the monolith, then we are defined. we are defined. we are defined. we are seen as one being and thus one being we are, though our hearts protest and our words fall upon deaf ears. there is no resistance to the gravitational weight of the popular thought among the throbbing, bulging, interconnected web we find ourselves in. there is no thought, there is no communication, there is no action or deed unless it is observed; and if it is observed, it is an error, and an error must be done away with, for there shall be nothing less than perfection in this new digital borg. though the meat sacks we call our human bodies appear to be moving of their own accord, the actions of our hands upon the keyboards and screens we find ourselves at are seen as naught but text; sometimes that text is accompanied by pictures, sometimes it is accompanied by a visual marker; a face to associate with the posts. this is all of course an illusion, for if you supply a word or two that one may interpert them, in the mind of the interpeter, it shall all turn to ash and be reassembled. reassembled. we are all reassembled in the mind of the observer, and the observer decides the correct way in which the pieces fall. the observer decides reality, and thus, can never be wrong. and the observer? well, the observer was the friends we all made along the way. friends and enemies, enemies and friends; how does such a thing come to pass, and whyfore are we all so hysterical? it all began with muffins. you know the little bastards. tasty yet bad for you, like most things in the world. get hooked on a muffin and your life is ruined. suddenly you wind up introducing yourself to worse pastries, then you entertain yourself with a pastry that isn't even a pastry. of course, this is all correct, because i am the observer and thus reality doesn't exist unless i say it does. my reality is perfect, because it's filled with muffins. muffins with a lot of butter applied. hot, spicy muffins. delicious, bready little pieces of garbage that make you fat because there's like, bread in it. you're all in my reality now because i'm the one observing you-- sorry, you're the helpless hostages of my mind. there's nothing i can do about it, it's just the nature of the human experience, because we've lost all fucking sense of self and others that we can just say a load of bullshit and get away with it nowadays. anyway thank you for listening to my ted talk, i'll collect the check on the way out. (there's gonna be a check, right? i have a taxi waiting outside and i can't take a loan from the mafia again to pay for the ride to a place i could just walk to, it's only fifteen minutes away but i can't be bothered with reminding myself how my legs work because i've been a massive potato ass sitting on my computer listening to and reading loudmouths try and pretend that they know what they're talking about when they don't, really. but of course, since as i established in my ted talk-- the one you're still listening to, how haven't you taken my mic off of me yet--- yes, there's canon now, we're all at a ted talk and i've got a mountan of muffins on display to prove a fucking point and not just because i wanted a bunch of free muffins-- those muffins are also free, right? i get paid to come here, so the food should be paid for too, just-- just whatever, just do whatever you want, i don't care anymore, i'm going to be over here eating these muffins and thinking about adorable little foxes that wouldn't hesitate to eat my foot off if they thought that A) it was tasty and B) they could get away with it. why would nature create something so cute and adorable that would just fuck you up if you went to pet it. what are my hands for, if not for petting? animals can observe something as mind numbing as petting, why would they not wish to create that reality for themselves? i wanna pet foxes, i wanna pick one up and hug it because it makes me happy, and if the little buggers decided they would enjoy such a thing, they'd enjoy it too. reality is all in the mind of the observer, of course, so if a fox wants to chew off my face and sees it as a perfectly fine thing to do, it'll just go ahead and do that anyway. we're all hostages of the chemicals coursing through us, in the end, because free will is naught but an illusion. if we went back in time, we'd only really be able to change what we did if we knew about the outcome. if we were faced with the same set of information at the time, we'de make the same decisions, because we're all basically little idiots running on autopilot who think we have some semblance of control of our lives. oh, i forgot a closing parenthesis there. that little bugger always runs away from me. come back you little prick. ). there we go. that should satisfy all of you, because i know it had you upset. that's part of why I did the A) and B) bit, because, well, those don't really gramattically count as closers, they're like-- whatever the fuck you call it. what do you call those pricks when they're applied in front of letters? they don't really remain parenthesis, do they? i'm sure english has a term for that. english is a fuckin' crazy language dudes, let me tell you. have you ever thought about how hard it would be to teach some of the bullshit we say to foreigners? i'm so sorry on behalf of the world for our stupid ass language. we can say the same word seven times in a row and have it mean completely different things and still be grammatically fuckin' correct. and don't even get me started on literally and figuratively. literally means both literally and figuratively at the same time and it's a pandoras fucking box unless you have either a full appreciation of the context or a talk with the person using it. it's an absolute mindfuck; a trancendant experience of bullshit, much like some of the words said in this thread. but of course I don't matter here, because we're all in the minority; contra and her fanbase is basically Big Trans and they set the state of discourse and if you cause discord in the discordant discourse-- try explaining that to somebody who isn't fluent, ya pricks-- you get dumped on like a sack of bricks. it's all a part of this tactic to cause fear because our perfect world can't ever not make a complete ammount of sense or be internally inconsistent. internally inconsistent is a pretty fun phrase, by the way-- lots of n's and stuff. Overly verbose though. why did I decide to randomly capitalize the start of sentences just now when i've intentionally avoided doing it all this post? fuck if i know. anyway i wouldn't reccommend being trans, it's not fun, but it's not really something you can control, because we don't decide what we are, it's just in the hands of fuckin', nature or whatever. i wouldn't reccommend it 'cuz the world doesn't give a shit about you and only pretends to do so most of the time, then there are the rare specks of light-- honestly good little fucks-- i say that affectionatley, don't ban me-- who actually legitimately give a shit and comment on like a thread about transphobia that doesn't contain the name of someone on the left in the title. y'all are absent when it's republicans legislating us out of existance because it became boring to call them out on the shit they wanna do, which is part of what lets them do it, so good fuckin' job ya dolticus maximumuses. (this is why we spent so much time saying don't let this be normal after trump became president. y'all failed. good job ya idiots, you let it become normal, almost like you want it to be and are more comfortable with this reality you've concucted for yourself. y'all resent being pulled into the minds of others and defined by them so much that you get dragged there kicking and screaming and have a completely different conversation with them because we can't just fuckin' talk to one another any more and anything we say is automatically dishonest or false because it goes against your own little narrative. anyway, back to muffins. you know what i like? pancakes. pancakes with a fuck ton of maple syrup. of course, the correct way to prepare pancakes is to use two individual pancakes as sandwich bread and put the sauce and fun little bits in the middle. like ice cream and bacon, which totally go together. i haven't tried it, but bacon goes well with everything. especially the grease.you should try mixing the grease into like, a smoothie. bacon grease smoothie. there's a millenial treat for you. i'm a millenial, so i get to say that. self criticizing is fun. we spend so much time doing it so when other people are dicks to us, it hurts less. it's all a part of conforming to the society we live in and being a member of this borg with the least ammount of friction. unfortunately, people like me and others tend to decide to go against this borg and do things like criticize contrapoints for some total bullshit she does. like that one fuckin' transphobe she let do a profile on her? i've forgotten his name already beacuse he's a fuckin' nobody. i bet he'll appear in the next video with this same asshole whose name i've already forgotten. sorry folkaroonies, don't have the brainspace to keep up with the growing number of twats in the world. i can say that because i'm writing all of this with my kiwi accent in mind. you can't help imagining that now because i've said those words in a string of letters and have thus defined your internal reality. hahaha! sucker. but also, the borg is the reason why this is such a problem in the first place. y'all can't handle us criticizing people you like because it strikes a dischordant chordant (i'm sure that's a word, there's no squiggly underneath it, i deon't care because ti doesn't mattter, nothign matters so it's fine-- hey look, squigglies aren't showing up there, i guess it don't work on era for me for some batshit reason, form coding be whack. i like squigglies, i wish i had them here. i'm a bit asinine about the phrasing and verbage and grammar and caps and spelling of shit i write. sometimes i give less of a shit to no shits at all though. like right now, for instance. i'ms ure you hadn't noticed.) and you struggle to maintain the prior shape of the borg because otherwise the world makes no sense to you, and we prioritize sense more than dollars. (yes, i know. shut up.)) anyway, so, like, uh. the weather's been pretty whack, right? i mean this is only something i care about, but we've had like four seasons in one day before. hail in the sun, rain, then blistering cold and rain... it's weird. probably a result of climate change. i wonder if climate change will have an impact on fox habitats? or evolution? what will our species look like twenty, fifty, one hundred and fifty years from now? the game of nature is adaptation, of course. maybe foxes will want to be hugged. i could deal with climate change if it gave me huggable foxes. but maybe i'm just selfish. the world's already going to crap though and we're certainly not treating each other nicer. though it's probably always been this shit right? like right now we're in the information age, and we weren't before, so there was less information going around. (that's how it works.). so yeah, the world's probably just always been a shit and we've been involuntarily living on a shit world and just kind of shrugging our hands and slinging crap at each other instead of fixing it. but yeah, it's been rainy all week. haven't really been able to get my washing done until today because it was a blisteringly hot, really nice sunny day. not blistering hot the way you know it though. blistering hot for new zealand means anywhere between like 25-32 degrees celcius. no, i'm not localizing this to farenheit. google it if you care that much. but then again, most people posting in this thread probably don't care to google; they don't even care to read the thread they're in to find the answers to the question they're gonna post which they are inevitably going to wind up reading the thread they're in, so they create this grand spectacle of redundancy that wastes everyone's time. wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. i like extending vowel sounds. even though it results in this kind of arbitrary length of sound in a person's head. are there studies done on how long a random vowel extension lingers in someone's head? i'd love to read it. it's the kind of meaningless bullshit i'd research if i were a scientist, which is probably why i'm not a scientist. i'm an armchair shitposter at best.
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Are we expecting them to cisplain the situation to Nathalie now?
This is typically the kind of situation when cis people should sit in a corner, listen, and keep their mouth shut.
*eyes this thread*
Yeah, dunno if that's true on Era. Think a lot of people in this thread would cheer if she never made a video again.
it kind of makes sense. isn't she friends with the twitch streamer / youtuber Destiny who basically is incredibly bigoted and whatnot in private?
Which people?
Unsure why people aren't allowed to criticize something without someone else bemoaning them for 'cancel culture', making them out to be some raging mess or telling them they should be giving whoever the benefit of the doubt.
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Ahhhhhhhh this are the exact same words TERFs use for the slur excuse!Huh. They actually did lol - apparently because it has the term "scum" in it 👀. Back-pedalled on it after two days. Wild.
I'm guessing that I'm one of the people you're talking about. And honestly, if she keeps ignoring trans people's criticisms of how she talks about genderqueer people, and keeps on saying hurtful ignorant stuff, I'd rather have she stopped making videos before she says something really bad in her videos. Cause when she inevitably does, trans people, probably especially genderqueer people, will have to deal with cis people being misinformed by her.
What I'd much rather have though is that she actually listened to the criticisms trans people have of her and tried to be better. But at this point I don't have much hope of that. Considering her saying she'll explain her reason for featuring Buck Angel in her next video, and her tendency to debate conservative transphobes, I'm expecting the worst.
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For all the things you can criticize Buck this is like the less problematic one and kind of plays into the narrative of "let's look for reasons to cancel someone". I mean, having compassion for someone who died of brain cancer shouldn't be a reason to cancel. Is a very "Jesus" approach yeah (as in "love your enemy") but hardly a big offense I would say.
Anyway, Buck has reactionary politics, and Contra seems to be willingly doing this stuff otherwise I don't know what's going on with her, since she always does RESEARCH before her videos. It feels to me that she might be trying to move past her harder-left, anti-capitalist fanbase towards a more liberal, vapid, aesthetically inclined fanbase. She wants the Nina West fandom I guess.
Seems to accurately depict at least a couple of members in here. Dropping the usual "performative" and "cancel culture" take before disappearing like a fart in the wind.
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People shouldn't be surprised that people are pushing back against the ContraPoints criticism. The video is extremely well done but nobody wants to talk about it. The thread is instead consumed with discussion about a single problematic aspect of it. It's turned into meta-commentary about Natalie as a person. The work itself has become irrelevant. Let's instead focus on the personality of the creator. It's more important to talk about whether we should "stan" Natalie or not rather than talk about the content of her videos or whether or not they are actually intellectually engaging.
You know what would be real nice? If cis people would stop coming in here to tell all these trans and nonbinary people who are upset with the things she's said that our opinions and feelings don't matter or not so vague digs at 'outrage culture'
So, is the Left eating itself again? Did one of our heroes turn out not to be a perfect marble statue of virtue and instead show herself to be a regular old human with some good thoughts and some bad ones too? Are we tossing somebody into the trash can, good and bad alike? Cancelled? Unsubscribed? Banned? Or is there some nuance to this discussion? I haven't been following it closely. First I even heard that anyone had an issue with Contrapoints was during a Google Search that brought up a dozen hits from GAF, Channers, and Reddit right wing forums crowing in triumph that the Left wants Natalie's head on a platter.
Edit: The above sarcasm is aimed mostly at my original source: GAF, Channers, and Reddit
Opulence was excellent and thought provoking, by the way.
So, what is it this time? I seem to recall she made callous remarks in regards to non-binary people?
Edit: I should have added "is she doubling down?" to the end of that sentence since people are reading it as being dismissive.
Edit: The above sarcasm is aimed mostly at my original source: GAF, Channers, and Reddit
Opulence was excellent and thought provoking, by the way.
So, what is it this time? I seem to recall she made callous remarks in regards to non-binary people?
Edit: I should have added "is she doubling down?" to the end of that sentence since people are reading it as being dismissive.
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Think you goofed on one of the spots. "They is Singular" the transphobes usually come in saying "They is plural"Happens frequently enough so may as well have a game to play with it. Threw this together.
Amended! Can't even make sense of that view when I'm trying to write it lmao. Thank you for pointing it out.
If you missed the prior discussion around the Twitter comments made it might be worth a browse. Should get you a sense of the grievances and what was said (screencaps of tweets are on the latter pages):
Did you have anything to aid in that discussion or were you content just adding to the meta-commentary you claim to dislike?
If you don't want the content of your video being obscured then don't throw in a prominent transmedicalist and make them proud of their involvement. Not exactly much foresight required to realise that people would look for something more than "find out next time on Contrapoints!" as a reason and have a general aura of "uh, what the fuck?" about it.
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I don't normally say this but this is one of those things I'm not going to touch with a ten foot pole on this forum. Complex issues without a morally clear answer involving complicated intersectionality between multiple heavily marginalized groups who don't agree with each other or even among themselves don't play well in black-and-white argumentation.
I see we're reaching PDP levels of defending Natalie now.
It's so funny that the people who say this shit because they have to blindly defend Natalie like a cult would are the same people that when they see a person still defend Trump goes "Wow I can't believe they're just blindly defending him like some sort of cult!"
Wow! Someone coming in here, saying a bunch of bullshit like "The left is eating itself" and "Cancel culture strikes again" while ignoring all the real problems that people have with her.
It's so funny that the people who say this shit because they have to blindly defend Natalie like a cult would are the same people that when they see a person still defend Trump goes "Wow I can't believe they're just blindly defending him like some sort of cult!"
Yeah, unlike the last discussion, I'm not going to die on a hill for her. While I appreciate her and her videos informing a lot of my current views of gender and society at large, if there's any missing context to putting someone like Buck Angel in one of your videos, you don't want to wait until it fucking blows up to bring it to light. She made this bed.
I actually just caught up. My thread alerts skipped the previous page of this thread for some reason so I'm glad to see there is indeed some nuance. I can understand her position, and thought her video on Transtrenders did a pretty good job illustrating her own struggles. If you have been placed on a pedestal to represent a group of people that mainstream society has little need to empathize with, the more diverse and complicated that group becomes makes the job all the harder. Especially when you never asked to be a representative and have your own work to do understanding/accepting/exploring your own identity (probably). Sometimes you just have to accept your "heroes" have their own issues. I'm always concerned that dogpiling, or at least turning a person's personal flaws into public sporting events doesn't help that person reflect. Defensiveness and digging in to your own detriment is also human nature. I wold hate to become famous.
Or maybe it was none of the above?
I think you're showing a lot of concern for people having a discussion she will likely never see. She could equally just not touch on those topics knowing her position and that she has the potential to cause harm.
Natalie Wynn isn't a hero of mine nor do I consider her some paragon of trans rights and progressive thought. Which is why I'm able to criticize her. I'd look more at the people that wish to shield her from any criticism as being the ones deifying her.
This is such a bad take because people are calling out her bigotry around nonbinary people and providing a platform to others who do the same.
The left IS eating itself though. But more importantly: people are still trained to believe that when someone is famous, then an X/Y/Z amount of harmful views is acceptable. Peter Coffins, I think, made a video about social currency. Now Contrapoints is using some of hers. Maybe she overspent it, maybe she did not, no one knows. I am sure about one thing though: it is possible to still like someone and criticize that very same person. Its the default view one should held against their own views.
So now your stances is "I just came in here with an uninformed hot take why you mad at me?" That's worse you know that right?
I agree with this. And there's something to be said about dissecting the flaws on one's own allies.
"You shouldn't put her on a pedestal" says person looking to dispell any criticism of her.
I don't believe the default should be liking someone regardless of their views considering some views people hold and espouse. I agree that you can like and criticze someone though, and think we should do so when somoene toes past a line. Especially those in a position to embolden other less savoury characters around the outskirts. The idea that if you're criticizing the output of someone that you must be in some rabid fever in which everything should be torn down is stupid, but then I never really think it's being made in earnest to begin with.
Not just this thread and not just this issue specifically. I was making a broader statement abut internet culture in general where becoming famous is concerned and the affect it has on how people think and react.
I put hero in quotation marks for a reason. People do look up to her and for good reason I think, and I feel the same even knowing she has her own blind spots. That's one of the nice things about a person who makes videos that are supposed to provoke thought, rather than encourage an audience to just nod along. Disagreement and criticism should be part of the package.
Sure, in some sense. Putting down non-binary people and hosting truscum not so much though.
I'm also not sure why you're saying criticism should be included after hand-wringing about criticism.
I came into this thread expecting the worst since my first exposure to the situation was right wing clap trap and then I saw it wasn't that bad so I moderated my position. My initial post was a question, albeit a sarcastic one with most of the sarcasm aimed at my original source of people cheering on our "demise".
Edit. Okay, whoa whoa, cool down people. My original "Take" isn't what you think it is. I'll edit in clarification.