Evil Jokers

A Neil Oliver video “Who are these evil Jokers?!?” was amongst the videos in the sidebar on Youtube and being curious as to who the evil jokers may be, served with a smattering of “isn’t he that bloke off countryfile” I gave the video a watch. Okay he’s quite passionate about the subject I thought. As the video progressed quiet alarm bells started ringing, getting steadily louder noticing his very emotively charged language and thinking it seemed somewhat hypocritical. Did I hear that right, climate change denial, but he’s that bloke off CountryFile!? His rant about Bill Gates set off more alarm bells. I’m not particularly well informed about the world, but I didn’t want to listen to rants like that without having prior knowledge providing a clearer idea about whether his views were based in reality or not (I was starting to doubt it). A quick google for his name and found everything I needed to know to never watch his videos again: GB news!

I’ve always been drawn to alternative culture (still am), sometimes venturing quite deeply down the rabbit hole. Sometimes it pains me to read some of the views expressed on STW against alternative cultures, but on the whole, reading STW has been very helpful for enhancing my bullshit detectors! :thumbup:

Grifter.

I selected his name from your text, right-clicked and chose Search Google for… and the top of the page told me all I need to know. Those eyes! Loonbag.

Yeah he went full looney a few years ago, shame really as he’s done some great documentaries in his time… or maybe he’s always been like that but his documentaries used to stay on topic for what he’s actually good at, nature and history…!!

He lost the plot during the Covid pandemic and went full conspiracy theory nut job.
Now he just spouts crap.

I was a bit gutted when Neil Oliver turned into a nutter, was a fan of his since Two Men In a Trench which was an excellent history series, then early coast was also brilliant.

Now though, geez.

I think what’s more disturbing is how YouTube has a symbiotic relationship with so many of these scumbags. It’s no accident that its algorithms like to slip Neil Oliver, Jordan Peterson, and innumerable other grievance peddlers into users’ feeds to try to draw them down its radicalisation rat holes. Oftentimes after you watch one you’ll see the results appearing in YouTube recommendations for weeks afterwards. Algorithmic recommendation is now something we have to talk to our kids about as we do alcohol and drug misuse. It should be heavily regulated but it’s a Wild West.

Another person who’s brain broke during covid when they spent way too much time online and alone with their thoughts.

We will be dealing with this for a very long time.

Algorithmic recommendation

Yes definitely a concern. Given what I said about being drawn to these sorts of things, and having two autistic children who will be growing up fed by the algorithm. Before the algorithms, you had to actively search with effort to find this stuff, but now it gets recommended to watch and pulls you into a feedback loop over it.

I was a bit gutted when Neil Oliver turned into a nutter, was a fan of his since Two Men In a Trench which was an excellent history series, then early coast was also brilliant.

Now though, geez.

He’s perhaps fallen victim of the Laurence Fox thing of having too much time on your hands, because youre not getting a lot of work even though a lot of your work is being seen, but at the same time being famous enough not to be able to get, or countenance getting, a proper job.

I think Oliver has been in a very odd career position – he fronted a lot of Coast and similar constructed, format-driven documentary. What been quite cleverly crafted about those shows is theyre infinitely repeatable, but also massively re-confgureable. So lots of episodes have latterly  been put to gather focussing on one topic around the whole coastline for instance rather than one specific length of coast. They’ve been able to do that because the element of each program works on their own, each individual topic in each episode is dealt with by one presenter – Neil looks at a foghorn, while down the road geoff hunts for fossils and across the bay Bob looks at a  ship wreck. You can take all the bits about foghorns from all the series and make a new program, and the same with fossils and the same with shipwrecks. Even cleverer really – was making the presenters wear the same clothes for everything they did

Its a program thats somehow able to seem contemporary without actually being current.

It made people like Oliver seem a lot busier as television presenters than the realy were. By the time the pandemic hit we’d all been watching coast week in week out – But Oliver hadn’t had any work from it for 10 years

What they can do now off course is continue to put out episodes without him in them it too

I think what’s more disturbing is how YouTube has a symbiotic relationship with so many of these scumbags.

I think Youtube somehow manages to fly under the radar in this respect – the criticisms that are levelled at Meta and Twitter as amplifiers of extreme content (with the exception perhaps of the current Musk death spiral) have actually always been much more true of Youtube. Not just in the sense of how its recommendation engine works, but in terms of reach, After the google search page its the second most visited website in the world and yet while Musk and Zuckerberg are constantly subject to analysis  of their adjenda, criticism, threats of legislation and regulation –  nobody real seems to know, care or talk about who operates Youtube or why its operated in the way it is.

Oliver and Fox have burnt their former careers.

Even if they wanted to turn things around and do a 180, it’s nigh on impossible now as they’ve made themselves pretty much unhirable by any reputable company.

So…

There is no redemption arc left and they have to continue down the conspiracy/far right route to get whatever money they can.

Id love to know, deep down, if they actually believe what they spout. I actually think Oliver does where as Fox, at some level, doesn’t. However, that makes him a particularly nasty shit as he is stoking tensions he doesn’t even believe in just for the money.

I’ve long ago blocked the likes of Oliver on YT, it’s the best thing to do.

nobody real seems to know, care or talk about who operates Youtube or why its operated in the way it is.

Youtube has been owned by Google for quite some time.

Youtube has been owned by Google for quite some time.

That’s a good start but arguably not useful in itself. Who are Google and why do they operate YouTube in the way they do? We don’t talk enough about what big tech is and what it means for humanity. Here’s an interesting (off-topic) recent Krebs on Security post about just one tiny facet of that edifice: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/the-global-surveillance-free-for-all-in-mobile-ad-data/

Well google is no different to Meta or Twitter or AWS really… Or any other big tech entities… It’s all about money and they all have their fair share of nefarious tax dodging and anti competition/ monopolising activities!

People moan about individuals trying to be tax efficient… But when it comes to goliaths like them it’s billions and billions, often larger than the GDP of entire countries.

JD Vance (who seems a lot smarter than he’s trying to make out as Trump’s running mate/heartbeat away from president) once came up with a couple of memorable quotes about the Republican Party, but which can be combined to make a phrase that can explain a lot of these opinion-forming media outlets.

It’s a phrase I find myself repeating more and more frequently.

“Appealing to the poorly paid and poorly educated who just want to blame somebody else for their shitty lives”