Ajax_the_Great1 wrote:
So if someone was out insulting your moral fiber by ridiculing what you do in a poorly made video, how would you feel about them?
Well if it's
this bad, I don't think I'd even worry about it. Oddly, I actually have a pretty good example that does apply to me. There's some guy who's been doing a series of atheist-themed videos on YouTube; I can't recall his name off the top of my head but he should be relatively easy to find. It looks like he's attempting to ape the in-your-face abrasive style of Richard Dawkins but doesn't have anything even close to the same level of education from the looks of it. He got around to making a video about "Wicca"; from the video itself I can only assume that he meant to be talking about neopaganism but since Wicca is the term most bandied about by the media that's the one he latched on to. He says a lot of pretty insulting, condescending shit in the video but he shows he doesn't really know a whole lot about it because he rambles about emo/Goth, vegetarians and a bunch of other random stuff that somehow in his mind ties in with "Wicca". He rehashes stereotypes that were old when he was still wearing diapers. Generally I get the feeling that he's more interested in provoking people and getting a negative reaction than trying to educate anyone about atheism or point out fallacies in peoples' belief systems. I considered posting a response on the video page but I was so floored by the unfocused stupidity and intentional unpleasantness of the video I couldn't think of one. After a few more minutes of thought, I decided to not even bother because it honestly wasn't worth the energy.
Initially I did feel angry, but it didn't last once 1). I realized that is
exactly what he was going for and 2). I watched more of it and said to myself "WTF is this kid talking about?". It never rose to the level of "I'd like to punch his lights out!". This guy doesn't really matter in the greater scheme of things and from the looks of the comments, the only people agreeing with him are either similarly unpleasant people or people who specifically don't like the things he talked about in that one video and will quickly turn on him once he decides to savage something they themselves believe in. Impact on my life? Zero, other than wasting the few minutes it took me to watch it. Impact on the lives of anyone like me? Likely also zero, since he's not radically changing anyone's minds with his approach, he's just preaching to his choir. End result, he really isn't worth my time to respond to but he did give me a good working example for this discussion here.
Now this video we're talking about here, I've been thinking about the style of it and it reminds me of another one I've seen regarding police surveilance of protestors. I'm starting to think that's where this guy got the idea for the Marines one; unfortunately for him he goes directly into inflammatory rhetoric and doesn't really back up his position very well so it comes off as a vastly inferior imitation. My guess is he's taking this position because he thinks it makes him look cool and iconoclastic but is too lazy to do any real work towards it. Because of that the video will probably just descend into obscurity after a while, only being resurrected by others who are also too lazy to do any real thinking. Unfortunately it will be useful to lazy people on both sides of the political spectrum; left will hold it up as the "truth" about the Marines, right will hold it up as being an example of how everyone on the left thinks.