The past few months have been totally absorbed by cultural events orbiting the question of women’s agency: the film Obsession and it’s insane popularity, the Lindsay Clancy trial, and now the Cornell 7. This is a fault-line for our societies; how we resolve it will (or ought to) determine how and whether we can continue to live with each other.
Much of the confusion is due to the fact that we hold two incompatible theories of human agency. On one hand, we believe that people have free-will and for this reason, when they do bad things, they have to be punished because they could have not done that thing. This is the cornerstone not just for our entire legal system, but for any moral framework of justice. On the other hand, we believe in material determinism, that people’s actions are per-determined by material causes, such that if a woman murders her children because of her hormones, she does not bear responsibility for that action. Exactly the same logic is at play in the Cornell 7 case. If a woman has sex while under the influence of any substance (even if voluntarily taken) then she is not responsible for that choice and that means she was raped, even though the men who had sex with her were (as far as I know) ALSO under the influence of substances and so (if we were being consistent) shouldn’t bear any responsibility for having had sex with her.
What emerges from these philosophical contradictions is a system of unaccountable privilege that benefits women in such a way that they may at any time claim that they do not bear responsibility for their choices, even if those reasons are that she was “too emotional over a breakup” or even that she just REGRETS it. In daily life she gets to enjoy the status of moral agent, but if ever she feels inclined, she may revoke that status and say that her agency was overwritten by some deterministic cause and therefore, she isn’t accountable for whatever thing she did.
For the record, I believe that women have equal agency to men, but this means that they must bear equal responsibility for their actions, regardless of whether the considerations and forces that act on men and women in any given situation are the same or different.
This shambolic state of affairs is untenable and intolerable. Men should not have to live alongside this kind of person. They should not have to live in a society that grants women opt-in accountability based on utterly incoherent theories of agency. They certainly should not have to live under this arrangement while being forced to call this “equality.”
This is also why pluralism doesn’t work in the long run. Eventually, the things on which our societies depend are deep philosophical and religious questions about value which have no clear answers. We simply have to collectively agree to how we will resolve those questions, and if people do not agree with that resolution, they should not be a part of that social arrangement.
Lol. So I had the bright idea to replace my thumbnails with some different ones that I though looked a little bit nicer, and somehow that action immediately assassinated my latest vid in the algo. I LOVE THIS PLATFORM SO MUCH!! Anyway, if you haven't seen it, here's the latest: https://youtu.be/1NXvB8nJPMw
Check it out and leave a like if you enjoy it. Maybe it'll resurrect the poor bastard.
I've also unlisted the Obsession response video because as much as I enjoyed making it, I don't want newcomers to the channel to happen across it and be completely confused. But I'll still keep it handy here.
Alright, I didn't want to post the essay until I could back it up with the video. These are really meant to be companion pieces. Anyway, the vid is about why Kant is wrong and sometimes you’ve gotta tell the categorical imperative to suck a fat one and mainline vampire blood for your homies.The essay...well the essay is much weirder. Vid: https://youtu.be/1NXvB8nJPMw Substack: thebarkingyears.substack.com/p/how-miyazaki-got-pw…
When I wrote my take on Obsession, I for one, did not realize that it was going to be the beginning of a month long siege of seething, brain-dead zoomettes and manlets, but I also didn’t predict that the discussion of women’s agency would prove so prescient. The Lindsay Clancy debacle has torn back the curtain on the way we think about female agency: that for a shockingly large number of people, it only exists within some idealized, friction-free state in which there are no external (or internal, as in the case of Clancy) forces acting upon her. And if any action that she takes is made in something less than that perfect state, she is not responsible for that action. I don’t think it requires a genius to understand that there is no moral or legal framework than can be shared by men and women on the other side of that belief.
Hey, fam. New essay up, in which I respond to concerns of some viewers and try to explain why I don't think we can avoid the Culture War, as unsavory as it may be at times.
What's up, fam? Sorry for the long hiatus. Life stuff, y'know. All (or mostly) good things, but man does it add up to there just being fewer hours in the day.
For a long time now, I've been debating whether or not I should shut this channel down. A couple of years ago, the Barking Years had a massive growth spurt when a video on the film Falling Down went kind of viral. I went from a little over 1k subs to around ten times that in a very short span of time. Even today, I think that probably 60% of my subscriber base came from two vids: Falling Down and Green Knight.
At first I was ecstatic, thought I was on my way to something truly life-changing, but I quickly realized that views on new videos were not keeping up with the changes in subs. In fact, it seemed like the correlation was actually kind of the other way around. I had another pretty substantial success talking about the Green Knight, but again, other videos seemed to experience downward pressure from the increased sub count.
After doing some research and listening to other creators, I've had my suspicions confirmed. Having a larger but disengaged subscriber base is an albatross around your neck if you're making content on YT.
I'm not blaming people. They watched a video, liked what they heard and subbed. Nothing wrong with that. But I'm not here following some formula. I'm not trying to occupy some niche, even if I understand how much easier that might be. These videos have been, in the most part, simply me exploring things that matter to me. Which means that just because the take I give you today may resonate, you may not care at all about the next thing I want to talk about.
Sometimes, the stuff that I'm interested in is highly legible to people scrolling around on Youtube, as with a discussion of masculinity (Green Knight) or a (somewhat) fresh take on a well-trodden culture classic (Falling Down).
But other times, they aren't.
The guys who want to hear about how heroic masculinity is awesome (and it is awesome) mostly DON'T want to hear a darker examination of the ways in which it can be taken advantage of (as with my Dark Knight vid which totally flopped), but those are the things that I'm drawn to. And there's only so many time you can watch videos you put your heart and soul into die on rocks of an algorithm primed to sell slop.
"Fucking hell, why are YouTubers ALWAYS COMPLAINING?"
Yeah, yeah. I get it, but I don’t really consider myself a Youtuber, and until you've done this shit yourself and had to look long and hard at the choice of expressing your passion or selling to the algo, then you DON'T get it.
Some of you guys have been ride-or-die this whole time and it would be corny for me to say something like "I love you guys" but the feeling is pretty much there. Still, I can't help the impression that the juice very often isn't worth the squeeze, and there's only so many times you can watch one of your low-effort shitposts stomp the fuck out of a passion vid before you start to wonder if you're just being a fucking idiot for trying to make the medium do something that it doesn't want to do.
Look, I love making videos. I'm gonna keep doing it, whether it's here or whether I decide to nuke this thing and start over. But in the meantime, I'm going to be changing how I do things around here. If I'm going to keep this thing, I'm going to run it in a way that makes it feel worth the effort. I'm still going to have my more thoughtful stuff, but I'm not going to shy away from being more aggro when I'm feeling it, and kind of maximizing the amount of fun I’m having. If I’m not enjoying this thing, then why am I doing it?
If you don't feel like that's what you're interested in—hey bro, absolutely no hard feelings for unsubscribing. You're doing me a favor. Like, seriously, I'm not being smug about that. I wish you well. For those of you who stick around, I’m going to try to be more consistent about putting stuff out, but the content may vary even more than it has in the past. Right now, I’m most active on Substack because despite having about a platform about 1/1000th of the size of this one, the growth feels more organic and more responsive to my effort. If there’s only one platform where you want to follow me, I think I’d recommend that one.
Well guys, that’s about it. If you read to the end of this thing, you're a hoss and I appreciate you. I don’t know if I’ll be able to smash it out in a WEEK but the next video is in the pipe. Take care of yourselves out there.
The Barking Years
The past few months have been totally absorbed by cultural events orbiting the question of women’s agency: the film Obsession and it’s insane popularity, the Lindsay Clancy trial, and now the Cornell 7. This is a fault-line for our societies; how we resolve it will (or ought to) determine how and whether we can continue to live with each other.
Much of the confusion is due to the fact that we hold two incompatible theories of human agency. On one hand, we believe that people have free-will and for this reason, when they do bad things, they have to be punished because they could have not done that thing. This is the cornerstone not just for our entire legal system, but for any moral framework of justice. On the other hand, we believe in material determinism, that people’s actions are per-determined by material causes, such that if a woman murders her children because of her hormones, she does not bear responsibility for that action. Exactly the same logic is at play in the Cornell 7 case. If a woman has sex while under the influence of any substance (even if voluntarily taken) then she is not responsible for that choice and that means she was raped, even though the men who had sex with her were (as far as I know) ALSO under the influence of substances and so (if we were being consistent) shouldn’t bear any responsibility for having had sex with her.
What emerges from these philosophical contradictions is a system of unaccountable privilege that benefits women in such a way that they may at any time claim that they do not bear responsibility for their choices, even if those reasons are that she was “too emotional over a breakup” or even that she just REGRETS it. In daily life she gets to enjoy the status of moral agent, but if ever she feels inclined, she may revoke that status and say that her agency was overwritten by some deterministic cause and therefore, she isn’t accountable for whatever thing she did.
For the record, I believe that women have equal agency to men, but this means that they must bear equal responsibility for their actions, regardless of whether the considerations and forces that act on men and women in any given situation are the same or different.
This shambolic state of affairs is untenable and intolerable. Men should not have to live alongside this kind of person. They should not have to live in a society that grants women opt-in accountability based on utterly incoherent theories of agency. They certainly should not have to live under this arrangement while being forced to call this “equality.”
This is also why pluralism doesn’t work in the long run. Eventually, the things on which our societies depend are deep philosophical and religious questions about value which have no clear answers. We simply have to collectively agree to how we will resolve those questions, and if people do not agree with that resolution, they should not be a part of that social arrangement.
2 days ago | [YT] | 27
View 4 replies
The Barking Years
Lol. So I had the bright idea to replace my thumbnails with some different ones that I though looked a little bit nicer, and somehow that action immediately assassinated my latest vid in the algo. I LOVE THIS PLATFORM SO MUCH!! Anyway, if you haven't seen it, here's the latest: https://youtu.be/1NXvB8nJPMw
Check it out and leave a like if you enjoy it. Maybe it'll resurrect the poor bastard.
3 days ago | [YT] | 12
View 2 replies
The Barking Years
I've also unlisted the Obsession response video because as much as I enjoyed making it, I don't want newcomers to the channel to happen across it and be completely confused. But I'll still keep it handy here.
1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 0
View 0 replies
The Barking Years
Alright, I didn't want to post the essay until I could back it up with the video. These are really meant to be companion pieces. Anyway, the vid is about why Kant is wrong and sometimes you’ve gotta tell the categorical imperative to suck a fat one and mainline vampire blood for your homies.The essay...well the essay is much weirder.
Vid: https://youtu.be/1NXvB8nJPMw
Substack: thebarkingyears.substack.com/p/how-miyazaki-got-pw…
1 week ago | [YT] | 11
View 0 replies
The Barking Years
Next video is in production (might be putting out a teaser soon) but in the meantime, here's the latest essay from the Sub: thebarkingyears.substack.com/p/the-btch-hypothesis
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 23
View 3 replies
The Barking Years
When I wrote my take on Obsession, I for one, did not realize that it was going to be the beginning of a month long siege of seething, brain-dead zoomettes and manlets, but I also didn’t predict that the discussion of women’s agency would prove so prescient. The Lindsay Clancy debacle has torn back the curtain on the way we think about female agency: that for a shockingly large number of people, it only exists within some idealized, friction-free state in which there are no external (or internal, as in the case of Clancy) forces acting upon her. And if any action that she takes is made in something less than that perfect state, she is not responsible for that action. I don’t think it requires a genius to understand that there is no moral or legal framework than can be shared by men and women on the other side of that belief.
1 month ago | [YT] | 49
View 33 replies
The Barking Years
Updates! New essay out on the substack. It's about fine dining in the greater New York metropolitan area (it is not).
thebarkingyears.substack.com/p/modern-life-makes-y…
Next video essay: audio is recorded and ready to begin editing.
1 month ago | [YT] | 28
View 1 reply
The Barking Years
New essay talking about the latest Evil Dead film and the fact that every other horror movie is about why men are the worst.
thebarkingyears.substack.com/p/evil-dead-burn-and-…
2 months ago | [YT] | 31
View 10 replies
The Barking Years
Hey, fam. New essay up, in which I respond to concerns of some viewers and try to explain why I don't think we can avoid the Culture War, as unsavory as it may be at times.
thebarkingyears.substack.com/p/why-the-culture-war…
2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 20
View 2 replies
The Barking Years
Future of the Channel / Effort Post Incoming:
What's up, fam? Sorry for the long hiatus. Life stuff, y'know. All (or mostly) good things, but man does it add up to there just being fewer hours in the day.
For a long time now, I've been debating whether or not I should shut this channel down. A couple of years ago, the Barking Years had a massive growth spurt when a video on the film Falling Down went kind of viral. I went from a little over 1k subs to around ten times that in a very short span of time. Even today, I think that probably 60% of my subscriber base came from two vids: Falling Down and Green Knight.
At first I was ecstatic, thought I was on my way to something truly life-changing, but I quickly realized that views on new videos were not keeping up with the changes in subs. In fact, it seemed like the correlation was actually kind of the other way around. I had another pretty substantial success talking about the Green Knight, but again, other videos seemed to experience downward pressure from the increased sub count.
After doing some research and listening to other creators, I've had my suspicions confirmed. Having a larger but disengaged subscriber base is an albatross around your neck if you're making content on YT.
I'm not blaming people. They watched a video, liked what they heard and subbed. Nothing wrong with that. But I'm not here following some formula. I'm not trying to occupy some niche, even if I understand how much easier that might be. These videos have been, in the most part, simply me exploring things that matter to me. Which means that just because the take I give you today may resonate, you may not care at all about the next thing I want to talk about.
Sometimes, the stuff that I'm interested in is highly legible to people scrolling around on Youtube, as with a discussion of masculinity (Green Knight) or a (somewhat) fresh take on a well-trodden culture classic (Falling Down).
But other times, they aren't.
The guys who want to hear about how heroic masculinity is awesome (and it is awesome) mostly DON'T want to hear a darker examination of the ways in which it can be taken advantage of (as with my Dark Knight vid which totally flopped), but those are the things that I'm drawn to. And there's only so many time you can watch videos you put your heart and soul into die on rocks of an algorithm primed to sell slop.
"Fucking hell, why are YouTubers ALWAYS COMPLAINING?"
Yeah, yeah. I get it, but I don’t really consider myself a Youtuber, and until you've done this shit yourself and had to look long and hard at the choice of expressing your passion or selling to the algo, then you DON'T get it.
Some of you guys have been ride-or-die this whole time and it would be corny for me to say something like "I love you guys" but the feeling is pretty much there. Still, I can't help the impression that the juice very often isn't worth the squeeze, and there's only so many times you can watch one of your low-effort shitposts stomp the fuck out of a passion vid before you start to wonder if you're just being a fucking idiot for trying to make the medium do something that it doesn't want to do.
Look, I love making videos. I'm gonna keep doing it, whether it's here or whether I decide to nuke this thing and start over. But in the meantime, I'm going to be changing how I do things around here. If I'm going to keep this thing, I'm going to run it in a way that makes it feel worth the effort. I'm still going to have my more thoughtful stuff, but I'm not going to shy away from being more aggro when I'm feeling it, and kind of maximizing the amount of fun I’m having. If I’m not enjoying this thing, then why am I doing it?
If you don't feel like that's what you're interested in—hey bro, absolutely no hard feelings for unsubscribing. You're doing me a favor. Like, seriously, I'm not being smug about that. I wish you well. For those of you who stick around, I’m going to try to be more consistent about putting stuff out, but the content may vary even more than it has in the past. Right now, I’m most active on Substack because despite having about a platform about 1/1000th of the size of this one, the growth feels more organic and more responsive to my effort. If there’s only one platform where you want to follow me, I think I’d recommend that one.
Well guys, that’s about it. If you read to the end of this thing, you're a hoss and I appreciate you. I don’t know if I’ll be able to smash it out in a WEEK but the next video is in the pipe. Take care of yourselves out there.
2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 34
View 19 replies
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