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YouTube deleted an electronics repair channel [video] (youtube.com)
775 points by lmilcin on July 7, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 554 comments



Youtube previously banned hacking demonstration videos, and his content might have got caught up in it. It could have been an accident, but even without evidence, one can't help but hypothesize he browsed or engaged with the wrong kind of ideas, or the wrong kind of people were interested in what he did and got associated with that traffic, triggering a cancellation. Conspiracy? Maybe, it doesn't take much to speculate on that conclusion, and there is enough mistrust in tech platforms right now that such a view would just be a product of the where their brands are. Youtube's service, their rules. They have the discretion to disappear peoples content for any reason, but it's worth considering that dumb stuff like this is a multiplier for reinforcing peoples negative views of their service. It's not a question of whether this person was arbitrarily cancelled, it's whether that's what everyone else thinks.

Would you launch, invest in, or run a business that depended on Youtube? If there is hesitation, that's a problem with the platform's brand. In an economics sense, it's becoming an inferior product - something you substitute away from as soon as you can afford to. There is still lots of money to be made in inferior products, but that does imply a negative inflection point for growth.


They banned home hacking videos and proof-of-concept videos only.

You can still host your ransomware kit ad on YouTube without any problems for months.


It's not just Youtube, Android apps and developers get banned as well, often with little explanation or recourse. I'm not sure why anyone would invest time or money building a business on any of Google's platforms.


1) Alphabet needs to be broken up (at least YouTube, Google the search engine, and the ad business).

Ideally, there would be a way to pull apart the hosting business, the “social”/channel/search business, and the ad delivery businesses. YouTube that runs only 3rd party ads looks very different than having to directly manage its own relationships with brands.

2) We need a creators bill of rights. Platforms that allow users to upload and share content should be required to inform users why content is removed, have a clear mechanism for appeal to a 3rd party, and allow users to exfiltrate their content if it even if it is removed.


I hate people that normalised censorship of this kind and it was predictable that someone would crash the fun at some point...

Our own fault to give single corps that much control on content though. Content creators should always upload their videos to other platforms too. If those get a critical mass of content, they might stand a chance.


If Youtube was liable for mistakes/wrongfully enforce their guidelines, this would be way less stressful.

This guy would go to a website and file a claim on a legal authority that would put Youtube's balls in a wheel that would squeeze them gradually the longer Youtube would take to present the case with facts that support the take down, and I'm pretty sure you'd start to receive less auto-replies and you'd get more humans typing.

Youtube is fucking over people's livelihoods because of a system that doesn't work properly, so they should pay for that. Shouldn't be the other way around.

If Youtube gives the tools for people to make money on it, then Youtube should be responsible for such people - not only advertisers.


This is a shame. I strongly recommend this Python program called youtube-dl for archiving any videos you care about. Occasionally it stops working but if you update it, it always works after the update.


I upvoted this because it's important to know. Too much good stuff gets deleted from YouTube.

But I have mixed feelings, because the first rule of youtube-dl is you don't talk about youtube-dl. E.g. it used to have a Wikipedia page but that got removed!


Business idea: videos creators pay $$ per month for a service to constantly scrap their videos from youtube as a backup system. If youtube delete your channel, in one click you can recreate it and reupload everything to another platform (or an alternative channel, whatever)


Presumably the creators already have their videos, since they uploaded them to youtube in the first place. Hopefully they don't delete their own copies and rely on Google to safeguard them, though!


Video files are one part of the data you lose, but you also have metadata, such as title, description, etc.


How about the community you lost due to a fake copyright claim or policy claim? Friends, followers, messages, ...

We desperately truly worldwide, encompassing, independent, standardized-so-that-anyone-can-communicatio-to-everyone p2p social networks. Social network providers should have only the role of any service provider, so you can change them on a daily basis with no repercusions, just as you can freely change your tailor, barber, news provider or internet provider.


Maybe. If "live Streaming" something I suspect the user isn't keeping a copy.


Serious question: are there any legal impediments to importing or mirroring an entire channel from youtube to other platforms?

Because I wouldn't be surprised to see YouTube or certain creators objecting to this.


Not if the person requesting the videos be scraped is the person responsible for making the videos in the first place. If I decide to move my own channel's videos off YouTube, YouTube doesn't exactly have the right to argue otherwise.

And even if the new site/service doesn't get permission, YouTube generally doesn't come into the picture. It'd be a copyright issue between the service/person using it and the channel creator.


This is the big question. I have seen it done, but definitely there are things that can change when a certain scale is reach.

Basically the idea would be something similar to Anchor.


It would be awesome, and I have a huge network of creators ready to use this product when available. Email me at joakim(at) matchmade.tv if you're interested in developing this.


I haven’t done it myself because I except users to be mostly people with the worst content (either illegal or awful in other ways), and I personally don’t want to deal with them.

Though I’m interested to have your opinion on this. My email is easy to find through my profile.

Also, anyone reading this, please feel free to take the idea and implement it if you think there is something interesting to do here.


I think there is definitely something here. If you look at some recent trends:

1. Past few years have seen a huge growth in new content distribution networks, which are trying to lure creators to rehost their content in their platforms. Usually these are "internet-tv" channels that come automatically offered by TV providers nowadays

2. This constant stream of high profile cases where people lose livelihoods because of reliance on a single platform

3. The massive increase in mature and professional youtubers in the past 10 years.

4. Lowering costs in storage and bandwith

Combining these all it seems to be clear there is some kind of viable business in some kind of "Anchor of video distribution" for lack of better phrasing.


This would be a neat idea, but cancel culture would merely start targeting these platforms as well.


I don’t have a solution to cancel culture, but YouTube is already deleting stuff around by itself without people even asking for it to be removed. I would think there is a demand for backups of uploaded content, but don’t take my words for it :)


In almost all cases, I'd bet some human did ask for this content to be removed.

Either a copyright claim, or a user hitting 'report', or a takedown request, etc.


While a great business idea, you can also use youtube-dl to backup your youtube videos locally.


Ideally you don't do this, but rather just keep the video that you uploaded in the first place. Obviously you can't do this retroactively if you haven't already been doing it, but it's preferable from a quality and time perspective these days considering that in addition to the extra compression, most videos now are being packaged and delivered as a zillion HLS/DASH segments that youtube-dl has to fetch and reassemble.

YouTube also lets creators download (sub-1080p) MP4s of their originally uploaded video, and Google Takeout will also archive all your videos this way, but of course this is assumes your channel was not recently deleted.


Does YouTube allow you access to your mezzanine originals if they delete your channel? They should, and it takes the sting out a bit if so. If not, monsters.


I'm not sure, having thankfully never had a channel deleted. That said, even with an account in good standing, the download you have access to is not the mezzanine original, but an mp4 that tops out at HD, even if you originally uploaded a 4K file.


Youtube-dl can download 4k videos from youtube, but they won't be the original encode you uploaded.


Sure, I'm just describing a nice web interface on top of youtube-dl. Someone could do it quite quickly IMHO.

- daily scheduler for downloads, pay more for more frequent backups

- simple web interface to manage your account

- system to upload your backup to somewhere else

So basically 3 components for a simple MVP that can be done on top of any cloud provider.


Depending on the channel, this could be terabytes of content.


You can specify clear limits on how much content you will save per user. Or ask for more money for people with huge amount of videos.


When that dude stops updating his tool it'll truely be the end of days.


If I get the guy from the originally posted video right, he uses services that do exactly that (+ also directly publish the content on their platform). And it sounds like they do it for free, to get content on their platform.


Use the same short links, too.


There is no Web 2.0. There are endless versions of sort of "AOL Reloaded." Why we embrace that is getting less and less clear.


> There is no Web 2.0. There are endless versions of sort of "AOL Reloaded." Why we embrace that is getting less and less clear.

There was a web 2.0. It allowed tech giants to hoard a lot of data before cancelling the web 2.0 themselves. This is why I'm not using microformats and semantic HTML in my webpages, it only profits Google which then display the product of my hardwork on their own webpages without giving back anything.


We need to decouple video hosting from discoverability.


somewhat oddly google has "video search" with results from many sources..

But discoverability is a huge problem.


You're technically correct in that the video search returns results from different websites, however the results are almost exclusively youtube or some website embedding a youtube video.

"Almost exclusively" isn't an exaggeration, either. You have to dig pretty deep before you start seeing some results from other video hosting platforms.


Someone make a service that automates uploading and managing channels on every video platform known to date:

Youtube vimeo dailymotion etc.

Wouldn’t that be a great tool for creators?


It would be awesome, and I have a huge network of creators ready to use this product when available. Email me at joakim(at) matchmade.tv if you're interested in developing this.


Something like that doesn't exist? Content creators and social media agency have to upload and curate their videos individually?


Censorship is bad. Discuss a better future for video at https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/. Current options seem like Bitchute (https://www.bitchute.com/), LBRY (https://lbry.com/), and D.tube (https://d.tube/).

Reddit and Twitter alternatives are listed at https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...


Copyright and patents need to be done away with or updated to work with contemporary thinking -- although, I don't trust the latter, so I'll stick with 'do away with'.

People whine about YouTube being strict about content, well, they are just trying to cover their ass. As soon as a real replacement comes along and gets big enough, it's going to have the same issues as YouTube.

I've seen it happen over and over again. One example is imgur. It was a nice replacement for all the image share sites and their annoying ads. But, now it has ads too. I've seen people asking for an imgur replacement.


It's not just copyrights and patents, though. One of the main benefits of YouTube is that it handles all that for you. Sometimes it doesn't quite work, but it's pretty valuable to be able to post a video with some music and have it claimed, and they take the revenue, rather than they sue you and/or issue a take down notice of some kind.

What about things like hate speech, abusive imagery and content aimed at children that actually is unsuitable?


Ideally each community runs their own servers. Something like https://joinpeertube.org/en/ can help with that. So for example someone would run an electronics and repair instance that only has those kinds of videos. Those are then all discoverable by the Fediverse.

This way also controversial instances can exist and people can choose to follow them or not. What's controversial in one country may not be in another. One size fits all doesn't work.


Everyone wants a youtube replacement, but I'd rather see more options for niche content. It might not be doable for most people to create something big enough to give something the size of youtube a run for their money, but someone could make a site that is basically a private bit torrent tracker that people could upload their own videos to. They could court advertisers, or offer a small subscription to be able to log in for more than free content. Then you'd just need a way of finding sites like this.


I've considered (though haven't had the energy) to build a serverless AWS video-on-demand project that anyone could spin up in their own AWS account, then either "just host" their own content or be a provider, and provide billing to customers.

Yes, that means that serving videos would cost money rather than earn money... or the provider could run a donation/ad service.

In any case, the ability to procure and operation a world-scale video distribution website easily is there, it is a matter of building it and having cost estimates built in.


Have you thought about integrating a way to bill the viewers directly? There are all kinds of content on the internet that I'd be willing to pay $2-5 on the spot to get a high quality stream that I could watch for some period of time.


He's got the channel back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg

However, if I was in the same situation I would seriously consider moving elsewhere, or at least keeping my stuff in more than one place just in case.


Because of a miscommunication youtube once deleted some of our D conference videos. Fortunately, we had a backup of them.

Moral: don't rely on the cloud as the only copy of your data. If you don't control it, it can disappear at any moment for any reason.


> don't rely on the cloud as the only copy of your data

The real moral: don't think of YouTube (a public video discovery platform) as a cloud backup tool. They don't pretend to be and you shouldn't think of it as so.


Federated (decentralised) video hosting: PeerTube. https://joinpeertube.com

- Don't use a company's service, then complain.

- Use a federated server, and share videos freely.

- Most importantly, learn what the Fediverse is.

Forget BitTube, Daily Motion, LBRY, or whatever other proprietary (company owned) video hosting site. The reason you've never heard of PeerTube is because it's a a community project who don't advertise their software, because it's not a product. It's free (as in cost and freedom) for anyone to to use and it works.

> But I won't get nearly enough views

Then stay on YouTube. If you value your freedom, you'll make the decision and the views will come. Be the change.


your link seems broken, I believe it's .org not .com


Agadmator (a chess youtuber) complained about his live podcast being taken down by youtube as well. It appears there is a new youtube algorithm out there which doesn't like it when black's position is compromised by white.


The problem with bandwidth is that its cure is largely political.

Legislations and agreements that prevent competition, community run ISPs... Help YouTube.

On more thought, bandwidth isn't the major politically caused road block. It's copyright laws.

Facebook and Microsoft are both capable of building YouTube clones.

But Microsoft has limited itself to cooperate video hosting.

And I believe Facebook has intentionally bad video discovery mechanism to keep copyright sharks at bay.

Porn hosting is pretty much triving in part because copyright laws / enforcement is weak there.

YouTube started aggressive, automated takedowns because of copyright laws.

Fix the laws and the tech will take care of the rest.


And Youtube let's fraudsters who claim to get you money for free run channels. I tweeted to them about the recently fraudulent ads that I see, but they take no action. I still see the same ads over and over again. they seem to be targeting the gullible people who want 'secret pubg level' or 'get cashback of 500 in one hour' or get '10000 subscribers within one day'. all of which are fraudulent, that I am sure.


John Gruber and Ben Thompson discussed a comparison of podcast vs. youtube and how podcasting isn't dominated by one company like youtube is for video. This is in the context of Joe Rogan moving to spotify. https://overcast.fm/+B7NB1G3rw/44:01


Spotify is trying real hard to become the YouTube of podcasts unfortunately.


This is surely getting out of hand, we need to go back to the days of competition. Google controls everything!


Just posted a topic about another channel that got deleted, 'CraigTube':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781180


These services can't be trusted anymore as a single point of failure. Distributed torrent like systems need to replace them. Trusting any of these companies as the stewards of content is foolish at this point.


While we're here getting riled up about the subject of this video, the content itself features a cleverly disguised banner running in a recorded video that cannot be blocked or paid to avoid. Well played, sir.


Centralized service and Youtube can apply censorship as they like. This is by nature. I'd suggest more people get into p2p network like ZeroNet or PeerTube if they value freedom of speech over popularity.


He's back online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg

It was a wrongful termination.


What would it take to automatically upload every youtube video viewed in Chrome or Firefox to eg ipfs via a browser extension?


Lots and lots of storage.


Two ads to get to the video? Better a TLDW.


I have uBlock Origin on Firefox (both for my phone and my laptop) and I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube.


I also have it on Firefox here in Windows 10, but it couldn't stop those two ads.


It is hard to underestimate importance of the lack of competition in FAANG services.


We should have the UN mandate IPv6 adoption everywhere, then that a block of public IPs for everyone is considered a human right, and great part of the issue would be over.


These companies need to be broken up.


It looks like more of Big Tech is against the 'right to repair' than just Apple.

I'd like to know what 'policy violations' were committed by Jordan Pier. But of course, Youtube has no obligation to let him know or to let his viewers know.


The banned channel apparently contained mostly "vintage audio repair", not exactly Google's bread and butter. Also they allow numerous other creators doing repair (ifixit, louis rossman, even the channel that posted this video).

This probably isn't an anti-repair move, but a Kafkaesque bureaucratic one. Still an annoying problem.


It would be nice to know the exact reason the Youtube decided to kill this and not other repair channels.

As an amateur I am subscribed to many repair channels and I can't see any specific reason why this particular channel would deserve getting banned.


An algorithm just deleted entire channel without a warning?


Wouldn't suprise me. A woodworking channel I watch had all of its videos deleted with no warning. The channel owner said that customer support told him it's against their policy to say why videos are deleted.


They probably don't even know why, or it's just too much effort to find out. The Algorithm Has Spoken. YouTube makes enough money anyway so why bother doing right by people?

At YouTube's scale it's almost impossible to not mess up these kind of things some of the time, that's okay. The unforgiving part is that they just don't care.


Yeah but these aren't being auto-deleted with logs or reason. They are almost certainly sitting in a table somewhere marked as deleted by algo. So they do know why, they just don't care.


Someone knows why. It's likely that the YT support rep doesn't know why, and it's likely not information you want to share with low paid outsourced staff.


Reminds me of a chapter in the book, "Weapons of Math Destruction"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction


Oh the "algorithm". Default excuse so that nobody is responsible. Someone is responsible.


Happens all the time on YouTube.


Is there a good video backup tool that archives a channel for later viewing?


# Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory:

$ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists


Yes, youtube-dl (also handles many, many other sites)

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl


Why does an AI have that power?


Situations like this are precisely why I'm against people who want to "automate everything" --- sooner or later a complex system is going to do something wrong, possibly with severe consequences, and you're going to have a very hard time figuring out what happened and how to fix it.


Because somewhere north of 500 hours of content is uploaded to YT every minute. Scanning and moderating that with people would be very expensive so they turned it mostly over to algorithms to have a hope of keeping some control over the nature of YouTube to keep it advertiser friendly. Then when a channel has accrued enough strikes to warrant removal you as YouTube potentially have hundreds of hours of video to consider if you're trying to manually review removals.


I can understand the inspection and analysis, but why automate the decision making over something that terminates potential revenue, and hampers goodwill?


Except for the larger channels any individual channel doesn't bring in much revenue and the larger channels get some contact with a rep where they can get actual support. Though even that can be spotty from the stories some channels tell; like the time one of CGPGrey's secondary channels was banned... for impersonating CGPGrey.


Because it helps against abuse, allows youtube to claim "We are doing something about X" and is pretty dang cheap.

And the cost of getting it wrong is pretty low for youtube.


There is nothing wrong with the AI having that power as such IMO, as long as humans have the ability to override it. The problems are mostly in that last part IMO.


Well in this particular case the YouTube humans surely have the ability but won't do anything about it. It feels pretty much the same, if you're at the receiving end of the stick.


I'm not so sure the regular Google support people have all that much power to change things; based on the various story I hear, I suspect they have very little power.


Trial by robot, welcome to 2020


It sounds like Mr. Carlson's Lab I hope he doesn't get the boot too.

https://www.youtube.com/user/MrCarlsonsLab


Considering it's YouTube, it seems a lot more likely that some black box AI kept picking up on him saying electron gun and preemptively nuked his channel over fear of guns. Wouldn't even be close to the first time something similar has happened, and most definitely wont be the last.


There's channels out there whose main topic of conversation is guns, lots of them! I'd be surprised if it's that.


They also frequently get deleted, which is why a lot of people who have channels that feature or regard guns also have second or third channels for non-gun related things, on which they refer to them as "pew-pews" or other similar infantile things that are less likely to be flagged by an AI reading transcripts.


You can talk about guns in general. For instance it's totally ok to comment on how guns are bad. But it's against YouTube policy to provide any information on the manufacturing, assembly or sale of firearms. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en


>You can talk about guns in general.

>But it's against YouTube policy to provide any information on the manufacturing, assembly or sale of firearms

These statements don't square with each other. I don't think there's any way to have even a historical discussion about arms (or many other subjects) without "providing any information about" manufacturing, assembly or sale.

So I guess you can talk about guns until you draw someone's ire or the algo flags you at which point the latter statement is the justification for kicking out your channel.


Youtube is a platform.

But can one really build a business on that platform? What kind of protections does the enterpreneur have? Do they have a contract with youtube? Is it easy to switch to some other platform?

How hard is it to buy video hosting from a web hotel?

I think the whole idea of the internet was a difference to these "dial in" services. On the internet, you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls. That's the whole point.


The audiences won't move. Mixer proved it recently, they bought two of the top streamers from twitch (Ninja and Shroud) but barely a fraction of their audiences would leave twitch for mixer, maybe 10% if that.

More to the point, it's not that simple, it's not just streaming but apps for all the mobile devices + everything else that people watch video on (xbox, playstation, smart tv's).


Moving takes time (and some marketing/word of mouth). Mixer wasn't willing to invest that time, which was very disappointing, because technologically speaking they had a very interesting platform, despite some flaws they never got around to fixing. I would have liked to stream Beat Saber on it and was only waiting for the necessary mods... Which someone finally implemented like 1 week before Mixer announced they were going down. Probably a bummer for whoever worked on that, too...


I don't think any amount of time would've helped. Twitch is long established as the place for video game streaming. It's possible that mixer could have established itself as a place for IRL streaming back when IRL was banned on twitch, but mixer was always under the xbox/gaming part of microsoft so ultimately IRL was contrary to their focus.


I'm not sure those are comparable. If you remove ninja and shroud, you're left with ~infinity-2 people playing FPS games on twitch. Removing a high quality electronics repair channel on YouTube is a significant impact on that class of content.

I'm going away from YouTube to twitch and other services for some specific tech content. If it's relatively unique, people will find it. (Or if you build awareness over a long time, rather than starting on the day of disappearance)


I 100% believe they are comparable. People tend to watch channels for the personality behind the camera. Ninja and Shroud both do stream FPS games and hundreds of other people stream them too, but look at their numbers. They get more views because the people want to watch them, not somebody else.


They want to watch when those streamers are available. The tiny percentage which moved to mixer pretty much confirmed that not others will just find someone else to watch instead. It's like TV celebrities. People will be really into one reality tv, but when it ends they'll pick up another one.


That's what I am saying, the tech channels are the same way. There are an abundance of tech channels out there, once one gets accidentally deleted from Youtube, people will just pick another.


> How hard is it to buy video hosting from a web hotel?

You can trivially host a peertube instance (or use an existing one). The question is how to move your viewers there.

There doesn't seem to be anything explicitly stopping big accounts from mirroring content. See LTT channel creating floatplane (https://www.htxt.co.za/2019/12/17/linus-tech-tips-streaming-...)


Build your own video hosting and streaming site? It's been done. They don't last.

There were no walls once. But it turns out building walls is a great way to make a lot of money.


It's also that hosting video is still pretty expensive at large scales and the only way to make money with advertising is with huge audiences. Other models like subscriptions has a chicken and egg problem of needing to simultaneously have enough subscribers to get creators to use your new service and enough creators to get people to pay.


> On the internet, you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls. That's the whole point.

The whole issue is that serving videos is very expensive to do as a "run your thing" effort. YouTube and Netflix alone are soaking up a lot of Internet bandwidth, so the subsidy YT is providing to video creators and viewers should not be underestimated. And this means YT gets to decide what they want to host.


Yes they have a contract "YouTube Terms and Conditions" not really favorable for the content creator.


> you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls

Welcome to the future Marty! How was your ride in the time machine? I think you've got some catching up to do from the web/world of the early 2000's that you've just come from and are describing here.

Let me fill you in on what has happened. Platform Monopolies are in full swing, and the internet is now a corporate owned web - with a myriad of apps that are surveilling our every touch and click (US but also abroad). Palantir has terrifying racist policing algorithms, the NSA is plugged into everything and has a dragnet filling a complex database for US 'homeland security', social media/Facebook campaigns can be used by 'Doublespeak'-ing authoritarian childhood-traumatized leaders to win elections [1], and Crypto AG is a CIA owned company that has been selling back-doored cryptography tools to national governments for many decades. [2]

Oh and you might want to Google 'Edward Snowden' and go back and read some of the great the Guardian articles published about it. [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-mJnYmdVmQ

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500231 or https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812537258/uncovering-the-cias...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden...

-

edit: seriously though - Intellectual Property laws and the Silicon Valley strategy of purchasing IP by buying up competition is suffocating and stifling much needed access to essential technologies, depriving humans the ability to remix, reuse and have access to the underlying technical components in a modular fashion. Our current reality is killing our ability to meet these human needs for play, growth, autonomy and cooperation.

The most promising change I see possible is a transition to Commons-based peer production, using the Holographic chain distributed app pattern by Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun, together with a move to mutual credit currencies, replacing mechanisms and dynamics that create or sustain the artificial scarcity of information or knowledge. This world would bring us universal access and shared control of a rich Commons, fully accessible by every child.

Essentially what I am describing is an open source world. An open source economic system made up of unencloseable carriers and ever-evolving protocols, immersing us in a diverse and beautiful Commons - our shared inheritance.


Things will improve but first they have to get worse.


No. I think you're just not connected to those already suffering. Some people are living in hell today. [1]

I think the narrative you describe comes from ubiquitous psychopathology, which affects all of us. In other words: the weight of our current systems creates a low level mental illness for all who are under it's influence and control. This weight comes from the continual stresses digitally technological society exerts on us. This is the shared reality of digital Rentier Capitalism [2]. It means the system keeps most of us fragmented and passive.

But I think your narrative is dangerous. To believe more suffering has to happen, just because you didn't experience pain directly doesn't mean others' suffering isn't worthy of acting upon. All you did is reveal your privilege, which is a great first step. Next comes awareness, should you choose to accept that important mission [3]

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-clas...

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8


> No. I think you're just not connected to those already suffering. Some people are living in hell today. [1]

If you think things can't or won't get even worse, you're being too optimistic. Even if you think some people are already experiencing a maximally bad time, "some" can become "more".


Guy Standing does wonderful work, very inspiring. I also applaud your faith in gradual improvements and the quality of your posts. We need many of you. I've become to cynical. I hope you make it before the rest of us burn everything to the ground.


TL;DR: The channel seems to have been deleted by mistake, potentially by an automated moderation algorithm.

Consequences of having tons of bad actors (like on any website). I hope the channel will be restored after contacting support, esp. since it has a decent following.


Reported to insiders for escalation.


As long as insiders keep putting out the high profile fires, the real problem remains. If everyone can't benefit from having access to an insider, then it would be better for everyone to keep getting hit in the face with the fact that this is a real problem, rather than hiding the problem from most people by having insiders fix the few cases everyone else ever might notice.


Also please have a look at Craig Tube/Vinyl TV, his channels have returned under a slightly different new name, but all the previous content has been lost from the old ones:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw

https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos

Archived copies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200227065130/https://www.youtu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120625045947/https://www.youtu...


YouTube = the new PayPal



I mean if YouTube is deleting flat earther videos than they should be deleting religious ones too.

The thing is that they shouldn't be deleting flat earther videos, and instead delete videos that are explicitly illegal.


You started a grotesque religious flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. No more of this please.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23759919.


As far as I can find, they're not deleting flat earth videos. Closest thing I could find was them saying that they were deprioritizing them in recommendations:

https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/01/continuing-our-work-t...


I don't get how you compare religious videos with flat earthers but I agree with your conclusion.


They both are areas of thought which promote ideas (sometimes framed as facts) without sufficient demonstrable evidence (otherwise validating the so called framework of facts).

But I would add neither should be taken down unless the videos promoting such ideas are also promoting violence.

Misinformation, disinformation -- whatever -- the onus is on the audience to educate themselves and arrive at hopefully an informed conclusion. If someone walks away from a video with the belief, that god or some god is real, or that the earth is flat, then so it goes.

Youtube is ofc welcome to moderate how they see fit here. However it is a laughable double-standard to selectively allow one faith-based belief system (religion) over another (flat-earth).


> They both are areas of thought which promote ideas (sometimes framed as facts) without sufficient demonstrable evidence (otherwise validating the so called framework of facts).

"Sufficient" (emphasis mine) for what?

If you're applying a particular approach to epistemology, I think you'll have a hard time defending it as unquestionably superior to the epistemologies held by others.


i am not exactly sure i understand your question -- are you asking if i think the perspective (mine), which thinks the two do not provide sufficient reasoning/knowledge/whatever, is unquestionably superior?

if that is your question, then my answer is: i do not hold the notion, that an approach (employed by me or by anyone), is unquestionably superior -- i do think, however, and am happy to point out, that via known, reliable approaches, these perspectives do not provide anything more than just words and reasoning (perhaps more specifically, philosophical argument). nothing quantifiable, observable, measurable, reproducible; just philosophizing. therefore, i consider them equivalent in this regard and moreover think it strange for YouTube to moderate them differently (as if, because one is theological, therefore it must be regarded as a loftier, more sophisticated (?) pursuit, and untouchable).

in short, i think words are just words, and i'll continue to ask both camps to demonstrate, that their words are actually something more, via known approaches, or alternative ones.


I agree with your point, but it was hard to come to that conclusion. Mostly because I'm constantly distracted by it being voiced in my head by Christopher Walken due to how many commas you just jammed on in there.


haha, word. legit made me laugh.

will try to dial it back. commas have always been my kryptonite.

thanks for the feedback.

https://youtu.be/XQ7z57qrZU8


Some religions (including most variants of Christianity) proposed models of universe equally as absurd as flat Earth.

Most updated their models when science proved they are wrong. But the holy scripture which specified these models in the first place remained and many of them declare holy scripture to still be 100% truth.

That's a self-contradicting stance and you cannot defend it without hardcore mental gymnastics (which is what theology mostly does - "proving that in fact 1 can be equal to 0").


Lets set aside for a moment that the flat earth movement is actually a religious movement disguised as science-based.

FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar.


> FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar.

You have to be careful here, because you cannot prove God isn't real or that a religion is false.

You can prove the earth is not flat, however.


There are plenty of bible literalist traditions that present falsifiable events/ideas as historical facts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism.


An assertion that X happened in the past is fundamentally different from an assertion that X exists.

The certitude one can achieve through evidence for (or against) the claim that the Earth is presently flat, can never be obtained for an assertion regarding a past event.

You're mixing apples and oranges.


This video, and the others on the Qualiasoup channel, cover the endgame of this type of discussion pretty well: https://youtu.be/KayBys8gaJY


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Please don't perpetuate religious flamewars on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I don't think gp was claiming that all religious beliefs are false and all religious videos should be removed under this standard; or at least that's not the claim I'm making. I'm saying many religious traditions explicitly promote falsehoods as facts, and videos that espouse those teachings should be removed, if we follow this standard.


You cannot prove that God isn't real. You can however prove that a specific God isn't, or that a specific religion is false.

Or, put another way, the pure idea of God is not falsifiable. The Christian God however, might well be.


> cannot prove that God isn't real. You can however prove that a specific God isn't

What's the difference between "God" and "a specific God"?


You can't prove a god is not real. You can though, prove that the Bible is not 100% historical fact as is claimed by a lot of mainstream religions.

So I would argue that you can prove a religion is false/incorrect by comparing the claims of it's holy book to the available historical records. If they don't match, I think we can agree that at least one set is false.


That's where you run into trouble debating this stuff.

Most of religion is in the interpretation of that religion's holy literature. Interpretations can and do change, and not everything is as clear as one might think.

Famously, in Christianity, God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Perhaps this God was from Venus, and experienced 6 days of 2802 Earth hours.

World wide flooding can be explained with localized floods based on knowledge of the explored world at the time the writing was done. Same with most writing from those times.

Lastly, most modern interpretations of holy literature don't claim everything in the text is fact or historical, but rather it has a mix of historical events and stories which promote religious principles.


> God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do?

Then why is it stated that the Earth was created in 6 days? To confuse us?


If you want to see the tremendous mental gymnastics that go into it, check this out:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/bibli...


Wow.

My favorite, by Michael Shermer ( https://michaelshermer.com/articles/genesis-revisited/):

In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers appear to be more than 4,004 light years from Earth. In fact, some of the fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, so He created “tired light” — light that slows down through space — so that the 4004 B.C. creation myth might be preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors, including Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Nova and Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing (can God make a planet so big that he could not lift it?), He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants. And in the land God placed fossil fuels, natural gas, and other natural resources for humans to exploit, but not until after Day Six. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God saw that the land was lonely, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the land’s strata, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. Since this caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt God brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.

By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.


the Bible is not 100% historical fact as is claimed by a lot of mainstream religions

Which mainstream religion claims the Bible is 100% historical fact? I ask because I'm interested in your definition of "mainstream" and "100%."


A 2011 Gallup survey reports, "Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God. That is similar to what Gallup has measured over the last two decades, but down from the 1970s and 1980s.... In the Reformation, Martin Luther (1483–1546 CE) separated the biblical apocrypha from the rest of the Old Testament books in his Bible, reflecting scholarly doubts that had continued for centuries,[15] and the Westminster Confession of 1646 demoted them to a status that denied their canonicity.[16] American Protestant literalists and biblical inerrantists have adopted this smaller Protestant Bible as a work not merely inspired by God but, in fact, representing the Word of God without possibility of error or contradiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism


That's a great clip from Wikipedia. But it doesn't answer the actual question posed. It avoids it.


Are you implying that the various Christian religions do not believe the Bible is 100% true? If so, how do they decide which parts aren’t and which parts are?

When I google, I find various resources from Catholic and Evangelical groups that say the Bible is 100% true.


I asked for someone to name a mainstream religion that believes the Bible is 100% true, and it hasn't happened yet.

You mention "Catholic," but there are lots of different types of Catholics. If you mean "Roman Catholic," you are incorrect in believing that it teaches the Bible is 100% fact.

Same with "Evangelical." There must be thousands of different evangelical religions. Please name the mainstream one that teaches that the Bible is 100% fact.

As stated previously, I think it will be interesting to find out what is meant by "mainstream."


The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word that marks true Christian faith. We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the face of current lapses from the truth of inerrancy among our fellow Christians and misunderstanding of this doctrine in the world at large.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061115025545/http://www.spurge...

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was formulated by more than 200 evangelical leaders at a conference convened by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy[1] and held in Chicago in October 1978. The statement was designed to defend the position of biblical inerrancy against a trend toward liberal conceptions of Scripture....

[T]he December 1986 conference adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application....

Signatories to the statement came from a variety of evangelical Christian denominations, and included Robert Preus, James Montgomery Boice, Kenneth Kantzer, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul and John F. MacArthur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_...

Notable signatories are listed at the Wikipedia article.


Christians of the Strawman denomination.


> you cannot prove God isn't real

If you offer a definition or description of God, I will give it a shot.


An all-powerful being who created the universe.


Thanks. That's a nice, succinct description.

Interpreting/expanding what you wrote, I think you're saying that God is:

* something that currently lives, or maybe lived in the past ("being"),

* that is not limited in any way ("all-powerful"),

* that created, from nothing, everything other than themself that has ever existed and that will exist in the future ("the universe")

Is that close?


Yep. Although for the first point I don't think "live" is the right word because God's existence is very different from a human existence. And to expand on that, God has always existed and always will exist.


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> Is up to you to prove that God is real and any bullshit a religion claims it's true.

No, not really. You can choose to reject this information and call it untrue, but you have not proven anything either.

All you've managed to do is assert you have a belief in some information that might be contradictory with someone else's. What you really have is nothing.

The burden to prove something is not true is on the person claiming something is not true.

In this case, there is no empirical test that can disprove the existence of a God or Gods, and thus religion.

> Today if you belief in Zeus, Baco or Heraclite you are interned fast

Last I checked, you can believe whatever you want in the US. Perhaps you're in another country though.

> Any serious religious believer should be put into clinical custody and in the worst cases these people should be interned into an asylum with the rest of the mentally ill people.

Religion is a lot of things. A moral compass, explanations for life events, explanations of the unknown, inspiration, community, etc.

A lot of things we think we know today, will be disproven tomorrow. That's how science is supposed to work. Perhaps in 100 years all this "Global Warming All The Things" will be viewed like some sort of religion today. Perhaps not, we literally don't know what we don't know with a lot of these things.

Lastly, I'm not religious in the slightest bit - but I do think being as hostile as you are here towards billions of people around the world is... unfortunate.


Positive claims bear the burden of proof. Not believing a God or gods exist is the null hypothesis. There is no need to prove that a God or gods do not exist; there is a need to prove its/their existence. Why do people have trouble understanding that?


> Positive claims bear the burden of proof

Citation please.


A unicorn created the universe.


That's kind of the point though.

You are free to believe whatever you want.

If I come along and assert you're wrong for believing that, I must prove why. Otherwise, I'm just rejecting your belief and inserting my own belief.


No, not at all. You're free to believe what you want, but the moment you expect me to believe it as well, you need to give me a reason to believe it. If there's no reason to believe you, then there's no reason to believe you. Or to allow you to regulate anyone else's life according to your beliefs. Or to allow you to teach your nonsense to children in place of verifiable facts.


The world exists and we know that you can not create something from nothing. Therefore the null hypothesis is actually that the world was created by something.

To claim that the universe was created by nothing requires pretty enormous evidence, which presently does not exist.


That logic doesn’t quite work. You cannot say that everything that exists needs to have been created but then make an arbitrary exception for a creator. In other words, if you believe there is a creator that wasn’t created, you already believe that not everything needs a creator.

So then the question: why do you think the universe was created?


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This is nonsense.

The assertion comes from the religious. That there is a God and He is responsible for the life, the universe, and everything.

Atheism isn't the belief that there is no God. It's the lack of belief in any God.


Atheism isn't the belief that there is no God. It's the lack of belief in any God.

No, that's the modern Dawkins-cult claim, commonly proselytised by Internet Atheists. Atheism has always been a more assertive position - there is no god.

Atheists' attempts to encroach on the much more rationally safe territory of agnosticism is crafty, but a sign of defeat.


> Internet Atheists

Not Internet Atheism, HN is being read worldwide. Just an European with common sense. We tought like that since decades.


Common-sense is not particular to Europeans.

The wishy-washy recent re-definition of atheism as "without belief" was given modern impetus by Anthony Flew (who later converted to deism) in the late 1970s and popularised by the "New Atheists" - especially as an internet debating tactic - in the early part of this century.


> The assertion comes from the religious.

Yes, religion does assert this, but that is also the defacto resting state for mankind. Allow me to explain:

For nearly all of human history, certainly all of recorded human history, there has been a strong belief in a God or Gods. It's a relatively recent concept that there might not be a God.

It is indisputable fact, that even today, in 2020, you are among the extreme minority of living people that do not believe in a God or Gods[1].

Therefore, being the newcomer, sporting a new assertion that there is no God, you must provide evidence to support this contentious claim. Since you cannot provide any evidence, and since no evidence currently exists to support this contentious claim, all you have left is a contradictory belief.

> Atheism isn't the belief that there is no God. It's the lack of belief in any God.

It is true one definition of Atheism is the absence of belief in a God. It becomes a belief when an assertion is made such as "God does not exist", because of the lack of evidence to support this claim[2]. That is the belief there is no God, because you have no empirical evidence to support your belief.

Belief means "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof"[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/belief


Since when a belief does something real? Where is Manitou? Zeus? Iupiter in the age of the Ancient Rome? Where is Gilgamesh?

I see no Zeus throwing rays in Athene's sky nowadays.

And the Roman Empire with the Greek/Roman Gods was VAST. Huge. Hu-ge. Europe and a good chunk of Northern Africa.

Have a look on the Parthenon, please. Those are the scraps of their beliefs. That's all what's left. Marble, and ruins.

The only usable things from the Romans/Greeks were the practical ones:

- Greek/Latin

- Math

- Philosophy

- Arts

- Pillars of science with Aristhotle, even if he was wrong. Science allowed the world to correct his failures.


Burden shifting is a rhetorical trick not a positive argument for a position.

It's unreasonable to suppose that the burden of proof lies with the party in the minority or with the person positing a change in analysis rather than the one making the claim in the first place.

The idea that people who believed disease was caused by bad smells or evil spirits accepted an unfalsifiable claim uncritically does not mean we are forever stuck with it. This would literally mean that any group of people would be stuck with every unverifiable belief from the last millennium either forever or until we could democratically convince the majority. Truth isn't a democracy.

Science and logic says that we not only reject verifiably false claims we reject those that just don't make testable claims in the first place. Every mainstream religion is a mixture of potentially falsifiable claims with vague hand waving that is neither here nor there. After dismissing the actual it is not necessary to address the hand waving. If it doesn't make any claims its not worth discussing.

The notion that god doesn't exist doesn't require absolute mathematical as its a probabilistic statement of my confidence as to the likelihood of the existence of a literal creator not a mathematical one as in fact are most of your statements about most things. When one feels sufficiently confident in an analysis one often feels sufficiently confident one says such a statement is false. After dismissing the reality of 99 it is entirely reasonable to consider dismissing the existence of god even while acknowledging that this will probably never be a scientific answer to unfalsifiable claims. The notion that the deist may dismiss the need for evidence while the atheist is required to submit proof of a negative is just another sort of burden shifting.


by saying that god exist in the first place, you are the one making the claim. So it is up to you to prove it.


Religion should be declared a myth because of:

- improbability

- lack of proof

- zillions on contradictions on their own manual

As I said, the burden of proof (God existence) it's up to the believer, not mine. Science says "nope", or unprobable enough clashing with near all common logic facts to not being declared a myth.


> Science says "nope"

It literally doesn't, and cannot, say "nope". It wouldn't be science if it passed any judgement on Religion, because it literally cannot provide evidence to support or contradict Religion.

> Religion should be declared a myth

That's your opinion, which is fine. I share your opinion too, but that's all it is.

As an aside - from observation, the use of "Science!" has become it's own sort of religion. Blindly offering "Science!" as a reason something is true or untrue is totally the antithesis of actual science, and unfortunately is becoming far too common.


To be clear a scientific evaluation of specific claims would lead one to reject a broad array of claims as either provably false or unfalsifiable and thus worthless.

I would suggest that every mainstream religion is so full of holes after you reject such claims as to have little remaining value. I have not personally evaluated thousands of individual belief systems due to lack of time and energy but evaluated enough to have developed the theory that there aren't any good ones among the philosophies that would self describe as religions and especially those that make supernatural claims.


> if it passed any judgement on Religion, because it literally cannot provide evidence to support or contradict Religion.

It's the religion cult the accountable one who need to probe their magic.

> "Science!" has become it's own sort of religion

No, Unicorns are better. And magic. Magic explains everything.


Atheism isn't a religion. It's simply not believing in God. Even the stronger version of actively believing there is no God isn't a religion any more than actively believing that there is no Bigfoot.

In short, not all atheists would say "I believe there is no God," and even if they did, not all beliefs are religions.


> Lets set aside for a moment that the flat earth movement is actually a religious movement disguised as science-based.

Flat eartherism is probably 99% trolls masquerading as a movement.


I don't think it's particularly "disguised as science-based" any more than, say, Christian apologetics groups like Answers in Genesis. Both groups seem pretty honest about the fact that their fundamental beliefs are religious, and the pseudoscience they do is pretty explicitly in service of that.


Really?

At least on YouTube, the main channels seem to put up exclusively pseudoscience. I didn't know how religious the movement was until I saw "Behind the Curve" from HBO.


People don't tend to bother believing something weird without a motivation.

I mean, there's contrarians, who believe all sorts of weird things just because they like the satisfaction of being proven right (which means they tend to only believe things that it seems like some fringe has evidence for somewhere.)

But other than them, if you're taking a heterodox position on something, it tends to be because it confirms or fits in better with the rest of your existing world-view in some way.

And in what world-view, does hypothesizing the Earth to be flat make things you already believe make more sense? A Creationist one.


Cool! Could you show me where in Genesis?

The best I've found:

He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers

Or:

He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing

--

Funnily enough, Big Bang started as a Christian theory


> Funnily enough, Big Bang started as a Christian theory

I don't think that's completely accurate, but it would be fair to say that resistance to the Big Bang theory was exacerbated by anti-religious sentiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Bi...



Serious question: Is a baby turning water into wine a falsehood that should be removed?


Is a baby turning water into wine a falsehood that should be removed?

In which religion does a baby turn water into wine? There's no babies doing that in the Bible.


My mistake - I thought baby Jesus did it . But an adult doing it still the same.


Also a serious question: How do you know it's false? How do we know the truth of events that aren't reproducible by empirical science?


Well, there are scientists who know an awful lot about the chemistry of wine; certainly much more so than people did 2000 years ago. If it were possible to instantly convert water into wine, we'd know about it, or at least have some idea about how it was conceivably performed.

For the fantastical accomplishments of people of thousands of years ago to be believed, there needs to be more concrete evidence than stories passed down for generations. In this situation, it's unlikely that such evidence survived, so the best we could do is replicate what happened in the past and determine whether or not such an accomplishment could have happened given the technology of the past.

I believe that people 5000 years ago could build awe-inspiring structures from stone because there's plenty of evidence of such capabilities (i.e., the great pyramids). I don't believe that someone turned water into wine instantly, because, afaik that is not possible, thus, at best, the event in question was some sleight-of-hand magic trick.


Christianity teaches that Jesus was God, so in that story, the same person who created all the atoms in the universe turned water into wine, presumably with the same power.

That’s only to say you have a more fundamental disagreement than the truth about this one incident.


Jesus created all the atoms in the universe?


Christianity teaches that a Jesus is God and God created the entire universe.


Several religions beg to differ. What do you think about that?


I agree that’s the case. I only pulled that information about Christianity for the OP because they weren’t sure what Christianity taught about the water-wine parable.


to me, it was Jesus being a nice bro, and bringing lots of wine to the party, coz he was cool.


It's an obtuse statement but it seems fair.

Both have theories about the world that can't be reconciled with scientific data.


Not really. Lack of data is very different from proof.

Flat earthers believe in something that empirically and rigorously has been proven to be false. There is no discussion required here, philosophical or otherwise.

Religion might be false based on the absence of evidence, but it has never been - and probably never will be - empirically proven to be false.


Claims about the Earth being only several thousand years old have been proven false.


What about claims of the Earth being only five minutes old?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#Five-minut...


One of the common "excuses" for earth's timeline in religion is the notion of time. What is time, and is it measured the same from all beings and perspectives?

We understand time in relation to Earth. If a being is not from Earth, or has some other non-human perspective, the notion of time can get very tricky to reconcile.


Of course.


Except the Bible never claims such a thing. It's been claimed by some religious figures over the last 1000 years and never been accepted as canon by any major Christian church (except maybe some minor sects I've never heard of but then those aren't "major", any belief system has fringes).


I’m sorry, but Your claim is revisionist.

A young earth belief was the norm before modern evidence to the contrary:

“The chronology dating the creation to 4004 BC became the most accepted and popular, mainly because this specific date was printed in the King James Bible.[19] The youngest ever recorded date of creation within the historic Jewish or Christian traditions is 3616 BC, by Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller in the 17th century,[20] while the oldest proposed date was 6984 BC by Alfonso X of Castile.[21] However, some contemporary or more recent proponents of Young Earth Creationism have taken this figure back further by several thousands of years by proposing significant gaps in the genealogies in chapters 5 and 11 of the Book of Genesis. Harold Camping, for example, dated the creation to 11,013 BC, while Christian Charles Josias Bunsen in the 19th century dated the creation to 20,000 BC.[22]

Several early Jews also followed an allegorical interpretation of Genesis, including most notably Philo (On the Creation, III.13).[23]

The Protestant reformation hermeneutic inclined some of the Reformers, including John Calvin[24][25] and Martin Luther,[26] and later Protestants toward a literal reading of the Bible as translated, believing in an ordinary day, and maintaining this younger-Earth view.[27]

An Earth that was thousands of years old remained the dominant view during the Early Modern Period (1500–1800)”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism


I would argue this is more than a fringe belief, as 38% of Americans think "God created humans in present form within last 10,000 years". [1]

That said, do you think that religions who preach this view should be banned from youtube?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...


The churches for some reason I don't understand, do nothing to dissuade that belief even though no major church teaches it (nor ever has). Same as some people think the earth is flat right?

And no, I don't think anyone should be banned unless they break the law.


A single shred of doubt has a lot of power. As a comment above mentioned, ~38% of Christians believe in a young Earth. They are more than likely the ones who believe in the so-called "infallibility of Scripture". The percentage of the ~38% that might consider evidence brought to them by an authority they respect may also consider the fallibility of other parts of the Bible that those authorities endorse actively in comparison. That's my best guess at why church leaders don't ever talk about myths perpetuated by the congregation.


Damn that's a good point. I had forgotten about that "infallibility of scripture" belief. I think it's misguided and I generally avoid engaging deeply with anyone who holds to it, because to me any meaningful conversation is nuanced. That position is markedly not nuanced..


The Bible does give genealogies of Jesus that are only a few generations long from the very first man to the time of the Roman Empire. Logically speaking then either the age of the earth is very short or some people in the last lived thousands of years.


I'd phrase it another way.

> Flat earthers believe in something that empirically and rigorously has been proven to be false by there existing a contradictory proof that the earth is mostly spherical.

I'd suggest that rather than prove the earth wasn't flat, it was proved it was ~sperical, a proof that was in direct contradiction to the flat theory, thereby nullifying it.

So, should the flat earthers have their videos removed? I dunno. It used to be funny, but now seems to have turned rather toxic. Some people might religiously believe that it's flat, and they should be allowed to continue to believe that if it makes them happy, and part of that faith, as with many others it seems, is attempting to convince others of your delusions.


Yes, it is a proof by contradiction.

And yes, it's not black-and-white with flat earthers. However, I think the story becomes quite different with conspiracy theories that directly impact the health and lives of other people.


Whatever the reasons for flat earthers believing what they do (ignoring the ones who don't actually believe it, but are doing this for attention), are they really that different than other religions?

There's enough cases of "regular" religions promoting views that are harmful or cruel and can have a direct negative impact on the health and happiness of others.


> Whatever the reasons for flat earthers believing what they do (ignoring the ones who don't actually believe it, but are doing this for attention), are they really that different than other religions?

Yes, they are different. Please refer to my original comment.

> There's enough cases of "regular" religions promoting views that are harmful or cruel and can have a direct negative impact on the health and happiness of others.

True, which unfortunately goes against what religion should be doing in the first place... welcome to the human race :)

Still, I don't really see how you can compare health and happiness in this context. Every idea is bound to make someone, somewhere unhappy.


In my study of both, I have actually seen scientific data compliment my religious views. It's usually the religious leader's interpretation that is sometimes flawed and outdated (like church vs. science era).


I agree, videos shouldn't be censored unless they put other folks in danger. It's scary that there are some "flat earthers" who are just playing characters in order to get the ad revenue, but in the end they're harmless.

There's been a really worrying trend towards this idea of censorship or deplatforming. It comes out of the same spirit as silencing or burning heretics in the Middle Ages, of Nazi book burnings, and of McCarthyism. Not a sign of a healthy democracy...


> if YouTube is deleting flat earther videos

I searched for "youtube flat earth". The only evidence that they were deleting flat earther videos was a support thread claiming they were. But this was falsified by other the results -- pro flat earth videos and channels that had stayed on youtube for some time.


So YouTube doesn't have a right to decide what is on its platform? I mean they are compelled by law to delete unlawful content and have to make efforts to comply with the DMCA, but we are talking about things that are neither unlawful nor copyrighted.

I could see a number of reasons why a content provider would want to remove a particular type of content from their site, like the consumers of that content are bad for business. You don't have any right to continue to use these services, why should you have a right to continue to have your content hosted with them?


Sure, they can do whatever they want. Though I suppose you could make the argument that other businesses can't deny service to anyone they want, so why should youtube?

But ignoring that, I'm merely stating what I think they should do, not what they can do.


Wait, what?!

Honestly I'm completely speechless.

EDIT: I actually mixed up the name with another person. I don't know about Jordan Pier's, so yeah. I will still not delete my comment for transparency. (I mixed him up with Louis Rossmann). I wonder what the reason was, why his channel got deleted?




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