Somerton has a bit of a history of weaponizing his fans to attack anyone bringing up issues by painting them as homophobic and attacking a gay man. Hbomberguy made a point of bringing up his own bisexuality in his video before he even brought up Somerton as a way a kneecapping that before it could start.
Honestly a great response. That question he asks himself, “how did I miss this?” really strikes me as genuine. I can’t imagine working with someone professionally and being let down so hard. You don’t want to have to doubt your colleagues or your friends.
Wild. Hopefully IH and AVGN don’t cave to this shit. I couldn’t care less about bombers video nor the plagiarism. Admittedly I don’t know who James is.
The relevant conundrum in the title is the fact that this person committed plagiarism not the fact that he’s gay that was added in as pandering clickbait.
Plagiarism doesn’t give a crap about what one’s orientation sex or gender is.
Moreover the engagement in the comment section specifically mentions this on more than one occasion as in I’m not the only one talking about the word gay in the title. So now instead of discussing the intellectual crime this particular person committed we’re now discussing the title in and of itself which takes away from the article.
But I wouldn’t expect a narrow sited sighted idiot such as yourself to understand the nuance of all this stuff.
However I do commend you on using your word of the day, you even hyphenated it correctly!
I feel like everyone complaining about the title didn’t bother to click on the link to see the source - it makes perfect sense to me that a site called “LGBTQ Nation” would point out in the title why it’s relevant to being published there.
Look at the URL. Do you really think they need to pander to an audience given the nature of the publication? They would be singing to the choir here, I don’t think they would get much benefit.
Honestly the lack of critical thinking here is truly spectacular
Him being gay is actually very relevant because he was profiting off of queer authors’ works without attribution while proporting to support their cause. His whole shtick was being gay and analyising media through a gay/lgbtq+ lens. The title highlights the hypocrisy.
Also this is an lgbtq+ focused publication so such a classification isn’t unusual.
So are you implying that if he weren’t gay he wouldn’t be plagiarizing?
Here, let’s flip the script. A magazine about crime writes an article with the following title: black man is sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder.
The fact that the man is black is not relevant to the fact that he committed murder. The word black was put in specifically to make it sound more controversial. You know so more people would click on it.
Or for something more benign an automotive publication writes an article entitled: red car crashes into a wall.
The fact that a car is red has nothing to do with it crashing into a wall.
Moreover, the fact that the publication is LGBTQ+ already is enough implication of the possible orientation of the subjects in the article and does not have to be emphasized in the title of the article. If it needs to be brought up it may be in the article proper.
And, on the other side of this you’ll never see an article titled: straight person so and so. Which is a whole other issue in and of itself.
His channel was about LGBT issues, so it's actually relevant. It's a reasonable concern and the source material is a four hour long breadtube thing bordering on self-parody, so I don't mind responding to this one.
It’s very relevant. One of the big points in the hbomberguy video is that James was known as a prominent voice in the LGBT community, and he blatantly plagiarized other LGBT creators that might have otherwise gained a larger following themselves
It isn’t. Plagiarism is plagiarism. It’s maybe relevant that that’s what his content was about, but the plagiarism accusation has nothing to do with them being gay
It’s fairly important because of the type of content that he is plagiarizing. Personal details can often relate and be important to the type of content that people make (or steal).
It’s core to Hbomberguy’s video, really. The guy tried to make himself the gay YouTuber by ripping off other queer content producers, and as a persecuted community that’s had to deal with a forever of social erasure, that’s a whole lot extra shitty.
I guess him being gay isn’t exactly important. The important thing is that the content that he stole was mostly about LGBTQ media studies. So “gayness” is relevant, but strictly speaking his gayness is not.
Edit: I would also note that if the headline writer was just adding “gay” to be incendiary, the writer could have said “Gay youtuber taken down by bi youtuber” but that would needlessly putting in the “bi” label. The “gay youtuber” is “writing” about gay stuff.
I think it’s a little relevant. He’s a gay focused YouTuber, in that he talked about gay topics in media, supposedly championing gay voices, while at the same time silencing those same gay voices, stealing their content and claiming it as his own.
For wanting to help the gay community, he really did a lot to hurt the community and help himself. All he had to do is give credit to the people he quoted, but when confronted with accusations, he would claim he’s being silenced as a gay creator rather than admit the truth, and his followers would attack the accusers on his behalf, thinking he’s being genuine.
He wasn’t quoting people though, he was straight up reading other people’s work and claiming it as his own. Like whole paragraphs at a time just copy/pasted with a couple words swapped out. Even with proper citations you would be kicked out of college for plagiarizing if you submitted something like that.
There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually did try to write some of the material himself, it was complete garbage.
For example, he completely plagiarized from a book about Disney, but then, he had to transition between one plagiarized book and a different plagiarized article, and in that transition, he presented some facts about Disney organizing gay events at their park, and it was all outright lies. Disney did not actually have any official LGBTQ events at their parks until far after that.
There was a different YouTube video that came out the next day, from this musician who listed all of the outright lies that he discovered while watching Somerset’s channel.
I think the plagiarism displayed by Somerset is atrocious, but personally, I find lying and spreading misinformation to be even worse.
I think the Todd in the Shadows video was the nail in the coffin. He might’ve been able to slither back by saying he didn’t realize he was attributing incorrectly (like Internet Historian fans are screaming), but he can’t come back from outright lying the times he wasn’t plagiarizing.
As an IH fan I’m not screaming he didn’t realize he was attributing incorrectly. I’m calmly saying I could not give less of a shit about copyrights, trademarks or any form of intellectual properties rights. It’s the one thing China gets right.
I have no issue with the content provided, but I wanted to give a little constructive criticism on the structure of your writing. Real small. When you say,
There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually…
When you say there is a thing, the reader is going to assume the next thing you write to be that thing. So you don’t need the “which is that.” You can just launch right into what you’re going to say, you already set it up. You basically said “I have a thing to say. The thing I have to say is this:”
Everything else is informative and well presented. No other notes.
I don’t know that you need a semicolon but you could definitely use one, and that would probably be the best way. Semicolons are for when two complete sentences are related. But they can still be formatted as two sentences, or even the same sentence with a comma. Many sentences contain parts that could be standalone sentences. But reading back over the original sentence again I would probably say it can just be rewritten to be more straightforward.
“Another aspect to this video is that Somerset, when actually trying to write some of the material himself, produced complete garbage.”
Mostly I’ve just been reading a lot of philosophy recently which tends to run on a long and complex sentence structure that’s unnecessary and could be a lot simpler, so this kind of thing has been at the front of my mind lately. That’s probably the only reason I even noticed in the first place.
Eh doesn’t really flow compared to the original. I would have to reread to understand.
I’m all for omitting unnecessary words, but certain cliché connectors are so ubiquitous that they act as punctuation. You don’t notice them, but reading is less comfortable when they’re missing.
HAHAHA holy fucking shit the level of comeuppance is beautiful. Good riddance. His blatant misogyny and narcissism is disgusting, I hope he finds a cozy stone to crawl under.
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