Good Youtube channels on politics, society etc.?

[Beorning]

Do you guys happen to know good (meaning: interesting and trustworthy) Youtube channels on politics, society, culture, science etc.?

I like watching stuff online, but there's a lot of channels out there. And I'm not sure which of them are reliable and which of them are run by biased people with awful agendas etc. I certainly don't want to end up watching some Youtube version of Alex Jones or something...

Currently, I'm following Beau, because I genuinely find a wise and balanced guy. I occassionally look at LegalEagle's stuff - I think he's considered compenent, right? I also watch Coffeezilla, because his investigations into financial scams are fascinating... I don't know, is he trustworthy?

Oh, and I follow Zefrank for funny and informative stuff on the animal world :) No worries about reliability there, I think...

Anything else you'd recommend - or advise to stay away from?

[Iniquitous]

Megaprojects
The People Profiles
Epic History TV
Biographics
Geographics
Decoding the Unknown
Sideprojects

I watch a lot of history/geography stuff. Simon Whistler is one of my favorites to watch.

[Lilias]

Contrapoints
Veritasium
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Axolot (mainly in French, but there are episodes in English too)
horror humanum est (^likewise^}
The School of Life
SciShow, and its branches SciShow Psych and SciShow Space
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
AsapSCIENCE
VSauce
MinuteEarth
Life Noggin
Crash Course
Be Smart
John Michael Godier
The British Library

[Twisted Crow]

My experience with Thoughty has been fairly solid.

[Oniya]

Avoid 'Prager U' at all costs.

[gaggedLouise]

David Pakman Show and MeidasTouch are excellent on the vagaries of U.S. politics - especially if you're interested in the MAGA movement and all things Donald Trump (with his allies, heirs and legal affairs). I discovered Pakman during the 2020 elections season, when he was regularly covering Trump's rallies, press briefings and live events and providing incisive, funny comments, fact checking and explanations about Trump's reasons for saying the stuff he did - and soon I found him invaluable; he was doing the kind of sharp reporting I felt the ordinary news media should be doing, and in real time, too!

David has been around for a long time, ever since the GWB years I think, and he's very good at seeing through the spin. Meidas is really good too, and I'll be following both of them into the new year.

[Yukina]

Some of the ones I watch for topics of history, politics, culture and such are:
-Some More News
-Renegade Cut
-Phillip Defranco (his "both-sides-ing" can get on my nerves though)
-Lily Orchard
-exurb1a
-Defunctland
-Down the Rabbithole
-Internet Historian (great for obscure stories and topics like the above two, though I take him with a notable grain of salt)
-Well There's Your Problem

[Beorning]

Megaprojects
The People Profiles
Epic History TV
Biographics
Geographics
Decoding the Unknown
Sideprojects

I watch a lot of history/geography stuff. Simon Whistler is one of my favorites to watch.

I think I've watched a few of Biographics videos. I've been wondering: are they well-researched? The author seems to be making so many videos I'm wondering whether it's not something akin to "documentaries" from History Channel ("I'm not saying it was aliens, but...").

Contrapoints
Veritasium
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Axolot (mainly in French, but there are episodes in English too)
horror humanum est (^likewise^}
The School of Life
SciShow, and its branches SciShow Psych and SciShow Space
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
AsapSCIENCE
VSauce
MinuteEarth
Life Noggin
Crash Course
Be Smart
John Michael Godier
The British Library

Contrapoints is *excellent*. I'm not super-thrilled by the camp style, but the actual essays are great. The essay on incels is the best and the most in-depth take on the phenomenon I've seen.

I liked watching Lindsey Ellis' stuff, but she got hounded away from the social media... Which is a shame, I think - her essays on movies were pretty interesting.

My experience with Thoughty has been fairly solid.

I'll check it out...

Avoid 'Prager U' at all costs.

It's some kind of heavy conservative content, right?

David Pakman Show and MeidasTouch are excellent on the vagaries of U.S. politics - especially if you're interested in the MAGA movement and all things Donald Trump (with his allies, heirs and legal affairs). I discovered Pakman during the 2020 elections season, when he was regularly covering Trump's rallies, press briefings and live events and providing incisive, funny comments, fact checking and explanations about Trump's reasons for saying the stuff he did - and soon I found him invaluable; he was doing the kind of sharp reporting I felt the ordinary news media should be doing, and in real time, too!

David has been around for a long time, ever since the GWB years I think, and he's very good at seeing through the spin. Meidas is really good too, and I'll be following both of them into the new year.

MeidasTouch keeps popping up in my YT recommendations, but the videos seemed... sensationalistic and aggressive? My reaction was that I didn't trust the author(s) to be unbiased...

Something that also keeps popping up for me is something named The Young Turks. I'm not sure who these guys are, though?

Some of the ones I watch for topics of history, politics, culture and such are:
-Some More News
-Renegade Cut
-Phillip Defranco (his "both-sides-ing" can get on my nerves though)
-Lily Orchard
-exurb1a
-Defunctland
-Down the Rabbithole
-Internet Historian (great for obscure stories and topics like the above two, though I take him with a notable grain of salt)
-Well There's Your Problem

Noted...

[Oniya]

TYT and MeidasTouch are both somewhat biased (both reached a bit of prominence during Trump's tenure.)  You probably want to double-check content details, but I think they hit the 'broad stroke' gist of things.  PragerU has had some distinctly sketchy content, including arguing against a $15 minimum wage, declaring that 'bigotry' and other such terms are 'meaningless buzzwords' and denying scientific data on climate change.

Even conservatives have had issues with them.

[Twisted Crow]

I should note that Thoughty2 doesn’t delve so much into politics as he does with exploring obscure things. How the education system we have is outdated, why fake martial arts are dangerous. Things of that nature. It would lean more into culture and stuff we don’t often think about on the daily as opposed to ‘news’ and politics.

[Hades]

Many of the non-gaming channels I watch have already been mentioned, but for science content I'd say the channel StarTalk is a good one as well. 

[Beorning]

Okay, so I started exploring Some More News and ended up watching a 3 hours long expose on Jordan Peterson. Oh my. Now I know way too much about hierarchies and lobsters than I ever wanted to know... 

[Oniya]

(I'd kind of stay away from Jordan Peterson's channel - it tends to lead the algorithm into incel territory for some reason.  Docs about him are probably safeish.)

[firepyre]

I am probably in the minority here, but I am of the opinion that you should try to make your feed as varied as possible - including what most people would consider propoganda/fake/biased. I follow a variety of left leaning sources, like the washington post, reuters, and australian media(ABC, BBC). I also follow a few New Zealand news sources as well, mostly to keep up with current events back home. In addition to those, there are some more unusual sources that I like, including:

South china morning post(chinese perspective - soft power propoganda)
Eurasian times (indian perspective)
Reason(American - leans right)

That doesn't mean you should take those at face value however. The point is more that if you take the broadest possible set of perspectives, then you're in a far better position to make good judgements than if you ignore/blind yourself to anything you deem biased - you're basically shooting yourself in the foot, and opening yourself up to being exploited. If you only surround yourself with views you agree with, all you're going to do is entrench your position, regardless of merit, or right or wrong.

People like Jordan Peterson are dangerous, mostly because of this. They sound perfectly reasonable to their audience, and as a result, their audience rarely bothers to question what they're saying too carefully. It's not an issue of right or left, you can fall into this trap regardless of your views.

It's not possible to be genuinely unbiased. Our past experiences govern how we interpret the world. So if we can only see things through a lens, then logically, the best way to mitigate the effects of that would be to gather the widest variety of information we can, and draw our own conclusions based on that.

Philosophy tube did a video that delves into Jordan Peterson's ideology that I think does a good job of illustrating how experience affects your perception, and why you should question it. (She comes off a bit condescending imo, but bear with it). I think she and I draw very different conclusions as a result of that introspection, but that's philosophy. Don't let anyone dictate what you should think.

https://youtu.be/m81q-ZkfBm0

[Oniya]

Being aware of bias is important (I even mentioned it with regards to TYT and MeidasTouch), but there are also sources that bear little resemblance to reality.  I wouldn't, as an extreme example, consider the Weekly World News to be a source to consider regarding anything factual. 

Being aware that someone like Alex Jones or Dinesh D'Souza will outright fabricate shit makes them a source to avoid.  Being aware that Russia Today will spin everything in favor of Russia's interests lets you know much credence to give the product they put out.

[firepyre]

Being aware of bias is important (I even mentioned it with regards to TYT and MeidasTouch), but there are also sources that bear little resemblance to reality.  I wouldn't, as an extreme example, consider the Weekly World News to be a source to consider regarding anything factual. 

Being aware that someone like Alex Jones or Dinesh D'Souza will outright fabricate shit makes them a source to avoid.  Being aware that Russia Today will spin everything in favor of Russia's interests lets you know much credence to give the product they put out.

I agree, but my point here is that you can't tell if Weekly World News is actually BS or not, unless you go look at their website. And while Russia Today will spin things in favor of Russia, they'll also go to great pains to emphasise things that western media would prefer you conveniently forgot, giving you a more complete picture of the situation, as well as russian motives.



Note: The rest of this post is me going off on a tangent... Even more of a tangent than the whole bias discussion already is. If you came here for interesting channels to follow... Sorry, I guess?


Consider this. If Afghanistan wanted to break away from the increasingly tight grip of the taliban, should we help them? Or should we just sit back and let them trample all over women's rights as much as they like? At what point would you step in and help?

Now apply that thinking to Donetsk. You've got a bunch of ethnic russians who are deeply unhappy with the westernisation of their country, and the devolution of... let's call it... "good soviet values"? At what point should Russia step in and help those who share similar values?

That looks utterly ridiculous to those of us in the west, because we see right and wrong through the lens of being western. The west is good right? What's the harm of bring pro western? But not everyone thinks like that. If you're chinese, and you see america blocking the sale of equipment(from the netherlands) to make computer chips to china, purely in order to try to maintain economic and military dominance over your country... How would you feel about that? I'd be furious. How is America the good guy there..?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-05/us-pushing-for-asml-to-stop-selling-key-chipmaking-gear-to-china?leadSource=uverify%20wall

We're only the good guy in our own narrative. We need to question it, and try to see things from other people's perspectives. To broaden our horizons. How can we expect anyone else to do it if we can't?

[Humble Scribe]

That assumes that uneasiness about creeping 'westernisation', or supposed suppression of ethnic Russian identity in Donetsk and Luhansk is the reason for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rather than the excuse. RT will only give you the official Kremlin line, which offers you zero insight into what either the Russian government (for which read Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin) or the Russian people are thinking and therefore does not help you understand the conflict. On the other hand you do occasionally get hiliariously bad fake footage like this.

If you want a relatively balanced non-western view of events, in my opinon your best bet is something like Al-Jazeera, which is pretty good on things happening in south Asia, Africa and the Middle East that often slip beneath the radar in the west, and at offering a perspective outside of a western media bubble. Of course they have their own blind spots - you won't get much criticism of the government of Qatar and its activities, for example - but it's more reliable than any other Middle Eastern outlet.

-----

I don't have much to offer on Youtube channels to follow as I don't really follow any except for a few review/discussion ones on TV programmes I'm interested in (Twin Peaks, Westworld before it disappeared up its own backside etc), and some covering the war in Ukraine, but Coffeezilla, who has already been mentioned, deserves special praise as - as far as I can see - one of the few serious investigative journalists working in the cryptosphere.

[Beorning]

(I'd kind of stay away from Jordan Peterson's channel - it tends to lead the algorithm into incel territory for some reason.  Docs about him are probably safeish.)

No worries - I watched the SMN and the Contrapoints videos on him and I don't feel like I need to explore his own channel...

Being aware of bias is important (I even mentioned it with regards to TYT and MeidasTouch), but there are also sources that bear little resemblance to reality.  I wouldn't, as an extreme example, consider the Weekly World News to be a source to consider regarding anything factual. 

You mean, WWN isn't reliable??? Now my worldview is shaken to the core!     

eing aware that Russia Today will spin everything in favor of Russia's interests lets you know much credence to give the product they put out.

Yeah, RT is nothing more than a propaganda outlet. Looking for anything of value there is like listening to Axis Sally for any reliable insight into German opinions during WW2.

[Oniya]

Yeah, RT is nothing more than a propaganda outlet. Looking for anything of value there is like listening to Axis Sally for any reliable insight into German opinions during WW2.

However, if you know what the Russians are telling their own people, then you can better understand how they'll react in a situation.  Small-scale example:  There is a conception that pit bulls are inherently dangerous dogs.  This is driven mostly because jerk-owners train them that way, and the only time you hear about a pit bull is when one of those jerk-owner's dogs does something horrible. 

So it's not very surprising that - even if you own the sweetest love-bucket of a pittie ever, people are going to shy away from you when you're out on a walk.

If Axis Sally is telling her listeners that Roosevelt and Churchill started the war, then you know that the Axis listeners are going to see themselves as 'noble defenders', and war-sick Allies (who were also being fed propaganda that their wives were being unfaithful) are going to question why they even enlisted.

[firepyre]

That assumes that uneasiness about creeping 'westernisation', or supposed suppression of ethnic Russian identity in Donetsk and Luhansk is the reason for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rather than the excuse.

The reasons people do things are rarely as simple as "X because Y." There are often a number of factors involved. While it may not be the whole reason, I do think the whole russian spring thing plays a sizable role in it. As does a misplaced sense of patriotism and self importance. There's quite a number of other factors that i think come into play too, but let's keep it simple-ish.

I don't think even Putin gets out of bed in the morning and thinks "Right... How should I fuck the world up today?" And I certainly don't think he sees himself as evil, despite how we in the west view him.

In the case of everyday Russians, I think it's even more important to recognize this. I'm not saying this to absolve anyone of fault. Actions have consequences. Putin and Russia have a lot to answer for. But unless you intend to wipe Russia off the map, then for the sake of peace, at some point we need to try to see things from their side as well. However evil, or alien that might seem. I'd argue that not even the Nazis did things for the sake of being evil. They just had wildly incompatible(and disturbing) ideology. Doesn' t make it right. That's why we went to war with them. If they'd won instead, we'd likely have a very different sense of right and wrong. Fortunately, they didn't.

Morality is also affected by your lens. There's value in trying to broaden it. It gives us a deeper grasp of right and wrong. That our sense of right and wrong can be flawed is probably one of the most valuable realisations a person can have. In my opinion. I think I'm right. I don't know I'm right.

[RedRose]

I used to be constantly on the news, especially after the Bataclan. Right, left conspiracy, everything. Then I decided I would never find out who's right, and it was just (dis)tressing.

[Chulanowa]

• @LilyVOrchard
• @Nexpo (only sort of touches on politics, more of a "weird stuff on the internet" channel)
• @mndiaye_97 (look, if Zefrank gets a mention, so must this fellow)
• @YaBoiHakim (Communism)
• @NonCompete (Communism)
• @BadEmpanada (Communism)
• @renegadecut9875 (hey guess what more communism! I think. been a while)
• @AtunSheiFilms (Historical analysis and satire, focus on Colonial and Civil War US history)
• @CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt (Technically botany. Often tangents into social commentary.)
• @LifeofBoris (Slav-themed comedy and cooking (...?) channel)
• @styropyro (Absolutely nothing political unless you believe a kid making death rays in his garage out of microwaves and discarded soviet technology is political)
• @miniminuteman773 (Archeology, conspiracy debunking, and social commentary)

[Beorning]

• @YaBoiHakim (Communism)
• @NonCompete (Communism)
• @BadEmpanada (Communism)
• @renegadecut9875 (hey guess what more communism! I think. been a while)

As in, actual and serious Communism? Not sure I want to watch that, Chula...

• @miniminuteman773 (Archeology, conspiracy debunking, and social commentary)

Wondering about the political orientation of this channel? I guess you could consider Tucker Carlson "social commentary", too :)

Questions about three things that keep popping up for me:

• John Oliver
• Stephen Colbert
• The Majority Report with Sam Seder

Opinions on reliability of these?

[Oniya]

Oliver and Colbert tend towards comedic commentary on current events - and sometimes past events if it's a slow news period.  For example, John Oliver once got Weird Al Yankovic to perform a song called 'Please Don't Nuke Us, North Korea', due to the fact that accordion music is strangely popular over there.   They seem to be reasonably researched, in my experience, but sometime tend to the dramatic.

[RedRose]

Just commenting that old school Euro stuff is weirdly popular in some Asian countries.