“Who are you?” energy

Is that what caused the clip earlier of Ethan repeatedly saying “He’s a fricking LIAR!!!” while his voice cracked and he literally pounded the table.

Agreed. I liked his early comedy / Youtub drama videos, and that was it.

Though he never had good politics, even by liberal standards, at least he used to just not talk about it. He then just waded into it and wobbles thoughtlessly in every political direction without a single bit of cohesive thought behind anything he says. I still have genuinely zero idea why anyone likes it.

I stopped watching when he started the podcast (especially given one of the earliest episodes had Jordan Peterson on and was just them fawning at his super massive intellect).

Counter-counterpoint: I found out about Jordan Peterson through their podcast and it gave me a little detour in the wrong direction, at the time in my life where his pseudo intellectual slop was very appealing to my young idiot cis het dude brain. The fact that they seemed relatively progressive really massaged his image for me. I don’t see this mentioned often, but I can’t be the only one.

They seemed in awe of having him in the studio, he took a big vape hit insisting that “rituals are important”, probably called himself a Classic British Liberal™. Amazing PR move. Coming from a very conservative culture I don’t think I realized how much of a reactionary he was, but to be fair to me, I totally think he was holding it back on purpose during that time. I think I moved away from him well before he went fully mask off, but I distinctly remember a conversation where I was arguing with a relative that he wasn’t that right wing. The same relative who no longer talks to me after a different argument where I didn’t insist transgendery stuff was the death of society. Fun. I love how the US exports bullshit culture war talking points to fuck up the little things too, love dealing with that.

And yes, one thing I liked was the biblical stuff, it was very appealing how he ostensibly discussed these old stories from a cultural perspective. I still think I’d like that from someone who isn’t fucking evil. “These old myths have shaped a lot of archetypal narratives within our culture" still seems cool to me, I don’t know. I don’t want the worst people to have a monopoly on that.

Funnily enough in the context of this post, I always found it interesting that these two moved from Israel to the US. I’m from (and in) Lebanon and I quite liked how much they said things along the lines of “Yeah we get lied to about how good living there is, it was a rough few years, more people should move out”. A sort of validation from the other side that the whole apartheid experiment is undercooked and not even worth it for the people it’s supposed to be “helping”. And they were just putting it out there as good advice. You may not be surprised that most people around me who can fathom an end to Zionism don’t picture it this way, I’m not sure how to explain to a mainly Western forum how refreshing it was to hear them say that. It was a big part of the appeal.

I stopped watching them long ago but this whole arc has been unfortunate, but not all surprising. Didn’t really expect them to move leftward like I did, but seeing how popular the show became, I do wish they did.

counterpoint: you’re a single person whos experience may be an outlier and thus meaningless

I mean I’m sure his videos are causing them some distress and maybe making them say more dumb shit but no this was hila just being stupid and not knowing that calling one of the idf’s main guys “a good guy” wasn’t going to be well received by non-israelis

Damn, I wanted to make this one

Heila Klein

Those low budget videos where it is Hila recording Ethan reacting to weird YouTube videos were funny. That’s what actually got me into them.