Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

YouTube bans independent Italian media outlet Byoblu

In yet another crackdown on independent media and creators, YouTube has removed the channel of Byoblu – an independent Italian media outlet that had more than 525,000 subscribers.

The popular channel had uploaded more than 2,000 interviews to YouTube in its 14+ years on the platform and racked up over 200 million total video views. It featured interviews with magistrates, presidents of the Constitutional Court, politicians, lawyers, scientists, and more.

YouTube deleted Byoblu’s channel after targeting it numerous times over its coverage of protests and interviews with scientists.

According to Byoblu, YouTube had removed several unpublished videos of demonstrations in Cesena and Milan, removed a video discussing a leading British Medical Journal columnist’s thoughts about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, removed a months-old video featuring an interview with a senior scientist from the University of Siena because he talked about the benefits of vitamin C, demonetized the channel, and removed 5,000 of the channel’s subscribers before it was permanently suspended.

Byoblu added that YouTube’s final action against the channel before permanently suspending it was to remove a September 2020 video of a street demonstration where the Pan-African activist Mohamed Konare spoke.

In a post about YouTube’s takedown of the channel, Byoblu suggested that it was targeted by YouTube because of its obsession with wanting ordinary people to speak and showing the news from an alternative point of view.

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University researcher: ‘Intelligence is a White man’s mythology’

A University of Cincinnati graduate assistant wrote that “intelligence is a White man’s mythology.”

“Stop calling your female colleagues ‘smart,’ or ‘clever,’ or ‘brilliant,’” wrote Mel Andrews, who studies cognition and evolution. “It’s sexist and infantilising… it shouldn’t be surprising to you in 2021 that women are capable of thought.”

“You’re doing the same thing when you describe your Black and Latino students as ‘very bright,’” added Andrews. 

“Intelligence is a White man’s mythology. A phantasmal concept. A non-referring term. Syncategorematic,” she wrote.

Indicating that her post was entirely serious, Andrews posted an excerpt from a chapter that she wrote for a book entitled Handbook of Parenting. She cited works claiming that “more than a century of wanton reductionism and definitional vagueness in the study of intelligence and human potential has perpetuated a stratified social order and obscured the true dynamic complexity and diversity of human cognitive development.”

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