Tuesday 13 December 2016

What Are My Dark Hidden Motivations?





















I'm going to make this quick. A frequent line of argumentation I receive in response to the criticisms of the people and organisations I comment on is to attack the motives behind my commentary. The reason people do this is very simple. They can't actually coherently argue against the points I raise, so they target the reason for raising them.

There are some common reoccurring themes, jealousy and money being the most common two. I've lost count of the amount of people who've called this blog click bait and accusing me of generating money through ad revenue. Here's the latest idiot to do this, a commenter called Daemenus on my recent post about the Youtuber Bearing. After a laughable string of logically inconsistent attempts to defend Bearing's use of an image he didn't own or alter in any way shape or form, or failed to correctly credit once (I incorrectly said he had credited Total Drama Island, upon rewatching the discussion in which I thought this occurred the statement is actually made to him and he squirms awkwardly in response. I apologise for misleading my readers into believing Bearing showed the slightest shred of decency. He didn't.), Daemenus made this utterly laughable comment:

"I realize that may be hard for you since you are only blindly attacking for profit, it's only natural for you to use Psychological Projection to tell yourself we are as blind and selfishly motivated as you are."
Hmmm... there's and easy way to debunk this one guys. It won't require screen caps or trawling through libraries of ghost app images or the slightest bit of research. Take a look at this page. What don't you see? There are no advertisements, there's no merchandise, no pop-ups, no amazon links, no sponsored content. You'll see that at the bottom of my page there are no links to click bait that contradicts everything I've written above, as you'll find on the Pharyngula blog of staunch feminist PZ Myers. There you can happily nod and cluck as he points out perceived misogyny and then go and generate him some cold hard cash by following a link to "cheerleader had no idea why they were cheering".
Unlike PZ I don't hold my principles until the foot of the page or when there's fucking money on the table. Also, there's no link to a Patreon page or a Go-Fund-Me, I don't have one, I've no intention of having one. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with bloggers and vloggers who seek funding from their audience, some of them make excellent content and deserve support, but I don't like to be beholding to anyone. Plus, I'd have to be.... you know... good and stuff. I suppose the biggest irony of this questioning of my motivation is it always comes in defence of people who are making money from their audience. Bearing, for example, has ads on all of his content, he also has a Patreon and makes a handsome $626 a video.... oh and a merchandising store selling tee-shirts with a stolen image, which Daemenus laughingly insists is "parody" some-how. Previous to this, I received similar criticism from supporters of Jayne Harris and HD paranormal, who is charging hundreds of pounds for online courses in demon identification or some other nonsense.

I've never made a penny from the blog and I never will.

So why do I do it? What really motivates me? It's quite simple. To paraphrase One-Punch Man: "I'm just a guy who's a skeptic for fun..."



Hey... I should put that on a tee-shirt. No one will notice, right?

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