Mark Privately Made Easy

Mark privately

okay I'm gonna do something a little bit different today I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain of political talk shows and YouTube channels and blah blah blah blah blah okay so the context here is that there are lots of right-wingers who do shows on the radio on the internet on YouTube whom I disagree with politically really significantly like I have real serious disagreements with a lot of these right-wingers but when I've met them in person most of them are pretty normal like in private conversations most right-wingers aren't doing material they're not reciting talking points they're respectful they have friendly conversation and I've given a bunch of examples Alex Jones now he seems to be completely off the rails but when I met Alex Jones he actually seemed like he sort of acknowledged that he was playing a character on his show he had a completely normal conversation with the hosts of free talk live which is a libertarian radio show and I was sort of in this circle of four people and he was a totally respectful nice sort of normal guy now this may have changed this was like eight years ago Sean Hannity Sean Hannity's politics are disgusting but he was one of the nicest people at a talk radio conference that I went two years ago he took pic took pictures with everyone liberal hosts conservative hosts nice to everybody approachable etc etc more recently I met roaming millennial who is a young a conservative youtuber person at politican in Los Angeles I met that Kyle khushu kid who is like a pro-gun guy from the Parkland High School shooting I know he's an extreme right-wing or we vehemently disagree on everything but he was respectful he was nice he came up to me he said he's aware of my channel etc etc like not even a hint that people are going to start being rude in person behind the scenes like when there's no reason to do it for your audience this gets us to right-wing conspiracy youtuber mark Dice now I don't know if you've heard of Mike mark dice and if you haven't maybe you won't find this interesting and I apologize in that case but it is a sort of like I said peek behind the curtain I've never done something like this so let's see what people think he has a big YouTube following more than a million subscribers and I previously had only one interaction with mark Dice which is when YouTube's ad pocalypse was going on and his channel was getting crushed and my channel was getting crushed we had a brief Skype call and we were just talking about how bad have you been hit what can we do do you have a youtube contact we can talk to seemed completely sort of normal and respectful in his private interactions few days ago I get a Twitter direct message from him and he says to me I'm curious what your honest unbiased opinion of the situation is is Wikipedia being unfair I do mention you in the presentation nothing against your success just an honest comparison and he links me to a video and I check out the video and you can look at the video yourself and what he's essentially saying in this video is that he believes there is an anti conservative bias on Wikipedia that editors are blocking details about his career on his Wikipedia page and as a counterexample if you look at my Wikipedia page there's a bunch of different sections and lotted lots of information on it so he says there's political bias the right-wing wiki pages are being stifled left-wing wiki pages are being allowed so I get this mesh's message from mark dice and I assume he just wants my honest opinion that were not sort of playing politics or whatever and so I answer him honestly and tell him that I'm trying to confirm what it is that he is asserting here so I wrote back to mark dice and I said I want to make sure I understand the claim your position is Wikipedia is liberally biased on the evidence that you found a few left-wing commenters who have pages on the site but your page can't be edited so I'm just trying to confirm that we're on the same page about what he's claiming and he responds to me in a way that no one in this industry has ever responded to me privately remember these aren't public tweets these are private messages he says oh just a few how many more examples do you want never mind you're obviously severely blinded by your bias hash Tagg liberalism find a cure so it's like he's been totally set off and it's not the way I talk to people really at all but especially privately so I don't respond in kind and he just keeps going and again remember this is a private conversation there's no audience to impress here with what he's saying and his next message to me is after I said oh okay I was just trying to understand the claim he says sorry I didn't know you were that dense so at this point I'm sort of like let me seriously look at what he's claiming and I'll give him a more detailed opinion and see how far this thing goes so I look a little bit more closely at what he's claiming about Wikipedia and I write to him no problem I don't care about out homonyms it looks like your page was edited 20 times this month I'm not seeing any edit rollbacks which is common for patients that are being censured or censored what should I be looking at on the actual wiki page that's concerning to you what does he do he sends me a link to a Washington Times article about this Wikipedia dust-up The Washington Times of course is owned by the crazy sung-yueng Moon cult Church so I tell him what I think about that I write back to him and I say The Washington Times is owned by a crazy cult so I think it's reasonable to question it as a reliable source as far as all the other stuff I think unless we do an empirical analysis that's bigger than a sample of a dozen it's tough to make any general assessment about Wikipedia's bias anything's possible but in my experience with them there's just way too much going on for them to even try to micro-target at the level that's being claimed don't really know what else to say about it and then his final commentary comes back in it's really sad you can't admit the obvious that a group of editors are zealously guarding the page to prevent anyone from adding anything that even hints that I actually have a decent career and have wrote have wrote several best-selling books quite intellectually dishonest of you actually but hey you're a liberal so guess that should be I think he said expected I'm unable to see that last word there I then asked him hey Mark can I share this with my audience and he said sure so what have we learned from this we've learned that it doesn't seem mark dice it doesn't seem like mark dice is playing a character in terms of who he is on his show he genuinely seems to believe at least some of the conspiracies that he has put together and he is not someone who is simply going to be polite to colleagues in private conversations as most people are so I don't know if people find this interesting if you've never heard of mark dice maybe you don't even care about this at all but I found it sort of surprising because I have never had any professional interaction with anybody in this industry people on the Left who disagree with me people on the right who obviously disagree with me everybody has been respectful and polite and sort of collegial in a way that it would be nice if in in in the sort of public sphere it was more of a reality and Mark dice apparently very very angry with me so send me your thoughts curious to hear what you think about it