not a real crow

"Over the entire first hour, military representatives of a western capitalist nation, with a long history of military and economic aggression against smaller countries, are allowed to present their employer as a purely defensive and reactive force against evil expansionist nations, when they are actually quite the opposite."

First off, I think overall, this post contains a lot of good critiques of the video. My minor nitpick is this specific point is the fact that they do bring up Gaza as an example of a non-defensive application. While this probably still falls under your "all they can ever offer is “awareness” and then leave you alone with having to make an “informed decision”" critique, I felt it was still worth pointing out.

I also personally found value in their drawing attention to the fact it is propaganda by going "Look, we got invited for a reason, they are getting something out of us reporting this stuff," I personally felt it encouraged me to think critically of the information presented and keep my guard up, though I understand how to others it may be a tactic for people to put their guard down.

You also alluded to structural weakness in past videos. I've heard many critiques of how they handled the Disco Elysium video, but I'm curious what other ones you've found fault with. The Roblox series in particular felt to me like the one they came down hardest on a company, which makes me wonder if there are issues I am missing/ ways they could have handled it more effectively.

At least this time they didn't end it with a rant screaming at the victims of war, there's always that

Thank you for this writeup, it really crystallized a lot of thoughts/bad feels I had about the video.

I kept wondering when the pivot was coming because going on the propaganda field trip, having an entire segment airing the rationalizations of people working there, talking to nobody actually critical of the military, and then having some uncomfortable feelings about it?? it's just so insufficient to me for something you're representing as important

After having read this and thought about it, these criticisms are pretty poignant but don't really overcome this sort of...impression inertia I have about the whole thing. It's certainly weak in critiquing the issues and driving home more salient issues, now that you've overtly mentioned it, but seems to me like they've made the most likely thing to successfully straddle the line between engaging a general audience and 'meeting them halfway' and encouraging more knowledgeable folks to add on to the conversation. What made you want to stop watching certainly did the opposite for me, at least.

And that's the thing - it's difficult to imagine the general gaming public as ready and/or willing to have productive conversations about these things without taking those bumbling first steps, as opposed to the demographics we're closer to here on Cohost and in our ideological locales. Given the usual nature of arguments over the internet, it's even less likely to have folks become respectful interlocutors seeking truths, rather than verbal tribalists exchanging blows - and there's a lot of people to account for here. The irony of me comparing it to tribal warfare isn't lost on me either.

What results is a watered down version of what could've been, sure. But for what it is, they're already breaching territory that most wouldn't even experience in their day-to-day lives, myself included. I guess I'm the passive, sheltered fool of today by not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but if that's what leads me to eventually stumble up on critiques like this that let me rethink my thoughts and actions tomorrow, then maybe it's already done it's job, and the payoff is merely delayed behind consequences.

You probably have your reasons for being so ungenerous towards their output and I do agree with your overall views on the subject matter, but I struggle to relate to what you're saying about the video.

I personally saw plenty of stuff in there that goes absolutely against them being uncritical towards military propaganda. I also think it's quite unreasonable to expect a YouTube channel about games to basically try and fix the existence of war while talking to their audience.

Not trying to be contrarian or something - I'm just pointing out the harms from the video that you're worried about may be lesser than you think and the positives from it may be greater.

Listen I don't want to retroactively shut down comments under this, but just as a general thing:

I'm not interested in debates under my posts.