MovieBob

It is not her fault he cannot take the fucking hint then. If anything she was being gracious giving him the chance to give up with no fuss.

Can we maybe not bothside this, please?

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Nov 13th 2020 at 12:52:06 PM

People like this don't take hints. Lindsay should've taken that particular hint after graciousness failed six times.

Not defending Bob here. He's been a total creep about this. But it wouldn't have gotten this far if Lindsay actually blocked him after "soft-blocking" failed the first time.

Like, when someone's house burns down, they deserve and need sympathy and help more than criticism, but for the sake of the future, I don't think "why did no one use the fire extinguisher?" is such a bad question to ask.

Edited by Kayeka on Nov 13th 2020 at 1:00:17 PM

Lindsay's not in the wrong here, but doing the polite softblocking was maybe too many chances.

But I think part of the reason it went on so long was because "colleague" is vague enough that it's hard to pin down without elaboration. Some people use it to mean professional friends, and others use it to mean "work in the same industry even if there's no personal connection" (they are colleagues in that sense even if it doesn't mean anything) and Bob's use was vague enough it generally could have been either. Until this last thing where he made it obvious he meant the former. And that made it obvious it wasn't okay and that Lindsay was being too nice.

I like a lot of Bob's videos, but a lot of his social interactions are not okay.

I think that's kind of the sticking point. How much of his behaviour is deliberate, vs how much is oblivious ingrained learned behaviour? A lot of the controversial stuff is a relatively normal response to a thing (there really are people who would ruin their own lives out of sheer racism) taken to an extreme, or they're parasocial relationships of the sort that many people get trapped in.

This doesn't make it okay, but it does mean the hate mob is getting in the way. Why would you listen to anything they say?

Edited by Zendervai on Nov 13th 2020 at 8:55:28 AM

I will not fault her for trying to be nice. Especially since women have been conditioned since...forever to be mindful of hurting the feelings of men.

I don't think soft blocking someone six times to "give them a hint" and then going full blast on them in front of everyone is "too nice". Rather it sounds like some standard high school BS where the popular girl is cold to the overweight guy and it ends with her shouting at him in front of the whole school, calling him a creep.

Doesn't mean the girl isn't justified and the guy in the wrong, but very much not the most professional way to do it. Also we're holding people responsible for what their hate mobs do now?

Edited by GabrieltheThird on Nov 13th 2020 at 6:34:16 PM

I mean, he made this public to begin with. Complaining about him being shot down in public when it's him trying to pose himself as a friend in public kinda weird.

Also Bob's 39 years old who's been on youtube for 14 years. He's not a little child who can't fathom the consequences of his actions in the public sphere.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 13th 2020 at 12:21:36 PM

Yet Ellis is someone with at least as long a career and has had to suffer hate mob harassment and various other injustices over her career, so she should have the grace and experience to handle this a bit more smoothly. She's not a teenager either. Which was my point.

Again, I'm hardly suggesting that Ellis needs to be tarred and feathered over this nor that Bob is in any way blameless here. Just saying that neither of them comes out of this smelling like roses and that there were many better ways to deal with this.

No, this is on bob, at worst you can said Ellis should just block him the first time because soft blocking feel too much of a weird move that someone can be not aware for a while, but not dealing this the best way is diferent from starting this mess, that need to be said.

Ellis is not at fault for giving him the benefit of the doubt. The only one at fault in this mess is the one who refused to respect another person's boundaries. And that's Moviebob.

Agreed. Not feeling the victim blaming "Hey okay but sure but she should be more diplomatic with the creep"

I'm likely the least ideal person to assess the situation given my previously noted issues with Bob, but part of this seems endemic of social media, specifically Twitter, exacerbating his worst qualities and contributing to a growing lack of self awareness about how he comes across.

Given his tendency to constantly dismisses any criticism towards him as coming from bad actors/trolls and making vast generalizations about people and situations regardless of context, his inability/unwillingness to recognize Lindsay's lack of engagement with him (despite a history of various tweets/replies directed at her) on top of the constant soft blocking of him? Its not really a surprise that it got to this point, given how much he's cultivated an idea about himself that would have him believing posting such a picture would get a good response and was dumbstruck when Lindsay responded as she did.

Whether or not such a public shutting down was warranted given his behavior is a matter of opinion, but I suspect in addition to setting proper boundaries it was also a visible distancing of herself from him and things he's said. That might be cold, but could be prudent given her relative status and position as a content creator with the likes of PBS.

Essentially I think it would do him a world of good to stay off stuff like Twitter for a while and long term really reassess the nature of both his behavior and whatever dubious attitudes/expectations he's developed about others in the past few years.

Edited by BorneAgain on Nov 13th 2020 at 1:37:59 PM

I think we could all do with staying off Twitter, period.

Also, nice to see Bob's as much of a shit as I figured.

I'd say Ellis' only mistake was not blocking him sooner or telling him off in private much earlier.

Because frankly, I don't think she had any choice in this instance other than publicly telling him off because he publicly posted that photo and her whole point is that she doesn't like being falsely associated with him.

So doing anything in private at that point wouldn't actually accomplish what she wants.

It would be like someone slandering you and then not refuting it.

Yeah, pretty much that.

Granted is said that so far Ellis only mistake on this was.....to be to soft on him in this matter.

I never get why Bob is so insistent of being her collague here, this is also the first time I saw what can be seen as non-romantic/sexual creeping on a woman like this.

Lindsay and Bob did get along back around the time the photo was taken; they were, at the least, genuine Twitter friends. She also wanted him to join Chez Apocalypse when that was a thing.

But things change. Twitter is a festering morass of negativity where everybody is constantly snarling, and Bob seems to have absorbed a lot of that.

Lindsay has also been much more successful than Bob, and he seems to be trying to ride her coattails, holding on to their former friendship to swell his own followship. He really should take some time to think and learn to be happy with what he has. He seems to be making enough from Patreon and merchandise to pay the bills. He should look to Shamus Young for an example. Shamus is an even smaller name on YouTube and has a family to support, but I haven't heard of him acting up like this. So yeah, Shamus is the example to follow.

I think the biggest problem though is Bob's hate crowd, for a couple reasons. The first is that a lot of the harassers he has are the exact same people who go after Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, and neither of those people anywhere near deserve the vitriol they (still, to some degree) get and it's really easy to come to the conclusion that everyone they harass is more or less blameless.

The second is that his harassers will take actual criticism and them pepper obviously bad-faith insults in there. Like, the people who post the picture of him in Mario cosplay, or the other unrelated guy in Mario cosplay. Bob doesn't see that as an old shame thing, so he doesn't care, but it paints the person talking in a bad light, because they're unaware enough of him that they don't realize that their insult didn't work and it makes anything else they say look ridiculous.

He's also literally not a Nazi. Or a fascist. Yes, even with the eugenicist leanings. Those leanings are bad, don't get me wrong, but eugenics was an everyone thing for like 150 years, and the Nazis got their ideas of how to handle it from the US treatment of black people and native Americans. Eugenics is bad, but it's also not an idea inherently tied to Nazism or fascism. This means anyone who calls him a Nazi is immediately discounted because, again, he's literally not a Nazi.

When the main source of negative criticism are people who call you something you aren't, or who constantly throw the same bizarre insults at you, it's easy to just assume that everything they say can be discounted, and it's also really easy to include people who don't say the crazy things, but also only give negative criticism in that crowd.

Bob does really need to step back from Twitter and think really hard about himself, but I also don't think he's the monster a lot of people seem to think he is. He mostly just seems like a person who works really hard on his output with not enough of a support structure and gets harassed daily with bad-faith arguments and doesn't really understand where most of the harassment is even coming from.

Ehhhhh is true he is not a nazi or a facist but that post about eugenis is as YIKES as it could be, and is not is only post: he have said he beliv eis smarter as all people in US, or that his political solution is a atlas shurgged event were all the progresive remove themselves and let other fall, how the problem with the internet is that they are not beaten when "they said something that warrants" that they are not bad tactic only bad targets....

He have said a lot of the same creepy shit you kinda find in atl rigther and other "personalities" in tweeter.

My personal "favorite" is his "There are times where I deeply regret Jim Crowe-era racist laws ruined Intelligence Tests to Vote" which is like... astounding to me. It's like an onion of stupidity. How do you decry racism but then fucking dive head first into ableism.

"Eugenics & multi-tiered human rights are a good thing as long as they don't precisely mirror prejudices behind past atrocities"

I think Bob's heart, in general is the right place, but he gets angry at stuff, and is too stubborn to really back out of what he says when annoyed or aggravated.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 13th 2020 at 9:44:43 AM

Review of Hillbilly Elegy. He's not impressed.

Bob feels "deeply hurt, confused and borderline gaslighted".

Make of that what you will.

FWIW, he did retract that statement and later issued an apology.

Ah. I think that was for the best.

> Bob feels "deeply hurt, confused and borderline gaslighted

You need an account to see the post

Sorry. Try this.