Tldr (go watch Angela Collier’s video on him for the full story), Richard Feynmann was a really good physicist and educator, but his most popular stuff is usually him being a misogynistic asshole [going a strip club and playing bongos, speaking gibberish and saying he was simply speaking a “regional dialect” to foreigners, forcing waitresses to earn their tip by making them answer physics questions in the middle of their shift, etc.].
That really how I feel with Bad Empanada. Because his main channel is good, well sourced and does a good job at educating people on anti imperialist causes.
But I never hear about that really. All I hear from people who like him are all of his really bad takes and his constant brain rot on Twitter and bluesky.
I would much rather hear about his really well researched videos on the Iraq War and Israel’s genocide. I don’t want to hear about some tirade he made on twitter/Bsky about something or other.
Like, 90% of his videos on his main channel are good, and the ones I criticize are at the very least still professional. But I don’t see content from those, I only constantly see content from his live channel and his Twitter. And I’m like…why? Why emphasize this part so much? Sure you can’t separate the two, but there’s the really, really good part of the person, and then the part where he’s an abrasive asshole. Why are you emphasizing on the second part?
Sorry, this isn’t some in depth debunking of him on anything. Like I said, I do like what he does and I think he is mostly correct. But for some reason people [who support him and all his views] love emphasizing the bits where he’s wrong for some reason. So I just wanted to vent that out.
Edit: There’s also the flipside of this, which is Hasan. I think Hasan is very friendly, pretty mature, and someone who is all round respectable. At the same time, I think his actual work is pretty meh at best, detrimental at worst. To go back to my Feynmann analogy, I might think that Neil Degrasse Tyson seems like a pretty okay guy who I would like to have a conversation with, and not as much of an ass as Feynmann. But Feynmann was definitely a much, much better physicist and educator than Tyson
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28822003/
https://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/am-i-a-monster-an-overview-of-common-features-typical-course-shame-and-treatment-of-pedophilia-ocd-pocd/
https://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/articles/pocd-fear-of-being-a-paedophile