'Sup, you beautiful bastards? Hope you're having a fantastic Monday!
Welcome back to the Philip Defranco Show, and let's just jump into it.
The first thing we're going to talk about today is the story coming out of Egypt that kind of plays as a reminder
that not everyone is living in 2018.
This case involves Rania Youssef, who is a 44-year old Egyptian actress who's been in many movies and TV series in Egypt.
The reason we're talking about this today is last week she attended the Cairo International Film Festival
in the country's capital. She wore this dress as seen in photos and video from the red carpet.
In it, you can see her legs underneath the transparent fabric of the dress.
While this dress looks pretty typical of what you might if you go to an awards show,
in Egypt, which is a relatively conservative Muslim country, the reaction to the dress was very different.
This story isn't just, "Ah, there was kind of some public outrage."
Following the awards show, multiple lawyers filed a lawsuit against Youssef,
accusing her of wearing an outfit that causes an incitement to debauchery.
Of note here, in Egypt, the law actually allows for a citizen to bring charges against another citizen
for subjective crimes, such as immorality and insulting the nation.
Although there is a check to this power, because it is ultimately up to a government prosecutor to decide whether or not to move forward with each case.
But in Youssef's case, prosecutors have moved forward and she is now facing a trial starting January 12th.
A trial that aims to, and once again, this is a real thing, determine whether she is guilty of inciting debauchery.
One of the lawyers who brought the case against Youssef, Samir Sabri, saying that Youssef's outfit:
If Youssef is found guilty, she faces up to five years in prison.
Now, since wearing the dress to the awards show, Youssef has responded on her social media,
posting statements saying her fashion designers were probably influenced by trends at other awards ceremonies, and adding:
However, interestingly enough, in a potential act of defiance, the post where she had the pictures where she was wearing the dress still remains up.
As far as the reactions to this whole controversy, they have been all over the place.
Egypt's actor's guild definitely didn't have her back, saying in a statement that it was planning on
investigating and disciplining actors who wore what they called inappropriate clothing during the festival.
We saw others on social media agreeing with that sentiment and going even further, saying:
However, on the other side of this, others such as Egyptian director Amr Salama saying that the case
only exposed the ridiculous intentions of the lawyers who brought the case forward, tweeting:
And a big thing I want to hit on is this would be nice if this was an isolated incident.
But Egypt has a long history of going after actors, artists, politicians, and dancers for seemingly innocuous behavior.
In fact, Sabri, who was one of the lawyers who brought this case against Youssef, he's made an entire career out of it.
According to a report from earlier this year, Sabri:
And Sabri saying:
While many of these suits are thrown out as frivolous, just in the last couple of years, we've seen some absurd cases make their way to Egyptian courts.
Earlier this year, a hugely popular Egyptian singer by the name of Sherine Abdel Wahab
who was also a judge on the Egyptian version of the voice, she was sentenced to six months in prison
for making a joke about the quality of water in the Nile River.
Although luckily, the update to that story was on appeal she was acquitted of those charges.
But there were also cases like January of this year, there was another singer was detained for dancing suggestively in a video.
Last year we also saw an Egyptian singer sentenced to two years, which was later reduced to one year,
for appearing in a music video in her underwear while eating a banana.
There was a case in 2015 where a belly dancer received a six-month sentence for wearing an outfit that looked like an Egyptian flag.
Of course, keep in mind, this is just some of the plenty of ridiculous and horrible.
As far as my personal reaction to this, I'm disgusted.
I'm not surprised, but I'm incredibly disappointed that this is still happening today.
The more that I read up on Sabri, the more I realize "oh, he is a sad, sad excuse of a man" in my opinion.
In a report, he talked about his wife, and the report says:
[stuttering] No, that's not what that sounds like.
But that does definitely sound like the mindset a loveless, limp-dicked bastard who gets excited
at the prospect of penalizing a woman with jail because she wore a certain dress where "oh my god, you can see her legs?!" would have.
With situations like this, people can always argue that "oh, the culture here, the culture there,"
If any part of your culture is about the villainization of women and their bodies and their choices,
fuck whoever embraces that part of the culture.
But that is the story, then that's my personal opinion, and of course, I pass the question off to you.
What are your thoughts around this story?
But from that, I want to share some stuff I love today,
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The first bit of awesome today is actually kind of an announcement.
Starting tomorrow, until we break for Christmas, in addition to your daily weekday Philip Defranco Show,
the five-a-week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays on this channel, you'll be getting an extra morning news video.
Also, regarding more and more new content, we'll be talking about that before we break for the year.
But yeah, be on the lookout for those, turn on your notifications if you want.
Then, as we lead into the new trailer for Captain Marvel that is dropping tonight, we got a poster of Brie Larson.
Then we got a trailer for The Innocent Man,
we had Nerdwriter1 taking on "Why are there so few smartphones in popular movies?",
we had Half as Interesting giving us the story of the secret train station under New York City.
Then we had Richard Madden reliving the red wedding scene.
Then we had Priyanka Chopka and Nick Jonas playing the newlywed game.
Then we had The Infographics Show giving us the place in your house that is most likely to kill you.
We had SNL giving us Dad Christmas. [note: at time of writing, video appears unavailable]
If you want to see the full versions of everything I just shared, secret link of the day,
really, anything I talk about today, links as always are in the description down below.
Then, let's talk about industry news, and it starts off with money.
Forbes released their list of what they called the Highest-Paid YouTube Stars of 2018.
Their list, starting from 10 going to 1, starts with Logan Paul at $14.5M, PewDiePie, JackSepticEye,
VanossGaming, Markiplier, Jeffree Star, DanTDM, DudePerfect, Jake Paul,
and at the top of the list is a complete surprise (if you haven't seen our coverage in the past)
RyanToysReview.
If you're like, "But I've never heard of him!" your kid or your niece or your nephew,
if they're under 7, they probably have.
Family selling stuff at Walmart -- their views over the past 30 days? They got over 564 million views.
Around 26 billion lifetime for that channel. Also, not just limited to that channel.
While this list is very interesting, I just want to point out I think that a lot of these numbers are probably off.
As they note at the bottom, these estimates come from data from multiple places,
as well as interviews with what they call industry insiders. You can never really tell what a creator's making,
I mean, just starting from point 1, as far as their AdSense is concerned.
There is a reason, for example, sites like SocialBlade.
When looking at the RyanToysReview channel, they're like, "They are making either $141K a month or $2.3M."
There are not a lot of standards in the industry, it also doesn't take into account everything that a creator is doing.
Also I think it needs to be pointed out the numbers that they're running are pre-tax.
It also doesn't take into account production, agents, lawyers, blah-blah-blah.
But it is very interesting.
While we're also on this topic of the industry and community news, I wanna talk about number 9, Mr. PewDiePie.
Felix has been in the news a lot recently, due to the fact that he is very soon going to drop
from the number 1 most subscribed channel on YouTube.
As we've talked about in the past and as has been a major topic on the site for the past two months,
there's another channel by the name of T-Series coming up.
T-Series, if you don't know, is this Indian music video label, film production company.
T-Series would have already surpassed PewDiePie if it had not been for the massive reaction from the community.
Another YouTuber by the name of MrBeast especially championing this campaign.
Campaigning online and in the real world with things like billboards.
We also had Mr. "6 figures I was only 4" doing it even bigger in New York.
There were stories popping up on the Internet about how tens of thousands of hacked printers were
printing "PewDiePie propoganda."
The things I'm referencing here are some of many, many big reactions,
one of the most recent ones was probably Markiplier an JackSepticEye.
So Felix still has not been passed yet, but we saw something really awesome happen today.
Felix made a video today, and the two main points that stood out to me is he talked about hate and good.
The first being is that he addressed some of the hate that has been directed towards Indian and Indian people because of these campaigns.
"You see comments such as '[censored] YOU INDIAN [censored]'
"Just really distasteful and unnecessary comments. I always made Indian jokes and stuff like that
"but I do that with all countries. This is not what I'm about, and I know my fanbase isn't about this either."
So he called that out, and then he promoted good.
Specifically, using the extra attention that this campaign has given him as a way to promote to a charity.
"That's why I decided to create a fundraiser for the charity called CRY.
"CRY is a charity that focuses on making a better future for kids in India."
Now the bad thing for Felix is that he has such a large audience the link he put out, which went to Fundly,
ended up crashing. But he has since updated it and linked to a GoFundMe, so money is now starting to come in.
I will say, I personally love this move from Felix.
He takes the situation, which really started as, I feel like, kind of a funny gag
and has turned into a somewhat community uniting/people realizing that they can get views and subs from it
into a situation where it's not just about getting new subscribers, but actually helping people in the world. [note: check out felix's channel for the charity links!]
I just love seeing that. What I'll say on a personal note:
Even when T-Series does finally do it, they finally pass Felix, they become the #1 most subscribed channel on YouTube,
Felix will still be the most subscribed YouTuber on the platform.
Those are two different things. I really think, if anything, this isn't some conversation around a "changing of the guard,"
"a changing of the environment." I really feel like it speaks volumees that it has taken this juggernaut,
this behemoth of a company, this long.
This is kind of a joke that this community has been able to keep them at bay.
But yeah, that's where I'm going to leave that one. [last note: remember to subscribe to pewdiepie!]
The last thing I want to talk about today is France because wow, wow, wow! Things have gotten crazy.
If you haven't seen, France was rocked by major protests Saturday for the third weekend in a row.
Reportedly over 8,000 protesters took to the streets of Paris, and across France over 100,000 took part that day.
According to reports at least 133 were injured, 400 arrested,
and unfortunately, there was also 1 reported death from a motor accident caused by the protests.
As far as the deathcount, 3 reportedly have died in total since the unrest started weeks ago.
As far as the response from the government, according to France's Interior Ministry,
they said they deployed 37,000 police officers, 3,000 gendarmes,
which is a branch of the armed forces under the Ministry's jurisdiction,
and 30,000 firefighters to deal with the riots across France on Saturday.
These protests in France are being considered the worst in over a decade, which is really saying something,
because the French really know how to protest and they have a long, long history of it since the French revolution.
With that said of course, the big question here is, what exactly are they protesting?
These protests started on November 17 after a Facebook group of truckers said they would be
shutting down parts of Paris to protest increasing fuel taxes.
Over 200,000 people responded that they were interested, and since the 17th, hundreds of thousands
across the country have gone out to protest the fuel taxes. Regarding the number of people involved,
we have the Interior Ministry saying that these protests are dying down.
Putting out that you had 300,000 that took part in the first day and now you have "only" 136,000 this past weekend.
As far as the protesters themselves, they're calling themselves « gilets jaunes » which means yellow vests.
That obviously stands for the high-visibility vests they're wearing.
Which also makes sense because it ties into the vehicle-related nature of the protest,
and it is widely available. Since 2008 all motorists were actually required to have one in their vehicle.
But also, these protesters are somewhat unique in French protest history, because they've been largely
organized online in more grass roots fashion. Rather than what we've seen in the past, usually it's large unions,
political parties. So those are the protesters, but let's talk about the thing that they are protesting.
The question that might be in your head right now is "how bad is the tax increase,
"that we're seeing hundreds of thousands of people take to the street?"
The first tax increase was in 2017, shortly after French president Emmanuel Macron took office.
There's also another one to be scheduled on January 1, 2019.
The two together would increase the price of fuel 6.8 (euro) cents/liter for 95 octane, and 14 (euro) cents per liter for diesel.
For a not-so-metrically-inclined audience, that would be around $.25/gal of regular gas; for diesel, it would be around $.53.
This is on top of the already high gas prices. To give you kind of an idea of how high it is,
in the US, it would come out to about $6.63/gal of 95 and $6.99 for diesel.
The argument behind the tax is that this is supposed to encourage people to use their vehicles less,
or invest in higher-efficiency vehicles.
However, it's been pointed out that these fuel prices are only affecting middle-class and lower-income groups in France.
Especially those who don't live in France's urban areas.
Out in the suburbs and more rural areas, public transportation isn't as prevalent,
and most of the French rely on their own vehicle to get around.
In addition to this, city residents are also concerned about the fuel tax.
Because increased cost of living in the city is forcing them to move to the suburbs,
where the fuel tax will more heavily affect them.
While all these protests were originally just about the fuel prices, as we've seen with other protests,
it became a much larger issue. According to reports, there was a large increase of people that were protesting
other grievances and demands due to declining living standards, high costs of living in France,
general dissatisfaction with Macron. You also had people who are upset about the state of the economy.
France still lingers at about 10% unemployment.
Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps rising, both with taxes and the price of goods.
All of this anger resulted in a sharp increase in the level of destruction this weekend.
There was very notable damage: you had stores being looted, cars being burned, the area being vandalized,
Even the famous Arc de Triomphe was targeted with graffiti that read "Macron, resign." [ « les gilets jaunes triompheront » = "the yellowjackets will triumph" ]
The damage was so bad that talk of a state of emergency was in the air,
but ultimately Macron ended up declining to do so.
Instead saying that policing proceedures will be reviewed in terms of:
Also while mentioning Macron, I think there is also something important to point out.
Macron himself is actually largely seen as pro-elite and ignoring the lower classes.
Especially after he cut taxes for the wealthy and enacted these fuel taxes, which affect the lower classes far more than the wealthy residents.
In fact, a poll by Kantar Public in late October showed that 71% of respondents had no confidence in Macron.
Also, while we're talking about Macron, it is also important to talk about the violence versus protesting.
Macron is trying to get a handle on the protests by saying that he would never accept violence.
While, at the same time, directing his Prime Minister to meet with what he called legitimate protest groups.
His government fears that the movement is being co-opted by far-left and far-right groups and professional rioters.
But on the note of left wing and right wing political groups, we are seeing them demand that Macron dissolve parliament and hold new elections.
Also, even though Macron isn't up for re-election until 2022, this is being seen as a possible killer to
any presidential run he has in the future. As far as whether the French president is willing to
budge regarding the fuel tax, not really but with an asterisk. He has been adamant that
the January 1st tax increase will not be rescinded.
However, he is reportedly considering adjusting the fuel tax increases are done when fuel prices themselves sharply rise.
But ultimately, that is where we are right now. Things are somewhat uncertain.
It'll be interesting to see what happens this week and then specifically, this weekend.
Will the number of people taking to the streets remain relatively the same, will it go back up, will it continue to go down?
Will we see more destruction or a crackdown?
We'll have to wait and see, and in the meantime, I pass the question off to you.
What do you hope will happen, what do you think will happen?
While that question is for everyone, if you've lived or live in France or live nearby, I'd definitely love to know what you're thinking.
Obviously understanding this situation is always different from the outside in.
That's where I'm going to end today's show. [captions end here]