Video References
A running log of individual videos (YouTube essays, talks, podcasts) that have informed DOD discussion or been cited in a blog post or concept page. This tracks specific videos, not the creators or channels behind them — a creator gets a row here for each video referenced, not a dedicated page, unless their body of work warrants a full organisation entry in its own right.
This is a citation log, not an endorsement list. Inclusion means a video was substantive enough to reference or respond to — not agreement with its argument.
| Date logged | Video | Creator / Channel | Topic | Referenced in | Thumbnail backup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-26 | We Need To Rethink Democracy | Andrewism | Anarchist critique of democracy as a category | Anarchist critique of democracy | local copy |
Thumbnails are saved locally under docs/assets/blog/ (named <date>-<slug>-thumb.jpg) rather than hotlinked, so the reference survives if a video is taken down. Only the thumbnail is kept, not the video itself, and it's credited and linked back to the source.
Watch list
Videos flagged as worth checking out but not (yet) discussed or cited in any DOD post. No "referenced in" link because there isn't one yet — these are bookmarks, not citations.
Add an entry with util/add_video_reference.py instead of editing this file by hand — it looks up the title/channel, downloads a local thumbnail to docs/assets/blog/, and appends both the table row and the thumbnail embed below:
python util/add_video_reference.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" --topic "One-line topic" --published 2026-06-18
--topic and --published are optional and will be asked for / left as TBD if omitted — fill in the date manually afterward if you don't have it handy.
Sorted newest-published first.
| Video published | Video | Creator / Channel | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| TBD | You Would Be a Terrible Leader | CGP Grey | How would-be rulers must satisfy supporters to stay in power, and why that constrains even dictators |
| TBD | You Can Win the Presidency With 22% of the Vote | CGP Grey | How Electoral College math lets a candidate win with a minority of the popular vote |
| TBD | The Voting System That Should Replace Every Election | CGP Grey | Explains the Alternative Vote / STV and why it can outperform plurality voting |
| TBD | Why Democracy Is Mathematically Impossible | Veritasium | Arrow's impossibility theorem — no voting system can satisfy all fairness criteria at once |
| 2020-11-03 | Supreme Court Chaos — How to Fix Governmental Exploits with Warhammer 40K | Extra History (Extra Credits) | Exploits/loopholes in the US political system, framed as game-design bugs |
| 2020-11-02 | Simulating alternate voting systems | Primer | Simulates how different voting systems (FPTP, approval, IRV, etc.) behave under the same electorate |
| 2018-06-26 | The Rules of Society (Extra Politics, Part 4) | Extra History (Extra Credits) | Why political systems need stable, game-design-like rules to function |
If one of these gets discussed or cited in a post, move its row up into the main table above.
Possible future: a recommendation feed
Worth considering separately from this log: a lighter-weight way to surface interesting videos/articles to DOD members as they're found, rather than only retroactively logging things already cited in a post. That's closer to social-media sharing than to blogging or citation-tracking, and would need its own format (a Discord/mailing-list digest? a dated links page? something else?) rather than overloading this log or the blog. Noted here as a gap, not yet designed.