CuriousCat Archive Page 114 of 202

  1. Is working within existing institutions to try and change them(Sanders, AOC) good praxis? How much should leftists actively participate in the systems we seek to undermine, in your opinion?

    As with many things, it is good praxis so long as it's not your entire strategy. Progress is going to come from dedicated activists outside the system and compromised activists within it.

  2. Would that therefore mean that liberals/centrists are the happiest people?

    in response to Do you think the left is, on average, happier than the right?

    Nah, cuz they're the ones getting dicked over by conservatives every day.

    It's 2020. Nobody's happy.

  3. I know that there's someone who runs a math/physics related blog who talked about the most expensive way to fill a shoe box, which might help with an estimation. I'm actually quite curious too now.

    Here's the link: https://what-if.xkcd.com/108/

    in response to Do you think we could quantify the point of wealth at which all new money becomes literally meaningless? Like not just, studies show happiness doesn't increase after 70k-ish, but like, you literally can't do anything with money beyond this point and the only meaningful thing about having more of it is that others don't

    I have the What If book, I should check if the answer's in there. Sadly, Randall hasn't updated the What If blog in a long time. Think I'm famous enough to email him?

  4. Ah, were you not younger in highschool than in now?

    in response to Would he have cared enough to Google them?

    Sure. I was younger yesterday, too. I was younger when I started answering this question. What's our cutoff here?

  5. Do you think the left is, on average, happier than the right?

    I've seen people cite research that they're not, because not being in denial about things like systemic racism, climate change, misogyny, and capitalism is kind of a bummer. But I haven't seen that research myself and I don't find the idea convincing?! Conservatism is animated by a pretty incessant cycle of anger and catastrophizing, it's increasingly disrupting people's ability to form healthy relationships, and I've argued that the Far Right in many ways resembles domestic abuse dynamics. It's really hard to imagine the people who yell at me all day are happy.

  6. Opposite question then, if you had a second Patreon, what would the new one be used to fund?

    in response to If you didn't have a Patreon what would you be doing to make a living?

    I have a ton of other projects I wish I could be working on, but, while money is definitely an impediment, the primary issue is TIME. The channel just takes all the energy I have. With my current work schedule I can sneak some passion project work at the end of each month, but I doubt that'll be sustainable when I get back to The Alt-Right Playbook. Those videos can take 100+ hours.

    But, if some wizard threw a few extra days into the week, I'd use a second Patreon to fund Miscellaneous Other Projects, like indie games, podcasts, fiction, and non-essay video work.

  7. What do you think of In Rainbows?

    I haven't really liked a Radiohead album since Amnesiac. In Rainbows was more likable than Hail to the Thief, but it still falls into the latter-day Radiohead that explores an interesting sound more than it writes great songs.

    But maybe I should give it another listen, I dunno.

  8. If you didn't have a Patreon what would you be doing to make a living?

    fucking hell I'd rather not think about that

  9. stay cool mr youtube! great vids! love the stuff! have you seen swiss army man? i liked it.

    yeah!

  12. Do you think we could quantify the point of wealth at which all new money becomes literally meaningless? Like not just, studies show happiness doesn't increase after 70k-ish, but like, you literally can't do anything with money beyond this point and the only meaningful thing about having more of it is that others don't

    I really, really want to know what the most a person can spend in a year is, and I bet that math is doable, but I haven't found anyone who's done it. :-/

  14. Um given that you support firing alleged sexual harassers etc, seems like you do think there are mistakes for which the consequences should be poverty?

    in response to I've been arguing with some right wingers I know personally and poverty comes up a lot. They think poverty is the result of bad choices. I know a lot about external feedback loops that keep families from attaining higher SES, the attitudes of the poor, and empirical evidence that welfare doesn't increase poverty. Would it make sense to argue that poverty isn't the result of bad choices, or would that be accepting their framing of the issue? My actual position is that poor people should be helped whether or not poverty is the result of bad choices.

    You understand I'm a leftist, right? That I believe people who aren't working are still entitled to housing, food, healthcare, etc., right? You understand I want sexual harassers fired to remove them from positions of power so they cannot harm more people, not because I want them to suffer, yes? You understand I think crime should be treated as a public health problem, and that the response to their crimes shouldn't be fucking up their lives but counseling?

    It's extremely frustrating that you could know *anything* about my politics and think I want to keep poverty around so I can punish harassers with it. Like, I get it, if you're not coming from the same worldview as me, it can be hard to understand that "person should be fired" and "person should suffer" need not be the same thing, but it's still EXHAUSTING.

  15. How to have cool sex

    turn on the AC

  16. Do you think conservatives would change their beliefs if they knew resources weren't scarce? Would you change your politics if it somehow turned out scarcity was real?

    scarcity exists but only because massive wealth exists, and they believe wealth is a good thing, so that seems like a losing argument

  17. I've been arguing with some right wingers I know personally and poverty comes up a lot.

    They think poverty is the result of bad choices. I know a lot about external feedback loops that keep families from attaining higher SES, the attitudes of the poor, and empirical evidence that welfare doesn't increase poverty.

    Would it make sense to argue that poverty isn't the result of bad choices, or would that be accepting their framing of the issue? My actual position is that poor people should be helped whether or not poverty is the result of bad choices.

    I don't know how to convince conservatives that poverty shouldn't exist and does not need to. You are correct that there are no mistakes for which the consequences should be poverty; you can't fuck up badly enough that you deserve to be homeless or go hungry. Presumably, on some level, they already believe this, but that belief is in competition with their belief that life is a competition for scarce resources where only the strong prevail and if there isn't a threat of catastrophic failure no one will try hard enough. And I don't know how to make the first belief win out of the second.

    I'm working on it.

  19. I don't know how anyone who does YouTube for a job doesn't drink coffee

    in response to I picked staple foods, foods that took lots of time to cultivate, domesticate and make nice and in the meantime someone has to eat them before the slow process of selection produces the modern diversity of potato, that bit happens before the ten thousand years the humble nightshade tubers of all kinds takes to produce infinite diversity and lose to the self domesticating transgenic housecat tuber, the sweet potato This is a maybe pointless distinction but you need to learn hominy (or use a limestone grinding mill) before you get yellow dent, the way in which you select for the foods you can already prepare changes what you're moving towards, see, wheat vs maize, mustard is just odd because different people all had different ideas which bit was the 'food' bit and so now they are just the sentai team of leafy greens, all different (roots, stems, flowers, leaves, seeds, go! add a sauce or fry something at least!) but each part of the team Also respect to people working on pluots, i don't understand, but clearly people are very into what they do, and you have to respect people trying to improve on amazing fruits, it's like a moonshot oh and i guess a question on topic, you ever try coffee substitutes? Chicory etc

    I dunno, friend, coffee's gross, and it's easier to get through the mornings without it when you don't wake up in caffeine withdrawal.

  20. Oh hey, looks like the Gravel institute changed the title of their video, almost like you suggested

    Yeah, we're DMing.

  21. have you heard of Modern Monetary Theory? I just learned about it and thought of the opening dialogue in Always a Bigger Fish where you said conservatives think that deficits don't matter

    I've heard the term before, need to look into the actual theory.

  22. Top 3 Simpsons songs?

    Best proper originals:
    Señor Burns
    Baby On Board
    Union Strike Folk Song

    Best style parodies:
    Talkin' Softball
    Flaming Moe's
    anything from Oh, Streetcar!

  23. what do you think a centrist Prager U would be like?

    BioShock

  24. PragerU has top-notch production value...

    Are you crying now?

    can't you read? I'm farting.

  25. Assuming that reality is plagiarizing Masque of the Red Death and quite a few of GOP members end up "incapacitated", what do you think we, as ordinary citizens, should do?

    party

  26. How would your younger self have reacted to your videos?

    younger self wouldn't know what all the words I'm using mean

  28. Would it still be good edgy if all of that were true except the men weren’t made uncomfortable?

    in response to How would you define good edgy?

    *someone* being uncomfortable - or, at least, posturing *as though* someone will be uncomfortable - seems a defining trait of edginess

  29. Is compromising your beliefs in the hope of appealing to or converting a larger audience good praxis apropos the Gravel Institute? As you noted earlier they don't really make a leftist argument, and watching it was kind of disappointing for those actually hoping for a real leftist alternative to PragerU. They might still change, but given the current state of American political discourse, I'm not too hopeful.

    It depends on the wider context of your political movement, you know? Having people doing the intro, 101, let's-stop-short-of-quoting-Marx stuff is important. It's also important to have people to guide you from that point to a more direct engagement with anticapitalism. And it's important to have people speaking to an already anticapitalist audience about how to create an anticapitalist society.

    But right now we have way, way too much of the first thing and we don't need *more*.

  30. I picked staple foods, foods that took lots of time to cultivate, domesticate and make nice and in the meantime someone has to eat them before the slow process of selection produces the modern diversity of potato, that bit happens before the ten thousand years the humble nightshade tubers of all kinds takes to produce infinite diversity and lose to the self domesticating transgenic housecat tuber, the sweet potato
    This is a maybe pointless distinction but you need to learn hominy (or use a limestone grinding mill) before you get yellow dent, the way in which you select for the foods you can already prepare changes what you're moving towards, see, wheat vs maize, mustard is just odd because different people all had different ideas which bit was the 'food' bit and so now they are just the sentai team of leafy greens, all different (roots, stems, flowers, leaves, seeds, go! add a sauce or fry something at least!) but each part of the team
    Also respect to people working on pluots, i don't understand, but clearly people are very into what they do, and you have to respect people trying to improve on amazing fruits, it's like a moonshot
    oh and i guess a question on topic, you ever try coffee substitutes? Chicory etc

    in response to Having actually studied the "selectively bred for centuries" bit, this is correct but not as much as you might think, wild potato is just small, grasses are just less productive, etc, we just got better at processing them and that's only possible at the point where you stop in one place and can put a handmill down What (if any) food or cultivar that isn't a common part of human diets anymore do you think we are missing out on? For me it's either the (no longer a main fruit in cultivation) Quince, or it's the (more) edible acorns, but that one is just too much reading the long history of famine

    nah, I don't even drink regular coffee

  31. Was freedom overrated anyways?

    quite the opposite

  32. Having actually studied the "selectively bred for centuries" bit, this is correct but not as much as you might think, wild potato is just small, grasses are just less productive, etc, we just got better at processing them and that's only possible at the point where you stop in one place and can put a handmill down
    What (if any) food or cultivar that isn't a common part of human diets anymore do you think we are missing out on? For me it's either the (no longer a main fruit in cultivation) Quince, or it's the (more) edible acorns, but that one is just too much reading the long history of famine

    in response to Do you think extinct prehistoric plants would taste good?

    I have also studied selective breeding and you're picking weirdly specific foods. Like, we could talk about bananas, corn, apples, all of which have been massively, MASSIVELY shaped by human hands. We could talk about how cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower are all the same plant, bred for different features. (Don't even get me started on hot peppers.)

    Besides, in prehistoric times there were no pluots, which means it can offer us nothing. Fi on it. Fi! Fi!

    [EDIT: also, "potatoes were smaller," but, like... WHICH potatoes? yukon golds? russets? fingerlings? purples? potatoes were domesticated MILLENNIA ago from a single source and each potato variety is the product of seven-to-ten THOUSAND years of selective breeding. that's a VERY weird example.]

  34. Do you think it's irresponsible for journalists to predict that Trump will die and just appoint one of his kids president, instead of Pence? This is apparently a rumor, but is being reported a bit too credulously considering it's hard to imagine who in the GOP benefits from trying to make Ivanka Trump president instead of Pence (besides Trump, who, in this scenario, is dead).

    Exactly how does Trump "appoint" someone? That's not how succession works.

    Granted, at this point there's nothing I'd believe the GOP wouldn't try and little I'd expect Dems not to roll over for, but, yeah, hard to see how that benefits anyone.

  35. I got the impression that the Gravel Institute wasn't actually leftist, but socdem-aligned (i.e. alongside Bernie, AOC, etc, who are not socialists but rather moral centrists posturing as socialists), given their ties to the Bernie 2020 campaign

    in response to What are the answers to those first two questions? I want to make leftist videos too and I'd rather not repeat their mistakes

    I don't expend effort trying to determine the inner beliefs of politicians because I will never know them and therefore cannot base my support on them. But I'll put forth that "moral centrists posturing as socialists" and "socialists who compromise their beliefs in the name of successfully passing policy" are equally likely. Which one you choose to believe depends on how much you like the person, which is precisely why you should be skeptical of either.

  36. What type of laptop are you using, if you don't mind me asking, especially since you are making youtube contents and graphics? Is your laptop having a really high-end graphics card like AMD Ryzen 3 and above?

    I edit on an iMac. My laptop is for writing and gaming.

  37. Is there a humane way of getting rid of rats?

    There are humane rat traps that just catch the rat and let you put it outside. And if you find a rat in a glue trap you can pour olive oil over it to loosen the glue.

  38. How would you define good edgy?

    in response to Is there such a thing as good edge?

    a rape joke told by a woman in which rape culture is the butt of the joke and men in the audience are made uncomfortable

    but that's generally not what we're referring to when we say "edgy"

  39. Should I feel guilty about not donating to or sharing the hundreds of thousands of GoFundMe's that show up in my Twitter feed every now and then?

    I'm not your priest

  41. Are you a DSA member? I'm not from America, so I don't know what they do and how effective they are

    not presently

  42. Thoughts on all of the Half Life soundtracks? (Yes, Black Mesa does count)

    I like it. It's mostly textural, but it's got a unique flavor. Doesn't really sound like modern shooters, which tend to go either for ambience or adrenaline, or older games with their chiptune and MIDI bangers. It's like... ambient industrial?

    Black Mesa's original music for Xen is absolutely gorgeous.

  43. Thought's on Ken Burns and his documentaries?

    realizing I've legit never seen a single one

    more of a Pennebaker man, I'd say

  45. Any good resources on telling if one's idea of a Leftist argument's warped or accurrate?

    "do it reject capitalism or no?" is a start

  47. Do you think extinct prehistoric plants would taste good?

    in response to do you think dinosaur meat would taste good?

    most of the best tasting plants are ones we've selectively bred for centuries, so probably not

  48. I was unaware that leftists hated John Oliver
    Think he could actually take that plunge without, say, losing his platform and/or his financial stability?

    in response to why do u think so many far leftists hate John Oliver? he’s by no means a radical but ppl treat him like rachel maddow, and that confuses me as someone who’s always found him informative, albeit not exactly hilarious

    I feel like a lot of people are defaulting to "John Oliver is probably an anticapitalist and just can't say so" when I'm not aware of any evidence to that effect.

    for the record, I like John Oliver, appreciate the way he's made longform analysis work in a popular idiom, and think he does significantly more good than harm. some leftists are just cranks.

  49. Is there such a thing as good edge?

    in response to Do you like Disco Elysium?

    depends on how you're defining "edgy"

  50. what if Trump dies of COVID and the working class storms his funeral to feast on his body

    in response to Do you think it is ethical to eat humans who are already dead?

    does "died because he refused to keep his body free of disease" sound appetizing to you?

  51. What are the answers to those first two questions? I want to make leftist videos too and I'd rather not repeat their mistakes

    in response to My understanding is that the Gravel Institute on the whole is meant to be a sort of leftist PragerU, but I feel like there's still only so much that can be conveyed in that format.

    that's a big question and CuriousCat has a character limit, but, for the bullet points:

    - you should not be titling your video "is big government really the problem?" that's framing your argument in relation to the right's instead of letting it stand on its own. it's letting the right control the conversation when they're not even present. 50x as many people see the video's title as actually watch it, so you are spreading the conservative lie much, much further than you are spreading your rebuttal. generally, if the title of your video is a question, your answer should be "yes." PragerU titles almost all its videos with statements you are meant to agree with, not ones it intends to debunk.

    - your opening premise should not be "Americans agree that democracy is good," because that is flatly untrue. five or so years ago, "conservatives don't actually like democracy very much" would sound conspiratorial, but not in 2020 when the President's economic advisor is making videos TELLING PEOPLE CAPITALISM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN DEMOCRACY. ( https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/capitalism-is-a-lot-more-important-than-democracy-says-donald-trumps-economic-adviser/ ) The GOP has made it abundantly clear that they believe in maintaining power more than they believe in democratic processes, and, no matter how bad they behave, about 1/3 of the country supports them. I made a whole video about how liberals believe in democracy but don't want to give up capitalism and conservatives believe in capitalism but don't want to give up democracy; when push comes to shove, though, conservatives *will* sacrifice democracy, and most conservative rhetoric is built around not having to admit that to themselves. so I don't know who "we all believe in democracy" is supposed to convince.

    - if your goal is to promote leftism, you should not be treating the 50's as your benchmark for when things were better, because that was a time of liberal control of government, and, while their policies were better than what we've got, they were still capitalist. the video starts to lay the foundation of an anticapitalist argument, and then backs away, leaving the audience to think all we need is campaign finance reform.

    if the goal is to deradicalize conservatives, it misunderstands what conservatives believe. if the goal is to turn liberals into leftists, it doesn't make a leftist argument. if the goal is to reach the apolitical before PragerU does, it shouldn't do Prager's work for them by putting their argument in the title.

    so my advice? begin with the truth, know your audience, and actually make a leftist argument.

  52. Do you feel like you misspent your youth

    most of the things I wanted to do in my 20s were things I did not have the resources to do, or things I did not yet have the life experience to do

    so, yes, but only because of capitalism and linear time

  53. Do you think it is ethical to eat humans who are already dead?

    I mean I wouldn't recommend crashing a funeral with a steak knife if that's your question

  54. do you think dinosaur meat would taste good?

    I don't even thing other meat tastes good

  55. Did you learn/do voice-over before starting your YouTube channel, or was it a "do it a million times till I got good" thing for you?

    Not voiceover, but my parents basically raised me in my local community theatre and I took acting lessons for a decade.

  56. Switching to a voting system based on proportional representation also makes gerrymandering and other forms of disenfranchisement much harder (although of course it won't address all the problems you listed).

    in response to What are other forms of activism that are more productive that engaging with bigots? Asking so I can do that instead of getting disullusioned in humanity on twitter

    yup

    we should really have runoff elections

  57. Do you like Disco Elysium?

    I like it a lot, yeah. I have some issues with it - I don't like it's edgy streak - but it's brilliantly designed, frequently brilliant in its writing, legitimately hilarious, and a really good kind of angry.

  58. How many TARP videos will be left in the series, or do you not know?

    not counting follow-up videos where I give advice on what to do about the problems I've brought up and also some sort of conclusion wrapping things up...

    5ish

  60. why do u think so many far leftists hate John Oliver? he’s by no means a radical but ppl treat him like rachel maddow, and that confuses me as someone who’s always found him informative, albeit not exactly hilarious

    I feel like there's a kind of leftism uncanny valley, where the closer to your politics a liberal gets, the more you resent them for not taking the plunge and rejecting capitalism. I suspect it's why so many hate Elizabeth Warren far more than they hate Joe Rogan.

  61. What are other forms of activism that are more productive that engaging with bigots? Asking so I can do that instead of getting disullusioned in humanity on twitter

    The five better places to put your energies that I listed in How to Radicalize a Normie:

    - fighting vote suppression
    - re-enfranchising prisoners
    - pushing for immigrant rights, esp. voting
    - statehood for DC and full voting rights for all territories
    - ending gerrymandering and redrawing district lines to accurately reflect populations

    The best thing you can do on any of these fronts is join an advocacy group. Barring that, you can at least volunteer some hours or donate some money, whichever one you have to spare.

  62. What do you think would be the "optimal" outcome for the us election? If Trump were to hypotetically pass, you think that would be detrimental to the left, because the center would say to vote republican?

    With the caveat that I don't predict the future and this is mostly hypotheticals:

    If Trump died from COVID, Republicans would have to last-minute switch to promoting Pence. Maybe that would shore up some of the moderate base that wants to stay home because of how awful Trump is, but my hope (and suspicion) is he would lose at least as much from Trump's base who hates everyone in the Republican Party other than Trump. And Pence would be far more likely to actually *leave office* in January, so we at least wouldn't be watching the death of democracy.

    Obviously the *optimal* outcome would be Biden withdrawing and handing things off to Sanders. I was never sure Sanders knew how to win a debate against Trump, but he would trounce Pence.

  63. My understanding is that the Gravel Institute on the whole is meant to be a sort of leftist PragerU, but I feel like there's still only so much that can be conveyed in that format.

    in response to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTou0ViHOXM

    well their argument fails to understand why PragerU is successful, fails to understand how a leftist argument needs to be communicated differently from a PragerU argument, and fails to be impressive as leftism

    it's just "what if the same video dozens of people have already made but with higher production values and more famous people reading the scripts? surely the problem with our failed strategy was not pumping enough money into it."

  64. What’s the most recent vegetable you’ve grown?

    the last thing I grew was giving a fuck and it was a long, long time ago

  66. My solution: watch whatever they drivel out, but be sure not to give them a FUCKING CENT of your money. No subscriptions, no ads, no purchases, no nothing.
    That way, you watch the mainstream, read the hentai, watch the hentai, read the mainstream, whatevs, but you KNOW that none of your hard-earned cash fills their filthy fuckin' pockets.

    in response to I'm not gonna say that porn is solely responsible for the normalization of rough, extreme or violent sex acts... Even still, should we not ignore these evidence that porn does influence the way people think about sex?

    if that makes you feel good, cool, everyone needs to draw lines somewhere. but that's not a solution.

  68. Will the revolution be horny?

    we've been shut inside for 9 months

    EVERYTHING will be horny

  69. How do you feel about people openly wishing Trump to die from COVID

    I prefer to wish it privately

  70. Disco Elysium: Even worth the time it'd take you to form an opinion about it?

    I know my opinion on DE

  71. Any specific examples of ethical porn? Would you consider the Japanese ones or softcore porn as ethical?

    in response to I'm not gonna say that porn is solely responsible for the normalization of rough, extreme or violent sex acts... Even still, should we not ignore these evidence that porn does influence the way people think about sex?

    Crash Pad is the most famous one. Erika Lust seems to be pretty on-the-level. I don't know if TrenchcoatX is still a thing, but it had a good reputation. OnlyFans being largely self-directed means it avoids *some* of the problems with other porn sites, though capitalism + algorithms + gig economy are sure to reveal issues over time.

    This is something I have casual knowledge of, but is not exactly my area of expertise.

  74. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTou0ViHOXM

    in response to Thoughts on the first video put out by The Gravel Institute?

    I honestly, sincerely cannot tell what this is meant to accomplish, who it's for, or how it thinks this is different from hundreds of videos already saying the same things

    fuck, now I'm demoralized

  75. Are things so far gone now that just being a cishet white dude would be enough to deny power and privilege? [I'm honestly okay with that myself as I hate responsibility of any kind, lol]

    in response to Then what do you think is to be done about those sorts of people?

    privilege should not exist and power should be evenly distributed. we need to not frame such things as punishments or denials.

Anon commented:
Ian replied: