CuriousCat Archive Page 117 of 202

  1. if you got a free reboot pass whatre you briging back? i think like it would be funny to make a reboot of a show thats still on or like just ended. Steven Universe Reboot 2020 or something. but definetly ben 10 for me.

    reboot the Matrix as a 12-episode miniseries

    you could literally call it The Matrix: Rebooted

    [EDIT] OH WAIT! Reboot ReBoot!

  2. Could and would King Danskin please revive Venture Bros?

    in response to Just replace columbus day with a voting day

    if we're lucky some other channel will pick it up

    seems like prime Netflix fodder

  3. How much agency would you say Kim Wexler (in Better Call Saul) has? To what extent does she feel like her own character and person vs being defined by Jimmy and her relationship to him?

    I would consider Kim extremely her own person. I know what she wants and why. Her story is inextricably bound up in Jimmy's, but let's not confuse that for having no character or agency.

  4. Do you think tourism can sometimes perhaps be bad in certain cases?

    in response to Is tourism bad? Are tourists bad?

    that's true of literally everything

  5. Just replace columbus day with a voting day

    in response to Coming from the uk, where after a freedom of information request revealed that the 'ceremonial' monarch kills legislation by fiat constantly, they made information about *what* she does or doesn't have an active involvement in a state secret, and so immune to FOI requests Well I don't think that monarchy stories do much either, buuuut #ActivateTheQueen was a comical hashtag used quite in earnest a few times over the last decade and with the implication that she could just flip the political card table over if she wanted and nobody would know what to do next, so to that extent nobody is even sure what powers we would need to return but giving her those back has actual traction that does indeed fluctuate some with pop culture In that spirit, what would your will be if forced onto the throne of the USA for a year? (I dunno, say they turf the giant Lincoln statue out, that throne, there's always a fancy enough chair somewhere)

    King Danskin approves your proposal

  6. That's true. But do you think that line of argumentation is an appropriate way to respond to someone on the Russiagate train without denying Russian interference or calling someone a liberal when they might not be?

    in response to What do you make of the lefties who say "well the US interferes in other countries' elections all the time, so therefore we can't criticize Russia for doing it to us" as a way of arguing against Russiagate?

    I'm not discussing this subject to give you arguments for winning debates with lefties who deny Russian interference. That is not a fruitful use of your time.

  8. Follow-up question, Mr. Studios: is there any crisis you can foresee we'd have in the Post-Labor Socialist Utopia that would require some kind of armed response? I'm not talking having an escort with nonlethal tools to protect a social worker while they try to talk down person having a mental health episode, I mean "this crisis is already dangerous, send in the SWAT".

    in response to Are the problems with the police so deep as to be inextricable from policing as a whole? Is the very concept of "the police" badwrong?

    this is not my area of expertise, but I don't think "treat crime as a public health issue" is mutually-exclusive with "have people authorized to use arms." the question is, why does EVERYONE who enforces the law need to be armed? why does the person who investigate a noise complaint or pulls you over for speeding need authorization to shoot you? I'd be a lot more okay with SWAT teams if they were among the only people with authorization to use force and, once the perpetrator is apprehended, they are sent to counseling rather than lethally injected.

  9. Don't you think Gerrymandering and vote suppression are the reason it was that close (in the Electoral College since he lost the popular vote)?

    in response to As far as you can tell, to what extent is the idea of Russian election interference a liberal conspiracy, and to what extent, if any, is it true? It's very difficult to find real information on this.

    They were factors, but, as with the Russian interference, it still never should have been close enough for them to tip the scales. The Dems ran a shit campaign because they either don't know what they're up against or know but would rather lose on their own terms than win by changing tactics.

  10. Is tourism bad? Are tourists bad?

    I get a lot of questions asking me "is [thing] good or bad?" despite my history of saying "[thing] good/[thing] bad mentalities are rarely useful," but this is one of the odder ones.

  11. Being sexual or being sexualized?
    https://www.instagram.com/p/CFL-8I6nmi0/?igshid=1rwgkens25egq

    I'm trying to think of a scenario where someone can give either answer and not be sexualized by a portion of their audience.

  12. What do you make of the lefties who say "well the US interferes in other countries' elections all the time, so therefore we can't criticize Russia for doing it to us" as a way of arguing against Russiagate?

    in response to As far as you can tell, to what extent is the idea of Russian election interference a liberal conspiracy, and to what extent, if any, is it true? It's very difficult to find real information on this.

    well, that's a different thing from saying Russian interference didn't happen

  13. Hi ! In your Indivisible Somerville presentation, you said that people, especially on the right, have a need to appear normal, to not be considered "assholes". Do you think electing and (still) supporting Trump was/is a way for the right to put forward an *asshole in chief" who would take all the blows, and in some way to hide behind him ?

    Mmm. The Lincoln Project has certainly used Trump to give their wing of the Republican Party a makeover, blaming him for the awfulness they've been perpetuating for years. But that kinda requires they oppose him. Not sure any of his supporters are using him as a scapegoat; they seem pretty aware that you are seen as a asshole for supporting Trump and often feel more empowered to BE assholes because of him.

  14. How blurry is the line between authoritarianism and fascism?

    While it is technically possible for certain stages of fascism to lack authoritarianism, the simplest explanation is that authoritarianism is the umbrella term and fascism is a subset of it.

  15. Are the problems with the police so deep as to be inextricable from policing as a whole? Is the very concept of "the police" badwrong?

    That is my suspicion.

    The argument that crime should be treated as a public health issue rather than a "locking people up" issue grows more convincing by the day.

  16. Have you learned much about yourself from answering curiouscat questions?

    I've fleshed out ideas and learned new things, but this is not a place of self-discovery for me.

  17. I remember a statement along the lines of "there is always violence, the only question is who is experiencing the violence" in the context of protests and I think it might have been in one of your videos but I'm not sure. Do you happen to know what I'm talking about and can point me in the right direction?

    https://youtu.be/6BB0Q1qHpAw

  18. Wasn't one of your main sources for Bigger Fish The Authoritarians? The Authoritarians always read as pretty essentialist to me, kinda put me off it in that way. Was that a flawed reading?

    in response to I'm curious how often you see someone use one of your alt right playbook videos to make an argument you don't agree with ? (I saw someone use your 'i hate mondays' video to argue for incrementalism)

    Altemeyer's pretty explicit that authoritarianism is largely cultural and, in fact, usually requires *very* strict boundaries to maintain itself, stressing how commonly people slip out of it when those boundaries are breached. I don't know how you could read it as essentialist.

  19. As far as you can tell, to what extent is the idea of Russian election interference a liberal conspiracy, and to what extent, if any, is it true? It's very difficult to find real information on this.

    There is pretty blatant evidence of Russia *attempting* to interfere with the election and some vagaries about whether/how much they were successful. Russian bot disinformation is more or less proven; something like 1/3 of tweets about Trump were from bots and most were Russian. And there's plenty of evidence they'll do it more in the coming election.

    The reason liberals seize on the "Russiagate" meme is because it's the one thing they can use to discredit Trump that doesn't require them to change policy in any way. They wanna get him out on a technicality rather than engage with all the ways their strategies failed to beat one of the most loathesome and unpopular candidates in history. It is possible Russian interference tipped the election in Trump's favor; it is EGREGIOUS that the election was ever close enough for that tiny margin to matter. That's on the Dems, and they don't want to deal with it. They ran a shit campaign with an uninspiring platform that DID NOT BRING OUT THE VOTE. If they hadn't fucked up, a few thousand votes influenced by Russia wouldn't have mattered.

    I get annoyed at lefties who see liberals leaping on Russiagate and then deduce that a) Russia didn't actually do anything wrong, and b) that anyone who says they did is a liberal. But, fuck, liberals don't make it easy to defend them.

  20. How is it you find so many songs that are both good and in some way relevant to the videos you're putting them in? I could understand one or the other consistently, both inconsistently, but how both consistently?

    I have good taste in music, and, while my memory is not great for remembering stuff like "where do I need to be today" or "what did my housemate ask me to do 20 minutes ago," it's great at holding onto ephemera like song lyrics. So, during the many hours I'm working on a video, some track will pop into my head that seems appropriate. And, if not, I'll just scroll through my iTunes til I see something that sparks.

  21. What game genre outside of virtual novels could best emulate being in a polycule

    puzzle

    https://w.itch.io/triad

  22. "exile Trump and Bush and Cheney and the rest of them for treason and corruption (since we can't put them in the prisons we abolished)"

    Obviously I know this is just a thought experiment but exile them to where? That's literally just making them somebody else's problem.

    in response to Coming from the uk, where after a freedom of information request revealed that the 'ceremonial' monarch kills legislation by fiat constantly, they made information about *what* she does or doesn't have an active involvement in a state secret, and so immune to FOI requests Well I don't think that monarchy stories do much either, buuuut #ActivateTheQueen was a comical hashtag used quite in earnest a few times over the last decade and with the implication that she could just flip the political card table over if she wanted and nobody would know what to do next, so to that extent nobody is even sure what powers we would need to return but giving her those back has actual traction that does indeed fluctuate some with pop culture In that spirit, what would your will be if forced onto the throne of the USA for a year? (I dunno, say they turf the giant Lincoln statue out, that throne, there's always a fancy enough chair somewhere)

    You can't "make" political prisoners someone else's problem because you can't send them anywhere that won't take them. This was one of the issues Obama had with trying to shut down Guantanamo Bay - no country would take the remaining prisoners and Congress wouldn't let him bring them to the States.

    I have no doubt Trump could find a willing host in one of his "shithole countries."

  23. What can we reasonably expect out of a Biden presidency?

    liberal bullshit instead of fascist bullshit

  24. Would you like to perform trepanation onto yourself?

    I would like to perform defenestration on this question.

  25. (different anon) Do you think there'll be a fourth movie? "Before Midnight" felt like such a natural ending to the whole story to me, but then I could've said that about the ending of any of them.

    in response to Who is the most well-developed and complex fictional character you know of, who is still defined primarily by their relationship to another character?

    I think they might run into the Seven Up problem of the earlier films covering the more formative years of a person's life and the later years being less dramatic? If the math holds, the characters would be 50 in the next one, but how different do we expect 50 to be than 41?

    Might be worth revisiting decades down the line, checking in on them when they're elderly. I'd pay to see that, if society still exists in 30 years.

  26. If I were to take a poll of non-monogamous game developers, would that be a "poly count"?

    how dare you

    ...

    also that number would be higher than you expect

  27. What's the game with the most boring and/or frustrating gameplay that you've still played all the way through because of the story?

    Dunno about "most." The most recent example is probably The Fall? Gameplay is extremely forgettable but the story is compelling.

  28. is better call saul worth a watch if i enjoyed breaking bad?

    Yeah! It's good, for reasons I can't seem to articulate.

  29. Eternal president Kim Il-Sung and the mortal (though still infallible) Kim family, as his chosen representatives in the role of supreme ruler of the Korean people... feels ignored?

    in response to Why do you think monarchy isn’t coming back? Aren’t modern dictatorships basically equivalent to monarchic rule?

    I know so little about North Korea, and so much of what we hear about it is either Korean or American propaganda, so, yeah, I tend to leave it out.

    Perhaps sustained dictatorship will, inevitably, turn into monarchy. We don't have a lot of test cases.

  30. Dune is famously difficult to film, but do you think Dhalgren is more 'unadaptable'?

    in response to Frank Herbert's Dune or Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren?

    I haven't read nor seen Dune so I can't speak to it. Dhalgren is pretty explicitly written as a metatextual exploration of writing itself: there are passages in a notebook the protagonist reads that are text from elsewhere in the book; there's a scene where he looks in a mirror and sees someone else, and the description of who he sees is Samuel R. Delany; and there's an entire chapter where passages are broken up in different, overlaid columns, House of Leaves style, to depict events that, though happening simultaneously, can only be *read* linearly, and to play with the tensions of what text cannot convey. And, overall, it's a book where impossible things happen because, in fiction, anything that can be rendered in text is "real" within the world of the fiction, and the many discussions of writing and science fiction and poetry draw attention to this fact, and yet no explanation is given for *why* these impossible things happen other than "this is fiction so they can." The book is many things, and, among them, is a meditation on the act of writing fiction.

    NONE of that translates to film.

    But you can take those themes and figure out how you might tackle them cinematically. You know, pull a Naked Lunch and make something that has similar themes and elements, but is ultimately it's own work that uses the source text as inspiration. Honestly, an adaptation of Dhalgren that is it's one big, weird, philosophical, and extremely *filmic* experience would be the only way to do it faithfully.

  31. Was capitalism created, or did people look at the economic system they were living in & retroactively define it as capitalism? Because it seems ambitious that some people want to overthrow & replace capitalism in 1 revolution if capitalism didn't even come about all at once or on purpose.

    Well, a revolution isn't a single thing that comes about all at once or on purpose, either. The Russian Revolution was built on a growing tide of socialist activity and collaboration, creating what Lenin dubbed "dual power," where there is the official power structure and another, growing power structure alongside it, that cannot coexist and will, eventually, come into conflict where one definitively defeats the other. It took years of mobilizing and one failed revolution to bring that about in Russia.

    The general rule about revolutions is they don't put new people in power so much as they reveal where the power has actually resided for some time.

    This is why Black Socialists in America are always stressing that people can't keep trying to skip ahead to the mass boycotts and general strikes but need to take the time to build dual power, and why I'm always exasperated with Twitter Leftists who don't.

  32. Do you think it benefits or detracts from the overall narrative of Breaking Bad to read either Gus or Gale as queer/queer-coded?

    Not sure I have a take on this! I read Gus as pretty explicitly queer, while Gale is either queer or just... really comfortable in expanding our assumptions of straight men. Gus at least *presents* as having a traditional, hetero life with the wife and kids, and uses "a man provides" to convince Walt to get back into cooking meth, so the fact that he is actually queer and built his empire on a long, patient revenge plot for the murder of his lover is at least *interesting*. But it would take someone more cognizant of queer culture to say whether that enriches, complicates, or problematizes the show's fascinating with masculinity.

  33. If feminism is more capable of addressing men's mental health than reactionary politics (I think it is), why does it never spend much time doing so?

    it does; when men find something that actually helps their mental health, you don't hear about it because it doesn't result in a mass shooting.

  34. Who's the more interesting deuteragonist: Mike Ehrmantraut to Jimmy or Jessie Pinkman to Walter?

    Jessie is the deeper character but Mike - partly *because* he's more enigmatic - is more interesting.

  36. Thoughts on blackkklansman?

    Generally good, weak narrative climax, closing sequence was a gut punch that left me crying in the theater in a way that nevertheless felt manipulative and a little cheap.

  38. Hi how are you?

    it's been a tough week but I'm feeling OK today

  40. Who is the best Power Rangers villain and why is it Lord Zedd?

    how dare you do Ivan Ooze dirty like this

    haha just kidding it's Lord Zedd

  41. Frank Herbert's Dune or Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren?

    now what do you think I'm going to say?

  42. Do you prefer reading a novel with short amount of pages (range:100 - 200+pages) or the thick ones (eg. Harry potter goblets of fire & lord of the rings books) ?

    yes

  43. How do we uncapitalism a capitalismic society?

    If I knew I'd be doing it, fam.

  44. Who is the most well-developed and complex fictional character you know of, who is still defined primarily by their relationship to another character?

    The protagonists of the Before... Trilogy. They are each defined by their relationship to each other but, by virtue of having been played by the same actors for 18 years, they have some of the most lived-in and believable character trajectories I've ever seen.

  45. How do you usually motivate yourself?

    bold of you to assume I'm motivated

  46. Coming from the uk, where after a freedom of information request revealed that the 'ceremonial' monarch kills legislation by fiat constantly, they made information about *what* she does or doesn't have an active involvement in a state secret, and so immune to FOI requests

    Well I don't think that monarchy stories do much either, buuuut #ActivateTheQueen was a comical hashtag used quite in earnest a few times over the last decade and with the implication that she could just flip the political card table over if she wanted and nobody would know what to do next, so to that extent nobody is even sure what powers we would need to return but giving her those back has actual traction that does indeed fluctuate some with pop culture

    In that spirit, what would your will be if forced onto the throne of the USA for a year? (I dunno, say they turf the giant Lincoln statue out, that throne, there's always a fancy enough chair somewhere)

    in response to My concern was more on how there exist countries like the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands where the monarchy still exists, even in a ceremonial sense, and there are movements to abolish the royal family.

    Oh, you know. Carefully and systemically destroy and replace capitalism, reform our electoral system into something more representative and harder to corrupt, slowly and steadily replace the police and prisons with a system that treats criminality as a public health issue, legalize drugs and create robust addiction management infrastructure, massive nuclear disarmament and extreme defunding of the military, send the freed up money to the education system while making college free and forgiving all student loan debt, kickstart the space program for shits n giggles, statehood for DC, give full voting rights to all territories and offer referenda on what they would like their relationship to the US to be going forward (be it statehood, independence, or something else they decide), exile Trump and Bush and Cheney and the rest of them for treason and corruption (since we can't put them in the prisons we abolished), create universal basic income and free healthcare with automatic enrollment, full transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, create sweeping affirmative action plans to ensure all new programs are free from racial/gender/orientation/ability bias, and replace Thanksgiving with Indigenous People's Day and replace Columbus Day with... something.

    And then abdicate my position as King of America and permanently dissolve it.

  47. Why do you think monarchy isn’t coming back? Aren’t modern dictatorships basically equivalent to monarchic rule?

    in response to Do you think it's problematic how some children's media portrays monarchy in a positive or neutral light?

    There are similarities, but the differences are critical. There is no "divine right of kings" for a dictator, they maintain power through military force and abolition of democratic structures, and generally exist in cultures that *expect* democracy and so hollow displays of democracy must be granted to them. I don't think true monarchy - a people consenting to rule under the will of a specific bloodline - is in any way threatening to return.

  48. As a citizen of the imperial core, do you think the usa is going to keep invading countries and installing puppet rulers or have the very public defeats in Vietnam, and now Afghanistan, weakened the country enough that it begins to lose hold of it's other client territories?

    We were not "defeated" in either country, and we have the most powerful and over-funded military on Earth. We will invade if whoever's President feels like invading.

  49. My concern was more on how there exist countries like the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands where the monarchy still exists, even in a ceremonial sense, and there are movements to abolish the royal family.

    in response to Do you think it's problematic how some children's media portrays monarchy in a positive or neutral light?

    if there were movements to re-empower royal families I would consider princess narratives irresponsible, but since no such movement has any real traction (that I know of), I still think kingdom stories, if a little weird when looked at critically, are mostly harmless

    (obviously there are ways of doing them harmfully, I just mean, like... they are not *automatically* bad)

  50. worst mistake question askers on here make iyp? (beside, I guess, meta questions)

    using acronyms I have to look up

  51. Will you put out a Alt-right playbook Video before the elections?

    At this rate, almost certainly not.

    Ugh.

    My original plan for this year was to try and get the series finished before the election. Like a lot of people, my plans for 2020 went out the window in February.

  52. Where do you stand on the "socialism in one country" vs "permanent revolution" debate?

    that's a few levels of theory beyond me, I'm still at "capitalism bad"

  53. Who was your go to Soul Calibur character?

    Cervantes

  54. Where on the Periodic Table of Polycules would the Power Rangers fall?

    (They are a group of five Teenagers With Attitude, all of whom are in love with each other).

    pretty sure everyone's in a 5-point solo-poly with Tommy

  55. How to deal with childhood friends who've now entirely redpilled into far-right ideals?

    If I knew the answer, I would've told you by now.

  56. if talking about Venezuela is such a cliche, can we talk about nicaragua, another regime that Sanders used to praise a lot, with its socialist revolution?
    Because the result is the second poorest nation in Latin America, and the poor suffering like usual, when intelectuals want to try socialism again.

    1. We funded a fucking civil war in Nicaragua that lasted a decade, you ghoul.
    2. Are you blaming communism for the Minagua earthquake now?

  57. Do you think it's problematic how some children's media portrays monarchy in a positive or neutral light?

    There are thematic issues there, but, honestly, monarchy is pretty decidedly not coming back, so I don't worry about it too much.

  58. Are video games and gamers trapped inside capitalism?

    Only in the sense that everyone who produces or purchases goods under capitalism is trapped inside capitalism. Games aren't special.

  59. I'm curious, where did you get the Life is Strange fan art from your last video?

    It's not fanart! It's a panel from the comic.

  60. What's your take on Hank Schraeder? Do you buy his transformation from largely-uncaring meathead into driven, relentless meth detective?

    Hank's got one of the more gradual and believable character arcs in the show. Outside of the mediocre stretch where he - in the middle of character growth - gets injured and turns into a mineral-collecting prick, his evolution from dick to honorable is really solid.

  61. Does "employees" mean in this case those that work at YouTube the company, YouTubers, or both?

    in response to What would nationalised youtube looks like?

    I was thinking "people who work for the company" but, sure, we could give people with channels some kinda representation as well, good thinking!

  62. What would nationalised youtube looks like?

    simplest would be to keep it basically the same but fund it with taxpayer money, remove the ads, and put the employees in charge

    but there are lots of ways we could do it, the sky's the limit!

  63. I don't understand curiouscat - it seems to find links where there are none.

    Anyway, may I introduce you to e-mail and generally the blogosphere as counterexamples, and various fediverse services as specific alternatives to monopolistic social networks?

    in response to What would it take for something other than Youtube to become a viable video platform? Would anything short of Youtube suddenly ceasing to exist possibly come close to making something non-Youtube a viable video platform?

    I'm not sure what that has to do with anything? They are not social networks, so they don't fall into the same monopolistic tendencies, and they are not in competition with social networks, so they don't put pressure on them to reform. You've just... mentioned a different thing that exists on the internet?

  64. (different anon) What about the "Youtubers Union" idea that I've seen bandied about? I'm not a Youtuber myself, so I don't know anything about how viable that would be.

    in response to What would it take for something other than Youtube to become a viable video platform? Would anything short of Youtube suddenly ceasing to exist possibly come close to making something non-Youtube a viable video platform?

    I've had ideas for how to handle a YouTubers' strike fund, and some kind of union would be useful, but I'm not sure how collective bargaining works on a platform where no one's an employee, people make wildly different amounts of money, even channels that aren't monetized deserve a voice in negotiations, but there are 31 million YouTube channels. We have to rethink our ideas of how to unionize and I just don't have the framework for it! I hope someone figures it out.

  65. could you upload a version of the video that talks about the police violence but does not show it?

    in response to That Ghandi Trap thing sounds effed up - they seriously didn't have the slightest, insincere gesture at a justification?

    ugh, maybe. I wouldn't want to take down the version that's already up, and having two versions of the same video online displeases me cuz I like keeping my feed tidy. but it would be good to have it available for under-18s.

    I'll consider it.

  66. Have you considered making a playlist of all the videos you've been featured in?

    if you mean stuff I've cameo'd in, that would be a very short list

    if you mean stuff I've been referenced in, that would be a lot of beardy white men yelling into webcams

  67. Do you think it is okay for a YouTuber to be more friendly with their patreon supporters than the rest of their fanbase?

    ugh, let's not treat "friendliness" as a resource different parts of the audience need to quibble over, yeah?

  68. Who painted your Curious Cat profile pic? It's pretty cool!

    https://twitter.com/skutchdraws

  69. If you could watch a performance of any cast of any musical which would you choose?

    Original cast of The Secret Garden. Mandy Patinkin in his prime AND a pre-Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell?! Yowza.

  70. Why do people hate the West Wing so much? I understand that it has issues, but does it need to be treated like the libertarian Anti-Christ?

    well, I mean... don't say "people" when you mean "Chapo fans"

  71. More interesting villain protagonist: Walter White or Jimmy McGill?

    in response to Huell or Skinny Pete?

    Walter's the more interesting villain, Jimmy's the more interesting person.

  72. What would it take for something other than Youtube to become a viable video platform? Would anything short of Youtube suddenly ceasing to exist possibly come close to making something non-Youtube a viable video platform?

    in response to Considering the past troubles with youtube, are you going to be crossposting on vimeo more? I'd be more than happy to point people to that channel; Is crossposting/migration to vimeo viable?

    You need to understand that there is no actual competition in social media. The thing YouTube offers is a standardized platform where everyone posts video. It is a monopoly because the public *wants* a monopoly; they don't want to have five different streaming sites with different tech and unique logins. It is easier for them when everything's in one place. Ditto Facebook - the service Facebook provides is access to everyone you know. It doesn't *work* as a service if some people you know are there, some are on MySpace, some are on Friendster, and some are on Google+. MySpace died when Facebook came to prominance, and Google+ failed to make inroads, because people don't want multiple sites offering the same service. This is why Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube all offer unique experiences: because people are willing to have accounts on all of them. Facebook and Twitter offer two unique ways of interacting with the same group of people. They aren't actually competitors because they share an audience. If a service is too similar, people will pick one or the other, because the product is everyone you know all in one place and people don't need two identical ways of interacting with that group and they don't want that group split up.

    YouTube is a monolith because a monolith is what works. There is no competing with it except by replacing it. And replacing it with a new monolith will just lead to the same problems, or new but equally bad ones, because monopolies are trash.

    The solution to YouTube is to nationalize it.

  73. So is this comic suggesting that the solution is that white ppl should do the work, but black voices should be amplified first and foremost? But then, one phenomena I've seen others notice in Breadtube is that white ppl are more comfortable and willing to listen to other white people on a topic like racism, so...?

    in response to "Racism is a white people problem! Don't burden POC when you should be doing the work!" "White people shouldn't talk about racism! You should be listening to POC!" Isn't this a bit contradictory?

    If you're a white person with a platform and white audiences are willing to listen to you talk about race, then it's your job to on-road them into listening to Black people. Anything a white person knows about race originates from a Black writer, so, if you're not pointing them towards Black people the way you would offer sources for any other argument you didn't come up with yourself, you are taking credit for other people's work. A white person getting the praise for discussing race using arguments that originate with Black authors is not fighting racism, it's participating in it.

    Yes, there are vagaries here. You will find yourself in weird scenarios where doing the work seems helpful on one axis and maybe counterproductive on another, but you can't find another way to do it. You need to do the work, and you need to defer to POC who did it first and better, and the those may be contradictory at times. If you're looking for a silver bullet, one doesn't exist. If this were a system that could be navigated ethically, we wouldn't be trying to change it.

    But, most of the time, talking to white people AND elevating the work of POC can be done at the same time. It's not that hard.

  74. What near future predictions do you have?

Anon commented:
Ian replied: