CuriousCat Archive Page 151 of 202

  1. Found Susan Faludi's Backlash book at my local library and is intending to read it, but it is... thick. Any favorite parts that you think I should focus on?

    I read that book while researching Why Are You So Angry and had to stop after the first few chapters because I needed to get the video online. I own a copy but haven't gone back to finish it. Those opening chapters are excellent, though. I'd say start at the beginning and see how far you get!

  2. I have centrist/conservative-but-sane friends and family, and I've been considering recommending your videos, or someone else's. What videos should I start them off with?

    My videos aren't really written with the intent of changing conservative minds. They're geared towards educating the Left. You might have better luck with Philosophy Tube or Hbomberguy or ContraPoints, someone who actually tries to deradicalize people with their work.

    Though I have heard of people GETTING deradicalized by my work, even if that's not what I was aiming for, so, hey, worth a shot!

  3. In the alt right playbook episode number "theres always a bigger fish" (thats a number now btw), at EXACTLY 17:26 , why did you use the mount and blade warband main menue background as the symbolism for fascism? like, i dont really mind i can sorta see how its fitting but i just wanna make sure- you dont got anything against mount and blade warband, do you?

    I haven't played it. That's what came up in a Google Image Search for "vikings." I was talking about the way fascists romanticize a much older past than traditional conservatives, and Norse folk religion is one of the things they've idealized. (Should stress, it does not reflect on the many antifascist pagans out there that fascists appropriate their religion.)

  4. hey ian! i asked you a question earlier about what you meant by "conservative rhetoric being about maintaining ignorance of your beliefs".

    you linked to "card says moops", and I'd actually seen the video before but I thought the point was that they could be dishonest to other people about their beliefs by claiming irony. I didn't understand how they're deceiving *themselves*

    thanks!

    That line comes from The Card Says Moops.

  5. If you didn't get an Art degree, what would you have studied instead?

    Originally I planned on getting a film degree, and for whatever reason decided I wanted to get it from an art school. Ended up with a broader concentration in "media," but a film degree from a liberal arts college was in the cards for a while.

    Probably would've gotten my degree faster if I had...

  6. What do you think of fried fruit?

    what kinda fried we talking? like, pineapple in a good stirfry is *chef's kiss*

    if we're talking about deep fried, though, I'd prefer grilled

  7. If alt right arguments are mantric and require refreshers, where do they come from?

    well when a mommy discourse and a daddy discourse love each other very much...

  8. If progressives want to ban all offensive words then what words can I use if I want to offend someone?

    invent them, fuckweasel

  10. Congrats on the new video! Really thorough and well researched!

    Have you ever considered doing a PhD or joining a progressive think tank?

    never a PhD, might join a think tank if one I thought were any good offered

  11. Lindsay has a vote about citation styles. 1) which one did you pick? 2) why do people get so gosh darned animated about this kind of stuff all the time, why hasn't that joke ended, is it even a joke at all?

    1) I went to art school, I didn't vote and have no opinion
    2) probably because they went to liberal arts colleges

  12. Is there a difference between nonbias and open-mindedness?

    well the second one actually exists, so

  13. Do you think people who act like the left's victory is assured are an issue?

    if they do the work, they can believe whatever they want about the future

  14. First cultural touchstone that you didn't personally connect to that made you realize you had become an Adult. Mine is Fortnite

    the time I asked my partner "what's a Fetty Wap?"

  15. Best fake word you can say to yourself to make yourself laugh

    I made up a new crowdfunding platform where you pay people in sweet potatoes and called it "potatreon," and have been cracking myself up for the last day over it

  16. Longest color you can sing?

    27

  17. how is there not a Battle Royale game based around playing tag

    someone should get on this

  18. Is there any writing by other people about polyamory that you would recommend?

    I'm not at all interested in your personal relationships, but I am still curious about the concept.

    Opening Up by Tristan Taormino is supposed to be good.

  19. Saw the recent vid. Amazin'. Is the next playbook titled: "The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Build a Holding Space"?

    We're still a ways away from videos about solutions. Next ones will probably be... about individual Alt-Right tactics? That was a thing this channel used to do...

  20. It has been said (and misattributed to Aristotle) that "we are what we repeatedly do".
    so i guess you're a "hit it out of the rhetorical/analytic park" whatever that means.

    ha, thanks <3

  21. Why don't video games use narration for Letters and other written material like movies have done for decades and instead make you read tons of stuff for no reason or try to justify people recording themselves

    Play Gone Home

  22. It's been just over two years since you released the first chapter of The Alt Right Playbook. Do you think the way the left interacts with the right has progressed much since then, or does the mention of this time passage make you want to tear your hair out?

    It's really hard to get a comprehensive view of how the Left engages with the Right. Mostly it's just what I see in my various feeds, and my feeds have changed in the last few years. And the last few years have been such a roller coaster I can barely remember what discourse was like 2 months ago.

    I feel like I see everyday people fall for the Right's traps less often now, and definitely some politicians have showed real savviness as to how the Right operates. And I've been very heartened at how Gen-Z activists like David Hogg and Greta Thunberg seemingly understand how to deal with the Far Right on a deeply intuitive level. So maybe things have improved a bit?

    The fact that anyone is giving Biden a microphone is evidence we have a LOOOOOOONG way to go.

  23. Will you ever do an alt-right playbook episode on TERFs?

    in response to What do you think you'll do to help the NB community going forward from this point? I know you didn't personally do anything wrong, but I feel like that'd be appreciated being seen, all the same, by everyone with larger followings. Maybe you got some NB channels or vids you liked?

    Probably not as the central subject, but I've talked about TERFs in several videos.

  25. Hey Ian! so, something that kinda came to mind while I was watching your new video, you were talking about how Gabes are going to the right-leaning outrage communities to be outraged and all, specifically because they're being promised a resolution of some kind at some point.

    I was wondering, what about Gabes who *know* they aren't going to get a resolution, and accept that? Those who go to these communities to get angry, and *like* to get angry, and keep doing it on purpose, without buying into the promise of catharsis, for the "thrill of the discourse," I guess?

    Do you think (or have evidence that) those people exist, and, if they do, I dunno, do they matter? Should we be thinking about them?

    Sorry if this is a stupid question.

    I'm sure there's a thrill to just going in and getting upset, but, beyond a certain point, that anger tends to convert into either action or nihilistic depression. The reports I saw from servers DEEP in the Alt-Right are not very mirthful.

  26. what do you think of youtuber sponsorships?

    everybody's gotta hustle

  27. Will robots take over the world?

    I fuckin hope so

  28. So i know this guy, he's a pretty funny generally, but he makes jokes about the USA like it's this hellhole fundamentalist warzone? Like the last time i brought it up to him he just said "fine, whatever, just don't shoot!" and played it off as a joke in a group chat. Why do you think there is such a hate on for Americans among european socialists and how do you think we should go about presenting the USA?

    because we're a capitalist hellscape with an enormous gun culture, a long history of imperialism, few social safety nets, the most overfunded military on earth, and no skills at guarding against fascism

    there is no way to present the USA honestly without owning up to these facts

  29. What is the greatest crime you've ever committed?

    sometimes I loiter EVEN WHEN THE SIGN SAYS NOT TO

  30. thought of u https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/591793774175453196/635712960576356370/facebook_1571636144026.jpg

    d'aw :D

    (the commune part, not the cis-hetero bs part, right?)

  31. What do you think you'll do to help the NB community going forward from this point? I know you didn't personally do anything wrong, but I feel like that'd be appreciated being seen, all the same, by everyone with larger followings. Maybe you got some NB channels or vids you liked?

    I will continue to do what I've always done: disavow transphobia in all its forms, stress the way TERFs are barely distinguishable from the Alt-Right, insist on the validity of NBs, and support NB creators wherever possible.

  33. If I had money to burn and wanted to commission a video from you, would you say yes

    if you happened to pitch something I genuinely wanted to talk about and offered me a buttload of money, we'd talk

    but otherwise, no

  34. most inexplicable thing you could tell your past self

    "you will literally never stop farting"

  35. how good was The Lighthouse?

    Especially what happened in the ending? What's your take on the ending?

    in response to Have you seen any good movies or played any good games lately?

    You can kinda twig to The Lighthouse's arc pretty early on. For such a weird movie it's not very surprising. But How it gets where it's going is quite the ride.

    Don't really have a take on the ending. How much of what we see literally happened is intentionally ambiguous.

  37. what about working on the internet do you wish to be improved the most

    getting rid of the nazis

    obviously

  38. I just wanted to second this. I appreciate you taking the time to address this in a sensible manner, despite the headache that makes up this whole situation.
    And also to voice my empathy for how genuinely anxiety inducing it can be to acknowledge that an associate/friend has fucked up, and that they deserve criticism. Especially when on one side the associate has thousands of passionate fans, and on the other a lot of very disappointed, and hurt people are yelling at you to just do the critiquing god damn it, publicly, and to do it right* the first time (or else)

    I really don’t envy anyone involved in this (including the people who were understandably hurt by Nats inclusion of Angel in her work).

    *right having 25 different, sometimes contradicting meanings

    in response to Not a question, just wanted to toss a "thank you for posting this" into the stream of yells going your way right now. I've started reflexively muting spaces that get swallowed up in Contra Discourse when these things happen because expressing any nuance south of "she's a truscum and a terf and an IDW sellout" has never gotten me anything but vitriol, and this was the perspective I would have wanted to air if it had felt safe to participate. So seeing *someone* do it legit lit up my day. No need to reply, I just wanted you to know this.

    thank you

  39. Have you seen any good movies or played any good games lately?

    The Lighthouse was a good movie
    the goose game was a good game

  41. What do you think of breadtuber parody accounts on twitter and would you have any problem if someone made an Innuendo Studios parody account?

    I find the clever ones entertaining. If someone made one for me it would be weird.

  42. I find it interesting how when I post videos there, they're often barely upvoted unless I give the posts titles that explain in some detail "how this content is leftist and why I think it matters," this goes for my own videos as well as videos of others.

    The sub usually barely upvotes anything unless it's from hbomb/contra/olly or some other at least moderately popular creator (like Jack Saint/Sarah Zedig/you, etc) and/or covers some major current event of interest to those in the community. I find that a little disappointing cause it kinda ends up excluding a lot of other really diverse and interesting content.

    Oh well, reddit's gonna be reddit, even when it's full of lefties

    in response to Do you think r/BreadTube seems like a good community?

  43. How many comments do you usually read before stopping and getting on with your day?

    in response to Do you often get messages like this while people have to wait the long waits in between your uploads? Or is this a new phenomenon?

    I play a game sometimes called How Many Comments Can Ian Read Before He Loses Faith In Humanity? I go to YouTube Studio's comments pane and read the feed of all my comments in reverse chronological order until something makes me ragequit. I rarely make it more than a couple minutes.

    I read maybe 1% of my comments.

  44. When someone asks you at a party/event/meetup/college reunion or whatever, what you do for a living, how do you respond

    I usually say I'm freelance and decide how specific I wanna get based on follow-up questions.

  45. How is it that Gamer-consumer-advocacy-shoutie-man-ism don't direct more people to realise that corporations and the market can't be trusted and to be pipelined to the left?

    In part because we don't spend as much effort trying to recruit them as the folks who say "the problem with big corporations isn't capitalism, it's feminists and Jews."

  47. I feel like I get regular content from you, I wonder if it's maybe related to spending money on your patreon? 🤔

    in response to upload videos, nerd

    My releases have been less consistent this year. I should be releasing something in the next couple days but it'll be the second time it's taken me 3 months to put out a video since January.

    But it's not like complaining about it makes me move faster.

  50. Have you heard about the Ship of Theseus? Fascinating stuff.

    yeah dog, have you heard that the card says moops?

  51. do you remember that innuendo studios guy? had some interesting videos on politics and movies and stuff. wonder what happened to him

    rude

  52. If you were a poltergeist, what kind of havoc would you wreak?

    I think I'd probably just try to make friends with people.

  53. Do you think r/BreadTube seems like a good community?

    ain't hung out there enough to judge

  54. do you watch the Good Place and if so who is your Favorite

    Chidi

    duh

  55. What are some subjects we should NOT ask you for an authoritative opinion on?

    well this is obviously a trap

  56. Do you ever get situations when people send you a question, and then you answer, and then they send you a follow-up question pretending to be a different anon who wants to "offer a different perspective" or "has something to add" but it's clearly the same person?

    if that happens, I haven't noticed it

    I often get multiple replies claiming to be the OP who cannot all be the OP

  58. If I wanted to gift you a book that I think you would enjoy reading and/or find useful for research, what would be the best way to do that?

    you can't

  59. What are your favorite varieties of fried potatoes? (steak fries, string fries, curly fries, home fries, potato chips, etc)

    so many good options, but probably them fat potato wedges

  60. Lemon juice or lime juice

    absolutely depends on context, but I do somewhat like the flavor of lime more than lemon

  61. Would you ever consider doing a fan meetup?

    oh god no

    I'll do talks because then I'm bringing something more to the table than my mere presence, and I'll crash other people's meetups because then I'm not the center of attention. but a gathering a crowd just so they can interact with me? I'd lose my mind.

  62. does it ever bother you when people are horny on twitter?

    no

  63. "I honestly think Natalie has gotten too rich for her own good, and her politics are beginning to reflect that."

    This gets brought up a lot with relation to contrapoints and it's really not as relevant as people think.

    I think people really don't understand how that Patreon money gets spent. Lindsay Ellis did a great thread about how much of it goes to health insurance for her and her employees. Contra's in a similar situation (do they think that people work on her videos for free?) and is probably in a lower middle class income bracket. She's hardly Jeff Bezos

    If being middle-class somehow excludes you from genuinely holding leftwing beliefs, somebody better tell all the college students and leftwing authors. Hell, tell Marx himself

    in response to "she has constructed an accepting, inclusive, and complex theory and taught it to an audience of hundreds of thousands that she secretly doesn't believe" I mean that's what recuperation literally is. The kind of thing Woke Capitalism does every single day, like how corporations will slap on a pride flag on their logo while secretly donating to far-right anti-LGBT groups. Or liberal pundits using vulgar identity politics to bash "Bernie Bros" while erasing minority supporters. Or the increasing feel-good commercialisation of XR. And so on. It's really nothing new, and Contra doesn't even have to be malicious or live a double identity to do so. We live in an era, where whole ideologies can be packaged as an item of commerce. I honestly think Natalie has gotten too rich for her own good, and her politics are beginning to reflect that.

    I'm just tired of getting called upper-middle class while I'm in collections.

  64. Not a question, just wanted to toss a "thank you for posting this" into the stream of yells going your way right now. I've started reflexively muting spaces that get swallowed up in Contra Discourse when these things happen because expressing any nuance south of "she's a truscum and a terf and an IDW sellout" has never gotten me anything but vitriol, and this was the perspective I would have wanted to air if it had felt safe to participate. So seeing *someone* do it legit lit up my day.

    No need to reply, I just wanted you to know this.

    in response to finishing my thought

    I got 9 asks last night and 8 were about Contra

  65. "she has constructed an accepting, inclusive, and complex theory and taught it to an audience of hundreds of thousands that she secretly doesn't believe"

    I mean that's what recuperation literally is. The kind of thing Woke Capitalism does every single day, like how corporations will slap on a pride flag on their logo while secretly donating to far-right anti-LGBT groups. Or liberal pundits using vulgar identity politics to bash "Bernie Bros" while erasing minority supporters. Or the increasing feel-good commercialisation of XR. And so on.

    It's really nothing new, and Contra doesn't even have to be malicious or live a double identity to do so. We live in an era, where whole ideologies can be packaged as an item of commerce. I honestly think Natalie has gotten too rich for her own good, and her politics are beginning to reflect that.

    in response to Since contra is trending again I'd like to ask you which one is the most likely: A) she's doing outrage marketing and I'm falling for it B) she genuinely doesn't give a shit about nb and non passing trans ppl C) she's so ignorant that she makes the same mistake over and over D) secret 4th option Additionally, do you have any thoughts about how those conversations always center on her and never on the people that feel hurt by her actions?

    god why do I even bother

  66. finishing my thought

    in response to Since contra is trending again I'd like to ask you which one is the most likely: A) she's doing outrage marketing and I'm falling for it B) she genuinely doesn't give a shit about nb and non passing trans ppl C) she's so ignorant that she makes the same mistake over and over D) secret 4th option Additionally, do you have any thoughts about how those conversations always center on her and never on the people that feel hurt by her actions?

    And, frankly, working with them is irresponsible. She is not platforming Angel's problematic beliefs, but she's providing a gateway to them, and I think she conflates her right to admire people with a right to work with them uncritically. I mean, obviously she HAS that right and you have the right to criticize her or stop consuming her work because of it. But I caution against the reflex towards a larger narrative: that Contra is truscum or hates nbs. The internet remembers events better than it remembers evolution. It sees a laundry list of times Contra has provoked outrage, and it forgets the ways she has learned from and incorporated those criticisms into her work. So when she fucks up today, people see that she's been fucking up for two years and say she hasn't changed. But they are, in fact, *different fuckups* that are products of an evolving perspective.

    I think what needs to be accepted is that this is who Contra is. She's going to keep having messy thoughts about gender - because understanding gender is a lifelong process not made easier by dysphoria or fame - and she's, for whatever goddamn reason, going to keep expressing them publicly. I would guess it's because she's a performer and that's what performers do, and because she spends so much time on her work she doesn't seem to have a lot of community offline to sort these things through with. She has improved in areas, and I think she will continue to improve, but it's slow, and she's going to say things and work with people you don't approve of in the process.

    I am privileged enough that this merely frustrates me, rather than causes me pain. For people who are hurt, your pain is valid, and you have ever right to disengage.

    Because emotions are high, whenever I talk about whether responses to Contra are overreactions people accuse me of telling trans people what to do or how to feel. But I am not issuing commands. I am coming at you horizontally; I am disagreeing, and advocating for different courses of action, but I don't have authority over you. I am making an argument in the hopes of convincing you.

    I do not believe Contra hates nbs, believes dysphoria is essential to transness, generates controversy on purpose, intentionally loses debates to cozy up to reactionaries, gears her entire career around getting on the Rubin Report, or any of the other theories people attach to because they're afraid of getting sold out. And I think they get in the way of talking about the actual problems with Contra's behavior.

    As for why the conversations center her, it's because she's upset a community, not a specific person, and that community doesn't have a unified perspective that can be personified, and, given that she has lately disappeared from Twitter as soon as there's a blowup, they are pretty much in control of the conversation, but she is the offending party so she stays the subject. Such is the nature of internet fame.

  67. Since contra is trending again I'd like to ask you which one is the most likely:
    A) she's doing outrage marketing and I'm falling for it
    B) she genuinely doesn't give a shit about nb and non passing trans ppl
    C) she's so ignorant that she makes the same mistake over and over
    D) secret 4th option

    Additionally, do you have any thoughts about how those conversations always center on her and never on the people that feel hurt by her actions?

    I'm going to get yelled at a lot for answering this, but here goes I guess.

    D) Contra featured Buck Angel's voice in a video because he is a trans elder and lifelong trans advocate whom she admires. He has also voiced some absolute bullshit opinions on nb folks. But Contra explicitly doesn't believe in canceling people, and has a long history of friendships and mutual admiration with people she disagrees with ideologically.

    That she would feature Angel in a video in such a casual way, not to comment on or complicate his beliefs but as a kind of tribute, is, intentional or no, a stamp of approval, and there's a solid risk that some of her audience is going to go check out Angel and uncritically consume his nb-bashing bullshit along with his other work. That she would do this amid her long history of pissing off the nb community is baffling; I cannot imagine she didn't know what Angel has said about them or how they would react. It's one thing to overlook his problems in appreciating his work, but it's another to feature him uncritically.

    So you have every right to be upset about it. I'm none to happy myself. But what concerns me is this reflexive leap to "she's doing it on purpose" or "she hates nb trans people."

    If you watch Contra's videos, you can see her offer up performativity as a lens for understanding transness in The Aesthetic, devotes a large portion of Pronouns to apologizing for the ways The Aesthetic didn't account for nbs and the non-conforming, and ultimately, in Transtrenders, rejects performativity largely *because* it doesn't account for nbs. You can see her entire understanding of her own gender evolve into something pointedly, explicitly incompatible with Angel's beliefs.

    And to interpret this as a lie, that she has constructed an accepting, inclusive, and complex theory of gender and taught it to an audience of hundreds of thousands that she secretly doesn't believe, and that she can somehow hide her beliefs in an internally-consistent ideology but reveal them in the dipshittiest ways imaginable just doesn't hold water for me, not when the alternate explanation is "she doesn't mind working with people she disagrees with."

    [cont.]

  68. you've said before that "conservative rhetoric is about maintaining ignorance of your opinions". I'm not quite sure what you mean, could you expand on that?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4

  69. Going by your analytics, do people seem to often go back and watch your old videos when you put out a new one that brings more people into your audience?

    Yeah, every new release sees a bump in traffic for older videos, especially if they're in the same series.

  70. Have you heard at all of Resource Generation? It’s a essentially a group of class-privileged and wealthy youngsters like myself who are actively attempting to make equal wealth redistribution a reality. Good class traitors, in short.
    I haven’t heard any breadtubers or any big left twitter names mention them. Do you think you could give them a shoutout, or at least give your opinion on them?

    I hadn't heard of y'all before.

  71. Has BreadTube actively changed more minds away from the anti-SJW crowd or has it simply awoken the silent opposition to them?

    That's the question, isn't it? You can read testimonials from people whose gateway to deradicalization was BreadTube, but they could be isolated incidents. There's no comprehensive way to measure our impact.

  72. I’ve heard this sentiment before.

    I’ve never read it. Is there something wrong with that book?

    in response to any sources of information online (article, pdf book) that has extensive research on these kinds of character archetypes?

    Joseph Campbell likes to look at a bunch of different cultures' stories and, instead of saying "hey, here are some recurring archetypes," say "here is the ETERNAL ESSENCE OF STORY THAT HAS EXISTED THROUGH ALL REMEMBERED TIME."

    So, like, read for the archetypes, but don't take the self-importance seriously.

  73. it seems more and more these days like the only viable way to make a good faith argument is to make a video essay

    in response to I have a question with regards to your Why Are You So Angry series and Contrapoints controversy. I'm not asking for an opinion about contra, its just a good example. Also I'm talking about the last controversy with the tweet about pronoun circles, not the one about buck angel which i haven't looked into at all yet. So basically what if there had been a problem with "ethics in games journalism"? In my opinion contra has said some dismissive or uneducated things about NB people that warrent criticism, but obviously not harassment. Whenever i said on twitter or reddit or something "I think contra was wrong" i was accused of being part of a harassment brigade against her. And it reminded me of your videos on how the 4chan chuds essentially used jack to mask harassment. But from my perspective my legitimate concerns were dismissed because other people were using those same concerns as an excuse for harassment. How do you think you have a conversation about "ethics in games journalism" when harassers hijack the conversation? Or when we're so militant about harassers we assume everyone is acting in bad faith? I always feel weird asking creators things since i can never figure out how to word it without sounding like I'm asking a DEFINITIVE SOURCE to form my opinion for me but mostly I'm just asking for your thoughts on this conundrum since your whole thing basically is talking about rhetoric and junk.

    I've got that market cornered.

  75. How worried would you be of the nuance being lost on viewers that your villain was actually a bad person? I feel that there would need to be precautions made that you don't end up creating a symbol for actual bad people to celebrate, like how Lindsay talks about in her video with Mel Gibson and Hitler.

    in response to Who is the most boring villain? If you were tasked with plotting a story that made this boring villain as interesting or as exciting as possible, what sort of story would you write?

    You mean Mel Brooks?

    Don't worry. I am not subtle.

Anon commented:
Ian replied: