CuriousCat Archive Page 30 of 202

  1. Is it true that you have some regrets about the Angry Jack vids? If so, what?

    Are they still worth watching, especially for someone with no context on Gamergate and the early alt-right?

    definitely worth watching, if I do say so myself. there is a post in the show notes of the final video that walks back some of my arguments. basically, I said we need to publicly argue with angry privileged people more, and I no longer agree with that. I have spent a lot of The Alt-Right Playbook talking about how to disengage and deplatform the Right, rather than argue with them.

    with that caveat, I think the videos hold up pretty well!

  2. This is a prisoner's dilemma. It always makes you better off to act selfishly, all other things equal. The only Nash equilibrium is for everyone to halve their own expenses so that everyone's expenses are multiplied by an enormous power of 2.

    That people find ways to avoid the catastrophic Nash equilibrium and cooperate doesn't make it not a prisoner's dilemma. “Setting precedents”, for example, suggests a repeated game. The repeated prisoner's dilemma is itself the case study for Robert Axelrod's work in “The Evolution of Cooperation”. The popular interactive demo by Nicky Case, “The Evolution of Trust”, uses population dynamics with a prisoner's dilemma as the underlying game as well.

    in response to Given a choice between halving your expenses and doubling those of all other Youtubers or doubling yours halving theirs, what would you choose? If all Youtubers got offered that deal, would your choice change? What would you expect most would choose?

    a central part of the Prisoner's Dilemma is having to anticipate how other actors in the game with behave; in this case, the moment you consider others as active players, the motivation toward selfishness disappears. I dunno game theory enough to say whether that disqualifies it from being in the category Prisoner's Dilemma, but, for colloquial purposes, that is a fundamental difference.

  4. Are you having a Merry Christmas?

    yeah!

  5. Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country, Yoshi's Island, Sonic, Mega Man, Rayman, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Banjo Kazooie, Conker, Bubsy, or Little Big Planet?

    World
    Tropical Freeze
    yes
    Mania
    X
    no opinion
    no opinion
    no opinion
    no opinion
    no opinion
    no opinion
    no opinion

    I grew up a Sonic purist but Super NES-era Mario has won me over later in life

  7. Yes, but you can only occupy one consciousness at a time. So assuming reincarnation is real when you die, you would likely be born into something else out of the billions of living things we know exist. Sure, there would be no "you" from your current consciousness to link you to your new consciousness, but your new consciousness would have come to existence the moment your old one ended. So it would be reasonable to say "you" were born into something else.

    in response to So souls are a required prerequisite for you to have been born nonhuman?

    I'm curious about this notion of reincarnation without souls

  8. What makes you doubt your enjoyment of it as a career?

    in response to Have you ever had moments where you question if you actually even Like making videos? Asking as someone questioning a graphic design gig

    it's stressful, difficult, unpredictable, the pay is shit, it is sometimes hard to maintain enthusiasm when you turn your passion into a job, lots of people yell at me, and sometimes people get attached to me in weird ways

    there are a lot of creative pursuits I haven't been able to follow because this is the only one I've managed to make a living at

  9. what makes it a personal favorite but not your "objective best"?

    in response to What, in retrospect, do you think your favorite video essay that you've made has been?

    at the time, it felt like I had used the most parts of myself. the video was about two of my favorite niche topics: adventure games and art theory. it was heady, but also funny. it served as a thesis statement on how I look at storytelling, and a test run for what kind of content I could make on the channel.

    see, the previous video was on Sonic the Hedgehog, which was the closest I had come to "chasing clicks." I had considered making a Sonic video but was pushed it over the edge was the realization that Sonic was one of a handful of topics that almost ALWAYS did numbers on YouTube. the opinions were authentic, but I bumped up the priority in hopes of getting traffic. to then follow it with my LONGEST video so far, on THE MOST niche subject, just a complete "no one will care about this but me" video, and then have THAT do really well? like, at first, actually do BETTER numbers than the Sonic video? that told me my channel could be anything.

    since then, the Sonic video has pulled ahead, cuz it gets a bump with each new Sonic game/movie. but The Artist is Absent has driven more Patreon subs.

    I was more proud of the Kenny video because I felt the subject was more important, I worked harder on it, and I felt the writing and editing were my best at the time. I rewatch that video and I'm still kind of amazed I made it! The Artist is Absent? I NEVER wonder how I made it. it is VERY me.

    nowadays I feel similarly about the Daria video.

  11. What do you exactly mean when you say "decolonizing school curricula"? What would such a policy even look like in practice?

    ok so you know those YouTube videos that explain things your high school history class didn't teach you? like that racism is not an innate fear of foreigners, but a theory invented for the express purpose of morally justifying the African slave trade? or the enormous death toll of European imperialism in India? or the scope of devastation in the colonists' treatment of the Native Americans?

    a step in decolonizing school curricula would be putting all that in the textbooks.

  12. So souls are a required prerequisite for you to have been born nonhuman?

    in response to Why do you think you were born a human instead of the billions of plants and animals?

    the idea that *I* could be born as anything other than I am requires that there be some essence to my consciousness that could exist beyond this body, yes

    my consciousness is an emergent property of my brain (is what I believe). an animal with a different brain will produce a different consciousness. there is no "me" that could have been born something else.

  14. The freer the market, the freer the people?

    why would that be true?

  16. Should more controllers be like it?

    in response to Gamecube controller thoughts?

    probably

  17. Gamecube controller thoughts?

    excellent

  18. What does a person do if they are completely devoid of both useful connections and utterly lacking in social skills but wants to move somewhere new?

    I guess use the internet

  19. (diff anon) would a 2DS suffice?

    in response to A little yeah

    4DS

  20. That's easier!

    in response to A little yeah

    chop chop

  21. How many questions have you got in the past 24 hours, excluding this one?

    10

  23. do you think I fucked up watching AVGN in high school and being like "I'm gonna make this be a big part of my life"

    in middle school I was obsessed with Goosebumps. I bought every single book as soon as it came out. I was in the fanclub. I wore a Goosebumps hat EVERY DAY for over a year.

    I don't think about Goosebumps at all anymore. I have zero nostalgia for it. Didn't watch the movie or the shows, don't even like horror these days.

    sometimes something is just part of your life and then you move past it.

  25. bro the trilogy is on sale in the Steam store for 9 dollars right now, I think a cartridge of just the original game would be more expensive than that without even accounting for the DS itself

    in response to I think there's a remaster on Switch.

    bro did I fucking STUTTER

  27. If more police presence in a neighborhood increases crime there, would more firefighters in a neighborhood increase fires there?

    no, because firefighters pretty much ONLY de-escalate fires

  28. what would it take you to try out the first ace attorney game

    buy me a DS

  29. Why do you think you were born a human instead of the billions of plants and animals?

    I don't believe in souls

  31. Do you think it's possible to have a happy and fulfilling life while having no close relationships with other people?

    I mean. I'm not saying no one can do it. some people are MAJOR introverts.

    for the large majority of people, it is not recommended.

  32. This is just factually false. Researchers have for decades now been showing that all sorts of economic behaviour is not strictly limited to HUNAMS (cleaner wrasses for instance).
    Unlikely you I'll be intellectually honest and say that I'm not aware of a study specifically for inflation, but I wouldn't be surprised if one shows up in the next 5 years decade.

    in response to Your claim that the idea of money changing in value being some sort of plot instead a measurement of observable facts is unconvincing. The very concept of an unchanging value of money undermines the notion of currency as representation of goods or services in the first place. Changes in supply or demand could happen in *any* economic system and would cause inflation. Imagine a non-capitalist country has a currency. It then prints a significant amount of that currency. This would reduce the value of that currency, causing inflation. Clearly, inflation can occur in a non-capitalist economic system.

    are you trying to argue ants experience inflation

  33. Are your politics effectively anti-American?

    in the sense that my politics are in direct opposition to the American government, its history, and a big chunk of its entrenched culture, yes!

    in the sense that my politics are, broadly, actually quite popular and opposing entrenched power is literally the inciting incident of America, my politics are, arguably, DEEPLY American.

    "America" is a land of contrasts.

  35. Can East Asian people be considered white?

    anyone can be considered white if white people think it's useful to them. white people are generally more interested in NARROWING the definition, though.

  36. Why does the internet feel like it is shrinking?

    sites that provided interesting content keep going out of business, everything is funneling down to either social media apps you scroll and get angry at or a store where you can buy shit, and both the apps and the stores get worse/more expensive the longer they exist

  37. what makes you melancholic

    an excess of blackbile

  38. Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Star Wars Jedi, or Lies of P?

    Hollow Knight

  41. Yes i am claiming that the vast majority of people in the developed world are fed adequately. Nothing can be truly freely accessible aside from like air. Nothing has objective value. A good has value in a context like a store, in that specific store its worth is determined by whoever's job it is. You said goods should be valued by quality and labor, but who determines that? What does the statement "value should be measured by labor and quality" mean?

    in response to a lot of strange things you have said here you claim that an abundance of food is bad in capitalism but we In the developed west have such an abundance of food that the poorest are dying of obesity you say value should be measured by labour and quality but who decides what those are you also did not answer the ops point yes you could just only print as much as the population increase demands and not have inflation but if you print more than that the value of the money goes down what does it mean for the value of the good to be tied to itself in your mind

    come on now you now that's not how a good's worth is measured in a store. it's not just "someone's job" to decide the price of goods. the price is determined by the market. yes, someone can CHOOSE to sell burgers for 50¢, but they won't make enough profit and will go out of business. or they can CHOOSE to sell burgers for $100, but they won't make enough sales and will go out of business. so their incentive is to set the price at the point that maximizes profit: what is the coefficient of supply and demand? what is the balance point between price and likely sales? the higher the price, the lower the sales, so what is the highest price you can charge before the loss of sales makes it unprofitable? that's how you stay in business.

    at no point in that calculation is there an incentive to make sure everyone gets fed. and that's how you end up with 44 million Americans living in hunger. [I don't know why CC won't let me post this with the link, but look at Feeding America's website under the section Hunger in America]

    "fed adequately" is a fascinating phrase. did you not bother to look up how many people live in hunger in the developed world, or do you think "1 in 5 children are malnourished" is "adequate"? and, to counter your question of who determines quality or labor: who determines how much hunger is "adequate"?

    cuz I can tell you: we could set the absolute value of labor any number of arbitrary ways. the number of calories burned. the number of hours of study required. the amount of caffeine consumed to get through a work day. frankly, it doesn't MATTER. units can be nonsense! the duration of a second is defined by the frequency of radiation on a caesium atom. it's just a unit! we can standardize it however we want! it could be COMPLETE BULLSHIT and it would still be better than "the market decides that, the more you need to eat, the more I can charge for food, which means poor people can't always afford to eat, and there is no incentive for me to get everyone fed." "the market" is the worst system for determining value I can imagine.

  42. Diff. anon, I feel a lot too many people forget fractions have both numerators AND denominators. Like, they cannot fathom that the value the dollars divide up could change, they think only the dollar count varies.

    in response to Your claim that the idea of money changing in value being some sort of plot instead a measurement of observable facts is unconvincing. The very concept of an unchanging value of money undermines the notion of currency as representation of goods or services in the first place. Changes in supply or demand could happen in *any* economic system and would cause inflation. Imagine a non-capitalist country has a currency. It then prints a significant amount of that currency. This would reduce the value of that currency, causing inflation. Clearly, inflation can occur in a non-capitalist economic system.

    it's the conundrum of living under capitalism. people accept the truisms: if you print more money, the value of money deflates; it's not worth as much. if there's suddenly a lot of a particular good, the value of the good deflates; you have to sell it for cheaper. if a lot of people enter the same sector of the work force, the value of their work deflates; competition drives their wages down. everyone understands all these things. but they have trouble asking the obvious next question: what is "value," and why is it limited so strictly?

  43. If you could have a second 24 hours in your day, how might you elect to spend it?

    sleep more

  44. a lot of strange things you have said here you claim that an abundance of food is bad in capitalism but we In the developed west have such an abundance of food that the poorest are dying of obesity you say value should be measured by labour and quality but who decides what those are you also did not answer the ops point yes you could just only print as much as the population increase demands and not have inflation but if you print more than that the value of the money goes down what does it mean for the value of the good to be tied to itself in your mind

    in response to Your claim that the idea of money changing in value being some sort of plot instead a measurement of observable facts is unconvincing. The very concept of an unchanging value of money undermines the notion of currency as representation of goods or services in the first place. Changes in supply or demand could happen in *any* economic system and would cause inflation. Imagine a non-capitalist country has a currency. It then prints a significant amount of that currency. This would reduce the value of that currency, causing inflation. Clearly, inflation can occur in a non-capitalist economic system.

    we have an obesity problem because the cheap food is fatty and full of sugars, not because poor people eat too much. are you arguing people don't go hungry in this country? we have such an abundance of food that massive amounts of it get thrown away, and the dumpsters are locked and sometimes guarded so no one eats it, because if it were freely accessible it would drive the price of food down. because everyone being fed is bad for business.

    who decides what things are worth now?

  45. Are you seriously going to highlight that when it’s wrong, do any of you people even understand what inflation is

    in response to (diff anon) to add to your point, we can use the example of the ancient Sumerian society, that had a complex system of accounting, where the cost of everything was denoted in silver, but the silver itself wasn't used as a currency. It also didn't inflate or deflate. Generally, to dispel common misconceptions about the history of money, I'd recommend David Graeber's "Debt: the first 5000 years"

    please explain what inflation is. walk us through it.

  46. (diff anon) to add to your point, we can use the example of the ancient Sumerian society, that had a complex system of accounting, where the cost of everything was denoted in silver, but the silver itself wasn't used as a currency. It also didn't inflate or deflate.
    Generally, to dispel common misconceptions about the history of money, I'd recommend David Graeber's "Debt: the first 5000 years"

    in response to There’s evidence of prehistoric societies having some form of fungible debt. Eventually it gets tiresome denominating your debt in different units so people tend to pick one, I don’t know what your standard for natural is here.

  47. Yes it does, read an economics textbook please. It's an actual field of research that people dedicate their lives to.

    in response to There’s evidence of prehistoric societies having some form of fungible debt. Eventually it gets tiresome denominating your debt in different units so people tend to pick one, I don’t know what your standard for natural is here.

    most econ textbooks presuppose capitalist behavior and project it onto the past, as illustrated in this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Capitalism

  48. Your claim that the idea of money changing in value being some sort of plot instead a measurement of observable facts is unconvincing. The very concept of an unchanging value of money undermines the notion of currency as representation of goods or services in the first place. Changes in supply or demand could happen in *any* economic system and would cause inflation.

    Imagine a non-capitalist country has a currency. It then prints a significant amount of that currency. This would reduce the value of that currency, causing inflation. Clearly, inflation can occur in a non-capitalist economic system.

    in response to Just to clarify - are you suggesting that a society should refuse to acknowledge when a unit of exchange changes in value (totally messing up the economy and making sure that black markets thrive since they base their prices on what a good is actually worth) or that a society should take steps to prevent the value of the unit of exchange from changing, which is just called "stopping inflation", which you were against?

    fucking jesus christ, WHY?

    money is a unit that represents value. it simplifies exchange of goods and services. in that framing, theoretically, the amount of money in circulation should roughly correlate with the amount of goods and services available, yes? if the goal were simply to facilitate exchange? if it's just a fungible unit meant to simplify barter and trade, than it would, on paper, mean [total units of trade] = [total things to be traded].

    which means, printing more money would be standard operating procedure. if one generation is larger than the next, then, when they enter the work force, you would print more money to represent the greater "units" of labor in that work force. if an oil deposit dried up, you would take some money out of circulation, because one of the common goods is no longer in circulation. if the GOAL of money were ONLY to facilitate trade, the notion of "inflation" would make zero sense. how can food be "worth less"? does it not provide the same amount of calories? does the body not still need it to survive?

    inflation is what happens when you have a market where goods and services are divorced from their real world value, their actually use and application, and reduced solely to their value as commodities for trading money. the idea that money's value is not tied to the good itself, but to the coefficient of "supply and demand," is a thing humans decided would be the case. for HUMANS, an abundance of food is a good thing, because it means everyone can be fed. for a MARKET, it is a bad thing, because a large supply means a low demand, and then you can't charge as much for the food. it is good from the lens of people being fed but bad from the lens of making profit.

    the idea that markets should exist to make profit, that the amount of money in circulation should be more or less fixed regardless of how many goods and services are being traded, that value should be measured by supply and demand rather labor and quality, that more than a small handful of goods should even be traded in a market, are ALL human decisions. none of them are requirements of money. none of them are requirements of markets. none of them are requirements of trade. inflation happens because we built a system in which it makes sense for inflation to happen. we can build different systems.

  49. What's your favourite Indian food?

    nothing brings me joy like a good samosa, but for entrees I'm a sucker for potato-stuffed dosa

  50. There’s evidence of prehistoric societies having some form of fungible debt. Eventually it gets tiresome denominating your debt in different units so people tend to pick one, I don’t know what your standard for natural is here.

    in response to Just to clarify - are you suggesting that a society should refuse to acknowledge when a unit of exchange changes in value (totally messing up the economy and making sure that black markets thrive since they base their prices on what a good is actually worth) or that a society should take steps to prevent the value of the unit of exchange from changing, which is just called "stopping inflation", which you were against?

    "fungible debt" does not imply nor require inflation

  51. Are there historic or current examples of long-term non-capitalistic market economies without inflation?

    in response to *ANY POSSIBLE* economic system would have to note the rate of inflation or deflation as a relevant factor within it. So long as there exists money, economic activity must affect the value of one unit of currency, which itself has tangible downstream effects. One can't just ignore or refuse to see data that has consequences, regardless of which economic system is employed.

    inflation is a thing that has happened throughout history in many economies *under specific circumstances* (e.g. incurring tons of debt to pay for a war) but has only become a thing that must constantly be managed in the last 300 years, since capitalism and fiat currencies became standard. inflation, the way we deal with it now, where the Fed is trying to keep it at 2% and markets are fluctuating in response to it every year, is a product of capitalism.

  52. Just to clarify - are you suggesting that a society should refuse to acknowledge when a unit of exchange changes in value (totally messing up the economy and making sure that black markets thrive since they base their prices on what a good is actually worth) or that a society should take steps to prevent the value of the unit of exchange from changing, which is just called "stopping inflation", which you were against?

    in response to *ANY POSSIBLE* economic system would have to note the rate of inflation or deflation as a relevant factor within it. So long as there exists money, economic activity must affect the value of one unit of currency, which itself has tangible downstream effects. One can't just ignore or refuse to see data that has consequences, regardless of which economic system is employed.

    again: currency is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. you cannot "refuse to acknowledge" when a currency's value changes, like that's a thing that *just happens* the way tectonic plates shift. money changes in value because we have devised an economic system in which that happens. money inflates or deflates solely because that is what needs to happen for capitalism to keep working.

  54. *ANY POSSIBLE* economic system would have to note the rate of inflation or deflation as a relevant factor within it. So long as there exists money, economic activity must affect the value of one unit of currency, which itself has tangible downstream effects. One can't just ignore or refuse to see data that has consequences, regardless of which economic system is employed.

    in response to It seems reasonable to presume that the Federal Reserve believes that a certain level of unemployment is necessary to prevent high inflation. Is there any good data for or against this? If there exists good evidence that low unemployment doesn’t cause high inflation, then one simply has to show the proof to the Fed and that should clear everything up. If not, then one needs to see at what rate the change in unemployment affects unemployment and whether the benefits are “worth” the downsides.

    inflation is not a function of money, it's a function of capitalism. it only exists because we say it does. there is no intrinsic reason the unit of exchange should fluctuate in value except that it is necessary for capitalism to function.

  55. It seems reasonable to presume that the Federal Reserve believes that a certain level of unemployment is necessary to prevent high inflation. Is there any good data for or against this? If there exists good evidence that low unemployment doesn’t cause high inflation, then one simply has to show the proof to the Fed and that should clear everything up. If not, then one needs to see at what rate the change in unemployment affects unemployment and whether the benefits are “worth” the downsides.

    in response to Wait, is it true that the Federal Reserve has provoked recessions? I haven't heard of that.

    think for a moment about what you're saying. understand the "downsides" you're referring to are people going broke, losing their homes, being unable to afford medical care, in some cases becoming homeless, and very likely taking a few years off their lives. understand that "inflation" is not some naturally occurring phenomenon; it's not the fucking northern lights. it is a function of an economic system *we made up*.

    if you have an economic model under which allowing a certain percentage of people to go bankrupt is "good," the *immediate* response should be "oh, it appears this economic model is FUCKING EVIL."

  57. Wait, is it true that the Federal Reserve has provoked recessions? I haven't heard of that.

    in response to Is there anything wrong with money and capitalism as long as everyone has their needs met and can comfortably choose not to work if they want to? i.e. "we'll take care of you, but if you want a billion dollars go for it"

    the Fed has a concept called "maximum employment," and if the unemployment rate gets too low they will adjust interest rates to bring employment back down and encourage layoffs. this can and sometimes does provoke a recession.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fed-interest-rate-hikes-unemployment-increase-layoffs-inflation/

  58. Why kiss feel good? Not understand.

    it just be like that

  59. What’s so bad about imperialism?

    these kinds of questions give me strong "I don't know how to explain why you should care about other people" feelings

  60. Would you prefer people sign up to your Patreon or sign up for Nebula? I assume either choice will support you financially

    hard to say, honestly. normally I would say Patreon, but my sponsor rate for ad reads thru Nebula is tied to how many subscriptions I drive. I've only done the single ad read so far, but long term it may prove more financially helpful to get subs? honestly, do whatever makes sense for you; Patreon is more reliable, Nebula has higher earning potential, both are great!

  61. I am calling bullshit on that 1 billion in India claim, no way that many people died in the past when the population was much lower, where did you get that number?

    in response to (Diff anon) what *reasonable* alternative is there to capitalism? Billionaires may be exploitative but at least they aren’t gonna disappear my family or commit a genocide. The collectivization efforts in Russia and China led to millions starving to death. I’m not implying that capitalism doesn’t perpetuate poverty and cause famines in third world countries. But everything else that has been tried since the Paris Commune has been undoubtedly *worse* and has collapsed *even sooner* than capitalism does.

    British imperialism in India lasted 200 years and caused multiple famines. depending on how many famines you attribute directly to Britain, the death toll is estimated at between 100 million and 1.8 billion.

  63. Taylor Swift is now a billionaire. Do you dislike her now?

    I always have and continue to have no opinion on Taylor Swift

  64. Diff. anon, you saying you want to build a society around "the selfish choice is also the one that's good for other peoole" or somesuch there? Not 100% clear there.

    in response to I think this comes at the core of my disagreement with leftists, you are not against anything concrete like markets but simply the concept of the profit motive, or in other words selfishness, you want to try to eradicate selfishness whereas I see that has naive and want to build society around it

    I want to build a society where selfishness primarily happens for selfish reasons, and not because society at large is built to reward it. I want to build a society where cooperation is incentivized and rewarded, and where selfishness primarily happens for small-scale, personal reasons.

  65. (diff diff anon) By "the US is funding a genocide", are you referring to Israel? If so, do you realize that you're accusing a country that was founded as reparations for the Holocaust of *committing a Holocaust*?

    in response to (Diff anon) what *reasonable* alternative is there to capitalism? Billionaires may be exploitative but at least they aren’t gonna disappear my family or commit a genocide. The collectivization efforts in Russia and China led to millions starving to death. I’m not implying that capitalism doesn’t perpetuate poverty and cause famines in third world countries. But everything else that has been tried since the Paris Commune has been undoubtedly *worse* and has collapsed *even sooner* than capitalism does.

    I'm not sure the semantic differences between "genocide" and "holocaust," but, yes, I am aware that Israel was founded (in part) for the survivors of a genocide and are now committing a genocide. they have, in fact, rejected the international agreements written after World War II to prevent genocides from happening.

  66. Have you ever had moments where you question if you actually even Like making videos? Asking as someone questioning a graphic design gig

    I know I like making videos. I liked making videos long before I made any money at it. I spent a long time afraid I wouldn't be able to make them very often because I'd have to work a job and sneak them in during my spare time.

    I often doubt whether I like having a career as a video-makey person.

  67. (Other diff anon) At this very moment, russia, a capitalist country, is conducting a genocide. Like, not financing one, but directly doing it. So I'm not sure capitalism prevents genocide in any meaningful way

    in response to (Diff anon) what *reasonable* alternative is there to capitalism? Billionaires may be exploitative but at least they aren’t gonna disappear my family or commit a genocide. The collectivization efforts in Russia and China led to millions starving to death. I’m not implying that capitalism doesn’t perpetuate poverty and cause famines in third world countries. But everything else that has been tried since the Paris Commune has been undoubtedly *worse* and has collapsed *even sooner* than capitalism does.

    Israel is also capitalist, and is conducting the genocide the US is funding

  68. (Diff diff anon) But the billionaires themselves aren't disappearing anybody's family or committing a genocide, only governments can do that. Can you at least admit that sort of thing is at least *as* common in non-capitalist countries, if not moreso?

    in response to (Diff anon) what *reasonable* alternative is there to capitalism? Billionaires may be exploitative but at least they aren’t gonna disappear my family or commit a genocide. The collectivization efforts in Russia and China led to millions starving to death. I’m not implying that capitalism doesn’t perpetuate poverty and cause famines in third world countries. But everything else that has been tried since the Paris Commune has been undoubtedly *worse* and has collapsed *even sooner* than capitalism does.

    name one socialist country that killed a billion people. I'll wait.

  69. (Diff anon) what *reasonable* alternative is there to capitalism? Billionaires may be exploitative but at least they aren’t gonna disappear my family or commit a genocide. The collectivization efforts in Russia and China led to millions starving to death. I’m not implying that capitalism doesn’t perpetuate poverty and cause famines in third world countries. But everything else that has been tried since the Paris Commune has been undoubtedly *worse* and has collapsed *even sooner* than capitalism does.

    in response to Is there anything wrong with money and capitalism as long as everyone has their needs met and can comfortably choose not to work if they want to? i.e. "we'll take care of you, but if you want a billion dollars go for it"

    aren't going to commit a genocide? the US is funding a genocide RIGHT NOW. what economy do you think Hitler had? what economy do you think Mussolini had? do you understand that British capitalism killed over a billion in India alone? do you understand how many millions die from poverty in capitalist nations every year? do you understand how many millions die of AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis every year because the treatments are privatized?

    like, how do you even construct a sentence like that? I'm willing to talk about your skepticism of other models, but we HAVE to be explicit about how much death is done by capitalism every year.

  70. humor me

    in response to Mussolini was in office for more than a decade before the Nazis took power, and Italy didn’t have any major genocides or economic/political catastrophes. Franco ruled Spain for a quarter century and the country actually had an economic boom in the 60s. The only massacres that occurred were around the Civil War. Can you say the same for the Soviet Union? Mao’s China? Even the French Revolution?

    Mussolini killed 70,000 Ethiopians you racist fuck

  71. I think this comes at the core of my disagreement with leftists, you are not against anything concrete like markets but simply the concept of the profit motive, or in other words selfishness, you want to try to eradicate selfishness whereas I see that has naive and want to build society around it

    in response to Is there anything wrong with money and capitalism as long as everyone has their needs met and can comfortably choose not to work if they want to? i.e. "we'll take care of you, but if you want a billion dollars go for it"

    no you see, I also want to build society around selfishness; you want to maintain a society in which selfishness is required, where selfishness is the optimal strategy, where cooperation and community and mutual support are liabilities. people will always be selfish, but we don't have to incentivize and reward them for it.

  72. Mussolini was in office for more than a decade before the Nazis took power, and Italy didn’t have any major genocides or economic/political catastrophes. Franco ruled Spain for a quarter century and the country actually had an economic boom in the 60s. The only massacres that occurred were around the Civil War. Can you say the same for the Soviet Union? Mao’s China? Even the French Revolution?

    in response to What makes fascism inherently bad aside from the extreme racism of the Nazis?

    wtf are you doing dude

  73. Is there anything wrong with money and capitalism as long as everyone has their needs met and can comfortably choose not to work if they want to? i.e. "we'll take care of you, but if you want a billion dollars go for it"

    I need us to get a few things clear about capitalism:

    1) the nature and purpose of capitalism is to use financial precarity to compel people to work; optional work and getting all needs met are fundamentally, philosophically opposed to what capitalism is; if those were your aims, there would be no point in having capitalism

    2) modern economic theory is that "everyone having their needs met" would cause runaway inflation to the point that the entire economy would collapse; the federal reserve will literally provoke a recession if we get too close to having everyone's needs met

    3) the only way to make a profit is to get more than you give, which requires that someone in the exchange get less than they give; the only way to make a lot of profit is to get more than you give a lot of times, to a lot of people; the billion dollars have to come from somewhere, have to be taken out of circulation, meaning there is less money for everyone else; there is, mathematically, no way to have billionaires without also having poverty

    4) "money" is not the problem; "money" has never been the problem; it is the nature of capitalism to make people think "capitalism" is synonymous with currency or markets; people can't fathom that money and markets could exist - indeed, DID exist for most of history - without the profit motive, without private control of the means of production, without the threat of starvation if one does not have goods or services to sell

    I'm sorry, I can't answer your question, because the scenario you're describing would not be capitalism

  74. Have you An Opinions on Canada or no?

    it big

  75. What's something that you are a good case studty for?

    in response to How did you start to build your viewership? Did you share it with friends and family and go from there, did you post in online in places where you thought it would land well? I assume that at some point, a channel gets big enough to be picked up by the algorithm and, with luck and good quality videos, you can grow organically from there (?), but what were your first steps to grow in that direction?

    uh... I guess that it is possible to be a political essayist without a degree in political science?

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