CuriousCat Archive Page 40 of 202

  1. You think there's much progress made on figuring out reliable methods of doing that? Also Nazis the only fascists that it applies to or are there others too also?

    in response to Is there a word for, like, trying to *intentionally* de-fascify a person? To try and make them not a fascist anymore?

    what research there is implies that there are no *reliable* methods. there are reliable strategies for getting large numbers of people to radicalize, but deradicalizaton seems to be pretty individual. like, we know the RESULT we need: people need to start seeing the people they are demonizing as people. and there are a lot of ways that can happen - through contact with an individual, through contact with a group, through consumption of media, through alienation from other fascists, etc. etc. etc. I list a bunch of them at the end of How to Radicalize a Normie. but what works for one won't necessarily work for another, so the best we've been able to do is create a list of Best Practices, and people have to employ which one they think is useful in the case of the specific person they want to reach, AND they have to be a person CAPABLE of reaching that specific person.

    this is why I've become skeptical of denazification as a political strategy. if people can be radicalized en masse but can only be deradicalized individually, that means it takes more people, more time, and more effort to get people OUT than it does to get people IN. we will always be outperformed in that arena.

    that doesn't mean we shouldn't DO IT! it is morally right and beneficial to our cause. it just can't be our primary or even a central strategy. we need to put more energy into preventing radicalization in the first place AND into disempowering radicalized people so they can't do as much harm. deradicalization can be happening in tandem with all of that, but it's a gradual process, more about doing the right thing than about having a big impact.

  2. if you were to found a business, what kind of organization would it take?

    cooperative

  3. Hierarchies aren't necessarily bad, why do you think otherwise?

    that's begging the question. institutionalized hierarchical power is bad. hierarchies can be useful in specific situations, in which case they should be limited in scope and dissolved once their purpose is fulfilled. as soon as you have sustained imbalances of power, you have exploitation, oppression, and loss of freedom.

  4. (different anon) Out of curiosity, is someone a tankie if they defend states other than the USSR and its like-minded contemporaries (the contemporary PRC, for example)? I've always understood the term to mean "an apologist for governments that are both leftist - at least nominally - and authoritarian", but you seem to be using it in a bit of a narrower sense.

    in response to Why do you dislike tankies so much?

    "Marxist-Leninism" is a term and philosophy created by Stalin to justify his heavily-centralized interpretation of communism. all four of the countries currently identifying as communist - China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos - self-identify as Marxist-Leninist states.

    people may use the pejorative "tankie" to refer to any Marxist-Leninist person, but the likelihood of the term goes up the more we narrow in on the USSR, Stalin, and the invasions of Prague and Hungary. anyone who carries water for Stalin is gonna get hit with the term, no question.

  5. Why do you dislike tankies so much?

    it's worth mentioning that tankies like to start arguments with me here and on Twitter, so I probably seem a lot more pressed about them than I am. I don't spend a lot of my time thinking about tankies in my away-from-keyboard life.

    but I do believe Stalinism, and the heavily centralized state that Marxist-Leninism supports, to be antithetical to everything that brought me to the Left. like, if we take it purely in philosophical terms, and set aside the gulags, the "disappearances," the Ukrainian famine, the invasions of Hungary and Prague to quell socialist uprisings that didn't support Stalin... if we put ALL THOSE THINGS aside (which no moral person should have to do), I just don't believe in the Marxist-Leninist structure. I don't believe in hierarchical power structures; seeing the way they are endemic to capitalism is WHY I abandoned liberalism. I stopped believing capitalism could be reformed when I became convinced it would always trend back towards centralized power that exploits the many for the benefit of the few.

    why would I EVER support a version of communism that says we must create an EVEN MORE centralized power structure, with EVEN MORE unchecked power held by the leader? setting aside - again - whether or not it's preferable to the capitalist society we have now, is that REALLY the best we can do? if a country's gonna go to all the trouble of overthrowing an entire government and rebuilding it from scratch, can't we do something more radical than "centralized government that still tells everyone what to do and gives only discretionary power to the workers, but is no longer strictly capitalist"?

    also every argument I've heard FROM tankies has been based on falsehoods or some vague notion of "duty" towards Marxist-Leninist states. these arguments are not convincing, and very annoying.

  6. Why are anti-vax conspiracy theories so prevalent among the right? Is it a consequence of purely reactive anti-Covid measures beliefs they hold regarding lockdowns and social distancing?

    off the top of my head:

    - the measures that would actually contain the spread of COVID and eventually end the pandemic would grind a lot of the economy to a halt, require government subsidization of not only businesses but people, almost certainly require increasing taxes to cover the cost, require (or at least pave the way for) socializing certain industries, and generally argue that the lives of the workers are more important than their bosses' profit margins. this is antithetical to the Right's hypercapitalist ethos.

    - vaccine conspiracism is a profitable grift and the Right's "all guts, no brains" MO makes them easy pickings

    - Trump lost, primarily, on his horrible mishandling of the pandemic, so the only way to salvage his legacy is to prevent the Democrats from handling it any better, so it will seem Trump was doing all he could

    - because the conservatives writing policy are mostly rich and white and the people dying in the largest numbers are poor and non-white, and they'd rather say "there are microchips in the vaccine" than admit it's politically beneficial for them if a bunch of Black neighborhoods that don't contribute much to the economy and mostly vote for Democrats get ravaged by COVID

    - honestly? because they hate us. "fuck you, that's why" is often the only answer they need.

  7. Yeah, that's what you say. Even if you're not paid directly, you're still furthering the governments agenda.

    in response to Are you propaganda?

    not sure how repeatedly saying that my government is patriarchal, white supremacist, and classist, and must be replaced by a government that is otherwise, furthers said government's agenda. they must be playing the long game.

  8. And does that necessarily preclude you from being propaganda?

    in response to Are you propaganda?

    in the standard definition, yes. propaganda is, *classically*, state-funded material meant to incite a deeply emotional patriotism. in the modern day, we often expand the definition to include material made by citizens meant to provoke a similar emotional response in service of the state even if not at the state's explicit request.

    we can expand it further to include hypothetical states, i.e. revolutionary propaganda, but the mechanism is the same.

  9. Are you propaganda?

    I am not working for, nor for the benefit of, the state

  10. Was Castro a fascist?

    experts say no

  11. Is there a word for, like, trying to *intentionally* de-fascify a person? To try and make them not a fascist anymore?

    de-nazification

  12. https://www.tumblr.com/unpretty/712360598538731520/as-someone-who-has-organized-a-gangbang-it-is-so

    I can neither confirm nor deny that this is what happens

  13. hahaha eddy is kind of hard to use at high levels

    in response to do you like tekken

    I was not high level, but I wasn't playing against pros so I was annoyingly effective

  15. What causes so many liberals to dislike people to their left more than people to their right?

    capitalism

  16. do you like tekken

    I used to play Eddy and everyone hated me

  17. What movie trilogy holds up the best and why is it BttF?

    it's the Before trilogy and you know it

  18. Can the dead die a second time?

    yep

  19. What's a video game that shoulda been split into two video games?

    xenogears

  21. What even is smol

    in response to What even are babies even?

    baby-size

  22. That's pretty good actually

    in response to At what age did you start balding

    it may have been happening long before that? I had really thick, course hair that DID start behaving itself more in my thirties, which probably means it was thinning. but I didn't find the nascent bald spot til last year.

  23. At what age did you start balding

    38

  24. What even are babies even?

    smol

  25. By "2/3 of a script", do you mean you're 2/3s of the way through the first draft, or you're 2/3s of the way to the version you'd be comfortable putting in a video?

    (I'm not impatient to see the video or anything, I just like parsing ambiguous statements).

    in response to That could be said about any fandom.

    2/3 of a draft, I've figured out what the ending is but haven't written it yet

  26. Does she like yours?

    in response to Do you like Taylor Swift’s music?

    yeah, she's such a groupie, it's awkward

  27. Hey, did you play Horizon's Gate?

    no, but it looks neat

  29. Done writing for writing?

    in response to ever done freelance writing?

    you're reading me, aren't you?

  30. Millions of people have fought and died for the chance to establish Marxism-Leninism in their country. The vast majority of socialist movements in the developing world are Marxist-Leninist. Are you gonna say that those people are oblivious to how bad Marxism-Leninism really is, and that it’s the people living comfortably in the first-world who are enlightened by knowing the true nature of Marxism-Lenjnism?

    in response to Why not Marxism-Leninism? It’s had the highest success rate of any anti-capitalist movement and improved the lives of billions, despite the slander and mischaracterizations the bourgeois media says.

    fam, the argument that people understand the nature of their government and if they are willing to die for it then it must be worth defending would apply to capitalism even more than Marxist-Leninism. if you're any form of Marxist you know damn well that people will adapt to their surroundings and consider their government, their economy, their culture, to be "normal," and will fight and die for *any* system that is what they've always know. fuckin... people died for fascism, dude! people died for monarchy!

    every Marxist-Leninist society has had dissidents who believe it should be democratic socialism, just as every capitalist society has anticapitalists. it's why Stalin had gulags, and invaded Hungary, and starved Ukraine.

    foh with this tankie shit.

  31. Should freeloaders who contribute nothing to the economy be euthanized?

    call me wacky but I feel people have intrinsic value whether or not they are "contributing"

    ...but if I felt otherwise, people who think the only form of contribution to society is monetary would be higher on my euthanasia list than "freeloaders"

  32. Why not Marxism-Leninism? It’s had the highest success rate of any anti-capitalist movement and improved the lives of billions, despite the slander and mischaracterizations the bourgeois media says.

    in response to Are you a socdem?

    because Marxist-Leninism sucks

  34. why not one of the two specifically

    in response to Are you a socdem?

    I am uncertain of the validity of The State. I haven't read much anarchist thought/theory, but I do have some skepticism about whether The State can ever trusted. I'm not yet convinced it can't, but I'm not convinced it CAN, either.

    my political journey is ongoing, and "determine my feelings about centralized government" is on my bucket list.

  35. What's more egalitarian than bringing mfs the great equalizer itself?

    the butthole?

  36. Lemme guess, Breaking Bad and BCS aren’t as good or thematically rich as everyone thinks they are, right?

    they are both very good and quite thematically rich! neither could POSSIBLY be as good as their biggest fans think they are, but they're good! I have 2/3 of a script about them.

  37. (Said in Hans Moleman’s voice) I’m a socdem.

    in response to Is anybody a socdem?

    that's a good start! we'll be with you on the rest of your journey!

  39. Do you like Taylor Swift’s music?

    sometimes

  40. Did Ted Cruz really bat for Trump?

    that photo is OF him calling on Trump's behalf right before the election

  41. Is anybody a socdem?

    in response to Are you a socdem?

    a fair bit of Northern Europe

  42. Did 9/11 conspiracy theories used to be more of a leftist thing at some point? In ‘The Card Says Moops’ when mentioning how the left has been on some bullshit, you showed a picture of some 9/11 truthers. I'm out of the loop if there's a connection there

    9/11 happened under George W. Bush, so truthers tended to be anti-war, anti-Republican types who thought W. planned the whole thing to justify invading Iraq.

  43. Are you a socdem?

    no, I'm somewhere in the demsoc/ancom vector

  44. How many street fights have you had lol tough guy

    in response to lol like you would win either

    not enough, it's true. come over and fix that, sweetums.

  45. Do you have a brand of automobile that you’re fond of? For instance: Nissan, Toyota, Ford, etc

    the only car I care about is the volkswagen vanagon

  47. Do you think that the average American has opportunities to engage in meaningful leftist activism?

    it depends on what "meaningful" signifies, you know? like, every American has the ability to support their community in non-capitalistic ways; every poor community is practicing mutual aid all the time, from feeding people who don't have food to posting bail when they've been arrested without charge to growing food without permits to having that guy who'll fix anything wrong with your car for $40. everyone has the ability to provide alternatives to capitalism. also everyone has the ability to disrupt capitalism, to stick a knife in a cop's tire when the car is unattended or to walk out on a job that isn't paying enough.

    if "meaningful" implies "will lead to the overthrow of capitalism," then it's more of an "iunno." I haven't figured out how to overthrow capitalism yet, so I can't say which activism gets us closer. I don't think small-scale mutual aid and civil disobedience, though undoubtedly part of the equation, are gonna change things on their own. and it's true that the most impactful tools and platforms are cordoned off from the average American - a handful of media CEOs have more influence on culture than the entire working class combined. I don't think any of these are fully INACCESSIBLE, but getting ahold of them is a lot of work and often a lot of risk.

    so I'ma say a tentative yes, I think the average American has opportunities to engage in meaningful leftist action, from the small scale to the large. but the EASE of that engagement is not uniformly distributed, and much of the country incurs FAR greater risk in attempting it than a privileged few.

  48. do you do any ADHD treatment that doesn't involve drugs? can you talk about it a bit? curious because I have ADHD but the approach has always been to give people adderall in my experience

    this last gap in my medication, I found that a lot of the strategies I've developed WITH the aide of meds can carry me through stretches WITHOUT meds. and, I mean, my whole career until last year was a lot of unmedicated coping strategies.

    things that have worked for me:

    - starting on work immediately after waking up so it's the first dopamine my brain gets, functionally forcing a hyperfocus
    - writing a Weekly Goals google doc every Monday and having an accountability buddy I send it to every week so there's someone who will ask "hey, did you do your goals?" if I don't send them
    - when overtaxed, I just spend a stretch of time mapping out my entire week, down to the hour, so I don't have to make decisions day by day
    - having a flexible enough schedule that routines can be thrown out/restructured when they stop working for me (e.g. my week never actually looks like the one I map out, but the point is I only ever have to decide "do this, or do something else?" for any given block of time instead of having to invent a plan each and every day)
    - caffeine
    - appblockers when I need to focus (I use LeechBlock on my laptop and AppBlock on my phone)
    - triage and prioritization (I am, in fact, VERY BAD AT THIS, and will treat every single thing on my task list as equally important, but when I FORCE MYSELF to actually put things in order of priority, it really helps with overwhelm)
    - writing to-do lists, because no matter how long they are they're always shorter than they feel in my head
    - putting things in Google Calendar or my Notes app as soon as possible, because I WILL forget things if I don't write them down
    - a shitload of productive procrastination; I finished two small Alt-Right Playbook videos last week, which you can bet means I'm avoiding my freelance gig

  49. all i'm saying is him giving the pope a steam key for undertale is funnier than anything i could have thought of and he wasn't even trying to be funny

    in response to Thoughts on MatPat?

    melvin van peebles got gonorrhea while filming an unsimulated sex scene, argued the producer's owed him worker's comp for getting injured on the job, and used the money to buy more film

    but giving the pope a video game is kinda funny I guess

  53. What did you think of Batman Begins? And what if you end up liking Oppenheimer?

    gotta see it to like it

    Batman Begins is fine enough, I guess. there's some goofy, David S. Goyer stuff in there they wisely moved away from in The Dark Knight.

  54. Thoughts on MatPat?

    had me at Mat, lost me at Pat

  55. You get your meds back and like bam!! Like six videos all in a row. It's potent stuff innit? Jokes aside: Hope your withdrawal wasn't that rough this time.

    I actually finished BOTH those videos while in Concerta withdrawal! turns out the skills I've built ON my meds can sustain me through stretches OFF my meds so long as they're brief! in some ways it was nice to be off then because I forgot everything I needed to do so I was less stressed out, but I had lists and schedules so I remembered things again when I looked at my phone.

    I don't think it's sustainable but I'm feeling better about skipping meds now and then.

  57. But aren't you vegan? Maybe you should play Super Tofu Boy instead.

    in response to Do you like Super Meat Boy?

    do not cite the meat boy discourse with me, witch, I was there when it was written

  59. There's many nazi mma fighters. Do you think you can take any of them in a fight?

    you mean a cage match or a street fight?

  60. it's been a while since i've seen dunkirk, but i remember that movie being held together pretty well. is there something i'm not remembering, or did you skip out on watching that one?

    also why are we calling him nolam?

    in response to could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "working as a movie?" i can imagine, like, five different ways to interpret that phrase and i don't know enough about nolam to know what flaws his movies have. also, incredibly bold to post this one to twitter, i hope your inbox doesn't get a repeat of The Card Counter situation

    Dunkirk would've worked better without the "one week/one day/one hour" gimmick

    I can him Nolam cuz it's funny

  61. More ideas for alt right playbook?

    hehe, keep your eyes peeled this weekend

  62. could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "working as a movie?" i can imagine, like, five different ways to interpret that phrase and i don't know enough about nolam to know what flaws his movies have.

    also, incredibly bold to post this one to twitter, i hope your inbox doesn't get a repeat of The Card Counter situation

    in response to Alright Ian, do your thing and tell us why Oppenheimer is a thematically shallow movie and isn’t as smart as it thinks it is.

    I mean I don't think they hold together narratively.

    Inception spends a solid HOUR tutorializing a rigid, rules-based dream logic (which is not how dreams work), but still has wild leaps of logic and plot holes. and it hangs so much of its emotional weight on Marion Cotillard that it forgets to give the supporting cast feelings and they all come off as robots.

    Interstellar wants to be a Spielbergian heartstring-puller, as if Nolam were rebutting all the people saying he can't do emotions, and ends up a movie both obsessed with scientific accuracy AND claiming love is a measurable force that transcends time and space, and can also create bootstrap paradoxes.

    Tenet cares little about its plot and characters and hangs everything on its time-reversing hook. which is neat! but not neat enough to sustain all the movie's "twists" that mean nothing, its female lead who is a talking womb with legs, or its utterly emotionless protagonist.

    Nolam mistakes "following a rigid set of self-imposed rules" for intelligence but his movies are actually pretty silly.

  64. Alright Ian, do your thing and tell us why Oppenheimer is a thematically shallow movie and isn’t as smart as it thinks it is.

    I haven't seen Oppenheimer. Nolam hasn't made a great movie since Memento, nor a fun one since The Dark Knight, but he has his uses. no one else will show me Joseph Gordon-Levitt fighting in a gravity-shifting hallway, or a realistic depiction of a black hole at a graphical fidelity NASA can't afford, or an action scene where time goes in two directions at once. do I like Inception, Interstellar, or Tenet? do I think they even WORK as movies? no. but he's the only person Hollywood will give $100 million to do this stuff, and the stuff is neat.

    anyone can do a sad white guy biopic. Nolam is perhaps the last person I'd expect to make a good one. they live and die on skills he does not possess.

  65. Do you like The Binding of Isaac?

    I more or less 100%ed the Flash version and the Wrath of the Lamb expansion, but I don't know if it was a healthy relationship. not sure how to answer.

  66. do you like The Beths

    are they related to The Donnas?

  67. Has he been excomm I mean milksha I mean cancelled or something?

    in response to That's Brennan Lee Mulligan, just FYI.

    no I'm just in a feud with the YouTube algorithm about Brennan Lee Mulligan

  68. Do you think *Marxists* (not socialists in general) resent the reality that resources are scarce rather than abundant?

    what resources

  69. Have you ever seen Weird Al live?

    I've seen Weird Al dead

  70. i diagnose you with traumaqueer

    you're half right

  72. Have you played Gabriel Knight?

    yes! the only Sierra game I unreservedly like.

  74. who's your favorite member of tmbg, john or john?

    Dan

Anon commented:
Ian replied: