CuriousCat Archive Page 53 of 202

  2. there is a line in his "12 rules for life" where one of the rules is literally ro pet a can if you meet them out in the street right?

    in response to I don't think the All-Beef Diet guy is kind to animals

    I haven't pet enough cans

  3. ah, but consider: beef is second only to lamb in terms of environmental devastation per serving. other meats aren't nearly as fast at accelerating global ecological collapse

    in response to I don't think the All-Beef Diet guy is kind to animals

    we are not discussing whether an all-beef diet is good for the environment, only if it is kind to non-cow animals. as a vegan, I do not need to be convinced that eating beef is, in other ways, bad.

  5. when she was still with us my mom would often go for green juice and i still don't know what the fuck it's even for

    in response to what do you usually do for breakfast? most of my go-to breakfasts have dairy, so i feel like unless you're using a non-dairy milk with cereal your options are bread and not much else, at least for typical american breakfast food

    it's for getting fruits and vegetables in your body when your breakfast is all carbs and protein

  6. Is debating a waste of time?

    not wholly, but it is, in my opinion, high risk and of marginal benefit. people have gotten good results out of it, but I don't think there are enough people on the Left who are both good at it and the kinds of people we'd want shaping the discourse.

  7. What would you do if your son was a Peterson fan?

    in response to Do you think Jordan Peterson is a bad person?

    the idea that Peterson will still be A Thing in the time it would take for me to have a child and raise him to the age of Peterson's demographic is laughable

  8. what do you usually do for breakfast? most of my go-to breakfasts have dairy, so i feel like unless you're using a non-dairy milk with cereal your options are bread and not much else, at least for typical american breakfast food

    Bagel with Tofutti cream cheese and Spike, some field roast breakfast sausages, and a cup of Irish breakfast tea with oat milk. Sometimes some green juice.

  9. Ok chud what's your problem with the white race?

    for starters we invented the concept of "the white race" which hasn't really resulted in anything positive

  10. Was John McCain the only good Republican?

    no he was a prick as well

  11. (different anon) Why don't you think in those terms? I don't much care for that dichotomy either, but it's been kind of difficult for me to articulate why.

    in response to Do you think Jordan Peterson is a bad person?

    I find that debating the absolute value of a person's character is almost never productive, because I don't know what Peterson is like in his free time or whether he's kind to animals or what kind of private thoughts go on in his head. saying "this person is bad to his core" is discussing how many angels can dance on a pin. but I can demonstrate pretty irrefutably that what he is DOING causes harm. and hurting people, is prick behavior.

  12. (different anon) Honestly, even in the absence of evidence I'd be willing to believe that the conquistadors raped indigenous women. An invading/occupying/colonizing force using sexual violence as a tool of subjugation is something with a *lot* of historical precedent.

    in response to Yes I'm being serious. If there really were mass rapes during the colonization of the Americas, it should have been well documented in the same way the slave trade was. But I can't find any source detailing such a phenomenon. And weren't ~90% of the natives in South America and the Caribbean killed off by diseases? Even if they were raped and impregnated, the chances those children would be able to grow up healthy enough to reach adulthood would be slim. To say that it happened enough to shape the bloodline of an ENTIRE CONTINENT'S population all the way to their present-day descendants is some True Romance shit.

    yes, indeed, but also WE HAVE EVIDENCE

  13. It may not reflect the aims of socialism directly, but socialism doesn't develop in a vacuum. State power is necessary in order to defend the revolution from imperialism (historically from Nazi Germany in WW2, or the United States and its allies during the Cold War) and potentially spread it to neighboring countries to eventually achieve proletarian internationalism. Fledgling socialist countries that don't consolidate their revolutions get overthrown (as in Allede's Chile and Sankara's Burkina Faso) or reformed back to capitalism (as in China, Vietnam, and eventually the Soviet Union.)

    Che Guevara himself witnessed the United States overthrow Guatemala's democratically elected socialist Jacobo Arbenz and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro, which was what cemented in his mind the need for state and military power to fight against imperialism. That was why he permitted Soviets to bring missiles to Cuba, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    in response to why is that? (diff anon)

    state and military power justified to "fight imperialism" just results in another long-standing hierarchical power structure. my aim as a leftist is to abolish capitalism for being such a structure, not shift that power back to the state. and, as an American, I live in the only country that could turn socialist and NOT worry about being overthrown by the US.

  14. i don't know shit about les mis except that i know the first song slaps. if i want to watch a good version, what should i go for?

    Tenth Anniversary concert edition.

  15. Do you think Jordan Peterson is a bad person?

    I don't think so much in terms of "good person/bad person," but he's a prick

  17. why is that? (diff anon)

    in response to Are you a Marxist–Leninist?

    I don't agree that the consolidation of that much state power reflects the aims of socialism

  19. You can't just say "Pride and Prejudice." Are we talking the 1940 movie? The 1995 miniseries?! The 2005 movie?!! The original novel on microfiche?!?

    in response to Are you gonna watch the Super Bowl tonight?

    '95 obviously

  20. Are you gonna do an ARP about how people just, assert there's no evidence despite it being incredibly easy to find?

    in response to Yes I'm being serious. If there really were mass rapes during the colonization of the Americas, it should have been well documented in the same way the slave trade was. But I can't find any source detailing such a phenomenon. And weren't ~90% of the natives in South America and the Caribbean killed off by diseases? Even if they were raped and impregnated, the chances those children would be able to grow up healthy enough to reach adulthood would be slim. To say that it happened enough to shape the bloodline of an ENTIRE CONTINENT'S population all the way to their present-day descendants is some True Romance shit.

    i swear to god

  21. Can I call you Haunchy

    just don't call me late for dinner

  22. Are you gonna watch the Super Bowl tonight?

    I think we're gonna watch pride and prejudice tonight

  24. What's the worst job you've had?

    I spent one day filing at a bank, where you had to take a paper from a stack and enter it into a system, and the process was so involved that, on my first 8-hour shift, the one I started still wasn't done at the end of the workday, and nobody smiled or talked to each other and the lights were this horrible yellow fluorescent

    I quit the very next day

  25. Which is more important: equality or liberty?

    you can't have true liberty without equality, and vice versa

  26. You ever stayed at the YMCA then?

    in response to Have you ever had to go hungry?

    no. I lived in low-income housing that can't easily evict people for being eight months behind in rent, so when I finally got a job I just cashed every check immediately and gave it directly to my landlord until I was caught up. I lived off my food stamps and only kept two paychecks for myself for the better part of a year.

    I should stress that, having been raised middle class, I was the only broke person I knew, so I had access to a lot of resources that people RAISED in poverty don't have. I had people to lend me money when the debt collectors called, I could be professional at a weekend temp job because I talked like a middle class person, there were always couches to sleep on and people with cars when I needed them. I was never going to end up in the street.

  27. This anon has a point tho. Why *would* conquistadors rape the Natives if they had wives and doing so would go against the religion they’re preaching?

    in response to Just came across this post.. Is it true that the ancestors of Latin Americans were raped by white Europeans? Like, wouldn’t that have been a sin for the Catholic Spaniards that sailed to the new world to spread their religion? Didn’t they have wives at home? I would like a source please.

    are you FUCKING SERIOUS RIGHT NOW

  28. Who will lead the revolution?

    I nominate weird al

  29. Why are markets in general bad?

    the basic market exchange, where goods and services are traded for money such that the material labor of the provider, the material need of the consumer, and the material substance of the good, are abstracted into vague, mutable notions of "price" and "value" that are meant to be negotiated, such that value is "agreed upon" despite labor, need, and substance being fixed, so that each party in the exchange must treat their own needs flexible because "price" always fluctuates, is dubious

    this exchange being subservient to "market forces" so that, if supply exceeds demand the provider is at a disadvantage and if demand exceeds supply the consumer is at a disadvantage, so that in nearly all cases the negotiation takes place on unequal footing, is deeply suspect

    a system in which nearly all goods and services, even basic necessities like food and shelter, must be purchased through such a market, and where any exchange that is still based on trading goods and services purely based on need and labor (like, say, sharing digital art online) is simply a "potential market" waiting to be monetized, and being at too great a disadvantage in these exchanges means not having basic needs met and often enough leads to poverty and even death, is unethical

    every single such market being interconnected to the point where the movement of money has long divorced itself from the actual needs of workers and consumers, such that entities like "angel investors" and "shareholders" influence the market far more than people who actually buy or sell things within it, and a business is "successful" even if it operates at a loss because investors pump money into it and every time they fire a ton of workers their stock goes up because it's PERCEIVED as cost-saving (even though everyone knows they have never turned a profit) and the largest products are getting worse year by year because shareholders and investors are the sources of income that matter even though those people don't actually produce anything and these companies are so big that if they failed it would crash the entire economy for everyone... is catastrophic

  30. Have you ever been to San Francisco? What did you think of it?

    I lived in San Francisco for 3 years.

  32. Yes I'm being serious. If there really were mass rapes during the colonization of the Americas, it should have been well documented in the same way the slave trade was. But I can't find any source detailing such a phenomenon. And weren't ~90% of the natives in South America and the Caribbean killed off by diseases? Even if they were raped and impregnated, the chances those children would be able to grow up healthy enough to reach adulthood would be slim. To say that it happened enough to shape the bloodline of an ENTIRE CONTINENT'S population all the way to their present-day descendants is some True Romance shit.

    in response to Just came across this post.. Is it true that the ancestors of Latin Americans were raped by white Europeans? Like, wouldn’t that have been a sin for the Catholic Spaniards that sailed to the new world to spread their religion? Didn’t they have wives at home? I would like a source please.

    weird that you couldn't find anything when this is the first hit on google for me

  33. Are you a Marxist–Leninist?

    no

  34. Have you ever had to go hungry?

    "going hungry" can mean a lot of things, from eating disorders to decades of malnutrition due to generational poverty.

    during the recession when I was underemployed and had no degree and my food stamps hadn't cleared I had a food budget of about $25 a week and lived off pancakes and lentil soup. at one point I had $7 in the bank. I dropped to 115 pounds.

    that is the hungriest I have gone.

  35. What is the first thing you notice about a person?

    their hat

  36. What’s the weirdest crush you’ve had?

    in high school I had a crush on a girl in my math class named Aris and I told my friend about it cuz he was in the same class but he thought I meant Aeris from Final Fantasy VII and for like multiple days he thought my current crush was a character from a game I didn't even own and gave me very weird looks

    he eventually put two and two together (cuz it was math class get it?)

  37. What song have you got on repeat lately?

    uhhhhh...

    once and for all from the disney musical newsies

  38. Would you rather have money or fame?

    no

  39. Just came across this post.. Is it true that the ancestors of Latin Americans were raped by white Europeans? Like, wouldn’t that have been a sin for the Catholic Spaniards that sailed to the new world to spread their religion? Didn’t they have wives at home? I would like a source please.

    in response to Can hispanic people be white, and if they are, are they no longer a minority? For example: both of my parents are Venezuelan, and so are their parents, and so on and so forth, and I even have lebanese heritage, but for all intents and purposes, I am the most cracker-ass looking mofo you've ever seen.

    are you fucking serious right now

  40. Have jokes about Betteridge's Law gotten stale over the years?

    certainly not as stale as "friends we made along the way" jokes, which are entirely stock at this point

  41. Looking at things and people OBJECTIVELY or SUBJECTIVELY ?

    it's impossible to look at anything objectively, which is why it's valuable to consider many subjective perspectives - both yours and others' - to try and approximate an objective reality

  42. Do you want your organs donated when you die?

    why wait??

  44. Have you watched any movies this week?

    if your week starts on Sunday, yes: I watched Birdman

    if your week starts on Monday, no, but I'm seeing Magic Mike's Last Dance on Saturday

  46. I am a stalinist

    you can get a lotion for that

  47. What has the Alt-Right even accomplished? I doubt the average person has ever heard of the term.

    well a number of people are dead because of them, which is a pretty big impact

  48. How many people can you name on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

    I have named them all Tommy

  49. Are you using ChatGPT to speed up your work? I strongly recommend it; its applications are incredibly broad

    elaborate, please

  50. Ion Danskin

    y'all are on FIRE

  52. Have you played any of the Silent Hill games?

    no, too spoopy

  53. Out of the Lynch movies you have seen, what do you think is his best?

    uhhhhh

    the one I dislike the least is Blue Velvet, the one that I would probably like the most if I liked his stuff is Mulholland Drive

  54. How long is it until podcasts start getting porn parodies

    WelCUM to Night Vale?

  55. LEMON DEMON???

    yeah doy

  56. (Different anon) would the country change its name from being the United Kingdom to something else? What could be its new name?

    in response to How would Britain abolish the monarchy? A vote in Parliament or something?

    I mean they already use Great Britain and The British Isles, they can probably just redefine one of those

  58. how often do you get asked questions about weird al yankovic

    not often enough!

  60. where do you sit on the classification of smash as a fighting game? i feel like, even though there's a lot of overlap in the community and culture of fighting games, anyone can take a look at smash, then take a look at any number of fighting games and say pretty confidently that it's not a fighting game

    I guess I would question your question: what do we gain by defining it as other than a fighting game? what does the lens "fighting game" open us up to? how is our understanding or appreciation of Smash changed if it is something other than a fighting game? I've been reading a lot of essays about film noir lately and you'd be shocked by how many entire essays are just arguing about whether film noir is a genre vs. a movement vs. a style, and they always beg the question of why the distinction matters. are there tools of analysis closed off to us if we limit noir to "genre" or Smash to "fighting game"? or is it just fun to argue about, like whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie?

  61. Are men who like trans women (not exclusively) considered straight and vice versa for trans men?

    what they're "considered" is irrelevant: if you are a man attracted solely to women, you're straight.

  62. Why don’t you like David Lynch’s work?

    I could give you my complaints but they don't matter. because everyone who loves him knows the complaints: the acting is weird, the movies kinda feel like they're gonna make sense but they never do, his fascination with women sometimes reads like a horny teenager simultaneously obsessed with and terrified of sex. in the end, most fans can hear those critiques and agree with them, or agree to disagree, but they don't change anything because Lynch's movies have a vibe. and none of that gets in the way of the vibe; hell, they're PART of the vibe. and the vibe is unlike anything else out there.

    his vibe doesn't work on me. I respect it, and him, and people who love him. but I can't stand watching his movies.

  63. True, but there are a significant number of murderers in prisons. They should be somewhere better than prisons, but they shouldn’t just be released.

    in response to if we abolish prisons what do we do with murderers?

    they can have ventura

  64. When do you estimate the next video will come?

    finished the rough cut today, you can see it now on Patreon. got some bits to work out still so dunno when it'll go public.

  65. Maccas order

    chronological

  66. do you like being spooked

    not at all

  67. How would Britain abolish the monarchy? A vote in Parliament or something?

    in response to I’m fully in the “I don’t care camp” of the fate of the British monarchy, but do you know why so many leftists act like ending the monarchy would be such an important step to ending capitalism? I’ve seen a lot of leftists who have been celebrating her death and all the “Megxit”drama like it’s going to bring about the Revolution or something. America abolished its monarchy 247 years ago and we aren’t exactly anti-capitalist here. I mean the royal family is mostly just a bunch of spoiled elitists, but they aren’t anywhere near the most harmful people in the world, especially now with how much the UK has declined on the world stage.

    that's preferable to the guillotine, yeah

  68. what's your take on the choking/abuse kink discourse?

    let's pretend I'm not up-to-date on the kink discourse and explain what the argument is

    you know

    for the readers

  69. if we abolish prisons what do we do with murderers?

    I think you overestimate how many murderers end up in jail

  70. Does it bring you some peace to know your content has deradicalized people?

    it makes me very happy! enough people have told me so that I know it's not a fluke, but I have no idea how much it happens. I've had a couple dozen confirmed cases; is that most of it, or the tip of the iceberg? so I have a hard time thinking of myself as "a guy who deradicalizes people," and I don't know how much of that is my chronic aversion to taking credit for things. the idea that I'm having THAT MUCH impact on people's lives is daunting. while I've always kept "if an unhappy conservative saw this, how would it be useful to them?" in the back of my mind, it's never been my target audience. I've geared my stuff very explicitly to a presumed-Left audience. and, you know, there's a persuasive power to treating people like they already agree with your position, sometimes more effective than trying to convince them of it. but it's not the AIM. and if it's happening anyway? that's awesome! but does knowing that change the way I make it? if not, should it? do my responsibilities shift? in what ways? and then it's oh god oh god, am I to take this ring to Mordor?

    but yes. happy!

  71. Italo Calvino, thoughts

    The Distance of the Moon is possibly my favorite short story

  73. How is your back feeling?

    it keeps developing new issues but nothing serious or debilitating

  74. what do you think of poker face so far (if you started it)?

    who doesn't want Natasha Lyonne as Vagrant Columbo?

  75. Did you miss us 🥺

    yeah 💙

Anon commented:
Ian replied: