CuriousCat Archive Page 72 of 202

  1. Do you ever get blackpilled thinking about all the people who could/should be leftists, but will never "get it" because they grew up in an overwhelmingly conservative social circle or watched Fox News too much or were indoctrinated by nationalist propaganda as a child? Like, Christ, there's kids out there watching PragerU videos now.

    I howl into the void about conservatives because they are hateful, racist, woman-hating bigots who can't be reasoned with, not because they "should be leftists."

    I get mad at LIBERALS because they should be leftists. they have no fucking excuse anymore.

  2. Why won't democrats get rid of the fillibuster?

    I don't even know. I would GUESS some vague sense that they might need it themselves someday? if I'm cynical, because it means they can campaign on policies they know they won't have to enact and can always blame Republicans for it, but I'm sure they have more complex rationalizations for it.

  3. Do you like Rage Against the Machine as a leftist?

    I like Rage Against the Machine as a person who likes good music. but their lyrics aren't politically interesting. it's so vaguely anti-establishment that pretty much any political persuasion can go "yeah!" to them. stuff they say in interviews is much more provocative, wish they could write more of that into their songs.

  4. Have you heard of a guy named Thomas Sankara—Africa's Che Guevara?

    yes, Burkina Faso under Sankara is one of the societies I want to study if I do this series on Leftist revolutions

  5. Give an opinion about a McElroy

    Travis isn't funny but a lot of funny shit wouldn't happen without him.

  6. Is there a director that you've seen every film they directed?

    sure, plenty. Boots Riley has only directed one movie!

  7. Should cops just turn into/ be replaced by crisis therapists

    I don't think they should be replaced by any one organization. crisis therapists don't need to hand out speeding tickets, you know? but generally yes, cops should be replaced by public services.

  8. Will you be trying cultivated meat once its more commercially available?

    probably not? I think the reason Impossible meat gives my stomach problems is the lab-cultivated "blood" in it, which my body doesn't know how to process anymore.

  9. What's your class background like? Did your parents (and grandparents) go to college?

    I was raised middle class; my parents had college degrees, I don't think all my grandparents did. my dad's business went bankrupt during the recession and my mom was diagnosed with MS and stopped working, so I had to drop out of college and spent the rest of my twenties extremely broke - low-income housing, SNAP benefits, visits to the food pantry. in short: I have spent much of my adult life in situational poverty, but do not come from generational poverty.

  10. Have you read anything by Jared Diamond (and if so, thoughts)?

    no. I saw someone write a quick summary of Guns, Germs, and Steel in a comment section once and it sounded pretty frickin' smart, but it's also pretty famously dense. maybe one day!

  11. Several of Batman’s villains are canonically wealthy. And Killer Croc is the only one I can think of who is supposed to be poor.

    in response to Is Bruce Wayne a "good" billionaire?

    those are not the only people Batman fights, are they? he tussles with purse snatchers and thieves all the time. loads of henchmen. the newest Batman begins with him beating the crap out of a street gang; I don't think any of them were billionaires.

  12. This is tangentially related to the neopronoun questions. If you are talking/writing about a person who uses he/they pronouns for example, should you switch back and forth in the paragraph? As in, “He woke up, then they brushed their teeth, and then he ate breakfast.” I don’t mean this in a transphobic/nb-phobic way, but that really does seem unclear.

    if you are writing a work of nonfiction, presumably you could just ask the subject

    if you're writing fiction, I would recommend not writing a character with multiple pronouns if you're not sure how such a person would use them. maybe talk to some nb people about their pronouns first, see what they think!

    sorry not to be more helpful, I am a cis dude on Curious Cat

  13. Is Bruce Wayne a "good" billionaire?

    in response to Is Bill Gates a "good" billionaire?

    is the billionaire who spends his nights beating the shit out of poor people one of the "good" ones... that's a headscratcher...

  14. Matter of fact, yes! A Simple Favor 2

    in response to r u excited for new Kendrick?

    WHAT

  15. If neopronouns are acceptable than can I identify as an attack helicopter?

    oh look it's the one joke

  16. Different person - If you think that fascism requires state control, wouldn't that mean that all unsuccessful fascists wouldn't really be fascists? Otherwise, you could just say that all fringe fascist ideologies that haven't achieved state control yet (like the weird environmentalist fascist one) aren't actually fascist because they haven't gained control yet

    in response to Wait so to decide whether a particular ideology that condones genocide is bad we do need evidence, but to decide whether harassment of a person championing said ideology has taken place, apparently we don't

    the person who started this argument said "leads to fascism," which I took to mean that it creates fascist societies. they could've meant "are fascists" and just phrased it poorly, I suppose (though they've had ample opportunity to clarify and haven't).

    if we want to get into a debate about whether Black separatism is a fascist ideology, they are skipping over the part where they make their shit argument.

  17. Republicans wouldn’t hold a scotus seat vacant for several years because eventually there are going to be rulings, rulings requiring a majority, not a 4-4 tie.

    they created exactly that scenario for almost a year and were fine with it

  18. Was this a deliberate 4 day hiatus from Curious Cat or just happenstance?

    (I don't mean to pry btw, your time and mental health should always come first!)

    I was out of town

  19. Don't you already reside in New England though? Toronto isn't much colder at all. Hell, most Canadians don't even live north of Maine.

    in response to You ever consider moving to Canada to get away from all this mess in the US?

    it's not a question of cold, it's a question of sunlight. I didn't have seasonal depression when I lived in lower latitudes; I do now. going farther north seems unwise.

  20. Ergo, to use a neopronoun is to communicate to others information that non-neo pronouns would fail to reliably carry to others?

    in response to Why should anybody use neopronouns?

    non-neo pronouns would fail to accurately describe the people neoprnouns would refer to

  21. Bill Gayes has done way more good for the world than you have you moron

    he has also done way more harm than all of us put together

  22. What nonfiction book has made the biggest impact on your life? Looking for a book recommendations and I'm a nonfiction lover

    impossible to narrow down to a single book, so I'll go by different impacts!

    Why I Write, by George Orwell. a collection of essays by George Orwell was the beginning of my move towards anticapitalism. this is not the specific collection, because I don't remember which one it was - the book was in a bag that got stolen - but this has the title essay, Politics and the English Language, and The Lion and the Unicorn, which are the most important ones.

    A Framework for Understanding Poverty, by Ruby K. Payne. read this while working with low-income kids and it fundamentally changed the way I view poverty. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods is a very good companion piece, balancing Payne's breadth with a deeper, narrower focus.

    The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. I've read a lot of Pollan and I'd like to pick a less obvious book like The Botany of Desire but The Omnivore's Dilemma is pretty well unmatched. it's a deep dive into America's food industry, which is fascinating enough on its own, but the real impact it had on me is in the way Pollan writes. he writes about food, but, really, he writes about *everything*, and he writes with a depth of research and genuine fascination that I admire. it's the way I aspire to write my essays.

    Cinema Studies: Key Concepts, by Susan Hayward. just an enormous, comprehensive glossary of film concepts, with a heavy emphasis on theory. leafing through just to geek out is a favorite pastime.

    Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. a primer on the way we read comics is, more broadly, about the way humans process narrative and images. really dramatically affected the way I conceive of storytelling.

    The Varieties of Scientific Experience, by Carl Sagan. could put a lot of Sagan on here, honestly, but I would say this one helped solidify me as an atheist, and helped me see exiting religion in a gentle, curious, and humanist way. very glad my journey happened here and not on YouTube.

  23. Wait so to decide whether a particular ideology that condones genocide is bad we do need evidence, but to decide whether harassment of a person championing said ideology has taken place, apparently we don't

    in response to (Different anon) their argument is that black separatism inevitably leads to fascism

    as Sagan was fond of saying, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence must be.

    there's the accessibility question:
    for evidence that Kat Blaque was harassed by Vaush's fans, all you'd have to do is go to her Twitter and search Vaush's name, she talked rather a lot about it. tons of QT's. or you could google "Kat Blaque Vaush" if you wanted to. if this is a thing you care about, looking for evidence is very easy, and the need for me to personally present it to you is a rhetorical feint that says you will treat anything outside the confines of the debate as nonexistent unless someone enters it into your sphere of attention using proper channels. I'm not doing it because I'm not interested in playing games with you.

    meanwhile, the claim that Black separatism leads to fascism is a much larger claim, requiring greater evidence, and I don't think I could find any by simply googling it. there is also the signal to noise issue: rather a lot of racists rant about such things, and most are talking out their asses, so finding *good* evidence, if such a thing exists, would take more work. so I would ask you to point me to the evidence you are referring to, if you have any, since finding it myself is a greater lift than you looking on Twitter for the thing you want.

    then there's the basic plausibility question:
    evidence should generally be consistent with what we already know. the more it contradicts understood facts, the more evidence is needed to explain the contradiction, e.g. quantum physics needed a lot of evidence to explain the ways it contradicted Newtonian physics. nobody actually requires proof for every claim, you can't live like that. we assess the need for proof based on the degree to which the claim requires it.

    "white guy with strong fanbase criticizes Black trans woman, leads to harassment" is entirely consistent with what we know. granted, "what we know" is highly malleable on the social internet, so it's possible that scenario is not common knowledge in your circles. (I would ask how "Left" Vaush is if that's not part of his audience's knowledge base, but...) that said, this scenario happens so often and so demonstrably that, I'm sorry, asking to prove it happens is like asking to prove the gravitational force. it's been proven. catch up. you require little more than a cursory check to confirm it is happening in this instance.

    meanwhile, again: knowing even a little bit of history makes one question how, exactly, one could argue Black separatism leads to fascism when fascism is a form of state control and we've never heard of Black separatists forming their own state, much less a fascist one, much less so many fascist states that you could call it a truism.

    so: provide some evidence for your claim, or stfu

  24. At the risk of adding to what I agree is a tiresome discourse, it seems to me like the only reasonable interpretation is that it's a mutually abusive relationship. Which I think a lot of nominally progressive people have trouble even acknowledging is a thing that *exists*.

    in response to Thoughts on the Depp-Heard Trial?

    that is, again, a thing I wouldn't be comfortable assuming given the very real risk you are victim blaming, and you don't know these people well enough to judge

  25. Do the people saying "if Hillary won in 2016, Roe would still be intact" have a point or is that just wishful thinking on their part?

    given the Republicans said, if she was elected, they would keep Garland's seat empty for up to 8 years, and given there's no reason to believe they'd let her appoint any other judges during her term, and given the absolutely fecklessness of Democrats in passing abortion protection as a law or amendment despite decades of opportunities to do so, I think... yes, technically, it wouldn't be repealed yet, because there would be three empty seats on the Court, but the moment a Republican took office they would stack the court and repeal Roe

  26. Is Bill Gates a "good" billionaire?

    there are no good billionaires

  27. Do you have one of those games that you come back to once every year or so and playing it consumes you for like two weeks then you put it down for another year?

    no, the games I come back to semi-regularly are usually adventures that I replay in an afternoon

  28. Do you think all food should be free?

    I think food should be freely available. maybe that means food is free. maybe that means food costs money but everyone is given a guaranteed food budget. maybe that means we abandon money altogether. there are a lot of options! but the goal of whatever system we select should be that no one goes hungry.

  29. r u excited for new Kendrick?

    there's a new Anna Kendrick movie???

  30. You're usually really good at coming back elsewhere to claims or ideas you've mentioned in passing in your videos and expanding on them, but there's one really big question you raised that I've not seen you bring up, but I think you might be able to finally lay it to rest here, which I'll love because it's a question that's near and dear to my heart.

    DOES gen Z know about Loss?

    weirdly yes https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/1371259375734685696

  31. Why should anybody use neopronouns?

    the only reason to use any new word or grammatical construction is to more accurately describe things

  32. You ever consider moving to Canada to get away from all this mess in the US?

    every day. don't think I could hack the winters though.

  33. Thoughts on the Depp-Heard Trial?

    I am tired of people speaking with certainty on the issue, as there is a real risk, no matter your interpretation, that you are, in fact, siding with an abuser and believing their lies about the victim, and it seems people who care about abuse would take that risk seriously.

  34. Can you explain the body positivity thing to me? I want to get it but really feel like the health risks of being overweight seem to get swept too easily which concerns me, what am I missing?

    far be it for me to summarize the entire body positivity movement, which is not my area of expertise, but I can say at the very least that your concern should be with health and not weight. while there is correlation between them, it is entirely possible to be fat and healthy, and, in fact, the assumption that weight MUST cause health issues is medically dangerous, because too often medical conditions are missed because doctors assume "lose some weight" is the solution. if you want to talk about diabetes, cholesterol, heart conditions, just talk about those things. don't bring weight into it except in specific cases where you know weight is the cause.

    one of my partners is, by their own terminology, fat. they are also healthy as a fucking ox.

  36. OP here:
    a) No disagreement here. Dems are WAY too timid.
    b) Are you saying Manchin should be kicked out of the Democratic caucus? Because he is in the senate until 2024 and at least he votes for 95% of democratic appointees. Any republican from West Virginia would vote for 0%.
    c) How could have democrats refused to confirm her? Mitch McConnell was majority leader in 2020. He scheduled the hearings and votes. There were 54 Republicans in the senate. There was no legal way to prevent her from being confirmed.

    in response to Obama could have (and should have) used a recess appointment for the Gorsuch seat. What could have the democrats differently for the other two appointees? They were in the minority and aside from Manchin for Kavanaugh, no democrat voted for them.

    I need to stress, again, that what McConnell did in 2016 WAS NOT LEGAL

  38. For a) Change dot org petitions and what is actually feasible are not the same thing
    For b) I think we can differentiate between Manchin and the average Democratic senator, so if we're attacking "the Democrats" rather than just Manchin, we should attack them based on what the average Democratic senator supports, rather than what Manchin supports
    For c), the reason why the Republicans were able to refuse to appoint Garland was because they were in the majority - I think we both know that "norms" are meaningless

    in response to Obama could have (and should have) used a recess appointment for the Gorsuch seat. What could have the democrats differently for the other two appointees? They were in the minority and aside from Manchin for Kavanaugh, no democrat voted for them.

    a) I only mentioned the petition to point out that it was a common argument. here is the legal justification: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-can-appoint-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-if-the-senate-does-nothing/2016/04/08/4a696700-fcf1-11e5-886f-a037dba38301_story.html

    b) what is your argument here? we've accepted that Republicans simply cannot be worked with, and now we're accepting that certain Democrats also can't be worked with? that's how far the goalposts have moved? do the "good Democrats" have any sort of strategy for dealing with people like Manchin and Sinema?

    c) refusing to convene a vote isn't something the majority party gets to do, it was unprecedented. they didn't, like, hold a caucus on it and their majority won over. they just didn't hold a vote. their majority meant they could have rejected Garland in the confirmation process, but they didn't hold the confirmation process, probably because they worried it would make them look bad to reject him or that there might be one or two moderate Republican defectors who would vote for him. so they just didn't hold the vote. to the best of my knowledge, Dems could also simply not hold a vote.

  39. Obama could have (and should have) used a recess appointment for the Gorsuch seat. What could have the democrats differently for the other two appointees? They were in the minority and aside from Manchin for Kavanaugh, no democrat voted for them.

    in response to You claimed that it’s audacious for Democrats to tell those who dislike the outcome of the likely future abortion decision to vote, because you said that this “happened on their watch” However, I should hope that the message conveyed is that a constant stream of Democratic governance is necessary to ensure a progressive Supreme Court, rather than that a Democratic congress can somehow prevent the ruling or a current Supreme Court The two ideas, that people should vote for Democrats to get progressive Supreme a court justices, and that Democrats are currently in power (through the slimmest of margins), are not at odds

    a) no, Obama should not have used a recess appointment for Merrick Garland, that was a temporary fix. he should have *appointed Garland without Senate approval*, as many legal experts were saying was valid at the time. if the Senate refuses to convene a vote to confirm, there is legal precedent to claim they are waiving their right to confirm. there was even a Change Dot Org petition asking him to do so.

    b) you don't get to say "aside from Manchin" when you ask what Democrats should have done differently. Manchin is a Democrat. we don't absolve him of his responsibility the way we apparently do for Republicans.

    c) Democrats could have refused to appoint Coney Barrett the same way Republicans refused to appoint Garland, because that was the norm Republicans claimed to be setting.

    the thing is, I'm not a professional politician, so I am fairly confident people who DO POLITICS FOR A LIVING can come up with more options than I can, and yet somehow I know of multiple responses to this bullshit "what else could be done?"

  40. You mean the tankie, the black separatist and the terf billionaire?

    in response to I'm pretty sure, given his particular policy prescriptions, that Destiny can't reasonably be called a leftist at all, so I don't think that you can include his misdoing (of which there are plenty) in the anecdotal evidence pile.

    I feel if you're going to argue that harassment is okay so long as the person is particularly odious you'll want to be more skeptical about the narratives you hear about them, because 2/3 of those aren't true

  41. So either your analogy is bunk or you're arguing to desegregate men's and women's sports

    in response to Wouldn't this debatebro-tier analogy refute your earlier claim that women's sport was created because men don't like to lose against women? Because if this was true, black's sports would already have to be a thing

    I would support desegregating sports, yes. break things up by weight class/muscle mass/performance stats, not gender. this isn't even a particularly radical idea.

  42. I don't think anymore that the Left exists - there's just a bunch of in-fighting factions that oppose both the center and the right (unless they fall into the nazbol vortex), and Vaush is at least fun and generally has good takes

    in response to You're not defending your own point but rather deflecting by attacking another point - a tactic you yourself critiqued.

    ah, yes, the guy who converts "so many people" into leftists has convinced you that there is no "Left" so you might as well pay attention to whomever entertains you, what a valuable person to make excuses for

  43. You claimed that it’s audacious for Democrats to tell those who dislike the outcome of the likely future abortion decision to vote, because you said that this “happened on their watch”
    However, I should hope that the message conveyed is that a constant stream of Democratic governance is necessary to ensure a progressive Supreme Court, rather than that a Democratic congress can somehow prevent the ruling or a current Supreme Court
    The two ideas, that people should vote for Democrats to get progressive Supreme a court justices, and that Democrats are currently in power (through the slimmest of margins), are not at odds

    Gorsuch is there because Republicans stole a seat and Dems refused to bend the rules even slightly to circumvent this

    Kavanagh is there because Dems confirmed him even when there was clear evidence he was a serial abuser

    Coney Barrett is there because Dems allowed Republicans to appoint her even though it violated the norm Republicans were claiming to set with Gorsuch

    all of that happened on their watch

  44. It feels like the entire world has some part of it wanting to do a Right-Wing Nationalism, what gives with that

    it is the inevitable endpoint of capitalism

  46. If Republicans know that the vast majority of people don’t support overturning Roe v Wade, and they presumably want to win elections, why are they going forward with this?

    their question isn't "is this what people want?" it's "do the people in our counties hate this ENOUGH to vote for democrats next time?" and, if they do, the question then is, is it more effective to change their policies, or to change messaging to convince their constituency they're still preferable to the alternative and/or suppress the vote of dissenters?

  47. As a fellow vegan, have you ever entertained misanthropic thoughts?
    I see some vegan spaces were misanthropy is really prevalent ("What we as human do to animals is unforgivable. I wish humanity would just end", etc.) and as a leftist who just wants the best for everyone it's depressing me a bit.

    I don't really hang out in vegan spaces, I'm just a guy who's vegan.

  48. But why though?

    in response to Is the big lebowski a neo noir? Why or why not?

    it's basically a detective mystery like The Maltese Falcon or The Third Man, the "detective" is just a bewildered stoner

  49. What arsenal shooters would you recommend for someone who's only played Black Mesa and loved it?

    Depends on what you liked about it!

    If you liked that kind of narrative-driven campaign, you can always follow up with Half-Life 2, and Titanfall 2 has a very Half-Life-y campaign (though not as varied an arsenal).

    If you like the big spread of weapons and wanna play something else from the 90's, you can't go wrong with Blood (if you're playing the Nightdive remaster, turn the Cultist AI down in the difficulty options, the game sings with that little balance tweak). Or, if you want a precursor to Half-Life, maybe play Marathon! I'm also a shameless enjoyer of Quake.

    If you want something modern with old-school arsenal sensibilities, I can highly recommend Dusk and Project Warlock.

  50. Would it be possible to truly end homelessness in the US (or at least reduce it less than 0.1%)? If so, how many levers of power would need to be controlled by those wanting to end all homelessness to actually let that happen?

    end capitalism

  51. Do you think there's any value to the idea of reading bad books so you can better understand the bad argument in order to create a better counter-argument that may be more convincing cause you've "read the book"?

    in response to Why not?

    while there is some merit to that argument, there are just way, way too many bad books out there to do that

  52. how come? i'm currently trudging through it and it's been fun but i also find it gets craaazy hard so i'm curious if that's the turnoff

    in response to what's the 5% you didn't do?

    I futzed around with it a little and was just like, no, that's way too hard. like, I could DO it if I put the time in, but I knew that was more than I was interested in.

  53. hit me, i'd love to learn something

    also partly curious bc you said you had no moral objection to the other anon eating eggs so i was just trying to pick ur brain on that moral debacle

    in response to i feel like some less savory characters use this as some kind of weird abortion analogue, but i'm curious: being vegan usually means not eating eggs, right? do you still adhere to that? I can't see an immediate moral reason not to eat them but I might just be blind

    a hen naturally lays eggs on the reg weather or not they're fertilized, and nothing really happens with those eggs, so I see no moral quandary in eating them. but that's, like, if you're on a farm in the 1800's. industrial farming involves clipping a hen's wings and cutting off the tip of their beak with no anesthesia. it involves the chicken spending it's entire life in a cage too small to turn around in. it involves them being force-fed from a from a tube. it involves being hopped up on hormones and antibiotics. it is a short, cruel, miserable life. even "free range" chickens spend their entire lives in a small, overcrowded building with a tiny patch of grass outside that the chickens must legally have access to but the owners actively discourage them from using.

    there is no part of the animal product industry that isn't horrifically cruel, which is why I don't participate in it. if you know and care for the hen yourself, I've got no qualms about it, but that's not what any egg you can buy in a store represents.

  54. on a scale of 1-10, how much "unhealthy parasocial relationship" does curiouscat fall under?

    I honestly can't tell, since 99% of questions are anonymous I don't know how many come from the same people. I talk a bit more about myself here, but I'm still pretty judicious about what access I let people have to me. nobody's gotten outright creepy in the inbox and stuff from here doesn't seem to spread out on the web, so it seems fairly contained?

  55. Wouldn't this debatebro-tier analogy refute your earlier claim that women's sport was created because men don't like to lose against women? Because if this was true, black's sports would already have to be a thing

    in response to You've conveniently overlooked the part that height is highly correlated with birth sex, which is the irrefutable kind of example you asked for; the point being that we should make arguments that can't be invalidated just by pointing out actual facts

    you dipshit

    https://sportsconflict.org/racial-segregation-american-sports/

  56. Now that you've seen The Northman, what's your take on the whole "co-option by white supremacists" discourse?

    I mean, I can't say I'm surprised

  57. Destiny isn't a leftist, no. He's more concerned with being correct.

    he should try being correct more often then

  58. do you typically buy things on Steam at full price or wait for a sale?

    I prefer to pay for indie games at full price (and, ideally, from the dev themself rather than Steam) but I don't have the budget for full-price games these days

  59. what would happen if kirby inhaled you

    he'd get a much larger vocabulary

  60. how often do you wash your hair

    what hair

  61. is it immoral to sell trump merch to pay the bills?

    I've had a harebrained scheme to make a quick buck off selling merch at trump rallies and either using it to pay for my bills or even outright giving it to trans charities or something, but I'm not sure if propagating political messaging like that would actually increase support of those ideas or if it's just taking money from people who already drank the koolaid and aren't likely to undrink it

    in the grand scheme of things, it's not doing that much harm, but it's not a GOOD thing you'd be doing

  62. The side I'm on is not accepting anecdotal evidence
    A question I have beforehand - how many people would need to be converted before you would consider the amount to be meaningful?
    Without this answered, I feel concerned that any amount would be considered too little

    in response to You're not defending your own point but rather deflecting by attacking another point - a tactic you yourself critiqued.

    no, I'm not going to be a dick about this. given that no one has done a comprehensive survey on how people's politics are affected by debate streamers (and I've looked), all we have is self-reports from people who say they've been converted. I don't imagine there are, like, thousands of these reports; I don't imagine there are more than a few dozen. understand, if you could dig up 400 reports of people being converted to leftism from Vaush's audience, that would still only be 0.1% of his audience.

    this is why I'm so skeptical of the "debate streamers convert so many people" argument. this is based on WHAT, exactly? there is enough anecdotal evidence that it happens that I would never dismiss it - it does happen, and I would wager it happens enough that, if there weren't any major drawbacks, they should absolutely keep at it. but I've seen how these audiences behave, and I've seen how LEGENDARILY BAD debate streamers' takes can be, and it's hard to believe the marginal gains are worth the drawbacks.

    so, like, if you have some data, some repository of anecdotal evidence, point me to it! I'd love to see it, because, even if I don't like how the current crop of people do it, I'd want to know if it's possible to learn from their positive traits while shedding their negative ones, or if the two are tightly intertwined. I hunger for data.

    but I don't want to hear anymore about how valuable they are to the Left from condescending fans who have nothing but hearsay backing them up.

  63. how are the videos coming along

    I have four finished scripts and I am trying to properly get back to editing. it's hard. I haven't tried to do ARP since, like, one month into the pandemic, and I'm still figuring out how to do it. long hours at the desk feel horrible when you're already spending every day inside and all your housemates are also working from home so you have no privacy whatsoever. so I'm experimenting with different methods: working from the library now that it's reopened, jumping around the script to do whatever part sounds interesting instead of working linearly, bribing myself with "you can work on whatever you want if you just do 10 slides today." I'm making progress, and I think sooner or later I'll hit a groove and inertia will take over. and soon I'll have a private room again, and with any luck I'll have ADHD meds for the first time in my life a couple months from now, so I'm hoping things things get easier then. for now, it's a struggle, but I'm getting there.

  64. I'm pretty sure, given his particular policy prescriptions, that Destiny can't reasonably be called a leftist at all, so I don't think that you can include his misdoing (of which there are plenty) in the anecdotal evidence pile.

    in response to You're not defending your own point but rather deflecting by attacking another point - a tactic you yourself critiqued.

    then we need to remove his "converting people to leftism" status as well, in which case we're only talking about Vaush, and Vaush has been directly responsible for two harassment campaigns against women in just the last couple months

  65. i feel like some less savory characters use this as some kind of weird abortion analogue, but i'm curious: being vegan usually means not eating eggs, right? do you still adhere to that? I can't see an immediate moral reason not to eat them but I might just be blind

    in response to i'm certain you get questions like this all the time since i imagine most vegans get questions like them all the time but i don't have any vegan friends so i've not really got anyone to ask. i'm asking not to denigrate or poke holes in your reasoning, but to get an idea of where you stand and where you come from on being vegan, since you tend to give level and reasonable arguments for almost everything people ask you about here. why exactly are you a vegan? is your objection to eating animal products ethical, moral, political, or environmental? do you eat honey? i keep a few chickens for their eggs. they're all happy and healthy. would you be comfortable eating their eggs? do you have a favorite vegan version of a typically non-vegan dish?

    no, I don't eat eggs. if you want to talk about the degree of animal cruelty on factory egg farms, we can go down that road, but it's pretty heavy and I'm not gonna launch into it unasked.

  66. opinion on the ATLA sequel comics?

    I read a bit of the Korra comic, was nice to see Korrasami in action

  68. let's say you're playing a shooter and the game offers you an upgrade for a weapon. one of them makes the weapon a better all-rounder, and the other makes the weapon even better in its niche. ceteris paribus, which one are you more likely to pick?

    it's going to depend on the arsenal, you know? if the game has a broad range of weapons, then there's no point making one more well-rounded, it'll only do things other guns are already doing. but if you've got a limited loadout, making a gun useful in a wider range of situations gives you more flexibility with what other weapons you're carrying.

  69. different anon but i just wanted to say that comparing people hoarding fundamental needs like food and shelter to a woman not letting you fuck her is probably the most Novel Incel Take i've seen this year

    in response to -To your first point, it's worth noting that male sex workers are coerced in many of the same ways female sex workers are (mostly by men) -To your second, the state preventing women from participating in *this* type of labor is no more patriarchal than the state prohibiting the sale of hard drugs. -And to your third point, setting a price for access to something you possess describes renter capitalism. There's an argument to be made that such a practice is inherently at odds with Marxist feminism. There's also an argument that the norms that make sex work coercive and patriarchal are inherent to the practice itself.

  70. You're not defending your own point but rather deflecting by attacking another point - a tactic you yourself critiqued.

    in response to Do you have evidence that those who enjoy debates are more likely to be jerks than those who don't? Because otherwise you're just kinda basing your view off of anecdotes.

    I know I'm being cheeky, but I am actually making a point. we are begging the question of whether debatebros *actually* convert a meaningful number of people to the Left, as we have only anecdotal evidence of this. if we're not accepting anecdotal evidence, then please provide something substantive. if we *are* accepting anecdotal evidence, than please account for the toxicity of that audience.

    the Left does not succeed simply by having a critical mass of people. you don't defeat capitalism like winning an election. these are people you have to work alongside for years, possibly decades. and I question whether the community debatebros are cultivating is actually valuable to any sort of movement building, when just about every single interaction I've had with them has been snide, confrontational, ignorant, and fraught with motivated reasoning, and I have observed for more toxic behaviors in the form of harassment campaigns directed at others. I don't see how this is a net gain for the Left.

  72. Hey sorry if this is a weird question but I vaguely remember there being some link or discussion on your tumblr at some point way in the past about a show / serial where each episode is about the making of the previous episode. Is that, like, ringing a bell at all, and if so do you remember the name of it? Sorry again if this is a weird question haha

    that's probably Caveh Zahedi's The Show About the Show

  73. Do you have evidence that those who enjoy debates are more likely to be jerks than those who don't?

    Because otherwise you're just kinda basing your view off of anecdotes.

    in response to If debate is such a waste of time why have people like Destiny and Vaush won so many people over to the left? I think the issue is less with debate and more with you.

    the claim that debatebros convert "so many" people to the Left is also based off anecdotes

  74. What do you think about Yahtzee's recent extra punctuation on the "death" of the adventure game?

    I don't keep up with Zero Punctuation anymore. Is it worth looking at?

  75. Is memento a neonoir?

    absolutely

Anon commented:
Ian replied: