CuriousCat Archive Page 79 of 202

  1. Say a Republican wins 2024 and Clarence Thomas retires or dies, but there’s a fifty two democrat majority in the senate, Do you think a Republican President would delay a nomination for several years leaving the court with eight justices?

    that would require Dems blocking a judge, which is about as likely as the girl from The Ring crawling out of my butt and running for office

  3. A few months ago you said that you were doing research on historical left-wing topics like The Spanish Civil War and The Paris Commune. Any updates?

    I said I was considering doing research for a future series, I've picked up a few books but I'm not tucking into anything until TARP is done.

  5. Welp, I walked right into that one...

    Of course I meant that "Ian Danskin" is directly attached to your videos. Just noticed that some content creators operate exclusively under a pseudonym and others don't.

    in response to What made you decide to build your online presence under your real name? Did you consider the alternative at the time?

    it wasn't really a decision, I just never had any desire to use a pseudonym. especially with the work I'm doing now, I'm glad "who is Innuendo Studios" isn't a mystery the Alt-Right is trying to solve, you know?

  6. any billionaires you'd feel bad about guillotining? gabe newell is oddly charming so i might feel bad about axing him

    I intend to take only their money, I don't need their heads

  7. Do you think that workers could pressure the federal government to do stuff were they to strike in massive numbers in vital roles? For example, airport workers and other transportation workers striking to pressure the government into addressing climate change

    Something like a fusion of the George Floyd protests and the numerous strikes in 2021.

    the question isn't could it work, the question is how to organize one

  8. What made you decide to build your online presence under your real name? Did you consider the alternative at the time?

    Innuendo Studios isn't my real name

  9. Name of that show?

    in response to How are movies?

    we're talking about movie

  10. Do you think a progressive primary challenger could have a realistic chance against Biden?

    I'm probably not qualified to speculate what would happen in circumstances modern America has never seen, but I'd be curious to see someone try it

  11. How are movies?

    in response to How are Video Games?

    I liked that one with the lady and the guy from the TV show

  12. R.I.P. Meat Loaf. What do you think he wouldn't have ever done for love?

    it's butt stuff, you know it's butt stuff

  14. I want to obliterate all cryptocurrencies off the face of the Earth.

    Any suggestions for how to do that?

    oh they'll do it themselves soon enough

  15. How are the rest of the forms of media?

    in response to How are Video Games?

    a'ight I guess

  16. How are Video Games?

    a few of 'em are pretty good

  17. What have you thought about Joe Biden and his cabinet now that we are one year into his presidency?

    garbage

  18. What’s your favorite movie of his?

    in response to umm why?

    parts of Anchorman are ok

  19. Do you like tickle fights?

    I win tickle fights

  20. How many of Bong Joon-ho's films have you seen? Memories of Murder is strange even among them for having so little for women in it. Whilst I wouldn't call Bong a feminist filmmaker, usually there's at least two meaty supporting roles for women, or a lead is a woman

    MoM, The Host, Snowpiercer, and Parasite

  21. Were you awake at like 2:00 in the morning answering curiouscat questions? Not that it's my business prying but :0

    couldn't sleep

  23. But then aren’t right-wing and left-wing not concrete positions? Hence the concept of the Overton window.

    in response to Could one argue that Bernie Sanders is a centrist of sorts given that his policies are about employing socialistic policies to keep capitalism from flying off the rails?

    the overton window is a measure of what is and isn't considered acceptable to talk about in politics. like centrism, it has not concrete borders and shifts with The Discourse. but right-wing means pro-capitalist and trending authoritarian, and left-wing means anti-capitalist and trending egalitarian. those are fairly concrete.

  25. I know one person whose vote it suppressed in 2016.

    in response to Yes!

    oh wow one person

  26. Could one argue that Bernie Sanders is a centrist of sorts given that his policies are about employing socialistic policies to keep capitalism from flying off the rails?

    in response to That is true for the vast majority of centrists, but aren’t there some people who have legitimate positions that happen to about halfway between the left and right?

    if your frame is the governments of other developed nations, he's fairly centrist. if your frame is American politics, he's pretty far to the left. if your frame is the whole of politics, from socialism to fascism, he's center-left.

    see what I mean about "centrist" not being a concrete position?

  27. When curious cat died for a while I thought I was free from mindlessly sending random questions to you but temptation has beckoned me once again anyway what's your favorite kind of ungulate

    don't make be choose between pigs and elephants

  29. Can you give examples of things to work on with doomer leftists?

    in response to How can I talk to my doomer leftist friends who are beginning to entertain not voting at all because democrats aren’t getting anything done?

    so far the definition of "doomer" we've been using only refers to their unwillingness to vote, in which case, literally everything else.

    if they're doomers in multiple areas, it's gonna be context specific. but most leftists will support mutual aid initiatives, or local direct action that impacts their immediate community like housing or food, and you can build outward from there. I think a lot of leftists who don't vote because they don't like liberals will still support movements to improve the voting process, like switching to runoff elections, abolishing the electoral college, or universal access to voting; things that make leftier candidates more viable.

    sometimes you can just get them to help out with Food Not Bombs or volunteering at your local leftist bookstore.

  30. which website then do you read reviews from?

    in response to Do you read reviews on IMDB?

    I went back to the AV Club when The Dissolve went dead but now the AV Club is being run by pricks so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. I follow a few critics I like on Letterboxd but not fastidiously.

  32. That is true for the vast majority of centrists, but aren’t there some people who have legitimate positions that happen to about halfway between the left and right?

    in response to Why is centrism bad?

    like what?

  33. I agree that there usually aren’t enough doomer leftists to sway an election, but their statements can be used in right-wing propaganda to suppress the votes of less engaged left-leaning voters.

    in response to I disagree that there aren't enough doomers to swing an election one way or another, there have been a lot of really close elections in recent history at all levels of government; the GOP won the Virginia House of Delegates by about 200 votes across two races, for example

    is this a thing you have seen happen?

  35. Do you think Adam McKay is a comedic genius in his screenwritings? Especially when it comes to films like Don't Look Up, The Big Short & Vice

    no

  36. Is human blood vegan?

    in response to best midday snack?

    come over here and I'll check

  37. Not the OP, but it doesn't seem like this guy is disagreeing with you. Certainly not "indulging a fantasy". He's just arguing semantics.

    in response to In my opinion, I think that we should focus our use of language to how (1) it can help people (2) in the present, regardless of accuracy - for these reasons, given that "racism" is often defined by people as "hatred and discrimination itself" rather than "institutional racism" and that "systemic racism" is BY NECESSITY often defined as "systemic racism", I feel like in order to make our anti-racist arguments most effectively, we should use terms where there is less dispute regarding meaning. If fascism just meant to most people "bad", than I would hope you would agree with me in that circumstance it would be more effective to, when referring to fascism, say something along the lines of "state-sponsored political and ethnic persecution", right?

    saying we should use the white definition that only exists to sweep their own history under the rug is more than semantics

  38. Why is centrism bad?

    centrism isn't even a belief in anything, it's just "whatever we're talking about, I choose the middle." it would be pathetic even if it weren't often catastrophic.

  39. best midday snack?

    your blood

  40. In my opinion, I think that we should focus our use of language to how (1) it can help people (2) in the present, regardless of accuracy - for these reasons, given that "racism" is often defined by people as "hatred and discrimination itself" rather than "institutional racism" and that "systemic racism" is BY NECESSITY often defined as "systemic racism", I feel like in order to make our anti-racist arguments most effectively, we should use terms where there is less dispute regarding meaning. If fascism just meant to most people "bad", than I would hope you would agree with me in that circumstance it would be more effective to, when referring to fascism, say something along the lines of "state-sponsored political and ethnic persecution", right?

    in response to I didn’t mean to imply systemic racism didn’t exist before it had a name. I know W.E.B. DuBois and many other wrote about the concept before it was named. My point is that the term racism did originally have a different though related meaning before Stokely Carmichael gave racism its systemic definition. Racism originally referred to hatred and prejudice to a different racial group, and this definition is still in use by people of all racism. I’m harping on this because I can see how difficult it is to explain systemic racism to most white people (and to a significant number of people of color) and the fact that two definitions of racism are in common use causes a lot of confusion. Many white people hear the statement “Black people can’t be racist” and take that mean that we are saying that black people can’t hate or discriminate against white people. This is obviously untrue, so it makes us seem like we are lying. This makes educating people about systemic racism more difficult because it helps the right “put us in a box” to use your term so they can ignore us and convince others to ignore us too.

    I'm going to make this very clear: racism has always been an institution. it was an institution when it said people were property, it was an institution when it said people of different races couldn't marry, it was an institution when it rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them in internment camps. for the majority of the history of racism, no had any notion that "racism" meant anything other than the logic by which people are oppressed by the legal system. the idea that racism is just a prejudice has only existed since POC clawed their way into enough rights that white people can pretend it's just a personal preference and that it's mostly about hurting feelings.

    you are not helping anyone by indulging this fantasy.

  41. Do you look at imdb ratings to see if a movie/tv show is worth your time to watch / put in your watchlist?

    no I read reviews

  42. Do you think of your veganism as a primarily political act? Or as a primarily ethical act with political consequences and implications?

    the deeper I get into leftism, the less I feel my own veganism functions as any sort of political act. one person abstaining from meat and animal products does not meaningfully reduce the suffering of animals nor meaningfully harm the meat industry. the way politics has been steered away from collective actions ("we should fight climate change") and towards less effective, individual actions ("I should recycle") that are primarily about consumption habits ("I should buy a Prius and avoid Exxon") is one of my deepest criticisms of neoliberalism. if I were working with an animal rights group, I would consider that a political act. abstaining from meat all by my lonesome is not politics.

    but, regardless, every day I have the choice of whether or not to eat meat, and I can't morally justify doing it. so, yeah, it's an ethical act.

  43. I disagree that there aren't enough doomers to swing an election one way or another, there have been a lot of really close elections in recent history at all levels of government; the GOP won the Virginia House of Delegates by about 200 votes across two races, for example

    and if you know any Virginians in swing counties saying they're not gonna vote, you should definitely yell at them, but this shotgun approach of "yell at everyone" is a massive waste of energy

  44. Is Mary Elizabeth Winstead either of them?

    in response to They're separated positions?

    no, MEW is still a little too niche for that, but she's the sweetheart of everyone who's ever paid attention to her

  45. Thoughts on the Unabomber's ideology?

    to my understanding it's some Philosophy 101 stuff about how SOCIETY makes us less FREE because we're ACCOUNTABLE TO OTHER PEOPLE and I swear if one more person acts like this is a profound statement I'ma say something uncivil

  46. Is it useful to consider the sentiment, "Both US political parties are exactly the same" an example of "I hate Mondays" on the left?

    yeah kinda

  47. Should democrats stop trying to pass these omnibus bills that contain so many things, and try to pass single focus bills?

    I don't think single focus bills exist anymore. everything has a thousand riders.

  48. I know this is a hard sell to most leftists, but isn’t keeping fascists out of power a good thing unto itself?

    in response to How can I talk to my doomer leftist friends who are beginning to entertain not voting at all because democrats aren’t getting anything done?

    as I said, there aren't actually enough doomer leftists to sway a vote, and if you're diverting energy away from collective action to yelling at fellow leftists over "the principle of the thing," I would say that's a bad thing.

  49. They're separated positions?

    in response to America’s sweetheart is and always has been Betty White.

    absolutely. Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore have both been America's Sweetheart, but neither is a national treasure (though Drew SHOULD be).

  50. How can I talk to my doomer leftist friends who are beginning to entertain not voting at all because democrats aren’t getting anything done?

    I disagree very strongly with the decision for leftists not to vote for liberals, but the REASONS for that decision are overwhelmingly correct. seems a better use of my time would be taking the huge overlap in our beliefs and commitments to work on something we DO agree on. the fact that they are doomers removing themselves from elections is annoying, but, in material terms, it doesn't make much difference. there just aren't enough of them to swing an election one way or another.

  51. Hello i'm glad i'm not american enjoy your infighting and your fading relevancy in the global left

    Cuck

    agreed, America is pretty F'd and I'd rather not be here! and a fine cuck to you, too, comrade.

  52. In that case, any clue what causes the scarce few cases of someone identifying explicitly with the term of facist?

    in response to Do fascists know they are fascists? Clearly some do, but it seems to me that many think they are hard-working, God-loving patriotic Americans™. Do these people know they are fascists on some level?

    "fascist" was a term coined by Mussolini, his is the only political party I know of to officially adopt the label. and, given that fascists are pretty universally considered the Bad Guys in World War 2 - not to mention the unambiguous losers - most people don't want to believe they are that, and the ones who know it want to distance themselves from the association. it's not good for recruitment to be seen as The Bad Guys Who Lost.

  53. Was Taxi Driver a “capitalist recuperation of class rhetoric?”

    in response to Why did so many people have an issue with the most recent Joker movie when it was anti-capitalist af?

    the issue with any class critique created under capitalism is that it can always be spun as "existing in spite of capitalism" and also "used by capitalism to recuperate class rhetoric," because both are typically true. which way a given leftist spins it mostly depends on that leftist's proclivities.

  54. Not really related to the matter at hand, but are categories like "germans" and "slavs", "yoruba" and "igbo" any less arbitrary than "white" and "black"? They just seem more granular to me

    in response to I didn’t mean to imply systemic racism didn’t exist before it had a name. I know W.E.B. DuBois and many other wrote about the concept before it was named. My point is that the term racism did originally have a different though related meaning before Stokely Carmichael gave racism its systemic definition. Racism originally referred to hatred and prejudice to a different racial group, and this definition is still in use by people of all racism. I’m harping on this because I can see how difficult it is to explain systemic racism to most white people (and to a significant number of people of color) and the fact that two definitions of racism are in common use causes a lot of confusion. Many white people hear the statement “Black people can’t be racist” and take that mean that we are saying that black people can’t hate or discriminate against white people. This is obviously untrue, so it makes us seem like we are lying. This makes educating people about systemic racism more difficult because it helps the right “put us in a box” to use your term so they can ignore us and convince others to ignore us too.

    most human categorization is, to an extent, arbitrary. we categorize things to aid in our own understanding of them. the question, then, is what purpose did those categories serve? "German" indicates a country of origin, "Slav" a region, "Yoruba" a culture. "white" and "Black" designate races, a nebulous concept that claims immutable truths about a person are embedded in the genes that determine skin tone.

  55. CuriousCat profile pic NFT when

    cc profile pic is by skutch who is too based to mint NFTs

  57. Maybe you can reuse stuff from your videos and old talks, kinda like how comedians tour specials: it's the same content in all shows, but it works

    in response to Will you ever do xoxo festival?

    standing up on stage and saying things I've said before that everyone in the audience can already see for free is incredibly uninteresting to me

  58. Do you actually believe in this stuff?

    in response to your enneagram?

    I don't really remember what the enneagram is supposed to tell you or what the science (or lack thereof) behind it is, I just remember doing the worksheet when I was like 20 and finding out I'm a 4.

  59. Why did so many people have an issue with the most recent Joker movie when it was anti-capitalist af?

    I didn't see it, but "Taxi Driver in clown makeup" wasn't a solid pitch in my book. I know a lot of lefties who raved about its stance on class, but I'm jaded and don't really get the folks who burned Captain Marvel for being "capitalist recuperation of feminism" but don't read Joker as "capitalist recuperation of class rhetoric." Whatever.

  60. I didn’t mean to imply systemic racism didn’t exist before it had a name. I know W.E.B. DuBois and many other wrote about the concept before it was named. My point is that the term racism did originally have a different though related meaning before Stokely Carmichael gave racism its systemic definition. Racism originally referred to hatred and prejudice to a different racial group, and this definition is still in use by people of all racism.

    I’m harping on this because I can see how difficult it is to explain systemic racism to most white people (and to a significant number of people of color) and the fact that two definitions of racism are in common use causes a lot of confusion. Many white people hear the statement “Black people can’t be racist” and take that mean that we are saying that black people can’t hate or discriminate against white people. This is obviously untrue, so it makes us seem like we are lying. This makes educating people about systemic racism more difficult because it helps the right “put us in a box” to use your term so they can ignore us and convince others to ignore us too.

    in response to I think the point this person is trying to make is that the term “racism” was not used to describe these power structures until 1967 when the concept of institutional racism was coined. Systemic and institutional racism were mostly discussed using that term only in activist and sociological circles until a popular pamphlet was published in 1978. Meanwhile, most (admittedly white oriented, but some media made by black people too) popular culture used the term racism to refer to individual acts of prejudice. To this day I have heard Black people I know call people who say and do bigoted and prejudiced things as racists, i.e. racism as an individual phenomenon. In the last decade, the definition of racism as systemic racism has broken through, but the individual definition is still in use among people of all races.

    I invite you to think about the history of racism beyond the last 50-odd years to consider how ludicrous your statement is. do you believe that the American South in the 1700s, where Black people were property, drew a distinction between racism as an institution and racism as a personal grudge? do you think such a division existed? I remind you that race theory itself, the very concept that Brits and Spaniards and Frenchmen and Germans were suddenly all one "race" because their skin was pale and Nigerians and Congolese and Ethiopians and Sudanese were all another "race" because their skin was dark, was invented *to justify the African slave trade*. so when in this history do you think suddenly the institution of racism and the personal prejudice of racism were split apart? was it after slavery ended in the US, but when Black people were still not allowed to vote on the grounds that they were Black? was it when they couldn't marry white people? was it when they couldn't go to the same schools? was it when they couldn't drink from the same fountains? exactly when is this mythical, prelapsarian time when people didn't understand that "racism" was an institution, and how did that divide happen, and whom did it benefit?

  61. Thoughts on Xenogenders?

    the playstation game?

  62. your enneagram?

    4

  63. How is cracker not a slur?

    well for starters white people are only pissed about it on principle, in that "well if WE can't say the n-word why do YOU get to say cracker?" kinda way. I feel a prerequisite to being a slur is the maligned party needs to actually give a shit.

  64. Diff anon, but on that note, how did you like Matrix Resurrections? I like it a lot and have positive things to say about it, due to its quality, and think it's neat it was made by a trans person.

    in response to people like yourself are guaranteed to say positive things about the latest Matrix movie regardless of quality just because it's directed by a trans person.

    I had a good time, and found the filmmaking about equally entertaining to the sheer audacity of it

    Wachowski films are always smarter than they look but not as smart as they think they are, in my experience. its philosophy holds up to some scrutiny, but not a lot of it.

  65. why does curious cat keep saying i need to be logged in to send links even though my question has no links in it

    you used a period probably

  66. What are the most underrated videogames, in your opinion?

    old indie games that mostly existed on forums back when "indie dev" wasn't much of a career

    Twine and Inform games

    little narrative games no one but me seems to talk about

  67. Did you have any unusual / peculiar dream job when you were little?

    chef on a spaceship

  68. Will you ever do xoxo festival?

    I've never been invited. What should I talk about if I ever am?

  69. Do fascists know they are fascists? Clearly some do, but it seems to me that many think they are hard-working, God-loving patriotic Americans™. Do these people know they are fascists on some level?

    I'm gonna clarify first that being a hard-working God-loving patriotic American™ is in no way counter to being a fascist. but, to answer your real question: no, most fascists don't think they're fascist. most fascist rhetoric is a series of convolutions meant to convince fascists they are not fascists.

  70. Why don’t a bunch of leftists just pretend to be super conservative, run for office, then flip the script and govern as a progressive?

    “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
    - Kurt Vonnegut

  71. How does it feel knowing lefties are better at taking down lefties than the altright ever was?

    pretty bad!

  72. America’s sweetheart is and always has been Betty White.

    no she was promoted to national treasure

  73. please similarly describe the difference between Dr Pepper and Pibb Xtra

    in response to What's the difference? I've never been able to tell.

    dr pepper tastes good and pibb tastes like weak dr pepper

  74. the 🌎 is a 🧛

    despite all my 😡 I am still just a 🐀 in a cage

Anon commented:
Ian replied: