CuriousCat Archive Page 99 of 202

  1. Have you ever tried to work on your appearance rather than suck up to women with these self flagellations about how stupid men are?

    in response to Men will literally develop a cult-like following around an unremarkable transphobic Canadian psychoanalyst, ubiquitously defending him from any criticism no matter how tepid until he spectacularly flames out from his inability to deal with the pressure and publicity, rather than go to therapy.

    I considered it but sucking up to women has been working really well, I'm basically drowning in 'em

  2. I hate "go to therapy" as a solution for everything wrong with men, especially if we're speaking about men in America. Oh? Just go to therapy? It's that easy? Maybe I'll put on my therapy helmet, jump into my therapy cannon, and blast into Socialized Healthcare land, where therapists grow on theratrees.

    in response to Men will literally develop a cult-like following around an unremarkable transphobic Canadian psychoanalyst, ubiquitously defending him from any criticism no matter how tepid until he spectacularly flames out from his inability to deal with the pressure and publicity, rather than go to therapy.

    okay, but the audience that Peterson is popular with - cishet white men - are the most economically advantaged subset of American life. I agree that many people who should go to therapy can't afford to and that sucks, but I'd wager a pretty sizable contingent of Peterson's fanbase CAN but prefers their sexist old white man instead.

  3. why isn't optimistic socialism more widespread online? It's pretty exhausting seeing people just go "things are bad actually" instead of "shit sucks, but we can fix it together"

    well, a) "online" is pretty big and if the socialist spaces you traffic in are pessimistic that might be a selection bias, but b) it's REALLY hard to feel like "we can fix it together" when not a single lefty I know, myself included, knows how to solve our biggest problems.

    like, if we all agree the US should be socialist, how do we make that happen? is it by electing nominally-leftist candidates like Sanders, maybe as a stepping stone to more radical candidates? we clearly don't know how to get Sanders elected, and many of his policies aren't even as far left as the US in the 50's. is the path forward sustained protest movements? we tried that in Occupy, and eventually the cops shut it down, and I can vouch that, at least in my chapter, hardly anyone protesting knew what the steps between "protest" and "deep systemic change" were. is it a general strike? seems like every six months someone tries to make one happen, and every six months it utterly fails to get off the ground; it seems like a sensible strategy but no one seems to know how to organize one. what's left? armed revolution? even among the people who favor that (of which I am not one, for the record), I've yet to hear a cogent argument for how the citizens are supposed to take on the most overfunded military on earth.

    it's easier to feel productive when you take the "think global, act local" mentality, where you can make genuine leftist inroads in your own community, and see real change. I've seen leftist groups stop evictions, feed the unhoused, get laws changed, force politicians to adopt their strategy. but none of them see a pathway from that to nationwide socialism.

    I only feel optimism in the sense of what I know is possible. I feel POTENTIAL. but I still don't know what it takes to turn that potential into something real and lasting.

    I'm working on it.

  4. What is your opinion of pornographic adventure games?

    Is this a roundabout way of asking me if my chosen flavor of porn is point 'n' click?

  5. Have you ever made a guest appearance on any other YouTuber's platform? Either reading a quote or a full-on role? I watched a lot of leftist content creators over the years so sorry if I missed an appearance!

    If not, do you have any plans to, or is it not your thing really?

    I've read lines for Shannon Strucci's Parasocial Hell and Maggie Mae Fish's Cats video. And I read the first lines of Zork for a RagnarRox video (though I embarrassingly don't remember which video). I was invited to read something for Curio, and I would've loved to, but I had COVID at the time.

    Basically if an admired peer asks me to, I usually say yes.

  8. Men will literally develop a cult-like following around an unremarkable transphobic Canadian psychoanalyst, ubiquitously defending him from any criticism no matter how tepid until he spectacularly flames out from his inability to deal with the pressure and publicity, rather than go to therapy.

    in response to Genuine question, but aside from his status as sort of an unwitting pawn for the alt-right, what exactly is Jordan Peterson's appeal? Like, a lot of what he says seems genuinely incoherent to me.

  9. How can calling in be applied to an online space like twitter, the article made it feel like a one on one process which is fine but how do you stop a situation that needs a call in from becoming a call out?

    in response to That article linked to an essay collection when it was going to explain calling in, can you summarise it?

    I wrote about how that's hard to do online. I don't think there is a perfect answer.

    https://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/139233993672/communities-call-outs-the-offworld-kerfuffle

  10. That article linked to an essay collection when it was going to explain calling in, can you summarise it?

    in response to What are examples of other tools?

    oh what the heck, that used to be a whole post, now it's a few paragraphs and a book pitch?! that's annoying, I feel like these arguments should be freely available.

    here's another article on the same subject. I haven't read this one before so if some of it's nonsense, don't blame me, I tried to link to the other one!

    https://theconsentcrew.org/2016/05/29/calling-in/

  12. ABIGAIL!!!!!!!!!!🏳️‍🌈

    GONNA BE THE BEAUTY OF COUNTY GALWAY
    AND SHE WILL LIVE ALWAYS IN A WORLD OF LOVE

  14. Is there a context where 'calling someone out' is good?

    yes, that's never been in question

    what's in question is, when do you use other tools?

  15. If you'll indulge my hypothetical--what do you think would happen if a disgraced alt-right figurehead, like, Richard Spencer or someone like that, were to suddenly come out with a public statement saying they'd rescinded all their alt-right views and are now in support of leftism and progrssivism? And judging by their posts on other sites, they seemed to be genuinely sincere about it?

    that happened with Baked Alaska, then earlier this month he helped storm that capitol

    until someone actually puts skin in the game of making things better and undoing the harm they've cause, they can say whatever they like, but I'm not gonna believe them

  16. Do you think a left radicalization pipeline exists?

    Intuitively it feels like: Olson/Ellis/Hbomb -> Contra/PhilTube/you/Shaun -> Weirdos on potato mics talking about Lenin

    potato mics?

  17. So now that Abby is our newest Breadtube Queen, are you going to nab the position of King?

    it's curious you imagine leftist twitter as a monarchy

  18. I've been feeling tired lately of hanging out in online leftist spaces. It's just that there's so much negativity. I get that there's a lot of work to be done, but any small victory is met with "Um, this doesn't matter actually." Plus there's some people who consider anyone slightly less left than they are a liberal simp who sucks Biden's dick.

    Sorry for venting, my question is, do you have any advice on how to handle this feeling of frustration?

    what kinds of spaces are these? are they spaces focused on a specific leftist cause - i.e. spaces working to provide shelter to the unhoused, setting up direct pipelines between farmers and hungry families, lobbying to repeal Glass-Steagall - or are they just, like, r/BreadTube?

    if the latter, I would recommend a space that is working towards a specific goal where you an measure tangible progress. if your only goal is "society is socialist now," yeah, nothing's going to seem like progress. and the kinds of people who frequent those spaces are the kinds of people who like bitching about how nothing really matters; if they wanted to feel they were making progress, they'd go somewhere else.

  19. If you could trade one subscriber for one hash brown, how much would you trade, if anything?

    what is "one hash brown" in this context? one serving? one potato? one sliver?

  20. Have you ever encountered anyone who believed that QAnon is real, but their stance was that they opposed Q and believed they needed to stop the conspiracy from coming to fruition?

    you lost me at "encountered someone who believed in QAnon"

    these aren't exactly people I run into, nor people I go looking for

  21. If socialism good, how come iPhones? Checkmate, atheists.

    if china bad because sweatshops, why come iphones? checkmate, pythagoreans.

  23. why is he wrong? context matters when using all those words

    in response to what's shitty/problematic about Carlin?

    he's taking a deontological approach that implies the intentions of the person using the word is the only context. in the social idiom of American racism, there *is no context* where a white person using the n-word isn't racist, no matter what he felt in his heart when he used it. and his white audience is cheering for it because they like that he broke the taboo and gave them permission to use it.

  25. I used to totally think like you where it's everyone's duty to donate everything above 60k/year to social causes but then I made a TON of money off Gamestop.

    I know you're trolling but I never said that

  26. What would you do if, tomorrow, you woke up and realized you had 10 million subscribers?

    panic

  27. Skeptic about what?

    in response to Do you like Adam Curtis/find his work interesting?

    About Adam Curtis. He speaks in broad strokes about geopolitics, and I don't know the histories of the places he's discussing but his statements are SO SIMPLE that I figure they MUST reductive.

  28. What’s the issue with the shock doctrine?

    in response to Do you like Adam Curtis/find his work interesting?

    There isn't an issue with it, the advice is to read it instead of HyperNormalisation. The argument being that HyperNormalisation's argument clearly points at "the phenomena we are describing are caused by neoliberalism" but never says it. The Shock Doctrine does.

  29. If new questions just stopped coming, how long do you think it would take to go through all your backlog here?

    I have no intention of going through my backlog, there's just too many of them to delete.

  30. Yeah but I heard some of the posters on Wall Street bets are racist

    in response to Hedge funds do stuff like this all the time and it's never considered to be a direct action against capitalism. What is it about redditors doing it that makes people think it's an anticapitalist action rather than capitalism in action? It's funnier than usual, but it's not out of the normal range of actions in the stock market.

    I mostly heard they were ableist.

  31. I'm just not sure that 'the people who usually lose win at capitalism this time' should be seen as an attack on capitalism. We can and should use this story to illustrate what's nonsensical about the market, but the redditors are just capitalists doing capitalism.

    in response to Hedge funds do stuff like this all the time and it's never considered to be a direct action against capitalism. What is it about redditors doing it that makes people think it's an anticapitalist action rather than capitalism in action? It's funnier than usual, but it's not out of the normal range of actions in the stock market.

    I mean, the master's tools won't dismantle the master's house, but bonking the master in the head with his own hammer is not nothing!

  32. Do you like Adam Curtis/find his work interesting?

    I haven't watched anything long-form all the way through, but the stuff I've seen kicks up my Skeptic Alarm something fierce. I saw a take on Twitter that just said "don't watch HyperNormalisation, read The Shock Doctrine."

  33. But hasn't profit/surplus always existed?

    in response to What made "capitalism" unique compared to "markets" in the past?

    Worker-owned collectives *exist*, that doesn't mean every economy that has them is socialist.

    There's a more complicated answer but it's 5:45am and my brain isn't going to put it in words good.

  34. What's your favorite bubble tea flavor?

    I'm a simple bitch who likes strawberry.

  35. Hedge funds do stuff like this all the time and it's never considered to be a direct action against capitalism. What is it about redditors doing it that makes people think it's an anticapitalist action rather than capitalism in action? It's funnier than usual, but it's not out of the normal range of actions in the stock market.

    in response to Would it be incorrect/hyperbole to say that a bunch of (presumably) overwhelmingly Libertarian shitposters have accidentally accomplished more tangible direct action against capitalism in a few days than any Progressive group has in years?

    Because the redditors were explicitly doing it, in part, to expose the nonsensical nature of the market and bankrupt a hedge fund. For most of them, those goals were secondary to making hecka money, but they existed.

  36. Could you explain how the fuck borrowing stocks works?

    Nope! That's the part I don't get.

  39. Do you think Biden will try to add or change any Supreme Court justices this year?

    I don't predict the future. There's been some push to expand the bench, which seems at least possible.

  40. In your new video you use a scene from Sister Act 2. Are you a fan?

    I haven't seen it in a very long time. It might have some enjoyable cornball appeal, but I don't think it's a Good Movie.

  41. I hope you have a really good day

    thanks!

  44. One of the big hedge funds that was shorting Gamestop, Melvin Capital, just today closed out (in the metaphor, bought the sandwiches they promised early, at a loss, in anticipation of further price increases) their Gamestop shorts

    It's hard to say how much they lost, but it was in the billions, and Gamestop short sellers collectively are estimated to have lost ~3 billion at this point

    Btw, them closing out their position means *they bought more GME* and the price will be driven higher, forcing even greater losses for remaining GME short sellers (almost all of whom are assumed to be other funds)

    in response to Do you know what the hell is happening with GameStop and the stock markets and the other whatchamacallits? Because I feel like a newborn baby.

    I kind of assume this is going to end badly for a lot of good people, but for now, WOOHOOHOO GET FUCKED

  45. Thanks for explaining it to me, but I think it's indicative of how I don't understand economics that gamestop magically became more profitable even though they know and gamestop knows and the buyers know that the value is artificial and will not last. Why were the hedge fund guys locked into this path? Couldn't they have just found another bodega? Maybe one that sells $10 at $10 so they don't make money, but they atleast aren't ruined by a farce that is apparent to everyone.

    in response to Do you know what the hell is happening with GameStop and the stock markets and the other whatchamacallits? Because I feel like a newborn baby.

    They were locked into the path because they'd already promised Jeff the sandwich BEFORE the prices started to skyrocket, and they are legally required to give it to him regardless of the price.

  46. Would it be incorrect/hyperbole to say that a bunch of (presumably) overwhelmingly Libertarian shitposters have accidentally accomplished more tangible direct action against capitalism in a few days than any Progressive group has in years?

    in response to Do you know what the hell is happening with GameStop and the stock markets and the other whatchamacallits? Because I feel like a newborn baby.

    It was not even remotely an accident, they were pretty upfront about wanting to bankrupt hedge funds. I don't think we could call this "direct action" since, beyond tanking the fund, there isn't any larger critique or demand. And I can't even predict if this will be a net positive because I don't know how the market or regulators are going to respond. Like, sure, it lays bare that the market is an utterly capricious and highly manipulable casino attraction that can destroy lives while producing nothing, but I don't think legislators are looking at this and saying "welp, time to abolish the stock market."

  47. Does this change your answer to the original question?

    in response to This isn't true, it's a reinstatement of an Obama-era ban which Trump rescinded also, it doesn't include private ICE detention centers which is kind of a big oversight if you ask me

    No. I picked a bad example, but, in general, the Dems adopt socially progressive policies when they are politically viable and when society at large has been onboard with them for decades. It's bullshit that they take so long, and that they refuse to adopt economically progressive policies, but it does mean, in several areas, there is a gradual leftward drift.

  48. Do you know what the hell is happening with GameStop and the stock markets and the other whatchamacallits? Because I feel like a newborn baby.

    Okay, so normally with stocks you make money when the stock you buy goes up, but there's this thing called a "short sell" where you make money when the stock goes DOWN. To oversimplify it with a metaphor: say your friend Jeff says, "Can you bring me a sandwich from the bodega tomorrow at lunchtime? Here's $10." But you know the bodega is suffering lately, and thing there's a good chance they're going to start slashing prices tomorrow to try to encourage buyers. So you take Jeff's $10, go in the next day, and, lo and behold, the bodega has slashed sandwich prices to $7. So you buy Jeff the sandwich, but, since he gave you a ten, you keep $3.

    This is one type of speculation hedge funds do: they borrow stocks that they have to sell back to the people they borrowed from, assuming they will sell back at LESS than they paid for it and get to keep the difference.

    r/WallStreetBets saw that a hedge fund was betting that GameStop was gonna tank, because they were already a badly managed company and it looks like the pandemic is about to finish them off. In our metaphor, you can see that the bodega is about to slash prices, so you promise to buy THE WHOLE OFFICE sandwiches tomorrow at lunch; if you make $3 off every sandwich, you'll make hecka bank! And what r/WallStreetBets have done is said to themselves, "Y'all, fuck this scam. Let's get THOUSANDS of people to go to the bodega today, make it the biggest thing in town, so they jack sandwich prices UP." They know you've PROMISED to buy the whole office sandwiches, which means if you get there and the bodega is charging $40 per sandwich, you're gonna get cleaned out.

    This has nothing to do with the bodega (GameStop). The next day, after you've been cleaned out, all the r/WallStreetBets folks will have moved on and the bodega will be back where they were: a failing business that makes sandwiches people only buy as a way of fucking over a scammer. But, for that one day, you've got people buying $10 sandwiches that are worth $40 later that same day and selling them at a profit, SOLELY BECAUSE THEY DECIDED EVERYONE SHOULD BUY THEM.

    So r/WallStreetBets is making a ton of money (in stocks, anyway, not sure what selling them is gonna look like), a multi-billion dollar hedge fund is going under, and GameStop was very briefly the hottest property in the market on its way to unavoidable failure.

  49. I mean, women aren't exactly crazy about listening to men for mental help either. Hence why most people prefer a same-gender therapist.

    in response to Genuine question, but aside from his status as sort of an unwitting pawn for the alt-right, what exactly is Jordan Peterson's appeal? Like, a lot of what he says seems genuinely incoherent to me.

    nope. https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/why-men-see-female-therapists-instead-of-male/

  50. Thoughts on alternate history?

    I'll take one.

  51. Are any other Malcolms or Gladwells hacks too?

    in response to Is malcolm gladwell a hack?

    Malcolm Reynolds is more of a charlatan.

  52. This isn't true, it's a reinstatement of an Obama-era ban which Trump rescinded

    also, it doesn't include private ICE detention centers which is kind of a big oversight if you ask me

    in response to Has the Democratic Party moved left in action, or just in rhetoric?

    Thanks for the correction! And, yes, ICE falls under "could be doing so much more."

  53. Genuine question, but aside from his status as sort of an unwitting pawn for the alt-right, what exactly is Jordan Peterson's appeal? Like, a lot of what he says seems genuinely incoherent to me.

    in response to Marx lived and died in London and was a columnist for a New York paper, so why wouldn't he speak with him in English?

    Self-help for depressed men. Telling them to do basic things like keep their space clean and assert themselves with other people, which do genuinely help with depression. They listen to him when they wouldn't listen to someone like Marie Kondo saying the same shit because he appeals to their masculinity.

  54. I’m interested in knowing more about A Mind Forever Voyaging, but I’ve kinda been so attention poisoned that I can’t play old text adventure games - so is there any good writing about it, especially in the context of modern politics?

    I have no idea. If I do that history on the adventure game series I've been fantasizing, I might write one.

  55. It's called beijing a decent human being!

    what is

  57. Has the Democratic Party moved left in action, or just in rhetoric?

    I mean, Biden just instructed the Department for Justice to cut ties with for-profit prisons, which no President has done before, so, yes, in their usual, gradual way they have moved left on social issues when it is politically acceptable to do so. Biden is doing a lot of stuff that needs to be done, even though he could and should be doing so much more,

  58. What do you think of Biden lifting the transgender military ban?

    I mean, I'll make my perfunctory "LET TRANS FOLX BE IMPERIALISTS" comment now, but, if we're going to have a military-industrial complex, the least we can do is not have a segregated one. So call it a net gain.

  61. Why is the general consensus on Thi4f so negative? I've watched gameplay vids and it seems fine to me.

    https://youtu.be/H-5KrE8mFKY

  62. If Jordan Peterson and Karl Marx sat down for a debate, what would happen?

    I think Jordan would have trouble understanding German

  64. Is malcolm gladwell a hack?

    Long answer: Malcolm Gladwell is a talented and infectiously enthusiastic writer who writes about ideas that excite him and uses his extreme likability to make up for a lack of rigor. He often bends or misinterprets data to fit the conclusion he wants to be true, he begs questions that need to be answered for his theses to work, and he often relies on far too little information to make the claims he makes. It may be too harsh to call him a hack, as this does seem to come from a place of sincere interest in the topics he discusses. But he's never corrected for his rigorouslessness because it's never cost him anything, so he fails upwards because he's fun to read. What's depressing is a lack of rigor is, in the end, a lack of curiosity, a desire for simplicity, a love of extraordinary claims with no correlating interest in extraordinary evidence, when that extraordinary evidence often points at a truth that is more complex and, in the end, more interesting than the surface-level Big Idea that he's pushing. And I feel what a pop science writer needs to be, if nothing else, is curious.

    Short answer: yeah.

  65. Date ideas that are pandemic accommodating

    Zoom, outdoor walks in masks, and, if after a month (or more) of that, you still like each other, the long, involved process of sharing the health status of everyone in your respective pods, assessing risk, and getting tested yourselves, and, if everything checks out, finally meeting in person.

  66. Maybe philosophy is just a bunch of people on drugs making shit up? It really makes you think.

    in response to And celebrity is the new religion

    no you're thinking of pop music

  67. Maybe not a book. but certainly a blog of some sort? At least so that some useful stuff doesn't get lost

    in response to Different person here, but why not? I'd be interested

    the most useful stuff usually ends up in a video

  68. No, it's just a realization that cops aren't the only union that one could have problems with

    in response to how to worry less about the idea of weapons manufacturers or the folks maintaining the nuclear weapons democratizing their workplace and deciding launch a bomb is good for business

    If the union isn't a bigger problem than the system of rich people with no accountability we have now, I don't see how this is an argument.

  69. Did you want to be in a ska band as a kid?

    no, I want to be in a ska band now

  70. You started The Alt-Right Playbook in 2017. To what degree do you think the fact that Trump left office will affect it? Not to imply that it's no longer relevant, just maybe relevant diffrently.

    Well, it was already winding down before the election. I have a pretty clear path towards the conclusion, and I think everything I still have to say is pretty relevant. The people who supported Trump aren't going anywhere, part of Biden's strategy was to allow conservatives to reject Trump without rejecting any of their actual politics, and Bidenism isn't any kind of solution to the problems we're seeing. So, yeah, I think we need tools for dealing with what happens next time.

  72. Maybe not more responsible as too apathetic and distant from day to day operations to reach their full potential in terms of sheer irresponsibility that they could achieve?

    in response to how to worry less about the idea of weapons manufacturers or the folks maintaining the nuclear weapons democratizing their workplace and deciding launch a bomb is good for business

    "rich people are more empathetic than workers" is certainly A Take

  75. how to worry less about the idea of weapons manufacturers or the folks maintaining the nuclear weapons democratizing their workplace and deciding launch a bomb is good for business

    I'm sorry, we're operating on the assumption that the CEOs are more responsible?

Anon commented:
Ian replied: