FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
I always thought "self-abuse" had a nice ring to it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
I thought it was a joke about Pedro Pascal's omnipresence in movies and TV shows these days.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
The Exorcist is based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, it doesn't have a novelisation.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Ever since first hearing about the Cornell 7 I've been unable to stop thinking about this article from this time last year, "The Preppy Gang Rape Crisis", which argues that there's a huge appetite for stories about scions of the white wealthy educated elite gang-raping women (and if those women happen to WoC, all the better) – but reality stubbornly refuses to comply, and in fact this demographic is one of the least prone to committing sexual assault.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It also has more than twice the rate of HIV compared to the US.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Ah, I see. I thought maybe the colour yellow had some special significance in Japan (e.g. "yellow journalism").
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
@George_E_Hale – forgive my ignorance, but what's the significance of the road being painted yellow?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Maybe I'll follow @FiveHourMarathon's lead and start playing Long War when I become a father.
Perhaps the most recurrent complaint in these threads is magnum opus dissonance: the comment you tossed off in five minutes gets showered with accolades, while the one you slaved over for days doesn't get a look in.
It's impossible to predict which comments will resonate with posters here, and which won't. All the same, I will admit to being amused that my lengthy effortpost about the importance of marriage and my desire to start a family didn't get nominated, while my (roughly as lengthy, admittedly) effortpost about the most efficient way to kill aliens without save scumming did. My wife was also amused.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I don't claim that this pattern is unique to anti-Zionists, but I find it a bit strange the way otherwise sensible and down-to-earth people (people who might have even scoffed at previous generations of conspiracy theories, turning "9/11 was an inside job" and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" into punchlines) reflexively reach for the "it was a Mossad false flag" explanation the second they hear about anything bad targeting Jews.
@Tanista below me writes:
The Israelis and Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else who shrugs at reports of crimes from their own are at least behaving in a normal, if not morally upstanding, way.
Acknowledging that the bad thing happened but insisting that the victim had it coming is, indeed, a perfectly ordinary human response. But in my experience, Western anti-Zionists/pro-Palestinians seem to be afflicted with a far stranger kind of conspiratorial cognitive dissonance. When a bad thing happens to Jews, they demand far more evidence that it really happened than they would ever demand had it befallen a different ethnic group. (Indeed, lots of people who are credulous about hate crimes targeting black people or Muslims are maximally sceptical about crimes targeting Jews.) When you can finally get them to begrudgingly concede that it really happened, they'll insist that it was a false flag, or that the IDF knew about it and allowed it to happen as a casus belli. When you can finally get them to concede that this is absurd (why would a nation capable of and intent on committing genocide wait until they were attacked to start doing so? Does that pattern-match to any historical genocide?), only then will they say that the bad thing happened, the Jews didn't "allow it" to happen to them – but they had it coming because of Gaza.
I don't quite know why this is the case, but it's a pattern I've observed across dozens of people who call themselves pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist. To reiterate: I'm not claiming this pattern is unique to them.
We're way past the realm of "that isn't happening, and it's good that it is". I'm proposing something instead called "The anti-Zionist's prayer" (modelled on Dayna Craig's "narcissist's prayer"):
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it was a false flag attack/the Hannibal doctrine.
And if it wasn't, the IDF knew about it in advance and let it happen.
And if they didn't, it wasn't a big deal.
And if it was, you Jews deserved it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I'm surprised no one's talking about yesterday's attempted plane hijacking in the Middle East. Via the BBC:
A flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was diverted to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday after one pilot stabbed the other and “apparently tried to crash the plane”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said.
The pilot was arrested and is being questioned by Saudi authorities, Netanyahu added.
The stabbed pilot, identified as Indian national Capt Smit Machchhar, was taken to hospital after the flight landed and later called a “hero” by the Israeli prime minister.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has called the incident an “attempted jihadist terror attack”. The BBC is yet to receive official statements from police, emergency services, or investigators regarding any motive.
Apparently the stabbed pilot managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers to storm inside and seize the would-be hijacker (the passengers obviously being alarmed by the plane plummeting 14,000 feet in 30 seconds). One passenger managed to take over the controls and land the plane safely in Saudi Arabia. I've heard unconfirmed reports that Saudi Arabia initially refused to let the plane land within its borders and instructed the pilot to land in Jordan, before finally relenting.
Western media outlets are variously referring to the incident as an "altercation", "fight" or "brawl" between pilots, rather than as a foiled act of jidahi terrorism.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
You forgot about the people who are exactly 5′9″.
Fair point, amended.
Starting from next week, I want to try shopping my novel around to literary agents one more time, but if I haven't heard anything by the new year I'm just going to post it online, one chapter a week.
One reason I think I'm not getting any takers is that, even after changing it quite significantly, I still don't think the opening is compelling or attention-grabbing enough. The other day I had an idea for an alternate opening, which I quickly bashed out. I'm curious if I'm on the right track, so if you fine people can spare five minutes to read two passages of text I'd really appreciate it.
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Fell slightly behind my posting schedule. Planning to knock out a quick blog post today.
- I had a headcold last week and didn't manage to get to the gym until Thursday. The plan was to go on Saturday and Sunday, but after running a half-marathon on Saturday morning (with a respectable time of 1:57), I couldn't summon the resolve to go to the gym as well. Instead, I went to the gym twice on Sunday. I also went to the gym last night, and am planning to go this evening. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I agreed with you, but then I realised I bought the phone I'm using to write this comment online.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
There are certain tics of his that get on my nerves alright. What specifically annoys you?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
where do people even get drugs, anyway?
From drug dealers.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
This post of Scott's about New Atheism is required reading, if you haven't read it already.
New Atheism was a failed hamartiology.
"Hamartiology" is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. Orthodox Christian hamartiology says we all have original sin because Adam and Eve ate the apple. Gnostic hamartiologies say we sin because we are ignorant of our true nature as celestial beings. Some heretical hamartiologies say that all of this is irrelevant, and we sin because we choose to.
We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.
And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?
And New Atheism had an answer: religion.
That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.
(This post starts off talking about trans issues, but that's really just a jumping-off point for a question about language. I'm not soliciting people's opinions about trans issues in this thread)
I've made a lot of posts about transgenderism this year, in the course of which I've had numerous opportunities to debate with our assorted trans-affirming posters. One of my most recent top-level posts was largely concerned with the ease with which one can embarrass progressive politicians simply by asking them to define the word "woman".
In attempting to define this word, several of our resident progressives have independently converged on something like the definition below:
I will concede that, unlike many definitions proposed by trans activists, the one above has the virtue of not being circular. My main objection to the definition, however, is that no other word in the English language is defined this way. We are using the same word for "a person who is X" and "a person who isn't X, but wants to be". The word "billionaire" means "someone with a net worth of $1 billion or more"; it does not carry the secondary meaning of "someone who wishes they had a net worth of $1 billion or more". Likewise "lawyer", "doctor", "soldier" and so on (some of these are even protected terms, and you can land yourself in legal hot water for describing yourself as such without good cause). It strikes me as profoundly odd to use the exact same word for people who are X, and for people who aren't X but who wish they were X.
Yesterday, a second example popped into my head: "entitled". Wiktionary defines it as "having a legal or moral right or claim to something" (e.g. "If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Mesothelioma, you may be entitled to financial compensation."); in other words, a person who is entitled to X is a person who deserves X. However, in common parlance, the word is often used to mean almost the converse: holding the erroneous belief that you have a legal or moral right or claim to something. (Wiktionary again: "(figuratively) Convinced of one's own righteousness (self-righteousness) or the justifiability of one's actions or status, especially wrongly so [emphasis mine]; demanding and pretentious."
So we have a curious situation where a single word means both "having a legal or moral right or claim to something" and "believing that one has a legal or moral right or claim to something, but erroneously so". In other words, when we criticise someone for being "entitled", what we really mean is that they have a false sense of entitlement. I presume what happened was that someone criticised someone else by saying "he thinks he's entitled to sth" or "he's acting like he's entitled to sth", then over time this got compressed further and further until you can say "I can't stand entitled people" and everyone understands that you mean "I can't stand people who erroneously think they deserve things they don't" as opposed to "I can't stand people who deserve things".
In effect, the word "entitled" is almost a contronym: a word with two meanings which are directly opposed, a word which is its own antonym. (Examples: "dust" which can both mean "to remove dust" [cleaning a house] or "to add dust" [adding icing sugar to a cake]; "sanction" which can mean both "to give approval" or "to impose a penalty upon".) Some of these are only examples because the same word can mean different things in British English and
English (Simplified)American English, but not always. The other obvious example is "literally" which, in common parlance, can mean both "in a non-figurative sense" and "figuratively".The two definitions of "entitled" aren't quite the same as the two definitions of "woman" offered by our trans-inclusive posters. The two definitions of "entitled" boil down to "he is X" and "he isn't X, but he erroneously thinks he is". For this reason, no one would ever describe themselves as "entitled" under the second meaning of the term. But the secondary meaning of "woman" proposed by trans activists concerns itself not with belief but with desire or aspiration: "woman" either means "she is X" or "he isn't X, but he wishes he was". While there are some rather batty trans-identified males who claim to be literally female (up to and including claiming to be capable of menstruating and similar), the impression I get is that the majority of trans-identified males understand that they are not female. As such, the word "woman" either means "a female person" or "a non-female person who aspires to be female".
Can you think of any other examples of words like this, where a single word in isolation can either mean "X" or "wishes to be X" or "erroneously thinks he is X"?
As an aside, I was curious if the ideological capture of Wikipedia I and others have been complaining about for years extends to Wiktionary. The website offers the following definitions of the word "woman":
None of which seem trans-inclusive on their face: there's no mention of "a person who identifies as X" or "a person with a female gender identity". The "usage notes" section likewise makes no reference to gender ideology. However, the image used to illustrate the page is a 5x4 grid of thumbnails of various people, including Mother Teresa, Marilyn Monroe, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, Oprah Winfrey... and Laverne Cox, a trans-identified male, who is not a woman according to any of the six definitions above. (Not even #4: Cox isn't married.) In effect, this means that the Wiktionary page for "woman" is not internally consistent: the image it uses to illustrate the concept of a "woman" uses a photo of someone who is not a woman according to the very definitions it espouses! Imagine if you searched "horse" and the definition was accurate, but one of the images used was a photo of a donkey.
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