FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
You know it's over when you're a black autistic sociology professor who writes about intersectional issues, and not even the Guardian will go to bat for you.
I think Scott's reputation as one of the all-time greats is almost wholly unearned. Alien is a masterpiece and Blade Runner is brilliant, but aside from those two, can you name a third film he directed which rises above the level of "pretty good"?
Black Rain? It was okay. Gladiator? Haven't seen it in full since I was a child, remember thinking it was pretty good. Ditto Black Hawk Down. Matchstick Men was elevated by a predictably great Nicolas Cage performance, but was ultimately a pretty shallow and predictable conman movie. The Martian was a lot funnier than I expected it to be, but I watched it for a second time a few months ago and found that I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first.
Obviously there are stacks of other films in his filmography I haven't seen, but of those I have, none are even approaching the standard set by Alien.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
18hr ago
I must have watched that movie five times and I never noticed that. I might suggest putting the third paragraph in spoiler tags for people who haven't seen it though.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
19hr ago
Terribly sad. Of course it was good to see him exposed for cheating and lying, and he made the right move by resigning his post, but I certainly didn't wish ill upon him. He may have lied and cheated, but to the best of my knowledge he never really hurt anybody.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
I once stayed in an Airbnb where the host provided coffee and freshly baked scones every morning, probably the nicest Airbnb I've ever stayed in. But in general, you're right.
Well, some genes certainly are "good" in the sense of an objective value system. If given the choice, no one would choose a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or ovarian cancer. All things being equal, people without such genetic predispositions are genetically superior to people with them.
In terms of beauty, progressives believe that what people find beautiful is contingent and socially constructed. This is true up to a point, and yet there are obvious commonalities in what's considered beautiful between vastly disparate cultures. Show me a culture where the average man finds middle-aged women more sexually desirable than women in their early twenties, or in which short men are seen as more desirable than tall men, and then we can talk about how malleable beauty standards really are. In pretty much every culture, most straight men are attracted to young petite women with symmetrical faces, healthy BMIs, narrow waists, wide hips and large breasts, while most straight women are attracted to tall men who are older than them with symmetrical faces, strong jawlines, wide wingspans and broad shoulders. (The fact that so many of these traits are clear proxies for reproductive fitness seems so obvious as to hardly even be worth mentioning.) Black guys place a larger premium on big asses and Asian men place a larger premium on slimness, but if you were to find the ideal female physiognomy (as rated by straight men) for every country in the world and compare them, I daresay they'd exhibit far more similarities than dissimilarities.
One of the ways Scott demonstrated the lunacy of the "social model of disability" is by pointing out that being blind would be disadvantageous even if one got stranded on a desert island, in which the concept of "social accomodations" simply wouldn't apply. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, with the corollary that being beautiful is only socially advantageous if there are beholders around to behold you. If you were stranded alone on a desert island, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if you were a 2 or a 10. But the nearest equivalent thought experiment is: if Sydney Sweeney was teleported to another part of the world completely at random, would she be seen as more desirable than the average woman there, and could she convert that into social capital?
Beauty standards do vary from culture to culture, but my guess is that Sydney Sweeney would be considered unusually desirable in just about any culture in the world. This seems as close to "good in the sense of an objective value system" as makes no difference. Stranded alone on a desert island, being sighted is always preferable to being blind. When moving to a new town where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language, a petite young woman with a symmetrical face, healthy BMI, narrow waist, wide hips and large breasts will always have an easier time of it than a woman with none of these traits. I mean, is this even controversial? What's the difference between "my appearance would provide me with a competitive advantage in essentially any social environment" and "I am objectively attractive"?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr ago
It occurred to me the other day that there might well be people who don't know what "BnB" in the name "Airbnb" means.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr ago
Fair.
It's a difficult question to answer, as the genre has become enormously stylistically diverse over the last four or five decades. Of the nineteen metal albums listed above, I think only five used blastbeats in any capacity, and only seven could be described as "technical" under even the most generous definition of that term. (Paso Inferior sounds downright primitive, like the guitarist only learned how to play the day before.) Maybe if you tell me some non-metal bands you like, I can recommend some albums that might serve as gateways.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
When you say "modern metal", what kinds of bands are you referring to? I think Songs of Blood and Mire is the only one of the albums listed above that came out this decade.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Henry's contempt is so real. I saw a post earlier joking that, with AI "musicians" now becoming a thing, DJs must feel so relieved that there's someone even they can feel superior to.
One of the most famous lines from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is (I'm paraphrasing) "Which came first: the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"
For many years I was an avid listener of music, and would constantly have my headphones on during my morning commute. I owned dozens of CDs and went out of my way to convert them to FLAC format, under the delusion that I could tell the difference from MP3s with my budget Sennheisers. When I read the above question in High Fidelity, I dismissed it as an obviously rhetorical one: of course I listen to music because I'm miserable!
Somewhere along the way I got out of the habit of actively listening to music in my own time, and rarely sit down to listen to an album from start to finish: most music I listen to is just something to put on in the background while I'm doing something else. And you know what? My subjective feeling of ease and well-being is dramatically improved compared to the earlier periods of my life in which I was an active and compulsive listener of music. There are many possible explanations for this improvement (I'm more physically active; I'm in a stable relationship; I've outgrown my depression; the period in my life in which I listened to music most compulsively was my adolescence, never an easy time for anyone), but I no longer think the question from High Fidelity is a rhetorical one with an obvious answer. Maybe listening to music did make me unhappier than I would have been otherwise.
All that preamble aside, I'm trying to get back into the habit of actively listening to music – not for the sake of enjoyment, but for research. I've been trying to write my next album and the riffs aren't coming as easily as I'd like. Surely part of that is because I'm not listening to music: the periods in my life in which I wrote the most riffs were also the periods in which I was listening to the most riffs. To that end, I drew up a list of albums which I've either been meaning to listen to for years, or which have a sound I'd like to emulate on the next album. I've been listening to them when I can get around to it. In no particular order, here are the ones I've listened to so far, and my thoughts.
| Artist | Album | Genre | Thoughts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ulver | Silence Teaches You How to Sing | Dark ambient | I encountered this as excerpts from it were used in the film "Sinister". It only really works in context, not as a standalone piece. |
| Ulver | Bergtatt – Et eeventyr i 5 capitler | Black metal | There are a million bargain-bin second-wave black metal albums just like this one. |
| Botanist | Photosynthesis | Black metal | Legitimately unique. Intend to listen to it again |
| Accurst | Fragments of a Nightmare | Dark ambient | I turned it off after the first five minutes. Corny af. |
| Aghast | Hexerei Im Zwielicht Der Finsternis | Dark ambient | A track from this was also used in the film "Sinister". Unlike the Ulver one, this one can stand on its own. Particularly liked the fourth track. |
| Katatonia | Brave Murder Day | Doom metal | The fifth track is pretty cool, but I have no intention of listening to this one again. |
| Shining | V: Halmstad | Black metal | Profoundly silly. Barely even warrants the "black metal" genre tag, never mind "depressive/suicidal black metal". The vocalist supposedly said that he wants people to be so affected by his band's music that they kill themselves after listening to it – I certainly would if I had to listen to boring corny dreck like this for the rest of my life. The cover art is the most interesting thing about it |
| Killswitch Engage | The End of Heartache | Metalcore | Great album, on the level of "Alive or Just Breathing", even if I prefer Jesse Leach as a vocalist. |
| Thantifaxath | Sacred White Noise | Black metal | There used to be a website called Metal Ireland, which was both a forum and published reviews of albums and EPs. One of their critics reviewed this album and said something along the lines of "I know as critics we're meant to be 'objective'. But it's hard in this case, because this album is pretty close to the Platonic ideal of what a black metal album is supposed to sound like". I finally got around to listening to it (twelve years after release) and wasn't disappointed. Jaw-droppingly brilliant. |
| Daughters | You Won't Get What You Want | Noise rock | Contra Fantano, I don't know if I'd call this "perfect", but even as someone who normally disdains noise rock and spoken-word vocals I can say it didn't disappoint. |
| Corrupted | Paso inferior | Sludge | Pretty good, but hardly memorable. |
| Eyehategod | Take as Needed for Pain | Sludge | I like the sound collage, and the tenth song. |
| Gnaw Their Tongues | All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity | Black metal | I first heard of Gnaw Their Tongues when a recording engineer compared my band to them. They collaborated with Dragged into Sunlight (immediately below) on an EP which included samples of actual serial killers talking about their crimes. It creeped me out, but I wasn't sure of how much of that was because of the music and how much was the enormously tasteless sampling. This album employs no such gimmicks, and I can say that Gnaw Their Tongues can produce some genuinely horrific soundscapes. |
| Dragged into Sunlight | Hatred for Mankind | Death-doom | I really liked it. I should listen to it again. |
| Isis | Panopticon | Post-metal | Meh. I once heard someone quip that if a band describes their music as "post-[anything]", that means it's boring. While this isn't true of every band, it's true more often than not, and certainly true of Isis. |
| Mastodon | Leviathan | Sludge | Its reputation is entirely deserved. |
| Meshuggah | Chaosphere | Progressive metal | Great, perhaps even better than ObZen. Buy it |
| Portal | ION | Death metal | Loved it. All the compositional insanity of "Swarth", but with production improved just enough that you can follow what's going on. |
| Spectral Wound | Songs of Blood and Mire | Black metal | Heard this album playing in a record shop in Athens and decided to check it out. Loved it. |
| The Angelic Process | Weighing Souls with Sand | Drone metal | Meh, did nothing for me. Getting signed to Profound Lore Records is now considered a hallmark of quality, but this was back when they were still finding their feet as a label and couldn't afford to be so choosy. |
| My Dying Bride | The Dreadful Hours | Doom metal | Rather corny |
| Cryptopsy | None So Vile | Death metal | Pretty cool, but so technical and complex that your brain can't really process it all in one go. |
| Type O Negative | World Coming Down | Gothic metal | More of the same. "Slow, Deep and Hard" had more stylistic range. |
You seem positively hell-bent on misunderstanding what I'm saying.
Let's compare with financial capital. Alice has $1,000 in her bank account, and Bob has $100,000 in his. No one would dispute that, all things being equal, Bob has more financial capital than Alice. There are certain disadvantages associated with having more rather than less financial capital (as they say, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose), but all things being equal, most people would rather be in Bob's shoes than Alice's. There might well be people who would refuse to do business with Bob on principle, but no one really disputes that Bob's financial capital affords him a greater range of opportunities than are available to Alice. This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying "it is an inexorable law of the universe that having $100k is morally superior to having $1k". It is simply a factual statement that, ceteris paribus, people with $100k in their bank account can do more things than people with only $1k, and hence that most people would rather have $100k than $1k if they could help it. This statement remains true even if you, personally, would rather not have $100k in your bank account, for one reason or another.
Now consider Sydney Sweeney. Her appearance affords her a great deal of social capital. Men will buy her expensive things in hopes of going to bed with her. People likely assume she possesses positive traits unrelated to her beauty which she may not actually possess. She has the privilege of working in, frankly, physically and mentally unchallenging jobs, in which she's paid extravagant sums of money largely just to show up and look pretty. (For the "jeans/genes" ad, she probably got paid more for eight hours' work than both of us will collectively see in our lifetimes.) If she wanted to, she could surely marry a wealthy man who would provide for her and fulfil her every whim, all for the low, low price of keeping herself trim and fetching (which she was doing anyway) and missionary sex with the lights off every other week. Of course not everyone is attracted to her, but that doesn't matter: enough people are that it's a fact about the world she can take advantage of. These facts don't in any way imply that her beauty is the only "correct" kind of beauty, or that the only beautiful women are women who look like her: there are doubtless women who look nothing like her, but whose appearances afford them a comparable level of social capital (e.g. female K-pop singers, Bollywood starlets etc.). Doubtless there are certain disadvantages associated with being unusually attractive (even before she was famous, she probably faced a disproportionate amount of street harassment, and probably struggles to be taken seriously) – but all things being equal, most women rather be in Sydney Sweeney's shoes than the shoes of a less attractive woman.
So when I say "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all that means is "Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce physical traits considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population, a fact which affords her a great deal of social capital". This is not a value judgement, nor a normative statement: it is simply a statement of fact. It doesn't imply that there's anything wrong with you if you don't want to fuck her or would rather not look like her. You might personally find another woman (whom the average man might consider a 6 on a good day) more attractive than Sweeney. That's a perfectly legitimate preference to have – but it doesn't change the fact that Sweeney has more social capital than the 6 in question. And you might say that a big chunk of the social capital Sweeney enjoys is not because she's hot but because she's famous – but that's bullshit. Even in the counterfactual world where Sydney Sweeney wasn't famous, if she found herself in the same nightclub as Rebel Wilson, I know who'd be paying for her own drinks.
Compare with your M&Ms example. The statement "M&Ms are delicious" doesn't in any way imply that Shropshire Blue isn't delicious. But more people consider M&Ms delicious than consider Shropshire Blue delicious, a fact which is reflected in the respective net worths of Mars Inc. and the Colston Bassett Dairy. If I asked a hundred people "would you rather control the assets of Mars Inc. or the Colston Bassett Dairy?" almost everyone would say the former, including people who personally prefer Shropshire Blue to M&Ms. Likewise here: if given a choice between becoming Sydney Sweeney or becoming a random unattractive woman, the overwhelming majority of women would pick the former, including women who don't personally find Sydney Sweeney physically attractive. And that includes women who claim to believe that men only find Sydney Sweeney hot because they've been "brainwashed by Eurocentric beauty standards" or whatever. I don't think the responses would be especially different if you clarified that, post-transformation, you don't get to keep any of Sweeney's monetary or tangible assets (I mean, obviously the... err, other assets are part of the deal): women understand that Sweeney's appearance alone affords her an enviable amount of social capital.
Oh sure, sure: some woke women would answer my hypothetical with "I'd rather live in a world in which a woman's social capital was not primarily determined by her appearance" or "I'd rather live in a world in which everyone enjoyed exactly the same amount of social capital". But gun to their head, even these women would pick being Sydney Sweeney over being a random unattractive woman.
Last point: Freddie deBoer has long argued that the most common pathology among people who describe themselves as on the left is a fundamental failure to understand the "is-ought" distinction. As I say, when I said that "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all I mean is that her genetic makeup means lots of people find her very attractive, which affords her a great deal of social capital. I'm not endorsing this state of affairs: I'm not saying she deserves to possess the social capital she currently enjoys. No one is arguing that she isn't a winner of the genetic lottery. But it's indisputable that she does enjoy a great deal of social capital, and that this is primarily due to her genes. Denying that she has "great genes" is tantamount to denying that she has social capital, which is obviously ridiculous.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
If you have hard data showing that the overwhelming majority of MAiD recipients are older people who've been diagnosed with terminal and/or degenerative conditions, I would love to see it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I take "sexting" to mean sexually explicit text messages, not photos. In many jurisdictions sharing intimate photos without consent ("revenge porn") is a crime, and I presume that if the victim was a minor that would be considered an aggravating factor.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
If one in twenty deaths in a country were caused by suicide or deaths of despair, that would be headline news. Somehow it's ho-hum when it's medically assisted suicide.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Fair enough, mea culpa. I don't think teens sexting should be legally classified as CSAM. By "CSAM" I was referring to the narrow case of photos and videos depicting minor children being sexually exploited.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Fair enough, mea culpa. I don't think teens sexting should be legally classified as CSAM. By "CSAM" I was referring to the narrow case of photos and videos depicting minor children being sexually exploited.
And I will reiterate: your 'factual' claim is no such thing because you are smuggling in a subjective value judgement as if it were a fact.
No, I'm not. "I think Sydney Sweeney is hot" is a subjective value judgement. "Sydney Sweeney is considered exceptionally attractive by millions of people" is a statement of fact, as is "millions of men would give away all their worldly possessions for one night with Sydney Sweeney". If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", it logically follows that a person considered beautiful by 1 million independent beholders is 100x more beautiful than a person who is only considered beautiful by 10,000 independent beholders. Given that, to the best of our knowledge, Sydney Sweeney's appearance is ultimately the product of her genes, it follows that Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce traits which are considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population – traits that a huge proportion of the population would either like to have for themselves, or would like their romantic partner to have. A reasonable compression of the previous sentence is "Sydney Sweeney has good genes".
Once you have taken for granted that some human phenotypes are "good" and others "bad", and that this means there are "good" genes and "bad" genes
Schizophrenia is estimated to be between 70-80% heritable. If presented with the option, would anyone choose to be schizophrenic?
There is no "differently abled": some traits are just intrinsically less desirable than others, and nobody actually believes that we're all created equal, much as they might pretend to (or cope by so doing). You can play this "no one is 'disabled', society has simply chosen to accommodate certain traits and not others" game as long as you please, but it's nonsense and everyone knows it.
The belief that "some people are more attractive than others" does not lead inevitably to Auschwitz.
I'm getting a serious "two movies, one screen" effect reading about this. Cofnas's painstaking demonstration of the plagiarism Arday committed is irrefutable. The claims Arday made about his personal history are so ludicrous that I can't fathom how anyone ever believed them, and the fact that so many of them were quietly softened or retracted by organisations associated with Arday in the last few years is a tacit admission that he was a fabulist. Not even the Guardian believed he was really a victim of racist harassment. I assumed (perhaps naïvely) that everyone would interpret his resignation as an admission of guilt. Likewise his penchant for threatening his critics with legal action or reporting them to the police.
But when the Journal reported on his suicide, the comments were full of people mourning him who apparently believe that he was a nice, well-meaning academic hounded to his death by a racist right-wing misinformation campaign, and that he was innocent of all of the allegations made against him.
I cannot understand it. Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI? Is his Wikipedia article being updated as we speak to reflect that narrative? Poor Comrade Ogilvy, a noble goodthinker cruelly snatched from us in the prime of his life.
I described the Henry Nowak case as an anti-scissor statement, in which there's absolutely no way one can possibly spin it which is remotely favourable to the progressive worldview. I thought this was another example of the same. But I underestimated the vindictive ingenuity of progressive journalists. All they had to do was keep hitting the "NATHAN COFNAS IS A RACIST" button, and enough people arrived at the desired conclusion that there's nothing to see here.
I assumed that, where the Guardian goes, the Journal follows. Maybe not.
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