FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
I wonder if her weasel-pinning days are behind her.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
Bahaha, great stuff. That's honestly how I feel most of the time.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
No, I'm trying to illustrate the flaw in your argument by way of analogy. Just because a given country is the fifth-highest in $metric, doesn't mean it's objectively high. Just because the US has the fifth-highest rate of incarceration in the world, doesn't mean that everyone who ought to be incarcerated is. There's no contradiction between "this country has the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the world" and "lots of people in this country aren't sent to prison even though they ought to be".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
The fifth-richest country in Africa still isn't particularly rich.
The "Ulm 5" are a group of pro-Palestinian activists in Germany. A year ago, they broke into the offices of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, and filmed themselves spraying red paint and smashing office equipment. They then called the police on themselves and came quietly when they were arrested. Their trial for destruction of property (to the tune of €1m) and criminal conspiracy is ongoing. Lest you have any doubt about their political affiliations, they have used Hamas iconography in public appearances.
Along with a 25-year-old Brit calling themselves "Crow Tricks" (ugh), the Ulm 5 includes a 32-year-old Irishman, Daniel Tatlow-Devally, whom you can probably tell on the basis of his surname comes from an affluent south Dublin background. Unsurprisingly, back in his home country Tatlow-Devally is being treated as a celebrity and an unjust victim of political persecution. His father claims that the German police are treating him like Hannibal Lecter, while various Irish politicians (not just on the populist left, but even establishment politicians who ought to know better) have characterised the proceedings as a "show trial": a particularly strange characterisation, given that Tatlow-Devally does not deny the charges against him. The Spectator has more information. I have essentially zero – no, negative sympathy for him: he is a canonical example of someone who Fucked Around and is now in the process of Finding Out. Hearing about the supposedly awful conditions he is being kept in, my reaction to that information is the following. I sincerely hope that Germany throw the book at him.
The whole affair seems to have skipped over tragedy directly into farce, and became doubly so on Tuesday evening when Tatlow-Devally's sister Clara appeared on RTÉ News, Ireland's national broadcaster. I have never met this woman, and yet I have met her a thousand times: at a glance, I can tell that she loves Fontaines DC, owns multiple pairs of Doc Marten boots, and owns at least one novel by Sally Rooney (which she may or may not have read). In a group chat of which I'm a member, someone shared a clip from her appearance yesterday, asking us if we noticed anything odd about it (link, the relevant section begins at 36:31; alternative link in case RTÉ Player is geoblocked).
I didn't clock it, but the person who shared the clip pointed out that
Someone else in the group chat (who I'll call Alice) is an unabashed supporter of the Palestinian cause (and a literal self-identified communist besides), who has met Daniel Tatlow-Devally at least once prior to his emigration and subsequent arrest. Despite Alice professing her support for
As silly as this whole circus is, I find it hard to laugh, as I feel too angry. I hate the way people are talking about this case; I hate the way Tatlow-Devally is being lionized in the popular imagination; I hate the way Irish people talk about Gaza; I hate the way Irish people shamelessly recycle centuries-old antisemitic canards and blood libels (then immediately retreat to the motte of "we're just against genocide" when challenged); I hate the way people scoff at me when I point out that there was no famine in Gaza, and that civilian:combatant ratios in the Gaza war are entirely typical of modern conflicts in the Middle East; I hate the way people who call themselves anti-racist can get away with saying the most appalling things about Jews (and they increasingly no longer feel any need to use the "Zionist" euphemism); I hate the way woke Irish people can share memes openly denying the Holocaust on their Facebook pages and receive zero pushback; I hate the way Irish people believe in the most preposterous antisemitic conspiracy theories; I hate the way Irish people will never come out and admit that they support Hamas, and yet will never say anything to criticise the organisation and will go out of their way to amplify its propaganda at every turn; I hate the way people who criticise Israel's "dehumanising" treatment of Palestinians will immediately call me a "Zionist bot" the second I disagree with them or point out that they're misinformed about something; I hate the absurd double standard, in which Irish people who rightly point out that it's unfair to tar every Muslim with the same brush will hold every single Jew personally responsible for everything the Israeli government does.
Increasingly, I just hate this country. There's something very deeply sick about it.
And as strange as it may seem, it makes me feel – isolated. Some of my opinions are unpopular among the Irish intelligentsia, but it isn't that difficult to find Irish people who agree with me that Covid lockdowns were a bad idea; that immigrants from MENA and Eastern Europe commit a disproportionate share of violent crime (and that the Irish news media covers this up); that gender ideology and its associated policies are stupid and present safeguarding risks, and so on. But when it comes to my beliefs that Israel has a right to exist, a right to defend itself, and did not carry out a genocide in Gaza (nor attempt to do so) – I really do feel almost entirely alone. Young woke people won't agree with me on any of these points, nor old-school socialists, nor working-class republicans, nor market conservatives, nor anti-immigration activists, nor nineties liberals, nor even my expat friends from Brazil or Mexico. Hatred of Jews increasingly feels like the only thing that every person in Ireland (regardless of class or creed) can be assumed to agree upon.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
"Billionaires control the government."
Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
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FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
"Trump is a Russian asset" is a definitive example of a conspiracy theory, given that it's directly borrowed from one of the most famous conspiracy films of all time. People who believe this conspiracy theory are not shy about where they got their inspiration from.
Antisemitism, with all the conspiracy theories and blood libel that implies, is more openly practised on the left than it has been for decades. The sitting mayor of New York City openly claims that the NYPD have only committed police brutality because they were trained to by the IDF. The New York Times uncritically ran an opinion piece claiming, with no real evidence, that the IDF trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. Leftists are disproportionately likely to claim that the October 7th attacks were false flags, or that most of the civilians killed were actually killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine. Leftists seem just as likely as groypers to believe the specific conspiracy theory that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent, and that the only reason for continued support for Israel among American politicians is because Mossad is blackmailing them using footage secretly filmed on Epstein's island.
Outside of Jew-hatred, American leftists are disproportionately likely to believe that a literal genocide of trans people is either imminent or already ongoing. They believe that numerous people have been successfully acquitted of killings they admitted to committing using the "trans panic" defense. Some would not characterise the BLM narrative as a conspiracy theory, but I think it bears a strong enough familial resemblance to be considered an honorary member at the bare minimum.
Obviously, there's the whole Russiagate thing. Many leftists believe that the assassination attempt against Trump was staged.
Many popular conspiracy theories (the moon landings were faked, vaccines cause autism, JFK was killed by the government) are equally popular among Democrats as Republicans.
I think conspiracy theories are at least as much of a problem on the American left as on the American right. The average American believes that at least one of the last three Presidential elections was illegitimate.
There's a saying in medicine, "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras". The idea is that medical students' imaginations get captured by rare exotic diseases, which they spuriously diagnose their patients with on the flimsiest of evidence. It's far more likely that the patient is suffering from an extremely common illness (even an unusual presentation of a common illness) than that they're suffering from a rare, exotic illness. I'm currently rewatching the medical drama House, whose working title was Chasing Zebras, the idea being that House and his team are the ones who chase down the zebras only after the less talented and specialised medics have confirmed that it isn't a horse. Almost every episode begins with House being presented with an unsolved case whose etiology he dismisses as something banal and uninteresting: it's only after the patient's symptoms worsen that he realises it really is a zebra.
The admonition to think of horses rather than zebras is not just an amusing observation about the availability heuristic, about the funny fact that we fixate on statistically rare events at the expense of common ones. Rather, it is an important lesson for doctors to internalise, not just to improve their skill as diagnosticians, but for the sake of their patients' welfare and for the efficiency of the medical system as a whole. Ordering tests for a statistically rare illness your patient almost certainly doesn't have wastes their time and unnecessarily immiserates them: rather than doing so, you should have started treatment for the common illness they probably do have. Ordering unnecessary tests is wasteful, a major contributor to Baumol's cost disease, and means that other doctors will get the results of tests they ordered much later (which in turn delays treatment for their patients). Doctors, sadly, are notoriously bad at statistics, which is a shame when statistics are such a huge part of their job.
A huge proportion of complaints about the deficiencies of a given country's medical system ultimately boil down to people failing to understand the "think horses, not zebras" insight. You'll have an obese person who'll claim that a whole series of doctors erroneously assumed their health problems were caused by their obesity and their advice boiled down to "lose weight", only to discover that they actually had a tumour. We're meant to interpret this as evidence of entrenched fatphobia among medics or whatever, but whenever I hear one of these stories, I can only think that this is the medical system working exactly as intended. When an obese person complains of health problems consistent with those caused by obesity, nine times out of ten they are caused by obesity, and would be resolved with lifestyle changes. Running a cancer test on every obese patient who complains about trouble sleeping and shortness of breath would bankrupt the health service overnight. I feel the same when photogenic young women appear on television to complain that their doctors missed the symptoms of their breast cancer and they're trying to "raise awareness" thereof. Despite what ad and awareness campaigns would have us believe, breast cancer is a disease that overwhelmingly affects older women. Preemptively screening every woman in her twenties for breast cancer is not a remotely sensible use of scarce medical resources. But everyone loves a sob story, especially when the victim is young and attractive. Older women might as well not exist for how much attention people pay to them.
Likewise here. When a teenaged girl goes missing, and the police tell the family not to worry because she's only run away from home and she'll surely show up in a day or two – well, I don't have hard stats on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were correct nine times out of ten. Having the police drop everything and initiate a full-scale manhunt every time a teenage girl yells "I never asked to be born!" at her parents is not a remotely sensible allocation of scarce police resources. (Indeed, if it became common knowledge that this is how police departments react whenever a teenage girl goes missing, it would be something that organised criminals could exploit: pay a junkie a hundred quid to report her non-existent daughter missing, then rob a bank while the police are preoccupied looking for her.)
On the margin, this approach inevitably means that doctors will occasionally miss a disease independent from an obese person's BMI, a young woman's breast cancer, or that the police will miss a teenager who actually has been abducted. This is regrettable, and yet I defy you to think of an alternative which is better on net. When you hear missing teenager, think runaway, not serial killer.
I know last month I devoted a whole post to criticising people who think the government should dictate who journalists are allowed to report on, how, and in what timeframe, pointing out the perverse incentives and side effects this would inevitably create. And yet I maintain the world would be a much better place if no one was allowed to report the news unless they could provide accurate definitions of "mean", "median" and "mode".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I assume @monoamine meant something like: it's easy to look at a photo of Lindsay Clancy and think that she "looks" evil, but you probably see a hundred people who look a bit like her every day without thinking that any of them look evil, because they haven't done anything that might make you think that.
Or conversely, you might see someone with a "kind and approachable" face, learn that they volunteer for a charitable organisation in their spare time, and think "that checks out". But it never occurs to you that many other people who volunteer for charitable organisations don't have "kind and approachable" faces.
I think you will enjoy this comedy sketch.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Nope, even in British/Commonwealth English that one's spelled "meter".
I did second-guess myself while writing it. Still, no need to be rude.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Nevertheless, if I see a guy with a face like this, I'm giving him some space.
Are you "giving him some space" because of his "physiognomy" (i.e. drawing inferences about his psychology from his physical appearance), or because he's built like a brick shithouse and could beat the stuffing out of you if he so chose? Just because the latter is true, doesn't imply that the former is.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Not quite as impressive as it sounds: I also did a half-marathon two weeks before that. But that one was the first long run (>10km) I'd done in about a year and a half.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
How many campaigns ended because you came in a fluffer?
I feel a little ashamed of myself that I understood that reference.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Yeah. Basically you want to keep your Sniper(s) as close to the mission exit as you can before entering the ship, but still within sight of it. Everyone else stays next to the ship without actually entering. The only soldier who actually enters the ship is an Assault, who can high-tail it out of there once they discover what's onboard. Then it's just a matter of legging it to the mission exit, ideally using both actions to move (but using the second one to kill any Chrysalids who get too close, if necessary) while your Sniper(s) pick them off from a distance. By the time you're within sight of the mission exit, there shouldn't even be any Chrysalids left within your cone of vision.
But hindsight is 20/20: the first time I played this mission it did not go smoothly. Even the description above may not be entirely accurate: I'd forgotten you have to activate the transponder aboard the ship before the countdown starts.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
The Newfoundland one is the one in Enemy Within with the
I do think that the first game is a purer, cleaner, less cluttered experience. While some of the new mechanics introduced in the sequel were interesting, a lot of them (e.g. the special ammunition that causes damage over time) didn't add much. I also really liked the ending in the first game in how
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I've heard a lot about the Long War mods. On the one hand I want to check them out; on the other hand, I'm nervous that XCOM might just be the gateway to an even more dangerous addiction.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
For the month of September I'm doing a thing for charity where I have to run a certain number of miles in the month. Having been focused on strength training for the last couple of years, it's good to get back into cardio, and I forgot how much I enjoyed a long run on the road as opposed to the treadmill. I ran a half-marathon last weekend (completing it just shy of two hours) and am planning to do another this Saturday. I'd love to get to a time of 1:45, but I'd settle for 1:50.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
But this is assuming the conclusion. How do we know that the majority of people with faces perceived to be "kind and approachable" actually are "kind and approachable"? How do we know that those two things are correlated at all? Why is that the null hypothesis?
Sorry bro, I couldn't resist.
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