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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
If the progressives arguing "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want" really meant it, I'd have no problem with this line of reasoning.
But after Musk bought out Twitter and started banning people he didn't like, these same people were rending their hair. They didn't actually believe the libertarian principle that privately owned social media companies can do what they please: they just mistakenly believed that these privately owned social media companies would always be owned by people sympathetic to their progressive worldview.
Censoring journalists to prevent suicides is a fool's errand
In 2015, Scott published a post called "What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?" He described a variety of cognitive-behavioural milestones that might seem innate but in fact have to be consciously learned, examples including "theory of mind" (the understanding that everyone's minds are distinct, and that just because you have access to a piece of information doesn't mean that another person does) and foreign languages (many young children take their native language to be the default, and people speaking foreign languages "really" know the e.g. Japanese word for a thing, but insist on converting them into their own special code before talking about them). He then moves into more controversial and potentially elitist examples of potential milestones, describing his reaction to a piece by Nathan Robinson, in which Robinson acknowledged it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper:
He proposes a bunch of potential counterarguments, then shoots each counterargument down by admitting that the other side would have a symmetrical counterargument of their own: for example, he believes that American Sniper is worse because it's racist and promoting racism is genuinely dangerous to a free society, but then he admits a conservative could say that Fun Home is worse because in their opinion it's homosexuality that's genuinely dangerous to a free society... I’m not sure what I think of this conclusion, but my main response to his article is oh my gosh he gets the thing, where "the thing" is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours. It seems silly when I’m saying it like this, and you should probably just read the article, but I’ve seen so many people who lack this basic mental operation that this immediately endeared him to me.
I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalise a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.
Following Nathan Cofnas's exposé regarding Jason Arday's plagiarism and fabulism, and his subsequent suicide, many are pointing fingers at the media's handling of the case. The more charitable framing holds that Arday was "hounded" to his death by a racist, right-wing harassment campaign; the less charitable framing (furnished by none other than Ibram X. Kendi) claims that the way Arday's story was covered in the press amounts to a modern lynching. Even people who concede that the allegations against Arday were not baseless insist that the amount of coverage he received was massively disproportionate (an opinion I do not share). The good people over at Change.org have a legal solution in mind to prevent future Ardays:
Proposal for Arday’s Law: a limit to articles published on one person within a timeframe.
249 articles were published across 15 major British news outlets in the period between 24th July and the date of his death (14th August). Worryingly, 188 articles were written in the 9 day period between his resignation and his death (5th-14th August). These articles scrutinised every area of Professor Arday's life.
This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame. By doing so, we can ensure that individuals are not subjected to undue public pressure and potential mental anguish caused by excessive media coverage. The government must hold media outlets accountable for their role in amplifying potentially damaging narratives.
3,642 people have signed the petition at the time of writing.
So, guys. Let's walk through this step by step.
How could such a law possibly be enforced? Imagine the UK government has a massive centralised database of every news article published in outlets domiciled within its borders, updated in real time, listing the primary subject of each one. As soon as the number of articles about a particular subject exceeds some threshold (e.g. 80 articles in 7 days), the UK government issues a presumptive gag order against all media outlets warning them not to publish any more articles on this subject until the articles-per-day metric has declined somewhat. Any article published after the threshold was exceeded will be issued a public order demanding the article be taken down. This petition is effectively demanding a nationwide digitised Stasi surveillance body employing dozens if not hundreds of Winston Smiths (not to mention an initial outlay of billions of pounds just to get the news article-crawling infrastructure up and running), all to prevent – I mean, how many people commit suicide in response to "excessive" media coverage every year? Aside from Arday, can you name a single British person meeting that description this year?
And needless to say, this legislation would be utterly pointless for any news story of international interest, as Arday's was. (Arday: "The New York Times and the Atlantic are calling me a plagiarist and a liar." His legal counsel: "True, but we made damn sure the readers of the Daily Record wouldn't hear about it!")
But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.
I know, I know: of the 3,000+ people who signed this petition, most surely have no expectation of any legislation being passed. Signing the petition is just an applause light, a way of saying "I feel sad that Jason Arday killed himself, and wish that he hadn't", with a fig leaf of having Called for Something to Be Done.
But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.
And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?
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18hr ago
Blade Runner is worth watching if only because of what a long shadow it casts on the science fiction genre. The sequel is also excellent, and for my money better than either of the Dunes Villeneuve later helmed.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
19hr ago
Best of luck to you too. Once more into the breach, old friend.
we can swap shoutouts on royalroad.
I'll hold you to that!
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
19hr ago
Earlier this year I submitted my novel to four separate unpublished novel competitions. Having heard the results of the last of these today, I am now proud to announce that I didn't win or place in any of them, lol.
Going to try shopping it around to literary agents one more time, although I can't say I'm optimistic. If I haven't received an offer of representation or a request for the full manuscript by January 1st, I'm just going to post the whole thing online and be done with it.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It varies. I don't remember ever feeling disgusted or ashamed of myself after eating McDonald's, or a burrito. If I get a really cheap takeaway pizza (Domino's or Apache), the first few slices will taste like the nectar of the gods, but by the time I get to the end I will feel full to the point of nausea, and will regret having over-indulged. I often get the same feeling after eating a burger and chips from the chip shop, or a kebab and chips. I remember one New Year's Day I bought a kebab and chips to treat my hangover, and felt so full afterwards that I was practically bedridden for the rest of the day.
So yes, there are absolutely certain kinds of fast food that will make me feel gross and remorseful afterwards. The same is true of casual sex: I have had sexual encounters which I regretted immediately afterwards (and equally, casual encounters that I didn't regret).
“You’re like fine wine” doesn’t really parse as a romantic phrase to me, and the process of alcohol intoxication sounds more like a metaphor for a bad hookup, of which I’m sure the drink has been the cause of many, than it does a burgeoning romance. “It’s fun while it lasts but I’m throwing up in the morning.”)
The comedian Sam Morril had a bit where he said that sex in a relationship is like a baked salmon darne, where you feel nourished and satisfied afterwards, having eaten something that was healthy and good for you. Whereas casual sex is like a takeaway kebab or burger, where you are absolutely loving the experience in the moment, but then feel disgusted and ashamed of yourself immediately afterwards.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Georges Cadoudal, a Catholic Royalist guerrilla fighter during the French Revolution, was arrested and sentenced to death in 1804 after a failed assassination attempt on Napoléon. On the guillotine, as he was reciting the "Hail Mary", he stopped at "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now". As the priest who assisted him encouraged to finish the prayer, he answered: "Why? Isn't now "the hour of our death"?"
My sides. Programmer humour over a century before the invention of the computer.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Has your mum had anything professionally published before?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
The claim in the book is heavily qualified, I was hastily summarising.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left?
She did, originally. The competition for black female influencers was too stiff, so she jumped ship.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
About halfway through The Age of Diagnosis.
I went into the chapters on "long Covid" and autism pretty much knowing what to expect, and I wasn't disappointed. But I was genuinely surprised to hear that cancer screenings exhibit no net increase on all-cause mortality.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Before seeing it, I was expecting a rather gritty survival movie, sort of like The Revenant IN SPACE! When I finally got round to watching it, what surprised me about it was its lightness of tone and comedic elements. In principle that's the sort of thing that should survive a first watch, but on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
This was beautifully written and I'm glad you're in a good headspace. Wishing you all the happiness you obviously deserve.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
According to Wikipedia, since Smollett's hoax the only things he's appeared in were movies he directed himself or documentaries about said hoax.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Not to mention that even after all the controversy, Simon & Schuster were still publishing his memoir. If there's no such thing as bad publicity, he could well have lived very comfortably on the royalties until he found a job as a diversity consultant or something.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Hunter did crack in the white house while hooking up with Obama's daughter.
Excuse me?!
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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4d 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.
New Year's resolution check-in:
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
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