FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date
I have to do no such thing. I simply have to stipulate that there was a low-level conflict prior to October 2023, and a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I genuinely don't see how anyone could contradict such a claim in all seriousness.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
He had so many memorable quotes! Some choice bangers:
- In a right triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
- ax2 + bx + c = 0.
- y = mx + b.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
I was referring to the most recent "hot war" in Gaza, not to the broader Israel-Palestine conflict. I think this was abundantly obvious from context.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
I had a maths teacher called Mr. Fox. He was fantastic.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
Yes, I agree that these labels are confusing and outmoded. A long time ago, I pointed out that white nationalists who want to transform the US into a white ethnostate are habitually characterised as "conservative". But to conserve things means to keep things the way they are. The US isn't a white ethnostate, so by definition anyone who wants to turn it into one can't be a conservative. Rather, white nationalists are reactionaries.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
I was tempted to mention the people who've claimed in all seriousness that Hamas killed zero civilians on October 7th, and all the footage depicting them doing that is AI-generated. But I decided I've banged that drum plenty of times already.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
never met a JFK conspiracist
Well, I certainly haven't met one who seriously claimed that no one assassinated JFK. But I suppose such a person must exist.
In any case, I suppose strictly speaking it would be "consensus-building" to claim that it's not up for debate that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and that the buildings were not destroyed by explosives. But I view that as "consensus-building" on a par with the claim that "it's not open for debate that heliocentrism is true".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
Is a blockade not an ongoing military action that kind of complicates the whole idea of Hamas striking first out of nowhere?
I don't recall ever claiming that Hamas struck "out of nowhere". I agree that a blockade constitutes an ongoing military action. Another example of a military action is "firing a missile at another country", something Hamas did somewhere in the region of twelve or thirteen thousand times (source 1, source 2, source 3) between the end of the previous "hot war" and the beginning of the most recent one. No one disputes that Israel and Palestine were engaged in an ongoing conflict prior to October 2023, but it's equally indisputable that there was a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I think the most parsimonious framing of the above is that the immediate catalyst for the escalation in hostilities was Hamas's invasion of Israel on October 7th.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
11hr ago
One can characterise the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cold war which periodically gets hot. I don't think anyone is disputing that there was a war in Gaza in 2014, and that the situation in Gaza looked very different before that war began and afterwards. I don't think anyone in Gaza would claim that they didn't notice any difference in their day-to-day experiences before and after that war began. Equally, I don't think anyone would dispute that the 2014 war was just the latest instance of a cold war going hot in a long, long line of them.
By the same logic, I don't think it's controversial to state that the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict went hot in October 2023 and the catalyst for it going hot was the invasion of Israel by Hamas squaddies. Accepting that fact does not require you to sympathise with Israel, believe that Israel aren't committing a genocide, believe that Israel has the right to defend itself, believe that Israel has a right to exist etc. But I don't think it's open to dispute that the most recent instance of this cold conflict going hot was prompted by an action freely undertaken by Hamas.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
11hr ago
because "conservatism" is kind of the definition of not doing things
I don't agree. Conservatism doesn't mean "don't do anything" but "don't do anything new".
Some questions of fact are open for debate. Some are not, and it isn't "consensus-building" to say so. No one would accuse me of "consensus-building" if I said it wasn't open for debate that JFK was assassinated in Dallas in November '63, or that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in September '01.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
I don't treat the October 7th attacks as having happened – look at that, you're doing the exact thing I criticised in the OP – having been committed in a vacuum. I'm aware that they were a reopening of hostilities in a conflict which has been ongoing for the guts of a century.
But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate. Other things that are not open for debate: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians; most civilians killed were intentionally killed by Hamas and not by the IDF; Hamas intentionally chose to attack Israel. The October 7th attacks were not "inevitable", and to claim that they were is to, ironically, deny the agency of the Palestinian people.
where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th
Please show me where I said any such thing.
My favourite and least favourite novels I read last year (respectively, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Nell Zink's Doxology) featured an eerily similar literary device. Large chunks of Doxology are set in New York City and upstate New York in the 90s and 2000s; unsurprisingly, 9/11 figures heavily in the plot. While the first act of Tomorrow... takes place at Harvard, most of the book takes place in the west coast, and so the 9/11 attacks don't feature as prominently, though they are mentioned.
The literary device to which I refer is that, while the 9/11 attacks are explicitly referred to, they aren't referred to as terrorist attacks. Not only is no attempt made to delve into the perpetrators' motives, there's barely any acknowledgement that the perpetrators had motives, nor even that the attacks were perpetrated by anyone. The attacks are essentially reduced to the status of a horrible tragedy that simply occurred on the volition of no one in particular, like an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or meteoric strike. The election of Donald Trump strikes Zink as a moral outrage, but for her, getting angry at 9/11 would be like getting angry about a heavy downpour. This framing is particularly galling in the case of Tomorrow..., as
It seems that this framing — 9/11 not as an attack that was committed but as an event that occurred — will soon become policy in at least one North American progressive media outlet:
KINSELLA: 9/11 wasn't a 'terrorist attack,' according to the CBC
The Encyclopedia Britannica people define it this way: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create general fear in a population and coerce a government or society to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.”
By any reasonable and objective standard, that is what happened nearly 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.
This week, I received a memo — presumably confidential — addressed to CBC News staff. It is authored by one Basem Boshra, who is the “Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News.” In Boshra’s memo, reporters are editors are told this:
“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”
Boshra states that all in bold letters, italicized, as if to emphasize the point. To make clear it is a directive, not a suggestion.
It is not fair and it is in no way accurate. It is rewriting the historical record. It is manipulating facts to fit an ideological perspective. It is cruel and despicable. It is Orwellian.
I contacted a couple of CBC’s designated spokespeople to ask them why CBC has decided that terrorism is no longer terrorism. To ask them why “hijackings [that] led to passenger jet crashes” is not considered terrorism. I thought about asking them, too, if “murder” is considered involuntary cessation of biological functions at CBC. But I didn’t, because that might offend their sensibilities.
Here is what [Kerry Kelly] said: “CBC’s longstanding language guidance regarding the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ is a preference for the use of these words with attribution, a practice shared by many of the world’s top journalistic organizations. Our general manager and editor in chief has written publicly in the past on the subject.”
I find this kind of evasiveness extremely frustrating. Last year a colleague of mine (who, full disclosure, I consider a manchild, and hardly someone I come to looking for cogent political analysis) was talking about the conflict in Gaza and scoffed at someone (I think it was Gal Gadot) who defended Israel on the grounds that Hamas started the most recent conflict and Israel was defending itself. I immediately shot back "but that's literally what happened", which seemed to stop him dead in his tracks: the relentless focus on Israel's purportedly brutal conduct in Gaza has obliterated from people's minds the simple fact that it wasn't a war Israel started. Likewise, see this article from Spiked: even progressive journalists, with their obsessive fixation on the civilians regrettably caught in the crossfire in Gaza, have essentially forgotten that Hamas and the PIJ are military organisations, with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of soldiers on the ground in Gaza:
‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.
Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.
Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians. [emphasis mine]
If you put Hamas apologists on the spot and get them to begrudgingly concede that a) the October 7th attacks happened; b) it was not a "false flag; c) Hamas deliberately targeted civilians, and the overwhelming majority of civilians killed were not killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine — having conceded all that, these apologists will defend the attacks on the grounds that they were "inevitable", like an avalanche, or ice melting when it's left out of the freezer. Yahya Sinwar and his legion of followers, you see, simply could not have chosen to behave other than they did.
I'm reminded also of the massive "data desert" in the UK's Ministry of Justice conviction data. It's one thing to collect information about the ethnicity of offenders, but bury it somewhere it's hard to find or insist that it must be considered in light of socioeconomic disparities. But simply not bothering to collect the information in the first place is a whole other ball game. Also consider Coulter's law, or that peculiar journalistic tic in which a vehicle-ramming attack will be described as having been committed by "a car", as if non-self-driving cars possess agency.
I also think this framing is the underlying cause of the discourse around hypoagency, or the "women are wonderful" effect. A lot of people (both men and women) seem to really struggle with the idea that a woman could simply do something heinous without having previously had someone (i.e. a man) do something heinous to her. See the Lindsay Clancy truthers, or the people baselessly claiming that Aileen Wuornos was a rape victim who killed her victims in self-defense — some people even feel more comfortable believing that Elizabeth Holmes was manipulated by her Svengali of a boyfriend into committing wire fraud. The novel I'm currently reading, Penance by Eliza Clark, is illustrative. Her first novel, Boy Parts, was about an abusive woman whose lashing out at men is implied to be the result of her having been molested by her male secondary school teacher. Penance continues the trend: of the three female murderers, one (so far) is definitively stated to have been raped as a child, while another is implied to have been sexually interfered with by a transparent Jimmy Savile stand-in. (We haven't yet done a deep-dive into girl #3's backstory, but I'm not holding my breath for what awaits me there.) For all her talk of delving into the psychology of evil fucked-up women, for Clark, there is always a male first-mover skulking about in the background. Both of her first two novels are ultimately trauma plots: I don't think Clark could even conceive of the idea of a woman doing something awful without having been interfered with in childhood. by an adult male.
This is an interesting asymmetry. When conservatives/Red Tribers/Leave voters/gammon/Zionists/whites/cis people/men/heterosexuals etc. do something bad, you will know about it. When a member of group who doesn't meet that description does something bad, you might hear about it, as a page 4 story. But the fact that a member of that group did it won't be mentioned as prominently as in the former case, if at all. It may be framed as something that happened, rather than as something that someone consciously chose to do.
I'm reminded, lastly, of a tweet posted in response to a YouTube video titled "The Internet is Failing the Left":
The fact that this video is titled “The internet is Failing the Left” tells you a lot about the psychological / ideological differences between left and right, much in the mode of Zizek.
If I (or any other right-winger) were to make a video, similar to Burns, criticizing some larger creator like Matt Walsh, we would never title it “The internet is failing the right”.
It’s not even that my arguments against Walsh would necessarily be different than Burn’s arguments against Wynn. It’s that “The internet is failing the right” reads like a GRAMMATICALLY incorrect sentence. The non-volitional object is the active subject. The political agent is the passive object. This is not correct, linguistically. The correct language would read “How the right is failing to use the internet!” or “How our enemies who run the internet are attacking the right!”
All of this goes to show that the modern left sees itself as a passive object that is acted upon. It cannot fail, it can only be failed. Capitalism and Oppression happen to the left, and that’s bad. Maybe, in the future, change and revolution will happen to the left and that will be good. But the left doesn’t DO things. Doing things is not what the left does. It isn’t that kind of thing.
The left is like a tree in the storm that is capitalism / modernity. The rain and the wind are happening to it. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is that of the storm. The right is like a ship sailing through the storm that is Capitalism / modernity. It cuts through the tempest. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is on the part of the ship.
Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives. If progressives do things, it's only ever in response to things that were done to them. And if there's no possible way to frame something they did as something that was done in response to something else, then we'll simply say it happened, not that it was done.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
It's funny, although a bit irritating that the journalists who insist on calling him that are the same people loudly insisting that it's never acceptable to refer to a trans person by their "deadname", even if said trans person is a convicted rapist or murderer. They're also more than happy to refer to entertainers by their stage names provided said entertainers hold the "correct" opinions.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I think I'll probably have to do that until I'm recovered.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
The fundamental attribution error, essentially.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm wondering if maybe the belt is too loose and it's not providing enough support. I think I should probably ask one of the personal trainers for advice.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Yes, I use a belt. Maybe it's too loose for me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
It's completely different from how actual trans women dress
Well, some and some.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I used to do a fixed number of reps, but now I just do five sets and rep til failure each time. (There have absolutely been days where I couldn't do all five sets.) My progress has been much faster using this method. I only do five strength training exercises (deadlift, bench press, squat, overhead press, pullup) and aim to do three each time I go to the gym, meaning I should be doing each of those exercises twice a week.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
My old gym did, but I don't think my current gym does.
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week and again yesterday evening. There's obviously something wrong with my squat form: the last two times I did squats, my lower back gave me hell that night. Last night was no exception, and it's still quite stiff this morning. Will have to drop down to a lower weight to correct my form. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.77x.
- 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.
3d ago
Citation in case anyone doubts me:
CURRY BARKER: Well, it's interesting. I had this idea for a while about an obsessed person, and just the relationship and how that could go crazy, but it didn't have anything to do with the wish. It was just this idea of, like, an obsessed relationship and codependency and kind of diving into that.
Not that I recall.
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