FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
Of course, but I think the advice is a little underspecified. Some crazy girls will go out of their way to try and ruin your life after you dump them, and some won't. Lumping all crazy girls into one box unnecessarily limits your pool of prospective one-night stands/fuckbuddies.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
ChatGPT thinks he's referring to a character in The Sopranos, an episode that came out in 2006. I haven't seen The Sopranos though, so I can't comment.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
That's a fair point. Which leads me to wonder – what's the absolute earliest ideological movement which could recognisably be characterised as "woke" in a way people in the 2010s would recognise as such?
The easy mode answer is for wokes to list off Martin Luther King, the abolition of slavery, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. I'm looking for the hard mode answer.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week and again yesterday evening. I can deadlift 1.62x my bodyweight, squat 1.26x and bench press 0.71x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
As of this morning, my weight is down by about 6kg from thirty days ago. Long may it continue.
Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done.
Why so kind to BLM? Kony 2012 was a well-meaning but silly exercise in virtue-signalling which accomplished nothing and wasted a lot of money in the process. BLM directly precipitated the single worst murder spike in American history resulting in tens of thousands of additional dead young black men, whose welfare the movement was ostensibly so concerned with. It also undermined trust in numerous public institutions for no good reason, of which American police forces are only one. In the process, the movement funnelled hundreds of millions of well-intended dollars into lining the pockets of cynical opportunists and carpet-baggers.
Kony2012 should be judged a silly time-wasting trifle. BLM should be judged a ginned-up moral panic and an atrocity.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
Yup. I've often said that wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt on a college campus should be exactly as unacceptable as wearing a swastika T-shirt would be, and yet it isn't. It's interesting to note that all the examples of once-ascendant but now aggressively stigmatised ideologies I can think of are on the right. Even moderate conservatives have to preemptively condemn the extremists on their side, but it's not symmetrical: liberals don't have to preemptively condemn communists before they can air their views.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology rather than an offshoot. Consider the use of the term "rape culture" in that clip: it's the exact same vocabulary, the exact same preoccupations. It isn't hard to find earlier examples of uncontroversially leftist movements which were explicitly not feminist (e.g. just pull up a quote about women by literally any Black Panther of note). My guess is that when we get woke 2.0 3.0 4.0, it'll be pronouns-in-bio, "we acknowledge this meeting is held on unceded Pawnee land" all over again. If the next ascendant thing in progressivism is something radically different (e.g. centred on class consciousness and wealth expropriation), then while it'll still be left, it won't be woke.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.
Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s. @JeSuisCharlie recently touted the virtues of a film called PCU, which I haven't seen, although my understanding is that it satirises the political correctness trend on university campuses. See, for example, this clip, depicting a feminist caricature using the phrase "rape culture". This film came out in 1994. Given the lead time to write, produce, edit and release a film, this implies that "political correctness" was ascendant as late as 1992.
Which rather illustrates the point that wokeness is cylical, with periods of ascendancy followed by periods of dormancy.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
it is probably true that American police resort to lethal force too quickly
Even though I never thought the shooting of Michael Brown was racially motivated, around the time of that shooting I probably would have agreed with you on this point. I'm no longer so sure. Comparisons between police shootings in the US and peer nations (with the intent of demonstrating how trigger-happy American cops are) are hopelessly confounded by the fact that the US is an objectively more violent country, with an unusually large black underclass. If I recall correctly, even the difference in per capita police killings between the US and Canada is not half as large as progressives would have us believe.
(I use this analogy not to invoke Godwin's law, but because it's the first example I could think of a once-ascendant ideology which is now widely condemned. Wokeness is not Nazism, not "like" Nazism, not "as bad as" Nazism.)
From Germany in 1933-45, Nazism was the thing. The Nazi party was in power, swastika flags flew everywhere, "Heil Hitler" was the official greeting. Since the end of the war, Nazism is perhaps the most widely reviled and condemned ideology in the world. Labelling someone a Nazi is such a reliable rhetorical kill-button that it's become a cliché, and yet still sees unironic use every day. In the Anglosphere and Western Europe, no public figure openly identifies as a Nazi. Even things with incidental connections to the Nazi regime (like the phrase "final solution", or the term "concentration camp", which the Nazis did not coin and which had an entirely legitimate meaning prior to the war) have become untouchable by association. In some cases this stigmatisation is enforced by law (e.g. for understandable reasons it's illegal to display a swastika in Germany), but not always: publicly wearing a swastika t-shirt in Boston is a legally protected act under the First Amendment, and yet one's likelihood of getting beaten up by a complete stranger for doing so is similar to the likelihood of same in Berlin.
Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.
In the above scenario, I doubt many would say that Nazism as an ideology had decisively lost. I think most would describe it as dormant, not extinct.
After the Sydney Sweeney "great jeans" thing, I observed that there has been a vibe shift, in that, while woke people are still free to publicly express pretty out-there opinions without it having much impact on their public standing, there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along, to mouth along with the catechism. On the surface, this might look like we've "beaten" woke. But as many other commenters below have pointed out, I think it's premature to be doing victory laps. Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind. I don't have to pretend to support putting convicted male rapists in women's prisons, or the sterilisation of autistic teenagers by their thousands – but every June, without fail, my entire office (my entire city) gets festooned with flags celebrating both. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, last weekend I walked past a mural depicting a trans-identified female with prominent mastectomy scars that was paid for with EU money).
Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.
On the one hand, they say "don't put your dick in crazy", advice I've never really taken to heart: I'll smile and nod at a lot of nonsense if it means getting to smash, even if I know it'll never progress beyond that. (My favourite was one time a girl shared a meme on her Instagram story which read "at some point a man has to choose between making fun of astrology and getting laid". On my first date with this girl, I made fun of astrology to her face; she still had sex with me later that day.)
On the other hand, this sounds like the exact type of woman to falsely accuse you of raping her, so you likely dodged a bullet.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I've been meaning to read Screwtape. Out of interest, how long was your copy, and how long did it take you to read it?
Surprised by your reaction to the latter. I've read it so many times there are entire passages I can quote from memory. One of the funniest books I've ever read. I also thinks it contains a great deal of genuinely useful writing advice, much of which is applicable to all kinds of prose (not just fiction).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
He named a talk he gave after a Bon Jovi song and has rambled on at length (both in lectures and in journal articles) about how important bands like Oasis and Simon & Garfunkel are to him. The Eagles thing might well be the only autobiographical claim he makes in the memoir which is uncontroversially true.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Who is claiming that?
Many of the denizens of /r/ireland, or the people who comment on The Journal.
Your summary seems to be nothing more than a straw man argument
Maybe a weak man. Not a straw man.
Kathleen Stock is so based.
Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on.
Serendipitously, the book I'm currently reading notes that, while the people being hospitalised for Covid were overwhelmingly old and male (and often diabetic), the people diagnosing themselves with long Covid were overwhelmingly young, female and not diabetic. O'Sullivan is much nicer about this than I would be, insisting that psychosomatic illnesses are not any less "real" than those caused by viruses or bacteria. But occasionally the mask slips, as when she notes that a widely-circulated list of possible symptoms of long Covid included both "loneliness" and "feeling scared".
I don't know why young women in the modern era are disproportionately prone to malingering or diagnosing themselves with diseases and medical disorders they don't have. But they are.
Daniel Kinahan extradited from Dubai back to Dublin.
Daniel Kinahan is a member of the Kinahan crime family, who control much of the drug trade in Ireland and Europe more broadly. At one time the US State Department were offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest (apparently at one point it was as high as $15 million). In April he was arrested in Dubai (where he and several other members of the cartel have been holed up for years) and arrangements were made for his extradition.
I actually heard the plane taking him to the Casement Aerodrome flying overhead earlier this evening, and passed close to the Special Criminal Courts where he was taken for his sitting. There was a heavy police presence with roads closed off and armed guards patrolling the streets (most police officers in Ireland are unarmed). A lot of men want this man dead, as the Kinahans have a longstanding feud with another criminal gang, the Hutch family. Kinahan has now been transported to a maximum security prison in Co. Laois pending his trial. One wonders if he'll live to see it. Most likely he will have to be kept on 24-hour protection.
Finished The Mothman Prophecies during the week. Good spooky fun, although I hardly believe a word of it. Makes me want to watch the film for the umpteenth time, though I'll have to wait for spooky season. The "prophecies" part of the title refers to how various contactees reported foreknowledge of assorted international events after interacting with Indrid Cold and co. I had to laugh when the first example used to illustrate these entities' supposed prescience was something along the lines "there will soon be a major escalation of one of the conflicts in the Middle East".
My word. Who but a clairvoyant alien superintelligence could have predicted such a thing!
A few months ago on a whim I bought the comic book The Con Artists by the Irish artist Luke Healy, which I read from start to finish on my evening commute the same day I finished Mothman. It concerns two gay men who were childhood friends, one of whom fractures his arm after being hit by a bus, an incident that in turn exposes thitherto unacknowledged tensions in their friendship. Aggressively millennial: the protagonist is a shitty standup comedian who claims to suffer from an anxiety disorder, but can't stop cracking self-deprecating jokes during his therapy sessions. The artwork was clean and minimal to the point of lacking character. Healy is talented both in writing and artwork, but I think he could benefit from getting off Instagram and trying to carve out a more unique identity of his own.
On to The Age of Diagnosis by the Irish physician Suzanne O'Sullivan. My fiancée attended a talk by her to promote this book and was very impressed: she read this one before I did. O'Sullivan's thesis will be familiar to many of us here: medics now diagnose and prescribe more than they ought, characterising problems as medical disorders when previous generations just considered them personality traits or the ordinary slings-and-arrows life throws at us. The first chapter concerns the ethical dilemmas surrounding whether to get tested for Huntington's disease. O'Sullivan's prose sometimes reads like a case history, and she has an annoying predilection for sentence fragments which should have been caught by a copy-editor, but I'm interested to see what ground she covers and how deep into the culture war she goes (in the introduction she touched on "long Covid" and the skyrocketing rates of autism and ADHD diagnoses).
Crazy how you always use these rambling irrelevant "analogies" when someone points out a hole in your worldview. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
As ever, there's a rather obvious elision in your analogy which you seem determined not to acknowledge:
However, if her father were to refuse her request, in order to avoid the slight possibility of her getting away with anything, while subjecting her to the far larger likelihood of spending every night for many years terrified out of her wits
I agree that if a girl is scared of something in her bedroom and wants a nightlight, the most parsimonious explanation is that she really is scared of it. The ratio of girls who claim to want nightlights because they're really scared of something in their bedrooms vs. girls who do so for some ulterior motive must be heavily weighted in favour of the former category.
But for your analogy to work, we need a good reason to assume that "people don't lie about their gender identity" is the null hypothesis. You seem to have essentially decided that the number of people telling the truth about their gender identity is vastly in excess of the number of people lying about it for ulterior motives. I genuinely don't know how you arrived at this conclusion.
Bryan Caplan had an article this week talking about how many socialists (and progressives, by extension) seem fundamentally incapable (or unwilling) to grasp the basic concept that people respond to incentives. I feel like I'm going nuts, because proponents of gender ideology will scoff at the idea that anyone would lie about their gender identity – then immediately turn around and say "so, anyone who identifies as a woman should be permitted to compete in female sporting events, should be allowed to use dating apps for female lesbians, should be sent to a woman's prison if they're convicted of a crime, should be eligible for grants and scholarships earmarked for female people, and there should be no gatekeeping on any of this because People Know Who They Are, and anyone who suggests that people who've never been diagnosed with gender dysphoria aren't really trans is a Nazi, and it doesn't matter if someone only discovered they were trans after being convicted of a crime, and it's wrong to ever refer to someone by their deadname even if they've been convicted of a violent crime..."
Why would someone lie about their gender identity? My brother in Christ, you just told me. The policies you're advocating are the reason they would lie.
I suspect I'd know it when I see it.
First the definition of the word "woman" depends on the context, and has something to do with either having concave genitals or really wanting them. Then you admit that wanting concave genitals has nothing to do with it and it's all about self-identification. Then you admit that even self-identification has certain arbitrary carve-outs which you are unable to enumerate.
What this means in practice is that, in your framework, the word "woman" is undefined. It has no formalised definition. It is a floating signifier.
Do you understand how you've completely vindicated the effectiveness of the "what is a woman?" gotcha question, when by your own admission you literally cannot define the term under discussion and it ultimately boils down to "you know it when you see it"? Do you understand how frustrating it is to have a debate with you, when you're constantly changing around the definitions of the words you're using, how it makes the act of talking to you feel like a shell game? Do you understand why most people find gender ideology alienating, incoherent and intellectually unserious, when it proposes taking a commonsense word like "woman" with a simple and intuitive definition based on anatomy, and replacing that definition with "idk whatever you want lol but don't ever make fun of us or we'll call for you to be murdered"?
The word "woman", as used by you, means nothing. In future, I will simply disregard any sentence you write which contains the word "woman" or its derivatives, as I have absolutely no idea what entities you're referring to by the use of said words. By your own admission, neither do you. You literally cannot provide a working definition beyond "I know it when I see it". You cannot define one of the basic terms on which your ideology rests, and yet expect the rest of it to accept that ideology at face value.
'[She's] a convicted rapist' is not such an indication because convictions for sexual assault are not the exclusive province of people born with male genitals.
Note the elision here. Yes, female people can commit sexual assault (although they commit a tiny, near-negligible proportion of sexual assaults every year – 1% in Ireland, <4% in England and Wales, 3% in Australia and so on). In many jurisdictions (including the UK, Ireland, Queensland and others), rape is defined as forcible or non-consensual penetration with a penis, which female people definitionally cannot commit.
I don't know if your acceptance of people committing the most quintessentially male of all crimes in the category "women" can be attributed to sheer unbridled gullibility, or an outright (but unacknowledged) hatred of female people. What's that saying? Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice?
You casually describe others as misogynistic without once stopping yourself to ask if your own attitudes are misogynistic, in practice if not by design. In your eyes, a man using the word "female" as a noun is misogynistic. But forcing a female person to share a prison cell with a male person with an intact penis who has used said member to penetrate multiple females without their consent and proudly declared his intent to do so again at the earliest opportunity – that's progressive. That's just "being a decent person".
"Why should I have to share a cell with this rapist?! He's going to rape me too!"
"Well, he's a woman."
"He only started 'identifying' as a woman post-conviction! In what possible sense could be be considered a woman?"
"Eh – you know one when you see one. His raping is so femme-coded. It's like, yass kween."
Is that seriously the argument you would present in this case? If so, does it seriously not strike you as utterly repulsive and abhorrent?
What the fuck is a female-coded rape with a penis? You ask your victim their star sign while overpowering them, or enquire about their skincare routine?
The fact that you can look at a male person who has forcibly inserted his penis into a female person without her consent, has no desire to remove said appendage, and proudly declares his intent to use it for that purpose again – you can look at him and announce "I know a woman when I see one, and boy are you ever one!" – just, honestly. This worldview, to my mind, seems far more misogynistic than those people who want to repeal the 19th amendment. After patiently listening to you expound on this ideology for months, the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that anyone who endorses this ideology is either ignorant about what it really entails, or has a profoundly deep-seated hatred for female people as a group. Perhaps both.
Given you purport to be such a devotee of Eliezer, let me put it in terms he might endorse:
- There are two kinds of entities, Bleggs and Rubes. They differ along numerous axes (shape, colour, size etc.)
- Sometimes a particular entity looks very much like a Blegg, but is considered to actually be a Rube, or vice versa
- But conversely, sometimes something that looks very much like a Blegg is categorised as a Rube, but this turns out to be a false positive, and it really was a Blegg all along
- Most entities never exhibit a particular behavioural trait (which I'll call Stux), but 97-99% of entities who exhibit Stux are Bleggs. There are occasional Rubes which exhibit Stux, but those that do tend to be central examples of Rubes along most other axes
- An entity which was categorised as a Rube, but which has numerous Blegg-like traits, exhibits Stux.
Which is the most parsimonious explanation of the above scenario? That the entity is an extremely non-central example of a Rube? Or that the entity really is a Blegg, and we were wrong to categorise it as a Rube in the first place?
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Sometimes this produces amusing results. @Markass @CertainlyWorse
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