FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
About 40,000 according to the last census. Not a lot in absolute terms, but they're quite visible by virtue of being young (80% under the age of 45) and often working in public-facing jobs like Deliveroo drivers or hospitality. The much larger Indian population mostly work remotely or in offices, so aren't as visible.
Years ago someone told me that the initial influx of Brazilians was the result of some kind of deal that Irish meat-packing plants struck with Brazil. Nowadays I think the main reason they come is because it's the only country in the EU in which English is the primary language (many of them are entitled to EU citizenship by virtue of having a European grandparent: I've met several with a grandparent from Italy or Portugal, although for obvious reasons the ones with a German grandfather aren't as keen to advertise the fact). They often come over on student visas to learn English which they then overstay, and most people understand that these "English schools" are a bit of a scam.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
Trigglypuff
Now that's a blast from the past. The Internet used to be so much more fun.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
What I meant was that "Irish male, Brazilian female" is a pretty common international pairing, and a large subset of these pairings are also interracial by virtue of being "white male, pardo female" or more rarely "white male, black female".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
WMAF couples are by far the most common interracial pairing in Dublin, except maybe WMBF (white male, Brazilian female; obviously "Brazilian" isn't a race and some of these women are white as snow, but you know what I mean). On the very rare occasions my AF wife and I pass an AMWF couple in the street, we give each other this knowing look like "what is it, Opposite Day?"
What do you mean by "testosterone poisoning"? You mean people who die while trying to show off how tough they are?
I don't think smart sociopaths and sadists are particularly rare. The supply of smart people wanting to enter careers where sociopathy is an advantage (politicians, lawyers, financiers etc.) exceeds the demand.
I worded this a bit clumsily. What I meant was that stories about idiots committing acts of overt, unambiguous criminality (murder, rape etc.) are dog-bites-man stories, whereas stories about unusually intelligent people committing acts of overt, unambiguous criminality (as distinct from white-collar crime, which is a more nebulous category) are man-bites-dog stories. A professional solicitor, architect, neurosurgeon etc. who murders his wife will be front-page news; a homeless person who murders another homeless person is barely considered newsworthy. I'm far from the first person to compare how much press attention the Cornell 7 case attracted vs. a story about a gang-rape in a black ghetto, and part of it is surely the incongruity of an allegedly brutal crime committed by Ivy League students (i.e. members of a demographic we would naively expect to be selected for intelligence and civility). In fiction, Hannibal Lecter isn't even the primary antagonist of The Silence of the Lambs, and yet he's the character everyone remembers, which is at least partly attributable to the incongruity between his genteel erudition (he's even a qualified psychiatrist) and the brutality of his crimes. Buffalo Bill, by contrast, is a more realistic portrait of a serial killer by virtue of being uneducated, sexually disturbed and a member of the underclass.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
I am reasonably confident that sociopaths do more damage in total because the system is better at detecting and rejecting sadists.
True, and also because I imagine the range of harmful actions which can be motivated by apathy is larger than the range that can be motivated by cruelty.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
So essentially, the 1960s was a buyers' market, and the 2020s is a sellers' market?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Perhaps "modern women living in the West"?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
14hr ago
Dating modern American men must be like shooting fish in a barrel for any healthy young adult woman given the competition. But maybe that's my bias showing, and the average white American man actually wants a strongly-opinionated, plus-size, nose-pierced and skin-scribbled, childfree, yoga pants-wearing woman.
Back when I was single, people often asked me why so many of the women I dated were first-generation Asian migrants and so few (none, effectively) Irish. Honestly, a big part of it could be explained simply by comparing the average BMI in Ireland with the corresponding figures in China, Taiwan, Korea etc.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
I once dated an Asian-American woman for a couple of months, during which time I fell in love with her. Interestingly, she didn't tick any of these boxes: she had a healthy relationship with her parents, spoke Mandarin fluently, and struck me as significantly less neurotic than I was (despite having had certain experiences which might reasonably lead one to neuroticism). She had dated multiple white men besides me, but gave no impression of thinking white men were obsessed with or fetishizing her, nor on the verge of reenacting the Japanese internment camps.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Sounds more like something vaguely in the ADHD cluster than pure laziness.
Is there a difference?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Bill Gates said "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Even a definite correlation between stupidity and criminality wouldn't necessarily imply a correlation between stupidity and evil. It's possible that smarter evil people tend to avoid getting caught, not by planning the perfect crime, but by realizing the expected value of the crime is negative (both because they're better at such estimation and because they tend to have more socio-economic status giving them more to lose) and just not committing it. Such people would still be evil in the sense that they'd do evil if they could definitely get away with it, but since they can't they just don't try.
I know some psychologists have done studies where they ask people "if you could [do something evil] and be 100% confident that you would face no punishment for it, would you do it?" It would be trivial to plot their responses against their SAT score and see if any correlation presented itself. But such a study would have all the weaknesses of any comparable survey: just because someone says they would/wouldn't do something, doesn't mean they would/wouldn't really do it if they found themselves in such a hypothetical.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Somebody here once compared it to bike-shedding on a nationwide level, a comparison I've been unable to unsee ever since.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Yes, but per @Opt-out's distinction, Hitler and Stalin committed great evil out of "ends justify means" utopian thinking. Whereas Madoff was merely selfish: he did great evil not because he wanted to make the world a better place or because he enjoyed causing harm to others, but simply out of a desire to enrich himself.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Fair point, although I would split 1) into two categories: did evil because they liked it vs. did evil because they were completely indifferent to the suffering of others. I think Madoff fell into the latter category, wherein he was aware of the harm he was doing to others, didn't derive any especial pleasure from hurting other people (he wasn't a sadist) but simply didn't care about their suffering. If Madoff could have made his money without hurting others I imagine he would have if only for pragmatism's sake, whereas for many serial killers, cruelty really does seem to be the entire point.
They're probably positively correlated, but that correlation is not 1, and it's much closer to 0 than it is to 1. There are a lot of really nasty evil smart people, and a lot of kind, wholesome, good people who are dumb as a sack of bricks but somehow brighten the lives of the people around them. I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody.
While I don't disagree that clever evil people exist (nor unintelligent but kind-hearted people), I would caution you that your perceptions of the relative frequency of both is heavily contaminated by selection effects and the availability heuristic.
From the perspective of media coverage, an idiot who's violent and can't be reasoned with is a dog-bites-man story in a very literal sense: many violent people are so because they're literally too stupid to understand the harm their actions cause. By contrast, evil geniuses are man-bites-dog stories: writers of fiction and journalists alike can't get enough of intelligent people who outwardly seem normal and civilised but who are really vicious and cruel. It follows that a given news outlet will devote far more attention and column inches to the crimes and misdeeds committed by intelligent and seemingly civilised people than they will to the crimes committed by idiots. There are ideological reasons for this (progressive outlets don't want to pay much attention to the crimes committed by idiots lest their readers draw conclusions favourable to HBD; for reasons of slave morality/sour grapes, unsuccessful people of either political stripe love to hear stories confirming their belief that everyone who's more successful than them is a moral mutant, especially if they're also a member of the Other Tribe), but even leaving these aside, an intelligent and seemingly civilised person who's secretly a vicious sociopath is just a more incongruous (hence compelling) story on its face than an uncivilised idiot who's also a vicious sociopath. "Intelligent sociopath" is a man-bites-dog story; "idiotic sociopath" is a dog-bites-man story; "intelligent, law-abiding person who works hard and pays his taxes" is not even a story at all, but I dare say a much higher proportion of law-abiding people are above-average in intelligence than vice versa. A person whose model of the world is based on consuming mainstream news outlets could very easily end up with a radically skewed impression of how much crime is committed by intelligent people, as opposed to the reality that the overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by a very small number of repeat offenders who are none too bright.
Even allowing that you know some kind-hearted but unintelligent people, you certainly aren't seeing the most unintelligent people (unless you work in a care home for people with Down's syndrome), and the unintelligent people you do know are heavily selected for kind-heartedness and responsibility. The Darwin Awards were set up to collect darkly amusing stories about people who inadvertently improve the genetic fitness of the population by selecting themselves out of the gene pool through acts of catastrophic stupidity. Along the same lines, prisons heavily select for idiots. (The latter point, in itself, does not prove a correlation between stupidity and criminality: there might be no correlation at all, and the ones who find themselves in prison are merely those stupid enough to get caught.) It follows that the unintelligent people you know are not a representative cross-section of the entire demographic, but selected for those who are law-abiding and who aren't careless enough to, say, point a loaded gun at their genitals with their finger resting on the trigger. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who's careless about their own welfare will tend to be careless about other people's welfare, ceteris paribus.
Lastly, I want to talk about the Breakfast Question. For those unfamiliar, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed to be a psychology researcher who was part of a team conducting intelligence tests in prisons, one of which concerned counterfactual hypotheticals: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning, how would you feel right now?" Many respondents were simply unable to answer the question, insisting that they did have breakfast this morning. It's amusing watching people conduct informal replications of this "study" on social media and receiving similar results. For me, the interesting part of the post was after the titular question, when the poster hypothesised that many inmates in prison were so lacking in intelligence that they literally lacked the imaginative capacity to place themselves in another person's shoes and imagine how they would feel. Expecting these people to empathise with another person was as unreasonable a demand as expecting them to do calculus.*
Obviously this is just an anonymous 4chan post and we have no good reason to believe that the author is who he claims to be, nor that the results of the study he described are accurate, nor that the study itself even exists. Nonetheless, it is a fairly well-established finding in developmental psychology that theory of mind is not innate and must be actively, consciously taught to young children, and that some people (most notably, the severely autistic) really are too unintelligent to ever grasp the concept. (This is also why, as noted by @ymeskhout, unintelligent people make for bad liars: they lack the imaginative capacity to put themselves in another's shoes and thereby construct a lie that would seem convincing to someone in that position.) But the idea that a certain floor of intelligence is a prerequisite for empathy is a disquieting one, and punctures many of our intuitions about the orthogonality of intelligence and morality. How can you possibly expect someone to treat other people as they themselves would like to be treated when, through no fault of their own, they literally cannot imagine what it would be like to be another person?
*Last Friday I mentioned @naraburns's review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart, and there was one passage that really stuck with me:
But when [deBoer] observes that "We sink vast sums of money into quixotic efforts to make all of our students equal" it does not seem to occur to him, at all, that we could therefore choose to stop doing that. Instead, bizarrely, he recommends we continue doing that--indeed, he thinks we should pay teachers even more money to keep doing that. Only instead of trying to make students equal by teaching them math, we should make them equal by teaching them to care about one another, to be compassionate, to work to the best of their abilities and be grateful to receive from others in accordance with their needs. Why deBoer thinks schools will be any better at teaching children these things, than they are at teaching children math, is never expressed or explored. Why deBoer fails to notice that there is no reason, in principle, to think that people's dispositions are any less governed by their DNA than are their capabilities, I can only guess, but it is an absolutely glaring oversight. What do we do, in his perfect world, with children who are predisposed to be bad at caring ? What do we do with teachers who are bad at teaching it? DeBoer seems to be laboring under the delusion that teaching people to behave is substantially less quixotic than teaching them algebra. [emphasis mine]
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- In an effort to catch up with my flagging posting schedule, last Friday I banged out a quick post on the ongoing controversy around Sally Rooney and Palestine Action. It now sits as my third-most viewed post ever and only my third post to exceed 100 likes, while the posts I slaved over for weeks die on the vine. Magnum opus dissonance strikes again.
- Went to the gym three times last week. I'm starting to think a lot of the recurrent problems I've been having with lower back pain may have been ultimately caused by wearing a weightlifting belt that was too loose. I've been using one that belongs to the gym which is much tighter than mine, and I can deadlift with much less effort (granted, with less weight than my peak). I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @ThomasdelVasto?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody.
Bold of you to assume that all woke busybodies are above average in intelligence.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Walt Bismarck restacked one of my articles. His name rings a bell, but I don't really know anything about him. Does he have interesting opinions?
One, I was not as aware of the details of phalloplasty; two, I was responding to the claim that, antiquote: "You may have noticed that female people have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to fashion a ... penis." The esteamed commenter would have been more accurate had he said "...do not have enough flesh in between their legs with which to...".
This is some of the most obnoxious hair-splitting I've ever encountered in my entire life.
"Why don't you buy a house?" Alice asked.
"Well, I don't have any money," Bob replied.
"Ah ah ah!" Alice retorted. "I saw your bank balance, and you have $200. So it's strictly untrue to say you don't have any money. You should have said you don't have enough money to buy a house."
Yes, I am going to tap the sign: "It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
This is extremely tiresome and obnoxious. A clitoris, no matter how large, cannot be used to construct a neopenis. We both know this. Do you really think tedious pedantry of this sort is a productive use of your time?
And this exercise in splitting hairs is coming in response to you asserting, falsely, that a phalloplasty is a vaginoplasty in reverse i.e. while a vaginoplasty consists of inverting external genitalia and making them internal, a phalloplasty consists of inverting internal genitalia and making them external. Not only is this an inaccurate description of what a phalloplasty entails, it is wrong to the point of outright anatomical impossibility. But you're giving me a scolding for daring to say "women have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to make a neopenis" as opposed to "women don't have enough flesh in between their legs which can be used to make a neopenis", when every native English speaker in the entire world understands that "X has no Y" is often meant figuratively to mean "X has an insufficient amount of Y for the object under discussion".
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
There's no conflict between "the hassle of stepping in shit is one of the most pressing issues of urban life" and "it's not the responsibility of cafés and restaurants to prevent the homeless from shitting in public".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Still can't provide a source for the knee replacement claim, then. Curious.
My brother would not believe me when I told him the capital of Kyrgyzstan was literally called Bitch Kek.
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