FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
Meanwhile there's obviously people who belong to a British ethnicity (English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish)
Excuse me?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
Sorry to hear that pal. Feel free to DM me if you need a sympathetic ear.
"Fabulist" is too strong a term, but for people working in the entertainment industries in Ireland and the UK, attempting to pass yourself off as having a more socioeconomically deprived background than you really do (class-Dolezalism) is the rule rather than the exception. If an actor, writer or (especially) musician claims (or implies) to have had a tough working-class upbringing, it's safe to assume they're lying unless they can provide receipts. (Prime example. You can just tell how fed up Beckham is with his wife's pretensions.)
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
This must be the most surprising "skill issue" I've ever gotten.
Last year my fiancée and I both read Eliza Clark's Boy Parts, which I thoroughly enjoyed (it was my third-favourite novel I read last year). A few months ago I bought her Clark's sophomore effort, Penance; she told me she enjoyed it, albeit not as much as Boy Parts. I started reading it on my commute this morning. It follows a muckraking journalist writing a true-crime book about a teenaged girl brutally murdered by three schoolmates in a small seaside town in the summer of 2016.
I'm thirty pages in and I'm enjoying it so far, although sadly the few tics and flourishes I found distracting in Boy Parts remain intact in the followup. Clark is a white Millennial Englishwoman who is Very Online and whom I presume had a middle-class upbringing: accordingly, her every waking moment is sodden with terror of getting cancelled for being insufficiently woke. (In the chapter in which the muckraking journalist introduces himself to the reader, he describes how getting cancelled in a Twitter pile-on temporarily derailed his career – something on your mind, dear?) To avert this fate, Clark interrupts her lengthy passages of sharply observed character details and pinpoint-accurate observations of British class dynamics with chunks of boilerplate, calcified woke orthodoxy e.g. going out of her way to mention that the "majority right-leaning" UK media largely ignored the girl's murder: the victim and three perpetrators all being white Britons, the case couldn't be cynically pinned on a grooming gang or an immigrant. It feels defensive and out of place, as if added just before publication at the behest of a sensitivity reader. C'mon Clark, show your power level already!
Last week I finished The Age of Diagnosis by the Irish GP Suzanne O'Sullivan. Her thesis, in short, is that medical diagnosis is more of an art than a science, and that in recent decades medical institutions have begun to err on the side of too much diagnosis rather than too little. This overdiagnosis comes in two main forms:
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Carrying out preemptive screenings and unnecessary tests on patients before they report any symptoms. Any oncologist will tell you that time is of the essence when it comes to treating cancer, and on paper the ability to identify and treat cancerous growths before the patient notices anything wrong sounds like a godsend. But O'Sullivan presents some disquieting statistics indicating that certain oncologists may not be as talented at distinguishing benign tumours from malignant as they claim to be, and that, as a consequence, many patients are being subjected to aggressive treatment regimens which deleteriously affect their quality of life for no good reason. Perhaps the most distressing example of this trend is women who undergo genetic testing to be told that they have an X% chance of developing breast cancer, and who undergo preemptive mastectomies before any tumours have been located (famous recipients of these procedures include Elizabeth Wurtzel and, most famously, Angelina Jolie). As O'Sullivan notes, while the margins of error on these breast cancer estimates have shrunk over time, they can never be zero; and even if they were, if you tell a large cohort of women they have an 87% chance of developing breast cancer in the future, the unavoidable conclusion is that some women have undergone mastectomies for literally no reason. We talk about medically unnecessary mastectomies a lot in this space, but it's sobering to be reminded that it's a topic of major concern even outside the domain of "gender-affirming care". O'Sullivan also cites some alarming statistics on the number of doctors who have admitted to ordering medical tests they did not think were necessary, purely to assuage a hypochondriac patient's worries (read: minimise the risk of a malpractice suit). This seems like a potentially under-discussed contributing factor both to lengthy hospital waiting lists and to Baumol's cost disease. When you hear that patients have to wait, say, 12 weeks to undergo an MRI, you can't help but wonder how many people ahead of them in the queue were not thought to be ill by anyone but themselves (not even by the doctor who ordered the scan).
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Existing diagnostic categories loosening and distending over time, until they include people who in previous generations would have been considered completely healthy. This is the story we're more more familiar with. No one is merely "shy" or "socially awkward" any more: every such person is now "on the spectrum". No one is "easily distracted": they have ADHD. Sometimes these diagnostic categories stretch to the point of becoming contested illnesses (e.g. "chronic Lyme" disease, "long Covid"). O'Sullivan reserves particular ire for the concept of "masking", wherein "mildly" or "high-functioning" autistic people can supposedly learn to hide the outward symptoms of their condition and pretend to be neurotypical – which effectively turns being autistic into an unfalsifiable claim*. O'Sullivan argues that the excessive focus on people at the "high-functioning" end of the autistic spectrum has resulted in a highly skewed public impression of what autism entails and, consequently, social policies which demote the severely autistic in importance in favour of their "high-functioning" brethren (in other words, autism and other disabilities have become gentrified). O'Sullivan is clearly afraid of being misconstrued as a right-wing culture warrior sneering at Millennial snowflakes diagnosing themselves with ailments they don't have for clout, and is even-handed and sympathetic to a fault, hammering home that suffering is not any less real for being psychosomatic in etiology, and that the people who stand to suffer most from a medically unfounded diagnosis of autism or ADHD are the diagnosees themselves. But there are brief moments where the mask slips, and her exasperation with and contempt for these self-absorbed malingerers is on full display: when she notes that some residents of Australia have diagnosed themselves with "chronic Lyme", despite that country being inhospitable to the tick whose bites cause Lyme disease; when she describes what a high proportion of people diagnosed with ADHD are comorbid with one or more other psychological ailments; when she describes a list of dozens of potential "long Covid" symptoms (including "loneliness") circulated by a woman with a PhD in a non-medical discipline who consistently refers to herself with the "Dr." honorific; when she argues that, in some cases, a nonspecific medical diagnosis is a convenient coping mechanism for people whose life didn't turn out how they thought it ought to have; and the banger quote below (emphasis mine):
Of the scores of people I spoke to, all of whom were adults, all perceived their lives to be better off thanks to a diagnosis. Every person welcomed the diagnosis into their lives. But almost all had left their job, dropped out of education and lost many old friends. Several were housebound.
A fascinating and eye-opening book, but there were parts in which I wished O'Sullivan would be a little less equivocal and even-handed, more willing to take activists to task for their selfishness, more willing to openly discuss how destructive the "self-diagnosis" trend has been. I'd be fascinated to see the first draft and see how many of the hard edges got sanded down by successive rounds of editing.
*As drily noted by Hannah Spier, "masking" is basically synonymous with "emotional self-regulation", something every adult, to a greater or lesser extent, eventually has to learn how to do. Dare I say that the legitimately autistic are distinguished by a literal inability to "pretend" to be neurotypical? Indeed, that they don't even understand the concept of pretending to be neurotypical?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
And by Barker's own admission, the first draft of the screenplay was just a movie about a toxic abusive relationship with no supernatural elements at all. It was only a chance viewing of a Simpsons episode that inspired him to include the "monkey's paw" element.
I doubt Barker was consciously thinking "if I make a movie about a woman with borderline personality disorder who's the villain, people will call me a misogynist, so I'd better come up with some pretext by which a male character is really to blame for her villainy". It was probably more of a subconscious thing, where the "monkey's paw" plot device felt "safer" for reasons he likely couldn't put into words.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
The megapint thing was hilarious, but to be pedantic, it would surely take a long time to drink a million pints of wine.
Despite being such a long and complex book, I couldn't put it down. Very different vibe from the film it inspired, but equally compelling. I've been meaning to check out Ellroy's other books.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
My bad, according to Robinson the progressive students were actually trying to get screenings of American Sniper cancelled. So it's perfectly symmetrical.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Online, certainly. The only people I've spoken to about it in person have been people who agreed with me that he was a fraud, or people who'd never heard of the case before. On Substack I've been videos of people giving public speeches insisting he'd been falsely accused of plagiarism.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I'm no longer convinced the words "racism", "white supremacy", "sexism", "misogyny", "Islamophobia", "homophobia", "transphobia", "hate", "fascism", "far-right", "genocide" and "lynching" mean anything at all.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Something something JK Rowling "preached hate" against a vulnerable minority group, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences blah blah blah
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Gary is a "there but for the grace of God go I" situation. What he did was in clear contravention of the law. Philosophically, I accept that the state is supposed to have a monopoly on legitimate use of force, extreme circumstances excepted (which does not describe Gary's circumstances). Does the foregoing mean I wouldn't have done the exact same thing in his shoes? Sadly, I don't think so.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges
Many do, in fact, argue he isn't guilty of the charges. I've spent long hours remonstrating with these people, but they refuse to listen.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
All I can say is that feeling extremely horny in your late teens is completely normal and you have nothing to worry about. There is nothing medically or psychologically wrong with you.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
To quote TV Tropes:
Sonny is so well-endowed that sex is uncomfortable for most of his partners. Even "the most hardened and fearless putain" demands double price, and his wife is actually glad that he's cheating on her, since it means she won't need to have sex with him as often (though she does start to complain when he neglects her too long). When he meets Lucy, a woman whose vagina can comfortably acommodate him, their affair is intense. Meanwhile, Lucy has the female version of this problem: her capacious vagina is the result of a weakened pelvic floor which prevents her from enjoying sex with any man less-endowed than Sonny, and which needs surgical correction lest it cause even more serious problems later in life.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Well, indirectly. I was thinking of the cavernous vulva.
I did something similar recently, looking at all the notches on my bedpost and sorting them by ethnicity, body shape and breast size.
Unsurprisingly, slim Asian women with small breasts predominated.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I'm not sure if spiritual adaptations should count. Although I suppose Heart of Darkness is in the public domain.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Fight Club is worth reading once, but the film is definitely superior. Even the author thinks the film has a better ending.
It's more than twenty years since I read The Godfather, but the film was wise to drop one of the novel's most bizarre and out-of-place subplots.
Have you heard about the latest TikTok trend sweeping across Ireland and the UK: stealing a car and then intentionally driving at high speed down the wrong side of a motorway?
The first of these incidents to cause a serious accident was about two weeks ago on the M50, the main ring road in Dublin. Two vehicles collided, resulting in eight teenagers and one man being hospitalised. When I first heard about it, my immediate thought was that it must have been tourists from a country where they drive on the right, who'd made an honest (if deadly) mistake. You can get a direct ferry from France to Ireland, and upon disembarking you will see signs warning you that we drive on the left here.
Then the following weekend, a second incident occurred in Kildare. Five teenaged boys deliberately drove a stolen BMW the wrong way down the M9 motorway three times, before finally colliding with another vehicle. All five boys were killed, while the four occupants of the other vehicle (including a small child) were seriously injured. Footage was recovered from one of the boys' social media profiles which he filmed during the escapade, emblazoning laughing emojis on top*. The realisation that they (and also the drivers on the M50) had done this deliberately for social media clout disturbed me profoundly. The Garda Síochána (Irish police) were heavily criticised for failing to pursue the vehicle, but they defended themselves on the grounds that most of their officers hadn't received appropriate training for dangerous chases like this. (Who could ever have foreseen that the police would need training in how to deal with someone driving on the wrong side of the motorway, not as an evasive manoeuvre, but literally for its own sake?)
Then, for the hat-trick, seven people were killed on Saturday morning when a car deliberately drove the wrong way down the A66 motorway in Middlesbrough (in the UK) and collided with another vehicle. The second vehicle was a police car, and the seven dead include the two police officers inside. Although police officers were pursuing the offending vehicle, it seems the police car they crashed into was not part of this pursuit and the decision had been made to abandon the pursuit seconds before the collision. Nonetheless, the Gardaí's decision not to pursue the M9 perpetrators seems a lot more defensible in hindsight.
A bit over ten years ago, I remember an idiotic trend of people getting themselves killed taking selfies in dangerous places (e.g. leaning out the windows of moving trains) or getting their friends to take pictures of them planking on top of tall buildings. As moronic as this was (and with such a laughably skewed ratio of risk to reward), at least the only people being endangered by these stunts was the people doing them. This is a whole other ball game: at least two bystanders have been killed so far, and at least five injured. I know teenage boys have a reputation for thinking themselves bulletproof, but this shower of arseholes seem wholly lacking in the most basic of self-preservation instincts.
And what scares me most is that I fear the breathless coverage of these horrific accidents will actually entice more teenagers to do likewise. Not in the sense of copycat crimes; not in the sense of glamorising the perpetrator, the way the media does (intentionally or no) whenever there's a school shooting; not even in raising awareness of the concept of driving the wrong way down a motorway to people who would otherwise never have considered it. The reason one carries out a stupid dangerous stunt like this (filming it all the while) is to demonstrate that you're a tough cunt who plays by his own rules. If people actually get maimed or killed while executing these stunts, then someone who does one and emerges on the other side unscathed seems like even more of a tough cunt than they would otherwise – the amount of death and injury that results quantifies how dangerous the stunt is. Thus, every additional corpse makes partaking in these stunts more appealing to someone eager to be seen as a tough cunt.
It also reminds me of a theory I've heard from multiple independent people that there's sort of a "conservation of rebellion" that comes with adolescence. Teenagers are driven to shock and appal their parents, but in the past all they had to do to accomplish this was dye their hair, get a tattoo or pierce their ears with a safety pin. But all of those things have become normalised, but the adolescent urge to act out and disrespect one's elders hasn't gone anywhere, so teenagers are driven to ever more extreme lengths to do things their parents won't approve of.
And here's where it leads us, apparently.
*Even the footage that doesn't show any collisions is scary enough. If I was in the leftmost lane on the motorway and saw a car barreling the wrong way down the hard shoulder, I genuinely don't know how I'd react.
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