07mk
6hr ago
Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.
I think the "literally" here is modifying the "just," to clarify that those 2 steps really are the only 2 needed. I think people often use the word "just" figuratively, where they say "You just have to do X, Y, Z to accomplish A," when, in fact, you have to X, Xa, Y, Ya, Yb, Z or something like that, and so the "literally" here clarifies that there are no implicit hidden steps in between that you aren't choosing to communicate because you assume that the listener can just figure out those in-between steps.
07mk
6hr ago
I remember distinctly having issues with this use of ellipsis when writing comments on forums back when I was but a wee lad in ye olden dayes of the World Wide Web 20+ years ago. No matter what sentence I wrote, it just felt better to end it with an ellipsis than a period, and I couldn't tell why. But when I encountered other comments using ellipsis like this, I could tell how terrible it was for readability and forced myself to just end sentences with singular periods even if every cell in my body was telling me to add 2 more.
I think it's the same sort of phenomenon as uptalk, where someone who isn't confident in what they have to say and wants to hedge their bets makes a declarative statement in the same tone as if it's a question. The ellipsis gives the sense that there's more to it there than what the person has stated, something left unsaid that shows that the person is still thinking and unsure about the contents of what they wrote. And I think that's more common among young people (and women, to allude to Skeletor's response below) than the alternative, which is why people notice it as a a phenomenon among them. So whatever generation is the youngest generation at the time will probably be seen as doing this.
07mk
5d ago
And its still very odd gotten less satisified with life even as they have more rights than before
This is a reality that I think any honest feminist has to deal with. Is feminism about freedom for women, or is it about a better life for women, as measured by their own personal satisfaction? It would be an incredibly convenient world if prioritizing the former led to the latter, but the evidence seems quite clear that it is not the case and, in fact, there's strong reason to believe that it leads to the opposite of the latter.
And, as a feminist, I find it very easy to square: feminism should prioritize freedom (to equalize it between the sexes) over life satisfaction, and the costs to the women whose lives are now less satisfying due to feminism (but more free) is worth it for the benefit to the women whose lives are both more satisfying and more free. I just wish more feminists would openly and honestly acknowledge and state as such, that there will be tradeoffs, because there always are, and that some people deserve to suffer not because they're morally or ethically bad or whatever, but merely because they lack the wisdom/intelligence/etc. to make choices that lead to better outcomes for themselves when given the freedom to do so, compared to the alternative where they were not given the freedom.
This, of course, applies not just to feminism but more broadly to most/all liberalizing/libertarian ideologies. And the same criticisms as above apply just as well to those.
07mk
5d ago
The latest stats on smoking I saw said something on the order of 1/8 chance of getting lung cancer if you smoke a pack a day. Of course, there are many other ways that smoking can kill you, including other cancers and heart disease, but I don't think all of those amount to significantly more than lung cancer, to the extent that the odds are better than not that, if you smoke a pack a day, smoking won't be the thing to kill you. As such, I don't think it's correct to call it a slow form of suicide.
07mk
5d ago
By your reasoning, there's no need to change any details; she could have made it exactly describe the guy and as long as she said it was fiction, it would be the fault of the people reading.
You're right, it should be more nuanced, and this does break down at the edges and extremes. If I wrote a short story about someone named "Jiro" who posts on a forum called "TheMotte" and characterized him as a big stupid doo-doo-head and published somewhere that would have a lot of TheMotte users (or we were in an alternative universe where TheMotte was fairly mainstream - but then that TheMotte wouldn't be recognizably TheMotte anymore, would it?), I couldn't credibly claim that this was a completely fictional story that shouldn't be taken as a malicious smear on you. At some point, the deniability is implausible, and that is beyond that point. Even if I named the character "Gyro" on "TheMoat" website, it wouldn't be plausible.
I don't think the situation here is all that analogous. We note that multiple people who knew the man in question and read the story inferred the story was about him; we don't know how many people who didn't know that specific man and read the story inferred the story was about some other poor sap who had nothing to do with the story. We also don't know how many people knew the man in question and read the story and never connected the two. It's not clear to me that it was predictable, much less completely so, for the author that publishing this story would lead to people believing bad things about the real man.
By your reasoning, I could say that there's a party on your lawn this weekend and if anyone comes and messes up your lawn, I have no responsibility. In fact, I could make a false police report about you committing an actual crime and as long as I've put some details in that the police could theoretically check before arresting you, it's not my fault if you get arrested.
If I were to explicitly and, in good faith, say that I'm lying when I tell others about this fictional party or file this false police report - as this author did when she said the story was fiction and doubled down on that fictional aspect when asked - then I do think the responsibility falls on the person who believes me (of course, lying on a police report is also itself a crime, but a different crime).
Or if you're Jewish I could report you to the Nazis--I've only given them truthful information, it's the Nazis' fault if they then decide to kill you based on it.
This one's an edge case where it's hard for me to imagine how I could lie to the Nazis, in good faith, that the truthful location of some Jew that I'm telling them is actually a lie. When some group is going around saying "we're going around looking for Xs to murder," telling them something like, "Here's a fictional story about an X living 2 blocks away in the red house with the blue door that we pass by every morning in our IRL commute" doesn't carry credibility as being just a fictional story without any basis in reality. The situation here with the story is somewhat analogous to that, but I do think the analogy breaks down due to the much more diffuse and weaker authoritarianism of the progressive/feminist/woke left during that era compared to the Nazis during the era when they were in charge in Germany.
07mk
5d ago
To whatever extent someone's predictable reaction is unjust, I place the blame on the person reacting in the unjustified manner. For instance, it's completely predictable that if you go around college campuses trying to use good faith debate to argue for milquetoast mainstream Christian conservative ideals, that others will react in a way that gives you the reputation as a neo-Nazi male chauvinist who wants to enslave all women and murder brown people. I place no blame on someone who does this for gaining such a reputation, because the actual responsibility lies in those who observe the former and unjustly/incorrectly/maliciously interpret it as an expression of the latter.
In this case, I place the full blame on those who read these scribblings on paper - scribblings that the author explicitly (falsely) said she invented based loosely on someone other than that man - and deciding that these made-up scribblings implied things about that real man. That decision was unjust, incorrect, maybe malicious, and I place the entirety of the blame on those who made that decision. If explicitly presenting the story as fictional and explicitly misdirecting the audience towards a false IRL inspiration is being reckless in terms of libeling the true IRL inspiration with the contents of the story, then I think that just renders the term "reckless" meaningless.
07mk
5d ago
No, the lie is that she made him out to be something damn close to a rapist and stalker when he really wasn't at all.
She did no such thing, though. She invented a fictional character who were those things, basing that fictional character and the fictional scenario largely on someone she met IRL. Any inference about actual reality and real humans living within it based on the text that she put down was something voluntarily done entirely by the reader. Especially since she lied in a way that pointed away from the real person she based the character on.
If it was purely a fictional story it would be fine, but she left in enough real details that all of his real-life friends and family isntantly recognized him and started asking him if the story was about him. She essentially libeled him by calling him a rapist, and got away with "it's just fiction bro" as a legal fig leaf. This probably resultd in a lot of his friends and family turning against him.
That's a big leap from the 1st sentence to the 2nd. I disagree that leaving in that many real details in a story that's explicitly presented as fiction is "essentially libel" with a "fig leaf." I think that's just an entirely normal, reasonable thing for any fiction writer to do, and any harm that might have come the way of the real person that the fictional character was inspired by is entirely the fault of whoever read the fictional story and jumped to conclusions about reality. Certainly, it's possible that this author was playing some 4D chess to libel this innocent man via plausibly deniable means? It's just not in evidence, and all she appears to be certainly guilty of is fictionalize some IRL story she heard in a salacious/provocative way that was particularly in vogue at the time. Perhaps that deserves condemnation for the worst of all crimes, poor taste. But for harming that guy's life or mental health or theoretically turning his friends against him? She deserves no blame, no responsibility.
07mk
6d ago
One of the most normie things in that era associated with that is a letter that the Obama administration sent to publicly funded universities telling them that they should use a "preponderance of evidence" standard (generally described as 50.00001% certainty of guilt) to find students guilty of sexual assault in their internal, non-legally-related justice and discipline system. This, combined with the general notion and meme that "false rape accusations are vanishingly rare as measured by court cases and convictions, therefore any verbally stated accusation of any sexual impropriety ought to be considered true by default until proven otherwise" which was never official policy but was certainly the attitude of most of the feminist left that tended to dominate university administration meant that students were aware that if they weren't 100% sure that they'd receive a positive response, hitting on someone carried a real risk of putting their schooling and sunk tuition costs in the hands of a stranger's whims. And, unsurprisingly, people who went to college tended to be overrepresented among the people with power and loudspeakers.
07mk
6d ago
Presuming that she's being honest in the quoted email, I'm not sure why you find yourself so outraged? Her lying about it in print is bad, but the lie was that it was purely fictional, which is a way of making the real guy appear more distant from the creepy asshole that is depicted in the fiction. Given that, I don't think she deserves any blame for whatever poor mental state that real guy might have gotten into. If this story made him do so, it was due to his choice to interpret the text in a way that was clearly against the stated and ostensible intention. Unfortunate for the guy, but if this author had used an RNG that, through sheer luck, happened to generate that exact same story, resulting in that guy falsely believing that he was being represented as a creepy asshole, the same thing would have happened.
No, screw that. I'm going back to my original gut reaction from when I first read it- this story is biased as hell, it's a feminist hit piece to smear all men, and it's just pure culture-war fodder. She started off with a true story for inspiration, but then deliberately changed all important details for maximum outrage. Sometimes things are just that simple.
Which, yeah. That's all it was, and, as someone who also subscribes to the Death of the Author, I believe that's pretty much all it could ever be. Whether or not the story is an accurate account of true things that actually happened or the fever dream of a feminist with a fetish for being oppressed (perhaps I repeat myself?) doesn't matter, it's the text that is presented that matters, because the text is what gets read and interpreted, not the thoughts or intentions of the author.
07mk
6d ago
If you imagined them, you and I were part of a shared imagination. I don't recall there being mountains of such articles, but there certainly were a bunch.
Within the new atheist movement, there was a major hubbub where a semi-famous figure in the sphere, Rebecca Watson (a founder of Skepchick, IIRC, and also a then-member of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast) wrote some essay complaining about being propositioned at some convention by a male attendee at 2AM in a hotel elevator as being something terrible and probably misogynistic and patriarchal or something.
I don't have any links to primary sources off-hand, because these aren't pleasant things that I wanted to remind myself of.
07mk
6d ago
It will be interesting to see whether those New York City Jews who swore they would leave for Florida if Mamdani got elected will make good on their promised exodus [heh].
I'd love to see God top his Red Sea trick with one all down the US East Coast from Manhattan to Miami. It's over 5x the distance, but it's been a couple thousand years, at least, since He pulled that off for Moses, which is a lot of time for Him to improve (or is that also one of those things that a perfect, omnipotent being can't do?).
07mk
6d ago
Given he's a socialist, it's hard to believe he won't fuck it up. Even if he weren't ineligible I can't see him being a serious contender for President based on what I expect his record to be.
As much as I'm being tongue-in-cheek by taking how hot Mamdani's been the last 3 months and extending it out forward (then he'd be God Emperor of the Democratic People's Republic of Earth within the decade - but no one remains that hot in politics for that long, not even exceptions to exceptions to exceptions like Trump), I think this analysis is flawed.
Almost certainly he will fuck it up - by default because he's a politician, and even moreso because he's a socialist - but a politician's record doesn't matter for his electoral prospects; it's the perception of his record by the voters that matters. And I've been burned too many times underestimating just how far the distance between perception and reality can be, especially in politics, to bet that Mamdani's (predicted) poor record once he becomes NYC mayor will meaningfully affect his chances in future elections for bigger seats, relative to his apparent charisma to half the voters, along with his superior genetics and religion to much of that same half.
My prediction as of a couple weeks ago has been that once Mamdani wins and rules over NYC, to whatever extent he achieves his political promises, they won't effectively address the real thing that the policies are supposed to address, and this failure will entirely be blamed on Republicans and not-sufficiently-socialist-Democrats for not doing what their moral superiors have told them they ought to do, rather than Mamdani and his allies for simply having a poor understanding of how politics and economics work. Whether or not this assignment of blame is "fair" or "correct" for whatever those terms mean in this context, most high status journalism outlets will reinforce the notion that it is "correct" to enough of an extent that it will be the mainstream, default, "educated" opinion that Mamdani didn't fail, he was failed by an Islamophobic, racist, and probably transphobic populace/political machine that stood in his way even after he had used his sheer force of charisma and standing for Basic Human Decency to convince enough voters to elect him.
One major wrinkle (among many, I'm sure) in this prediction is that these high status journalists' credibility has been falling among the electorate and seems likely to continue, and so I could be overcorrecting from underestimating the future distance between perception and reality to overestimating it.
07mk
6d ago
I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I only saw bits of some ads online, and "unhinged" was a thought that came to my mind as well, reminiscent of the type of things thrown at Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, which ostensibly helped him get elected in 2/3 of those cases. The past decade or so, I'd been worried that President AOC was going to be the Dems' President Trump, but it looks like Mamdani being that might be more likely. The Republicans might MDS their way into creating enough political will to change the Constitution to allow someone naturalized into US citizenship to become POTUS for the sake of Mamdani.
This connects to a pet peeve I have, about social media companies all changing date formats to "1 hour ago," "5 hours ago," "1 day ago," "last year," etc. Usually there are ways to change it back, but often there aren't. Just give me the precise timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format and let me figure out when that was relative to now. Right now, on 11/11/2025, the knowledge that some comment was made on 11/4/2025 at 16:03 GMT means far more to me than the knowledge that it was made "last week" or even "1 week ago." Because I can far more easily cross-reference other events and comments around the time of that comment based on the former information than on the latter one.
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