I'm pretty sure they cast the character as an African woman because the actress playing Chani (Zendaya) is biracial, and if her father is going to played by European Javier Bardem, one African parent is necessary for her ethnicity to make sense.
Although frankly I'd have preferred if they'd recast all the Fremen with Arab actors. It may not be canon, but in my head the Fremen are Bedouin, damnit!
Crowstep
6mo ago
Well, I'd hoped it would never come for me...
Last night my girlfriend, I and a mutual friend got into a discussion about nonbinary people. I put forward my position, basically that it's a fashion statement for people who want to feel different and special. My girlfriend has a couple of friends (I've only met one of them once) who prefer 'they' pronouns. Both are men, dress and act like men, although one has changed his name to a rather ironic noun (equivalent to someone renaming himself 'Drama', although not exactly that.
Anyway, now she's not happy. I attempted to compromise by agreeing to use they/them in their presence, but not when speaking to my girlfriend. Apparently this isn't sufficient. She feels it's akin to using racial slurs to refer to someone when they're out of earshot, even if you don't use slurs to their face.
I can't really see any third way beyond conceding or sticking to my guns. It's frustrating, because she is very much not the intolerant idpol type. Indeed her political beliefs are broadly conservative. Apparently not for this topic.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I really don't think Zendaya was mere diversity casting. She's a popular actress and her character is described in the books as being 'skinny, with an elfin face' and having 'darkly elfin features'. When I heard she was being cast as Chani, I immediately thought she was the perfect choice. And if we're in agreement that the Fremen should have been Bedouins, well, here's what a real Bedouin girl looks like. You can hardly claim Zendaya is too dark to play the sci-fi version of her.
This is just a straight up gish-gallop. None of these arguments address the central HBD thesis (individuals and groups differ in personality and intelligence, and these differences are at least partly genetic). Most of them are non-sequitors, some are just straight up lies.
To address just one randomly selected point, 'Africans have greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world'. This is entirely meaningless because genetic diversity does not guarantee phenotypic diversity on any one trait within an ethnic or racial group. For example, all SSAfrican ethnic groups have darker skin than every ethnic group in Europe. Their genetic diversity doesn't provide a range of skin tones matching the breadth that we see in humanity as a whole, so why should we assume that same genetic diversity would provide a range of IQs matching humanity as a whole.
The Ashkenazi Jews obviously have less genetic diversity than the whole of Subsaharan Africa, but that doesn't stop them having the highest IQs in the world.
I guess a question I would put to a HBD-skeptic would be:
Why do IQ scores correlate with brain size, academic achievement, income and criminality? What is the cause of these correlations if not intelligence?
Crowstep
9mo ago
Apparently a lot of critics saw this in Knives Out, where the wealthy WASP author leaves his estate to his diligent South American nurse instead of his spoilt kids.
Of course, that interpretation only makes sense of you subscribe to the American view that Spanish people are their own race instead of just another European ethnic group...
Crowstep
6mo ago
That Indian (politicians) in the UK have gone anti-immigration doesn't shock me. As a group, they are wealthy, well-educated, law-abiding and immune to accusations of hating brown people. They're natural Tories. Of course, that doesn't mean they actually reduce legal or illegal immigration, they just talk stridently about it.
What I'm curious about is why so many of the native Tories (Boris Johnson, George Osborne, David Cameron) were so open-bordery. Aristocratic disdain for the native proles? Desire for cheaper servants? Regular cosmopolitan posturing?
Crowstep
1yr ago
Richard Hanania thinks that if everything can be faked, (we'll be forced to trust the establishment)[https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/deepfakes-will-make-the-establishment] CNN has more to lose by lying with a deepfake than John Q Anon on your message board of choice.
Crowstep
2d ago
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
Crowstep
9mo ago
That's true in some countries but not others, the average person in Argentina is very much not mestizo.
And Ana de Armas (born in Cuba) who plays the nurse certainly isn't. She's as European as Mitt Romney.
Crowstep
8mo ago
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
Unfortunately, the modernist ugliness you are right to complain about is Western, or at least it came from the West originally, and has now been embraced by decision makers globally.
Traditional architecture, sculpture and painting are beautiful everywhere, regardless of the geographic background. The modernist equivalents are ugly regardless of background.
Compare two recent statues in London. The first is a pile of whipped cream, with a drone, fly and cherry sitting on top. It is designed by a British woman and is an example of contemporary western art.
The second is a recreation of the ancient Winged Bull statue from Iraq, which was destroyed by ISIS. It was designed by an Iraqi Jew and is a literal recreation of ancient middle eastern art.
The Winged Bull statue is self-evidently far superior, it is also not western. It is superior because it is traditionalist and not modernist.
Crowstep
1yr ago
So what's the story behind everyone's usernames?
I'll start, mine is derived from crow-stepped gables, a common feature of the architecture in my city.
Crowstep
6hr ago
Many people who would laugh at the idea of the Aztecs believing the conquistadores to be emissaries of the Aztec gods also themselves believe in the literal truth of the Jewish covenant, that Jews are a people Chosen by god and they are a race of god-creators vis-a-vis the ancestry of Jesus Christ.
I wondered how long it would take for this to be about Jews. You never fail to disappoint.
As far as I can tell, you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt, despite his noble physiognomy and the fact that they are 'short, weak, ugly nerds'. Am I getting that right?
I would worry about this being an uncharitable take, except for the fact that you cannot stop posting about how Jews are bad.
Have I misinterpreted the post? Could you summarise your thesis in a sentence?
Crowstep
3mo ago
Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I agree that it's fake. Aside from the things that others have already pointed out, she humblebrags about her 'nice big house' more than once. The use of 'nigger' reads as an Americanism to me, and overall it's just too long. I would imagine a real death threat would be shorter.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I've just downloaded the full collection as ebooks.
My kids can have kindles full of samizdat.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.
If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.
The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.
Crowstep
7mo ago
False rape accusations certainly happen. A schoolfriend of mine had one made against him before the judge threw it out of court, as the accuser kept changing her story.
But you don't need to have a strong opinion on whether false accusations are common or rare to examine the merits of this case. We can just look at the specifics. And based on the Times article linked, I think that most or all of the accusations are true. Specifically, the woman who attended a rape crisis centre immediately after the alleged assault (which can be verified). If her accusation was false, you would have expected her to make the accusation at the time, rather than only revealing it when interviewed by a journalist years later.
Brand is a (self-confessed) sex addict, and has slept with a lot of women. It's easy to imagine him getting so used to women saying yes that he crosses the line into sexual assault.
Crowstep
9mo ago
According to the chart in that article, Asian-Americans actually support racial quotas at college more than Euro-Americans (although both groups are still net disapproving).
You would think that as the people most disadvantaged by the quotas, they would be most opposed. I wonder if many of them are making the incorrect assumption that the race-based admissions policies are just benefiting minorities in general, rather than being targeted at specific racial groups.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think there's merit to the straw vegetarian/vegan trope. I don't think I've ever met a vegan in person who tried to convert or harangue me. However, I have seen them on social media.
I guess that the mediating effect of being in person causes people to tone down their beliefs for the sake of social harmony. One assumes that the growth of the web and social media is what's driving the great awakening, rather than any deeper ideological shift. Freddie deBoer did an interesting post about a book from the 90s that mocked PC types from that era. Their beliefs weren't that different from those of modern progressives.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
As a disinterested atheist, it seems pretty clear to me that the Vatican is just trying to slow-walk gay marriage. I'm sure they'll do it bit by bit, with just enough continuation between each change to avoid getting called out too heavily, but the end result will be rainbow flags in St Peter's Basilica.
I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church? Would they just be another protestant denomination at that point? Can they appoint their own Pope? Or get one of their own elected to the Papacy?
This Reddit thread is hilarious. A handful of posters acknowledging what this is, another handful criticising the Vatican for ambiguity (as if this wasn't part of the plan) and another group saying that it doesn't technically involve blessing gay unions so there's nothing to see here.
I'm a big supporter of Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis. Essentially, he argues that the way infants acquire language is by understanding messages in that language, and that adults have the capacity to do this as well. Instead of practicing grammar or memorising vocabulary, the adult learner's focus should be on getting as much input as possible that is at or slightly above their level of understanding. This YouTube video gives a good overview of the principle.
In practical terms, this means watching lots of easy videos, listening to podcasts etc in your target language. Then gradually increasing the difficulty as you understand more. Crucially, in order to avoid your mother tongue's sounds and grammar 'getting in the way' and cementing bad habits, speaking should be left very late. You want to get a good model of the language in your head before you try producing it. Reading should also come quite late to avoid the learner subvocalising incorrect pronunciation.
Fortunately, for Spanish this is very easy. I've been subscribed to Dreaming Spanish for a few months now and it's amazing how quickly my comprehension is improving. I've been combining this with some easy podcasts (Cuentame, Chill Spanish Listening Practice, Un Dia en Espanol). I was considering writing a post about language acquisition so I may do this later on, but for now I'd recommend looking at Dreaming Spanish's method page to get an idea of what it entails. There's also an active subreddit for it.
A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.
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