FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5hr ago
How is failure to “fight the decline” cowardly?
That almost sounds like a tautological statement. If something is getting worse over time, you're in a position where you could do something to arrest that decline, and you choose not to – well, maybe not "cowardly" by definition, but do we have any positive adjectives for the person who makes that choice? Selfish? Lazy? Shiftless? More-than-me-job's-worth? Above my pay grade? Head in the sand?
FtttG
7hr ago
Not that I'm aware of. I've been meaning to watch it for a long time. Have you seen it? Is it any good?
It honestly feels like the ceasefire in Gaza has only incensed widespread Irish antisemitism* even further. Two stories from this week:
For the Americans, the Eurovision Song Contest is a musical competition held every year, hosted by the European Broadcasting Union, in which musical acts representing various nations get up and perform gloriously garish and tacky pop songs. Despite the name and the majority of the competitors being European, countries from outside of Europe are eligible to compete, and Australia and Azerbaijan have taken part at various points over the years. Israel's participation has always been controversial, but it kicked into overdrive since the start of the war in Gaza two years ago. Israel placed second in this year's popular vote, an announcement which was immediately met by accusations of vote-rigging (not sure how that's supposed to work but whatever). Ireland has now joined Spain and the Netherlands in boycotting next year's contest in protest over Israel being allowed to participate.
As I mentioned many months ago, there's a small park in Dublin named after Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast, grew up in Dublin and went on to serve as Israel's sixth president. Some time ago there was a social media campaign to rename the park after Hind Rajab. After much discussion, this motion has been officially vetoed by Dublin City Council.
I no longer find it credible that these campaigns and demands are motivated solely by sympathy with the people of Palestine and horror at the war in Gaza. The level of ambient hostility towards anything with the most tangential connection to Israel just seems wholly disproportionate to me. As Eamonn Mac Donnchadha notes in the second article linked above, no other nationality is subjected to this treatment: Pakistanis and Chinese people in Ireland are not habitually called upon to denounce the behaviour of the governments of their home countries. The ongoing Uyghur genocide did not prevent Dublin City Council from observing Chinese New Year.
It's starting to make me really uncomfortable. We should have left these attitudes in the 1940s, and yet eighty years later we're still falling back on the same familiar tropes of cunning, conniving Juden Zionists manipulating public opinion from behind the curtain. My own mother (generally a very sensible woman) recently saw a movie about the Israeli hostage situation in 1972 and immediately jumped to the conclusion that those monstrous Jews Zionists had financed the movie's production in order to curry favour for their genocide in Gaza. A cursory Google quickly showed that the movie went into production months prior to the October 7th attacks – but then, I suppose those were staged by Shin Bet and Mossad as a false flag, weren't they? It never bottoms out.
*I'd have been hesitant to label this behaviour as such two years ago, but honestly, at this point it's become so deranged that no other word seems appropriate.
FtttG
9hr ago
Because I wanted to avoid people saying I was begging the question by simply saying "better" and taking it for granted that kinder laws are better.
That's exactly how your original comment came off to me.
Also you seem to have an unorthodox definition of "kind".
FtttG
10hr ago
Interesting. Imagine four people who call themselves Catholic:
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Alice goes to Mass every day, observes the Sabbath, and follows every papal edict to the letter.
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Bob professes to believe every papal edict and tenet of his faith – but in practice, he never goes to Mass, doesn't observe the Sabbath, eats meat on Fridays, doesn't give up anything for Lent etc.
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Carol goes to Mass every day, observes the Sabbath, gives something up for Lent etc. – but her actual worldview is functionally indistinguishable from any of her woke friends, which entails major doctrinal disagreements with the Church on abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, divorce etc. She also doesn't believe in transubstantiation.
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Like Bob, David is non-observant, and like Carol he has major doctrinal disagreements with the Church, including disbelieving transubstantiation (I think this accurately describes an absolute majority of nominal Irish Catholics).
I'm sure most people would say that Alice is the "most" Catholic, or most "authentically" Catholic, or a "central example" of what we call Catholic. Equally, most people would say that David is only nominally Catholic, neither walking the walk nor talking the talk.
I'm torn on whether Bob is "more" Catholic than Carol, or vice versa. On the one hand, Carol "walks the walk" in making at least some of the sacrifices her faith demands of her, including getting up early on Sundays. On the other hand, if Catholicism is a belief system first and foremost, then holding the correct beliefs ought to be seen as far more important as following the rituals – observing the rituals when you don't believe in any of the beliefs underpinning them strikes me as sort of insincere and performative.
Authentic membership in a religion is a special case, as it's usually determined based on privately-held beliefs and active, observable behaviour. For a lot of the other categories I discussed above, authenticity is often based on only one or the other. While support for animal rights and opposition to factory farming are beliefs commonly held by vegetarians, they're not generally considered rule-in criteria: as far as I'm concerned, anyone who doesn't eat meat is a vegetarian, regardless of their worldview. Saying "I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat meat, but I don't really have a problem with factory farming" doesn't sound incoherent to me in the way that "I'm Catholic and I go to Mass, but I don't believe in transubstantiation" does.
FtttG
11hr ago
Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.
Your use of the word "kinder" is rather a transparent applause light. I don't doubt that disabled lawmakers would be more likely to pass laws or make legal judgements which will favour the interests of disabled people (at least in the short-term), but I'm not at all persuaded that this would be beneficial for society at large.
I mean, sure, if a country which passed a law which made it illegal for an employer to fire anyone with a disability, I guess this would be "kinder" to any currently gainfully employed disabled people. But I would have a hard time describing such a law as "better" legislation than what a reasonable person would come up with.
FtttG
12hr ago
I agree that "street smarts" means more than that, traditionally referring to métis in the Seeing Like a State sense (in contrast to we "rationalist" mistake-theorist quokkas who can't quite believe people would go on the internet and tell lies, or try to take advantage of others).
But it's surprising how often the term gets used in a manner indistinguishable from the usage Malcolm outlined above. It sort of reminds me of those people who "discovered this cool life hack", which amounts to them lying and cheating other people and abusing the social contract. "I discovered this cool life hack: if you print off a fake handicapped parking permit, most people won't bother to check and you can park in the handicapped spaces." Hate to break it to you dude, but the reason we aren't doing that isn't because we didn't think of it.
FtttG
13hr ago
This is my new favourite country song. For the full experience, read the lyrics.
FtttG
13hr ago
Only half of self identified evangelicals attend church weekly.
On this topic in particular: a survey conducted in Ireland over a decade ago found that nearly two-thirds of self-identified Catholics don't believe that the communion wafer literally transforms into the body of Christ.
Never mind the fact that they're non-observant: from a theological perspective, most Irish Catholics are Protestant in all but name. And that's not even mentioning how many of them voted to legalise abortion and gay marriage.
FtttG
13hr ago
It's funny: I know this isn't the first time I've heard of this concept, and yet every time I come across it, I immediately think "is this a Scientology thing?" I don't know why.
FtttG
13hr ago
Yeah, that's fair enough. If no one likes you (even if it's not reciprocated), you have no business calling yourself charismatic.
You're right that a disproportionate number of examples in my post were left-coded, which was unfair of me. In my defense, at the time of writing I was sincerely thinking of "identifying as a good person even though you've never done anything good" as a bipartisan phenomenon. When we hear a term like "performative virtue signalling" our mind reflexively goes to AWFL women sharing black squares on Instagram, but it's equally applicable to boomer wine aunts who share posts on their Facebook pages about violent criminals coupled with demands that the UK "bring back hanging". When it comes to slave morality, the kinds of people described in Hillbilly Elegy are just as prone to self-destructive crabs-in-a-bucket begrudgery as the residents of any urban ghetto. And a lurid fixation on the nastiest crimes committed by others (as a means of downplaying one's own moral shortcomings) can and does afflict anyone regardless of tribal or political affiliation.
As for the self-examination piece: well, earlier this year I released a solo album on an actual legit indie record label, and completed an (as yet unpublished) novel — and yet I would still feel hesitant to describe myself as a "musician" or a "writer". (I'm not saying you can't call yourself one of these things until you make a living from it, but it has to be a major part of your lifestyle, not just a hobby.) I have no illusions about having enjoyed a privileged middle-class upbringing (attempting to pass oneself off as coming from a more underprivileged background than you really did — class-Dolezalism — is endemic in Ireland and the UK, and equally common regardless of political stripe), although with the qualification that I did earn a partial scholarship to my private secondary school. In the past I had a very bad habit of really "identifying" with the fact that I'd been diagnosed with depression as a convenient excuse for my various shortcomings (ethical and otherwise), but I don't do this anymore and can't honestly say I've suffered from depression for many years, if I ever did. Offhand, I truly can't think of any way I habitually describe myself without "walking the walk" or meeting the traditional criteria for such a designation.
As for the "identifying as a good person" bit: the main reason I abhor performative virtue signalling of all stripes is because it reduces the preconditions for being a "good person" to simply holding the "correct" opinions, making pro-social actions completely irrelevant to the moral calculus. To give a current example: over the past two years I've donated somewhere in the region of €1,700 to assistance for Gaza (via charitable foundations such as Médecins sans Frontières, Medical Aid for Palestine and Realign for Palestine) — not a vast sum, either in absolute terms or as a percentage of my income, and yet I can only assume it's a damn sight more than most of the people accusing Israel of genocide have donated over the same period, by either metric. (As I've mentioned before, there are few things that infuriate me more than being lectured and scolded about how I ought to do more to help the less fortunate — by a person who is doing a damn sight less to help the less fortunate than I am.) The belief seems to be that, because I'm not terribly sympathetic to the cause of Palestinian statehood and acknowledge Israel's right to exist, I am forever and always unclean, whereas a person who holds the "correct" opinions on this cause is therefore One of the Good Ones, regardless of what actions they undertake. My friends and family members won't actually come out and say that Alice (who has the "correct" opinions on the Jewish Israel Question, but who hasn't donated a penny to helping the people of Gaza) is morally superior to Bob (who's donated a decent chunk of cheddar to helping the people of Gaza, but who acknowledges Israel's right to exist, doesn't think they're committing a genocide [while acknowledging they've committed war crimes], has minimal sympathy for the cause of Palestinian statehood and zero sympathy for Hamas) — but it's abundantly clear that's what they believe, at least subconsciously. It seems at some point the idea that "well, he hasn't done much, but he means well: at least his heart's in the right place" was surreptitiously supplanted with "because his heart's in the right place, he has therefore discharged his moral responsibilities and no longer needs to lift a finger to help others — he is already One of the Good Ones".
To be a good person, you have to do good things: people's lives are saved with bandages and splints, not retweets and vibes.
FtttG
15hr ago
By contrast, you have the person who loudly proclaims their emotional intelligence, such a person almost certainly lacks emotional intelligence as that is not a very emotionally intelligent thing to say to people.
True, and weirdly enough, these people bear a strong familial resemblance to those people who seem extremely invested in their IQ score or MENSA membership, as a substitute for their paucity of actual intellectual achievements. Genuinely smart people don't care about their IQ score or what fruity little club they're a member of: they demonstrate their intelligence through their actions.
Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense.
My favourite critique of this concept came from Malcolm in the Middle:
Ida: Your pretty words don't hide your fear.
Malcolm: What?
Ida: You are afraid of the next trial because it is a test of intelligence. You are afraid to find out who is really the smart one in the family. He goes around with his nose in a book, sucking in facts. He doesn't have what we have. You and I have street smarts.
Malcolm: Oh, here we go. Every moron who's willing to act like a criminal is loaded with street smarts. Well, let me tell you something, Grandma, you're either smart or you're not. Saying you have street smarts just means you're willing to do things that smart, sensitive people are too decent to do. That's not a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's not!
FtttG
16hr ago
The person who talks about their intense charisma but has no friends
I mostly agree, but I don't necessarily consider these two in tension with one another. Consider the archetypal charming psycho-/socio-path in fiction, who could maintain friendships and relationships if he wanted to, but doesn't see any value in doing so, and yet is unquestionably adept at charming and manipulating people in the short-term (e.g. con artists, cads, politicians with shit-eating grins).
I suppose this hinges on the question of what "charisma" means. To take a stab at it, I'd say it means the ability to make people like you, feel at ease around you, trust you — and especially the ability to do this in a very short timeframe. When considered as a goal-oriented skill, it's the ability to get people to do things for you because they find you prestigious rather than dominant. I see no reason why a person couldn't be good at this (even exceptionally good at it) and also have no use for friends, approaching every interpersonal relationship as a mark to be exploited.
FtttG
16hr ago
Even if we were to grant that your thesis were true, there's the weird human psychology thing where telling people it's true can have certain self-fulfilling prophesy effects
You mean stereotype threat?
In any case, I'm sceptical about whether the extremely mentally disabled people I'm describing are even capable of the reasoning required to understand the concept of being unintelligent on multiple axes, never mind fall victim to the self-fulfilling prophecy it implies. If you're referring to 90 IQ people who read this comment and decide there's no point in trying any more, that's not the category of person I'm referring to.
FtttG
17hr ago
A quick Google led me to this article. A study of 11,399 adults of varying diets were recruited from a representative group of Americans. Five out of six people who give up meat eventually abandon vegetarianism. Vegans are less likely to backslide than vegetarians (70% vegans, 86% of vegetarians).
But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.
This idea of "you are smart even though you don't do anything smart" reminds me of a book Freddie deBoer reviewed, Amy Lutz's Chasing the Intact Mind. From reading the review, Lutz's thesis appears to be that the parents of severely mentally disabled children often seem to believe (explicitly or implicitly) that, while their non-verbal autistic or cerebral palsied etc. child gives no outward appearance of engaging in high-level cognition of any kind, somewhere inside there's an "intact" mind which is fully conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level reasoning. Their desperation to communicate with this "intact mind" leads them down a range of garden paths, such as pseudoscientific nonsense like facilitated communication: a technique wherein a non-verbal person can purportedly communicate through an intermediary. Countless studies have demonstrated that facilitated communication is bunk, the product of wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect: the non-verbal person is effectively being used as a Ouija board. The belief in an "intact mind" residing somewhere inside the body of a non-verbal or even vegetative person amounts to a modern form of mind-body dualism.
(Some people might be tempted to point to the existence of people with locked-in syndrome, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, as a counter-example. The difference here is that Bauby was unambiguously capable of high-level cognition prior to the stroke which caused his condition, living an entirely independent life; and after the stroke his communication did not need to be "facilitated" in the manner described above. Contrast this with a child who has never given any indication of higher-level brain function.)
I wonder if there's a less extreme version of the same phenomenon going on here. Much as proponents of the "intact mind" believe that every human being is equally conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level cognition, and some people just need more accommodations to express themselves than others — perhaps by the same token there are people who believe that everyone is born equally intelligent, and some people just need more accommodations to express that intelligence than others (or they're only intelligent in a nonstandard domain unrelated to verbal or numerical reasoning).
There are several obvious retorts to this worldview:
- If Bob takes three hours to do what Alice can do in two; or if Bob can score a C in an exam provided he is allowed to sit it in a quiet room containing only himself and an invigilator, while Alice can ace it while sitting in a noisy exam hall surrounded by hundreds of her classmates — then Alice just is more intelligent than Bob, almost by definition.
- "Multiple intelligences" strikes me as something of a motte-and-bailey argument. No one disputes that some people are bad at maths and good at music, or shape-rotators but not wordcels. I think the degree to which talent in one domain is orthogonal to talent in other domains has been vastly overstated: I think you would have a very hard time locating someone who scores in the 90th percentile of numerical reasoning but the 10th percentile of verbal reasoning. (The whole concept seems very prone to Berkson's paradox.) Likewise, we can debate how many distinct "intelligences" there really are: while social skills are definitely a thing, I'm sceptical of how useful a category "emotional intelligence" is, and I've even seen straight-faced claims that "spiritual intelligence" is a meaningful concept in an undergrad psychology textbook. But even if we grant that all of the proposed intelligences really exist and are not strongly correlated with one another (such that you can be good at one and bad at another): the law of averages nonetheless dictates that there are bound to be people who are unintelligent on every possible axis. Bad with numbers, bad with words, can't sing, physically uncoordinated, lacking in social skills, lacking in self-awareness and so on and so forth. I say "the law of averages dictates" like I'm describing some statistical certainty I've never personally observed, but obviously if you want to see the kind of person I'm describing, you just need to walk down to your nearest school for developmentally disabled children. None of these children will be winning Nobels, Grammys or Olympic gold medals any time soon, no matter how many accommodations we make for them.
FtttG
1d ago
You could try a magnesium supplement shortly before bed. Don't overdo it though, maybe twice a week at most.
I hope this isn't an obvious suggestion but have you tried cutting out caffeine? I once went a month without drinking any caffeinated beverages: the first week was a challenge, but after that I felt no less alert and focused during the day, and slept like a baby through the night.
Avoid drinking anything an hour before bed, just in case you feel the urge to pee during the night.
In the winter months it gets dark here no later than 4:30. My girlfriend was feeling the pinch of seasonal affective disorder more than I was, so we bought a sun lamp. It's about the size of an iPad and sits on your desk.
I cannot believe how effective it is: the impact is (if you'll pardon the pun) night and day. I try to sit in front of it for as little as half an hour (longer if possible) and it makes a huge difference to my mood, energy levels and focus. Well worth the expense if you find yourself feeling run down in winter. Will update with the specific model tomorrow morning.
FtttG
1d ago
My point is that the misuse of the labels is not always exclusively due to TLP's narcissism theory.
Agreed, and I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was using it as an example of a once-strict identity category for which the boundaries seem to have become more porous over time.
Performance-enhancing drugs can also fuck up your judgement when abused. See DOGE, FTX among many others.
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