Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
1d ago
Choral arrangement of "Adagio for Strings" was some baller shit.
the claims about widespread sexual assaults been proven to have absolutely no sourcing or evidence beyond Israel propaganda.
Freddie again (Ctrl-F "hasbara").
See this article by Inverse Florida (Ctrl-F "rape").
Folamh3
2d ago
I found both of those articles very persuasive, and also this one: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-trump-proved-foreign-policy-experts
I didn't really participate in the Israel-Gaza megathreads while they were live, for the same reason I don't participate in threads about crypto or YIMBYism: it wasn't a topic I knew much about, and I wasn't especially interested in educating myself. As an undergrad I'd attended a pro-Palestine march or two, and harboured some lingering vague, passive, semi-ironic anti-Zionist sentiment as a consequence; I was vaguely aware of the general contours of the history of the Israeli state (Six-Day War, USS Liberty, compulsory military service for men and women); I'd seen Waltz with Bashir many years ago; I recognised the names Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and PLO; and was under the general impression that a two-state solution would be in everyone's best interests, although I had absolutely no idea what this would look like in practice. While the megathreads were live, the word "Nakba" would have meant nothing to me, and I can't even say with confidence that I knew at the time that Gaza and the West Bank were non-contiguous.
I think my attitude of willing blissful ignorance changed when @ymeskhout posted his article "The Jewish Conspiracy to Change my Mind" and its followup. Like me, he approached the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a position of relative ignorance, and after doing some research came away far more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians.
While Israel-Gaza may not have had much staying power on the Motte as the Current Thing™ (there were only four megathreads posted a week apart), it's been a fairly durable Current Thing™ in the popular discourse, and looks to remain that way for the foreseeable, perhaps at least as long as the Ukraine war did before it. As a result of this, it's hard to avoid encountering new perspectives on the conflict, and I'm finding myself reading countless articles about it every week. Wary of echo chamber dynamics, I'm making a conscious effort to force myself to read articles which are less sympathetic to the Israelis. I've found Freddie deBoer's takes unnecessarily combative and employing some rather queasy Fanon-esque mental gymnastics, but found Sam Kriss's articles on the topic to be some of the best of his I've read. I admire that he's demonstrated an ability to do what so many outspoken anti-Zionists seem unable or unwilling to do: express deep-seated sympathy for the Palestinian cause, up to and including denying the right of the state of Israel to exist, while also acknowledging the shocking brutality of Hamas's combat tactics and condemning them without reservation.
One such Kriss post, "Against the Brave", takes as its thesis that both the Israelis and Palestinians should be ashamed of the horrific, unspeakable cruelties they've inflicted on one another over the decades, and that a shared acknowledgement and a shared shame is the only path towards reconciliation. I noticed that this post was liked by @ymeskhout himself, which got me wondering if, seven months into this conflict, his attitudes have changed since he wrote his "Jewish Conspiracy" posts. More broadly, have any of you changed your minds on any key aspects of the conflict since October 7th? Did any of you think a two-state solution was viable within a generation, but no longer think so (or vice versa)? Has the conflict changed your opinion of Netanyahu, for better or worse?
Folamh3
3d ago
Fascinating rereading that post (I think that post was my introduction to the sub) and seeing all the people quoted who are still posting here semi-frequently.
Sure, but I don't think this phenomenon is unique to the US. There are three towns called New York in the UK too.
Folamh3
4d ago
Bill Bryson described one aspect of American culture as "London, England" syndrome. American newspaper headlines tend to provide both the city and the country, whereas their British counterparts only provide the city. He used this to illustrate a point that Americans aren't stupider than Brits, but rather their culture is set up in such a way that they aren't required to expend mental effort on simple cognitive tasks in the way that citizens of other nations are. In other words, the brain is a muscle - don't exercise it, and it atrophies.
Folamh3
5d ago
Earlier this month I saw a double-header of Desire and Johnny Jewel. Great fun, retro synth-pop vibes. Made me a little sad that such an obviously talented band are still coasting on the fact that their music was featured in the movie Drive over a decade ago.
In March I saw Sunn O))) live. A wholly unique experience I have no intention of ever repeating.
Folamh3
5d ago
What you're describing is precisely the reaction I had to the first Christie novel I read, Death in the Clouds. The summation didn't have me thinking "oh my God, the answer was staring me in the face all along, how did I fail to cop it?"; it had me thinking "well, sure, I guess that makes sense, sort of, if you say so". I felt like the killer could have turned out to be a completely different person and I would have found the ending exactly as satisfying, which is to say, not very.
By contrast, when I read my second Christie novel And Then There Were None, the summation seemed ingenious and completely logical, and I felt like there were enough clues that a sufficiently attentive reader could have figured it out well in advance. All that in addition to being a more genuinely terrifying work of fiction than most horror novels and stories I've read.
Folamh3
5d ago
Went to see it in January, having received several recommendations over the years. Far better than I expected it to be, definitely worth spending two or three hours if you're in the area.
Not many, but any marathon with a sufficiently large cash prize will have many Kenyans or Ethiopians competing, and the Boston Marathon is no exception. Since the start of this century, the men's and women's divisions saw a combined six winners who weren't Kenyan or Ethiopian (and one was an American citizen who was born in Ethiopia to Ethiopian parents).
Folamh3
12d ago
Like that George Carlin bit, that if Jesus was born 40 years ago in the US, Christians would be wearing tiny electric chairs around their necks.
Folamh3
12d ago
Terrorist bombing campaigns were more a feature of the Troubles than of the War of Independence. The IRA of the era largely favoured guerrilla warfare tactics, in which their combatants (in plain clothes) would assassinate a police officer or British spy and then melt into the crowds. In the Wikipedia article about the War of Independence, the word "bomb" only appears five times, one of which in reference to a Loyalist bombing attack and another to a planned bombing campaign on the British mainland which was never actually carried out. I'm not aware of a single instance of the IRA using any of Hamas's more unsavoury tactics (e.g. child suicide bombers, planting bombs with the deliberate intention of causing mass civilian casualties) during the War of Independence.
Folamh3
12d ago
STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT
Joking aside I have a real job and music is a passion project I pursue in my spare time.
Folamh3
13d ago
No, not particularly, because as I said above there is an asymmetry between first-mover violence and retaliation.
Which just leads to an endless game of temporal gerrymandering. Israel says that Hamas started the current war on October 7th, ergo Israel is entitled to retaliate. Hamas would have a rather different view of who really started it. Who should we believe? Personally, I'm inclined to lean more towards the Israelis.
Folamh3
13d ago
Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis.
This just seems like a fundamentally dishonest framing. Hamas fires dozens if not hundreds of rockets at Israel every year. These rockets are slapdash affairs with no guidance system to speak of, and the Iron Dome renders most (but not all) of them ineffective. Without the Iron Dome, it's obvious that Israel's casualties would be an order of magnitude higher at least.
Describing Hamas firing hundreds of rockets at Israel (most of which miss or are shot down before they can hurt anyone) as Palestine "de-escalating" the conflict - I mean, really? If you repeatedly shoot at someone, the fact that you're a lousy shot and/or they were wearing full body armour does nothing to exculpate you.
Folamh3
14d ago
I remember being stunned a decade ago seeing a guy bring his huge girlfriend or maybe wife to a cyclist restaurant right at the city limit. They drove there ofc. She was at least twice as heavy as he was and wearing tight fitting clothing.
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She's very lucky not to have a fat face (or at least her makeup is extremely flattering).
Folamh3
14d ago
No argument here. I'm not saying that men who like big girls don't exist (the BBW category on PornHub exists for a reason), I just doubt that they exist in sufficient numbers to significantly move the needle on the rate of loneliness/singledom/inceldom among fat women. Even if dating fat women was effectively "destigmatized", I can't imagine this would have any more than a marginal impact.
Folamh3
14d ago
Having had more than one close friend who struggled with anorexia, this jibes with my experience. At no point did "slimming down in order to become more attractive to men" ever enter into it.
Folamh3
14d ago
I got into a debate with some fat acceptance types on Substack, who were arguing that dating fat people is "stigmatised" i.e. there are lots of people who find fat people very attractive and would very much like to date them, but choose not to because dating fat people is seen as low-status.
I thought this was, frankly, a load of hogwash: fat people have a harder time getting a date because, all things being equal, people find fat people less attractive. I was trying to find this exact article to illustrate my point - the body types that RealDolls are manufactured in are practically the ultimate revealed preference. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what the article was called.
Folamh3
14d ago
The link to Gaashk's comment isn't working for me.
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