FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3hr ago
I don't know why we're giving bachelor's degrees to people who can't distinguish between astrology and astronomy
Interestingly, this confusion is common enough to seriously pollute survey results. The proportion of people who respond affirmatively to the question "do you believe in horoscopes and star signs?" is dramatically lower than the proportion who responds in the affirmative to "do you believe in astrology?"
No, that was the point I was making alright. I think the whole thing might come down to a Russell conjugation, or Trivers' theory of self-deception: if a strategy is beneficial to us, we unconsciously come up with reasons why it's also the pro-social thing to do. See also "yasslighting": I don't believe that talented actors are consciously thinking "if I encourage a bunch of talentless hacks to pursue careers in acting, it'll make it easier for me to secure roles", any more than attractive women are consciously thinking "if I encourage my friend to get an unflattering haircut and tell her it really suits her, it'll make me look more attractive by comparison". Of course in their own heads they'll tell themselves a story which casts their behaviour in a more favourable light e.g. "it would devastate Bob to be told he's a terrible actor, so instead I'll just give him some pat platitude about never giving up on your dreams"; "I don't want to hurt Alice's feelings, so I'll tell her her new haircut really suits her". But subconsciously, the practical benefit of these decisions to those who make them is obvious. It surely cannot be an accident that actors so rarely encourage their more talented peers not to give up on their dreams.
FtttG
3hr ago
They know that people respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".
Well, yes, they do. That doesn't mean that filling talentless hacks with false hope is a pro-social way to behave.
FtttG
4hr ago
The most infuriating thing about this court case is that there may be legal precedent for this in the EU:
McConnell gave birth to a son, publicly known just as SJ, in January 2018. When attempting to register the child's birth, the Registrar denied McConnell's petition to be listed as the child's father on the birth certificate, though allowing McConnell to use his current name. In September 2019, McConnell lost an application for judicial review to be described as father or parent on the child's birth certificate... The president declared that McConnell was legally the child's mother and thus possessed parental responsibility of the child accordingly. Because of this decision, McConnell could not be listed as the child's father on the birth certificate... McConnell announced his second pregnancy in August 2021,[12] with plans to give birth in Sweden in order to be listed as the child's father, rather than mother, on their birth certificate. His second child was born in the UK in January 2022 via emergency c-section.
If I'm reading this correctly, the second child was actually born in the UK rather than Sweden, meaning the same legal ruling would apply to the second child as the first. If the child had been born in Sweden, would the Swedish courts have ruled in McConnell's favour, and allowed her to be listed as the child's father? Apparently so.
FtttG
5hr ago
Alternative lifestyle choices work great - for alternative people
Aww thanks bae.
FtttG
23hr ago
Don't forget the spiritual successor.
FtttG
23hr ago
I'm trying to think of how explicitly racist someone would need to be before I would cut ties with them. Certainly I wouldn't want to be friends with someone if I found out that they had a swastika tattoo they had no intention of removing.
FtttG
1d ago
So much so even The Onion cracks jokes about it.
I watched Lanthimos's Poor Things in the cinema. I kind of liked it, but watching Emma Stone fuck assorted men for forty-five minutes isn't exactly my idea of a good time. I don't really understand the hype around Barry Keoghan (he was dreadful in The Banshees of Inisherin, the only thing I've seen him in), though I'd heard he was good in KSD.
Last night I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene with the girlfriend, which I saw exactly once in the cinema ~13 years ago. It's remarkable what a big impression it made on me: there were specific shots and line-readings in it that I remembered so clearly, as if I'd only seen the film the day before. Along with Kill List, probably the best film about a cult I've ever seen,* highly recommended.
The night before we watched Casino, which she'd seen before and I hadn't. Comparisons to Goodfellas are unavoidable (the two films' style, grammar and use of licensed songs are nigh-identical, and Joe Pesci might as well be playing the same character), but in some ways it's the superior film. When Henry and Karen got into ferocious arguments in Goodfellas, there was always this blackly comic undercurrent to it, a sense that you shouldn't take it too seriously. By contrast, I found it genuinely upsetting watching Sam and Ginger scream at each other in Casino, even though Ginger is arguably a more despicable character than Karen. This is primarily down to Sharon Stone's performance, which is committed and forceful: she's entirely believable as a booze- and coke-addled BPD nutcase, and in a way that somehow manages to come off as sympathetic rather than caricatured. Afterwards, I remarked that being exceptionally attractive as an actress can be something of a double-edged sword: on the one hand it does make it easier to secure roles, but it's easy to wind up pigeon-holed as just a pretty face, and in both of the previous Stone films I've seen (Total Recall and Basic Instinct; love the former, the latter is meh) she was essentially playing a one-dimensional femme fatale. But in Casino, she really demonstrated her acting chops.
*Yes, I'm including the original The Wicker Man.
I haven't thought about this in a systemic way, but if I knew for a fact that a friend of mine had done one of the below (without having been punished), I think I would have no choice but to cut ties with him:
- Murder
- Rape
- Wife-beating
- Anything involving the sexual exploitation of minors (including downloading CSAM)
I'm sure there are others that one might add to the list, those are just the first few that come to mind. If I knew for a fact that a friend of mine had stolen someone's wallet or defrauded someone out of a significant amount of money, I would probably cut ties with them as well (although in that case it would be more out of concern that he might do the same to me).
What if I don't know for sure? If my friend has been publicly accused of one of these serious crimes, but I personally think he's innocent, then I don't think I have any obligation to cut ties with him (indeed, probably the worst thing about #MeToo was the number of men who lost their livelihoods and entire social circles on the basis of allegations which were implausible on their face). If he hasn't been publicly accused, but rumours are starting to circulate, then I think one ought to do one's due diligence, investigate if the rumours sound credible, and escalate if so.
FtttG
1d ago
I disagree. Knowing that an acquaintance of yours is a pederast (or "merely" an ephebophile) and refusing to report him or cut ties with him reflects badly on you, even if it's not legally actionable, and this social convention long predates wokeness.
FtttG
2d ago
Have killed the third and final Chosen in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. Now back to the main storyline.
FtttG
4d ago
But I wasn't criticising the people bringing up the fact that Good was a committed activist. I was criticising the people bringing up her prior criminal record, which had nothing to do with her political activism.
If it turned out that he had been a serial killer or the reincarnation of Christ, it would still be manslaughter.
I made the same argument about the people trying to dig up dirt on Renee Good. Either it was a good shoot (no pun intended), or it wasn't. Her prior criminal record (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with it.
FtttG
5d ago
I think I saw someone on Substack claiming that, with Pretti being caught on video violently engaging with police officers twice in the space of a week, it's possible that he was depressed and attempting to commit suicide by cop. Would that strike any of you as a plausible hypothesis?
I think the Twitter poster's point is that these anti-ICE protests are being widely represented in the popular media as spontaneous grassroots affairs, when in fact they are much more organised and coordinated than that. Do spontaneous grassroots protests organically converge on "specialisation of labour", vetting the people attending the protest, purging chat history so there's no digital paper trail? Not in my experience. If his assessment of how these protests are being organised and coordinated is accurate (and you aren't disputing that it is, merely that the fact that they are is worthy of comment), they sound materially different from a great many leftist protest movements, many of which inevitably degenerate into directionless rioting and/or People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front squabbling.
FtttG
6d ago
I've been meaning to make a survey for Motte users which I should post.
Do it! I love doing surveys.
FtttG
6d ago
Ahhh. Yes, I'm Irish.
For example, we were discussing her vegetable garden at home, and I asked her what her favorite vegetable from it was. Answer: I don't know. What she wanted to study: I don't know. What she liked to do for fun. Many things.
Ugh, I'm feeling vicariously frustrated just reading about it. Some people have like negative conversational skills.
It's also interesting considering how students might square this with the messages they receive in their other classes. In both secondary and primary school, a lot of the material we covered preached the virtues of civil disobedience, using the canonical examples of MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi and to a lesser extent the suffragettes. I can't imagine present-day British schoolchildren are receiving fewer lessons about MLK et al. than my generation did, and it isn't hard to imagine how this could induce a sensation of cognitive dissonance: history class at 10 a.m., in which you learn the importance of civil disobedience against clearly unjust laws; followed immediately by civics class at 11, in which you learn that a good British subject follows all laws to the letter, no matter how ridiculous they are on their face. (Being arrested for watching a political video?)
It's another reminder of how woke people reflexively arrogate to themselves a monopoly on virtue. Paul Graham once posed a rhetorical question to his students: "do you hold any opinions which you would feel uncomfortable expressing in front of any of your friends or family?" If you answer in the negative, you're most likely a conformist, and it stands to reason that if you'd lived in the antebellum south or Nazi Germany, you would have gone along with what everyone was doing. It's easy to be an Oskar Schindler in hindsight.
Woke apparatchiks in the British civil service commend to the high heavens historical examples of civil disobedience against Jim Crow etc., but this does not inspire in them any methodic doubt in whether any modern laws are unjust. The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.
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