Folamh3
User ID: 1175
I think it's fair to acknowledge fat activists aren't just fantasizing about the shortcomings of the medical system. Doctors can sometimes focus on obesity at the expense of other issues. I've personally seen an obese family member's tumor go undiagnosed for a troubling amount of time, because the doctors all assumed her symptoms were weight-related. But I'm skeptical of the activist framing that this is all due to fat oppression and discrimination. Rather, doctors begin with the simpler or more common explanation, and obesity is a) very common and b) affects almost all body systems.
This is the standard "chasing zebras" narrative in medicine, and I've honestly never given it much serious consideration. We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money. It seems the height of narcissism to demand that healthcare professionals disregard their training and ignore statistical fact (in fact, to demand that healthcare professionals administer substandard care to their patients) just because it makes some of them feel sad. (See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)
It's also demeaning to feel like you're in for a scolding every time you interact with the medical system, and this can discourage people from getting checked out.
Sure, but the same is true of smokers, drinkers, drug addicts etc. and no one expects me to take the Alcoholic Acceptance movement seriously or check my Drinks-In-Moderation Privilege.
Folamh3
10mo ago
Another example: "Rape victim." For the purposes of access to rape counseling services, "rape victim" is often defined as anyone who thinks she has been raped, even if, objectively, she has not been. The key there is "for the purposes of access to rape counseling services"; apparently, those who make such decisions deem it sound public policy to define membership in the group, "rape victim" to be based purely on self-identification.
I don't think this is analogous at all. By your argument, rape counselling services are defining "rape victim" more or less as follows: "a rape victim is a person who believes that they were orally, vaginally or anally penetrated without their consent". The term is defined by reference to a specific factual belief the individual in question does or does not hold (without passing judgement on whether that belief is true).
By contrast, "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman" tells you exactly nothing about what the term "woman" means. It is, as /u/arjin_ferman points out, recursive: "a woman is a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a..."
Women are not a hive mind: it would be very surprising indeed if literally every woman in the entire world would be disgusted by Skookum as he currently exists. There's no accounting for taste: I routinely see an ugly and/or overweight man walking down the street holding hands with a plain or even attractive woman. Moreover, if a given woman is disgusted by @SkookumTree as he currently exists, I very much doubt that her opinion of him will significantly change once she learns that he went on a hike in Alaska. (If anything they might be even more repulsed: I can't imagine that spending two months completely alone without interacting with another soul will do much for the social skills of someone who already seems to consider himself rather socially awkward.) I wasn't asking why Skookum thinks (certain) women are disgusted by him - I was asking why he himself thinks that he's disgusting for merely wanting to be in a relationship. If he thinks that he's disgusting because he wants a relationship even though he hasn't "earned the right" to want one by proving his masculinity - well, that implies that the vast majority of modern men are disgusting, as most of us haven't fought in a war or gone hiking in Alaska or etc.. That includes most of the men who post on this site: I'm certainly not a hyper-masculine Chad, and I've never been to war or similar. If Skookum literally believes that any man who wants to be in a relationship without having proved his masculinity is "disgusting" and "hypocritical", I wish he would just come out and say "I am disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship, and so are most of you", rather than dancing around the issue by self-pityingly asserting that he is disgusting and hypocritical, but dodging the question of who else is according to his metrics.
So, in times of modern plenty, and when women have more options outside of marriage and "settling," why not dispose of at least the worst of disposable males, or at least assist them in disposing of themselves?
Skookum is able-bodied, physically strong (able to deadlift a perfectly respectable 275 pounds and squat 245, the latter of which far exceeds my PR) and intelligent enough to be training to be a doctor. Any criteria of "the worst of the disposable males" which includes him would probably include you. And, based on your weird comment history, on the off-chance it turns out that you're really Skookum using an alt account, I will be very annoyed by the run-around.
Folamh3
4mo ago
The other night my father rhetorically asked "I feel like asking Netanyahu, 'when has a terrorist group ever been defeated militarily?"
I immediately said "In Sri Lanka in 2009?" The reason it occurred to me was because of @CriticalDuty's write-up here.
Naturally, my father immediately commenced moving the goalposts of the question.
Out of curiosity, are there any other recent examples of terrorist groups being defeated militarily?
What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best ' older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.
The same here, only the tabloids and alternative media specified that the attacker was Algerian; "respectable" outlets like The Journal, the Times and the Independent don't consider his nationality or ethnicity worth mentioning at all. Whenever there's a horrible unprovoked crime like this, you can practically smell the "please let the assailant be Irish" energy emanating from broadsheet journalists and the PMC types on X and Reddit. I saw a comment about the stabbing on the /r/ireland subreddit, some dude said something to the effect of "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
Some years ago (probably on the old subreddit) I pointed out that this journalistic approach has a limited shelf life. Sooner or later, every reader will cotton on to the fact that whenever the MSM report on a violent crime committed by a white native man, his skin colour will be mentioned prominently (either in the headline or the lede); ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim). (See also Scott's post, section IV, about how banning employers from asking interviewees about their criminal record actually decreased the rate at which employers hired black candidates.) They're going to have to come up with a different method for routing around this problem sooner or later. Perhaps five years from now, news articles will read "an assailant stabbed a victim" without mentioning any identity characteristics about either person at all.
Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give creedance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?
Well this is the thing: for modern broadsheet journalists, contempt for the common man is built into their psyche. If you've fully internalised the idea that any uneducated person can become radicalised overnight by exposure to far-right disinformation and "fake news" - well, imagine how much more potent an effect information and real news might have. The average journalist no longer sees their job as one of informing the public but educating it, and if that means selectively leaving the reader in the dark about certain pertinent facts, so be it. (Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.) Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions, so they resort to this circuitous approach of informing the reader that Alice has transphobic™ opinions (or quoting a woke person who thinks Alice has transphobic opinions i.e. "delegated defamation") without actually telling the reader what those opinions are and allowing them to draw their own conclusions as to whether "transphobic" is an accurate characterisation.
'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.
If you mean to imply that "the average male is stronger and faster than 99% of females" is as obviously ridiculous an assertion as "African savages are incapable of civilization and self-rule" - well, I don't know what to tell you. That you're wrong? That you're exactly as wrong as the last time as we talked about this stuff, when you offered some extremely weak arguments in favour of the hypothesis that "trans women have no competitive advantage over females", I pointed out (at length) how weak your arguments were, you said you were going to reply and then didn't?
Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg. You can claim that they are anti-lgbt and justified, if that's the hill you want to die on. But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.
To be pedantic, these laws mostly seem anti-T, not anti-LGBT. The only ones which maybe could be classified as anti-LGB are the ones about sex ed, and even then it's a reach. Good luck explaining to me how gay men are negatively impacted by bans on male athletes competing in female sporting events, or lesbians by bans on males using female bathrooms. There are quite a few lesbians who support laws banning males from using female bathrooms, if you haven't already noticed.
I'm curious where and when it was decided that everyone has the "right" to compete in sporting events which accord with that person's claimed gender identity. On the contrary: everyone has the right to compete in sporting events for their sex, and legislation of this type does nothing to restrict the ability of trans women or girls from exercising that right.
If commitment to being an "ally" requires me to pretend that there's no innate difference between male and female athletic ability, and all of the female athletes complaining about being ruthlessly outcompeted by male athletes who "discovered" that they're trans all of five minutes ago - those uppity women just need to stop whining and Git Gud: then yes, this is the hill I want to die on, thanks for asking. The idea that any policy which is marketed as pro-LGBTQ is automatically a good policy is such a silly and juvenile way of looking at the world.
And while I suspect it's just true that police in those state are actually less likely to punish you - or will punish you less harshly - for that type of crime, I'm confident that a good portion of the people who want to commit those crimes will hear about their local government passing anti-lgbt laws and take that as a sign that the law is on their side and will treat them kindly if they go ahead.
Curious, then, that states which didn't pass anti-LGBT laws saw far greater spikes in anti-LGBT hate crimes during the period under discussion than states which did. As I went to great pains to demonstrate in the post that you're replying to.
No fucking way did Oppenheimer deserve Best Picture. Gwan the boy Cillian for nabbing Best Actor though, doing Cork proud.
I think that neither gays nor their straight allies are aware of both sides of this- gays that it's not considered acceptable to simulate sex in public in the straight community, straight allies that the gay community doesn't care about such things or understand why anyone would.
Last year I watched the movie Cruising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruising_(film)) from 1980 (well worth a watch if you haven't seen it, it's stylish, thrilling and unpredictable). The film concerns a serial killer active in New York's gay community, so to track him down Al Pacino goes undercover, spending night after night in leather bars and inhaling poppers. The scale of the perversion he witnesses (e.g. looking on with barely concealed revulsion as a man, lying supine on a table in the middle of a club, gets fisted by another man while a captive audience watches) affects him psychologically and makes it impossible for him to perform with his girlfriend.
I was telling my brother about the movie and he said "I reckon there are a lot of very mainstream progressive types who really believe that gay men and gay couples are no different than straight men and straight couples aside from the objects of their attraction, and if they knew the kind of sexual behaviour which was seen as completely normal in the gay community, they'd be horrified."
The film was criticised as homophobic both during production and upon release, to the point that gay activists tracked down where the location shooting was taking place and blew air horns nearby so that the audio would be unusable. Watching the film, I honestly wasn't sure why it inspired such ire. I don't think it's homophobic to correctly observe (as Cruising does) that promiscuity, casual sex and chemsex are extremely normalised in the gay community. Most straight people (and lesbians) have never had sex in a bathroom stall with someone they met ten minutes earlier and whose name they don't know - but if you were a gay man and you said you'd never done that, in my experience most gay men would look at you like you'd two heads.
Folamh3
1yr ago
While in this community we generally understand the term "gender" exclusively to refer to gender identity and the term "sex" exclusively to refer to anatomical sex, normies generally use the two terms interchangeably, and will not be impressed or persuaded by this rhetorical gesture. Rowling's "crime" is that she thinks that there are instances in which a person's anatomical sex is more important than their gender identity, which was sufficient to get her tarred as transphobic.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I was always under the impression that most people understand the terms "man" and "woman" to refer to one's gender, and "male" and "female" to refer to one's sex. The more I discuss this issue, the more I start to think that this distinction is not as widely employed as I previously believed. Lots of people use "man" and "male" interchangeably to refer to sex or gender, without endorsing the view that sex is mutable. You'll see people employing circumlocutions like "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman but is biologically/anatomically male"; if "male" was understood to exclusively refer to sex, the qualifiers "biologically" or "anatomically" would be redundant. This confusion over terminology is widespread enough to seriously affect survey results and the interpretation thereof:
Turban et al.’s most important claims rely on sex ratios, or what percentages of trans kids are biologically male versus female. They argue that since in 2017 and 2019 the ratio still favored natal males, this is evidence against ROGD. I think this reasoning is totally wrong, especially given that over this period the ratio shifted in the direction ROGD theorists would predict, but the bigger problem is we don’t actually have any idea what the real sex ratios are here.
The data set in question simply asks respondents whether they are transgender and “What is your sex?” — not “sex assigned at birth” or “biological sex” or other, more specific language. So the question is how a trans person responds when you ask them their “sex.”
The consensus, before this study was published, appeared to be that there’s simply no good, reliable way to know whether a trans person answering this specific question is referring to their biological sex versus their gender identity, which, for a trans person, are likely to have opposite answers. This is a widely known issue in this data set and this sort of research. For example, one group of researchers relying on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey demurred from making any claims pegged to respondents’ biological sex in their paper: “Because it is unclear whether transgender students’ responses to the sex question reflected their sex or gender identity, this analysis could not further disaggregate transgender students.”
I used to work with a girl who wrote like this. We had to co-write reports once a month, and she was constantly talking about how "the Government decisions have made a major impact on the Company's ability to do business" or whatever. I was so relieved when she left the company and I could write the reports properly.
There's a certain species of midwit who seems to think that any Noun or Adjective which seems Important in some way must be capitalised.
Criticised in one of my favourite books How Not to Write a Novel (which was published in 2008, so obviously it was fairly common in unpublished fiction even then):
Similarly, some writers, displaying either an admirable knowledge of sixteenth-century English literature or a fondness for the German way of doing things, will Capitalize Important Nouns, or Anything Else that seems Significant. (This is not a reference to those writers participating in the current vogue for self-conscious Ironic Capitalization; we are speaking here to those writers who assume that Love and Honor deserve initial capitals because they are Eternally Important.)
Folamh3
1mo ago
I have to be honest, I never really understood what you folks saw in that guy. Even aside from his personal antagonism (which I found very trying) his comments just seemed to be the same three or four points repeated ad nauseum.
The Leviathan-shaped hole. HBD is a normative belief, not an empirical belief. Democrats are the real racists. Liberals think that's air they're breathing now. Mix and match as necessary, throw in some stories that don't go anywhere and you've got the full package.
If I want to help the ordinary Gazans caught in the middle of the airstrikes, but really didn't want to provide any military aid to Hamas, what would be a good charitable organisation to donate to?
Non-facetious answers only, please.
Folamh3
8mo ago
Probably not.
Why? By your logic the man's father was unable to consent because he was in a coma. I've read enough feminist discourse about how "Sleeping Beauty" promotes rape culture to know how I'm supposed to interpret this situation.
What's wrong with the men these days that people think this is the only way they will behave?
I don't think there's anything wrong with "the men" these days that wasn't wrong with them 50, 100, 200 or 500 years ago. Men have always done things analogous to this prior to the existence of dating apps or smartphones or even telephones. I think we have plenty of reason to believe that men are behaving much better today than they did in the past - I'm sure the Australian statistics for sexual assault over the last hundred years would bear that out. [EDIT: not over the last thirty years, per /u/AshLael. Would still like to see a chart of the last hundred years.]
I don't think the people behind this bill have exhausted every possible course of action to attempt to remedy this problem and are now throwing up their hands in defeat and trying to legislate the problem out of existence. I think these people are petty authoritarians who want the state to intervene and control every facet of human behaviour. I think trying to legislate the problem out of existence was a first resort for them, not a last resort.
Twenty years ago we would have said that a man who's overly pushy and bad at reading signals needs to learn a bit of empathy and improve his social skills - not locked up. From a rehabilitative perspective, I have a hard time believing that spending a few months in jail for the crime of sending a few rude texts would make a man more respectful towards women.
Folamh3
5d ago
I went into a shop to buy a blouse my girlfriend wanted. The cashier said "it's 10% off if you sign up to our mailing list". I said "sure" and she told me to scan the QR code. It brought me to a website in which I had to enter my email address. I quickly fired up temp-mail to generate a burner email address, entered that in the field, and showed the cashier that I'd signed up. 10% discount applied.
Have I done something morally wrong?
Folamh3
1mo ago
The "radical fringe" which is neither
What the 2024 referendum says about modern Irish political alignments
I
Last Friday, Ireland held its fifth constitutional referendum is less than a decade. The referendum concerned two amendments to the Irish constitution which, if successful, stood to move Ireland in a dramatically more socially progressive direction.
The first proposed amendment (the "family amendment") concerns two clauses defining the family. As the constitution stood prior to the referendum, the family is defined as a natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, based on the legal institution of marriage. The constitution additionally pledges to protect the institution of marriage (on which families are based) from attack. The proposed wording would amend this so that families can be based on "durable relationships" in addition to just marriage.
The second proposed amendment (the "care amendment") concerns two clauses regarding the role of women in Irish society. The constitution acknowledges the contribution women make to the state within the home, and hence promises that the state shall "endeavour" to ensure that women are not obliged by economic necessity to earn a living and hence neglect their duties in the home. (These clauses have been widely glossed as the constitution asserting that women belong in the home, including by no less than government ministers.) The proposal is to replace these with a single clause reading: "The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision."
This referendum marked the government's latest effort to "modernise" Ireland and bring its values more in line with those of our EU betters on the Continent. They touted the proposed amendments as feminist (no coincidence that the referendum was held on International Women's Day) and an important step towards making Ireland a more inclusive and tolerant society.
Sadly for the government, Ireland's resolutely backward, parochial, latently Catholic, Massey Ferguson-driving, GAA-playing population refused to play ball.1 Despite the backing of every major party and a raft of NGOs (who may well have been "encouraged" to endorse a Yes vote under public pressure), both proposals were rejected in a landslide, with the family and care proposals receiving a mere 32 and 26 per cent of the vote, respectively.
A wealth of reasons the proposed amendments proved so unpopular with voters have been proposed. Traditional feminists were worried that the government was angling to wash its hands of any commitment to providing financial support to mothers who don't work, particularly single mothers (of note is how the proposed amendment tied into Taoiseach2 Leo Varadkar's open admission that he doesn't think it's the state's responsibility to provide for people who are unable to provide for themselves).)). At least one article made hay of the fact that the proposed wording promises only that the government shall strive to support families in the provision of care (i.e. "we'll try to help out, but no promises") - although I'll note that the wording as it remains similarly states that the government shall endeavour to ensure that women don't have to neglect their duties in the home by reasons of economic necessity. One could persuasively argue that this is a much of a muchness.
Meanwhile, gender-critical groups were deeply suspicious of the government's desire to remove the words "woman" and "mother" from the constitution entirely. Social conservatives were concerned that acknowledging that families can be based on "durable relationships" might result in legal recognition of polycules, or even polygamy. Anti-immigration activists argued that a Yes vote would result in increased immigration from overseas (I confess I don't quite get the reasoning on this last point, and it seemed like a knowing attempt to sow FUD by piggybacking on widespread anti-immigration sentiment).
We could talk about which of the above factors were most important for the No side until the cows come home, but for now I'd like to talk about what the result of the referendum means for Irish political alignments more broadly.
II
Roughly fifteen years ago, a new ideology began making dramatic inroads into societies across the Anglosphere and beyond. In a remarkably short space of time, this faction has achieved enviable success in colonising existing institutions and political parties, forcing them to, at the bare minimum, pay lip service to various components of their worldview. This faction is variously referred to as "wokeness" or "social justice politics" or any other of a number of terms. It's a strange new movement indeed: a movement with whacky policy prescriptions ranging from the ludicrously utopian to almost impossibly trivial and petty; which came packaged with a unique and abstruse vocabulary originating in the academy, and wholly impenetrable to those not in the know (possibly by design); which becomes outraged by successive attempts to even apply a neutral label to the faction; which markets itself as leftist, and yet is eagerly co-signed by neoliberal capital-friendly politicians and multi-national corporations (while more traditional socialists often react to it with a blend of bemusement, exasperation and horror).
One can conceive of the woke faction as an uneasy coalition made up of woke leftists and woke liberals. The leftists are ornery, confrontational types who have no interest in playing nice or being respectable, know what they're saying is unpopular and don't care who they piss off, because they're largely people with nothing to lose (more on this in a future post). The liberals, by contrast, are agreeable to a fault, keen on "reading the room", obsessed with respectability politics, desperate to avoid being seen to make a fuss.
When woke leftists encounter public disagreement with their worldview, their default tactic is to dismiss their interlocutor using one or more of the following descriptors: "alt-right", "Nazi", "neo-Nazi", "racist", "white supremacist" "misogynistic", "transphobic" and (by far the most popular term in Ireland over the last five years) "far-right". This tactic is essentially impossible to refute, as it's ultimately a meaningless (and masturbatory) debate over the definitions of words. If I say I don't think it's appropriate to house convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons, and a woke person says that I'm "far-right" because only a "far-right" person would say such a thing - well, this is vacuously true, based on the stipulative definition you've just assigned that term.3
By contrast, when woke liberals encounter public disagreement with their worldview, their preferred tactic is to insist that the vast majority of people already agree with the opinion in question, and the only people voicing disagreement are a "vocal minority" or "radical fringe" of extremists who've become radicalised as a result of consuming too much Fox News and Telegram. This is an essential tool for dispelling the cognitive dissonance inherent to being a liberal in a woke space.
Prior to the woke era, liberals largely endorsed safe, middle-of-the-road political opinions which could be presumed to enjoy a high level of popular support among most audiences. But as a result of the woke colonisation of traditionally liberal spaces, liberals are now expected to recite a collection of opinions and slogans which the average member of the public finds bizarre and alienating - or else. Alas, liberals are temperamentally disinclined to express opinions which most people disagree with - opinions which, if taken to their logical conclusions, imply that "almost everyone you encounter in contemporary society is a bad person". The last thing a liberal wants to do is seen to be stepping on people's toes.
Their "solution" is to dutifully mouth the unpopular opinions while loudly asserting that the opinions in question are actually popular, and studiously avoiding any and all evidence to the contrary. The minute a woke leftist says something radical and outrageous, the woke liberal will be on hand to sanewash it, massage the sentiment, assure the general public that "he didn't really mean that, it's just rhetorical hyperbole". But sometimes no amount of sanewashing will do anything to make woke opinions more palatable to the mainstream, which explains woke liberals' irritating habit of talking around opposing opinions by labelling them as "far-right", "transphobic" or similar without plainly stating what those opinions are and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.4
Pay no attention to that opinion behind the curtain
To be fair, sometimes liberals are correct in their assesssment that only a vocal minority are opposed to this or that policy. Actual Irish far-right parties are as marginalised as they come, without a single elected representative between them; progressive policies like legal abortion and gay marriage enjoy broad popular support; rates of religiosity and Catholic observance are in freefall. But on other occasions, this assessment is significantly wide of the mark.
III
The results of this referendum serve as a timely confirmation of what many already suspected: many woke policies are profoundly unpopular among the Irish electorate, and can usually only make their way into legislation under cover of darkness. The people of Ireland were asked point blank if they believe that families based on marriage are just as valid as families based on "durable relationships" (which could mean practically anything: cohabiting straight couples with children who are too lazy or stubborn to formally tie the knot but want all the ancillary benefits of doing so anyway; polycules made up of one woman and five men; polygamous relationships in which one man has a harem of brides). By a staggering margin, the people of Ireland responded - no, they are not. Their attitudes towards "durable relationships" now join trans issues and immigration as examples of topics on which the median Irish voter deviates quite sharply from woke orthodoxy.
When a woke leftist calls you far-right for expressing an opinion which would have been seen as a bog-standard liberal opinion five or ten years ago - well, no one wins a fight about the dictionary definitions of words, but everyone loses. But when a woke liberal argues that such-and-such an opinion is only held by a vocal minority of radical extremists, I think it's incumbent on people to retort: no, actually most Irish people don't believe "durable relationships" are essentially the same thing marriages, and they made that quite clear when they went to the polls in their tens of thousands. We're the mainstream and you're the radical fringe, the ones who hold strange and unpopular opinions they absorbed from consuming American media. Woke liberals are welcome to believe that their opinions are morally correct. They should no longer be permitted to believe, contrary to all evidence, that those opinions are also popular among Irish people.
Now of course, we shouldn't read too much into this referendum in isolation. Turnout was a mere 44%, shockingly low compared to the gay marriage and abortion referenda which both achieved a turnout in excess of 60%. It's not impossible that there are half a million+ voters out there who would have voted Yes to both amendments but didn't bother. Maybe the fine poly people of Ireland simply couldn't find the time to get down to the polls amidst their busy schedules of posting in r/relationshipanarchy and self-flagellating over their toxic jealousy. But I can't help but admit to a certain scepticism on this point. The impression I get is of a populace who were overwhelmingly either indifferent or actively opposed to the proposed amendments, and certainly not "confused".
I also want to reiterate the point that the fact that wokeness is unpopular among voters doesn't mean it's wrong - that would be committing the exact same logical fallacy in the opposite direction. I'm only pleading with liberal journalists and politicians to acknowledge that many of the policies they're advocating are deeply unpopular among voters, and adjust their tactics accordingly.
IV
With such a striking landslide of a result, one can't help but wonder why the government even put the issue to vote in the first place. Wasting €23 million on a referendum rejected by 70% of the country is a national embarassment, and with such a skewed outcome it ought to have been obvious to the government months in advance that neither amendment had any hope of passing. Two explanations for why the referendum went ahead in spite of this occur to me. Perhaps the government is made up of woke liberals wilfully ignoring all of the evidence as to how unpopular the proposed amendments were outside of a specific social bubble. Alternatively, they thought that a given density of trendy buzzwords like "inclusive" and "misogyny" would be sufficient to trick the public into voting for a referendum which was not at all what it appeared to be. With all the talk of how "confusing" the proposed amendments were, it looks like the latter might be the case - isn't it interesting how voters are only ever "confused" when they give the wrong result? But regardless, it seems this referendum was only put to the vote because the government is wilfully ignorant, or deceitful and underhanded. Not a great look either way.
The usual fingers for the failure of the referendum to pass will be pointed. Government ministers will insist that the proposed changes were moderate and incremental, and were unfairly mischaracterised as radical and sweeping. Some journalist somewhere is bound to argue that the negative result came about as a result of nebulously defined "foreign interference". I'm sure Varadkar will eventually claim that a Yes-Yes vote would have been secured if only there had been more robust legal powers in place to combat social media "disinformation" in the months prior, using the failure as an opportunity to finally get his beloved hate speech bill over the line, it having languished in the lower house for nearly a year.
But on some level, Varadkar and his cronies knows what everyone else knows: the Irish public for the most part find wokeness bizarre and alienating, and no amount of shaming them, labelling them far-right or telling them they're in the minority in their opinions will get them to change their minds (even if they might pretend to have done so in public). Either come up with more persuasive arguments for why wokeness is right, or stop pushing it altogether.
1 A resolutely backward, parochial, latently Catholic, Massey Ferguson-driving, GAA-playing population which gave the nod to both gay marriage and abortion by popular mandate in the last decade, by a 60%+ majority in both cases - but let's not let that pair of inconvenient facts disrupt the narrative we've concocted.
2 Prime minister.
3 Strictly speaking, it isn't even necessarily a contradiction to assert that an opinion held by the overwhelming majority of a given populace is "far-right": even if this description isn't true of numerous opinions in modern Ireland, it was uncontroversially true in Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany or countless other examples.
4 Sometimes one even gets the impression of the liberal and the leftist living side-by-side in the same individual, occupying opposing hemispheres of the brain, the apologist and the revolutionary. These contrasting perspectives allow a woke person to seamlessly hop back and forth between
- everyone in Ireland is already woke: it's only a vocal minority of far-right agitators - those dastardly Healy-Raes! - preventing it from being fully implemented
and
- racism and misogyny are baked into Irish society, incrementalist reform won't do a damn thing, we've got to rip this up root and branch
as the moment requires. Scott Alexander detected some of this tension between two fundamentally incompatible worldviews in the film Don't Look Up.
Folamh3
8mo ago
If that's the case, then who the hell is going around interpreting pats on the back as romantic or sexual?
I know some of you may be sick of "wow, look at this cool thing AI can do, how eerie is that?" posts, but I can't help but be blown away by some of the applications of this technology.
I play in a band, and we upload our music to streaming platforms using a company called DistroKid. When you're uploading music, they strongly encourage you to submit the lyrics for the song at the same time for SEO reasons (and so that the lyrics will appear onscreen if someone shares the song on Instagram). It's a little textbox where you paste your lyrics in, then you're done.
I went to upload a song today, and found that they've added a new feature. After uploading the audio file, you can get an AI to try to transcribe the lyrics rather than typing them out manually.
It nailed it. The song is 215 words long, and the AI only made about 6 mistakes i.e. 97% accuracy. For reference, this is a noisy post-hardcore song with layers of shoegazey guitars, feedback and pounding drums. What's more, it achieved this 97% accuracy in a matter of seconds, maybe 5% of the total runtime of the song itself.
A few years ago I used a voice transcription service called Happy Scribe, which achieved comparable levels of accuracy - but only for plain speech recorded in a quiet environment with no background ambiance. If you record speech without a directional mic in an environment with a lot of background noise (e.g. a café), Happy Scribe was pretty much useless and I had to transcribe everything the old-fashioned way.
But now AI can transcribe words near-perfectly from lyrics with a musical accompaniment? That's insanity. I can't imagine how anyone will be able to find work as a transcriber for any major language a year from now.
Folamh3
27d ago
Years ago I saw the trailer for an indie comedy film wherein two straight men pretend to be gay in order to get women into bed. Their reasoning is that if they present themselves as gay, women will let their guard down around them. Then they can announce "oh my God, I'm so attracted to you, I've never been attracted to a woman before", and the woman in question will be so flattered that she'll go to bed with the guy.
Is it reasonable of me to assume that any straight man who describes himself as "demisexual" is pulling exactly the same kind of long con, but more subtle?
I don't know what this means
Skookum has explained to me at length his theory that women suffer greatly as a result of voluntarily being in relationships with socially awkward men who aren't especially good-looking, to the point of believing there's a 1 in 20 chance that a woman in a relationship with such a man suffers more than a woman in a relationship with a man who literally beats her up (yes, really). He hence thinks it's hypocritical of him to ask a woman to suffer for his benefit without him having suffered a comparable degree beforehand. Completing his stupid hike is his way of demonstrating his willingness to undergo pointless suffering for nobody's benefit.
If this chain of reasoning makes no sense to you, that makes two of us.
The figurative use of the term "cuck" is essentially just a dysphemism for calling someone a "doormat". The assumption is that men who allow their wives to have sex with other men aren't really okay with it, but go along with it due to a lack of backbone and an inability to establish boundaries for themselves. This obviously generalises (no one was fooled that "bike cuck" really didn't mind his bike getting stolen).
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