Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
5mo 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.
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
3d ago
I recently played Wolfenstein: The New Order, which was pretty good, and found that my favourite parts of the game were the stealth segments in which you're sneaking around popping off soldiers from a distance with a silenced pistol. Sadly The New Order doesn't commit to the bit: the stealth segments are optional, and there are plenty of missions in which you're forced to go in guns blazing.
I'd love to play a game which was essentially just the stealth segments from The New Order for the entire runtime. What I'm looking for is games with the following criteria:
- Played from a first-person perspective
- Has a combat system (ergo excluding games in which the player character is defenseless e.g. Amnesia, the xenomorph sequences from Alien Isolation)
- Combat system is based on guns - no unarmed or melee combat (except maybe takedowns/stealth kills)
- Player is forced to be stealthy throughout - stealth is not optional (ergo excluding immersive sims in which you have the option of combat, stealth or diplomacy)
- Player character is vulnerable and can take on no more than one or two enemies before becoming overwhelmed
Folamh3
2mo 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
20d 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
2mo 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?
Folamh3
1mo 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.
I suspect it's a skills mismatch. Years ago I watched a video essay in which the author outlined the concept of "chaos cinema". It's that style of action cinema you're all familiar with because it was all the rage in the 2000s and 2010s (maybe even today, I don't think I've seen any action films which came out in the last five years): omnipresent shaky handheld camera, cuts every half a second, lens flares up the wazoo, post-production blurring, dirt on the lens. It's a style of action cinema more prone to inspire disorientation than excitement, nausea than an adrenaline rush. Think Paul Greengrass (Bourne, Captain Phillips), Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, World War Z), just about every Christopher Nolan action film, Hunger Games.
A later article (which I can't find now) noted that this trend coincided with a spike in Hollywood hiring directors who didn't cut their teeth making action films to direct action films, in hopes of lending them a little cachet and respectability. Before he was tapped for Batman, Christopher Nolan made understated psychological thrillers; before Bond, Marc Forster made intimate dramas and quirky comedy-dramas. The skilful directing of an action film, contrary to what Hollywood producers might believe, is not an easy thing to do, and one shouldn't assume that the ability to direct an intimate character drama necessarily translates to the ability to direct an action film which is exciting and engaging. So these directors, with colossal budgets at their disposal but essentially no experience in how to stage and shoot an action sequence effectively, took the easy way out. Let's just get fucktons of coverage from every angle and shake our cameras like we're having an epileptic fit, we'll figure it out in post.
Note that this approach can technically "work" in producing an action film which is true to the franchise in question, provided the director (and, more importantly, the screenwriter(s)) actually have some respect for it and understand why it appeals to people. The Dark Knight is widely considered a faithful adaptation of the Batman comics despite containing some of the most incoherent action sequences ever put to film, and the received wisdom was that the Nolan brothers and David S. Goyer had really done their homework in understanding the comics.
I think there's something similar going on here. We're making a new Indy movie, yay! Who's going to write it? We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre, but that's not enough - we don't just want our Indy movie to make bank, we want it to have prestige. Everyone who's anyone is talking about that Fleabag girl, who's got her phone number?
The trouble is that, while Phoebe Waller-Bridge may be a talented playwright and screenwriter in her comfort zone (my girlfriend made me watch the first episode of Killing Eve the other day and I barely laughed, but everyone who's seen it tells me Fleabag lives up to the hype), she may not really understand what makes Indiana Jones appeal to people. She may, in fact, have nothing but contempt for the people who enjoy Indiana Jones. So when a Hollywood producer gives her a fat paycheque and tells her to "put her own spin" on the franchise - well, she's going to deconstruct the shit out of it, isn't she? It's not bloody Shakespeare.
Folamh3
4mo ago
As it happens I've unsubscribed from his Substack, but I'm still paid up until May. I promise not to post another top-level post about something he's written for awhile.
There was much in his anti-tech manifesto that I agreed with, it just made me concerned for his state of mind. The two recent trans posts seemed disappointingly shoddily argued to me. Part of the reason my response contains so many links to previous things he's written is my way of saying "you're doing the exact same thing you complained about here, here and here - you're better than this". If you like, I'll dig out some links to some of his bangers for you tomorrow.
Seconding /u/Jiro below. Just because something currently has no direct material impact on your life doesn't mean it never will, and forewarned is forearmed. It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future - The Black Swan spent 400 pages warning against the folly of doing so. It's doubly arrogant when we live in an extremely interconnected globalised economy: a person getting sick with an infectious disease in Wuhan might not have had much impact on the average European's life in the 14th century, but the same cannot be said in the 21st.
I enjoyed "Cat Person" when it came out and thought it said something real and true about the dynamics of modern dating (certainly a vastly better #MeToo story than that account of an awkward first date with Aziz Ansari). I received Roupenian's first short story collection (which includes "Cat Person") as a gift a few Christmases ago and for the most part enjoyed it.
But yes, reading the Slate story sullied the experience for me a bit. I won't go quite so far as to say it was an act of character assassination targeting Charles, but Roupenian could have done a lot more to distance her fictional character from his real-life inspiration.
According to Freddie deBoer the movie is laughably heavy-handed. The minute I heard they were adapting it as a "psychological thriller" I was wary, because the story is nothing like that.
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.
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.
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