Folamh3
User ID: 1175
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.
A bit off-topic but my Irish aunt was married to a Frenchman for years and lives in Paris. When she was expecting her second child (a boy), she wanted to give him an Irish name, but it was also very important that the name be easy for a French person to pronounce. Some of the most popular Irish boys' names include names like "Cian" or "Cillian". The trouble is, these are pronounced with a hard K sound in Ireland, whereas French people would presumably read them as "SEE-an" or "SILL-ian". To get around this she considered using the alternate spelling "Killian" (which she didn't make up: it's a perfectly legitimate alternate spelling) which is far less ambiguous. The problem with that, she explained, is that boys' names beginning with the letter K in France (e.g. "Kevin") are generally associated with the banlieues, and she didn't want people assuming her son was a scumbag.
In the end she went with an English name I despise, but which is equally easy to pronounce in Ireland and France.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Women in male-dominated communities like heavy metal or video games often complain about men gatekeeping them, which typically takes the form of a man aggressively demanding that a woman name three songs by the band whose T-shirt she is wearing.
What women don't realise is that sometimes this gatekeeping is carried out for the woman's own protection, to avoid the woman being accused of tacitly endorsing neo-Nazism and white supremacy, however unintentionally.
/s /s /s
I do care about formulating sound public policy, which is precisely why I think that a) making self-ID the legal standard is a policy which will backfire horribly for the trans movement and b) I don't support allowing any male convict who identifies as a woman to be housed in a female prison, without any guardrails being imposed at all.
My point is that you can't have it both ways. Trans activists demanded that anyone who declares that they are a woman must be legally treated as a woman. That's the policy they sought. Having succeeded in having that policy implemented (at least in certain jurisdictions), they cannot then turn around and say "No no, Karen White is only pretending to be trans!" The policy they themselves called for draws no legal distinction between a person legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria and someone like Karen White.
Folamh3
1yr ago
My comment was not intended as a "boo outgroup" comment. While I have misgivings about the authoritarian leanings of many Western left-liberal parties/movements, I also think many libertarians are completely nuts, and I'm glad not to live in a country in which gun ownership is common. If someone I know hung this poster on their house, I'd think they were a lunatic.
the authoritarian position is hardly the sole province of those on the left
I never claimed it was and I don't know why you're implying that I did. I made the much narrower claim that, in the West, hostility to free speech is more commonly found among left-liberal parties than right-leaning parties. This does not remotely imply that left-liberal parties are the only parties which are hostile to freedom of speech, in the West or elsewhere.
And, btw, here is a paper that weighs against your hypothesis.
Thank you, I look forward to reading it.
Folamh3
7mo ago
I'm so sick of the word "violence" being used in this figurative manner. Pestering someone with messages when they've made it abundantly clear that they're not interested - call it "harassment" if you like, or even "cyberstalking" if you must. It's certainly not "violence".
It was bad enough when it was just woke academics and activists (but I repeat myself) describing the act of someone disagreeing with you or calling you by the wrong pronouns as "violent" - now it's making its way into legislation too.
Folamh3
10mo ago
Isn't housing convicted male sex offenders (who have raped or assaulted children) in women's prisons when they claim to be transgender (even if they have made zero effort to medically or even socially transition) a perfect example of the increasing tolerance afforded towards paedos under this rubric?
Folamh3
10mo ago
hypothetical books for children on "Jewish cultural influence", whatever that means, is more insidious than books containing LGBT themes.
Why?
EDIT: Thanks for all of the suggestions folks, they're greatly appreciated.
I'm worried I may have some kind of anxiety disorder. For the last few months I've found it very hard to relax, and almost always feel tense and on edge. I don't (or rather, can't) enjoy most of the things I used to enjoy. Even when I'm spending time with my friends or a girl I'm dating, I feel tense and can't let myself relax. I don't look forward to anything. When I'm in work I'm bored out of my mind, when I get home I do nothing to pass the time. My sex drive is virtually nonexistent.
What I've tried so far:
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Cutting out caffeine: I didn't drink any caffeine for an entire month. Now I'm back on it but drinking less than I was before I cut it out completely.
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Reducing alcohol intake: I was probably drinking too much during Covid. For the last few months I've been trying to keep my non-social drinking to a minimum and not to overdo it when I drink socially
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Meditation: I've been doing guided meditation once a day for the last two weeks, using www.tarabrach.com as a resource
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Talk therapy: I was seeing a therapist once a week from July until two weeks ago (I had to pause the sessions as I changed jobs which meant a change in insurance provider). The therapy wasn't specifically about this issue, but the issue did come up in the sessions
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Exercise: I got into running during Covid and still run once or twice a week. I cycle to work every day (provided it's not raining).
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Leisure activities: I try to read from a corporeal book every day.
None of the above seems to have helped much, if at all. Maybe once every two weeks I'll experience a day where I'm able to just completely relax and unwind - but there doesn't seem to be any obvious rhyme, reason, or pattern to when these days strike, at least as far as I can see.
Any suggestions for how to deal with this are welcome. Ideally I would prefer not to resort to psychopharmaceuticals, as I've been prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics in the past, and found the gains rather meagre compared to the brutality of the side effects.
Folamh3
1yr ago
the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female"
I agree, but that's sexual dimorphism, whereas I'm talking about adherence to gender roles. It's a bit confusing because He-Man both looks like a man and fully conforms to a classical archetype of how a man is supposed to behave (vice versa for Barbie), but I'm only really talking about the extent to which people adhere to gender roles, not what they look like. I was trying to make this distinction clear in a footnote but maybe it was too ambiguous.
This obviously varies from culture to culture, but I think it's fair to say that in much of the West, few people fully conform to classical archetypes of how members of their gender are "supposed" to behave. Even leaving aside overt gender non-conformance like men wearing dresses and makeup: very few men engage in hard physical labour as their primary source of income, no one bats an eyelid at a woman drinking beer or wearing jeans, women pursuing careers in STEM are generally encouraged to do so by their peers and mentors, it's not seen as embarrassing if a man knows how to bake (or a woman doesn't).
And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category
Completely agree.
Folamh3
4mo ago
I do think admin and moderator decisions (some of which were absolutely necessary) have resulted in its userbase becoming more selected for midwittery, conformity and smugness over time. In 2012, Reddit was so committed to its vision of a free speech-friendly website that there was a major controversy over whether or not to ban a subreddit for photos of attractive teenagers taken without their knowledge (a rare example of a subreddit ban I fully endorse, for what it's worth).
But successive bans of subreddits for weird porn, edgy humour or anything which contradicts woke orthodoxy (most notably The_Donald, but also numerous subreddits which tolerate even the mildest scepticism of gender ideology - I expect the days are numbered for /r/detrans) have resulted in most of the witches and weirdos fleeing the coop, leaving behind only the midwits whose tastes tend toward the anodyne and who can reliably be assumed to believe that we really have always been at war with Eastasia.
Folamh3
5mo ago
Really struggling to see how what you just said differs in any way from my gloss of your position.
Look at this meme.
It was made in the 2000s, an era in which it was totally legit for liberal people to make fun of fat people and their motivated reasoning and mental (certainly not physical!) gymnastics. Nowadays body positivity is the order of the day and liberals can only make fun of fat people if they're wearing MAGA hats.
The point of the joke, obviously, is that the fat woman in the photo claims that the shape of her body is entirely genetic in origin while ignoring the obvious dietary choices she makes which contribute to her body shape.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of modern progressivism is a wide-ranging assertion that social influences shape people's identities and desires. Men aren't naturally more interested in STEM than women, they've just been socialised to want to pursue careers in STEM, and were it not for this we'd see them going into childcare and education at the same rates as women. Men aren't naturally stronger and faster than women, it's just that women are systematically discouraged from playing sports. Most people aren't straight because that's their natural inclination, they've just been brainwashed by the heteropatriarchy and in the state of nature we'd all be bisexual. Stereotype threat, power posing, "internalised" Xism etc. etc. The apparent goal of many progressives is to undo the cultural conditioning (borrowing here from Marxist "false consciousness") which causes women to believe that they're more interested in childcare than computers. This false consciousness is unidirectional: a man can mistakenly believe that he's more interested in computers than childcare, but not vice versa; a repressed gay man can be in denial about his sexuality, but no straight man can mistakenly believe he's gay.*
This is the worldview underpinning the fury and rage surrounding the ROGD/social contagion model of transgender identity. I used to (by which I mean, at the time I started writing this comment) think that the tenets of gender ideology made for odd bedfellows with the rest of woke ideology. When I first heard about it, I was like "why are you guys so mad that social influences affect one's gender identity? You think social influences affect everything!" I thought that woke people had made a weird little carve-out for trans people, whose gender identity is assumed to be unresponsive to social influence in the way that their career aspirations or physical fitness might be.
But now that I think about it further, it makes sense from the false consciousness perspective. A trans person who mistakenly believes that they're cis until the moment their "egg hatches" is like a factory worker in Victorian England who, in a horrifying epiphany, realises the extent to which he is the victim of exploitation and alienation at the hands of his boss: they are to be commended, praised, welcomed with open arms. But a cis person who mistakenly believes they're trans: that's like being a strike-breaker. It's no accident that trans activists have nothing but contempt for detransitioners: they're traitors to the cause, scabs. This is one reason they resent the term "groomer", as that's not what they see themselves doing. If you're in a trans subreddit and you find yourself thinking that the list of "possible signs you might be trans" is so exhaustive that everyone alive must have at least one - that's a feature, not a bug. They don't think they're persuading children to be trans - they think that every child is already trans (and queer, and interested in topics associated with the opposite sex, and feminist etc.) and has simply been brainwashed into believing otherwise - if they lived in the state of nature then no "grooming" or education would be required.** Just like Marx thought that every proletariat already supported communism and had simply been tricked into thinking otherwise.***
So no, gender ideology and sexuality aren't carve-outs from the general woke assumption that social influences affect who you are (but only in one direction), they're central examples. But such a carve-out does exist within the woke framework. For whom, you ask? Look up top! Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.
*People talk a lot about how Friends "aged poorly" and so on, but more than anything I think the B-plot here from which the episode derives its title would make woke people furious if it came out today, not least because it's still funny and more relevant now than at the time of release.
**Hence the historically tenuous claims that the gender binary is a recent artifact of Western capitalism and ancient civilizations had a more fluid conception of gender - "two-spirit" etc.
***This can get kind of Gnostic the more you think about it. It's not revisionist of the Wachowskis to claim that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor - the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.
Folamh3
11mo ago
Or buy used
My immediate thought was "how would I buy used Bud Light? After it's passed through someone's bladder?" And then I thought "would I even notice a difference?"
/s
Folamh3
1yr ago
I absolutely agree that some methods of teaching kids to read are vastly more effective than others, and the idea that teachers would deliberately choose an ineffective method just because it's more "fun" (for the teacher!) fills me with a sort of furious disgust.
A few years ago I finally got around to watching Falling Down, because I'd heard it was funny, disturbing and thought-provoking; and also because Michael Douglas always has a magnetic screen presence even in bad films (e.g. Basic Instinct and Wall St. Yes, the original Wall St., not the sequel with Shia LaBeouf. Fight me.).
Falling Down, huh. What a weird, insipid and unfunny movie. There's this spree killer who, after years of petty frustrations and disappointments, has snapped, gone postal and is plotting to murder his estranged wife, right? How do we get the audience to identify with him? Why, we'll just have him spout inane observational humour about the petty irritations of modern life in between vicious indiscriminate violence. "What's the deal with fast food chains, amirite guys?" This inane observational humour is never funny, never feels remotely in-character and essentially just feels like it's there to pad out the runtime, but - well, how else are we going to get the audience to sympathize with such an unpleasant character? What, explain his situation and motivations to such a degree that we can understand them even if we don't think his behaviour is justified? Bro, I'm a screenwriter, I'm not Cormac McCarthy.
The thriller parts aren't thrilling, the comedy parts aren't funny, the "satire" falls flat on its face, the plot and how it's depicted is so exaggerated, cartoonish and contrived that you could practically call it a preemptive adaptation of Grand Theft Auto V. Baffling how the filmmakers thought they were making some kind of profound statement about American society, masculinity, consumerism, whiteness etc. Even more baffling how so many critics apparently bought it.
Folamh3
11mo ago
I would be all in favour of your proposal. Do you know who wouldn't? The loudest trans activists out there.
Twenty years ago, gender dysphoria was understood as a rare and unfortunate medical condition which caused intense distress among those suffering from it, who deserved respect and compassion. Nowadays, trans is seen as something wholly unrelated to any medical condition (never mind a psychological disorder) and to suggest that only people who have been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a qualified mental health professional are "really" trans is a form of essentialist gatekeeping. Hence all the navel-gazing about what a woman "really" is: if it was put down to a simple binary choice "do you have gender dysphoria yes/no", then some of the most vocal trans people out there would be forced to concede that they aren't really trans at all. On some level they must know that they would not pass a diagnostic test for gender dysphoria with flying pink-and-blue colours: they don't have stereotypically feminine/masculine interests, they don't experience distress looking at their naked bodies in the mirror, they haven't undergone gender reassignment surgery (nor have they any desire to), in many cases they aren't taking hormones and have no plans to. All they really want is to be treated socially as a woman, and perhaps gain access to women-only spaces.
I think saying "instead of navel-gazing about what a woman really is, we ought to be investigating the underlying biochemistry behind gender dysphoria" is sort of missing the point. The current state of the discourse (and, more importantly, the current state of legislation) in the Anglosphere admits no intrinsic relationship between the transgender community and gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is now a condition incidentally suffered by some, but far from all, trans people, where before it was treated (more properly, in my view) as a rule-in criteria for membership of the group: being a trans person without gender dysphoria would be like being a vegetarian who eats meat. Before we can even begin to shift focus towards investigating the neural substrates of this medical condition, we need to roll back ten years of dualist nonsense about an "internally felt sense of gender identity" and acknowledge that self-ID, wherever implemented, is a fantastically ill-thought-out piece of legislation.
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?
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