FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
6d ago
From the Irish perspective, all my normie colleagues in work (one of whom is a liberal Canadian expat) are saying he had it coming. I expect there'll be a lot of tongue-biting today.
FtttG
7d ago
It's so telling that Strangio had no choice but to admit that to avoid perjuring herself.
While not defending this soldier's conduct, I would put "snipers in a warzone" and "assassinations" in different categories. According to his testimony his decision to shoot the teenager was an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment one, which by definition means it wasn't an assassination.
mouthing along to incorrect arguments for something which you would have more principled reasons to support anyway is
Lying. It's called lying. And explicitly telling scared, confused parents that if they don't allow their child to medically transition they are thereby condemning them to death by their own hand, when you know full well that this is complete bullshit, is so transparently manipulative and emotionally abusive that anyone who does it should have their license to practise medicine revoked.
FtttG
7d ago
He was also a defender of Israel's assassinations so he was pro gun and pro assassination.
This is silly. Being in favour of assassinating terrorists who wantonly murder civilians doesn't mean you're in favour of the general concept of assassination, or in favour of assassinating anyone you don't like.
FtttG
7d ago
Searching "do irish women" got the suggestion "do irish women wear kilts" which is interesting.
I think using freshly ground beans just results in a much richer, smoother flavour compared to instant coffee. I'd say the flavour has more to do with the fact of using beans rather than the brewing implement used - if you gave me a blind taste test of an americano brewed using an AeroPress and another brewed with a French press (but using the same beans in the same quantity), I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference. The main advantages of an AeroPress lie in its ease of use, its robust, non-fragile design compared to the French press, and the fact that it's better-suited to making espressos than French presses (as my preferred coffee is a cappuccino). But if plastic in contact with hot water is a no-no for you, I don't know what other advice I can offer, other than that I've heard moka pots tend to burn the coffee.
Out of curiosity I looked up whether AeroPresses contain BPA or phthalates, and apparently not, which is a relief as we've just recently replaced almost all of our plastic lunchboxes with glass ones for this very reason.
FtttG
7d ago
I bought an AeroPress about five years ago and use it every day. (Being made of plastic, it's almost impossible to break, unlike the French press I bought the year before which I carelessly shattered a few months later.) When we moved into our apartment a few months ago, the owner had one of those Nespresso knockoffs that consumes pods. We tried it for awhile, but quickly went back to the AeroPress because we preferred the taste.
FtttG
7d ago
faking a video is a fun Saturday afternoon project for Mossad
There it is.
It’s bewildering that they wouldn’t let a single journalist see this kid
Almost as bewildering as Aguilar's original claim that, of the 2,000+ Palestinian civilians shot dead by the IDF at aid centres, not a single one of them was caught on video by the body cam he was personally wearing.
FtttG
7d ago
I'd read that Hungary has rather strict abortion legislation, and was curious if Hungarian women ever go abroad to get abortions. I typed "do Hungarian women" into Google Search. Here were the autocomplete suggestions:
- do hungarian women like black men
- do hungarian women like american men
- do hungarian women make good wives
- do hungarian women like older men
- do hungarian women like foreigners
- do hungarian women shave
- do hungarian women date black men
- do hungarian women like indian men
- do hungarian women like americans
- do hungarian women like asian men
In July, @coffee_enjoyer cited the testimony of a former US Army Green Beret named Anthony Aguilar, who claimed to have witnessed the IDF indiscriminately shooting at people seeking famine aid at their distribution centres. @P-Necromancer earned themself an AAQC by arguing that Aguilar's testimony didn't come off as terribly persuasive.
Today, Quillette published an article called "Gaza and the Collapse of Truth-Seeking", which adds further wrinkles:
In late July, a self-described “eyewitness” finally emerged—a former US Army green beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been dismissed as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. News organisations (including the BBC and PBS), websites, and numerous podcasts carried interviews with Aguilar in which he was described as a “whistleblower” and permitted to allege “barbaric” tactics and “war crimes” on the part of US security contractors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nobody seemed to mind that the accompanying footage from Aguilar’s body camera [emphasis mine] showed not a single killing. Aguilar’s most heart-rending story—in which he claimed to have been kissed by a grateful Palestinian boy whose killing he then witnessed—was later found to have been fabricated in every detail. The boy was never shot and remains alive. At the time of writing—four days after Aguilar’s claims had been fully discredited in early September—neither the BBC nor PBS had amended their earlier coverage.
FtttG
8d ago
Ideally I'd like to have the third draft of my NaNoWriMo project finished by the end of this week, or failing that, next Thursday.
I put more stock in Ebert's opinions than I do to the modal critic, but when he got it wrong, he could really get it wrong. He gave Blue Velvet one star pretty much solely because he objected to Isabella Rosselini appearing nude in it for what he considered ignoble aesthetic ends.
As much as I love Fight Club, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that it has significant pacing problems and the first half is much stronger than the second.
FtttG
10d ago
At the recommendation of herself, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Reluctant to read it on my lunch break in work for fear of bursting into tears.
FtttG
10d ago
For people who are members of the demographic most likely to be sexually assaulted, it matters to them a great deal to know if the people in their vicinity are members of the demographic most likely to sexually assault them.
FtttG
12d ago
Nah, way before that there was Fallon Fox, an actual transgender, rather than male with DSD like Khalif, literally cracking an opponents skull.
True. I suspect it's because MMA is a comparatively niche sport compared to the Olympics, female MMA even more so. A cursory Google suggests that as many as 5 billion people watched at least some of the 2024 Olympics: if even 1% of those watched the Khelif vs. Carini match, that's 50 million people around the world watching a presumably male person punching a female. I'd surprised if as many as 10 million people watched the Fox vs. Brents match.
FtttG
12d ago
I think this is addressed in the OP. The absurd beliefs of today (there is no difference in peak athletic performance between males and females, and all observable differences are the product of socialisation) are an overcorrection to the absurd beliefs of yesterday (men are physically superior to women on every axis, and women are so physically weak that they cannot even safely compete in long-distance running events). We're now belatedly arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, in which we acknowledge that men are stronger and faster than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation, while still recognising that women can be plenty strong and fast on their own terms. While "the establishment" was once pushing the "men and women are the same" angle and are now pushing the Hegelian synthesis, the use of the collective noun disguises what a hard-fought battle it was to get them to sit up and take notice. Gender-critical activists spent innumerable thankless years trying to draw attention to the higher rate of injury when male athletes were permitted to compete in female sporting events, and were rewarded for it by being harassed, doxxed and called bigoted and even racist (?). It's only very recently that the Hegelian synthesis has undergone a respectability cascade and the establishment is starting to recognise just how absurd the "men and women are the same" framework is. It'd be curious to see what the catalyst was - I think Lia Thomas started to make a lot of people sit up and take notice, but "swimming speed" is too abstract a metric for a lot of people to care about. Imane Khelif, however, seemed to have really redpilled a lot of people. The sight of an obviously male person punching a female person and being rewarded for doing so triggers an intense emotional reaction which probably has a long standing evolutionary basis.
This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours.
True, but they were both Kenyan, who are so far removed from the average in long-distance running it hardly seems like a fair comparison. I would love to see the average difference in finishing times between male and female competitors.
The famed tennis Battle of the Sexes is often derided today, don’t you know that he was out of shape and old, that Serena and Venus in their primes couldn’t take some minor league nobody in tennis, etc. What this ignores is that the Uncle Roys of the world really believed that Billy Jean King didn’t stand a chance, that any professional male would slaughter her. The result was genuinely shocking to a great many people at the time.
To the best of my knowledge, Billie Jean King is the only case of a female tennis player defeating a male: going through the examples in the Wikipedia article, I can't find any other examples in which a man played a match of three sets or more against a woman and lost, and these include many examples in which the man played with significant handicaps. Even in the single outlier of King v. Riggs, there's a credible theory that Riggs deliberately threw the match in order to get out of a gambling debt.
As to whether people believed that no woman could beat any man - I'm sure people in the 1970s would have conceded that a female tennis player could beat a man who was a literal invalid. Even if Riggs didn't throw the match, he was twenty-six years older than King. I ask you whether "several decades past his prime" is closer to the "able-bodied woman vs. male invalid" end of the spectrum than to the "evenly matched competitors" end.
FtttG
12d ago
On the rare occasions that the Irish media reported on the identity of the man who murdered Ashling Murphy, he was generally referred to as a Slovak, to disguise the fact that he was a Roma gypsy.
FtttG
13d ago
I've heard it called "horoscopes for men"
My sister said this once. She was very disappointed when I told her about all the women's dating profiles I'd seen with their ostensible MBTI in the bio.
FtttG
13d ago
Yeah, I'm curious about that myself. The impression I get is that his TV career had been circling the drain for many years, to which he'd responded by becoming a sort of all-purpose keyboard warrior, taking to Twitter to attack all manner of people (including Kanye West, of all people) as "Gamergaters". At some point he fell down the gender-critical rabbit hole and here we are.
Perhaps the spiciest take I've seen on the whole matter came from Scott, in which he admitted that the spike in trans identification is probably a bad thing and it's worth trying to determine the underlying cause thereof - but then said that no one should bother trying to answer these questions because they'll end up ruining their lives in the process, like Linehan did. (Of course, a major contributing factor to Linehan's life being ruined was trans activists doing everything in their power to ruin it - Linehan claims that the police knocking on his door over tweets he'd posted was the catalyst that caused his wife to leave him. Regardless of whether that was the catalyst, it's undeniably true that the police did knock on his door because trans activists sicced them on him.)
To my mind, "this is a question worth investigating, but you shouldn't try to investigate it because bad actors will try to destroy you if you do" is a sensible position to take, if and only if you include an explicit condemnation of the bad actors trying to destroy people, which Scott doesn't.
I think I remember reading somewhere that, when Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, for many audiences it was the first time they'd seen the Zapruder film which shows the moment Kennedy was shot, and there were audible gasps of horror during screenings. It's hard to imagine a similar reaction nowadays.
It's interesting, because per capita murder rates have steeply declined in the last hundred years. In 1924, the USA's homicide rate was 10.8/100k; in 2023, it was 5.8/100k. On its face, this suggests that the number of people who personally witness a murder in a given calendar year has roughly halved, and likewise that the number of people who would truthfully answer in the affirmative to the question "in your lifetime, have you personally witnessed someone being murdered?" has fallen precipitously. If you expand the question to "personally witnessed someone being killed", the comparison would be even more striking given the fall in military enlistment over the period (in 1980, 18% of American adults were veterans, compared to 6% in 2022).
And yet over the same period, the number of people who have watched graphic, high-definition footage of someone being killed has shot up, when as little as two generations ago the number of people who could accurately claim to have seen footage of this type would have been a rounding error.
This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?
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