FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
50m ago
Also, Monica Bellucci.
If the music video for "Love Don't Cost a Thing" by J-Lo hadn't awakened my budding sexuality, Bellucci's dress in Reloaded would have done.
FtttG
57m ago
Agreed. I'm sure most people expressing support for Palestinians, if pressed to explain themselves, would say something like "I think it's bad when Palestinian women and children get killed by Israeli rockets". You would probably get a very different response if you asked people who they support more: the IDF or Hamas.
FtttG
59m ago
I agree that it is possible to get so good at "reading the room" that you forget how to "write" and just mindlessly go along with local consensus. Ideally, we would like people to be Kolmogorovs who are adept at reading the illegible social reality and know when to pick their battles, rather than wasting social capital on pointless battles they can't hope to win.
I agree with the point Damore made, and I don't think he should have lost his job because he expressed it. But if he'd been a bit more socially adept, he probably would have understood that losing his job was a foreseeable consequence of expressing that opinion in that place at that time. If he'd understood the social rules and played the game a bit better, he might have been able to navigate himself into a position where he really was able to make proactive changes to Google's hiring policies (in particular, avoiding hiring policies based on nakedly pseudoscientific premises). But instead he was a naïve Kantorovich, and suffered for it.
FtttG
1hr ago
The big refugee wave from Israel's warmongering was Syria.
Well, I'm going to stop you right there. How exactly is a civil war between Assad and ISIS the fault of Israel?
All of the remaining commentary is interesting sure – but can you concede the original point, that "a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep" simply did not happen as a result of the most recent conflict in Gaza, and hence that it is profoundly unlikely that engineering such a crisis was Israel's intention while prosecuting said war?
FtttG
1hr ago
Hot take incoming: I think The Matrix Reloaded is vastly underrated. Although nearly three years after posting that comment, I still haven't gotten around to watching Revolutions.
I was enthusiastically nodding along with @100ProofTollBooth's post about bullying-as-Chesterton's-fence, until I came to this line:
Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore).
I understand the point you're making. Damore should have "read the room" and understood that the opinions he expressed would get him in trouble. He should have understood that when Google created an internal forum specifically to express potentially controversial opinions, they only expected or wanted people to use it to express "controversial" opinions of the "fifty Stalins" variety. I get that.
But all the same, I dislike the framing that Damore got fired for being an autistic weirdo who expressed a weird opinion that creeped everyone out. It wasn't as if his manifesto was a spirited defense of lowering the age of consent, or normalising bestiality or incest. Rather, his manifesto boiled down to an opinion that would strike 99% of people throughout time and space as utterly unremarkable: "for reasons unrelated to socialisation, men and women tend to have radically different interests, which has obvious implications for the kinds of careers they tend to pursue".
Yes, a more socially adept person would have intuitively understood that, while this opinion would be considered obvious outside of Google, it is not an opinion that is likely to be received warmly within Google. But your framing seems to imply that Damore expressed a crazy shocking opinion, and the normies responded by firing him. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that: Damore expressed a normie opinion in a crazy space (a space in which lunatic ideas like "male and female brains are exactly the same" have significant purchase), failing to appreciate that this opinion was unlikely to be as warmly received in Google as it would be elsewhere.
I was tempted to close this by saying that Damore probably would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids if he'd been more handsome and confident, but you were way ahead of me on that front anyway.
FtttG
5hr ago
Thank Christ I don't need to add several thousand micromorts to my lifestyle just to get laid.
FtttG
5hr ago
God, that is awful. I once knew a woman who was a nurse in a rehabilitation hospital, and about 90% of her patients were either motorcycle or horse-riding accidents. I'll never ride a motorcycle. I even worked with a guy who was in a pretty serious motorcycle accident and nearly lost a leg, and he still rides motorcycles to this day. Like, dude, how many hints do you need?
With regards to Terminator, every time travel story ultimately has to take a firm philosophical position on whether the past is mutable or not. The original The Terminator was an enclosed, self-contained story which took the stance that the past was immutable: the ending reveals the entire story to have been a stable time loop. Terminator 2 set out to surprise audiences at every turn (oh my God, Arnie is the good guy this time!) which extended all the way to its ending and its reveal that, in stark contrast to the original movie, the past is mutable. The film ends on a note of optimistic uncertainty, with the protagonists' actions appearing to have averted the future apocalypse for good. This was made even more explicit in the original scripted ending which depicts Sarah, John and Sarah's grandchildren in an idyllic future Los Angeles, which was thankfully cut for being too sappy, on-the-nose and tonally dissonant with the rest of the film. (James Cameron has a recurrent problem with indulging his inner Spielberg and wanting to end his films on a corny sentimental note, only for cooler heads to prevail in the editing suite and instead opting for something more ambiguous and restrained.)
Not having seen any of the sequels following the first two, all my knowledge of them is secondhand, but my understanding is that every subsequent sequel has set out to follow the example set by Terminator 2 and have its philosophical attitude to the mutability of the past directly contradict the attitude espoused by the previous film. This leads to an interminable game of "the past is immutable – no it isn't – yes it is — no it isn't – is – isn't". With a binary question, the number of times you can surprise audiences by changing the answer is exactly one. When Terminator 3 revealed that Judgement Day was still going to happen, audiences didn't find this exactly as shocking as Terminator 2's implication that Judgement Day could be decisively averted; rather, it registered as a regression to the original film's status quo. In spite of Cameron's strenuous efforts to reinvent the entire franchise from the ground up with Terminator 2, by the end of Terminator 3 the franchise was back almost exactly where it started. Eventually audiences just got sick of being jerked around and lost interest: no permanence, no stakes.
Another reason might be a bit more mundane. The Terminator made the most of its limited budget, but some of its visual effects looked pretty ropey even at the time. Half of the appeal of Terminator 2 was getting to see a story very similar to the original (indeed, the plot beats and structure are so similar that in some ways it's more like a remake than a sequel), but with an expanded budget and VFX wizardry. The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well. But you quickly run into the law of diminishing returns: while I'm sure the visual effects in the subsequent sequels were marginally superior to those of Terminator 2, they could never hope to match the quantum-leap sensation of the transition from The Terminator to Terminator 2. "Come see the Terminator, with visual effects that will blow your mind" is an easy sell, unlike "come see the Terminator, with visual effects very slightly improved over previous Terminator films".
More Americans supported Palestine than israel in a poll for the first time in the US.
Citation requested.
I find it fascinating that all of your doomsaying predictions about Israel consistently fail to come to pass, and yet this doesn't prompt any reflection or reconsideration on your part. Since it began, you've been repeatedly assuring us (including as recently as yesterday) that Israel's war in Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with its stated aims of destroying Hamas or recovering the hostages, and is solely motivated by a desire to create a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. As a fellow European citizen, I can't help but notice that, two and a half years after the start of the war in Gaza, this refugee crisis you've been warning us about has conspicuously failed to materialise. Indeed, the number of asylum seekers claiming refuge in the EU actually fell between 2023 and 2024 (a trend which appears to have continued into 2025), and there doesn't appear to have been any spike in the proportion of those refugees who are Palestinian (who I assume would be included in the "Other" category). Sincerely – where are all these Palestinian (or Lebanese, Syrian or Persian) refugees arriving in Europe? Not only has there not been a massive spike in refugees arriving in Europe from these countries, the absolute number has declined since the start of the war in Gaza.
There are two possible explanations. Either Israel waged its war on Gaza in a deliberate attempt to engineer a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep, but it didn't pan out as intended (in which case they aren't as competent as they present themselves; or, more to the point, as competent as you seem to think they are). Or engineering a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep was never Israel's aim.
One might naïvely assume that, when a prediction you made about Israel didn't come true, this might prompt some reflection on your part, perhaps even an admission that you were mistaken in your apprehension of Israel's true motives. But no such admission is forthcoming. Your claims about Israel's sinister motives were conclusively proven false, but Israel remains exactly as nefarious and inscrutable in your eyes as ever. Your hatred of Israel appears wholly uncoupled from any specific action Israel takes. I wonder what Leon Festinger might have made of you.
Out of interest for someone largely ignorant, is "ayatollah" a hereditary monarchic title? If he dies, is there an immediate line of succession so that somebody else becomes the ayatollah?
FtttG
2d ago
I'm saying the fact that something was true in 2007 doesn't necessarily prove that it's true in 2026.
FtttG
2d ago
I think if Israel currently posed as grave a threat to American national security as claimed, it shouldn't be hard to find a credible source arguing as much within the last decade.
FtttG
2d ago
Fair enough, although I can't help but note your source is a decade old and based on a report published nine years prior.
FtttG
2d ago
I don’t want that guy being loyal to a country that is considered one of America’s top espionage and influence threats
Weasel words. "Considered" by whom?
FtttG
3d ago
For me, the visual aura usually precedes any actual pain, and if I find it I take two paracetamol (and drink lots of water), it usually prevents the part of the migraine that actually hurts, and the visual aura generally subsides shortly thereafter.
FtttG
4d ago
I came to the end of the last chapter. At 101,232 words, the fourth draft of my book is now almost 12k words shorter than the third. But I'd like to get it to an even 100k (rounding down), so I'm doing a second pass on the unusually long chapters, and considering recording myself reading the whole thing aloud so I can identify any clangs that aren't obvious on sight. The consensus from last week's survey is that neither of the two opening paragraphs I came up with is particularly strong or compelling, so I think the opening will need to be reworked.
FtttG
4d ago
"If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." – Prince Philip
This was included on a list of Phil's worst "gaffes", but no Chinese person I've mentioned it to has been offended by it, or even contested it. They really will eat anything that moves, and more power to them.
FtttG
4d ago
I Love You, Man is a fairly safe and predictable comedy, but the chemistry between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel is strong and endearing, and I laughed plenty of times.
Okay. So has your claim shifted from "Israel's primary goal in prosecuting their war in Gaza is to engineer a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep" to "Israel has already engineered a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep"?
Because I think the shelf life on the former claim has conclusively expired, and you should stop making it, because it's dumb.
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