FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
I don't mind listening to Indian women speak English with heavy accents, but I must admit I can't say the same of Indian men. (Apologies to @self_made_human.)
That being said, if I may be permitted to stretch the definition of "foreign" a bit, Multicultural London English (that mish-mash of Pakistani, Afro-Carribean, Arabic and Indian accents and slang spoken by urban youths throughout the Yookay) is verbal sewage. "Wha' you lookin' at bruv? I wiw fucking kiw you bruv! Watch yourself, innit." Give me a thousand "don'd dell me whad do do"s over that. Unlike the former case, there's no gendered element to it: I honestly don't think I could bring myself to have sex with an otherwise attractive woman who spoke with this accent.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
True. I meant writing in the sense of writing fiction.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
How's your luck?
Non-existent. Congratulations, though!
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I thought of that, but I really cannot imagine how that isn't already adequately covered by "prefer not to say".
Father Ted and Co. as well
So we have:
- the titular character, a greedy, embittered narcissist, sent to Craggy Island as punishment for his assorted financial improprieties – his catchphrase is literally "That money was just resting in my account!"
- Father Jack, a violent, greedy alcoholic routinely implied to harbour ephebophilic tendencies
- Bishop Brennan, a cantankerous bully who takes pleasure in humiliating the protagonists, and who does not take his oath of celibacy remotely seriously
- Father Dick Byrne, Father Ted's opposite number and hence like him in almost every way.
- Father "Todd Unctious", who becomes so obsessed with trophies and trinkets that he tries to steal one of Ted's (and steals a fellow priest's vestments as a disguise despite himself being a priest and having vestments of his own, seemingly out of spite)
There is also Father Dougal, who can't be called evil only by virtue of being too stupid to understand the consequences of his actions.
I genuinely can't think of a single sympathetically portrayed priest in the show.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
they cast two actors that are pushing fifty
Renate Reinsve is only thirty-eight.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I was filling out a form last night which asked for some demographic information about me.
- Sex:
- Male
- Female
- Intersex
- Prefer not to say
- Not known
???
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I have nothing to offer, other than that reading this made me feel sad.
I think the conception of "gender identity" as something wholly unrelated and untethered from one's anatomical sex is functionally indistinguishable from an immaterial soul. Ergo, gender ideology is a dualist worldview.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
You mean that people who say this are tacitly admitting they themselves have evil impulses?
I know I've seen sources which demonstrated this was Roske's motivation and remember sharing them with my brother, but I can't find them. I did manage to find this collection of screenshots from his Reddit account:
I am pro-abortion (in favour of aborting fetuses, not pro-choice)
I think that something as significant as consciousness should not be imposed on matter (the person below they gain consciousness) without consent, and as a non-conscious person cannot give consent, being born is inherently done without consent.
It doesn't seem open to debate that he is an antinatalist (or was at the time of writing, anyway), although I admit this doesn't prove that was his motivation for trying to kill Kavanaugh. Will try to do some more digging and see what I can find.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I was basing my description of Gnosticism on Montaillou and The Perfect Heresy.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I ended up having sex with this girl which broke a pretty long dry spell.
My man! Where's she from?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Yes, antinatalism is just one example of the general trend wherein politically radical people are almost invariably those who are least satisfied with their lives. An antifa meetup will not exactly be swimming with charming, good-looking people, but neither will a gathering of white supremacists.
If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. I was a bit disappointed to find that I'd been scooped seven decades in advance.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Antinatalists justify their worldview on the grounds that, because every human being is guaranteed to experience more suffering than joy in their lives, having a child cannot be justified on utiliarian grounds. The Gnostic equivalent is the belief that it is cruel to trap a pure soul inside a flesh prison. In both cases, the admonition not to have children is justified on the grounds of the suffering that the hypothetical child would endure were it to be born.
I agree that antinatalists aren't intrinsically dualist, but there seems to be a great deal of overlap between the worldview and support for gender ideology, which I view as dualist in practice. Trans people are overrepresented in r/antinatalism.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Posted my twelfth blog post of the year last night, also cross-posted here in the CW thread.
- Went to the gym three times last week. The weather's been so nice the last few days I haven't been able to summon the resolve to go any evening this week. Will have to go this evening. Can deadlift 1.84x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.22x for 8 reps and bench press .87x for 6 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
It is frankly staggering how few Western women are familiar with the term "geriatric pregnancy". Some of them even get offended when I mention it, like I'm making a value judgement.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
If I'd been born ten years later, I probably would have been diagnosed with autism and identified as trans.
This is an indirect way of saying that I am neither.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
This novelette is approaching novel-length.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Complaining about people lying about their self-professed reasons to not breed seems pretty pointless in my opinion. What will change if they are honest? If they don't want to have kids, they don't want to have kids, the end, and whatever excuses they make up about it is their business.
As Scott would say, "If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It".
I want to respond to you in more detail, but I haven't fully woken up yet. I'll come back to you after another cup of coffee.
On Monday evening I finished The Matriarch. Not the sort of thing I'd usually read, and the narrative was a bit digressive and all over the place, but I found it engaging enough to read it to the end. Interesting, 7/10. Curiously, my edition states it was first published in the fifties, but it's primarily set in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Given that it's a family drama following several generations of European Jews, I interpreted it in a wistful light, with the author looking back from a post-WWII perspective on a more optimistic era in which Jewish integration among European Gentiles seemed a live possibility. But consulting the author's Wikipedia page, it seems it was actually published in the mid-twenties, and that made me sad: it was written by a woman who had no idea how bad things were going to get for Jews.
The same day, my copy of INCEL by Arx-Han arrived in the post. It was unusually warm and sunny on Monday, so after work I spent a few hours sitting in the park reading. By Wednesday evening I'd finished the book, and I have thoughts.
I first encountered Arx-Han when I stumbled across his Substack, specifically an article called "The problem with modern fiction is that most writers lack artistic courage". In the article, he argued that the current generation of Anglophone novelists are cowardly, systematically refusing to articulate uncomfortable truths that might land them in hot water on social media. Specifically, he took Tony Tulathimutte to task for pulling his punches throughout his second book, Rejection. I was under the impression he was setting himself up in opposition to Tulathimutte: "unlike Tony, I'm telling it like it is, saying the things the establishment doesn't want to hear, so much so that I had to go the self-publishing route because no traditional publisher can handle the truth!" This unavoidably coloured my expectations of INCEL going into it. Reading the post again, I'm surprised to find that I'd remembered it incorrectly, and he openly cops to being even more of a coward than Tulathimutte.
And he's right. If INCEL was meant to be a more daring and honest take on similar subject matter as that tackled by Tulathimutte, it must be judged a failure.
"The Feminist" was a brave story, presenting an incel character as sympathetic, three-dimensional and capable of articulating his worldview in detail. The most daring thing about it was how viciously and relentlessly it skewered the stock piece of advice inevitably offered to sexually frustrated men by feminist women: "if you can't get laid, it means you don't Respecc Wimmen enough". Sure, Tulathimutte lost his nerve at the end by having his protagonist jump off the slippery slope, but up until that point you'd be hard pressed to find a better example this century of a fiction writer arguing that some sexually frustrated men really do have legitimate grievances and aren't just entitled manchildren. Braver still was Tony writing the story in such a way that it could easily be taken as (semi-)autobiographical, with its unnamed, bookish protagonist who's implied to be a Thai-American (so of course when it came time to republish the story as part of Rejection, Tony lost his nerve and retconned the character into being a white guy named Craig). But in its original incarnation, "The Feminist" was genuinely daring.
(See also Will, one of the four protagonists of Tulathimutte's debut Private Citizens who is Thai-American and a perverted pornsick loser, and probably the least sympathetic of the four. Again, that takes a certain amount of guts.)
Now compare the unnamed protagonist of INCEL. Unlike Arx-Han, he's a white American, and in his internal monologues constantly rants about his superior genetic heritage relative to people of other ethnic backgrounds. Very little attempt is made to make him seem like a real person, and he's more of a one-dimensional caricature. Essentially no effort is made to make the reader sympathise with him: per the laboured, obligatory allusions to Fight Club and American Psycho, we know from the outset we are reading a novel from the perspective of a fundamentally unlikeable character. (Aside from Tulathimutte's oeuvre, the work it most reminded me of was, for some reason, the Maniac remake starring Elijah Wood.) The novel's ostensible premise ("if I can't get laid by my 23rd birthday, I'm going to commit suicide byThe protagonist gets called out on his bullshit by his sister, the sole voice of reason in his life. By treating her as a person and not just a number on a scale from 1-10 who can be manipulated with a flowchart of responses, he finally succeeds in fucking a hot white girl, even if he blows his load too soon. He realises sex isn't all it's cracked up to be and losing his virginity won't magically solve all of his problems, and discovers that women aren't all whores, and even attractive women face serious obstacles in their lives. Early on, the protagonist attempts to approach women involve him recycling dialogue from (in his opinion) trite romcoms like (500) Days of Summer, but his own character development arc is so pat and conventional that it wouldn't take a lot of tweaking for it to feel entirely at home in a film of that ilk. As Christopher Orr might put it, this novel doesn't even have the conviction of its own malice.
copPoC by finding the biggest black guy I can find and calling him The Gamer Word") is underdeveloped to the point of feeling like anti-woke clickbait: if Arx-Han had included a countdown at the beginning of each chapter, the device might have had more impact. I can only assume he included this device to lend a sense of narrative momentum to what would otherwise have consisted of a series of largely self-contained vignettes. At no point in the novel did I seriously believe it was going to end with the protagonist's death: sure enough, the ending is so meek and milquetoast that I felt cheated.I don't know what Arx-Han would consider a brave and daring artistic statement, but I have a hard time imagining it would amount to "incels are a bunch of privileged, entitled white manbabies who can't get laid because of their reactionary politics and because they think of women as sex objects rather than people. The solution to their problems is to stop being racist and Be More Empathetic". No one in the West would get in trouble for claiming as much. The reason Arx-Han self-published INCEL isn't because it was too daring and subversive for a traditional publisher to touch: this is the work of an aspiring provocateur. Even leaving aside its punch-pulling, this compulsively readable and not particularly long book (less than 300 pages in the edition I read) is crying out for an editor. One chapter of cringe comedy wherein the protagonist cold approaches a girl in public and makes a fool of himself is plenty; by my count, there are at least four. One might have thought such a devotee of Chuck Palahniuk would have internalised the value of economy.
I dunno. I expected more. Even when Arx-Han admitted to being less brave than Tulathimutte, I thought maybe he was being self-deprecating, or holding himself to an unreasonably high standard ("I was brave, but I wasn't brave enough"). But he was right on the money: he's less brave than Tulathimutte, and not as funny, and less concise, and his characters aren't as believable. The poor man's Tulathimutte, alas.
Started on the third book in the Neapolitan quartet.
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