FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3mo ago
I did read the Wikipedia page, but I'm also distinctly aware that, for any contentious topic, Wikipedia is ideologically captured and cannot be relied upon to provide a neutral answer. If there were a lot of psychologists, psychiatrists etc. who privately agreed that dyslexia isn't a real illness, and if there was a large community of people diagnosing themselves with it, I'm not sure if I'd trust Wikipedia to say so.
FtttG
3mo ago
I guess my question is more along the lines of "is dyslexia distinct in any meaningful way from a lack of skills in verbal reasoning?"
FtttG
3mo ago
I've occasionally heard people allude to the idea that "dyslexia" isn't really a discrete medical condition, but rather a sort of cope that parents use to prevent their kid feeling bad about being a bit on the slow side, or lacking in verbal comprehension. For example, Freddie deBoer:
Let’s set aside whether dyslexia is one thing or many things and whether or not it’s simply a term that we came up with to say that some people are poor readers, as a matter of compassion.
Is there anything to this? Is dyslexia a real medical condition, or a contested one? Is it generally sensibly diagnosed by qualified professionals, or is there an epidemic of self-diagnosis muddying the water?
FtttG
3mo ago
I recently announced my plans to do a self-imposed NaNoWriMo in February and document my progress in these threads to keep myself honest. I'm moving house this week and I've decided it's not feasible, so I'm pushing it back until next week. I apologise for not being as disciplined as I'd hoped.
FtttG
3mo ago
In his defense, in his first term Trump was the first President not to get the US embroiled in any new wars since Carter.
FtttG
3mo ago
Ah. Yesterday when you said that you were correct in your assessment that Russiagate was a conspiracy, I took that to mean "Trump really did conspire with the Russians to pervert the course of the 2016 election". I see now that you meant the opposite - that Russiagate was a conspiracy on the part of the Clinton campaign to discredit Trump, which is my stance on it as well. Carry on!
FtttG
3mo ago
I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct.
I'd be interested to read them, would you mind sharing the links?
FtttG
3mo ago
I'm kidding, it's a town called Peñiscola (so I'm sure it's pronounced more like "pen-YIS-co-LA" or whatever), but I did a bit of a double-take when I saw it.
FtttG
3mo ago
Still on Montaillou, from which I learned that there's a town in Spain called Stuck my dick in a bottle of Pepsi.
FtttG
3mo ago
Likewise, transness is such an intense and sacred topic on the left that many consider it offensive to put it in any film that doesn’t treat it with the utmost seriousness and deference. I’m pretty sure that’s the basis of the anti-trans claims against Emilia Perez. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about transness or trans women, it’s just inherently offensive to make a goofy movie that doesn’t take transness serious enough.
I see what you're getting at. On the other hand, my impression is that most progressives love Sean Baker's Tangerine, a movie about two trans women prostitutes which isn't merely a comedy but an outright farce, in which essentially none of the characters are remotely likeable. (Highly recommended, incidentally, I laughed my head off.)
FtttG
3mo ago
What is your basis for the claim that a large portion of those casualties were killed by the IDF?
One of the rules of the site is "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." Hard to imagine a more partisan and inflammatory claim than "the Democrats rigged the 2020 election in order to install their preferred candidate". It's very aggravating when this rule has been egregiously violated (i.e. an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim was presented without any evidence in support of it), I try to be charitable by specifically requesting that various posters provide evidence in support of said claim, and the best they can cough up is "well there would be evidence in support of this partisan and inflammatory claim if the Dems/deep state/Big Tech/WHO/Bilderberg Group/Illuminati/whoever hadn't suppressed it". This is not evidence in support of an inflammatory claim. This is an IOU for said evidence. This is a glorified "source: dude trust me". And when I respond with more than a little exasperated frustration at multiple posters egregiously violating the rules of this space, you accuse me of being "cancerous" and failing to argue in good faith.
Put yourself in my shoes: imagine if someone made an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim with which you disagreed without presenting a lick of evidence to back it up, you asked them to do so, and their response was "I don't have evidence for it because it's been suppressed". Would you respond with "huh, how unfortunate, that must be really frustrating, this thing must go all the way to the top"? Or would you roll your eyes and say "come on dude, get real, I need more than just your word to go on"? I strongly suspect the latter, as I did.
You're also failing to take population into account. The current combined population of Israel, Palestine and the West Bank is about 15 million people. In 1948 it was about 2.2 million. Let's average that and say the combined population is 8.6 million in the period under discussion.
The Troubles were almost entirely confined to Northern Ireland, only occasionally spilling over into the Republic and the British mainland. To keep things fair, I'll exclude any deaths which took place outside of Northern Ireland, per this table. The population of Northern Ireland was 1.5 million in 1966 (when the Troubles began) and 1.7 million in 1998 (Good Friday Agreement), giving us an average of 1.6 million for the period.
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3,272 deaths against a population of 1.6 million = 214 deaths/100k
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100,000* deaths against a population of 8.6 million = 1,221 deaths/100k
So the Israel-Palestine conflict is only 6 times as bloody as the Troubles, not 360 times. And that isn't even taking timescale into account, as the Troubles went on for 32 years while the Israel-Palestine conflict has been ongoing in one form or another since 1948.
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3,532 deaths against a population of 1.6 million, over 32 years = 7.2 deaths/100k/year
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100,000* deaths against a population of 8.6 million, over 77 years = 16 deaths/100k/year
So only slightly more than twice as bloody as the Troubles.
*Roughly.
FtttG
3mo ago
But by the same token, I'll note that Hamas claimed nearly half as many lives in one day (7/10) as the Troubles did in 30 years, almost all of whom were civilians. It seems to me that you're being rather selective in your condemnation.
I'm sorry, but "there would be hard evidence to support my claim, but They have suppressed it" is what you say when you have nothing. It is the first port of call for every paranoid conspiracy theorist who arrived at their conclusion first, went looking for evidence to support it and came up short. To which I say: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I also don't know what you mean by "genuine". I genuinely don't believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. I genuinely haven't seen any evidence that I found remotely persuasive.
FtttG
3mo ago
No, I'm sincerely asking the hypothetical. I find it deeply suspicious how many people claim an election was rigged when it doesn't produce the outcome they want, and insist that it was perfectly legitimate when it does.
Compare the British in Northern Ireland
You mean the British soldiers who opened fire on a peaceful protest completely without provocation, killing fourteen people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)) ? The British security apparatus which provided almost all of the resources to a paramilitary organisation on one side of the conflict, while British soldiers had an explicit policy of shooting members of opposing paramilitary organisations dead on sight? The British security apparatus which urged the members of a separate paramilitary organisation to assassinate the Irish Taoiseach?
"The British soldiers brought peace to Northern Ireland" is certainly not my understanding of the period 1960-98, some of which I lived through. I accept that the Troubles was a much less brutal conflict than the Israel-Palestine war (although I wouldn't say Israel is solely to blame for said brutality), but the British military and security apparatus deserve a great deal of the blame for needlessly escalating it.
FtttG
3mo ago
Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor.
Since densely populated urban centres have become commonplace, how many Europeans have comported themselves in such a manner in wartime? There was plenty of deliberate bombing of exclusively civilian targets on the part of the Allies in the second world war, for example (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki). Likewise the deliberate bombing of villages by Americans in the Vietnam war. Evidently this "cowardly and brutal" fighting style is not unique to Jews.
And that's not even addressing the obvious point, that civilian collateral damage is literally unavoidable when engaged in a conflict with a belligerent which employs guerrilla warfare tactics and uses civilians as human shields, fully anticipating - even hoping - that they will get caught in the crossfire.
FtttG
3mo ago
If Trump had won in 2020, what would your conclusion have been?
Do you think Trump was elected legitimately in 2016?
FtttG
3mo ago
Is your argument that all of these vulnerabilities were addressed in between 2020 and 2024, which is why Trump got in in 2024 and not 2020?
FtttG
3mo ago
No idea, I've never seen it, and nor had my mother who told me this story. Is there onscreen kissing in it? It may have been something like that.
I was very interested to learn a few years ago that Patrick McGoohan is a distant relative of mine on my mother's side. My grandfather was from Kerry in the southwest, but moved to Dublin for work. In the sixties some of his Kerry family came up to Dublin to visit, having heard that their Nth cousin was starring in a film (Ice Station Zebra) - I don't believe there were any cinemas in Kerry at the time. They went with my grandfather to see it, and were apparently so scandalised by the film's contents that, upon leaving the cinema, looked up to the sky and ruefully commented "no wonder there's rain".
I've been writing this novel in Google docs, periodically backing it up on Dropbox and on a thumb drive.
I had an idea for a novel I couldn't (can't) get out of my head.
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