FtttG
User ID: 1175
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".
FtttG
3mo ago
If you still believe that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 wasn't, I would like to see some evidence in support of the former claim. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence thereof.
I was reading about the case and it's funny reading a sentence like "Emma owned a katana". I was telling my girlfriend it's funny, because what the fuck kind of woman owns a katana? I've met dozens of nerdy females in my life, including some trans men, and not one of them owned a katana or any similar kind of decorative weapon. Then I look it up, and it turns out the kind of "woman" who owns a katana is a nerdy autistic man. My girlfriend got a good laugh out of that.
FtttG
3mo ago
Teresa certainly looks like a transwoman to me, but I couldn't be sure from this profile picture.
I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go
To steelman this perspective, my lefty sister explained to me that, on a trivial level, democracy doesn't just mean tyranny of the majority: a necessary precondition of a functional democracy is ensuring that everyone who ought to be entitled to the franchise has it and is able to exercise their voting right. If every other Republican was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia by a malicious Dem-voting psychiatrist and carted off by the men in butterfly nets (hence unable to go to the polls), everyone would recognise that this wasn't a fair election in any real sense. Likewise if gangs of Antifa goons were bussed in to red states to stand outside polling stations and level AR-15s at anyone in a MAGA hat.
From the perspective of these Dems, if you take them at their word, they believe that Trump will do something like this to American democracy. Either he'll abolish it entirely and crown himself Dictator-for-Life (the less outlandish version of this talks about him abolishing presidential term limits); or he'll use various procedural tricks to manipulate election outcomes - taking away the franchise from assorted reliably Dem-voting demographics, straight-up shipping them off to concentration camps, or simply instructing police officers to look the other way when members of these groups are assaulted or mudered. Thus, in order to ensure the long-term survival of American democracy, actions which are surely undemocratic in the short-term must be undertaken, as a "pre-emptive strike" to prevent the destruction of democracy in the long-term.
Needless to say, I don't agree with any of this. No concentration camps will be constructed during Trump's second term, the rate at which black Americans are stripped of their voting rights (e.g. because of felony disenfranchisement) will be no different than under Biden, the murder clearance rate will be largely unchanged (i.e. there will no massive spike in unsolved murders of black Americans, LGBT people etc.).
But if you were one of these people who sincerely believed that the long-term destruction of American democracy was imminent, I could certainly imagine thinking that, therefore, short-term undemocratic actions might be justified to protect. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
FtttG
3mo ago
I was pleasantly surprised to see so many doomers here issuing mea culpas on election night and admitting that if the 2024 election wasn't rigged, the 2020 one probably wasn't either.
FtttG
3mo ago
As documented in these threads, I completed NaNoWriMo in November, but that only left me with about half of a first draft. In the first two weeks of December I kept writing and wrote ~15k words on top of the 50k I knocked out in November, but then got stuck. I hate leaving things unfinished and self-imposed deadlines seem to work well for me, so my plan is to do NaNoWriMo again in February: write 1,666 words every day until I get to a first draft. Will be posting in this thread every week to keep myself honest.
FtttG
3mo ago
Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants.
Which person awarded a grant was a member of this cult?
FtttG
3mo ago
★ Postbrat
What does that mean? Is it using the term in a BDSM context, or referring to the Charli XCX album?
★ Not A Person ★ it/its
FtttG
3mo ago
The difference being that Islam already has a critical mass of adherents, a sufficiently large subset of whom are willing and able to do violence on its behalf.
The entire global population of self-identified rationalists could probably fit into a single stadium with plenty of room left over; the proportion of them who are willing to do violence to further the community's goals is vanishingly small; the proportion of them who are able to do violence is smaller still.
My opinion is that, per another commenter's allusion to geeks, MOPs and sociopaths, the rationalist community currently comprises three groups:
- People who really value the truth for its own sake, even if it's uncomfortable, and who sincerely want to get better at reasoning and recognising their own biases - "not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions... a dojo for people learning to resist them."
- People who are self-aware enough to recognise that many of their beliefs are probably false or rest on extremely shaky reasoning, but are reluctant to abandon them, typically because it would be socially disadvantageous to do so. Instead, they turn to rationalism in search of ever more outré and convoluted reasoning with which they can justify clinging to their obviously erroneous belief in beliefs, aiming to suppress their nagging doubts about them via overwhelming streams of abstruse jargon - essentially Gish-galloping themselves in addition to the people around them. I think @Dean is absolutely correct in describing what this group does as "rationalisation".
- Cargo-cultists who lack even the self-awareness of the second group, and who dress up the beliefs they hold (which they arrived at via the typical algorithms of social conformity) using the superficial language associated with the rationalist community, with zero understanding of the more complex and reflective insights and concepts generated by the first group. Rationalism as a community and fashion statement, and nothing more.
What's interesting is that some people who are scrupulously in group 1 most of the time can fall into group 2 only for certain specific beliefs, typically if the social pressure is great enough. Coming out and saying you're not onboard with gender ideology is a great way to get yourself disinvited from parties in the Bay Area.
I suspect that every sufficiently large community eventually undergoes such a process of degeneration, in much the same way that the moral principles explicitly endorsed by Christianity don't necessarily tell you much about the moral character of the religion's adherents. And rationalists, of all people, should know better than pulling the No True Rationalist schtick - a community is only as good as the people in it, and this episode makes it abundantly clear that the rationalist community (just like any other sufficiently large community) contains some pretty odious people who can hide in plain sight by adopting the vernacular and parroting the appropriate shibboleths. See also effective altruism and Sam Bankman-Fried.
FtttG
3mo ago
we haven’t had sex in over a year
Unless one or both of you:
- is asexual
- has some kind of medical condition
- has some kind of mental illness
- is going through some long-term personal extenuating circumstances (e.g. bereavement)
This is game over, right off the bat. I don't even need to hear anything else about your relationship - I already know it's not working.
FtttG
3mo ago
A generation of crime stats have been contaminated because of recording the perpetrator's claimed gender identity rather than their sex. Twenty years from now, criminologists will be baffled as to why the UK saw such a massive spike in "female" sex crimes over the course of five years, which then regressed to the mean in a heartbeat.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Horrible Histories entry when I was in primary school: https://www.amazon.com/Woeful-Second-World-Horrible-Histories/dp/1407163914
Despite the funny illustrations, it's remarkably unsanitised for a children's book. I think this is actually where I first learned what the Holocaust was. There's a chapter going into detail about the moral ambiguity of the conflict, pointing out that, while the Nazis were obviously evil, the Allies did some pretty questionable things too, such as the firebombing of Dresden. Surprisingly confrontational given the intended demographic.
I finished The Trial on Friday. It was rubbish, dull as dishwater, not a patch on Metamorphosis. Kafka took a killer premise (a man is arrested but never informed what his alleged crime is, and must mount a defence in spite of not knowing what he's accused of) and squandered it: Josef K's arrest never has any material impact on his life, the allegedly nightmarishly inscrutable bureaucracy never really materialises. I've read books which induced the sensation of Kafkaesque dread and disorientation far more effectively than the book from which the term originates.
Started Montaillou today. As someone who doesn't read much "pure" history (or any, really), it's quite a challenging read, but I intend to finish it anyway.
FtttG
3mo ago
Probably weird of me but I maintain an Excel spreadsheet of many motte regulars (their usernames , I mean) with my own notations, so I can have a clearer idea who I'm interacting with or reading.
Did senpai notice me? If so, what does it say?
FtttG
3mo ago
I've watched seasons 1 and 2 and loved them, felt genuinely mature and novelistic in a way Breaking Bad never did for me. We watched the first episode of season 3 and liked it but got distracted and never picked it up again. Maybe we should.
FtttG
3mo ago
I wonder if we'll get more "edgy" hardcore bands making music videos about tattooing swastikas on Trump supporters' foreheads: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yy-SiZSlmhI?si=0pc1FG5jcplOh0yr
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?
More options
Context Copy link