FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4mo ago
Nominated for AAQC.
I keep thinking of this observation I once saw that when you're drunk, you don't realise how drunk you are (but it's instantly obvious to everyone else), but when you're high on weed, you become paranoid that everyone around you will notice (but in reality most people don't).
FtttG
4mo ago
I'm very sorry for your loss. Everyone processes grief differently, it probably hasn't really hit you yet. Don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong, my cousins gave me a complex about that when I was six or seven years old and it sent me on a shame spiral for years.
FtttG
4mo ago
- YMS, and specifically his watch-along videos: either by himself (last night my girlfriend and I watched the highlights of him watching The Weeknd's vanity project The Idol and laughed ourselves silly) or with his pals (their watch-along of seasons 3 and 4 of 13 Reasons Why was great comfort telly during Covid and I watched the whole thing several times).
- Errant Signal. His long rambling videos about video games are very comfy watches, even if his woke left opinions occasionally disrupt the vibe. I've watched his System Shock 2 review two or three times.
- Super Bunnyhop, as above (but without any wokeness or leftism). I've watched his reviews of Resident Evil 4 and the RE 1 remake more times than I can count.
- The Internet Historian. I've watched The Cost of Concordia at least ten times.
FtttG
4mo ago
I find it interesting that this is coming less than a year after Ireland's prime minister Leo Varadkar announced his resignation, a politician who drew obvious influence from Trudeau.
FtttG
4mo ago
The sheer volume of racist tweets coming from Indians was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
I literally don't think I've ever heard a white person say anything racist about Pakistanis, unless they were an actor playing a role. As far as I can recall, 100% of the racist statements about Pakistanis I've heard were spoken by Indians.
FtttG
4mo ago
About two-thirds of the way through The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When it comes to marital fidelity, this makes the Czechs sound worse than the French.
Yesterday I read a passage that I've been thinking about all day, may be good fodder for a top-level post.
FtttG
4mo ago
My brother's girlfriend was holding out for the Pfizer because she heard about this side special effect.
Apparently shortly before blowing himself up, the Cybertruck bomber, Matthew Livelsberger texted his ex that driving the rented car made him feel like "Batman or halo".
I can only assume Livelsberger thought halo was a pretty cool guy. After all, eh kills aleins and doesnt afraid of anything.
FtttG
4mo ago
I rewatched The Big Short recently and found it not nearly as good as I remembered it being. Despite Adam McKay's comedic background, I didn't find the "funny" bits funny at all (and the meta fourth-wall breaking bits were just embarrassing). I think it would have worked better as a straight drama with no postmodern jiggery-pokey.
Margin Call, which I watched for the first time more recently, was to my mind a more intelligent, entertaining and tonally consistent take on similar material (and what a cast!).
FtttG
4mo ago
chose literally the worst possible vehicle to commit his terrorist attack.
Terrorists choosing symbolism over efficacy is nothing new. If the point you're trying to make is that you think Elon Musk sucks, of course you're going to use a cybertruck, quite possibly the ugliest land vehicle ever designed.
FtttG
4mo ago
It'd be interesting to do some kind of academic research into this: what concentration of inaccurate or knowingly misleading reporting, in what timeframe, must a reader be exposed to before they apply healthy scepticism to a) that journalist in particular; b) that outlet in particular; and c) mainstream journalism in general? What is the level of bullshit you must be exposed to in order to overcome Gell-Mann amnesia? We could call it "Gell-Mann saturation point", where more naturally sceptical/distrustful people have a lower GMSP than more naïve or trusting types.
FtttG
4mo ago
I drew this exact comparison several years ago. My sister was very annoyed.
FtttG
4mo ago
Yes, I think many if not most Irish people are wholly ignorant of the role Islam plays in black American culture. To the extent that they are aware of the role of religion in the culture, it's limited to black gospel churches and so on.
Funnily enough, I'm reminded of a joke in an Irish sitcom which riffed on this. Dan and Becs was a short-lived sitcom about a young Dublin couple: Dan, an aspiring writer-director who works for the national broadcaster; and Becs (Rebecca), an aspiring actress/model. At one point Dan tells Becs about a concept he's come up with for a film revolving around a female Islamic suicide bomber. When Becs asks if she can have the lead, Dan tells her he thinks the role calls for a MENA actress. Becs is outraged, and says something to the effect of "Who says an actor has to be the same race as the character they're playing? Will Smith played a Muslim!" (A joke that instantly dates the show to the late 2000s: Becs is exactly the kind of spoilt privileged middle-class Anglophone girl who, if the show had come out eight years later, would have been horrified at the concept of a white actor playing a non-white character).
I think for a lot of Irish people in particular (and Western people in general), when they hear "Muslim" they immediately think "MENA". I've encountered many people who seem genuinely flabbergasted upon learning that there are plenty of Muslims who aren't MENA (Indonesia, Chechnya, Bosnia etc.), and plenty of MENA people who aren't Muslim (and not just apostates but e.g. Palestinian Christians).
FtttG
4mo ago
Oh of course, I'm well aware. It's one of those things I never stop being appalled by no matter how often I encounter it. I guess it must work on a majority of their readers or they'd have stopped by now.
FtttG
4mo ago
Reminds me of when I heard that Sabrina Rudin Erdely was in the same journalism class as Stephen Glass.
FtttG
4mo ago
Referring to Liz Truss as a former PM feels so wrong to me. Like, it's technically true, but it doesn't sound right. Like referring to Pete Best as a member of the critically acclaimed recording act The Beatles.
FtttG
4mo ago
I find it very hard to imagine an Irish person hearing the name "Shamsud-Din Jabbar" and picturing a white man. Trying to put myself in the shoes of an Irishman less terminally online than me, I imagine such a person, upon hearing his name, would assume he was a first- or second-generation immigrant from the middle East or North Africa, and would probably not assume he was a black convert. I've had to explain the concept of "Yakub" several times in the past year, and without exception, no Irish person I've encountered was familiar with it or the Nation of Islam. (Funnily enough, I did once find a discarded Black Hebrew Israelite flyer on the largest street in Dublin.)
FtttG
4mo ago
it isn't misleading to refer to him as a Texas man as long as you also include the ISIS information alongside it.
Exactly what I was getting at. The average Irish person, upon hearing "Texas man", thinks "white, God-fearing GOP voter, probably living on a ranch which contains a small arsenal of firearms". Upon hearing "Texas man commits terrorist attack", the average Irish person would probably assume that such a person committed a Dylann Roof or Timothy McVeigh copycat crime. Mentioning him by name later in the sub-heading immediately disambiguates this (I'm not saying it's impossible that a white man might convert to Islam and change his name to "Shamsud-Din Jabbar", but such a sequence of events certainly sounds unlikely), and emphasising that his attack was inspired by ISIS disambiguates it further still.
Such honesty and forthrightness is to be commended from the Independent, considering that they published an entire article about the stabbing in Dublin in November 2023 without once naming the assailant or mentioning anything about his ethnic background.
I wonder if there's some kind of geographic component to Coulter's law: maybe Irish journalists are willing to specify the ethnicities of criminals who commit crimes in far away countries, but are reluctant to do so when it happens at home (or in neighbouring nations). Or perhaps not: the New York Times is no less cagey when reporting on the Dublin riots, refusing to name the perpetrator and continually referring to "unconfirmed" reports that he's Algerian (by which they mean "unconfirmed at the time the riots unfolded" - by the time this article went to press it had been conclusively established that the perpetrator was Algerian).
FtttG
4mo ago
I went into the shop this morning and rolled my eyes when the front page of the Irish Independent referred to the perpetrator as a "Texas man". But later in the sub-heading he was mentioned by name. The online version of the article even refers to him as an "Islamic State-inspired killer". Perhaps, in Irish journalism, nature is healing?
I distinctly recall seeing, on the same day of the stabbing [in November 2023 which precipitated the Dublin riots], a commenter on the /r/ireland subreddit saying something to the effect of: "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
I mentioned to my girlfriend that the book I'm currently reading contains the first example I've seen of the word "pornsick" in print.
She thought it was analogous to "homesick" i.e. when you haven't watched your favourite porn for awhile and you start getting nostalgic for it.
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