FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
9d ago
When I was in college, I noticed a lot of people using "excessive" to mean "a great deal". It means "too much". That one seems to have fallen out of favour, thankfully.
FtttG
9d ago
If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?
DESCRIPTIVISTS, BEGONE
Many common expressions only make sense if "jealous" has a distinct meaning from "envious". "To guard sth jealously" — how can you "guard" something if someone else has it? Likewise "a jealous husband".
FtttG
10d ago
Not that I recall, no. I went on two dates with a doctor a few years ago, but I don't remember her mentioning anything about a car accident.
FtttG
10d ago
In this case it's a colleague of mine in her fifties. We have a rota in which each department is responsible for buying milk for the office each week, and my colleague (who we'll call T) was offering to do it on behalf of our team next week. I don't think any passive-aggression was intended or implied, which makes the choice of punctuation all the more baffling.
FtttG
10d ago
Less than a hundred pages from the end of The Story of a New Name. All Napoli men are bastards.
FtttG
10d ago
The female version of my real name is significantly more common in Ireland than the male, and is so common in the broader Anglosphere that I'm sure many Brits and Americans would actually be surprised to learn that it's an Irish name, whereas my name is practically unheard of outside of Ireland. As a consequence, I routinely get emails addressed "Hi [female version of my name]", even if they're direct replies to emails I sent them in which my name is clearly indicated in the From field, the email signature, and the profile photo is of a tall, bearded man wearing a shirt and tie.
This is bad enough when it's Brits or Americans misgendering me: it's inexcusable when my fellow Irish do it.
For some reason, overuse of ellipses is as big a giveaway of someone's age as overuse of em-dashes is for ChatGPT.
Many people I know over the age of fifty seem constitutionally incapable of writing "I'll buy some milk on Monday" or "I'll buy some milk on Monday.", instead feeling this weird compulsion to jazz it up with "I'll buy some milk on Monday..."
I'm far from the first person to notice this peculiar generational touchstone. I have no idea what this is intended to convey but it creeps me out.
Even worse is those people who haven't realised that an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less, so you end up with even weirder constructions like "I'll buy some milk on Monday.." or "I'll buy some milk on Monday............."
There's another, more recent misuse of "literally" that really annoys me: when people use it to "clarify" a statement that no one could possibly interpret in a figurative sense, essentially using it as synonymous with "simply".
Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.
Oh, I do that literally, do I? Thanks for clarifying, for a moment I thought this was all a big extended metaphor.
In the case of nerds specifically, I think the simplest explanation is that they are high-systemisers who are fascinated by abstract systems with complex (yet consistent and legible) rules. The world of interpersonal relationships with its frustratingly arbitrary and definitely inconsistent ("lookin' good, Susan") ruleset is confusing and scary for them.
If you're an intelligent high-systemiser, this means pursuing a career in physics or computer science; if you're not particularly intelligent, you instead get into D&D, MtG or trainspotting.
FtttG
12d ago
In the mind of just about every self-identified feminist woman I've interacted with in the past decade and a half.
In the mind of the contributors to the Shitty Media Men list.
FtttG
14d ago
While I agree with you that no reasonable person would characterise Robert as a rapist, I'm curious if his actions would qualify as such under that absurd "affirmative consent" framework of a few years ago.
FtttG
14d ago
That scandal inspired one of the most memorably titled articles in Wikipedia history.
I liked "Cat Person", and though I could understand why it was interpreted in that light, upon first reading I didn't read it as a #MeToo story at all, but rather an incisive examination of the dynamics and awkwardness of modern dating. God knows I've been on my fair share of awkward dates like those described in the story. Neither character struck me as the "villain" (until Robert arguably pulls a face-heel turn at the end): rather, they're both clumsy and inexperienced, and no-strings-attached courtship makes it all too easy for one partner to just ghost the other at the first sign of trouble or inconvenience. The murky circumstances of its inspiration should not detract from how skilfully it's composed and the precision of its observations.
I dunno. If I was in Nowicki's shoes, I'd be furious at Roupenian for recasting (blackwashing?) my ex-boyfriend to whom I harboured no ill will as some kind of fumbling misogynistic creep whose dick doesn't work. In fact, technically speaking I have been in Nowicki's shoes: when I was eighteen, an ex of mine asked me to read a short story she'd written. This "short story" was simply her account of the years preceding and following our relationship: changing the names of the "characters" was the extent of the creative invention and poetic license she'd put into it. On the one hand I was grateful that she didn't invent shitty things I'd done to make me out to be a worse guy than I am; on the other hand I was like, when your current boyfriend urged you to draw inspiration from your personal experiences, I presume he meant to use them as a jumping-off point for a fictional story, not to simply transcribe them as-is. Unlike "Cat Person" it couldn't even claim to have been written well, and I'm enormously grateful it was never (to the best of my knowledge) published anywhere.
Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This is worth checking out:
Controversy around the inspiration for its most well-known story aside, I received Kristen Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This a few Christmases ago and enjoyed it quite a lot. Every story is short enough to be read in one sitting, her spare, terse style means that the stories never drag, and there were several stories I enjoyed quite a lot and none that I actively disliked. The stories are "dark" in the sense that they deal frankly with BDSM and weird sexual fetishes, but they're more like campfire stories or high-class /r/nosleep posts (made explicit in one story which veers into outright supernatural horror) — there's nothing here that's grounded or realistic enough to be truly disturbing or unsettling. As an understated slice-of-life examination of modern dating culture which is never really trying to shock or scare the reader, "Cat Person" is actually the outlier here.
FtttG
15d ago
Since it was just @FtttG saying this (from the UK)
I live in Ireland.
I was under the impression UK progressives had entirely forgotten about the Kirk thing
In fairness, my colleagues were only talking about it the day after. I don't think I've heard his name mentioned around the office since.
FtttG
15d ago
Depending how you define body count, I'm probably somewhere between one and three dozen?
How many people have you had PiV or PiA sex with?
FtttG
15d ago
I agree that if you're pursuing some activity for your own amusement, it can sap the fun out of it to be constantly trying to "optimise" it and so on. But outside of that narrow sphere, people do need to do things they don't necessarily want to do. If everyone just did what they felt like all the time, society would collapse.
They would have to be very prolific indeed to be a significant cause of this uptick.
According to the Guardian, there were 97 sexual assaults in the female estate between 2016-19, of which 7 were committed by transgender inmates. At the time there were 3,795 people housed in the female estate, of whom 34 were transgender. In other words, a transgender inmate is more than ten times more likely to sexually assault a fellow inmate than a cisgender female inmate. In light of this (and the fact that transgender inmates are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned for violent offenses, including sexual offenses) and given there are only six women's prisons in the UK, I don't find the idea that the newfound presence of male people in the female estate could be a significant contributing factor to the recent spike in prison violence in the female estate the least bit implausible.
Talking about murders rather shifts the goalposts.
Why? Homicide rate is usually considered a robust metric in determining how violent a country or region is. "Assault" is a heterogenous category which includes everything from a savage beating which renders the victim paraplegic to a rough shove on the shoulder.
At that point, how can you fault wokes if their principle isn't "protect women" but "protect women from direct assault by people who have systemic power over them"?
Because if that was the principle on which they were operating, presumably they would be opposed to the presence of male people in female prisons, given that male people have systemic power over female people by virtue of being systematically stronger.
If you cared for women in prisons being submitted to punishment beyond the fact of being imprisoned, you could campaign for improving conditions or donate to charities that aim to do so.
"You need to do more to help the less fortunate than you are currently doing," says a person who (unless I am very much mistaken) is doing even less to help the less fortunate than I am. Isn't it always the way?
My point is that you don't seem to care if inmates, male or female, get beaten, mentally abused, or slowly poisoned by mycotoxins
On several occasions over the last decade I've volunteered to perform music for church services at two of the men's prisons in my county. That may not sound like much, but I'm quite confident it's a damn sight more than the average person has done to improve the wellbeing of male inmates. So in point of fact I rather resent you deciding on my behalf whose welfare I do and don't care for.
in fact I am fairly sure that I have seen stories of abuse of female prisoners by male guards
none of which you care to provide, of course. And while I don't dispute that this must happen sometimes, in most Western jurisdictions it's much more difficult to become a correctional officer if you've been convicted of a crime (the US, the UK) — no such restriction applies to male inmates who claim to be trans. If you don't understand why a female inmate would be more concerned about the presence of a male person whom they know for a fact has a history of violent behaviour serious enough to warrant imprisonment vs. a male prison guard who has never been convicted of a crime — then I don't know what to tell you, really.
FtttG
15d ago
I was surprised to run into the same rhetoric IRL from the patrons at that gay bar.
You seem to be spending a lot of time there bro 👀
Do you assume women's prisons are meaningfully less violent than men's prisons?
I don't assume, I know:
One data point: in the period 2001-18, 1,251 male prisoners were murdered in US prisons, while the equivalent figure for female prisoners was 7. Based on the size of the US prison population in 2022, that works out at 104.29 murders/100k population among male prisoners, 7.59 murders/100k population among female prisoners. A male American inmate is nearly 14 times more likely to be murdered in prison than a female inmate. This shouldn't come as a surprise given what proportion of the male prison population is serving time for violent offenses vs. what proportion of the female, or the obvious differences in aggression and propensity to violence between the sexes, or the obvious differences in physical strength between the sexes (which are only minimally explicable by differences in body mass).
Given that your article is from the UK, it won't surprise you to learn that the story is much the same over there as far as homicides go. It appears that not a single woman or trans person has been murdered in prison since at least 2015. If per capita homicide rates between the male and female estate were identical, you would expect two women murdered in the period.
Were you aware of headlines such as this?
Interesting that the UK is one country in which male inmates have been housed in the female estate, this is a recent phenomenon, this article comments on a huge spike in violence in the female estate, and yet doesn't mention the sexes of any of the perpetrators of this violence. I'm not saying that this spike is entirely attributable to the relatively new presence of male inmates in the female estate, but it sure is interesting that the source you provided specifically comments on the fact that the current rate of violence in the female estate is discontinuous with historical trends.
None of this other mistreatment seems to trigger the same instinctual reaction in right-wingers, at least not to the extent that I have even once seen them bring it up.
As I said previously, I think a great many people have an instinctive reaction of horror and outrage when they learn about a male person assaulting a female person, and this reaction isn't triggered when they hear about a male person assaulting a male person or a female person assaulting a female person. We can debate whether that's fair, appropriate or logical until the cows come home, but I think that instinctive reaction has a great deal more explanatory power in why conservatives might object to male people in women's prisons or contact sports than the pat answer of "they hate trans people and want to make their lives difficult out of sheer bloody-mindedness".
All I am asking is that you apply the same standard that, in your opening post, you wanted to be applied to the "woke coalition"
What standard am I failing to apply? I am strongly opposed to violence against women, as a consequence of which I've donated literally thousands of euros to my local rape crisis centre and am strongly opposed to male inmates being housed in the female estate. I don't feel any kind of inconsistency.
An extremely niche one I've complained about before is members of the rationalist community using rationalist lingo in contexts in which it is obviously inappropriate, as part of some kind of weird cargo-cult approach to in-group membership. I once saw a guy saying that he had an "irrational prior" on believing X over Y.
If it's irrational, it's not a prior. Stop it.
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