FtttG
User ID: 1175
That is not remotely what non-partisan means.
Echoing @ArjinFerman, I take "non-partisan" to mean "not driven by partisan affiliation"; in other words, the fact that someone believes in X doesn't tell you much about their political affiliation. This includes beliefs which are so popular that practically everyone believes them (like "murder should be illegal"), but also includes unpopular beliefs which are equally likely to be endorsed by a conservative or a progressive:
Based on 20 surveys conducted in the US between 2012 and 2021, the authors found that around a third of the conspiracy theories they reviewed were more attractive to Republicans than to Democrats, a third were more attractive to Democrats than to Republicans, and the rest were non-partisan... Some of the best-known conspiracy theories, including the JFK assassination, Holocaust denial, and 9/11 being an “inside job,” were not associated with political views, although they may have been in the past.
If four per cent of conservatives believe a conspiracy theory and zero per cent of progressives do (e.g. "the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats"), that's a partisan belief: the fact that someone endorses it sends a strong signal as to their political affiliation. If four per cent of conservatives and four percent of progressives believe a conspiracy theory (say, the Warren commission lied about the assassination of JFK), it's a non-partisan belief (even though it's unpopular in absolute terms), as the fact that someone believes doesn't in and of itself tell you anything about their political affiliation, unless further disambiguated by "Oswald was in the pocket of the Soviets"/"Oswald was a CIA stooge set up to kill Kennedy so they could escalate the Vietnam war". If conservatives are just as likely as progressives to want to "recognise" (whatever that means) a Palestinian state, then it falls into this category.
FtttG
16d ago
After previously hemming and hawing about the efficacy of the vaccine six months into Covid, when encouraging more people to get vaccinated ought to have been the top priority. By December 2021, probably just about everyone in the US had already developed Covid antibodies, natural or otherwise.
FtttG
17d ago
Democrats didn't shy away from giving Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed
Kamala Harris explicitly stated that she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump recommended her to do so.
Instead of Diet Coke you might try substituting sparkling water, soda water or tonic water.
FtttG
18d ago
Yeah, that's about as young as you can be without being middle-aged. Terribly sad.
FtttG
18d ago
I stumbled across this article of lifting advice on Substack.
This year I've been far less disciplined about going to the gym than I'd like, and have accordingly found that my progress on most of my key exercises has plateaued. I'm planning to follow the advice outlined in this article:
- Gym Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (aim to do some cardio on off days)
- Each day, do five sets of any three exercises (pullup, deadlift, squat, bench press, overhead press), doing as many reps as possible before I have to stop.
- Increment each of the free weight exercises by 2.5kg each week.
- Increase protein intake.
I have, of course, built an Excel spreadsheet to track my progress and make sure I'm doing equal amounts of all five exercises. Keen to see if it'll pay off before the end of the year.
FtttG
18d ago
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. Roughly how old was he, if you don't mind my asking?
FtttG
18d ago
Install the "Lock me out" Android app
Could you share the URL? I can't find it on the Google play store.
FtttG
18d ago
I thought the Kathy Griffin thing was gross and creepy, but I still think there ought to be higher standards of decorum expected of Presidents than of washed-up standup comediennes.
FtttG
19d ago
Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs, penned by Aaron Sorkin, was a transparent attempt to recapture the magic of The Social Network, Sorkin's earlier film about a brilliant tech entrepreneur whose arrogance and single-mindedness ends up compromising his relationships with his loved ones. It was slated on release, but I thought it was actually quite good, with an interesting narrative structure, great performances all around and some clever cinematography to reflect the passage of time. What was lacking compared to the earlier film was the propulsive force of Nine Inch Nails's score and a strong narrative through-line: Steve Jobs just ended up feeling too episodic for the audience to feel consistently engaged throughout. Each of the three "acts" could have been broadcast as an instalment of a three-part miniseries without compromising the emotional effect one iota.
FtttG
19d ago
LA Confidential might be in my top ten movies of all time (definitely in terms of the number of times I've watched it). But I've always considered Training Day a terribly overrated film. Denzel deserved his Oscar, but I don't know that the film has much else going for it.
Ireland's presidential election is this Friday. The Irish president (Uachtarán na hÉireann) is a ceremonial role which wields no actual power, but the incumbent is expected to serve as the ambassador for the nation. The office is currently occupied by Michael D. Higgins, who became something of an icon both nationally and abroad owing to his short stature and white hair, lending him an elfin/leprechaun appearance. (My mother thinks he's a closeted homosexual in a lavender marriage.) Higgins is coming to the end of his second term, for which the term limit applies.
This election cycle has been something of a shambles. Lack of coordination at the nomination stage has resulted in a meagre ballot of three candidates, half as many as the last election in 2018:
- Heather Humphries, Fine Gael
- Jim Gavin, Fianna Fáil
- Catherine Connolly, independent
After several presidential debates, Gavin unexpectedly dropped out of the race, but with too little notice to have his name taken off the ballot. It'll be interesting to see what happens if he secures a majority. It's rather surreal seeing the election posters for a candidate who's already taken his hat out of the ring dotted around the city.
I know very little about any of the candidates beyond their party affiliation. Connolly is apparently intensely proud of the fact that she's fluent in the Irish language and has made it a major plank of her campaign. My opinion of her instantly soured when she argued the reason the Irish electorate rejected the "durable relationships" referendum was because they didn't understand it. There are few things I find more insulting than condescension: people understood it perfectly well, which is why they rejected it.
The poor showing of candidates and controversy over the nomination procedure (particularly concerning Maria Steen, a conservative activist who sought the nomination) has resulted in many voters announcing their plan to deliberately spoil their ballots in protest, with a recent poll suggesting as many as 6% will do so.
As for me, I'm mainly just breathing a sigh of relief that the name "McGregor, Conor" doesn't appear on the ballot.
FtttG
19d ago
Met police drop all charges against Graham Linehan's tweets on trans issues.
On the one hand, good. On the other hand, this was sort of inevitable, and the process was probably intended as punishment: if they can cow him into silence without formally charging him with anything, that's cheaper and more efficient for them.
More interesting is that this article also claims that the Met police will stop investigating NCHIs (non-crime hate incidents) because they are too subjective and ambiguous. Kind of amazing that a Western police service is openly announcing "we will stop investigating things that even we ourselves do not consider crimes and return to only investigating crimes", but here we are, I suppose.
Linehan is planning to sue the police for wrongful arrest, and more power to him.
FtttG
20d ago
Last night I rewatched one of my favourite psychological horror films, The Mothman Prophecies, with which I developed something of an obsession during Covid. Still holds up, even on probably my ~fifteenth watch. I've ordered the book on which it was based, curious to see how it compares.
Okay, I know I said I wouldn't change a thing, and yet I did bristle a little at the culture war aspects.
But for all that, it didn't sully the emotional impact of the book for me one iota.
it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?
Try reading the aforementioned Doxology and come back to me.
The Japan analogy doesn't work, because there is no active anti-Japan resistance due to Japan having already made amends and settled the conflicts those crimes took place in.
Lies. Japan denies culpability for its assorted war crimes in the second world war to this day.
but I did actually go out and protest against the Iraq war which 9/11 was used to justify.
It's amazing to me that you consider this a relevant analogy. The entire reason the invasion of Iraq wasn't justified was because the Iraqis weren't responsible for 9/11. It was a ginned-up casus belli. The Palestinians were responsible for October 7th. Do you really not understand how these two situations are incomparable, or are you just pretending not to?
Hell, right now the Israeli government is proudly bragging about how they tortured Greta Thunberg
Dying to see a source on this one.
Wow, what heartening news! Thanks for the pick-me up.
So you claim that your preferred solution is for a single-state solution in which Israel is renamed to Palestine. And yet, it cheers you up to learn that lots of people want the Israelis to pack up and move elsewhere. Why would that be the case, if it isn't your preferred solution? Dare I say you're not being entirely truthful about what your preferred solution is?
You may as well ask jews in the 1940s if Nazi Germany has a right to exist.
Of all the obnoxious rhetorical strategies pro-Palestine activists use, Holocaust appropriation must be the most distasteful. Other Arabs are a far bigger threat to Arabs than Israel has ever been.
But even leaving aside the relative death tolls, the reason this analogy doesn't work is because, prior to the Nazis, relations between Jews and Germans were fairly cordial, as evidenced by the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of Jews living inside Germany at the time. But Arabs hate Israelis now, and also hated them in 1948, before Israel had even been founded (back when they were just called "Jews"). You claim that Arabs hate Israelis as an inevitable consequence of decades of mistreatment, but they already hated them before any of this mistreatment. Am I supposed to pretend that this is just a coincidence? As ever, I find myself irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that this is an ethno-religious conflict dressed up as an anti-colonial one.
Some time ago I read an article talking about how literary publishing is experiencing something of an extreme Pareto distribution: every year, one book becomes the literary book that everyone is reading, to the point that its sales completely dwarf the sales of every other literary book published that year. In 2022, that book was Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which a family member (I think my sister) gave to me some years ago and which I started reading earlier this week.
I'm as surprised as anyone to find that the hype is entirely warranted.
Seriously — of the 27 books I've read from start to finish this year, this is the best I've read so far and it's not even close. (I was only about a third of the way through it when I started to think it might achieve this accolade.) The last time I remember being so affected by a book was when I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in February of 2023. When I woke up this morning I was on page 236, and when I picked it up this afternoon, I found that I simply couldn't put it down, tearing through the remaining 242 pages in three sittings and finishing it all of ten minutes ago.
It concerns two childhood friends who reconnect as Harvard undergrads in the mid-nineties and, with the help of one of their dorm-mates, decide to design a video game together. As a gamer it was of particular interest to me, but even my family members who don't game enjoyed it, so don't let that put you off.
Tender, moving, perceptive, topical, gorgeous. The three main characters are so vividly drawn, I feel like I know them personally. I don't think I'd change a thing. I will be thinking about this book for quite some time.
Funnily enough, about a decade ago I attended a talk by Brenda Romero, an American game designer. (You might have heard of a certain project her husband John designed.) She was talking about a board game she'd designed as an art installation called Train. One of the characters in Tomorrow... designs a video game with a broadly similar premise, to the point that Romero publicly accused Zevin of plagiarism. I can certainly see the parallels, but it seems possible that it was a coincidence: even when Romero was describing the premise of Train I thought it sounded a bit trite. Creative works using the "actually it was the Holocaust all along" twist often come off as cheap and manipulative, and that's coming from someone who used exactly that twist in a short story he wrote (come to think of it, I was about the same age when I wrote it as the character is when she designs her video game).
FtttG
21d ago
FtttG
21d ago
Working much better today.
Thank you for all your tireless work Zorba, you really are the unsung hero of this space.
FtttG
21d ago
Watched Les Diaboliques from 1955, having heard it described as a psychological horror.
If it was made today, it would be called a psychological thriller, not a psychological horror. Well shot, well acted, well edited, but alas I called the twist ending in every detail about an hour in, meaning the remaining ~forty-five minutes were just an exercise in killing time. Check it out if you're less genre savvy than I am.
Likely story buddy.
Joking aside, I'm sorry dude, that's a nuisance.
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