FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1mo ago
faking a video is a fun Saturday afternoon project for Mossad
There it is.
It’s bewildering that they wouldn’t let a single journalist see this kid
Almost as bewildering as Aguilar's original claim that, of the 2,000+ Palestinian civilians shot dead by the IDF at aid centres, not a single one of them was caught on video by the body cam he was personally wearing.
FtttG
1mo ago
I'd read that Hungary has rather strict abortion legislation, and was curious if Hungarian women ever go abroad to get abortions. I typed "do Hungarian women" into Google Search. Here were the autocomplete suggestions:
- do hungarian women like black men
- do hungarian women like american men
- do hungarian women make good wives
- do hungarian women like older men
- do hungarian women like foreigners
- do hungarian women shave
- do hungarian women date black men
- do hungarian women like indian men
- do hungarian women like americans
- do hungarian women like asian men
In July, @coffee_enjoyer cited the testimony of a former US Army Green Beret named Anthony Aguilar, who claimed to have witnessed the IDF indiscriminately shooting at people seeking famine aid at their distribution centres. @P-Necromancer earned themself an AAQC by arguing that Aguilar's testimony didn't come off as terribly persuasive.
Today, Quillette published an article called "Gaza and the Collapse of Truth-Seeking", which adds further wrinkles:
In late July, a self-described “eyewitness” finally emerged—a former US Army green beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been dismissed as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. News organisations (including the BBC and PBS), websites, and numerous podcasts carried interviews with Aguilar in which he was described as a “whistleblower” and permitted to allege “barbaric” tactics and “war crimes” on the part of US security contractors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nobody seemed to mind that the accompanying footage from Aguilar’s body camera [emphasis mine] showed not a single killing. Aguilar’s most heart-rending story—in which he claimed to have been kissed by a grateful Palestinian boy whose killing he then witnessed—was later found to have been fabricated in every detail. The boy was never shot and remains alive. At the time of writing—four days after Aguilar’s claims had been fully discredited in early September—neither the BBC nor PBS had amended their earlier coverage.
FtttG
1mo ago
Ideally I'd like to have the third draft of my NaNoWriMo project finished by the end of this week, or failing that, next Thursday.
I put more stock in Ebert's opinions than I do to the modal critic, but when he got it wrong, he could really get it wrong. He gave Blue Velvet one star pretty much solely because he objected to Isabella Rosselini appearing nude in it for what he considered ignoble aesthetic ends.
As much as I love Fight Club, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that it has significant pacing problems and the first half is much stronger than the second.
FtttG
1mo ago
At the recommendation of herself, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Reluctant to read it on my lunch break in work for fear of bursting into tears.
FtttG
1mo ago
For people who are members of the demographic most likely to be sexually assaulted, it matters to them a great deal to know if the people in their vicinity are members of the demographic most likely to sexually assault them.
Nah, way before that there was Fallon Fox, an actual transgender, rather than male with DSD like Khalif, literally cracking an opponents skull.
True. I suspect it's because MMA is a comparatively niche sport compared to the Olympics, female MMA even more so. A cursory Google suggests that as many as 5 billion people watched at least some of the 2024 Olympics: if even 1% of those watched the Khelif vs. Carini match, that's 50 million people around the world watching a presumably male person punching a female. I'd be surprised if as many as 10 million people watched the Fox vs. Brents match.
FtttG
1mo ago
I think this is addressed in the OP. The absurd beliefs of today (there is no difference in peak athletic performance between males and females, and all observable differences are the product of socialisation) are an overcorrection to the absurd beliefs of yesterday (men are physically superior to women on every axis, and women are so physically weak that they cannot even safely compete in long-distance running events). We're now belatedly arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, in which we acknowledge that men are stronger and faster than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation, while still recognising that women can be plenty strong and fast on their own terms. While "the establishment" was once pushing the "men and women are the same" angle and are now pushing the Hegelian synthesis, the use of the collective noun disguises what a hard-fought battle it was to get them to sit up and take notice. Gender-critical activists spent innumerable thankless years trying to draw attention to the higher rate of injury when male athletes were permitted to compete in female sporting events, and were rewarded for it by being harassed, doxxed and called bigoted and even racist (?). It's only very recently that the Hegelian synthesis has undergone a respectability cascade and the establishment is starting to recognise just how absurd the "men and women are the same" framework is. It'd be curious to see what the catalyst was - I think Lia Thomas started to make a lot of people sit up and take notice, but "swimming speed" is too abstract a metric for a lot of people to care about. Imane Khelif, however, seemed to have really redpilled a lot of people. The sight of an obviously male person punching a female person and being rewarded for doing so triggers an intense emotional reaction which probably has a long standing evolutionary basis.
This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours.
True, but they were both Kenyan, who are so far removed from the average in long-distance running it hardly seems like a fair comparison. I would love to see the average difference in finishing times between male and female competitors.
The famed tennis Battle of the Sexes is often derided today, don’t you know that he was out of shape and old, that Serena and Venus in their primes couldn’t take some minor league nobody in tennis, etc. What this ignores is that the Uncle Roys of the world really believed that Billy Jean King didn’t stand a chance, that any professional male would slaughter her. The result was genuinely shocking to a great many people at the time.
To the best of my knowledge, Billie Jean King is the only case of a female tennis player defeating a male: going through the examples in the Wikipedia article, I can't find any other examples in which a man played a match of three sets or more against a woman and lost, and these include many examples in which the man played with significant handicaps. Even in the single outlier of King v. Riggs, there's a credible theory that Riggs deliberately threw the match in order to get out of a gambling debt.
As to whether people believed that no woman could beat any man - I'm sure people in the 1970s would have conceded that a female tennis player could beat a man who was a literal invalid. Even if Riggs didn't throw the match, he was twenty-six years older than King. I ask you whether "several decades past his prime" is closer to the "able-bodied woman vs. male invalid" end of the spectrum than to the "evenly matched competitors" end.
FtttG
1mo ago
On the rare occasions that the Irish media reported on the identity of the man who murdered Ashling Murphy, he was generally referred to as a Slovak, to disguise the fact that he was a Roma gypsy.
FtttG
1mo ago
I've heard it called "horoscopes for men"
My sister said this once. She was very disappointed when I told her about all the women's dating profiles I'd seen with their ostensible MBTI in the bio.
FtttG
1mo ago
Yeah, I'm curious about that myself. The impression I get is that his TV career had been circling the drain for many years, to which he'd responded by becoming a sort of all-purpose keyboard warrior, taking to Twitter to attack all manner of people (including Kanye West, of all people) as "Gamergaters". At some point he fell down the gender-critical rabbit hole and here we are.
Perhaps the spiciest take I've seen on the whole matter came from Scott, in which he admitted that the spike in trans identification is probably a bad thing and it's worth trying to determine the underlying cause thereof - but then said that no one should bother trying to answer these questions because they'll end up ruining their lives in the process, like Linehan did. (Of course, a major contributing factor to Linehan's life being ruined was trans activists doing everything in their power to ruin it - Linehan claims that the police knocking on his door over tweets he'd posted was the catalyst that caused his wife to leave him. Regardless of whether that was the catalyst, it's undeniably true that the police did knock on his door because trans activists sicced them on him.)
To my mind, "this is a question worth investigating, but you shouldn't try to investigate it because bad actors will try to destroy you if you do" is a sensible position to take, if and only if you include an explicit condemnation of the bad actors trying to destroy people, which Scott doesn't.
FtttG
1mo ago
You may be familiar with Graham Linehan, an Irish TV writer best known for co-creating Ireland's single most beloved sitcom Father Ted and also for creating two other well-regarded sitcoms, Black Books and The IT Crowd. In recent years he's pivoted away from TV towards political activism and has become well-known for his aggressive opposition to transactivism, about which his ceaseless pontifications on Twitter earned him a ban (which was reversed following the Musk buyout). By his own admission his obsessive dedication to this cause has cost him professional opportunities, his marriage, and left him financially destitute. I believe his gender-critical Substack is now his primary source of income.
On Monday he returned to the UK from the states to find five armed police officers waiting for him over three tweets he'd posted to X in April. He understandably found the experience so stressful that he was taken to hospital because of his elevated blood pressure. Certain of the officers who interviewed him alluded to the ongoing Sandie Peggie* case in what struck him as sympathetic terms, suggesting they thought they were wasting their time by arresting him.
For two of the offending tweets, no reasonable person could argue that any kind of criminal offense had been committed: the first depicts a photo of a trans protest which he describes as "a photo you can smell", while the second consists of Linehan asserting he hates trans activists because they're homophobic and misogynistic. For the third, one could in theory argue that it constitutes incitement to violence:
If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
But let's be honest: trans activists using Twitter to urge their allies to assault TERFs (however broadly defined) is as common as dirt. Have any of them been arrested for so doing? Have they fuck. Funnily enough, even various Labour figures (such as health secretary Wes Streeting) are acknowledging they went too far in this instance, as has the Met Police chief.
From the Irish perspective, I find the hypocrisy appalling. The Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap were charged in the UK for, among other things, urging attendees to their gigs to go out and "murder their local MP". Just about everyone I've spoke to thinks this was an outrageous infringement on their freedom of expression and a sign of how hostile the UK has become to same: after all, no reasonable person could interpret their statement as intended literally. But all of the people who were up in arms about Kneecap's being charged with a criminal offense are crowing over Linehan's arrest and calling him a "drama queen" for complaining about his elevated blood pressure. Look at this thread over on /r/ireland, for which the comments were initially set to "approved users only" owing to "far-right brigading" (read: don't interrupt the circlejerk) and have since been locked.
I'm reminded of something I saw in response to the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes ad. If people keep abusing the "Nazi" epithet to the point that being attracted to slim, pretty blondes with big tits makes one a "Nazi", eventually people are just going to shrug their shoulders and say "guess I'm a Nazi so". By the same token, if objecting to the presence of male sex pests** in women's changing rooms, or thinking that someone shouldn't be arrested for expressing gender-critical opinions makes one "far-right" - eventually I'll simply have no choice but to say that's what I am.
*A nurse in Scotland nurse who objected to the presence of a trans-identified male doctor in the female changing rooms of the hospital where she worked, for which she was subjected to an 18-month internal investigation.
**I'm emphatically not asserting that all trans women/trans-identified males are sex pests, but I don't think it's open to debate anymore that short-sighted self-ID legislation enables sex pests.
One of my last AAQCs was about how tiresome I find the "you're only speculating about possible future technologies because you're afraid of death" "argument". As I argued there, even if that's the underlying psychological motivation for why people are speculating about said technologies, it doesn't really tell us anything about how likely said technologies are to come to pass.
When someone's speculating about how different future societies might be to our own, before accusing them of wishful thinking, just think about how bizarre our society would seem to someone from five hundred years ago. I'm sure hundreds of years ago when Alice said "in the future, we'll be able to treat infections easily, and smallpox will be eradicated, and amputation won't be the first port of call for damaged limbs, and only a small proportion of women will die in childbirth", Bob would be there to condescendingly pat on her head and tell her that her childish wishful thinking would get her nowhere. Or, as a comic recently shared in these parts wittily put it, "ME GO TOO FAR!"
FtttG
1mo ago
I agree with @WandererintheWilderness. Speculation about future technologies is in a separate category from religious beliefs.
FtttG
1mo ago
Work continues on the "polish" draft of my NaNoWriMo project. I'm indebted to @jake for providing feedback on the second draft, both in terms of the big-picture stuff (character motivations, stress-testing the plausibility of the basic premise and subsequent plot developments) and incredibly attentive copy-editing on the level of individual words and sentences.
FtttG
1mo ago
It sounds like your acquaintance is using "specifically" when they mean to say "intentionally". There are few things more irritating than people using long words in an effort to sound educated, and compromising the effort by using the wrong ones. I find it even more embarrassing than using the correct word but mispronouncing it because you've only seen it written down - "get a load of this guy, he's literate!"
Jesse Singal has a two-parter about this kerfuffle which I started reading but haven't finished yet (no paywall FYI).
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