FtttG
User ID: 1175
As I mentioned back in July, every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. A lot of these are harmless days and observations that no one could take exception to (World Friendship Day, World Chocolate Day etc.), but a significant number this month were of a more... strident nature. In descending order from the top of the notice board:
- Movember
- Time to Talk About Mental Health
- Transgender Awareness Week (November 13th-19th)
- International Men's Day (November 19th)
- International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25th)
- International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (November 29th)
Numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 are unobjectionable (curious if I'll hear the "ugh, every day is International Men's Day!" joke two weeks from today). With regard to #3, my immediate thought was "for God's sake, how many days do you people need?" But my primary reaction was a feeling that 3, 5 and 6 are all in tension with one another, and that anyone who thinks about this for long enough would realise how unstable the coalition is.
- Trans — Palestine: The absurdity of the "Queers for Palestine" slogan (and facetious comparisons to "turkeys for Christmas") has been well-enumerated and I'm not going to relitigate the whole argument. Suffice it to say that a given LGBT person is much safer in Israel than they are in either Gaza or the West Bank, and leave it at that. Accuse me of pinkwashing if you must, it doesn't make me wrong.
- Trans — violence against women: My opposition to violence against women is precisely why I am opposed to housing convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons, or allowing male sportspeople to compete in women's contact sports.
- Violence against women — Palestine: As a rule, the woke coalition adopts a maximally credulous approach to women's claims to have been sexually assaulted — unless the women in question are Israelis who claim to have been raped by Hamas squaddies on 07/10/2023. (As one commentator ruefully put it, it's "#MeToo — unless you're a Jew".) The entire reason I'm uncomfortable about the idea of solidarity with the Palestinian people is that the activists are constantly muddying the waters about whether they support solidarity with the Palestinian people or solidarity with the Palestinian cause; if the latter, there's another layer of intentional ambiguity about whether it's support for a Palestinian state via peaceful activism or via armed resistance. If the latter, this logically implies that adherents support Hamas squaddies gunning down unarmed women at a music festival. And even if you have zero sympathy for Israeli women, even within Palestine, women are treated spectacularly poorly relative to their Israeli peers.
More than anything I'm reminded of Scott's evergreen post "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle":
In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.
Were I to argue that male rapists with intact penises don't belong in women's prisons, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace, but observing Trans Awareness Week is just being a decent person. Were I to point out the shockingly brutal acts of violence against women Hamas committed on October 7th, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace*; but announcing that you "stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people" is just being a decent person.
I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.
*Even if I prefaced it by saying that Israel's response was disproportionate, and acknowledging that Israel has also committed crimes against humanity.
FtttG
23d ago
About halfway through The Story of a New Name. The story is starting to pick up now.
FtttG
24d ago
If they say "British nationals" as opposed to "Englishmen" or "Britons", you can join the dots.
FtttG
24d ago
Nine people injured after a stabbing attack on a train from Doncaster to London. Police have two suspects in custody, British nationals in their thirties.
FtttG
24d ago
people-on-manic-spectrum hugs are like unsecured loans
What do you mean by this?
FtttG
26d ago
Have you read the book? I found that all the points in the film's favour that you mentioned came across more effectively in the book. I really cared about the characters in the book, and didn't care about the characters in the movie.
FtttG
26d ago
Agreed, I was so disappointed by the film of A Scanner Darkly, especially in light of how it was my favourite of the Dick novels I've read.
In fairness, both Minority Report and Total Recall were based on his short stories, so a certain amount of Adaptation Expansion was unavoidable. TV Tropes argues that, while Total Recall explores themes that aren't mentioned anywhere in its source material, they are themes that Dick returned to again and again throughout his oeuvre. So Total Recall isn't so much an adaptation of the specific short story on which it was based, as it is an adaptation of Dick's work as a whole.
In contrast, the film version of Minority Report takes the basic premise but drops most of the philosophical complexities around precognition and completely inverts the message: in the short story,
I remember reading somewhere that Blade Runner was the only adaptation of one of his works that Dick saw in his lifetime (well, a rough cut anyway), and he said he loved it.
FtttG
26d ago
Chinatown was made in 1974 and set in the 1930s, and with its themes of public corruption, it can easily be read as a commentary on the Watergate scandal.
Its spiritual successor from 1997, LA Confidential, was set in the 1950s. With its narrative about corrupt police officers, police brutality, institutional racism and muckraking journalists, it's easy to read it as a reaction to the beating of Rodney King, the subsequent riots, and the trial of OJ Simpson and surrounding media circus.
FtttG
26d ago
Minority Report is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made in the Hollywood mainstream. Atmospheric, gorgeous to look at, intelligent, thought-provoking, emotionally resonant. Spielberg was firing on all cylinders with that one.
FtttG
26d ago
Along the same lines, my mum and brother recently watched Rosemary's Baby, which I watched years ago. My mum had often said that her mother said that Rosemary's Baby was the scariest film she'd ever seen. Now, I love Rosemary's Baby, but I imagine it must hit a lot harder if you're a mother, a devout Catholic (as my grandmother was), or both.
FtttG
26d ago
Played it, loved it, even more than Amnesia. Incredible atmosphere and the ending really got under my skin.
FtttG
26d ago
I made it halfway through 2005's Cold Fear before realising I wasn't enjoying myself and don't care to see how it ends. And now Spooky Season is over before I can play any more horror games.
In the same spirit I recently tried playing Perception, one of those horror-themed walking simulators. Gave up on it after an hour.
FtttG
26d ago
Sora, an app for generating deepfake videos, has banned people from using it to create deepfakes of MLK Jr., after a rash of "disrespectful" videos.
They're right: they are disrespectful. They're also fucking hilarious.
FtttG
27d ago
I'm not saying it's the only contributing factor: all kinds of violence have declined over time. But I think it's one of many, and it's an important consideration to bear in mind before touting the virtues of "renormalising" (for want of a better word) casual fistfights, which is the context in which I was originally discussing this. Fistfights on concrete are more likely to be lethal than fistfights on grass or dirt tracks; a higher proportion of people live in built-up areas now than in the past; ergo, all things being equal, an unarmed fistfight in 2025 is more likely to end with one participant dead than an unarmed fistfight in 1925.
FtttG
27d ago
You're basing your entire argument on surface hardness?
I think the fact that more people live in built-up environments now than they used to has a major impact on how they behave, yes.
The fields in our area are full of rocks, if you hit your head on one of those it's much worse (sharper) than concrete.
Okay, but if you fall over in one of those fields, what is the likelihood of you hitting your head on a rock vs. if you fall over on a footpath?
FtttG
27d ago
I ask these people: how did our ancestors ever manage to live?
In that period, about 56% of the US lived in urban areas. Now, the equivalent figure is about 81%. If two guys working on a farm get into a fistfight, it's unlikely to result in anything worse than a black eye. If two guys get into a fistfight outside a bar, a single punch can easily result in one of them falling over, hitting his head on the concrete and being killed instantly. This is such a big problem in Australia that various states passed so-called "one punch" laws.
Punching someone when they're standing on a concrete footpath presents a vastly higher risk of death than punching someone when they're standing in a field or on a dirt track.
FtttG
27d ago
Or alternatively, they're staking out a territorial claim. "In This Office We Believe..."
FtttG
27d ago
because it's unnecessary for childrearing
Isn't it? Surely punishing a child is just reinforcement learning.
Pleased to find I'm already seeing results from my new strength training plan, both in terms of max weight and also endurance. When I started exactly two weeks ago, I could deadlift 142.5 kg (incl. the bar) for 18 reps over 4 sets; this morning, I lifted 147.5 kg for 25 reps over 5 sets. Curious how far I can get before Christmas.
FtttG
28d ago
are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?
You will have to disambiguate this. I think I presented a convincing case that, if you look at the decline in total inflation-adjusted wages in the manufacturing sector in the US over time (as opposed to wages per employee), most of that decline is attributable to automation and mechanisation. This is also true of agriculture, for much the same reasons. If you look at all American employees who don't work in agriculture, in 1945, 37% of them worked in manufacturing: by 1977, this figure had fallen to 22%. This is before any of Reagan's neoliberal policies and nearly twenty years before NAFTA. Perhaps if there had been no offshoring and less immigration in the decades to come, the decline over the following fifty years wouldn't have been quite as steep, but I still find it hard to envision a scenario in which more than 10% of the American non-farm workforce works in manufacturing.
FtttG
28d ago
I don't know if that answer is tautologically true: I think there are quite a number of nativists who think the number of Indian programmers getting hired by American companies on H1B visas ought to be zero, regardless of how talented they are.
If you're already in a relationship, you're probably better off not knowing.
More options
Context Copy link