FtttG
User ID: 1175
I may have exaggerated slightly. Prior to Covid, the gay marriage referendum was the thing everyone in Ireland was talking about for the first half of 2015 and several months prior. The campaign to legalise abortion via constitutional amendment was likewise a really big deal for several years prior to its successful legalisation in 2018, occupying discussions almost as much as Brexit and Orange Man Bad (Irish people would put "Repeal the 8th" in their Instagram or Tinder bios, and plain black sweaters with the word "REPEAL" emblazoned on them in all caps sold in their tens of thousands). One sometimes gets the impression that progressive politicians and activists in Ireland were victims of their own success: after both gay marriage and abortion were legalised with massive public mandates, they found themselves at a bit of a loss for what to do next, hence their eagerness to lend their support for foreign causes like Ukraine and Gaza. Neither nebulously-defined "trans rights", nor farcical efforts to portray Black Lives Matter as a movement which has the slightest relevance to Irish politics, scratch quite the same itch. The campaign to amend the Irish constitution to remove any reference to "marriage" or "mothers" was a resounding failure, being rejected even by many who consider themselves progressive. Likewise the so-called "hate speech bill", which was never put to a public vote but which was so controversial that it was shelved.
Other than those two, in the linked post, I listed some domestic Irish issues which were the Current Thing in Ireland — but, as a rule, only for the duration of a single news cycle. For a few weeks in January 2022, everyone was talking about the murder of Ashling Murphy, then promptly forgot about it as soon as her killer was arrested, and immediately started talking obsessively about Ukraine for the next twenty months.
Looking back over the past two years, I sincerely cannot think of any domestic Irish event or issue which captured the public's imagination (or had nearly as much staying power) as much as the conflict in Gaza has. There have been literally hundreds of protests against Israel across the country; both our prime minister and President have weighed in on the conflict several times, as has virtually every recently-minted Irish celebrity (and some less recently minted); our government are considering passing a bill which would make it a criminal offense to do business with certain Israeli firms and so on and so forth. The only domestic issues which even came close to this level of omnipresence were a) the ongoing debate about immigration, and by extension the anti-immigration riots in Dublin in November 2023; and b) the civil rape trial against Conor McGregor, which everyone was talking about from the tail end of last year and early this year.
FtttG
27d ago
I explicitly stated that I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict will come to a complete end any time soon, so I don't know why you're pointing that out. It doesn't seem like a productive contribution to the discussion.
Thank you for the detailed, succinct write-up. I intended to make a top-level post using the presumptive end of the current Gaza conflict as a jumping-off point to ask a much broader question, namely:
What will the next Current Thing™ be?
In May of last year, I argued that media minutes, column inches and the forefronts of public consciousness follow a Pareto distribution, in which one issue clearly dominates at the expense of all others. In Ireland (and presumably a significant chunk of the Anglosphere and also the entire world), a list of these "primary" issues over the past decade or so looked as follows:
- Brexit (June-November 2016; intermittently recurs as a secondary topic whenever there's a lull in one of the subsequent primary topics)
- Donald Trump election and presidency (November 2016-March 2020)
- Covid (March 2020-January 2022)
- George Floyd/BLM protests (May 2020-September 2020) [I'm cheating a little bit; while the protests were ongoing they seemed to take up exactly as much space in the discourse as Covid, then after they died down Covid returned as the sole current thing)
- Russia-Ukraine war (February 2022-October 2023)
- Israel-Gaza war (October 2023-present)
I'm not saying the Israel-Palestine conflict is permanently over: as a cold conflict which periodically goes hot for 77 consecutive years, it would be very impressive indeed if the imminent cessation of hostilities represented a decisive end to the conflict. But I do think there's a very good chance that it stops being the "primary" issue that dominates the discourse, and retreats to the status it occupied prior to October 7th, 2023. Diehards will still emblazon their balconies with Palestine flags, you have not heard "from the river to the sea" for the last time, there will be periodic calls to boycott and divest — but it will go back to being a page 4 story. I strongly suspect that the era of copycat attacks on random Jewish civilians in First World nations has come to an end.
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be?
Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution. Sometimes the easy, obvious answer is the correct one: activists had been complaining about police mistreatment of black Americans for years prior to the murder of George Floyd, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine could not have come as a complete surprise to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with the geopolitics of the region. In this framing, obvious candidates for the next Current Thing™ include AI, the ongoing debate about immigration from the global south, and Orange Man Bad. In the latter case, it's entirely possible that all of the "ceasefire now" people will quickly realise that their moment in the limelight has passed, exchange their keffiyehs for black bloc and get back to partying like it's 2017.
Playing the game on Hard Mode, the answer might be something completely unexpected. In January 2020, who among us could have foreseen that a virus in Wuhan (whether from a lab or a wet market) would determine the course of our lives for pretty much the duration of March 2020-December 2021? In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
FtttG
27d ago
If there's no aid on the ships, in what sense are they humanitarian? Because they're full of good vibes and well-wishers?
FtttG
27d ago
I've heard Infinite Jest is quite the doorstopper. Are you finding it difficult to read?
FtttG
27d ago
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. It's the book which is widely credited with inventing YA fiction, for better and for worse. An easy read which I know I'll never read again, and probably the best book written by a 17-year-old girl I've ever read. The name on the protagonist's birth cert is "Ponyboy"; now there's another reference I understand, RIP.
I recently saw a clip of David Lynch speaking some time before his death. In stark contrast to his usual affable, Jimmy Stewart-esque demeanour, Lynch sounds not merely exasperated, not personally affronted, but positively wounded by the recent trend of people watching films and TV shows on their phones. He patiently explains that his films are designed to be watched on a big screen with a real sound system: how can you possibly expect to experience the intended emotional reaction watching the film on a screen smaller than your hand, using the integrated speakers which can't reproduce any frequencies lower than 200 Hz? He practically begs the viewer to watch his films the way they were intended to be seen. Boy, can I ever relate.
Personally, I cannot fathom the idea of watching a movie or TV show on a smartphone. I recall exactly one instance in which I've done it: myself and the girlfriend were on a long train ride through Italy and had neglected to bring anything to read, so we watched The Collector on her iPhone, each wearing one of her Airpods. (I think the movie was mixed in mono, thankfully.) The only kinds of videos I'll watch on my phone are ones devoid of aesthetic merit: YouTube reviews, Instagram reels and so on. But perhaps people like me are going the way of the dodo.
FtttG
1mo ago
Price including the sales tax is the norm in Europe, the lack of it was one of the biggest culture shocks the last time I was in the states. I understand some jurisdictions have passed laws against drip-pricing - the idea that the price indicated must be the final price (i.e. including the sales tax) seems like an obvious extension of that principle.
FtttG
1mo ago
When I came to realize all supernaturalism is a lie, and the only way one with intellect and curiosity can believe it is to intentionally blind themselves, I became very angry with everyone who should have known better (or DID know better) and lied to me.
If the Witnesses were sincere in their faith, they weren't lying to him. They were flagrantly, wilfully ignorant, but not technically lying.
FtttG
1mo ago
Is there a word for this process?
Per Quillette, The Boy Who Inflated the Concept of 'Wolf'.
I was about to ask how, exactly, destroying a Greek diner's exterior could possibly hope to advance the interests of the Palestinian cause.
... but then it occurred to me that "pointlessly destructive behaviour which could not possibly hope to advance the interests of the Palestinian cause even in principle" actually describes a great deal of pro-Palestine activism, and activism for a number of other omnicause issues. So, yeah, good point.
A few months ago, @ymeskhout shared a video of a 23-year-old American woman who happened across a diner decorated with what she thought were Israeli flags, and began tearing them off the diner while chanting various pro-Palestine slogans and condemning the diner for being complicit in genocide. The proprietor came out of the diner to ask her what on earth she was doing, and pointed out to her that (I'm sure you've guessed the punchline) it was a Greek diner decorated with Greek flags. Shortly afterwards, the woman was arrested for destruction of property.
Leaving aside what this farcical incident says about the typical pro-Palestine activist and how well-informed they are, what really jumped out at me was that the perpetrator recorded the video herself, and even after her mistake was pointed out to her while recording the video, she still uploaded it to TikTok under her personal account. Now, if it had been an Israeli diner, I can imagine a sufficiently committed activist publishing a video of themselves damaging it in order to make a political statement, fully cognizant of the fact that doing so would make it easier for the authorities to arrest and convict her. But this woman attempted to commit a crime in order to make a political statement, failed due to mistaken identity of her victims, and even after realising her mistake, still distributed the video of her committing the crime. Not only did she commit a crime for no discernible personal or political benefit, she made a complete unforced error in distributing evidence of her committing this crime under her personal TikTok account, again for literally no benefit that I can fathom (except maybe the fleeting dopamine hit of racking up some views of her making a fool of herself).
It's a level of idiocy I simply cannot fathom. As I said last month: attempts to practise law enforcement by appealing to the rationality and common sense of criminals are doomed to failure by virtue of the fact that criminals are a group heavily selected for lacking rationality or common sense.
FtttG
1mo ago
I wonder to what extent just decriminalizing minor physical violence would help. Like you look back to the 30s/40s and it seems like a low level of pervasive physical violence was normal.
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.
FtttG
1mo ago
Glad you liked it. Having read Tartt's entire oeuvre I can confirm it's all downhill from here, although The Goldfinch is better than The Little Friend.
When looking at the country as a whole, I would suspect Polish and Hindi.
When looking at Dublin specifically, it might be Portuguese and Mandarin.
FtttG
1mo ago
One of my new year's resolutions was to read at least 26 books this year. About halfway through the book I rather strongly felt I was no longer enjoying it, but I didn't want the time I'd invested so far to go to waste.
To be fair to Zink, the book wasn't boring as such. Her style isn't funny, but it's at least easy to read.
Finished Nell Zink's Doxology on Friday.
Easily the most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book this year. Have you ever been at a standup comedy gig and the comedian tells a joke which doesn't land, and there's just this awkward silence? Doxology is that in literary form. There were so many attempts at humour which simply fell flat. While reading it, I found myself constantly rolling my eyes at some of the really lame attempts at humour. Zink seems incredibly smug and pleased with herself for some reason beyond my capacity to divine — her attempts at humour are neither funny nor even clever enough that she gets brownie points for being obscurantist. For some reason, I pictured Zink making this expression the entire time she was sitting in front of her computer typing. There's one point where one of the characters tells her husband that she's looking for a collaborator (i.e. in a business startup), and her husband "quips" back something like "You mean you're going to shave my head?" And then the narration adds a parenthetical literally explaining the joke, that the husband was referring to the French women who dated Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation. I'm not saying the joke would have been funny to begin with, but explaining it didn't help any and just made me feel annoyed in addition to not laughing.
Awhile back, someone on this forum complained that, when writing fiction, Scott suffers from "MCU disease", in which he's unable to stop himself from cracking jokes even when it's inappropriate, thereby puncturing the dramatic tension. I agree that this is a bad strategy, and the chapters in Unsong where he's able to restrain himself are some of the strongest, showing that he's perfectly capable of generating real dramatic tension and power when he wants to. But in Scott's defense, at least a lot of his jokes actually work. The only thing worse than disrupting the tension of a dramatic scene with an actually clever joke is disrupting with a joke which isn't funny and which just annoys the reader.
Nell Zink is attempting an ambitious family drama charting three generations of a family from the 1970s right up to the start of Trump's first term. But with half of an exception, all of the characters (regardless of age, sex, race, which state they grew up in, which state they live in, their political affiliations, profession, education etc.) sound exactly the same. If one of the characters makes a reference to some obscure hardcore punk musician from the 1980s, the other characters will always understand without any explanation required. In written fiction, dialogue is the primary means of making characters feel like distinct entities, and Zink completely fucking whiffs it. Dialogues in this book sound like two chatbots with identical training data talking to one another. Because none of the characters feel like real people, all of the melodramatic soapy efforts at generating emotional torque (corporal punishment! sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll! 9/11! death by OD! family reconciliation! May-December romance! infidelity! indeterminate paternity!) go nowhere. A character must feel real before we can feel affected by their travails, and none of these do, because they're a league of interchangeable sock puppets.
And my God, the politics. This is some of the most sophomoric, Boomerlib, TDS-brained "political commentary" I've ever read. In the final third of the book or so, it's 2016, immediately prior to the election, and one of the characters decides to become a political activist travelling to various purple states canvassing for Jill Stein. Of course Trump gets elected and all of the characters are devastated. Zink is not even the least bit interested in honest speculation as to the nature of Trump's appeal: in her view, it does really seem to boil down to "Trump is evil and full of hate, and half of America voted for him because they're so hateful and evil". In Pennsylvania, immediately after the results are announced, the narration observes a man driving around in a pickup truck and speculates that he's "probably looking for some black people to shoot", a goal in which he's bound to be frustrated because Pennsylvania is 98% white. Oh, please.
In a particularly outrageous act of historical revisionism, Zink even has the nerve to more or less directly argue the reason Hillary lost was because her campaign was too positive. One of the characters is a political campaign advisor who strongly encourages the DNC to go hard on attacking Trump sooner rather than later, but they ignore his advice in favour of a campaign founded on hope and optimism. "When they go low, we go high" etc. The clear implication is that if the DNC had followed this character's advice, Hillary would have won. With respect, Zink — are you fucking kidding me? Have you completely forgotten about the basket of deplorables? The "grab them by the pussy" tape? "America's Bully"? "Mirrors"? I don't know how anyone could possibly claim in all seriousness that the reason Hillary lost was because she was too positive and hopeful, and didn't spend enough time attacking her opponent. This kind of self-serving cope might be excusable if Zink was Hillary's campaign advisor trying to keep her career afloat after a shocking upset — but no, there's nothing for Zink in this, this seems to be what she really believes. (For clarity: I'm not saying I found the book annoying only because of its politics. The plot arc involving the 2016 election only appears in the final ~third of the book or so, and my goodwill had been more or less exhausted well before that point.)
I donated it to a charity shop this afternoon. Probably my fastest ever turnaround time between finishing a book and disposing of it. Next up is SE Hinton's The Outsiders.
FtttG
1mo ago
In men (and possibly women), hard vs. soft status corresponds very closely to dominance vs. prestige.
When I was doing my master's, one of my lecturers was telling us about how the quality control standards on the Apple App Store are much stricter on the Google Play Store. After one too many instances in which some child was paying some scummy pay-to-win game on his parents' iPad and racked up four figures' worth of "micro"transactions, Apple apparently established a blanket policy of banning games targeted at small children. (I may be misremembering this somewhat: obviously you can install games from the App Store meant for small children. I think the crackdown was targeting games which seem to be marketed towards children, but which contain microtransactions.)
All well and good, I thought: children's brains aren't fully developed, this is common sense. But what about people at the opposite end of the telescope? Elderly people being taken in by Indian call-centre scammers and Nigerian princes is already a known issue. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where the App Store will simply prevent you from installing an app if you exceed some age threshold. Sure they'll be accused of ageism (that's literally what it is) or discrimination against people with dementia, but I'm sure they'd rather ride that wave of negative publicity than the much bigger wave of bad publicity associated with thousands of elderly people having their bank accounts drained because they mistakenly installed an app which looked like WhatsApp but was actually something else entirely.
It's not just /r/menwritingwomen, or the fact that King is profoundly porn-brained (although he is certainly both): he also has this pronounced vulgar streak, this urge to include gross details into his stories even when they add nothing:
One of the many ways the film adaptation of Shawshank improved on its source material was omitting the novella's repeated descriptions of inmates smuggling things in or out of prison by inserting them into their rectums. Some things are better left to the imagination. Early on in IT (which I never finished and don't intend to), the narrator recites an anecdote about a man whose car was washed away in a flood, and when they recovered his corpse, his penis had been bitten off by fish. Even as a child I was just like, why did you have to specify that? Just being gross for the sake of being gross.
Not to mention that one climactic scene from IT which neither adaptation has included and which far-right people always bring up when accusing King of being a closeted nonce.
Some murder cases create such intense media circuses that they inspire numerous fictionalised "true crime" depictions thereof, sometimes years or even decades later, with varying degrees of historical accuracy and queasy exploitation. There have been dozens of movies and TV shows made about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson respectively; even less notorious killers like Aileen Wuornos has been the subject of two movies and numerous documentaries. Oftentimes, one of these films comes to be seen as the definitive account of the events in question: David Fincher's film Zodiac is widely considered the "canonical" film about its titular serial killer, despite being neither the first nor last such film.
This got me thinking about the most famous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper: a case which, like Zodiac, remains unsolved decades later. There have been dozens if not hundreds of attempts to depict the murders more-or-less historically accurately in feature films, along with further hundreds of fictional works inspired by the case (even one of the first films directed by no less than Alfred Hitchcock, released thirty-nine years after the actual case - the same interval as that between the Zodiac murders and Fincher's film). This got me wondering: is there a film which is to Jack the Ripper as Zodiac is to the Zodiac killer - a film with a scrupulous regard for historical accuracy comparable to Fincher's, which takes few if any gross historical liberties, and which scholars consider an accurate portrayal? (Right off the bat this would immediately exclude Alan Moore's From Hell or its film adaptation, which were never intended to be historically accurate; or any of the various fanfic works which depict the murder being investigated by Sherlock Holmes.)
More broadly, what are some of your favourite films or TV shows in this sub-genre of "historically accurate, non-exploitative true crime"? The other night I watched the film Harvest starring Caleb Landry Jones, who I recognised from supporting roles in Get Out and the Twin Peaks revival. (Harvest was interesting and gorgeous to look at, but ultimately rather dull, and its runtime felt unearned.) I went on Jones's Wikipedia page and found that he recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his starring turn in Nitram, a fictionalised portrayal of the infamous Port Arthur attack in 1996, the worst mass shooting in Australian history and which directly precipitated that country's gun buyback program which American gun control advocates often seek to model. Nitram's director Justin Kurzel previously directed Snowtown, a fictionalised account of a group of serial killers operating in the titular Australian town in the 1990s, which I've heard is an excellent but gruelling watch. If any of you have seen Nitram or Snowtown, are they worth checking out?
FtttG
1mo ago
Halfway through Doxology. No longer enjoying it but determined to finish it. It really irritates me how samey all the characters' dialogue sounds.
I can definitely envision nationwide anti-ICE protests in the same ballpark as 2020 BLM next year.
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