FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1mo ago
Richard Hanania and Yassine Meskhout were two I saw.
The first thing I learned about Aella is that she only takes two showers a month (1 shower for every ~9 bowel movements). I have an instinctive revulsion towards people who smell bad, but nothing I've learned about her since has persuaded me she has anything interesting or insightful to offer, quite apart from her presumably foul body odour. I'm convinced that the exalted social status she seemed to enjoy in nerdy circles for the last few years, she only achieved by surrounding herself with men for whom talking to a woman who was even mid in attractiveness (hell, talking to a woman without a penis) was a tremendous novelty, and shamelessly appealing to their nerdy interests (funnel charts of gangbang outcomes, ugh). All of these white knights suddenly rushing to her defense feels extremely Zoe Quinn-coded to me, and for much the same reasons.
In summary, bitch you stink. I'm willing to live and let live up to a certain point (I don't really care that she's a sex worker, or polyamorous, or a habitual drug user), but I'm not going to pretend that hygiene and grooming are optional, or a "Western patriarchical construct" or whatever. People who refuse to bathe frequently or ignore normal standards of hygiene and grooming should feel ashamed of themselves.
FtttG
1mo ago
Still on The Perfect Heresy, which I'm determined to finish tonight or tomorrow so I can move on to something more interesting. Medieval history just doesn't seem to do it for me.
FtttG
1mo ago
he doesn't remember when he bought some of the records he owns
girlslaughing.png
FtttG
1mo ago
Have you ever read High Fidelity? The protagonist is an obsessive collector of vinyl records, and whenever he's going through a major life upheaval, he reorganises his records as a therapeutic exercise. At the very start of the novel his girlfriend breaks up with him, so he immediately begins reorganising his records - but in a break from tradition, he does so not in alphabetical or chronological order, but autobiographical: the chronological order in which he bought them.
FtttG
1mo ago
My understanding is that he intentionally drove into a crowd of pedestrians, but it wasn't political or a nihilistic mass murder: he was just on a lot of drugs. It doesn't appear to have been an accident.
FtttG
1mo ago
Last night, I was telling the missus about Countess Constance Markievicz, an Irish revolutionary who was the first woman elected to the House of Commons, participated in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, and was appointed as Minister for Labour in Ireland's first Dáil.
As a member of the Citizen Army, Markievicz took part in the 1916 Easter Rising... Markievicz fought in St Stephen's Green, where on the first morning —according to the only two pages surviving of the diary of an alleged witness — she shot a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Constable Lahiff, who subsequently died of his injuries... Markievicz supervised the setting-up of barricades on Easter Monday and was in the middle of the fighting all around Stephen's Green, wounding a British army sniper...
The Stephen's Green garrison held out for six days, ending the engagement when the British brought them Pearse's surrender order. They were taken to Dublin Castle and then to Kilmainham Gaol through what Matt Connolly described as "several groups of hostile people". There, she was the only one of 70 women prisoners who was put into solitary confinement. At her court-martial on 4 May 1916, Markievicz pleaded not guilty to "taking part in an armed rebellion...for the purpose of assisting the enemy," but pleaded guilty to having attempted "to cause disaffection among the civil population of His Majesty". Markievicz told the court, "I went out to fight for Ireland's freedom and it does not matter what happens to me. I did what I thought was right and I stand by it."
She was sentenced to death, but the court recommended mercy "solely and only on account of her sex". The sentence was commuted to life in prison. When told of this, she said to her captors, "I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me".
I miss the era when feminists were tough as nails. The only things "triggering" this woman were the guns being fired at her. Every time I read about her, a frisson of awe runs down my spine. We used to be a proper country.
FtttG
1mo ago
The guy who allegedly did the Liverpool attack has been remanded in custody.
I don't have a particularly high opinion of British police, but, per Bounded Distrust, I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to think they would frame an innocent man for a terror attack just because the real perpetrator was of the wrong ethnicity. It invites the question of why this wasn't done for any of the high-profile public acts of violence committed by non-white non-natives in the recent past (Southport, 7/7, the murder of David Amess, Reading, London Bridge X2 etc.).
FtttG
1mo ago
Last Sunday, a 22-year-old man walked into a small shopping centre in Fairgreen, Co. Carlow and began discharging a shotgun into the air. The police and bomb squad were quickly called, but the man in question turned the gun on himself. To the best of my knowledge, the only other person injured at the scene was a young girl who tripped while fleeing from the scene and skinned her knee.
That's not the interesting part of the story - the interesting part is how it was reported upon. The Irish police (Garda Siochána) were extremely quick to clarify that the perpetrator was a white Irishman:
The Garda Press Office issued four press releases over the next 24 hours which provided a full picture of what happened, including a precise timeline of events, the extent of injuries (including to a young girl), and – most notably – a description of the perpetrator as a “white adult Irish male” on Sunday night.
It was unusually direct by the standards of the Garda press office, which tends only to offer the most basic details around crimes, in part out of sensitivity towards victims and their families.
The decision followed a similar move by police in Merseyside less than a week previously, after a man drove into a crowd of football fans celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League title win in the city.
The incident in Liverpool saw the same kind of misinformation spread as in Carlow, with false claims that the ramming was a terrorist attack and that the suspect was a person of colour being shared on social media.
So why are the Garda announcing the perpetrator's ethnicity, you ask? To combat "misinformation" and "uninformed speculation":
The Dublin riots in November 2023 were fuelled by a deluge of speculation about the identity and motive of the man who carried out a knife attack at a school near Parnell Square.
The Southport riots last year in England followed the same grim pattern, when far-right groups seized on speculation about the identity and motive of the man who fatally stabbed three children.
Both instances were preceded by hours of silence from police and officialdom, which created an information vacuum in which speculation and conspiracy theories were able to take hold.
On each occasion, speculation dampened much more quickly after both police forces provided additional information about the background of the perpetrators.
...
The strategy denied bad actors the ability to hijack the narrative and acknowledged a basic truth about modern social media: in the absence of facts, fiction will flourish.
I know this word has been abused to death over the past decade or more, but I really cannot think of any word which better captures the feeling I am feeling right now. I feel like I am being gaslit. A full year and a half after the stabbing in Parnell Square which sparked the Dublin riots, in an article specifically about the Garda's sensible decision to get ahead of conspiracy theories by disclosing demographic information about the people who perpetrate crimes - and The Journal still cannot bring themselves to mention that the stabbing in Parnell Square was committed by an Algerian Arab. They still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the Southport stabbings were committed by a black Rwandan. They'll wax lyrical about the "deluge of speculation" which followed these horrific crimes, without once mentioning that much of this "uninformed speculation" turned out to be entirely accurate.
But some people aren't happy about this strategy:
But although it worked this time around, it’s a tricky strategy that’s not without its downsides.
Several far-right accounts online accused Gardaí and Merseyside Police of being ‘too quick’ to say that the suspects in Carlow and Liverpool were white locals, with the implication that this was an act of political messaging rather than public clarity.
What is so confusing about people objecting to a blatant double standard in how crimes are reported upon? What is so objectionable about a standard in which all crimes are reported upon in the same way regardless of the perpetrator's ethnicity or national background?
The next time a similar major incident occurs and Gardaí or British police don’t — or can’t — release identifying information about the suspect(s), it’s easy to see how the decision not to do so will be seized upon.
The public may take the lack of information as confirmation that the suspect is foreign or non-white, and may end up believing bad actors or others who are speculating about what has happened.
Gosh, how might they arrive at that idea, I wonder? It's not like the article in which this sentence appears mentions four distinct crimes, and only provides any identifying information about the two perpretators who were white natives while conspicuously avoiding mentioning anything about the perpretrators of the other two crimes.
At this point, all I can say is that, at least in Ireland and the UK (and probably in a great deal of the rest of Europe as well), Coulter's Law is no longer just a journalistic convention, but actually an official public policy.
FtttG
1mo ago
But he also isn't bitching about you on an anonymous forum for contrarian autists.
That you know of.
FtttG
1mo ago
After the trans mania dies down, I wonder if this will be the new context in which we're not allowed to use the phrase "social contagion".
FtttG
1mo ago
Therapy might well work for people who really need it, but for those who don't, it may end up either being a massive waste of time or actively making their lives worse (or the lives of their loved ones).
Great post. I know this isn't really the point of it, but do you know what happened with Lana's child(ren)? Do she and her ex-husband share custody?
FtttG
1mo ago
I can't comment on brain scan interpretations, but there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on.
At least one of these much-touted studies was hopelessly confounded by the fact that it was examining the brains of deceased trans women postmortem, all of whom had been on HRT for years if not decades prior to their deaths. Ergo, impossible to determine if genetics or hormones was the cause of their atypical brain structures (if indeed they had them, given that the study in question failed to replicate).
Every year, Scott runs a book review contest for his readers. This year, to mix things up a little, he's running an "anything that isn't a book" review contest. Readers can vote on who makes it to the finals here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025
In the interests of partial disclosure, I did enter the contest, but in order to maintain Scott's desire for the entries to be judged anonymously, I won't tell you which entry is mine. Suffice to say that writing it was a big operation, to the point of having my girlfriend read over it to give feedback, and also printing it off myself so as to go through it literally line-by-line. I think the end result was something pretty special, and I hope you all agree if you do end up reading it.
FtttG
1mo ago
Pretty much my reaction when I heard she stopped.
FtttG
1mo ago
America doesn't want you to know that "Hamas" stands for Hoes And Money And Success.
A spiritual successor to my favourite tweet of all time:
"Allahu Akbar" is Arabic for "world star hip hop"
Bro, you're not helping
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