FtttG
User ID: 1175
citing health concerns
I'm glad she didn't starve herself to death. And yet, is it terrible that I read this and immediately think to myself "do a flip faggot"?
There's something so contemptibly safetyist about voluntarily signing up for a task which is dangerous by nature - then refusing to do it, because of how dangerous it is. It induces the same feeling of disgust in me as those photos of Secret Service agents cowering behind Trump while he was being shot at. What the hell did you think being a Secret Service agent entailed? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
On May 21st, a woman in Galway commenced a hunger strike in protest over a) food not being let into Gaza (?) and b) the Irish government's failure to pass the Occupied Territories Bill, which would "ban trade with and economic suport for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law". In other words, it's a Boycott, Divest and Sanction bill, which would criminalise economic actors from doing business with Israeli companies. Last I checked she was on day 6 of her strike - she should now be on day 9, assuming she hasn't given up or been hospitalised yet.
Now, obviously a hunger strike isn't quite as dramatic as setting yourself on fire, but same ballpark. And I have to ask - what is it about this issue that seems to attract so many histrionic, mentally ill people? If you take them at their word, the Free Palestine people believe that, if left to their own devices, Israel will exterminate the entire population of Palestine (~5.5 million people), while the Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion think that, unless we acquiesce to their demands, literally everyone on the planet will die in a matter of decades. Given the respective stakes, you would logically expect the latter group to engage in more dramatic forms of protest than the former - 1,470 times as dramatic, to be precise. But instead it's the reverse: it's the Free Palestine people who are going on hunger strike and setting themselves alight, while the worst the Extinction Rebellion people can muster is hurling soup at paintings and gluing their palms to tarmac.
Thank you.
As mentioned, this project started off as a NaNoWriMo project, for which I had to write 50,000 words in the month of November (i.e. averaging 1,666 words a day). Some days the words came easily, other days felt like pulling teeth.
The trick, I think, is to break a large task down into a bunch of smaller ones. Setting yourself a daily target of X many words is an obvious one: during November I aimed for 1,666, ever since then I aim for 1,000 on weekdays and 2,000 on weekends.
Additionally, I have a spreadsheet I use for tracking my progress. At the outset I mapped out a basic plot structure, including a chapter list. When I reach the end of a chapter, I open the spreadsheet, mark that chapter as complete and enter its word count in the corresponding cell. The spreadsheet then calculates the average word count of the finished chapters, the number of incomplete chapters and multiplies them out to produce an estimate of how many words I have left to write. Being able to say I only have X many chapters totalling Y many words left to write is a helpful way to motivate myself, as opposed to a vague "it's finished when it feels like it's finished". Of course it's not perfect, because as I write, ideas for new chapters occur to me and I have to update the spreadsheet accordingly (my first pass at the chapter list was only 28 chapters, which eventually ballooned into 41: admittedly, some of that was because of me coming up with new ideas, whereas in other cases I just decided to split an extremely long chapter in two), but still helpful.
This is, needless to say, a new working method for me: when writing my previous novels (of which we do not speak, because they were unreadable trash) I didn't use a spreadsheet, and got no more sophisticated than using a project management tool to ensure that I was meeting my daily word target. But I think this method works better.
FtttG
1mo ago
I'm sorry man. Out of curiosity, did the two of you not have sex for the duration of your relationship?
FtttG
1mo ago
In spite of Ireland's deserved reputation as an earnestly anti-Zionist state, I learned today that there's a park in Dublin named after Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast but grew up in Dublin. And it's in Rathgar, one of Dublin's most affluent neighbourhoods, whose residents could reasonably be assumed to be staunchly pro-Palestinian.
Upon learning this, my first thought was "huh, surprised there hasn't been a campaign to have it renamed". One Google later...
128k words on my NaNoWriMo project. I'm only two half-chapters (~3.5k-4.5k words total) away from a complete first draft. All going smoothly I'll be finished by Friday morning, a full seven months (!) after I started the first draft. If I do manage to accomplish that goal in time, I won't mention my progress in these threads for six weeks, at which point I'll start working on the second draft.
Edit: first draft in the can, 134k words. Not looking at it for six weeks.
FtttG
1mo ago
I believe that "14,000 babies" figure has already been retracted.
Indian women are beautiful. Good luck.
Edit: the second-most controversial comment I've posted this week lol
FtttG
1mo ago
Still on The Perfect Heresy. It's a lot more accessible than the last book I read about the Cathars (Montaillou) but still a bit difficult in absolute terms. The voice is a bit droning and I sometimes forget how a paragraph started by the time I get to the end of it.
FtttG
1mo ago
Yeah, can't say I've ever met someone whose appearance was improved by a septum piercing or gauge. At best they're attractive in spite of said piercing.
FtttG
1mo ago
Sorry if that came off as a bit of a Gish gallop. I had variations on this debate a lot between 2020-21 and you, for a want of a better word, "triggered" me.
FtttG
1mo ago
This video of RZA making a beat from scratch for a Guitar Center promo has me rolling.
The comments are brilliant:
my guy wanted to add a hi hat and decided Mr Krabs running would be a better fit
"To have that modern sound, I'm just gonna add a little hi hat. A normal... a normal, like, hi hat from uh...... modern music, shall we say?" is such a goddamn funny quote. You can almost see him trying not to laugh lmao
in his defence, we're not hearing it through those headphones
“Two guys connected……………………you can’t beat that.”
FtttG
1mo ago
It might be the worst comment section on the internet
How can you say that when YouTube exists?
Pick a song that came out earlier than this year. The top comment on that song will be "Anyone in 2025?" It's the most retarded thing ever.
FtttG
1mo ago
The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point.
Didn't Gen Z overwhelmingly vote for Trump?
FtttG
1mo ago
You're absolutely right. I noted in another comment that, during the period, Sweden had fewer excess deaths per capita than the EU average.
Fallacy of ad hoc post hoc justification
As mentioned in the first item, the Covid hawks’ basic model of how a lockdown works assumes a simple linear relationship between how restrictive the lockdown is (and the degree of public compliance) and the rate of cases/hospitalisations/deaths. When a lockdown is implemented, followed by a spike in cases and deaths, the standard response is to blame overly permissive restrictions or poor public compliance. Conversely, if a lockdown is relaxed and there is no spike, this will be attributed to an exceptionally cautious public: an “unofficial” lockdown.
But sooner or later, these simplistic explanations for the failure of the model to describe reality begin to strain credibility, and Covid hawks are forced to introduce additional epicycles into their model. When faced with incontrovertible evidence that cases failed to spike even in the absence of exceptional voluntary compliance, Covid hawks will begrudgingly acknowledge assorted secular factors which likely contributed to the rate of transmission: “lots of people in Sweden live alone”, “Florida is close to the equator”, “there’s a seasonal component to transmission” etc.
The reason this is fallacious is not that these secular factors didn’t contribute to the spread of the virus and rates of hospitalisation and deaths - of course they did. It’s fallacious because these secular factors are only ever considered post hoc, after the limitations of lockdowns and other restrictions have been empirically exposed. Covid hawks never consider in advance of enacting or supporting a lockdown whether or not the lockdown passes a cost-benefit analysis, after taking these secular factors into account. Surely it would be trivial to find or estimate some key metrics about a particular region (the season, presence or absence of land borders, the percentage of adults who live alone, the rate of obesity etc.), estimate the expected “return” of the proposed restrictions, and input all of these variables into a formula which would indicate whether the proposed restrictions will pass a cost-benefit analysis. Many Western governments were already producing models which forecast cases and deaths conditional on the predicted rate of public compliance; what am I proposing seems like a logical extension of the foregoing.
But aggressive Covid hawks are reluctant to acknowledge secular factors which impact upon the rate of Covid transmission, and not just because these other factors complicate their simple, easy to grasp model of the world. Whether or not to enact a lockdown is supposed to be an easy and straightforward question: when you enact a lockdown, cases and deaths go down; when you don’t, they go up. Once you have acknowledged the fact that factors other than the lockdown itself might affect the rate of Covid transmission and serious illness, you’re only a step away from recognising that these other factors might dwarf or even negate the benefits of the lockdown itself. This in turn implies the uncomfortable possibility that locking down might sometimes be a bad thing on net: that you might throw thousands of people out of work or disrupt cancer screenings for weeks at a time for no reason, breaking a dozen eggs with no omelette to show for it.
To avoid confronting this discomfiting conclusion, lockdown proponents are incentivised to downplay the impact of secular factors, or deny them altogether. You will still, to this day*, encounter Australians and New Zealanders who will proudly declare that it was their lockdown measures (and their lockdown measures alone) which got Covid under control within their borders; and who will become very defensive when you suggest that their success with managing Covid might have something to do with the fact that both nations are geographically isolated islands without land borders.
"Lots of people in Sweden live alone" was an ad hoc justification I saw a lot during Covid to explain how the country were able to maintain a low rate of Covid transmission without ever officially locking down. And indeed, this is true. For reference, Sweden's Covid case count and death count per capita currently stands at 269,511 and 2,682, respectively.
After Sweden, the country with second-highest percentage of people living alone is Lithuania, which locked down and nonetheless saw 525,154 Covid cases, and 3,718 Covid deaths per capita. So much for that as a causal explanation.
The picture's not much better when looking at population density in Europe. Directly above Sweden is Latvia, which locked down and whose Covid case and death counts per capita were roughly the same as Lithuania. Next is Estonia (which admittedly did have a slightly lower Covid death count per capita than Sweden), Lithuania, then Montenegro (472,238; 4,532), Belarus (dramatically lower than Sweden on both metrics), then Bulgaria (195,753 cases per capita; 5,661 deaths per capita - literally second-highest in the world after Peru).
This is not to argue that lockdowns exacerbate Covid metrics: it's merely to argue, as @The_Nybbler did above, that a simplistic model of "impose lockdowns in any given country -> Covid cases go down -> Covid deaths go down" is extremely lacking in predictive power, and the effect of lockdowns will likely be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (percentage of population who are obese, average population age etc.). In other words: if you were to show you a list of anonymised countries' Covid cases per capita, Covid deaths per capita and case fatality rates and told you that some of them had locked down and some hadn't: I think you'd find it extremely difficult to identify which was which.
As soon as you say "lockdowns do work in general, but happened not to work in location X because of [ad hoc factor]", consider how easy it was for me to disprove the "Sweden didn't need to lock down because of population density/people living alone" ad hoc hypothesis.
*I published this article over a year ago, but this statement is literally true: earlier today I got into an argument with a guy who argued that of course lockdowns work - look at Australia and New Zealand! His argument, as I understand it, was that lockdowns work when used in concert with strict border controls, but don't work otherwise. Which struck me as an extremely roundabout way of saying "strict border controls are an effective way of stopping the spread of Covid; lockdowns unnecessary".
FtttG
1mo ago
The other week I mentioned a brewing controversy surrounding the hip-hop band Kneecap, being investigated for supporting proscribed terrorist organisations (namely by yelling "Up Hamas!" or leading audiences in chants of "Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!") during live performances.
One of the band's members, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (who goes by the stage name "Mo Chara" meaning "my friend") has now been formally charged with supporting a terrorist organisation by the Metropolitan Police, namely for waving a Hezbollah flag during a live performance last year.
FtttG
1mo ago
Certainly Sweden's excess death toll was lower than the European average, which seems like the most damning statistic for the efficacy of lockdowns.
FtttG
1mo ago
Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.
He changed that paragraph from "deadliest" to "highest fatality" when several people in the comments pointed out that the civil war was still more lethal per capita.
FtttG
2mo ago
122k words on my NaNoWriMo project. Finally, it feels like the end of my first draft is in sight. Although the projected length has steadily increased over the past few months, I now feel reasonably confident it will be no longer than 140k words. I would love to be finished before the end of May.
A spiritual successor to my favourite tweet of all time:
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