FtttG
User ID: 1175
Trans people talk a lot about "gender euphoria", and it clearly means more to them than just "the absence of dysphoria"!
Less charitably than your interpretation, it's a euphemism for "the sense of intense arousal autogynephiliacs experience upon fulfilling their sexual fantasies". I can't remember ever seeing a trans man describe experiencing gender euphoria, although I'm open to correction on this front.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
- Washington Post: "Donald Trump just threatened to commit genocide"
- Foreign Policy: "This Is How Every Genocide Begins"
- Foreign Policy: "U.N. Genocide Watchdog Suggests Trump, American Hardliners Fueling Hatred of Muslims"
- Sky News: "Donald Trump warned of 'genocide' over threat to 'obliterate' Iran"
- Channel 4: "Trump’s foreign policy may be seen as ‘open invitation to commit genocide’, warns Turkish Kurd"
- Al-Jazeera: "The Muslim ban and the ethnic cleansing of America"
- Truthout: "When Trump Calls People “Filth,” He’s Laying Groundwork for Genocide"
- KCRW: "Is Trump Building a White Ethnostate?" (Betteridge's law of headlines notwithstanding)
- The Guardian: "How white supremacy went mainstream in the US"
- Vanity Fair: "How Trump Became an Accidental Totalitarian"
- Reuters: "Michael Moore compares Trump to Hitler in new documentary"
- Daily Commercial: "Yes, there are parallels between Trump and Hilter [sic]"
- Vox: "A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany"
- MSNBC: "MSNBC’s Deutsch equates Trump voters to Nazi guards: ‘If you vote for Trump, you’re the bad guy’"
- The Independent: "Donald Trump using Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' playbook, says world expert on Nazi leader"
- Salon: "If Trump wins, say goodbye to your black friends: A modest proposal"
- Time: "The Billionaire and the Bigots" (which comes perishingly close to predicting that Trump will be directly responsible for the founding of a new white nationalist political party)
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole.
No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.
I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.
Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.
FtttG
2mo ago
Weak men are superweapons.
Transparent false equivalence. Ostensibly respectable left-leaning newspapers of record spent years milking the "Trump = Hitler" comparisons for all they were worth. Russiagate was a nonsensical conspiracy theory elevated to the status of a federal inquiry. I'll grant that a lot of people who should have known better gave the birth certificate theory more credence than it deserved, but the only people I've seen claiming that Michelle Obama has a penis are extremely online far-right weirdos. If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible)
Of course it's not realistic to expect everyone who dislikes Trump never to act histrionic or retarded. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to request mainstream, ostensibly neutral institutions to dial down the hysteria a smidge.
"see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is.
Why not? Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.
Agreed.
then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.
I don't have to own anything. I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way, I've personally attended at least one protest against a policy he enacted, and even if I had been eligible to vote for him in 2016, 2020 or 2024 (neither being a US citizen nor residing in the US), I wouldn't have.
Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared
Over the last decade, the prediction/warning/whatever I've most frequently heard about a Donald Trump presidency has been that he is a white supremacist KKK neo-Nazi with concrete plans to transform the United States into a white ethnostate (optionally also a Christian theocracy), which necessitates rounding up anyone who isn't white, cisgender, heterosexual or Christian and herding them into concentration camps. I literally don't think there was a single day in 2016 in which I didn't see or hear the "Trump = Hitler" comparison at least once. A distant second was "Trump is a Russian asset".
After four years of Trump in the Oval Office, this accusation became increasingly untenable, so his critics abruptly changed course and started accusing him of being a crypto-fascist with no respect for democratic institutions. In this regard, his critics are on much firmer ground (I've been saying for a decade that Trump has far more in common with Orbán or Berlusconi than with old Adolf), so this pivot made a lot of sense.* What doesn't make sense is that his critics are now pretending that this was the only class of accusations they'd ever been levelling at him. (The "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see" thing still gets periodically trotted out, courtesy of slow learners who haven't yet gotten the message that we're no longer at war with Eurasia.)
This is the same kind of blatant goalpost-moving and historical revisionism Scott complained about when grading his Trump predictions. Throughout the run-up to the 2016 election, all I heard was a never-ending stream of "Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to round up all the Muslims, Trump is going to kill all the Latinos, Trump is going to round up all the gays and trans people, Trump is going to turn America into Gilead". After four years of nothing even remotely like this transpiring, the people who had made these predictions just cited a bunch of other random bad shit Trump and his supporters did (e.g. January 6th) and turned around and said "see? We warned you!"
It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared. Show me the concentration camps, then we can talk. At least have the humility to acknowledge that careless accusations of genocidal ambition on Trump's part have only helped him: when facing more reasonable accusations of taking a cavalier approach to the rule of law and democratic institutions, Trump can quite reasonably defend himself by pointing out that his critics were crying wolf when they accused him of being Hitler, so why wouldn't they be crying wolf now?
I know when you said that he's showing himself to be "everything" his opponents feared, you were speaking figuratively, and you don't think that literally every criticism/accusation/whatever levelled against Donald Trump was well-founded. But I feel like there's some kind of Pareto distribution, where 80% of attacks/criticisms/warnings about Trump took the form "Trump is a genocidal white supremacist" (optionally also a Christian fundamentalist, heteronormative etc.), then "Trump is a Russian asset", then "Trump is a fascist with no respect for democratic institutions". I think honesty and humility behooves people to acknowledge that 80% of their predictions failed to come to pass. When 80% of your accusations/predictions fail to come to pass (90% if you include all the utterly baseless accusations of Russian collusion), I don't think you deserve a prognostication medal because some of the remaining 10% were accurate.
*Google Trends shows the precise point at which "Trump is going to turn America into Gilead" stopped being The Narrative, in favour of "Trump is a fascist authoritarian". The obvious objection to this interpretation of the data is that most of the searches for The Handmaid's Tale pertained to the novel's television adaptation (which, incredibly, is still running); the even more obvious rebuttal to that objection is that the only reason the television series even exists is because of hysterical scaremongering about the alleged parallels between the novel and Trump's America.
FtttG
2mo ago
Only up about 2.5k words on my NaNoWriMo project since this time last week. Can't believe I was consistently knocking out 1,700 words a day in November, and now I'm struggling to make 1,000 every day. The weekend was a write-off for reasons largely outside of my control.
FtttG
2mo ago
several of the worst ideas he had in the prequels we're proposed for the original trilogy but got shelved when others rightfully told him no
So in the prequel trilogy, he fell victim to protection from editors?
FtttG
2mo ago
But if he's already holding a bloody knife and trying to hop the border, it's tendentious at best to call everyone's attention to the fact that he's a man as if it's some crucial point of the case.
If all you know about a given murderer is their sex, you can reasonably assume that a male murderer will pose a greater threat and be significantly more difficult to subdue than a female one, given men's greater physical strength, speed and aggression.
"Male murderer at large, considered armed and extremely dangerous" conveys significantly more actionable information to a police officer than "murderer at large, considered armed and extremely dangerous"; unlike "blond murderer at large" vs. "brunet murderer at large".
FtttG
2mo ago
I've never watched this movie but I found this review interesting.
What is your overall opinion of George Lucas as a creator? Talented director but mediocre screenwriter? A hack on both fronts who got lucky once, aided by riding other people's coattails?
FtttG
2mo ago
The City and the City is pretty good. I was impressed by how he managed to take a completely bizarre premise and make it seem mundane and ordinary, and authentically eastern European. The thing I'm working on is inspired by that, in terms of the setting.
I started working for a new company about six months ago, and three of my colleagues are white South Africans. There's been a noticeable influx of white South Africans to Ireland in recent years, and I'm curious at what point we'll stop calling them "ex-pats" and start calling them "refugees" (even if that's not how they'd describe themselves, even if they conspicuously go out of their way to flaunt their antiracist bona fides, even if their motives for leaving the country are functionally indistinguishable from those of refugees).
One of these South African colleagues was explaining to me that, because the police are so useless, any white South African who can afford it lives in a private gated community; because power outages are so common, everyone who can afford it has solar panels and a backup generator. While nominally a liberal democracy, the country has essentially devolved into a Wild West libertarian/anarcho-capitalist state.
FtttG
2mo ago
Are you telling me I'm a googlewhack?
FtttG
2mo ago
Since the invasion of Ukraine I've given the idea of serving in the military a lot of thought, but I legitimately hadn't considered this point before.
As a European, there is absolutely no way I would volunteer to be deployed in a military operation in a foreign country knowing some "asylum seeker" is safe at home living off social benefits. I would certainly enlist (albeit begrudgingly) if the country was facing a land invasion.
FtttG
2mo ago
Ahhhh, I have read Unsong, completely forgot about that plot point. I was planning to re-read it this year anyway.
I'm up to 75,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project.
During November, I wrote that I found myself feeling legitimately guilty about the fate which was soon to befall one of the characters in my book. Last week I was writing the chapter in which the fate in question befalls them, and it was a punishing experience. For a solid hour my heart was pounding in nervous anticipation, as the dreaded event drew closer and closer. Once I got to the end of the chapter I had to get up and pace around my apartment for a bit to calm down.
I've repeatedly argued in this space that you shouldn't use an artist's degree of passion and personal investment in their art as a proxy for how good it is, or assume that an artist being personally invested in their art is a prerequisite for it being good. Many of the best novels, films etc. ever made were tossed off by their creators for a paycheck, while probably no one is more emotionally invested in their art than a shut-in composing Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic. But for whatever it's worth, it is indisputable that I've become intensely emotionally invested in this novel. In the event that I get it published, if an artist having a personal stake in their art is important to you, I hope I can count on you picking up a copy.
FtttG
2mo ago
1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20. Very curious to know what the others mean.
FtttG
2mo ago
Yeah, I've heard the term "woke right" bandied about in the last few months and I'm only starting to get it now.
FtttG
2mo ago
I wouldn't say so. The only reason I read it was to gain an insight into Catharism, but that only takes up a very small portion of the book. The rest of it is dedicated to describing life in the titular fourteenth-century French village in minute, exhaustive detail: how the villagers worked, ate, formed relationships etc. Some of this was interesting, but it wasn't really relevant to the purpose I was reading the book for and hence felt like a bit of a waste of my time.
FtttG
2mo ago
Last week I finally finished Montaillou. Took me the guts of a month to get through, what a chore.
Onto Orbán: Europe's New Strongman by Paul Lendvai, as reviewed by Scott. Another book I'm reading for research purposes. About a hundred pages in and it's a very easy read, I'm learning some interesting tidbits about the man himself I can use.
I'm sorry to hear that bro. The only advice I can give is that there is absolutely zero point trying to have a platonic relationship with her. All you'll be doing is torturing yourself by wondering what might have been. Best thing for everyone is to make a clean break of it, never interact with her again and try to forget about her as quickly as possible. If you can move to another city so you won't run the risk of bumping into her and her husband, even better.
It is these hypothetical posthumans who I imagine cringing at the thought that "she" is inherently wrong/a lie if applied to a person whose body has a penis, when it will routinely be applied to people who have no genitalia or chromosomes at all.
I also see the sleight of hand you're attempting here. "In the future there'll be sentient individuals who have no genitalia or chromosomes who everyone considers it unremarkable to call 'she'; therefore there should be nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in our world (in which every sentient individual has chromosomes and only a negligibly small portion don't have genitalia)".
I will reiterate that my grandmother has no wheels.
I'm arguing that the trans-inclusive policies you're endorsing have a demonstrably negative impact on women and children's safeguarding. You're dismissing this criticism by saying none of it will matter in the post-Singularity transhumanist future. Fair enough - but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter now.
Frankly, this line of reasoning proves too much. I presume, as a self-identified progressive, you are a staunch opponent of racism and think that colour-blind policies which don't take historical oppression into account make the lives of people of colour worse. Why couldn't I retort "pfft - after the Singularity, the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their skin tone will be as alien to humans as the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their preferred flavour of ice cream"? Even if this is true, so what? What would it have to do with your criticism? Fucking nothing, is what.
Since this time last week I've written just under 4,000 words of my NaNoWriMo project, 71,000 in total. Dying to finish the first draft (now projected to run to 95-100,000 words) as soon as possible so I can have my evenings back, then come back to the second draft with fresh eyes. I know there's loads of stuff I'll be able to cut out, but I don't want to start cutting until the first draft is finished.
Finished Orbán: Europe's New Strongman. Felt like I learned a lot from it, and it was accessibly written.
On to Kiki de Montparnasse, a comic book I picked up on a whim in a charity shop several years ago. Only about thirty pages in, don't really know what it's about yet.
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