FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1d 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
1d 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 selected for lacking rationality or common sense.
FtttG
1d 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
4d 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
4d 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
8d ago
In men (and possibly women), hard vs. soft status corresponds very closely to dominance vs. prestige.
FtttG
8d ago
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
11d ago
Halfway through Doxology. No longer enjoying it but determined to finish it. It really irritates me how samey all the characters' dialogue sounds.
British police are trained how to do it
British police are trained to scour Twitter for crimethink and turn a blind eye to child abuse if the abusers are Pakistani.
FtttG
15d ago
As to the second half of your comment: I don't really have a problem with police officers "leaning in" to the image that they're trigger-happy and unaccountable. I have a problem with them actually being trigger-happy and unaccountable. If police officers aren't trigger-happy and unaccountable, but hardened criminals think they are, that might motivate criminals to behave better when the police show up. A great deal of effective police work involves strategic deception of this type: polygraph tests do not actually detect when someone's lying, but police officers are in no hurry to disabuse the widespread misconception that they do, as it demonstrably makes people more honest if they believe they'll be caught out if they lie. Likewise, there's a widespread misconception that undercover cops are legally required to identify themselves if directly asked if they are police officers: there is no such legal requirement, but it can only help the police if criminals think there is.
I understand the point you're making, that if a criminal thinks that the police will gun him down even if he drops his weapon and agrees to come quietly, then there's no incentive for him to surrender, so he might as well go out guns blazing. I agree that conveying that impression would be counterproductive. But on the margin, if criminals think that police officers can punch them in the face or Tase them (but not kill them) and face no professional repercussions, that might well incentivise them to be on their best behaviour when the police do show up. Even if, in point of fact, police officers will face repercussions for unwarranted use of force.
Trying to make cops appear threatening in ways not directly related to spreading factual knowledge of "if you commit a crime they will inevitably arrest you; if you resist arrest they will reliably shoot you" will fall on a spectrum from gilding the lily to actively counterproductive.
Of course if there was widespread common knowledge that police officers will arrest you if you commit a crime, and shoot you if you fail to comply, criminals would rationally understand that it's in their best interest to simply come quietly, and individual police officers being scary and intimidating on an interpersonal level would be unnecessary.
But criminals, as a group, are not renowned for their rationality and forward planning skills. Criminals fall into two categories: those smart enough to correctly think they can commit a crime and get away with it, and those dumb enough to erroneously think they can do so. With few exceptions, criminals are an overwhelmingly stupid group, often mentally ill, disproportionately likely to suffer from alcohol- and/or drug-induced psychosis. Of course a rational person would understand it's in his best interest to put his hands up and come quietly - but then, a rational person also wouldn't have thought that squirting lemon juice on his face would be an effective countermeasure against CCTV cameras before robbing a bank. A rational person wouldn't have murdered his wife in a drunken rage in the first place.
So given that police officers spend a great deal of their time trying to force irrational, stupid people into compliance who don't understand the game theory you're describing, if they want to get them to comply, appealing to their rationality and common sense (or lack thereof) isn't going to cut it. This means that you need to appeal to their lizard brain through shouting and intimidation. This is true everywhere there are stupid, irrational criminals, not just the US.
FtttG
15d ago
And as I said in one of my previous comments, how threatening and intimidating a police officer needs to be is heavily dependent on the community being policed, the concentration of criminals within that community, what kind of crimes said criminals are committing and how violent said criminals are. It would be overkill for a cop in the Hamptons to walk around with a bulletproof vest and an AR-15, but if some stockbroker shoots his wife in their summer home in a drunken rage, when a police officer shows up, he must be intimidating enough that the stockbroker agrees to come quietly. But when you're dealing with MS-13, a violent gang who feel no qualms about beheading their enemies with machetes, one guy in a squad car with a Beretta isn't going to cut it - yes, you actually do need facemasks, assault rifles and a "generally unpleasant attitude". Nothing else is likely to be effective.
Now, is the nature of the problem ICE is ostensibly addressing closer to the former scenario or the latter? I don't know, probably the former - maybe they really can enforce immigration law with Berettas and a smile. But we were discussing the question of whether cops, in general, need to be at least somewhat scary and intimidating in order to be effective in their jobs, and you were quite explicitly arguing that they don't. That's the point I was addressing, not the question of how intimidating ICE specifically needs to be in order to be effective.
FtttG
15d ago
But one who remains level-headed - who points the gun and without flinching, delivers the "you're under arrest. I don't want to hurt you, I will if I have to" spiel
But, once again, a police officer who can point his gun at someone and say "I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to" is already at least a standard deviation more scary and intimidating than the average person. The "I will if I have to" part of the threat must seem credible - it must be spoken by someone who seems like the kind of person who actually will do what they say if their conditions aren't met. And while a law-abiding citizen might be more easily fooled - if the threat doesn't come off as credible to a hardened criminal who is himself no stranger to violence (and hence is intimately familiar with the difference between people who are actually willing to do violence and those who aren't), then it's useless. If hardened criminals don't consider police officers a credible threat, you might as well not bother having a police force at all.
All of this means that, once again, even a police officer who is polite and courteous and who clearly views violence as a matter of last resort must be found intimidating by hardened criminals to have any hope of doing his job properly. If a police officer says "I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to", and a hardened criminal doesn't believe that he'll follow through on the threat, the hardened criminal will ignore the instructions. If hardened criminals, collectively, don't believe that police officers will collectively follow through on their threats, hardened criminals will ignore the police and act with impunity. I'm sorry, but this trade-off is unavoidable.
But the fact that police officers fight crime simply means that police officers have to be effective at fighting crime. Intimidation doesn't have to come into it.
No, sorry, it does.
Imagine you're a criminal who's just stabbed someone. A police officer shows up, levels his gun at you and tells you to drop the knife and put your hands on your head, or he'll shoot you. In order for this threat to be effective, you must believe that the police officer will do as he says - if you don't, you'll try to make a run for it, or even try and stab the police officer yourself. In order for the threat to be effective, the police officer must seem like the kind of person who would fulfil his threat, which means he must be at least scary and intimidating enough that a hardened criminal who's just stabbed someone will believe that he will act on his threat. (In game-theoretic terms, the police officer must pre-commit to a certain course of action if certain conditions are met.) This is true even if the police officer has never discharged his weapon in the line of duty, would greatly prefer not to, and actually would hesitate to fire if you decided to make a run for it.
All of this is equally true even for unarmed police forces: the police officer must seem like the kind of person who actually would Tase you, mace you, or smack you with a nightstick. If he doesn't seem like the kind of person who would follow through on his threat, no criminal will pay any attention to his instructions.
Imagine the alternate scenario, where you've just stabbed someone, a police officer shows up, and his response is to say "well, golly gosh, you've gotten yourself into a right pickle haven't you? Why don't you drop the weapon and come down with me to the station and we'll talk about this? But if you don't want to, that's alright with me too." All without so much as unholstering his weapon. Does that sound like a police officer who would be effective at fighting crime?
Even if you insist on viewing deterrence as a major role of the police, the promise of swift and reliable response to wrongdoing - leading to arrest and sentencing - could provide that all on its own, without the cops needing to individually come across as scary mofos who'll beat you to a pulp at their own discretion.
This has precisely nothing to do with deterrence. As argued above, if someone has committed a crime and is facing arrest, they would most likely prefer not to be arrested if they can help it. The worst-case scenario is getting shot dead by the police; the second-worst case scenario is getting arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced; the best-case scenario is getting away with it scot-free. In order to come quietly, the criminal must believe that if he doesn't, the police will shoot him dead - if he doesn't believe that, he'll ignore them and make a run for it. In order for the criminal to believe that the police will shoot him dead if he doesn't come quietly, the arresting officer does unfortunately have to be scarier and more intimidating than the average person.
The ideal police force, IMO, should aspire to work like a magic spell that teleports you before a judge as soon as you commit a crime... If you know he's indestructible and omniscient, Superman can deter crime just as well as Batman.
It's so telling that, when illustrating how you think police officers ought to behave, you keep falling back on examples from fictional escapist media aimed at teenagers, rather than, say, examples of real police officers in the real world. (Because the trade-off I'm discussing is equally true everywhere, not just in the US.) But even this example doesn't illustrate the point you're trying to make: comics depicting Superman as an intimidating figure who scares criminals shitless are so common there's a trope about them. You're right in one sense, though: Superman can afford to be polite and courteous to everyone he meets, up to and including violent criminals with sub-machine guns, because he's a superhuman alien who is functionally invulnerable to harm from virtually everyone he meets. This description, you'll note, is not true of police officers, who are only marginally less vulnerable to harm than anyone else (even if you're wearing a bulletproof vest, getting shot in the torso will probably break a rib or two, and getting shot in the head will probably kill you). Because they are vulnerable to harm and would prefer not to expose themselves to unnecessary risks, they must instead rely on threats and intimidation which, once again, means that violent criminals must find them intimidating.
FtttG
15d ago
I was so conflicted between the two of them that I ended up filling it half full to split the difference
Should've been 5/8ths.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
FtttG
15d ago
By the nature of the job, police officers interact with dangerous, scary people who don't care about adhering to the laws of the country they live in or about hurting others. In order to do their jobs properly, police officers need to present a credible threat to criminals. If a criminal finds a police officer scary and intimidating, it stands to reason that a law-abiding citizen will too.
There's really no way out of this trade-off. Do you want a police force which is unfailingly polite and courteous to everyone, but impotent as a result and a laughingstock to hardened criminals? Or do you want a police force which hardened criminals find scary and intimidating, but which ordinary decent people also find intimidating as a side effect?
Of course you can dial this trade-off up and down a bit on the margins, depending on the concentration of hardened criminals in the community being policed. A cop in the Hamptons is bound to be significantly more mild-mannered than one in Compton, who in turn won't be anywhere near as scary as a cop in El Salvador. Probably no police officers are more scary and aggressive than the screws in maximum security prisons, in which "the community being policed" is made up entirely of violent criminals. But at the end of the day, there's no way around the trade-off. Police officers fight crime, which means they have to be intimidating to violent criminals, which means it's not reasonable to expect a police force to be as gentle and kind as your local pastor and still do their jobs effectively.
"No no, I'm saying that police officers should be tough and intimidating with actual criminals, but kind and civil to the ordinary people they're arresting."
If they're arresting you, it's because they don't know you're an ordinary, law-abiding citizen. As such they can't afford to give you the benefit of the doubt and must assume that you're a criminal.
FtttG
16d ago
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs? When the moderates and normies start voting red instead of blue, that increases the average extremism of the modal blue, accelerating the purity spiral?
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.
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