HereAndGone
11hr ago
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
Jurors took just over four hours last month to unanimously convict Mr Scannell of the murder.
He struck Mr Baitson from behind the left knee with a sword at the Eurospar car park on Newtown Road in Cobh, Co Cork on the evening of March 15, 2024. Medical evidence revealed that such was the ferocity of the attack, the samurai sword cut through muscle, artery and bone and partially severed the leg.
... A letter from his partner, Alison Roche, was read to the court which said he was a devoted and loving father and partner.
She said her partner had battled alcohol and drug addiction issues but that everyone deserves a second chance at rehabilitation.
"Addiction is horrible," she wrote.
Mr Scannell has 11 previous convictions, one from July 2016 for assault causing harm in which he received a two year suspended sentence from Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
HereAndGone
12hr ago
Problem is, yes I would lose weight if you locked me in a camp and beat me with sticks. But to keep the weight off, you'd have to keep me locked up for life, or give me my own personal 'beat me with sticks and knock the food out of my hands' 24/7 person.
Changing habits is hard and willpower won't let me power my way to the new regime. I managed to willpower my way to stop biting my nails after years and years of that, but I can't willpower 'just stop fucking eating, you fat bitch'.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
a very young child would benefit from being around its family, versus being one of 10 or 20 kids overseen by essentially a cut-rate nurse, I’d think.
Over here, there are government regulations about staff-to-children ratios, and you would need more than one staff member to supervise 10-20 kids, depending on age (unless this was a really cut-rate, under the counter, unlicensed operation):
Sessional pre-school service A pre-school service offering a planned programme to pre-school (Montessori) children for a total of not more than 3.5 hours per session. This services category covers may include pre-schools, playgroups, crèches, Montesorri pre-schools, naíonraí or similar services which generally cater for pre-school children.
Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1 — 2.5 years 1:5
2.5— 6 years 1:11
Part-Time Day Care service A pre-school service offering a care service for children for a total of not more than 3.5 hours and less than 5 hours per day. This may include a sessional pre-school service for a child not attending the full day care service but instead a half day service. The service must provide the same physical environment, including rest, play and facilities, as for full day care. This service category may include pre-schools, playgroups, crèches, Montesorri pre-schools, naíonraí or similar services which cater for pre-school children.
Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1-2 years 1:5
2-3 years 1:6
3-6 years 1:8
(While within a sessional class - 2.5— 6 years 1:11)
Full Day Care service A pre-school service offers a structured day care service for pre-school children for more than 5 hours per day. This may include a sessional pre-school service for children as part of that day. This category includes day nurseries and crèches.
Adult to Child ratio
0-1 year 1:3
1-2 years 1:5
2-3 years 1:6
3-6 years 1:8
(While within a sessional class - 2.5— 6 years 1:11)
HereAndGone
13hr ago
You get families like that, and they're not confined to Russia. They're trash, dysfunctional, and the kids have little chance to grow up not to be dysfunctional trash themselves given how they're raised, unless someone intervenes at a very young age and takes them out of that environment.
They'll probably still have a ton of problems, but at least they're not being raised like feral dogs.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
There is a difference between "crying because hungry/wet/scared" and "crying because I started and don't know how to stop" and if you're around kids for any length of time you'll pick up on the difference. That being said, I'd hate to be a kid raised under the "at six months ignore the crying" regime because yikes. A small baby is not trying to manipulate its parents, it has few other ways to communicate except through crying.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"? The hell? Babies were sharing the bed or at the foot of the bed in a cradle in lower class families, so they were never far away from human contact (see The Reeve's Tale, where a plot point is the deception wrought by moving the baby's cradle from the foot of one bed to another). Now it's a lot more "put the kid in a separate room nowhere near the parents until it cries to be fed" which has got to have an affect.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.
I know, which is why I've resisted the blandishments of doctors trying to sell this to me. I know I'd be one of the patients who didn't stick to the stringent lifestyle changes you have to make along with the surgery, and I'd be one of the ones who over-eat to the extent of bursting the sleeve.
Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.
I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories.
Oh, I've tried the fibre tablets thing - eat this tablet before a meal, drink water, it'll swell up inside your stomach and make you feel full and you'll eat less. Never worked for me because I never got the "feeling full" bit even after taking more than the recommended dose (luckily, I think/hope eating too much fibre is not a bad thing as such).
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it.
Ah, the good old "all that's needed is just some willpower" argument.
If anything would drive me to be a biological determinist, it's this. Oh, you find it easy to cut down eating, take more exercise, make necessary changes and stick to them?
Do you want a medal for that? Because it's not on you, it's not you making up your mind and applying willpower that does it. It's the genetic luck of the draw of having the fortunate combination of heredity and environment that gave you the physiological and psychological phenotype that means you can eat less, exercise more, and stick to changes.
Both my parents smoked. My father was able to give up smoking and never go back. My mother tried and failed, many times, to give it up and eventually she died of the lung cancer it gave her.
That was not a question of willpower, because my mother was not less strong-willed than my father, or more resistant to change. I don't know why she couldn't stop. She didn't know why she couldn't stop. She wanted to stop, she tried, she failed over and over.
Tell me "all that's needed is just some willpower" about that, and I will spit in your smug face.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Driving her to tears failed.
that's what people don't understand about "well let's just shame fat people into not over-eating".
If you really make me feel bad, what happens? I feel bad, I cry, I hate myself. There's no quick fix, because even immediately going on a starvation diet will not shift significant amounts of weight in time for all the "good job, you are now not a disgusting lard bucket" to make up for the shaming.
You know what does make me feel better in the short term? Eating.
Congratulations, now you've driven me to eat even more.
(Yes, I'm on Ozempic now. I haven't lost weight, but it'd doing good for my blood sugar. Weirdly, I'm eating both less and more, since I don't eat as much at one sitting, but now I'm constantly eating small snacks and meals. No idea what the hell is going on there).
HereAndGone
18hr ago
I think what we are not getting here is that Aristotle means slaves. Not "people who need to be looked after" or "people who are incapable of not fucking up their lives" - we do accept that there is a social duty to look after the mentally ill or the intellectually disordered who can't live without support.
He means "people who are born to be property". And that, dear Mottizens, is the nettle you need to grasp: do you really advocate that some people are property?
HereAndGone
18hr ago
The more you protest, the more I suspect, because this has happened before. "Me, a sockpuppet of Someone? Not at all!" (yes it was a sockpuppet).
HereAndGone
18hr ago
I thought it was good, but weak. The story wasn't well-developed. And there seems to have been no follow-up or sequel as you'd expect.
HereAndGone
18hr ago
I think the "getting girls when they're young" was less about actual paedophilia and more about "get them while they're impressionable, groom them to accept that you're helping them build careers as models or whatever, then have a stable of pretty young things to be arm candy at the parties you're throwing".
It's an old racket, people have been picking off girls since the days of stage coaches. They arrive in London looking for work, or are recruited by those who go into the country looking for girls, and are tricked into joining brothels by a procuress.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Oh yeah - make this a pirate movie, it'll work. Even a space pirate movie. But that doesn't seem to be what it is. People judge by the marketing, so seeing something with a kid with an eyepatch, that looks to be "moral lecture about disability". I was going "why the hell is he wearing an eyepatch?" when looking at the posters etc. instead of going "oh this looks like fun kid's SF cartoon and maybe smart as well!"
HereAndGone
1d ago
spend half the movie looking at her phone
That's absolutely a problem with audiences today, and part of the reason our attention spans and focus are so frayed. And yeah, the writers have to compensate for "if we don't keep the action moving, we won't keep eyeballs on the screen".
HereAndGone
1d ago
I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.
That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The Sting
Redford and Newman, couldn't go wrong with that combo at that time. That's characters + plot meshing well.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The only thing better than Darwin and Jussie Smollett was Impassionata betting the house on Trump going to jail, for sure, this time, definitely, just we all wait and see, by this time next week he'd be locked up for real.
How many years ago was that, does anyone remember? Ah, good times, good times!
HereAndGone
1d ago
Problem is, if you were one of the people who engaged regularly with Darwin, you soon got to know his tricks (and yes, he did engage in tricks). As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
It's more of a "whole body of work" thing rather than "this specific post here, this one, this one" because ain't nobody got the time to make a list and checking it twice over arguments from years back (I know, somebody will pop up with just such a list). It's like somebody new coming in to a pub and hearing about Billy 'BabyEater' McGee getting barred, and asking why, and going on about how "but all you're telling me is that he got into a fight, and the other guy was the one who threw the first punch anyway!"
Yeah, that was the last straw which gave the ostensible reason for barring him, how do you think he got the name "BabyEater" in the first place?
HereAndGone
1d ago
At this point, I'm starting to lean towards you being either Impassionata (hi, guy!) or even Darwin himself. You're doing the same darn thing of repeating the same point over and over ("Darwin had AAQCs!") and ignoring every other point being presented.
AAQCs mean nothing. I've gotten some myself, and I certainly never put any effort into the ones that got recommended. I've also gotten some bans, and I have to admit I did flounce off once myself, and those are more meaningful.
HereAndGone
1d ago
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Ah, come on. He was able to finesse the rules within an inch of their lives so that the people responding to him ate bans while he just slid on by with clean hands. Eventually it all caught up to him, but he wasn't the one on the receiving end of the rules enforcement.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I'd forgotten how entertaining the Smollett thread was. Darwin lecturing de haut en bas about empirical reality in regards to one of the stupidest (but admittedly hilarious) fake hate crimes ever was just perfection.
If Smollett had just stuck to "I got jumped and beaten up by two white guys yelling slurs", he probably would have gotten away with it. Even the MAGA thing would have worked if he said one or both was wearing a MAGA hat. But he had to plan it out like a TV episode with the bleach and noose and on-the-nose dialogue, and it all fell apart.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
HereAndGone
1d ago
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.
All white people will be middle-middle to upper-middle to upper-class, doing high-status jobs for Elite Human Capital because we are so much better, and all the shitty (literally) jobs will be done by the inferior brown people until the AI-powered robots take over.
Am I right? Because I'm blessed if I can understand in any other way the points you are darkly hinting at.
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