Anyone watched the Fury-Ngannou fight? Spoilers below.
As an MMA fan: what the fuck? We're kinda used to the unreasonable effectiveness of Francis Ngannou (Rozenstruik is a tenured kickboxer, for context. So was Overeem) and he has a general reputation as a very fast learner but this is kind of ridiculous.
Before the fight, even fans of his were mainly glad he was going to get a boxing style payday, despite the likely KO.
I almost suspect Saudi shenanigans but they're having Fury-Usyk so it wouldn't be in their interests. I guess Fury's used to tiring people in the clinch and Francis' famous strength + greater experience clinching turned the tables. It was absurd how he threw him around at some points. But Francis looked good even outside that.
Ngannou went into MMA because the skill level was seen as much more favorable for a late starter. But, as a latecomer, he beat multiple strikers, submitted wrestlers, adapted so much to his one serious loss that Stipe Miocic looked like he had nothing for him, wrestlefucked Gane...him going straight into boxing or being discovered as a teen is the biggest what-if in combat sports.
Much of this article is just mainstream pap, whipsawing from gleeful enjoyment about how women are better than men nowadays to lamenting how much men suck
Eh, from what I know of Emba her feminism is motivated entirely by the fact that she thinks women aren't happy with the current situation either.
If I were a cynic I'd say that this recent reactionary feminist wave is precisely about women and the easiest way for people like Emba and Louise Perry to distinguish themselves is where the current status quo shows serious cracks: how it handles men's problems (also mainly sex for women, going by her book topic)
Tanista
9mo ago
In that manner, it’s quite similar to maths, which also don’t materially exist but certainly can be studied.
Isn't math usually seen as objective - i.e. its truth or falseness is mind-independent? After all, we use it to come up with falsifiable theories of how the universe works. In fact, one line of argument for theism is that math is unreasonably useful here.
Tanista
11mo ago
I always defend the Fast and Furious movies. To me they're big dumb movies but not bad ones. Well, okay: not not-entertaining ones.
Yes, all of the set pieces are dumb. But they're well-crafted. It seems like a low-bar but in the age of CGI dreck I can actually follow along with the ludicrous things they're doing
You're right about Diesel though; success has ossified him. It's not just his now-bloated, older look, which I can get past, but the character he plays has nothing to him besides being a taciturn hero yet he's supposed to anchor the films.
Not sure why he's degenerated below even speaking in complete sentences (Keanu has a similar thing with John Wick, but he was always laconic). He's actually not a bad actor and he must have a ton of creative control at this point (given how he ran off The Rock who used his star power to run wild in DC)
Tanista
2mo ago
And so if we listen to a lot of HBD proponents like Murray and ‘accept’ it and dismantle those programs that largely benefit those communities, and abolish / criminalize affirmative action and so on, do we really think that the social problems we see in black communities are going to improve? That issues with eg violence are going to improve? It just seems very unlikely to me.
Problem is that the anti-HBDers are not standing in place: recent anti-policing pushes have made black communities worse off.
It's not simply "keep what works even if you have to lie about it". The other theory has motivated policy that is now not only hurting black people but affecting others, with no sign of stopping.
The latter is a much less attractive status quo.
it was often because they didn’t want to see the country burn.
A black guy gets shot by police at the wrong time and the country may burn anyway.
Tanista
4mo ago
This reminds me of long arguments I used to have with a not-even-crypto HBDer on reddit (he was just politely not bringing it up too much because I was clearly refusing to even consider it). He also had this theory that, with enough successful African migration, the unity of the black elite, and thus the black grievance industry, would fail.
I, ironically enough, was the cynic even then- having seen how African migrants assimilate to "blackness" in my own family.
Obviously they are hiring their own ethnics at a preferable rate, but I haven't seen one of them be part of the "Black at XYZ Company" groups or really care about that.
What about their kids?
If it isn't just culture, even the kids of highly selected African migrants'll revert downwards. Then they'll face the same fight to get into the same elite spaces as the other elite blacks...where well-meaning progressive whites have made it clear that emphasizing victimhood is the path forward if they want a spot, even now since SCOTUS struck down race-based AA but explicitly allowed schools to take struggling with race into account.
So I tried to read 1632 again and I just...can't bring myself to. But I'm still hankering for some alternate history/ISOT stuff. Does anyone have any good recs? And yes, I've read Stirling's Trope Namer. Hopefully that can't be the best work in the genre and it's all downhill from here.
Tanista
8mo ago
Where it differs is Christianity made the slave equal to the emperor whereas woke seems to want to put George Floyd above the POTUS and the black transvestite above George Floyd. A reverse pyramid instead of equality.
The last will allegedly be first in Christianity too, this is just pushed till the eschaton. Wokeness obviously doesn't have this luxury and so tries to make a theological claim manifest in politics, with ludicrous consequences.
The other thing is that it seems Christianity has a more substantive concept of the Good, which acts as a guardrail. The "meek" may nominally be praised (or at least seen as opportunities to display Christian charity) are not allowed to demand a blank cheque because there are other priorities.
Wokeness is a revolutionary ideology that almost celebrates not just the violation of old norms but the upcoming obsolescence of even previously progressive versions. Which leads to weird, unconstrained ideologies and outcomes.
Right above it the report gives examples of staged or PR photos as a separate, but also bad, categories. If that's what they meant it was already covered.
Also,in my experience with Canadian ads, mixed race couples (especially with black people, who should be of much less relevance here) are very over-represented. I don't really see how it can be a coincidence at this point and not a result of the exact sentiment I'm seeing here, even if it isn't as badly or explicitly put. I think they just said the quiet part out loud this time.
Why do supposedly "leftist" subreddits (stupidpol, Redscarepod) get flooded with rightoids when there's a banwave?
Because they allow serious critique of left-wing idpol they dislike while also being left enough that they're less likely to get banned by admins.
I have a theory that many people are actually sort of a meta-fan of the politics fandom.
Or they're just overly online and so absorb the language of the overly online. In the past it might have been memes about can has-ing cheeseburgers or jokes about Aalewis and his euphoria or whatever. Now it's incel/FDS/Zoomer lingo, with a lot more existential politics because things have polarized even more.
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
I just reread the book fight scene: underhanded Feyd and Paul are at such a level,with so many plans within plans, that it'd honestly be hard to show visually. Making Feyd honorable and having a more straightforward fight seems like an easy fix.
Since they cut out Hawat and a lot of the Feyd and Duke maneuvering around each other (here I simply give them a pass due to time), it's easy to also just "fix" the Coliseum scene by having Feyd show he's formidable but capable of being honorable. Otherwise you have to get into BG control words and Paul's inner struggle to try to play into the finale and...
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
This is kind of my problem: it's hard to tell how all of this comes across to a totally virgin audience since I've known about some of the plot points so long. It seems that Vileneuve gave people enough to essentially grok what was going on (even putting aside Jamis' words and Jessica's own initiation, the Harkonnen reveal shows there's some ancestral memory shit going on - and how else could Alia be sentient?). But it feels a bit hollow from my perspective.
Tanista
3mo ago
Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups.
Which is why the Gulf States are a hotbed of insurrection?
Tanista
4mo ago
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
You say "not at all" but nothing you say actually changes that they were "normally ineligible" to play in female teams with attempts to change that only recently (despite attempts to promote female sports going back to Title IX).
Your attempt to leverage semantics in your favor (e.g. via the word "penalize" vs "exclude") doesn't actually defeat the basic claim about the status quo.
Even if they were uncontroversially considered women - and they aren't - they were/are still ineligible.
Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies
The big flaw imo with "right side of history" thinking is not that parties don't generally think they're right, it's with the assumption that things will work out eventually (somehow). It's not defeatism or a rejection of your belief in your answers to be pragmatic or to hedge your bets.
Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland.
Yes, this is the sort of advice I'd expect the GOP to give Democrats.
Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate
This was also "Notorious RBG's" argument - she may have even been right. But, at this point, even the most fervent pussyhat-wearers have begrudgingly admitted that she erred. In isolation this argument works I guess but not if the comparison is with a potential Republican pick. Certainly not for Nate Silver's audience.
because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant
It's morally repugnant socially (I can't speak on the roots of your personal belief) because we believe that the bantustans are the outcome of white neglect and oppression (even if we place the blame far back in the past or through some dubious logic : e.g. "white flight" where white people just ruin neighborhoods by...leaving)
If tomorrow we just accepted that Black neighborhoods aren't bad because white people took the secret suburb sauce but because low-IQ blacks (disproportionately large group compared to other races) ruin them in a variety of ways then the entire situation changes.
Even if white people were not inclined to abandon blacks, it would be a totally different relationship - certainly there'll be less apologizing for enforcing the law. And things like desegregation and white flight can now be reframed - white people were simply trying to escape the predictable consequences (violence, destruction of legitimately earned wealth) and so on.
White people are then victims, and the fact that the entire federal apparatus is causing excess deaths and loss of opportunity for white people for simply being genetically lucky is what's morally repugnant.
This is exactly the argument the DR makes.
Tanista
1mo ago
I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is
The Christine Blasey Ford thing came up again and all I could think was "if the entire nation is going to have to relitigate decades-old teenage parties filled with drunk kids maybe people should keep a tighter handle on them, cries of tyranny or no". Because clearly it can't help but be everyone's business.
That is a particularly extreme example but still.
This is one I hear a lot and, coming from a low IQ part of the world myself, I've never understood. It never occurred to me that people literally couldn't hold hypotheticals in their head.
There are many bits of conventional "wisdom" I see in DR circles that I can at least relate to some experience IRL, even if they're unflattering or exaggerated. This one is just totally baffling.
Maybe it's hard to tell when you're in the boiling pot because you're all low IQ and within the same range. But I've lived in the West for about an equal amount of time now and, while many other things pop out, this was not one of those things.
Tanista
3mo ago
Yeah, The Wire doesn't succeed because groups are overly distinct (though it often shows they are). It arguably succeeded because the writers aren't Nowheres.
They had careers before Hollywood and lived their whole lives in the region. The city feels like an actual place and not Vancouver in Yankee drag. Entire plotlines and direct quotes are ripped directly from their experience (Simon's Homicide is basically The Wire). So they have roots, a position that isn't just ideology. Many of the characters are basically real people or composites of them, so they aren't predictable hacky stereotypes (though a "woke" author would have had Herc and Carver's stories end the same way)
A lot of the writers and showrunners not only often have much weaker credentials than you'd think - and in fact may be selected for their inexperience but they seem to be the same sort of person who uprooted themselves, moved to Hollywood, learned the new emperor's religion and now repeat that as their way of bringing value and climbing the ranks. So, if they're faced with something they're not familiar with, why not just let ideology act as a shortcut? As we see with the recent Barbie news, it becomes even more insufferable when such people get a ton of validation from their audience for this behavior.
So you end up with so much of the media and the personalities in it sounding the same.
Tanista
4mo ago
Assimilation only happens on US terms. It would quickly overwhelm Canada and bring it in line with US politics.
Most of the distasteful shit (from my perspective anyway - anti-migrant Canadians must hate both parties since I came over in Harper's time...) is Liberal stuff they can get away with because there's no GOP and governmental splits. That changes in the US system.
Tanista
5mo ago
I would reform the education system to strongly encourage people who are smarter and more capable to have more children.
While I wouldn't deny that there are cultural messages that come up here, I'd think that the workplace is a far bigger issue here than the K-12 education system. If women perceive having a child as holding them back in their career, fewer will.
Lots of women freeze their eggs and have the clock run out on them. That is not really an issue of not wanting kids but trying to balance them with having a secure career first and failing.
What should Israel do to ensure that an attack like the one launched by Hamas never happens again? I don’t know right now.
This is basically all I seem to be hearing. Nobody knows what Israel should do (or rather, they have some sort of vague shopping list of 'hearts and minds' and 'developing Gaza'* with no idea how to make it happen in reality) but everyone apparently knows what it shouldn't do.
The only difference seems to be who the "how we got here" padding blames.
* Somehow, when you're dealing with terrorists that will literally steal infrastructure for weapons and brag about it.
I predict there's a very high combined chance that it is not Biden vs. Trump by the time we get to election night.
Biden dies, everyone blue holds their nose and votes for President Kamala.
I'm convinced she's probably going to end up Pres by default. Now, that will be boring, in an awful, Nicola Murray sort of way.
They're not worse than Nigeria. They're worse than the elite of Nigeria.
In a lot of these places people don't go to public school because "public" is for people with no choice. Private schools on the other hand don't have to try to educate everyone.
One of my classmates went to Yale. She was very smart and studious but I have to wonder what would have happened had she been stuck in some stereotypically hellish inner city school with the worst performing students.
But, honestly, a lot of it is just pre-school social family resources. People from her class come in with an expectation of studiousness (which parents reinforce with private tutoring and other means). Hard to hold it against American schools that in a universal system many people...don't.
(That said, it is insane to me that teachers have to expect violence. You'd think that would be a bare minimum thing).
I don’t think Ratajkowski is that pretty, she’s often cited by men online as an example of a ‘butterface’ with a perfect body but not so great face.
I'm surprised to see this from you since you usually seem to be very skeptical (rightly imo) about a lot of these stories people - especially bitter men - tell themselves in the Discourse.
To see you citing how "men online" talk down Ratajkowski without a jab at how crazy /r/truerateme is is a bit funny.
IMO Ratajkowski is like Sydney Sweeney or hell, Benedict Cumberbatch for a weird male version: their status and/or SMV is so self-evidently high that people can sit around mocking them for their looks without it coming across as mean-spirited (well...less so than usual).
Unless you're a fashion designer or a homosexual, it's almost certainly a meaningless meme.
Nobody has a problem with "a female lead". Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley were anchoring movies before I was born. Nobody had a problem with Black Widow. Nobody was annoyed by the original Charlie's Angels movies, even if they hated the recent woke abomination
I would say the problem of "wokeness" is beyond that now. Things like Rachel Zegler's comments on Snow White or the replacing of the dwarves had nothing to do with the mere presence of women in a fairy tale about a woman. It often just feels hostile to the existing IPs, general beloved tropes and stories and even the legacy audience (which matters since they drive hype)
That sort of wokeness applies in two ways here: Brie Larson is seen in a similar light as Zegler by the sorts of males who love this shit and (more importantly) the original movie was "woke" in the sense that Larson's character was so bland (most of her struggle being essentially against social forces telling her she's not good, fitting wokeness) that there's nothing to be loyal to. Middle class people will go watch that movie when they're told it's The First , and it's right before Endgame. But they don't love the character the way people love Stark or even Black Widow and so they have no reason to stick with her when the MCU's brand is collapsing.
Besides that, the problems are:
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