Titus_1_16
9mo ago
Far-right insulting term for blacks. Comes from some case in the US South a while ago where a black jogger was shot. I think it's popular because the last four letters are G-G-E-R
Titus_1_16
4mo ago
The Rest Is History podcast is really excellent, wide-ranging and not super ideological
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
That's super interesting, have you ever been to Europe? There's a lot that's distinct about White Americans (the capitalisation makes sense here to draw attention to the group, they're not just Americans who happen to be white) compared to other Euro nations. If I'm to trade in unkind European characterisations, White Americans can be a bit insincere, plastic and not-quite-there. Maybe "hollow" would be a better term than "plastic", actually.
I wonder if these traits are what you noticed; "automaton-like" is not a bad match for this set of traits
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
Poland in full war mode would likely crush Russia.
What on Earth makes you think that? Is this a typo?
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
Fair play
Titus_1_16
10mo ago
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Which Jesse Singal article, the trans kids one?
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Would the USA be "more democratic" if toddlers could vote?
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
You might not believe this, but he's not.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Standard physiognomy win, nice
Heck, I can't remember the last time I've heard a "Bethlehem and Jesus" style song on the radio instead of a "Presents and Reindeer" one.
A point that rankles my American other half, year after year, is that the "Christmas Music" played publicly here in Ireland is a completely different canon to what she grew up with back home. And, unusually, there is just a total failure of Americanisation in the domain of Christmas music - her canon seems ancient (many tunes from the 1950s versus a tilt towards the 1980s here, because of different population pyramids - we don't have a bulge of 60-70 year olds monopolising all the cultural memory space) and painfully schmaltzy to most Irish ears, including my own.
For example, the universally-acknowledged GOAT of Christmas music in Ireland is The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, a thoroughly secular 1980s ballad that consistently rankles schoolmarmish woke types not because of overt Christofascism, but because the word "faggot", in the pejorative sense, is a key lyric. This song gives rise to the only occassion in modern Ireland where a person can drunkenly chant the word "faggot" at a stuffy office (Christmas) party and recieve no censure.
Overtly religious stuff is also played publicly (a fine example is Mary's Boy Child by Boney M, a jaunty German-calypso tune) because it's a religious holiday. The modal Irish person under 35 sounds like a Q-Anon believer when discussing Catholicism (it's a giant conspiracy run by paedos to amass wealth & get a go of children), yet will still tolerate religious music at Christmas because, come on. I don't know how American culture has managed to get away from this. Maybe it really is semitic sour grapes from the pullers of American cultural levers.
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Interesting euro/American contrast here - fewer Euros would tolerate living in a place where you can only "exist" (ie do normal stuff like go to work, go to school, see friends, buy groceries, etc) with the help on a car, so this dilemma doesn't arise as much over here.
That is, I fully accept that freedom of travel should be a fundamental right, but also agree that driving a car is not - it's something you do on the state's sufferance.
These two principles don't often conflict in Europe, but it's a damn hard dilemma. Probably it's easier to solve with AI driving than by rebuilding most of your cities
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Hmm, personally I think that sets too high a bar for constituting a "movement" at least in the intellectual or cultural sense. Sure, a handful of books doesn't constitute a political movement - for that you need crowds, voting, candidates (though note that this definition also means the "alt right", such as it ever was, was not a "movement") but I think the bar is different/lower for an intellectual or cultural movement.
It's a consistent cliché in intellectual history that some group strongly disavows belonging to a single movement, while then spending the next 200 years being taught and studied as one. French New Wave Cinema, the Vienna Circle, etc.
My suspicion is that, (if there are such things as essays and undergaduates a hundred years hence) a student writing in the future about how American religiosity collapsed to European levels in the first decades of the 21st century will mention "the new athiests". Before of course talking about the triumphant rise of Zensunni Catholocism in the 2030s, which fuelled the Butlerian Jihad.
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
And I strongly suspect the 'people see more child porn so they want to offend more' effect is either nonexistent or tiny
I eh, disagree emphatically with your suspicion. If cp doesn't make people into more vigourous paedophiles, then we have to assume also assume the whole wild explosion of paraphilias and perversion that's come out in the past 20 years has just, by remarkable fluke, happened to co-incide with the ubiquity of online porn. I don't think the evidence supports that position, and I think wider availability of cruelty-free fairtrade child porn would likewise increase paedos' appetite for real-world abusing.
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
Yeah she's quite pretty, looks well for her age
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
It's ubiquitous porno usage, not obesity. The Japanese example supports this heavily
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Very interesting way to pose the question.
I can't speak for the entire nation, but I would think it's a saccharine and narcissistic sentiment and stop consideration there - I wouldn't consider how deeply believed it might be by the speaker.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Both are in restitution for evils that are older than the state of Israel, ie well past your 50 year rule. If the Paelstinian cause has exceeded some statute of limitation, it follows that WW2 and all its attendant evils has passed also.
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
What did Jefferson mean by inferior in "body"?
Probably aesthetically. Enslaved people tend to look pretty wretched. Also, this might not be obvious to a person from a multiracial country, but if you're not exposed to them very much, people of other races can seem kind of generally gross. Witness eg Chinese people encountering bodily hairiness in the flesh for the first time - they're often repulsed. Or, non-African men (for whom women's hair is a site of eroticism) encountering precolonial African women, for whom the hair on one's head was no more a locus of beauty than the skin on one's elbow.
Titus_1_16
10mo ago
People who get eye contact wrong come off as autistic, because it's a classic symptom of autism. But they can get it wrong by having too much or too little.
The correct amount of eye contact varies by culture. New Yorkers make remarkably little, and Irish tend to make quite a lot. I was showing a crew of New York Jews around Dublin last year for a wedding, and the eye contact differential was striking
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
Twitter is a lot more crass than this place, it's like putting your mouth right on the tap.
I know the answer is always to curate one's feed, but it's hard to stop the low content creeping in on twitter
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
A 50% raise is serious business, well done
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
As a European, "hot ethnic cleansing in Europe" would be top of my wishlist. I have a few candidates in mind.
However it's very, very, very unlikely to happen within a 12-month time horizon. There is no party near power in any western/central European country with the will and means to do this.
The likeliest scenario (and it's not very likely) would be that we have another crazy year of illegal migration north across the Med like 2016 - except voters and politicians know what this spells now, and "Wir Schaffen Das" sentiment is supplanted by "No Fuckin Way" sentiment. I could then imagine a pushback of current wannabe migrants, and perhaps expulsions from some of the particularly god-forsaken tent cities - but not deportations of people who'd been here longer than a few months.
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.
It's amusing in a post talking about translation and language prowess that you've actually made a (very common with Americans) grammatical error.
This should be either "if I evaluated" or "if I were to evaluate", since it forms a subordinate clause to the second conditional, if you're interested. Mistakes of this form are nearly guaranteed with Dutchmen, which I always find interesting because their English is otherwise near-perfect, and typically more orthodox than the average, say, Brit.
More options
Context Copy link