Tollund_Man4
No bio...
User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Why do we eat meat? Because we like meat. That we like it is justification enough, because humanity alone is the arbiter of right and wrong.
Why use 'we' here? Humanity is divided on this issue or else there would not be a debate. If you want to say 'meat eaters alone are the arbiters of right and wrong' that would be more precise and would sound pretty cool, but I'm not sure it settles anything.
Tollund_Man4
30d ago
Ireland
In an unexpected change of tune Sinn Féin have come out against the controversial hate speech bill, citing their own experience being on the wrong end of censorship and the refusal to include their proposed amendments to the bill. This is especially strange given that they voted in favour of the bill at every stage of the process so far. Leo Varadkar has accused the party of cowardice and falling prey to "an online campaign of misinformation".
They've also come out against the EU migration pact saying that Irish immigration policy should be decided in Ireland. The migration pact seems like it would solve some of the immigration problems the EU is facing so Sinn Féin's opposition isn't a move to the right on the face of it, but they have said they agree with some parts of the agreement so the objection doesn't seem to stem from their being against stemming the flow of migrants.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
"Jefferson was racist, ergo a bad person and all of his works are now discredited."
Maybe this is how things work in the culture war but I don't think the latter has to follow when you admit the former. I've seen plenty of wholehearted defenders of a philosophy say something to the effect of "X (founder of their favourite ideology) was a terrible person, now let's discuss what is still worthwhile about their ideas".
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
That seems like a good plan. I've got a lot of programmer friends and another friend who is being hired by a friend after spending the last year learning in his own time.
It will just take some discipline, I've tried to pick it up a few times and never found that pure interest that allows me to read books without needing to motivate myself. My dad is also fairly passionate about programming so I'm sure there's something to it but I haven't found it yet.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
I cannot believe I, an Englishman, am looking with envious eyes and a hopeful heart at Ireland.
Regarding the street fights, with the rise of Antifa it didn't take long for right wingers to get violent too. A couple of hundred members of the National Party were attacked at a hotel last year during a conference with an acquaintance of mine being one of 5 hospitalised. Since then everyone knows a confrontation between the far left and right will probably get violent so they come prepared.
Arson has been going on for much longer. I can think of quite a few incidents in relation to this issue in the past few years. If a building has been earmarked for becoming an asylum centre, simply getting rid of the building works pretty well (especially in small towns where that might be the only suitable building for miles around).
A few examples: Kildare, 3 times in Donegal, Leitrim, Dublin.
Although I do remember it being widely unpopular?
Yes, 70% of people responded negatively in a public consultation on the law. When questioned, our Taoiseach (prime minister) said that the public consultation was likely swayed by organised groups of dissenters and dismissed it as unrepresentative, when asked why they did the public consultation in the first place if it was so flawed he answered "because this is a democracy" and that public consultations aren't the way things are decided.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there.
Yes there are some very visible technological achievements during war, but what's the counterfactual? More capital to invest in research, fewer short term economic decisions, fewer collapsed states, fewer dead scientists...
It's hard to believe that a Europe which didn't spend a decent portion of the last century blowing itself to bits isn't far ahead of where we are now. Where's our Austro-Hungarian space program?
Tollund_Man4
27d ago
We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.
Reading him as charitably as I can I'd say he's advocating something like what the French had before they brought in age of consent laws a few years ago. You still got sent to prison for having sex with a minor but it wasn't called rape, and you got sent to prison for much longer if your case satisfied the coercive bar needed for a rape conviction.
An bhfuil ceannaigh mé dul go dtí an leithreas! (I checked after I wrote this and it was even worse than I thought).
Tollund_Man4
3mo ago
See also Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" EP, which spawned an entire genre of purely computer-generated piss-off-your-dad music, and was tremendously popular to boot.
Small correction: Dubstep was a thing in the UK since the early 2000s, Skrillex made it popular in America.
Tollund_Man4
4mo ago
Anyone got got recommendations for podcasts/Youtube channels focused on history or philosophy? I listen at work where my hands are kept busy so anything longform or a good playlist of shorter stuff would be good to minimise having to pull my phone out.
Ireland
A riot has broken out in Dublin after a man stabbed two 5 year olds, a 6 year old and a woman in her 30s earlier today. The woman and a 5 year old girl are currently undergoing surgery for serious injuries. The man is also being treated for serious injuries after bystanders intervened (I've seen photos and the guy is barely conscious and bleeding from the mouth). The rioters don't have a spokesperson or anything but I think it's fair to say that this is an anti-migrant riot, politicians and police are certainly blaming the far-right for it.
This is all happening right now so this isn't a complete list, but at least one hotel housing migrants, a Luas tram, and multiple police cars have been set on fire. O'Connell Bridge leading on to the city's main street has been blocked a burning bus and there are videos of shops being looted.
Worth mentioning because of the timing - this comes a week after a man was convicted for the apparently random murder of schoolteacher Aisling Murphy in Dublin last year. The man who was found guilty was a Slovakian convicted rapist, but the media went from scolding Irish men for their toxic attitudes to near complete silence once it came out that the perpertator wasn't Irish.
Tollund_Man4
7mo ago
Has anyone here ever been terrible at remembering names and then solved that problem? I'm thinking of just writing every new acquaintance's name into a notebook or something.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?
Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.
I've been reading which I think put this distinction we should be making between cultural and material progress quite well. From Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos:
We are much more willing to look at the progress of technology as the model that social progress "should" resemble, no matter how improbable the resemblance might be. The cycle of invention and obsolescence is more appealing than the tragic history of "the rise and fall" of Rome: technology promises us a rise without a fall, and a history without heroes or villains – only inventors. Unlike a struggle between factions, with each side pretending to be certain that they alone can lead the public to a better future but living forever with uncertainty and regret (as when the Tories slaughtered the Whigs, and vice versa, in the American Revolution) about all the good men who died on the other side, half wondering as to whether or not the unexpected outcomes of all the violence really were "the best of all possible worlds", as Candide would say, when we imagine social progress in technological terms we need not question the extent to which we will be heroes, villains, or simply passive cowards, in the next chapter of history to be written. Brutus must have wondered, before his death, if he had been more a villain than a hero, and must have questioned whether or not he would have been better off a coward and a conformist –whether or not all of Rome would have been better off, by the same token. Instead of all this endlessly ambivalent tragedy, we can all fix our eyes on a new cellular phone, laid bare upon the dining room table, and express our astonishment at how much "the state of the art" has improved in the last twenty years: now this is progress!
We ignore that the table the phone is sitting upon hasn't changed at all; nor has the concrete floor, nor the pipes that bring us water below the floorboards, and so on. It does not occur to us that the stasis of our senates, parliaments, prisons, police services and universities should be judged more harshly, relative to the rapid progress made in other fields (or at least in this one). Instead, we behave as if the innovations made in consumer electronics were infectious. Perhaps if you leave that cellphone sitting on the table long enough, the ingenuity embodied within it will seep through the polished surface, drip down the wooden legs, through the concrete floor, and then percolate into the pipes --revolutionizing the sewage system along with everything else it touches, without any of us having to be bothered about leading a revolution.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.
It might be more efficient, but is the thing you're improving efficiency on really that much of a constraint in the first place?
Like it would take X amount of time for 100 immigration officials to thoroughly sift through 1000 applications. You're suggesting we save those 100 people a lot of time by implementing a race based admissions system, why not just double or triple the amount of immigration officials? It's not like they're a big item in any country's budget.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Sex toys for men becoming widely accepted would lower women's value in the sexual marketplace in the same fashion that a UBI puts upwards pressure on the lowest wage.
They might also placate a lot of low value men to the point where women are grateful for the drop in attention, it wouldn't be the type of attention they're trying to win after all.
There aren't any other non-white TDs (members of parliament) to make the attempt in the first place (and Varadkar is already half-Irish). At the moment it looks like Simon Harris is going to be the next Taoiseach, he's shifty-eyed even for a politician.
True, though some of the ones brave enough to set fire to buses might be.
There’s been a lot of tension between Brazilian couriers and Dublin’s feral youth these last few years. A lot of Brazilians work courier and food delivery jobs and a certain section of young Dubliners like stealing their motorbikes. I don’t know the number but a few Brazilians have been severely injured or killed by joyriders and thieves (or in one case by the police trying to stop the thieves).
Tollund_Man4
5mo ago
except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/
/pol/ really enjoys bringing it up but it's not that obscure. Looking it up on Youtube I see a BBC documentary from 2002, an Al Jazeera documentary, a Jocko Willink Podcast discussion and some small high production value channels giving an animated breakdown.
Ireland
TAOISEACH LEO VARADKAR has said that Palestinian refugees will not be granted the same temporary protection as Ukrainians and claimed that Ukraine is in a “different category”. . .
While Varadkar said he thinks the treatment of Palestinian refugees is “very unfair” globally, he said that the group was “different” when it came to providing them with the same protection status as those fleeing Ukraine.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio One’s Today with Claire Byrne, Varadkar said: “I think Ukraine is a different category. It’s a European country, it’s an EU candidate state, and we’ve given us a special recognition by granting temporary protection.
Varadkar said “Palestine is different” and said that he believes that it would be the responsibility of the “arab countries” to welcome the those who have been displaced, similar to how Ireland has with Ukraine’s.
Not granting Palestinians the same streamlined entry as Ukrainians doesn't necessarily mean much as there are still a lot of people coming in via the normal asylum system, but the suggestion that Arab countries should take care of Arabs (and the implication that European countries should take care of Europeans) is something I would have expected to be outside the Overton window. Europe is quite a varied place, but one of the more pro-refugee countries saying this makes me think the countries which have had problems with Arab migrants won't hesitate in doing the same (Ireland's migrants are nearly all EU, Ukraine, or Brazilian so Islam is not really a domestic issue).
Notably a lot of left-wing politicians went back on their past promises (this campaign goes back at least 2 years) to vote to expell the Israeli ambassador, a motion was passed today condemning the violence etc and the Sinn Fein leadership made no effort to include this condition in their suggested amendment of the wording. Sinn Fein has been quietly dropping some of their more radical proposals as they come closer to actually winning an election so this isn't a huge surprise, but getting softer on Israel is something that will annoy a lot of the more left-wing portions of their base.
hardcore antisemitism is (not exclusively, of course) a particularly Irish thing even in the US
Maybe I just can’t see the water I’m swimming in but I don’t think modern Irish people are antisemitic (Keith Woods and 4chan posters excepted). The first half of the 20th century was pretty bad (like the Limerick Boycott), but since then Jews are barely talked about in Ireland because there are only like 1,000 of them. The anti-Semitic stuff I heard from Muslims and Poles in Ireland struck me as a fairly foreign thing when I first heard it.
Irish people oppose Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians for the same reason they opposed South African Apartheid: not because Jews or Boers are inherently worthy of hate but because if you squint you can sort of draw parallels with Ireland’s experience under British rule. Irish people support a Jewish leader in Ukraine because Russian actions remind them of British colonialism, they supported the Sinn Féin Rabbi when being pro-Israel meant fighting the British, they oppose the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians because it reminds them of what the British did. Everything is interpreted through the lens of our history, we’re too self-centered to be anti-Semites.
Tollund_Man4
6mo ago
Ireland (I will update this later as I do more reading)
It seems giving multinational companies low tax rates is a gift that keeps on giving. Despite a massive increase on covid related spending Ireland ended up with a 10 billion euro budget surplus (this is apparently going to increase to 65 billion by 2027), and they've made use of it to pass a generous 'cost of living' budget consisting of tax cuts, tax credit increases, a minimum wage increase, introduction of more one off welfare payments and an increase in the existing ones in a bunch of different areas. The healthcare sector is seeing a hiring freeze to reduce massive overspending, and the Minister for Health has conceded that there will be a large funding shortfall as a result of this budget (everyone knows the healthcare system does poorly given its funding but no politician has been willing to tackle the issue head on).
Ireland is still a very expensive country to live in and not everyone has a nice job with a tech or pharmaceutical firm, so while this budget is generous its unclear whether it will keep up with the rising costs of day to day life (most of all the insane housing market).
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
They fall back on reliable distractions (current iteration being video games and anime), and opt out of social activity entirely
I can see one reason to be skeptical about this model. Young men and teenagers fall deep into video game/porn addiction well before the time where it would be reasonable to conclude that they're locked out of the sexual market. It would be ridiculous (in a typical immature way) for an 18 year old to look at his high school romantic failure and say "I guess it gets no better than this", it would be surprising to find an 18 year old who hasn't already spent at least a few hundred hours gaming and indulging in Netflix and some fraction of that watching porn.
There's a real question here as to how demoralizing school must be that men seem to be pre-emptively dropping out of adult life, but there's also the simple fact that distractions are more addicting and ever present than ever before.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
You can't tag people on this site yet can you?
Maybe this is just my domestication showing, but here in Ireland (very similar to the UK) I have almost never needed a knife for anything outside the kitchen. I might get a Swiss Army knife today because they're cool, but I'll probably just use it as a can opener.
More options
Context Copy link