Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
You can't tag people on this site yet can you?
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
That's Hiberno-English for you, I say if we have to put up with "ain't" you should tolerate this.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Bringing the most powerful people in society slightly more in line with the level of safety the rest of us make do with? I'll bite that bullet.
What is that quote about the British empire having such effective administrators because they had a broad education and so could draw on the lessons of ancient history to improvise a solution instead of floundering in the face of anything outside of their narrow expertise?
One is constraining what you can think and the other what you can do no? I can't really think of any other desire or valuation (whatever mental category worship falls into) that can't conceivably be negated, though maybe somebody could suggest one. It would be odd to have one where there really is no choice.
Ireland
Continuing from last week's post on Sinn Féin making a u-turn on the hate speech bill, the Irish Independent has reminded us of one of Sinn Féin's proposed amendments to the bill just one year ago:
The definition of “hate” is laid out in section 10 of the bill and is about preparing or possessing material likely to incite violence or hatred against people on account of their protected characteristics.
Under the Sinn Féin amendments, migrant status would have become one of these protected characteristics.
The party’s amendments to the laws specified that reference to a person’s migrant status included references “to persons seeking international protection, persons with refugee status, persons with permission to remain and persons with any other regular or irregular migrant status”.
Now given the party's present (probably tactical) lack of clarity on why they are opposing this bill, and the fact the past year has seen the controversy garner worldwide attention, there is still a possibility that Sinn Féin have woken up to the fact that there is political gain to be had in curtailing the most extreme woke tendencies which until recently have gone unopposed amongst all the main parties. This is more plausible in light of the fact that some genuine opposition has arisen within the coalition government, notably Fianna Fáil TD Willie O’Dea accusing the Justice Minister of playing to the "woke gallery". It does seem like every party has simultaneously remembered that elections are still a thing and that they've been doing a lot of very unpopular things recently, but whether that will actually lead to a change in direction seems far less likely.
Still, unless some very clear statements are made that leave no doubt about the party being genuinely opposed to any hate speech bill, I'm going to rule out the scenarios of Sinn Féin remembering that a good portion of their base are the same working class types who have to live beside asylum centres and chalk this down to "left-wingers think left-wing law doesn't go far enough!".
Ireland
The arson attacks have died down (barring one seemingly apolitical attempt to burn down 5 shops in one day in Cork city) and the government has hardened their attitude somewhat towards the abuses of the asylum system, sending one man to prison and arresting dozens of others for showing up at Dublin airport without a passport and promising to resume deportations of failed asylum seekers on chartered flights (the covid response involved putting a moratorium on deportations).
I'm a bit late with this news but it turns out the man charged with setting fire to a Luas tram during the Dublin riot is a member of the National Party, so there is some evidence to the claims that far-right agitators are taking advantage of these protests to commit crimes. Stirring up violence is about all the National Party seems capable of, right now there are two self-proclaimed leaders of the party since Justin Barrett was ousted as party leader (something he denies) after a controversy over a large amount of stolen gold and a police investigation into who actually owns it.
Another slightly out of date headline is that the number of asylum seekers without state provided accommodation broke the 1,000 figure last month, but given the rate of increase it is likely still higher today:
On Friday 9 February, the figure passed 800 for the first time, the following Friday it passed 900, and today, one week on, it has passed 1,000.
Many of these asylum seekers have pitched tents outside the International Protection Office and are protesting the breach of their human rights given the sometimes freezing temperatures and constant rain. It has been the case for a while now that if you show up in Ireland claiming asylum that you will be sleeping on the street, but that doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.
Tollund_Man4
5mo ago
Not sure if there's no sound or it's just my computer but here's a black guy with his hands completely full of loot drawing strange looks from the rioters: https://twitter.com/wayotworld/status/1727851752697831824
There's videos of Irish people looting too so I wouldn't say it was whites vs migrants as much as political rioters (who are basically all white) vs looters.
The polls and studies I've seen show that the Irish tend to generally be pro-immigration, but it's obviously hard to get a sense of the country through a poll.
This is true, and Irish people aren't the type to cause a scene either way. Working class Dubliners are quite different though, and actual organised right wingers like the National Party are extremely loud for their size (I doubt they made up a large portion of the rioters but probably a decent portion of the guys livestreaming).
Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?
It depends on what you mean by creating your own values. Does it really require a particularly high amount of societal power or agency? Or at the minimum is it merely a cognitive act involving the recognition that the values you live by have no special authority other than that which you give by assenting to them? Perhaps this is just nihilism and creating your own values demands authorship of something new, but even that is nothing more than a cognitive act at the minimum.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
(who are a lot poorer than Americans, yes, if one actually participates in American online forums it would seem impossible to not learn this fact)
I think the scale of the gap is still missed on many, and if you do bring it up people just assume ruinous healthcare and tuition costs level the playing field.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
I'll have to look into the Irish Freedom Party. I was pleasantly surprised with how intelligent Justin Barret seemed in his interview with Keith Woods but a National Party protest doesn't seem like something you'd want to risk showing your face at.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Is that because 'revenge' is the same as logically 'wanting to maintain incentives against intentionally doing harm to society' or are you just discounting motivation and looking at the act itself?
If it's the first I disagree with equating the two as revenge can be justified irrationally without concern for the harm to society. I might fully agree with the idea that the legal punishment for an offender is sufficient to disincentivise him and deter others from doing the harm he did again, yet still chafe against the fact that the law is holding me back from doing worse to him than prison can.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.
What's nebulous and philosophical about it? I could call it common sensical and immediately intuitive: you're becoming absorbed in cheap pleasures at the cost of living up to your potential.
Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.
I would say that the first two lead to the second.
How one can be stupid but still have a high IQ is an interesting question. You can be intelligent but lazy, intelligent but incurious, but how about an intelligent ignoramus? Laziness and incuriousity can lead someone into becoming an offensively ignorant person, would we call that person offensively ignorant yet intelligent? It seems there are more paths to stupidity than low IQ.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Brexit was supposed to be massive, but I don't see that much of a course change in the UK
It might eventually mean the dissolution of the United Kingdom given that it has given the Scottish nationalists a lot of energy and they're pretty eager to hold another referendum.
Similar (but to a lesser extent) in Northern Ireland where most voted Remain. I'd say it's early for anything to happen yet, but given the recent demographic tipping point some economically minded pro-EU Protestants would be an important cohort for nationalists to court.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women
Do you think they'd do it as often? This sounds similar to saying that if you ban fast food people will just gorge themselves on healthy food, except they'd also probably stop gorging altogether.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I don't think it would be an absurdity to assert that the mass of people may be wrong.
Ireland
Riot police have been called out to the small town of Newtownmountkennedy (population 2,800) in response to another protest outside a site which is soon to become an asylum centre. It got violent and the riot police charged the protesters after they set fire to a building on the outer portion of the site. It seems like most of the protesters/rioters have been pushed into an adjacent field, but police are still moving through the town and running into more angry locals.
Ballina had a ]far larger peaceful protest](https://x.com/Mick_O_Keeffe/status/1781727303283692017) a few days ago, it would be harder to shut this one down given how big the town is (c. 10,000) and how isolated it is.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.
The Brother's Karamazov was much more comprehensible. I did have some confusion with the names, not just because of the Russian naming conventions but because apparently none of the readers could agree on a single pronunciation of 'Ivan'.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
Well if the next Taoiseach is to be a sacrificial lamb I'm not too unhappy with it being Simon Harris, Helen McEntee would be my preference.
Tollund_Man4
4mo ago
Western online feminists love to loudly complain about as a nightmarish dystopia to be avoided, namely a society plagued by enormous numbers of single, sexless and, one can imagine, bitter and traumatized, violent young men
Bitter, traumatised and violent, yes they treat that as a huge problem, but single and sexless? I’m not sure feminism explicitly worries about this, single and sexless men are to be dealt with on an individual level as inconvenient complainers who are to be ignored or shamed - feminism only deals with these men insofar as their situation (whether self-inflicted or not) causes them to step out of line. I don’t think women in general have this attitude but it’s the sense I’ve gotten from any explicitly feminist space I’ve seen.
Tollund_Man4
7mo ago
How were they oppressed by Poles? Not disagreeing, I'm just not very familiar with this area of history.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
(The distribution of high IQ men vs. high IQ women, particularly in STEM subjects, proves that this won't cause much if any disruption to the technological and intellectual progress of society.)
Wouldn't a lot of high IQ men have to shift into less intellectually loaded but still necessary work? It's just the law of comparative advantage, more menial but unavoidable jobs being done by a bigger labour force frees up time for the cutting edge stuff.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
Here's a hard bullet to bite: perhaps things don't usually get better.
I haven't actually said they will get better. Dropping out of adult life has a cost, someone might have squandered most of their opportunity by the time they decide to change. My point was just that the addictions we associate with 'checking out' come first (whether or not they're causative).
If you wind up reaching an adult height of only 5'1" and realize that you don't have what it takes to become a billionaire, you're going to be making some frankly rather nasty compromises if you want a partner.
There are guys who are 5'1" and there are guys who are so ugly they are hard to look at, but even amongst guys who don't have romantic success or were bullied in highschool, these people are the minority. Even amongst the cohort of sexless young men they are the exceptions.
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.
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