dasfoo
1yr ago
yeah - "exploring mental disability in novel form is never done" is just wrong. Hate this kind of article, but a lot of popular books explore mental disability
I couldn't get into it for this reason, but isn't Faullkner's The Sound and the Fury told partially from the POV of a retarded character? I found those early chapters unreadable.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is also a first-person narrative from the POV of a character with arguably limited mental resources.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I have a completely opposite view of the Reddit /r/jailbait saga. Places like /r/jailbait and /r/coontown did not exist because the Reddit admins at the time secretly liked it, but because they had a legitimate ideological commitment to only ban things that were explicitly illegal.
Good point. Now, unless there are any objections, since we're finally off Reddit, I'll started on this site's Jailbait thread later today....
dasfoo
1yr ago
he's been an utter failure. Maybe apart from appointing SCOTUS justices.
And that one notable success was the result of Trump delegating SC nominees to the swampiest establishment Republicans. Trump strengthened the process with his refusal tro cower in the face of outrage, but he succeeded here by essentially doing nothing.
dasfoo
1yr ago
the magnitude of that risk is still fairly minimal at 0.018%
How does that compare to the risk of serious COVID complications among the same cohort?
dasfoo
1yr ago
Trump was on the right side of history, and I think it's important to retain belief that there is a right side of history and people can be on it.
Was he? It's his vaccine, as he proudly claimed.
The CDC was more concerned about getting the vaccine out than perfect safety. Does that really make them mass murderers?
IIRC, the CDC postponed the vaccine until after the election, whereas Trump wanted it out before the election. I don't see how you can praise Trump as "right" while comdeming the CDC as vaccine hawks, when Trump was pressuring them to release it earlier than they did.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Wow, I must have missed the memo.
"It's cool, we won, you can take the sticker off now."
This is unnecessarily antagonistic and reads into Supah's comment something that isn't there. There doesn't need to be coordination/conspiracy for fashion/fads to change over time. It's not at all uncommon for peope who see themselves as trendsetters to tire easily of what was trendy last month, especially when a trend has since been codified by less-cool bodies, like commercial institutions.
dasfoo
1yr ago
It calls to mind an earlier America of fabulously wealthy well-bred Europeans living in Federalist-styled homes over generations, exerting control over the planning of towns and showcasing their wealth with opulence and beauty.
It did occur to me, having only been to MV once in the off-season, that these rich Democrats vacation there and leave the houses mostly uninhabited during the colder months. We should be sending them our homeless, too, in addition to our illegal immigrants.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Reviewers' standards of taste are very much aligned with 18-30 single consoomer demographic, but more weakly aligned with people who fall outside this group. If this were true, then I'd be curious to know, e.g., which 90s films resonating with my current demographic but panned by critics I might be able to retrospectively enjoy.
I don't have any data for this, but my understanding as a kid in the 1980s was that during the print media age, critics were misaligned with the 18-30 demographic but skewed older. Critics were often dismissive of youth-oriented programming and favored adult-aimed material that many young people considered stiff and dull. I'm not in-tune with gaming journalism, but followed movie criticism closely as a teenager. I was the weird kid who loved both the movies aimed at me but also wanted to see Akira Kurosawa's Ran, because the critics praised it, and watched anything rated 4-stars in the weekly TV section of the newspaper. This meant watching new movies like Ghandi and Out of Africa, and old movies like Ben-Hur, etc. These were "old people" movies. The popular movies might have been skewing younger but the critics were lagging.
With the death of newspapers and rise of digital journalism, I think that critics have either gotten younger or are consciously aiming at that younger readership who look for movie talk on Twitter but never would've read a newspaper had they been the same age in the 1980s.
Maybe this is where you find yourself misaligned: as younger person, you had a taste for the more mature media favored by old critics, and as you've gotten older, the critics have become less mature.
dasfoo
1yr ago
In this case the bar is incredibly low: Didn't attack another country with the explicit intention of annexing it and didn't threaten several other countries that you're going to conquer them? Ok, you're good.
I try this line with my trad-right pro-Russia friends in the U.S. -- one of whom was a fringe leftist until COVID swung him far right -- and I get the reply, "I know our government is evil, but I don't know that about Russia." The taint of the U.S. elite is so strong that it makes Ukraine look worse than Russia.
I've found this whole thing very ideologically frustrating. But I do think there is some evidence in my friend's left-right pendulum swing: his complaints about the U.S. government are, essentially, Chomskyite. Chomsky acolytes like Oliver Stone (and, I assume, Glenn Greenwald) grew up assuming the U.S. was being mean to innocent Russians, and can't shake the old allegiances -- that same memeplex is alive now on the right more than the left.
dasfoo
1yr ago
The sheer extent of social and economic destruction all around the Western world caused by long-term lockdowns will probably remain incalculable for years to come, provided that anyone even dares to calculate it. Will anyone have the courage to hold the feet of avocado toast people to the fire for what they have supported?
I listen to the BBC's daily news podcast -- which could be the mouthpiece of the World Avocado Toast Forum -- and at some point in the last week or so there was a report about how some third-world region's economy had been devastated "by COVID." It's not the first time I've heard it put like this, and it always makes me vomit in my mouth a little: attributing the mal effects of oppressive lockdown regimes to the disease rather than the politicians/bureaucracies who chose against other options. This is going to be the narrative going forward.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Wasn’t the Sokol Squared guy punished for experimenting on humans without advance warning? I thought this kind of science was now off-limits?
dasfoo
1yr ago
There is not a single item on your list where the guilty criminal is routinely sentenced to death in CA, much less executed. The number of crimes committed in CA where the criminal deserves death considerably outnumbers the number of actual executions.
Despite that long list, no one has been executed in California for nearly 17 years. With a freeze on capital punishment in a one-party state with no serious advocates to reverse it, that list could grow or shrink by 100x and it would be insignificant.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don't know why it's so hard for you to accept semantically that someone who glorifies, and is part of a party that glorifies, Mussolini and his party - the inventors and namesakes for fascism in its original incarnation - can be described as post-fascist.
I think it's more an objection to the intentional smuggling of the word "fascist" into a description that is otherwise vague. "Post-fascist" could mean anything: rejecting fascism, re-inventing fascism, whatever. The goal of calling them "post-fascist" is, presumably, for the prefix to be mentally filed away as decorative.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don't know if Russia would be that concerned about China in a context where it would consider a full-blown nuclear exchange with the US
Is there a scenario in which a Russian-U.S. nuclear war is not essentially suicide for whichever country starts it, if not both? Unless it were somehow possible to completely avoid same-scale retaliation, it seems like "What will China do?" would be the least of their immediate and even medium-long-term problems. Large-scale nuclear war, as I think of it, is essentially, a murder-suicide in which any notion of "next" is not part of the game plan.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I think the prediciton is correct becase it was assumed that by 'all' he was referring to the general population, not govt. employees or healthcare workers.
By this metric, there never was really a vaccine mandate for "the general population," so the prediction is non-falsifiable.
dasfoo
1yr ago
If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.
The problem with this is that the population most likely to comply with rational limits are the high-IQ types who you would want to reproduce, while low-IQ types are more likely to carelessly continue to reproduce, so you will end up with a population even more heavily titled toward a low-IQ population that is less likely to come up with effective technological solutions to population growth and other potential crises. Instead, we need to encourage high IQ people to reproduce more in the hopes that it will blunt or harness the effects of low-IQ reproduction.
dasfoo
1yr ago
FWIW, as an asian guy born in the West this does not even appear on my radar as things that influenced by upbringing. Then again, I did have Jackie Chan and Hong Kong kungfu cinema in general to look up to.
Since you mention Chan: I've always related to him moreso than to white (like me) movie heroes, because Chan plays characters who are often foolish and who get beat up badly a lot. He's not treated like an idealized superhero. The idea of anyone relating to a superhero of any color seems weird to me because they're not real.
dasfoo
1yr ago
if I'm watching a show where a woman is fighting, I feel it in my body. Watching a show where men are fighting, I'm just an observer.
Are you sure this is because you are female? I feel the same way, as a male, because watching a woman fight subverts expectations. If a woman is typically more vulnerable and less aggressive, then it means more to see her fight and risk more than a stronger man would risk in the same situation. Even for a superhero like Buffy, there is power in the idea of what is supposed to be "the weakest" element -- not only a girl, but a pretty girl, and not only a pretty girl but a child -- standing up as the only line between monsters and men. This is (or was, until it got beaten into the ground recently) powerful to a wide range of viewers regardless of their sex. For a more extreme example, the little girl in Kick Ass, who is not even superpowered -- it's extremely emotional to see her mix it up because she is a supposedly weak female child, not because the viewer is a weak female child.
dasfoo
1yr ago
We need genetic testing for this sort of thing going forward. Native ancestry of 50 percent or greater or no dice
Too much. Lower the standard and call it "The One-Drop Rule." Maybe it will make some of the participants feel gross.
dasfoo
1yr ago
The radical right in America is unable to articulate a coherent vision of the kind of society it wants to live in. This is the problem with many modern Western conservatives: they live modern, liberal lives and then preach against it. Georgia Meloni is a single unmarried mother with a bastard, to provide one illustration. The parliamentary leader of the AfD is a transnational lesbian with a wife who prefers living in Switzerland to Germany. That’s not very trad of them.
Maybe, but when the opposition is a Luciferian death cult that wants to fuck our children while drinking their essence, anyone will do. At least that's where my friends on the New Right go when pushed. I had one explain to me his support for Russia v Ukraine as follows, "I know we [The West] are evil. I don't know that Putin is evil." In the battle between literal demons (or Nephilim, more like it) and flawed strongmen, they pick the strongmen. And they don't care if civilization gets destroyed in the process, because civilization has been ruined by gays, Jews, and gay Jews. The best case is that a strongman can put all the gay jews in prison, so we can build something better. This feels like a strawman as I write it, but it seems to be the essence of their private views. And they really do believe that the World Economic Forum/Democrats/RINOs/Neoliberalism is literally Satanic.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don't think that's fair actually. Elizabeth Warren very clearly only did it to advance her own career, but Littlefeather didn't. If anything it hindered her career in Hollywood.
How can you suggest it hurt her Hollywood career? She had no credits until after her Oscar appearance, she had no career to speak of until the stunt gave her some publicity?
dasfoo
1yr ago
This story could be true. There's no indication of the child's age, and my scepticism is more due to how it's such a handy little story, but maybe it's become polished over many recitals and tidied-up, and the child's words have been 'improved'. It could be true. Or it could be "my friend the drag teacher and his class of gender nonconforming cute moppets, don't you want to make sure no child tries killing themselves, have you seen the suicide statistics for trans kids?" propaganda.
My assumption would be that no kindergarten age kid has given any organic thought to pronouns without an adult prodding them to think about pronouns.
dasfoo
1yr ago
So, because all groomers harm children, all who harm children are groomers? You are arguing that, because all Xs are Ys, all Ys are Xs.
That's obtuse.
Think of "grooming" as a long con. It's a program of psychological manipulation that targets vulnerable children and conditions them to a mindset that accepts abuse as a form of care. Obviously, if a stranger walks up to child out of the blue and abuses them, they are not a groomer. A groomer assumes a role of a trust and care in a child's life and convinces them that abuse is good for them. Whether the end product of that abuse is sexual or physical or psychological, the grooming approach is the same. And, IMO, a groomer doesn't even need to acknowledge to themselves that they are harming the child. A lot of abusers trick themselves into thinking that their abuse is utilitarian.
[For a look at a masterful real-life groomer, watch the doc Abducted in Plain Sight on Netflix or the new drama miniseries of the same story, Friend of the Family on Peacock. That guy was a genius in all the worst ways. He groomed an entire family, methodically.]
dasfoo
1yr ago
it means behavior done for the ultimate purpose of sexually assaulting the child
Rephrase that to "the ultimate purpose of sexually exploiting the child." What the people using the term "groomer" now are seeing is even worse than your definition: instead of one lone perpertrator running the entire grooming schedule, there's a diffused but coordinated grooming operation with multiple points of contact that is conditioning children for sexual exploitation. Perhaps many of these so-called "groomers" were groomed themselves by snowballing social conditioning to ignore past limits on sexual definition and expression and encourage further erosion of sexual norms, as if those norms had no utility.
Well, it's a natural catch-22, isn't it? Subvert expectations in the same way often enough and you will have established a new expectation that could use subverting. One of my pet peeves about recent genre storytelling is the twist-on-a-twist trope; I spend a good deal of my time watching new thrillers anticipating the requisite multiple twists -- to the point that the most refreshing surprise would be if there are no twists at all.
But then I think a lot of this drive for originality is largely missing the greater point. There are, as the book says, only 36 Dramatic Situations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations), so we are bound to revisit the same stories over and over, What makes them matter is not necessarily originality, but rather genuine investment and honesty. If a creator is driven to tell a certain story and does so honestly, it will resonate in a way that the same story, created to sell products or fit in a certain # of ideological platitudes, won't resonate.
Look at Rocky. It takes the common underdog trope and, with real emotional investment by its writer, seems original because it tells the story honestly. Spoiler: Rocky does lose his final match, but that doesn't matter to audiences who were invested in his emotional goals, which were fulfilled by genuine storytelling that insulted neither the characters nor the audience.
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