domain:web.law.duke.edu
FtttG
1d ago
Has Gaza been ethnically cleansed, or is this ethnic cleansing ongoing? If so, that's news to me.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man.
Yes. And no. I loved the writing of Harlan Ellison, and he was responsible for one of the best ever Star Trek stories in all the series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", as well as some classic Outer Limits episodes.
But towards the end of his life, he beclowned himself, notably at the 2006 Hugos where he groped Connie Willis.
All through his career, he had (and cultivated) a reputation of being a grade-A pain in the ass, someone awkward to work with, someone who was a troublemaker - but who was worth it because he was just that damn good. And indeed, if you take the title of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, that's exactly what he thought science fiction could and should do, shake up the conventional pieties, show a different version of reality. He really, truly believed in the 60s and the counter-culture as "this is going to change everything". Of course, in the end, a lot of things stayed exactly the same despite it all. (And the delays, delays, and yet more delays and problems with the Dangerous Visions anthologies were also an example of classic Ellison).
On the other hand... we have to separate the artist and the art. This is a guy who could be a total dick, and yet then he writes a story that smacks you in the chops with its humanity. Sometimes he's screaming in justified outrage, in righteous anger, about a real wrong that should be redressed.
a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want
Yeah. And then he goes and writes a story like Croatoan which does not go where you expect it to go (he should be writing a slam-dunk pro-choice fable here, shouldn't he? but it's not. It's very differently not).
Ellison was someone who suffered in life, and who took advantage of that as an excuse for being an asshole. I was very angry with him in his later years. And then a while back I read a very sympathetic piece (possibly the foreword to the final Dangerous Visions that he edited after Ellison's death) by J.M. Straczynski about his friendship with Ellison and how he (probably, likely, definitely) had undiagnosed/untreated mental illness for a long time, and how he was declining physically and mentally in his later years and that explained a lot about Ellison for me and won back some of the sympathy he'd lost. This comes from an article about Straczynski and Ellison:
Unknown to most of his fans and critics, Ellison was suffering from an undiagnosed mental condition. What had once been an unusually prolific career as a writer of books and TV scripts slowed to a crawl by the ’90s. The missing Dangerous Visions book was only one example of that. There was also some erratic, alarming behavior, including an incident at the 2006 Hugo Awards where Ellison groped the breast of writer Connie Willis onstage and on-camera.
At Straczynski’s urging, Ellison finally went to a doctor and found out he was bipolar and suffering from clinical depression — a diagnosis that remained little known outside his inner circle.
“Once you know he was bipolar, a lot of things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense,” Straczynski says. With treatment, Ellison began to improve mentally and physically. Getting back to work was a real possibility. “One thing we talked about was maybe he could do The Last Dangerous Visions. The mountain didn’t seem so high anymore. And just as he was gearing up to do all that, he got nailed by a stroke. There was a part of him that just said, ‘Fuck it, I’m done.’”
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.
And yet women-only colleges survive.
Yes.
My point is he records everything and has a clear counterparty rather than just spitting predictions with no skin in the game and crowing that he was right when a few of them land.
But Fuentes ain't predicting black swans either. "Israel and Iran will try to hurt each other" is a generally reliable prediction at its base.
And once you've been given the information "Hamas just killed a bunch of Israeli Civilians, in Israel" there's a few straightforward guesses from there RE: Israeli response.
I'll say there's zero chance I would have correctly predicted the Pager operation, even in the broad "Mossad wipes out Hezbollah's entire command in a single attack" strokes.
But "Hezbollah gets decimated by Israeli espionage" is not a wild, out there guess by any means.
If Fuentes was specific enough to say "The U.S. drops bunker busters on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities" as a likely outcome I'd start to give him credit.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Thanks for always posting these stories! I'm curious how the pro-Palestine monoculture you describe comes to be in the UK - is this stance already the predominant one in their media? Here in Germany, every mainstream outlet is solidly pro-Israel, and since COVID at the latest media skepticism has become right-coded. As a result, we get some wild right-side-of-history positions like "we should let Israel do its thing and take in all the Palestinians as refugees here", along with vegan housecat fantasies that Israel and Palestine could get along if Bibi just were replaced by a proper left-wing leader.
I think what's actually going on with Fuentes is that he's alienated with what he sees as the low-class nature of modern conservatism. Here for instance he attacks conservatives for being "openly hostile to all the good things about liberals" and being "low-IQ hillbillies who take pride in being simple and hate the rich:"
https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1908187813117411525
The problem with populist political movements is that the people who rise to the top tend to have psychological traits more characteristic of elites, intelligence, drive, and ambition, which wind up alienating them from the populist masses.
My point is not claiming with certainty that premarital sex and single parenting due to divorce is going to exist forever. But at least in my lifetime I'd say I think it's unlikely that any group that opposes this will acquire control of the mechanisms to ever find out what they could do with them. Given that slavery lasted for millennia, the people who said slavery wasn't going anywhere were probably right in all the ways that mattered.
Sex outside of marriage was frequent even when said groups did control those mechanisms. And the advent of birth control means people at least believe they can have sex with no consequences. A quick search suggests only 5% of people want to make birth control harder to get, and only 28% want abortions to be harder to get. About 95% of Americans have had sex outside of marriage, often with someone they did not eventually marry. Only about 35% of Americans say sex outside of marriage is wrong. Only 32% of Christians say it is never acceptable to have sex outside of marriage.
I'm saying that this viewpoint is in a very deep hole and it would take a very dramatic shift for it to happen. Gaining control of those mechanisms to convince people to stop having sex outside of marriage is a chicken and egg problem. Even Republicans don't seem interested. It sounds about as likely as me hypothesizing how many people I could sway to become pro-immigration if I could get a speaking role at the Republican National Convention. Maybe some of the attendees will switch to Democrats at some point in their life, but that's not a reason to pursue that line of thought.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
I see tons of pickups in my blue/Hispanic area in absolute mint condition and empty beds. Fairly often they drive around with tow mirrors extended despite not towing anything. Sometimes you even see "duallies" (trucks with four wheels on the rear axle) in similar pristine condition. Hispanic landscapers drive beat to shit Ford trucks.
Does anyone have a sense of why Americans choose pickups over other big-ass form factors?
I think in my area, suburban office workers are alienated from anything to do with manipulating the physical world rather than symbols and feel that a very large and expensive truck connects them in some way to rugged manual labor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Are autoandrophiles even a thing? Blanchard was sceptical.
Heck, now the option of identifying as non-binary is more salient, FtMs are barely a thing for autoandrophiles to be a sub-thing of.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Seconding the others’ interest. I want to say I agree with you but I suspect we have pretty different ideas of which movements are the central examples.
SerialStateLineXer
2d ago
Caplan's record, as he readily admits, is somewhat less impressive when you account for the fact that he wins by consistently betting in favor of consensus and the future being like the past. He's not successfully predicting black swan events, but arbitraging others' overestimation of the frequency of black swan events.
To be fair, you’re describing about 75 percent of the major 20th century authors here. The personal dysfunction (Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, James Ellroy, David Foster Wallace), the string of failed careers with writing chosen less as a calling and more because it’s easier than working a real job (Bukowski notably, but most of them), the constant seething racial and personal axe-grinding (Phillip Roth, James Baldwin, James Ellroy). Sci-fi writers back then tended to be more functional and less of an emotional garbage fire, which is probably why this was such a surprise to you. To be fair I think it’s a big part of the reason their writing is actually interesting. Riley Sager has a stable home life and is emotionally well adjusted and unfortunately you can clearly see that on every dreary page of fish-wrap.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
I feel like this would be different if Ellison had any sort of coherent views aside from being loud and angry. What did he stand for that could outlive him? Following along with the civil rights movement? Earning a few attaboys along the way? He mostly just spilled hate across countless pages.
Like I said below, I fell in love with the man's TV persona. And I greatly enjoyed many of his non-autobiographical stories. But undergoing this deep dive into the person has been a journey into the horror of the man. Where as I naively assumed before that the TV persona was the real Ellison because it was so much more impactful than Ellison on the page, and so I assumed written Ellison to be schtick, it turns out the TV Ellison was the schtick, and the written Ellison was the genuine article.
I can only describe it like this. There is a horror film coming out called "Cannibals Rape, Murder and Consume College Coeds 3". You watch all the press junkets and the actors seem very charming and likable. You know when you see the film you'll see some shocking stuff, but you know it's not real. There are no actual cannibals eating anyone.
Then 2 months later Italian authorities arrest the cast and crew because they did in fact rape, murder and consume one of the extras when they were filming in Sicily. Do you still separate the artist from the art? I mean, it was the most amazing cannibal film you've ever seen.
Possibly the only defining feature of Ellison's entire body of work is the hate. It used to exist in a box with suspension of disbelief applied. They were just words on a page. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that more likely than not, the hate was the realest part of him he ever put out there, and it's just sad. Not fun and edgy anymore.
Goesaert v. Cleary: “Only when the owner of the bar was a sufficiently close relative to the woman bartender, it was argued, could it be guaranteed that such immorality would not be present.” 1948. Overturned in 1976.
Schulz v. Wheaton Glass: it turns out making identical job listings but paying the women’s jobs less actually counts as discrimination. 1970.
US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.
I find it obvious that second-wave feminism was legitimately fighting oppression. The same is doubly true for racial minorities. There are plenty of reasons why the Civil Rights Act was significant, rather than a formality.
Firstly, if we are limiting the discussion to the mentioned attributes, with the exception of age (a condition which on retrospect I suppose I only included because it tends to correlate with accumulation and accentuation of other mentioned issues), why is it unreasonable for me to set as conditions my own characteristics (not with children, not overweight/obese)? I refuse to compromise on what I also expect of myself, and if that destroys my odds, so be it. Whether this is "punishment for entitlement" or "punishment for having standards" is a good Russell Conjugation.
Secondly, if it is, as I believe, psychological issues which inhibit my rapport with the opposite sex, then a relationship with someone sufficiently "low value" to initially entertain my eccentricities and chronic self-esteem issues would likely end up going badly in the long run.
This does loop back around to a rejoinder which I have come to accept: it is also perfectly reasonable and fits with my experience that most women are similarly unwilling to compromise on certain severe psychological and self-esteem issues in men, and that's not a standard I'd expect anyone to spontaneously drop.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
2d ago
This is why tomboys hate formal events - they are used to being able to be performatively androgynous without looking like they are cross-dressing.
And, in reverse, this is how you can trivially differentiate autogynephiles from everyone else (AGPs dress as formally as possible all the time).
I agree that autoandrophiles can exhibit this, but they often don't because the pull effect from "guy clothes" isn't as strong considering there's no article of clothing (except ones you can't see) that aren't trivially available for women; you'd have to go out of your way to be transgressive and most people wouldn't understand it being "designated guy clothes", they'd just see as "woman with unusually poorly fitting clothes".
dogfish
2d ago
Didn't we all? One only needed to have looked at the Palestinian-to-Israeli death ratio in any given scuffle to have known how this was gonna turn out
Hadad
2d ago
Sure, I personally responded to October 7th with "oh, damn, Gaza's gonna get fuuuucked."
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Some speculate all sorts of things. Please preemptively provide evidence, not speculation.
Lots of parents deputize the one kid they think is reliable. The wisdom can be debated but it doesn't really contradict the playground cop thesis. The US also bribes countries like Egypt on the other end which fits as well.
As for letting them squabble... this'd work if a)everyone didn't already agree that the use of nukes is a taboo to be maintained and b) there was no chance of it spreading to the exact sort of groups that got Iran into this mess and c) one of these nations didn't continually insist it was in a religious war with the rest. That gives people reason to deny you a nuke.
People were protesting and demanding ceasefires almost immediately after October 7. I assume this was because they expected destruction.
At least on the left some personalities like Cenk Uygur - whose geopolitical acumen I don't value particularly highly - were explicitly condemning Hamas because they thought Israel would just absolutely wreck Gaza in response. (This bit faded as Oct. 7 became more distant and now it's mostly Israel criticism)
A lot of these people overestimated the damage (they assumed much heavier starvation much earlier on) they didn't downplay it.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Indians are usually far more adept at keeping track of the clan. I think I personally know just two of my third cousins, this one included. With my coaxing, he's up to four. But if I cared to ask my mom, I could probably find out about dozens of others.
Oh sure, knowing your third cousins isn’t weird. It’s knowing whether they’re second or third cousins- or even caring- thats a bit odd.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Please elaborate a bit when you’re questioning someone.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
Sky takes up cool hues here during the rains, so its frequently pink and other colors during this time of the year as opposed to any other. Very light rain probably has a lot do with colors in the evening.
I mean, yeah. He could be funny and charming. My late father, who knew nothing about the guy, saw some of those on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it was the Sci-Fi Channel and not Syfy or whatever they're calling it today), and he too loved them. Thought they were funny, thought they were witty, they made him laugh, and he liked Ellison.
So it goes, as another SF author said.
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