FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5hr ago
I recently got into an argument with a pro-Palestine guy, who argued that Israel is the world's sole remaining ethnostate. He did begrudgingly concede my counter-example of Liberia (in which citizenship is explicitly reserved for those of Negro heritage). However, he didn't budge when I characterised Japan, Korea and essentially every Arab nation as ethnostates in all but name. Would you think that's a fair characterisation of China?
FtttG
5hr ago
Orwell once described fascism as "socialism shorn of all its virtues".
My immediate reaction was "what virtues?"
New year's resolutions check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week and again this morning. This morning I did three sets of deadlifts, but found I simply couldn't do a fourth, which I'm attributing to a) going to the gym on an empty stomach and b) running out of whey protein a few days ago. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1x for 8 reps and bench press .8x for 7 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed 8/11 modules in the SQL course. Will do the ninth this evening.
How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @oats_son? (Incidentally if any of you no longer want to be pinged every week, just say so.)
FtttG
1d ago
I wonder if it would be worth my while investing in a rubber duck.
FtttG
2d ago
Following a suggestion I independently received from several sources, I'm recording myself reading my fourth draft out loud, then listening back to it and line-editing as I go. I'm only four chapters in and it's remarkable how this approach is throwing up infelicities I didn't notice when reading in my head.
FtttG
2d ago
remember "JUST DO IT"?
Do I remember one of the most inspiring motivational videos I've ever seen in my life? Of course I do!
FtttG
2d ago
It's pretty trippy. I like reading books where I have no idea where the story is going to go next and I feel like the rug will be pulled out from under me at any moment. I'm enjoying it a lot more than The Man in the High Castle (which I read last year), but not quite as much as A Scanner Darkly.
FtttG
3d ago
I watched The Animatrix when it came out on VHS (Christ, VHS? I wonder how many of the users on this board even know what I'm talking about), and remember finding most of the shorts quite entertaining and stylistically distinct.
Looking it up now, it turns out the protagonist in one of the shorts was literally named "Cis" lol? Let no one say the Wachowskis' insistence that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor is just a retcon: it was staring us in the face right since the beginning.
FtttG
3d ago
"Failure" implies that ethnically cleansing it was their goal in the first place. Maybe both of the ulterior motives you claimed for their war in Gaza were just inaccurate?
Israel consistently claimed that their goals were to destroy Hamas and recover the Israeli hostages. For the last two and a half years you insisted that this was just window dressing, and their real goal was to engineer a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep and/or ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians.
Your predicted refugee crisis never materialised, and millions of Palestinians still live in Gaza. Meanwhile, the majority of the hostages have been recovered, and Hamas has taken a severe beating. As a consequence, the war is winding down, consistent with Israel having achieved its stated aims.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that you were simply mistaken in your apprehension of Israel's real aims?
FtttG
3d ago
Agreed. With the exception of some questionable soundtrack choices and John's totally radical slang, Terminator 2 feels remarkably timeless.
I once went out with a woman who I thought was smarter than I was, in spite of the fact that she was an avid believer in astrology.
In no particular order, some novels I have enjoyed by female writers (I'm excluding The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged from the below list because you're already familiar with Rand):
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt
- And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
- Democracy, Joan Didion
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
- Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (the book which literally invented the science fiction genre)
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
- Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
FtttG
3d ago
I agree that parroting the demanded platitudes ultimately kills the soul. "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be." I'm not suggesting that Damore should have explicitly claimed to believe that men and women are exactly alike until such time as he could admit that they aren't without facing negative career repercussions. Rather, I'm suggesting that had he been more selective in how he presented his opinions and loudly announced how much he supported a bunch of adjacent opinions (such as his support for women who sincerely wanted to pursue a career in tech, or his opposition to sexual harassment), he might have been able to manoeuvre himself into a position in which Google's hiring policies could be changed and made less pseudoscientific. All without once telling an explicit lie.
FtttG
3d ago
Okay. So has your claim shifted from "Israel's primary goal in prosecuting their war in Gaza is to engineer a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep" to "Israel has already engineered a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep"?
Because I think the shelf life on the former claim has conclusively expired, and you should stop making it, because it's dumb.
FtttG
3d ago
Also, Monica Bellucci.
If the music video for "Love Don't Cost a Thing" by J-Lo hadn't awakened my budding sexuality, Bellucci's dress in Reloaded would have done.
FtttG
3d ago
Agreed. I'm sure most people expressing support for Palestinians, if pressed to explain themselves, would say something like "I think it's bad when Palestinian women and children get killed by Israeli rockets". You would probably get a very different response if you asked people who they support more: the IDF or Hamas.
FtttG
3d ago
I agree that it is possible to get so good at "reading the room" that you forget how to "write" and just mindlessly go along with local consensus. Ideally, we would like people to be Kolmogorovs who are adept at reading the illegible social reality and know when to pick their battles, rather than wasting social capital on pointless battles they can't hope to win.
I agree with the point Damore made, and I don't think he should have lost his job because he expressed it. But if he'd been a bit more socially adept, he probably would have understood that losing his job was a foreseeable consequence of expressing that opinion in that place at that time. If he'd understood the social rules and played the game a bit better, he might have been able to navigate himself into a position where he really was able to make proactive changes to Google's hiring policies (in particular, avoiding hiring policies based on nakedly pseudoscientific premises). But instead he was a naïve Kantorovich, and suffered for it.
The big refugee wave from Israel's warmongering was Syria.
Well, I'm going to stop you right there. How exactly is a civil war between Assad and ISIS the fault of Israel?
All of the remaining commentary is interesting, sure – but can you concede the original point, that "a refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep" simply did not happen as a result of the most recent conflict in Gaza, and hence that it is profoundly unlikely that engineering such a crisis was Israel's intention while prosecuting said war?
FtttG
3d ago
Hot take incoming: I think The Matrix Reloaded is vastly underrated. Although nearly three years after posting that comment, I still haven't gotten around to watching Revolutions.
I was enthusiastically nodding along with @100ProofTollBooth's post about bullying-as-Chesterton's-fence, until I came to this line:
Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore).
I understand the point you're making. Damore should have "read the room" and understood that the opinions he expressed would get him in trouble. He should have understood that when Google created an internal forum specifically to express potentially controversial opinions, they only expected or wanted people to use it to express "controversial" opinions of the "fifty Stalins" variety. I get that.
But all the same, I dislike the framing that Damore got fired for being an autistic weirdo who expressed a weird opinion that creeped everyone out. It wasn't as if his manifesto was a spirited defense of lowering the age of consent, or normalising bestiality or incest. Rather, his manifesto boiled down to an opinion that would strike 99% of people throughout time and space as utterly unremarkable: "for reasons unrelated to socialisation, men and women tend to have radically different interests, which has obvious implications for the kinds of careers they tend to pursue".
Yes, a more socially adept person would have intuitively understood that, while this opinion would be considered obvious outside of Google, it is not an opinion that is likely to be received warmly within Google. But your framing seems to imply that Damore expressed a crazy shocking opinion, and the normies responded by firing him. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that: Damore expressed a normie opinion in a crazy space (a space in which lunatic ideas like "male and female brains are exactly the same" have significant purchase), failing to appreciate that this opinion was unlikely to be as warmly received in Google as it would be elsewhere.
I was tempted to close this by saying that Damore probably would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids if he'd been more handsome and confident, but you were way ahead of me on that front anyway.
FtttG
3d ago
Thank Christ I don't need to add several thousand micromorts to my lifestyle just to get laid.
FtttG
4d ago
God, that is awful. I once knew a woman who was a nurse in a rehabilitation hospital, and about 90% of her patients were either motorcycle or horse-riding accidents. I'll never ride a motorcycle. I even worked with a guy who was in a pretty serious motorcycle accident and nearly lost a leg, and he still rides motorcycles to this day. Like, dude, how many hints do you need?
The specific claim that a trans genocide is around the corner is still being trotted out.
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