FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
By my count, searches for "Cornell University" last month were 3x searches for "Gisele Pelicot" at their peak: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11w96jzych%2Ccornell%25207%2C%2Fm%2F01w3v&date=today%205-y&geo=Worldwide
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Was this intended as an example of a hot male standup?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Looking at Google Trends, Cornell 7's peak visibility was 19x that of the Pelicot case.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Yeah, it's weird that people can assert "relative to their share of the population, black people are underrepresented in Ivy League universities, and this is evidence of racism" and in the next breath assert "the majority of murders in the UK are perpetrated by white Britons".
I would reflexively accuse these people of doublethink, of holding two obviously contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. But actually, I think a lot of these people literally don't understand the meaning of "relative to their share of the population, X group is underrepresented in Y industry". They use it as an empty slogan, a more sophisticated-sounding way of saying "there should be more X people in Y industry". If I were to point out to them that black Britons are in fact overrepresented in British telly, that wouldn't give them pause, they wouldn't think "oh, mission accomplished". They weren't demanding that the demographics of British telly reflect the real demographics of the UK: they just want there to be more black people on the TV. They don't necessarily even understand the idea that "fairness" means that you should see a black character in a TV show set in Britain about as often as you would in real life.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
17hr ago
I've heard a lot about Scanners, and of course I've seen that one GIF. May check it out.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
17hr ago
Yeah, we were considering watching the show, but I'm not sure how well it could translate, especially given how much of the books are devoted to interiority.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
17hr ago
Yup. Used to see it at least a few times a year, although off the top of my head I couldn't tell you the most recent time.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
True. I can't remember ever seeing an ethnic Irishman wearing traditional Islamic dress (e.g. a thawb), a traditional beard, or a garment or adornment associated with that faith (e.g. a crescent moon pendant). But you're right that my friend officially converted to Islam without changing anything about his appearance.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I think it got significantly less attention than the Cornell 7, for instance.
I was about to say that I was painfully underwhelmed by White Noise, but if it's significantly better than that I might check it out. I've heard a rumour that a film adaptation of Libra was in the works until Oliver Stone torpedoed it, though Stone denies this.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Anecdotally, I see small but growing numbers of white British Muslim, including many in South Asian dress, around parts of east London like Stratford now (yes, there are ginger Arabs, but I know an Anglo-Celtic phenotype when I see one). One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian.
Interesting. I occasionally pass hijabi women in the street who are clearly ethnically Irish and who I assume converted at their husbands' request, but I don't remember ever encountering an Irishman in Ireland who had converted. (I have an Irish friend in London who met a Syrian girl and converted, although I think they both understood it was just a formality.) Maybe it's only a matter of time.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I think part of the reason the Pelicot gang-rape case didn't get as much attention as it perhaps should have was that, going by their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of Arab extraction; in other words they were 3.5x overrepresented relative to their share of the French population.
During the week I finished the last book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child. While I had certain misgivings about the series and found it painfully slow at times, I don't regret reading them and felt quite moved by the end. I know some others here have read the full series, I'm curious what ye made of it.
A couple of years ago I developed a bit of an obsession with the JFK assassination, and picked up Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the story straight and debunk the assorted conspiracies about the second shooter on the grassy knoll and Oswald being a stooge for the Soviet Union or the CIA (or both). It's a massive tome at 600 pages, but I find it so absorbing that, after starting it on Wednesday, I'm already more than halfway through.
While Posner of course takes us through the forensic evidence from Dealey Plaza in exhaustive detail, he also wants to make the case for Oswald as a lone wolf, demonstrating both that he was a) the kind of person who could commit an act of savage, unprovoked violence and also b) not the sort of person any self-respecting intelligence agency would trust to run the hot tap. As such, the book is as much a character study of Oswald as it is a forensic analysis. I was familiar with the broad strokes of Oswald's biography (troubled childhood, Marines, attempted defection to the USSR, return to the US with Russian bride in tow), but Posner goes much deeper, and his portrayal is not at all flattering. I must confess that the book is confirming a lot of my biases about self-identified socialists being lazy (Oswald was both surprised and disappointed when, upon being granted permission to stay in the Soviet Union, he was put to work in a metalworking shop; he was apparently under the impression that he would be allowed to study politics and economics at his leisure), selfish (friends of Oswald's battered wife Marina took pity on her and offered to put her and her baby up; Oswald never even offered to make any kind of financial contribution, not even when he drops by for dinner) and anti-social (essentially everyone who knew him prior to the assassination describes him as rude, superior and inconsiderate; not to mention his abusive treatment of Marina, which was so bad she attempted suicide before he intervened). On some level Oswald must have been aware of what a pathetic loser he was, but rather than confronting this and trying to change, he retreated into a fantasy world (details of which furnished by the copious spy novels he read in his free time) in which he was a vastly more important and consequential individual than he really was, someone who'll be welcomed to Cuba with open arms as a fellow comrade (rather than politely turned away because he doesn't have a valid visa). I found it grimly amusing that, when he's evicted from a boarding house less than a week after moving in because his landlady can't stand his obnoxious and entitled behaviour, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that the FBI has intervened to make his life difficult. (This conspiratorial jumping at shadows ironically foreshadows that exhibited by Mark Lane, Oliver Stone et al.) And yet, for all that, it's not a completely negative portrayal of a warped, frustrated young man. Just a few weeks prior to the assassination, Oswald comes home to a surprise birthday party thrown by Marina and her friends, and he's so moved that he bursts into tears and sincerely apologises to Marina for the abuse and hardship he's subjected her to. One has to feel a little bit sorry for Oswald: it wasn't his fault his father died two months before he was born, nor that his mother could have given Norma Bates a run for her money. If a few things had gone slightly differently, he might well have made something of himself.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
[urge to read The Camp of the Saints intensifies]
Interesting. Cronenberg is a high-variance director: I loved Dead Ringers (and found it surprisingly moving), and thought A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method were decent. On the other hand I turned off The Dead Zone half an hour in, Spider was pretty forgettable, I didn't know what to make of Maps to the Stars, and eXistenZ was just the poor man's The Matrix (the latter film, in particular, felt lame and tryhard in a way that's uniquely Canadian). I'm putting The Fly in the W column, definitely better than A Dangerous Method. I do think some of the humour in the film was intentional, parts of it had that "don't know whether to laugh or scream" quality.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
In the spirit of Spooky Season, my wife and I just watched the Cronenberg version of The Fly, which I'd never seen before.
I nearly vomited while watching it. Possibly the single most disgusting, repulsive film I've ever seen in my life. We finished watching it over three hours ago, and I still feel a bit nauseated.
A masterpiece. I'm never, ever going to watch it again.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
It does. This is my second playthrough, and my first was several years ago. It made a big impression on me, it's one of the most emotionally affecting games I've ever played.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I started playing the Resident Evil 2 remake the other day. It's pretty cool. I like how it has the over-the-shoulder gameplay of Resident Evil 4 but paired with the extreme vulnerability and limited ammo capacity of the earlier games.
My wife and I are about halfway through SOMA.
Absolutely. It's so telling that conspiracy theorists arguing for Oswald as an innocent patsy invariably fail to mention that he had already tried and failed to murder someone (as had Jack Ruby, incidentally) long before the thought of killing JFK ever crossed his mind.
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