FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
As described in Tuesday's thread, months ago I had an idea for a work project using geographic projection. @ToaKraka suggested using GIS, which I'd never used before, and I started work on Wednesday. While I'm not coding anything from scratch, ChatGPT and Gemini have been immensely useful for everything from sourcing the data I need, to writing Excel formulae, to optimising my workflow. I'm finding it so absorbing to work on that I even took a working lunch break today. After three days' work I already have something I'd feel pretty comfortable presenting to senior management, and would like to do so next week.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
You are correct, I was thinking of Tron. Will amend.
I agree. As I'm fond of pointing out, in 1989 The Abyss 1982 Tron was deemed ineligible for the Oscar for best visual effects because it used CGI. Eventually generative AI will come to be seen as just another creative tool that can be used well and used poorly.
The other night, my girlfriend was watching the trailer for Hokum on her phone and I expressed my frustration that trailers for every new film in a particular genre are so similar. I saw the trailer for Obsession the other day and it was functionally identical to that of Hokum (and functionally identical to every other trailer for a horror film I've seen in the last five years: quiet, atmospheric opening; critic blurbs introduced using the Hans Zimmer BWAAAH bass drop effect; steadily increasing cut frequency coupled with steadily escalating volume and intensity of sound (typically introducing more and more high-frequency sounds in the form of women screaming and/or Psycho strings); after the climax, a period of "falling action" and relative calm and quiet. It's as if they have a template in Premiere called "horror_trailer.prproj" and just slot clips from the relevant movie into it. Horror movies are where the trend is most visible, but it's also true of thrillers, action movies, comedies and so on. I no longer look at the trailer for a horror film and think "that looks good" or "that looks bad": I just think "I am watching the trailer for a horror film". The homogeneity of the form has collapsed the distinction: the trailer for a good horror film looks practically identical to the trailer for a bad one.
It wasn't the trailer for Hokum that piqued my interest, but a headline calling it the first good Silent Hill movie – do you think that comparison is justified? It's also directed by an Irish director – I was intrigued by the trailer for his previous film Oddity but never got around to watching it.
My girlfriend took me to the first one in the cinema and I was howling with laughter throughout.
Mindhunters is an unofficial adaptation of And Then There Were None from 2004, with the twist that most of the characters are FBI agents-in-training. It is spectacularly silly and cheesy. It features, among other things, Jonny Lee Miller doing a laughable Southern accent; the corpse of one of the most recognisable actors in the cast portrayed by an entirely unconvincing plastic mannequin; and Ice Cube saying "eeny-meeny-miny-mo: who's the next motherfucker to go?" in deadly seriousness. Absolutely nothing about the plot makes a lick of sense: the killer's plan hinges on impossible coincidences they could not possibly predict in advance; the characters (who are all, as mentioned above, FBI agents) behave incredibly stupidly when convenient for the plot; and Saw-esque death traps which would require, at the minimum, a vanload of equipment and several days' prep time are assembled out of an overnight bag in a matter of hours, without a hitch.
I've probably seen it at least ten times. It is tremendous fun.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
20hr ago
What a convoluted run-on sentence. Right up there with "he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died".
and then insisted that the person who called out your fabrication was being unreasonable and worse.
I will reiterate that there is a difference between duped by a claim made by others and inventing a claim from whole cloth. You don't have to believe the claim that Hamas livestreamed themselves committing assorted acts of sexual violence, but this claim did not originate with me and I'm sick of you people pretending that it did. The person accusing me of making up this claim from whole cloth was being unreasonable by so doing. I have already pre-committed to eating my words if this claim turns out to be false, which is more than can be said for any of the people in this thread accusing me of lying through my teeth.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
I never claimed that everyone had seen them.
LiveLeak has been shut down (news to me), and apparently its successor website is ItemFix. I did do a cursory search of ItemFix which didn't return anything relevant: it seems pretty light on war footage across the board (it seems police bodycam footage is their bread and butter). I didn't look any further than that; besides LiveLeak, I don't know where one would locate this kind of footage, nor do I especially care to find out. If respectable academic researchers have watched this footage and confirmed that it depicts what I believed it to depict, that's good enough for me.
It's not like I even want to watch gory footage of Hamas raping and torturing people, but it sure would be nice if their Western apologists could see exactly what it is they're defending instead of retreating into these "false flag" muh Hannibal doctrine evasions.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I am confident that there exists footage captured on October 7th by Hamas squaddies which depicts them doing things that any reasonable person would characterise as gang rape. If the full database of footage is made available for public consumption (as some Jews are already demanding) and it turns out that no footage meeting that description exists, I promise to eat my words.
It's possible that it was originally a subscriber-only post but then he unpaywalled it, though I've never known Freddie to do that.
Well, that just seems preposterous. Hamas's strategy of employing Gazan civilians as human shields by stashing combatants and armaments in civilian facilities (hospitals, schools, mosques etc.) is well-established. The only reason they employ this strategy is because they know that the IDF (and the broader Israeli population, by extension) assigns a value to the lives of Gazan civilians which is greater than zero, and would prefer not to kill them if possible.
Fine, fine, you'll say the IDF doesn't really care about Gazan civilians' lives, but know that it would be bad optics in the eyes of the international community to kill them willy-nilly. But assigning a greater-than-zero value to the lives of Gazan civilians for reasons of pragmatism and realpolitik (as opposed to "high-minded European notions about the intrinsic value of human life") is still assigning them a greater-than-zero value. It's telling that this is an asymmetric strategy: no Hamas leader or foot-soldier is going to hesitate before attacking an Israeli military installation out of concern for civilian collateral damage.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I'm going to have to plead "revealed preferences".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I, for one, do not assign zero moral value to members of my outgroup. While I accept that the average Israeli is probably more likely to take seriously accusations of rape made against Palestinians than accusations made against Israelis – I do nonetheless believe that the modal Israeli assigns greater moral value to members of his outgroup than the modal Palestinian does. Call me a Zionist shill if you must, that's what I believe.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Rape denialism is inexcusable coming from anyone, but particularly hypocritical coming from individuals whose catchphrase was "believe women" for the better part of a decade.
If you'd prefer me to amend my comment to "Numerous witnesses independently witnessed Hamas squaddies gang-raping women on October 7th; Hamas squaddies filmed and publicly disseminated footage of them assaulting, humiliating and sexually torturing women; but they did not, strictly speaking, livestream themselves gang-raping women", then fair enough. But this seems like just about the most macabre kind of hair-splitting I've ever encountered.
Even then, if a group of armed men surrounded a woman and collectively forced her to undress before humiliating and sexually torturing her, I think few people would object to characterising that as "gang rape", even if technically none of the men forcibly penetrated the woman with his penis. Likewise if the men in question were wearing GoPros on their person, I think few people would object to characterising that as "a group of men filmed/livestreamed themselves committing gang rape", even if, again, none of the men forcibly penetrated the woman with his penis.
But why am I even saying any of this? You've preemptively decided that any factual claim that makes Hamas look bad and portrays Israelis as victims is "Zionist propaganda". You've preemptively decided that any organisation advancing any factual claim that makes Hamas look bad and portrays Israelis as victims is therefore a sinister Zionist organisation. I might as well argue with a brick wall.
I ask for evidence of this happening and it turns out that, in fact, you have no such evidence whatsoever. No such livestream exists. You lied. You made it up. Why did you do that?
If this specific claim turns out to be untrue and you want to accuse me of having been duped by Israeli war propaganda, then go for it. But I didn't "make up" this claim. It did not originate with me.
you're going on a hysterical rant about things I never said.
Dude, it's right there. You said "Also with the possible exception of the abuse/mocking/burning of female corpses basically all of these accusations would hold true if you replaced "Hamas" with "Israel"."
I mean, if Hamas livestreamed themselves committing gang rape then surely a link to it exists somewhere, right?
There is the film Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre, which edits hundreds of hours of Hamas-produced footage into a 47-minute documentary. According to people who've seen it, some of the Hamas-captured footage implies sexual violence has recently taken place. Netanyahu defended the decision to publicly screen the footage on the grounds that, without doing so, people would deny or downplay the extent of Hamas's brutality. Sadly, it didn't have the desired effect, if your reaction is any indication.
In addition, the Civil Commission maintains a more extensive archive of footage, although for obvious reasons it isn't a publicly accessible database. They are planning to give access to academic and legal professionals over time. I look forward to the day when several of these individuals watch the footage, confirm that the linked report described its contents accurately, and get immediately dismissed as "Zionist shills" by you and your ilk.
Andrew Fox claims to have seen footage which was not included in the aforementioned documentary:
Back in 2024, with a visiting group of senior military officers, I was shown part of the sexual crime evidence discussed in the Civil Commission report released today; evidence far beyond the infamous 47-minute reel. It remains the most horrific thing I have ever seen in my life, which to this day causes my voice to hoarsen and the hair to stand up on my arms when I talk about it.
There are things that permanently alter your sense of what human beings can do to one another. There are images and details that do not fade, because they are not merely violent; they are desecrations. They are crimes against the body, against the dead, against the living, and against the idea that humanity has limits... the rapes are what [Hamas] are most desperate to deny. Every time I have written about what I have seen, the response has differed from the usual abuse. The bots arrive in far greater numbers. The replies are filled with smears, mockery, deflection and outright denial. The purpose is not persuasion. It is intimidation. It is to make bearing witness so exhausting, so poisonous, and so socially costly that people stop doing it.
But I know you've already dismissed his account as lies.
entirely secondhand Israeli war propaganda reports
I have a very hard time believing that the only reason you don't believe this report is that it's "secondhand information". I don't think you would immediately change your mind and accept that Hamas really did what they're accused of doing if you personally spoke to the people who attended Nova and confirmed to you the things they'd witnessed.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
read my blog already Ft!
My bad, I've been putting it off. I assure you I'll read at least one post before the day is out.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I thought of using GIS alright. Is it free?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I hate e-readers, reading books on them feels like work. I'd never buy two phones at the same time, but hanging on to my old phone while it's still working makes sense.
I wasn't critiquing the Grey Lady in particular here. I very much doubt the author of this specific article would dispute that Hamas committed sexual violence on October 7th. I'm critiquing the double standard among woke leftists, who demand exhaustive beyond-reasonable-doubt proof when a member of their in-group is accused of sexual misconduct, but when a member of their out-group is accused of sexual misconduct, even hearsay is deemed sufficient to condemn them.
None of this requires you to support Israel, think Israel isn't committing a "genocide", think Israel isn't a settler-colonial apartheid state, think the Palestinians don't have a legitimate grievance etc. You're welcome to think the IDF is just as bad (or even worse) than the people they're fighting. You can sympathise with the Palestinians (even sympathise with Hamas) while acknowledging that Hamas committed acts of unspeakable cruelty on October 7th. But you do, in fact, have to acknowledge that Hamas committed acts of unspeakable cruelty on October 7th. That part is not open for debate.
And it is absolutely not a strawman to say that some woke leftists, pro-Palestinians or Joo-posters will deny to this day that Hamas committed any sexual violence at all on October 7th. I have personally met these people. I may have been dunking on a weakman, but I was not dunking on a strawman and I quite resent that accusation.
Sorry if you got a second ping just now, I just noticed I misspelled your username.
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