FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
At the same time, the publishing industry has swallowed so much of their own bullshit that they're stuck. Publishing has pretty much been captured by what people call "woke" around here. Getting published is wildly easier if you are some form of favored minority.
Freddie deBoer points out that:
- the publishing industry collectively made a loud pre-commitment to publish more books by writers from "historically underserved communities" i.e. fewer white males
- This wasn't just cheap talk, and the composition of the writers whose books they published changed accordingly
but when you point out the obvious inference of the former two points (namely: that publishing more books by women and minorities means publishing fewer ones by white males, and consequently that it has never been harder for a white male novelist to get published), people tend to scoff and roll their eyes. It's just basic mathematics: if you don't increase the total number of books published (and there's no evidence that this has happened), then publishing more books by women and minorities logically entails publishing fewer books by white males.
Despite being a white male and an aspiring novelist, I am not completely opposed to the trend towards publishing more books by female novelists. Although the proportion of Americans who claim to have read a book in the past year has fallen dramatically over the past fifteen years, women have always read more than men, and this remains true today. All things being equal, I can imagine a female novelist having an easier time writing a novel which would appeal to female readers compared to a male novelist doing the same thing. It follows that the drive to publish more novels by female writers might be a fundamentally sound business decision. It's the same basic argument as to why I could never get too bent out of shape about female underrepresentation in video game development*: PC and console gamers are overwhelmingly male, and all things being equal I imagine a male developer would have an easier time designing a video game which would appeal to men than a female developer would. Note that this argument does not apply to the drive to publish more writers from ethnic minority backgrounds: white Americans read far more books than every other ethnic group (including Asians, to my surprise).
But my question is this. As with any affirmative action-adjacent argument, the drive to publish more books by women and minorities logically implies that, for the last ~decade, literary agents and publishing houses have been optimising for something other than literary quality and/or commercial viability**. Has this resulted in any concomitant decline in revenues? Are revenues from publishing meaningfully lower now than they were ten years ago, controlling for inflation? And consequently, is there a potential gap in the market for a new publishing house to announce "at $Publisher, we don't care about a writer's identity markers and only care about how good the book is?" Or is publishing such an effective oligopoly that this isn't a viable option?
*Not to mention another more, uh, prurient entertainment industry.
**Spare me your "always has beens": I'm not completely naïve. I don't think it's controversial to say that the publishing industry is loudly, conspicuously announcing its decision to optimise for something other than commercial viability for the last decade in a way it wasn't before.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
So... you're okay with the existence of Israel, then?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
The Israelis as they exist today never intend to relinquish any relevant representative control over the explicitly racially defined jewish state of Israel to anyone other than jews. They define themselves ethnically. They define their state ethnically. It is not possible for Israel to exist without jews. It's not possible for the state to be jewish without jewish sovereignty.
And I assume you're similarly outraged by the existence of Japan, South Korea, Liberia etc., all of which are ethnostates in fact if not expressly in law? Or for that matter, essentially any Arab nation, most of which purged themselves of their Jewish, Christian, Druze etc. minorities at some point in the last eight decades or so.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
You'll be otherwise occupied in Pantibar or the George.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
My Substack buys me a few cups of coffee every month.
I sold a few digital and vinyl copies of my last album (not enough to break even on the recording costs, although fortunately the label paid for the vinyl pressing).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
Hoping to have finished de la Rochefoucald's maxims by lunchtime.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
It's nice to know I was right, but I sure wish I wasn't. I'm sorry to hear that bro.
Are all Nolan movies this bad?
I haven't seen The Odyssey (and won't unless someone physically drags me along), but I think he's a tremendously overrated director. The Prestige is his only film I can really say I like without major reservations. Oppenheimer is overlong, tedious and populated by characters who seem more like robots than human beings: it is beyond me how anyone could honestly claim to have enjoyed the last hour. Memento is gimmicky nonsense (comparisons to the similarly overrated and contrived The Usual Suspects are well-deserved), a puzzle to be enjoyed once and discarded. Tenet represented him at his most indulgent, and could have been a lot of fun (its "core mechanic" certainly has a lot of cinematic potential) if not for its infamously appalling sound mixing and charmless nepo baby leading man: unlike Oppenheimer, at least it was never boring. The Dark Knight had a soundtrack which effectively conjured a mood of dread and anxiety and a staggering performance in Heath Ledger's Joker (I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the best performances in any film so far this century), but I think the effectiveness of that performance has distracted audiences from noticing some of the film's glaring flaws, namely a plot no less implausible than any other capeshit film, an anticlimactic ending, and action sequences just as incoherent as those in the rest of his oeuvre. (In spite of all that, I'd still probably put it in the W column for him, if begrudgingly. I can imagine myself watching it or Batman Begins if I was on a long-haul flight and there was nothing better to watch, the same circumstances under which I watched The Prestige.) Interstellar showed this infamously cold and remote director attempting to go a bit softer and Spielbergian, and the results were embarrassing: sentiment is not something you can fake, as anyone who's used generative AI will tell you. Dunkirk was a transparent attempt to do a Bri'ish take on Saving Private Ryan, and benefitted from featuring extremely sparse dialogue (believable dialogue was never one of his strengths), but missed the memo that Ryan's bloody, brutal grittiness was an essential element of what made it work: a gritty PG-13 war film is a contradiction in terms. I haven't seen Inception since it was in the cinema, but don't remember especially enjoying it, and have always found the basic concept of "it's a movie which is a metaphor for making movies" kind of silly and masturbatory. (I do remember feeling exceptionally annoyed at the Nolan fanboys patting themselves on the back for being able to follow the film's plot, and insisting that anyone who didn't like it was just too thick to understand it. It's not Primer, lads.)
I've noticed that every time a new Nolan film comes out, it makes a lot of money and critics praise it to the heavens as his best film yet – but inside of a year, everyone has completely forgotten about it, which I take as a tacit admission that these films are ultimately rather shallow and unmemorable. I bet you'd all completely forgotten about Dunkirk before reading this comment, hadn't you? Inception was probably his last film which made any kind of durable impact on popular culture. Not only that, but he's getting worse over time: neither Tenet nor Oppenheimer were good films, but the latter was measurably worse. I have a hard time imagining anyone will be talking about The Odyssey ten or even five years from today: even his biggest fans certainly aren't talking about Tenet now. People will say the latter film might have made a bigger impression if it hadn't had the bad luck to come out during Covid, but that's cope and everyone knows it.
If Insomnia, Following and The Dark Knight Rises are widely considered indisputable masterpieces, that's news to me. I have a hard time imagining even Nolan himself would claim TDKR exceeds either of its predecessors in the series.
In spite of all that, it's almost disappointing his films largely leave me cold, as there's a great deal about him I respect. His insistence on shooting on film and keeping CG to a minimum is admirable: as incoherent as his action sequences are, from a purely visual standpoint I think many of his films will age more gracefully than many of their contemporaries. I likewise commend his refusal to simultaneously release his films in cinemas and streaming platforms. The decision to cast a black woman and a trans man in The Odyssey was probably a sop to fend off the entirely warranted accusations of his being a crypto-conservative: politically, The Dark Knight can be summed up as "the PATRIOT ACT was good and necessary, actually" – not a sentiment I'd endorse, and yet not one I can imagine any other blockbuster director encoding into one of his films. Dunkirk was unabashedly, unapologetically patriotic in a way few films of its type are these days (something progressive critics recognised on release, derisively characterising it as a film made for Brexiteers and taking him to task for depicting the British armed forces of the 1940s as fuggin' white males, a historically accurate casting decision he made a point of repeating in Oppenheimer). Politically, he's probably the Hollywood mogul with whom I'd have most in common, and can imagine him being a very interesting dinner party guest, as long as we were talking about something other than movies.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I'm mainly a guitarist, but whenever I have to record bass I usually go for Ernie Ball.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I was surprised by that myself. Maybe they're trying to reclaim it? Other than that slogan, the poster just consisted of the name of the parade, the starting point and time, and photos of various placards ("Hands off our HRT" etc.), so it seemed to be legit.
Last weekend Dublin hosted a "Trans and Intersex Pride" parade, allegedly attended by "thousands" of people. (I was out of town so I can't comment on the turnout.) Inevitably, it quickly devolved into an omnicause™ parade, with the announcers proudly announcing that the parade was both anti-capitalist and in support of a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
I just saw a poster advertising the parade which hadn't been taken down yet, on which the slogan was, no joke, "Transsexuals are Revolting".
Jeez guys, don't be so hard on yourselves.
(I'm sure that this play on words was intentional, but it still strikes me as terrible optics. One of the most common complaints trans people make is being thought of creepy and gross: I cannot fathom why the organisers signed off on a slogan which on its face amounts to "yes, trans people are creepy and gross".)
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I will never understand Joo-posters' obsession with the USS Liberty.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Played the first mission of the original Crysis. I like it so far.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Finished Kane and Lynch, thought I'd give Trepang2 a try. Thought I was cut out for hard mode. I was not.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
abandoned by the developers with most of the bugs left unfixed?
Thus perfectly replicating the experience of the original for modern gamers.
/s I've never played either. Previous discussion here.
It certainly gelled with the tone of the story, but the developers have made it abundantly clear that they set out to design a game with fun gameplay. The resulting monotonous drudgery, it seems, was just a happy accident.
Playing Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, which I last played over a decade ago. Very much a product of its time. You rather get the impression that the Danish writers lacked confidence in their ability to write convincing Anglophone tough-guy dialogue, and compensated by just having every character (and I mean every character) curse a lot. The voice actors do what they can with the material they're given, but the results are... not entirely convincing. Comparisons to Michael Mann are unavoidable, with setpieces clearly modelled on Collateral and Heat (for most of the game Kane carries a black bag on his back much like those De Niro, Sizemore and Kilmer wore during the bank heist, and Lynch sans glasses even looks a bit like Waingro). Sound mixing is atrocious, with gunfire sounding weak and tinny and dialogue sometimes inaudible (and not, I think, as an artistic choice). When Spec Ops: The Line came out, its gameplay was so poorly received that some people suspected it might even have been made bad on purpose, but it's a mechanical masterpiece compared to this game: how on earth do you design a cover-based shooter without a dedicated "get into cover" button? Tonally, it actually has a lot in common with Spec Ops, with everything constantly going wrong for the protagonists no matter what they do. I've heard some people interpreted the game as sort of a deconstruction of Grand Theft Auto, and that makes a certain amount of sense: the decision to populate most levels with numerous civilians who will inevitably get caught in the crossfire certainly didn't happen by accident. Gritty, sloppy fun, for all its faults.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
"She sent me to Coventry on WhatsApp and Snapchat" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?
But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
In fairness, the term "gaslight" dates back to the 1930s, although people only started using it as a verb two decades later. I am sort of curious what people called "ghosting" before that term came into vogue.
This week's thread went live recently, you might want to post this there as well.
I have no interest in seeing The Odyssey, as I've long felt that Nolan is an overrated writer-director. With each passing year it seems the shine is starting to come off for more and more people, and his limitations are becoming more obvious.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
The article I linked to in the Journal was specifically about countries like Spain, Ireland and Norway taking in refugees.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
It isn't difficult to find examples of Westerners who explicitly argue that allowing Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza would amount to ethnic cleansing.
I know the Arabs don't give a shit about the Palestinians, but The Journal is a left-leaning Irish outlet quite forcefully arguing that it would be wrong for Ireland to accept Palestinian refugees (and I'm pretty confident I could find plenty of articles in which they argue the opposite about those coming from Ukraine). E.g.:
- An article where they fact-check a video claiming most Ukrainian refugees are unemployed: https://www.thejournal.ie/ukrainians-ireland-unemployement-rate-90-percent-workers-national-misinformation-7031572-May2026/
- An article criticising anti-immigration activists and implicitly taking the stance that Ireland taking in Ukrainian refugees is a good thing: https://www.thejournal.ie/fermoy-anti-immigration-protests-derek-blighe-5934834-Dec2022/
From AP News, Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza:
Their refusal is rooted in fear that Israel wants to force a permanent expulsion of Palestinians into their countries and nullify Palestinian demands for statehood.
Arab countries and many Palestinians also suspect Israel might use this opportunity to force permanent demographic changes to wreck Palestinian demands for statehood in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which was also captured by Israel in 1967.
El-Sissi repeated warnings Wednesday that an exodus from Gaza was intended to “eliminate the Palestinian cause … the most important cause of our region.”
“All historical precedent points to the fact that when Palestinians are forced to leave Palestinian territory, they are not allowed to return back,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Egypt doesn’t want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza." [emphasis mine]
Obviously I don't believe these people. The reason Egypt doesn't want to accept refugees from Gaza is the same reason they built a massive wall along the border which extends several feet below ground level: they know that if Gazans come into Egypt, they will cause trouble. But the stated position of the Egyptian government is that accepting Gazan refugees into Egypt is tantamount to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and plenty of Western people seem to accept this reasoning at face value.
See also this article in The Journal (kind of like the Irish equivalent of the Guardian):
The language employed in Katz’s statement is an example of what Baoumi called “humanitarian camouflage”, or as the Arabic saying goes, “poison in honey”.
By this he means that Israel often attempts to “conceal criminal behaviour in the guise of a humanitarian cause”.
In this case, he said Israel is trying to justify “the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing” of Gaza [emphasis mine] by cloaking it in the language of international legal principles.
Palestinians in Gaza: do they have a right to seek asylum elsewhere?:
UNHCR has not overtly espoused this argument, which is belied by the fact that some Gaza residents are paying large amounts of money to leave, and which effectively denies them the right to exercise freedom of choice. Even so, there is an indication of such thinking in the statement provided by UNHCR, which prioritizes ‘final status issues’ over the question of asylum, and which asserts that an exodus from Gaza will make the resolution of the Palestinian refugee situation as a whole “even more intractable.”
In other words, the people of Gaza should not seek protection elsewhere, because to do so would complicate and compromise the UN-endorsed principle that Palestinian refugees have a right to return to and establish their own state. And that is an awkward position to take for an organization that simultaneously affirms that people have a universal and non-negotiable right to seek asylum.
A final point to be made about the UNHCR statement concerns its suggestion that if the Palestinians currently trapped in Gaza were to leave the territory and seek asylum elsewhere, this would facilitate any intention that Israel might have to deport, forcibly transfer or ‘ethnically cleanse’ those people [emphasis mine]. As many commentators have pointed out, if that were to happen, Israel would almost certainly not allow them to come back, and would be likely to repopulate Gaza with militant Jewish settlers, as is happening in the West Bank.
This was just a cursory Google on my phone, and it wasn't difficult to find three completely separate sources making the same basic argument: that allowing Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza amounts to ethnically cleansing it, and that it is only just to sacrifice said civilians on the altar of an independent Palestinian state, even if they would prefer not to be so sacrificed.
It sounds like you're in about as good a place mentally as you could hope for in these circumstances. If you don't mind my asking, do you have children?
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