Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
19hr ago
Your first point is well-taken. It's remarkable to think of how recently it was completely normal for people to smoke at their desks.
Folamh3
19hr ago
It seems like it might be a problem if they have kids
He has two children. I always wonder what dinnertime is like.
Girl: I don't want to eat mashed potatoes and broccoli! I want chicken nuggets!
Mother: Now now, you can't eat chicken nuggets all the time.
Girl: Why not? Daddy does!
The counter-argument is irrefutable.
Folamh3
19hr ago
The second is that this is all "Taqiyya", and the perp was a genuine Jihadi.
Such a long con for such meagre reward (a mere five dead at the last count) seems a bit unlikely to me.
In my effortpost from last week, I talked about the "respectable" media's reluctance to mention anything about the identity of the perpetrator who committed the shocking knife attack which precipitated the November riots in 2023. Some outlets, in an effort to disguise the fact that he was Algerian, described him as "born outside of Ireland but an Irish citizen" or similar.
The clear intention was to give the impression that the perpetrator was "one of our own", so racism was misplaced. But of course, an anti-immigration activist would counter - the fact that he was an Irish citizen makes it even worse! It'd be one thing if he snuck into the UK, took a ship to Belfast then crossed the border into the south and applied for "asylum" as a "refugee", and committed this attack while he was in the legal limbo of waiting for his asylum application to be processed. The Irish government could perhaps be forgiven for extending clemency to a man about whom they know nothing by allowing him to stay in the country pending his asylum application, and then he goes on to commit a terrible crime. That's the kind of unfortunate but inevitable outcome that could theoretically happen even in a country with an extremely strict immigration policy.
But no - this is a man who has already jumped through all the hoops of applying for Irish citizenship, was thoroughly vetted, and still went on to commit a shocking and completely unprovoked crime like this. If a nutcase like this can pass the vetting process, clearly it's not stringent enough.
I don't know. I certainly believe that second-generation immigrants to Ireland can be fully assimilated (I've met plenty of women of Chinese descent who sound more Irish than I do; I work with a woman who has at least one Algerian parent and didn't clock her as anything other than Irish until she told me, although her name was a dead giveaway in retrospect; I once dated a Polish girl who sounded Irish from top to bottom), but I have no firsthand experience of a first-generation immigrant fully assimilating.
Cosplaying as someone caring about federal politics is just as silly as cosplaying as a member of the rebel alliance: you will no more change the outcome of the presidential election than you will change the outcome of the galactic war. (It is a lot more bitter, though, because the cosplayers take it more seriously.)
My dad is into the South Pole in a big way, and owns dozens of books about various Antarctic expeditions. He once attended this event where all the people pretend they're on such an expedition (may have been Scott's, I can't remember) and dress for the occasion.
Sometime later I won free tickets to our city's Comic-Con. I don't have much interest in this sort of thing, but my girlfriend at the time was a big Marvel fan so we went. I was telling my dad about the cosplayers, and he sort of scoffed at what a silly way it was to spend one's time. I pointed out that, while it's certainly silly, it's not objectively more silly than cosplaying as an Antarctic expeditioner in a warm and dry restaurant.
Reading Shakespeare is unlikely to give you unique insights into the human condition you could not have gotten from other sources. Read it if you like, but don't pretend that you are doing something more useful with your time than the person who reads YA novels or smut.
Hard disagree. It's true that the insights gained from Shakespeare can be gained from other sources, because Shakespeare's insights are in the water supply. But spending hours poring over The Tempest at least has a chance of resulting in you understanding something new about the human condition (even if you could have learned the same thing in a shorter period of time from a more accessible source), whereas I think learning anything noteworthy from reading smut is more or less impossible.
While I broad-strokes agree with you that some hobbies considered high-status are no less silly than certain hobbies which are considered low-status, I'm not going to go the full cultural relativist maximally nihilistic "it's all bullshit anyway". I do actually believe that good things are good. Ceterus paribus, pastimes which actively engage the mind, the body or both are more edifying than those which do not. Of course learning Klingon is a waste of time in the scheme of things, but I would still rather someone put the effort into learning Klingon than simply passively watching TOS for the fifteenth time. Even if the only reason you're going to the gym is so that your Thor cosplay is more convincing, that's a hell of a lot better than not working out at all.
I also disagree that your life would be worse if you took up running. I mean, it could be, but I found it did wonders for my mood and energy levels, and I'm far from alone in reporting that experience.
Folamh3
1d ago
I'm not sure what's going on with the adults eating exclusively chicken nuggets and Mac & cheese, but it sounds like depression again? Or an eating disorder? It certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.
I work with a guy who's an extremely picky eater. Every day for lunch he eats a cheese toastie from the nearby garage. His wife cooks him chicken nuggets and chips for dinner every night. The team once went out for lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant, and he had a bowl of ice cream.
While it will not surprise to learn that he is rail thin (almost emaciated) and his teeth are in shockingly poor shape, he gives no outward impression of being depressed at least as far as I can see.
Folamh3
1d ago
was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account?
Folamh3
1d ago
Last year I was curious if there was anything to this whole "academic analysis of Taylor Swift's music" thing, so I listened to the song which, to my understanding, is universally considered to be her crowning achievement: "All Too Well". It sounded like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that didn't make the album, and the lyrics were decidedly adolescent, even juvenile. If that's the best she can do (according to all the music critics and academics who have built up a cottage industry around obsessively analysing her music and lyrics), I see little reason to dig any deeper. If there are songs in her discography which are more impressive from a compositional or lyrical perspective, I'll give them a go, but I honestly don't expect to be impressed.
I'll grant that some of the singles are catchy if forgettable.
Folamh3
1d ago
Of course, but even her more recent singles (like "Anti-Hero") sound, from a compositional perspective, largely indistinguishable from singles released by the current generation of teen or early twenties pop stars, whose target demographic is teenage girls.
Being a fan? No. Buying all the merch (including the authentic Indy Funko Pop), spending hours and hours discussing why the new movies suck, spending a small fortune on the authentic hat and whip so that you can cosplay several times a year? Past a certain point, I do think I'd find such a person rather sad.
Folamh3
1d ago
Speed is such a great movie, Dennis Hopper looked like he was having so much fun.
Folamh3
1d ago
Well, it's rather pointless trying to discuss the merits of a particular work of art with someone who hasn't experienced it, surely.
Folamh3
1d ago
That's fair. I guess from a compositional standpoint, what little of her music I'm familiar with screams "pop for teenaged girls" for me, even the more recent stuff, even if the lyrical content is more mature than one would expect of pop for teenaged girls.
Folamh3
1d ago
I feel the chances are good the goalposts would move again.
What are you basing this accusation on?
And my experience with "citation needed" is no citation will be accepted anyway.
That was needlessly rude. "There's no point providing evidence for my factual claims, because even if I do you people won't believe me anyway" seems profoundly out of keeping with the ethos of this space.
Folamh3
2d ago
But that's actually my question - in the 1970s, were there actually any unmarried childless women in their thirties showing up to Elvis gigs and literally fainting with excitement?
Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.
Folamh3
2d ago
I at least suspect that I am actually being called to narrow and limit my artistic tastes.
What makes you think that?
Folamh3
2d ago
Two words: Elvis Presley. Nothing's changed much here recently.
If you look at videos of Elvis performing in his prime, I think most of the people going hysterical and literally fainting were teenage girls. I think that's largely Freddie's point: that certain behaviour which is acceptable in teenagers is very unbecoming in adults who ought to know better. Which includes many Swifties. I absolutely think the phenomenon of unmarried childless thirty-plus women spending small fortunes in order to go see a teenybopper on tour is a new one, actually.
C.S. Lewis answered that one
But C.S. Lewis did have varied and challenging artistic tastes! There's nothing wrong with a person in their thirties reading YA fiction in addition to reading books intended for adults. It's when YA fiction, fantasy, sci-fi etc. is all that you read that it becomes a sign of immaturity.
Folamh3
2d ago
For some reason leftists tend to consider shaming and social pressure as completely irrelevant factors of the environment. I've brought this up in discussions on reddit, that maybe "fat-shaming" actually effectively helps people maintain a healthy weight, and this idea is usually met with disdain. However, leftists are highly inconsistent on this point, as they surely believe shaming people for racism to be highly effective and critical in stopping racism.
Funnily enough, I made a similar point about a year ago:
Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.
We permit some things and forbid others. Same as every other time and place in history.
Yes, and an "overly permissive" society is a society in which too many things are permitted and too few are forbidden. Not a difficult concept to grasp, I would've thought.
Are these the actions of a society that encourages "doing whatever you want"?
The word "encourage" or any of its synonyms appears nowhere in my post. As far as I grasp Freddie's point, it's not that following the path of least resistance (expending the least amount of effort) is encouraged, but doing the bare minimum isn't forbidden i.e. is permitted.
Sure, you can dress smart casual... as you work nights and weekends (and respond to emails and texts even when you're not "working") to get that big project over the finish line.
No idea what the point is meant to be here. The dress code in my last job, my current job and the job before that (post-Covid) was smart casual. My hours were 9-5 and I rarely had to work late, and never nights. In the two years I worked in my last job there was one occasion in which I had to work on the weekend. I don't think my experience is at all uncommon.
how exactly is anyone supposed to have time to enjoy anything with these cataclysmic threats constantly lurking in the background?
I doubt that, say, King Louis XIV knew how to cook for himself. He had people to do it for him. Should he have been ashamed of himself?
I think so. Is there any skill more fundamental to self-preservation than the ability to feed oneself?
I find that hot so I'm all for it.
Gross.
Antifa and BLM rioters, pro-Palestine student protesters
Go to any one of these protests, and you will find that 20% of the people protesting are true believers and 80% of people are there because their friends were going, or because they're hoping to signal that they're the right kind of person on Instagram, or because they want to get laid. Nothing is more performative or insincere than modern wokeness. How many of the people who shared a black square on their Instagram in June 2020 had even the slightest idea of what the intended message of said image was? You think everyone who ever dressed up in black bloc gear earns a living at the local vegan co-op or working for an activist nonprofit? I'm sure an absolute majority of these people subsequently put away childish things and took a cushy job at Merrill Lynch.
But you can't accuse them of concealing anything.
In punk (and by extension Antifa) circles, pretending that you're from a less affluent background than you really are is so common that satire websites poke fun at it. And while you might concede this point, it's certainly not like leftist apparatchiks would conceal something as fundamental as their ethnic back- oh wait, damn.
Freddie deBoer has a new article out in which he argues that our society has become overly permissive (without ever actually using the phrase "the permissive society"). He uses a few recent articles to set the scene (an increasingly defeatist sense among the laptop class that there's no option but to be extremely online; a qualified defense in the New Yorker and New York magazine of the notion of being an iPad parent), before getting into the meat of his argument. Where before our society expected people to behave in a certain way most of the time, increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid; that there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life; and that people who do hold people to higher standards of behaviour than the bare minimum are being toxic in some way. Where before the expectation was to dress formally in the office, now "smart casual" rules the day (if that); where before it was only profoundly autistic and unemployable men still playing with Lego and cosplaying as Star Wars characters in their thirties, now such behaviour has become entirely normalised among the gainfully employed. The boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore, or if they are, it's the same YA slop their teenage children, nieces and nephews are reading. If modern Anglophone society has a telos, it's "umm, let people enjoy things??"
Freddie's point is well-taken and I agree with most of it: Disney and Marvel adults are contemptible, as are adults taking out second mortgages so they can follow Taylor Swift. Grown adults who don't know how to cook proper meals and eat fast/convenience food for every meal should feel ashamed, even if they don't. Some examples of the trend are conspicuous by their absence: it's interesting that Freddie brings up "adult men who proudly eat nothing but chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese" and women wearing snuggies in public without once alluding to the body positivity/health at every size movement, even though it's a perfect example of the relaxing of standards across the board. (I mean, these people spent years complaining about the "toxic and unrealistic beauty standards" promulgated by the fashion industry and social media, and apparently succeeded in replacing them with - nothing, no standards at all.) But one of the specific examples he cites seems oddly in tension with the others:
Authenticity. Closely related to but distinct from selling out was the quest for authenticity - to live a life where the outside matches the inside, to embrace one’s own internal values and ethics in one’s outward behavior, to not try to appear to be anything other than what we truly were. The idea was that we have a true self, or at least true impulses, and we live better and more ethical lives when we allow them to dictate our acts and (especially) our self-expression. When I was in high school in the late 1990s, there was no insult more cutting than “poseur.” But then online life happened, and we were stuck in these various networks and mediums that were fully the product of choices we made, where how we appeared to others was in every sense orchestrated to some degree. Instagram is the notorious example; few of us actually live lives that are composed of nothing but tasteful minimalism, inspiring visuals, and enviable brunch spreads, but that’s how everybody started to present themselves. The idea of authenticity in such a context is rather ridiculous, and so most people let go of it, and now a younger generation has arrived that has no idea what the term could mean.
I agree with him that, in the modern Western world, there's no longer much of an expectation for people to live and present themselves "authentically" : among sufficiently online women, using Instagram filters on your selfies is the rule rather than the exception; cosmetic surgery (in both sexes) is more common than ever; the less said about LinkedIn, the better.
But it occurred to me: for all of the other examples of the trend towards relaxation of standards, isn't this precisely how the people engaging in these lifestyle choices would defend them? "I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin wearing a tie to the office - wearing a hoodie and sweatpants makes me feel more like myself." "I used to read boring grown-up books because that's what was expected of me and people would make fun of me for reading Harry Potter on the tube - I like that now I can read Harry Potter without shame." And so on.
What do you think?
Do you like men of Islam?
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.
Would you like them here or there?
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.
Would you like them in Berlin?
Even shorn of their foreskin?
I would not like them in Berlin.
I care not if they have foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.
Would you like them in a mosque?
Or standing 'round their big black box?
Not in a mosque. Not round a box.
Not in Berlin. Without foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.
Would you? could you? in a car?
Let them in - here they are.
I would not, could not, in a car.
You may like them. You will see.
Living in our land, rent-free.
I cannot stand them here rent-free.
Nor in a car! You let me be.
I do not like them in a mosque.
I do not like them 'round a box.
I do not like them in Berlin.
I care not if they have foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.
A plane! A train! A plane! A train!
Could you, would you on a train?
Not on plane! not on train!
Not in a car! Sam! Let me be!
I do not like them in a mosque.
I do not like them 'round a box.
I do not like them in Berlin.
I care not if they have foreskin.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like men of Islam.
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