FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
22m ago
Unrelated to the main thrust of your post, I've read that men tend to wear their trousers higher and higher the older they get, which may be related to their bodies producing less testosterone as they age (don't ask me to explain the causal mechanism here, that's just what I've heard).
A prominent example of this is this compilation of clips of director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Cruising), well-known for his bluntness and sharp tongue. One of the top comments quips "the higher the pants, the shorter the temper".
On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.
I think the idea is that it "frames" the waist in such a way as to give the impression that the wearer has wider hips and a narrower waist than she really does. A lot of women's clothing is designed to accentuate these features (e.g. if a woman is wearing a striped top, it will almost invariably have horizontal rather than vertical stripes, so as to make her curves more prominent).
I wish you would become a comedy writer on Substack or something, your talents are wasted here. The other day I told my brother your "Stochastic Frankenbrad" line and he roared laughing.
While the governmental interference in people's lives doesn't sound half as draconian or invasive as the worst excesses of Covid hysteria (it's not as if, in the interests of combating illegal immigration, Minnesotans are being prevented from hiking on mountain trails or attending their spouses' funerals; nor has their full participation in public life been made conditional on their undergoing a specific medical procedure), I nonetheless agree with you that many of the people cheering on ICE are motivated by a similar kind of spite. As a committed civil libertarian it's always disheartening to find out what a large proportion of my ostensible fellow-travelers really just want the boot on the other foot.
FtttG
1hr ago
Far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
A relative of mine lives in the UK, and when he was last over he said that he always appreciates when media outlets point out that "Tommy Robinson" isn't his legal name. I replied "so you think it's okay to deadname him?"
FtttG
15hr ago
Yes, but the operative fact in that distinction is sexual contact. It's not a crime in and of itself for a fifteen-year-old girl to love a twenty-year-old boy, or vice versa. (Indeed, how could the law ever criminalise emotional states? That's right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
FtttG
15hr ago
It would be even better if the law made a distinction where a loving relationship involving a 15 year old between could never be statutory rape.
Does the law ever pass judgement on which relationships are "loving" and which aren't? How would it even go about doing this? I know that in custody disputes between divorcing parents the judge may well take the respective parents' apparent affection for their children (and concern for their welfare) into account, but my understanding is that this is only one factor of many taken into consideration: if forced to choose between granting custody to one parent who really loves his children but is a heroin addict, and another parent who doesn't seem that invested in them but isn't addicted to heroin and always feeds and clothes them, I imagine most judges would choose the latter parent. Offhand I can't think of any instance in which the legal system adjudicates on which relationships are "loving" and which are not. Still less can I think of any crime which is not considered a crime provided the perpetrator and victim love each other. We used to recognise such categories (domestic abuse, marital rape), and it was considered a major feminist victory when we no longer did so. I, for one, would not like to go back to the world in which it is legally impossible for a man to rape his wife.
I guess in mine it's not
Which jurisdiction would that be?
It is if they have sex, even if she wanted it and is not victimized by it.
No, it's not. If a fifteen-year-old girl loves her twenty-year-old boyfriend, but they have a celibate relationship, no crime has been committed. If a fifteen-year-old girl has sex with her twenty-year-old boyfriend, in some jurisdictions he will be considered a statutory rapist. The extent to which she loves him simply doesn't enter into it. We're not criminalising loving relationships, we're criminalising the sexual exploitation of minors, and as with literally every law in the history of the human race there are bound to be weird edge cases where it could plausibly be argued no real harm has been done.
FtttG
18hr ago
Assault is legal in some cases, such as self defense
The law makes a very clear distinction between the two such that self-defense is not assault.
it's not a felony to get in a fight
In many jurisdictions, it absolutely is.
if I punch someone, they're more of a victim than a 15 year old girl who loves her 20 year old boyfriend
A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".
FtttG
1d ago
I keep thinking about a tweet which went something like this:
Being a boy sucks because when you're 13, you're competing for the attention of 13-year-old girls against 19-year-old men. And when you're 19, you're competing for the attention of 19-year-old girls against Saudi princes.
FtttG
1d ago
First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls.
Studies also show that men are more aggressive than women. That doesn't mean we should legalise assault.
FtttG
1d ago
On certain months, rather than putting money into my fire extinguisher account, I'll invest it (or I'll do half-and-half).
I think this comes back to the fact that what the left wants from a police force is fundamentally incoherent:
Either the police can adopt an aggressive, proactive and hands-on approach to policing African-American (and Hispanic, to a lesser extent) communities, which means more COCs (criminals of colour) getting shot and/or being sent to prison; or they can adopt a hands-off, laissez-faire approach, which means more people of colour getting victimised by the criminals in their communities. There's pretty much no way for police officers to cut down on the rate of violent crime in a community without arresting the perpetrators, and there's no way for police officers to be more hands-off without a huge spike in crime victimisation.
I'd like to believe there's some hypothetical point on the thermostat that would keep the majority of progressive activists happy most of the time, but it's hard to envision what this might look like. American progressives have been complaining about over- and under-policing in black American communities for as long as I've been alive, and indeed many decades prior.
If a young black man gets shot dead in the ghetto, the odds are overwhelming that the perpetrator was another young black man, and thus the best way to ensure that the perpetrator faces justice for his crime is for the police to aggressively investigate young black men who the victim knew. Is this "racial profiling" (or more accurately, "demographic profiling": the "young" and "man"* parts are almost as important as the "black" part)? I guess so. But I'm not persuaded that the right of young black men not to be questioned by the police automatically supersedes a murder victim and his family's right to justice, and refusing to properly investigate a crime solely because it might "inflame community tensions" is exactly the kind of attitude that led to Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and so on. It's just one of many trade-offs that come with living in a free society. Of course it's not the fault of any young law-abiding black men that they belong to a demographic which commits a disproportionate amount of violent crime (esp. violent crime within their own demographic group) and I don't want them being harassed morning, noon and night, or their civil liberties persistently violated, on that basis alone. At the same time, denying police the right to exercise their own judgement and use statistical heuristics in pursuing lines of investigation because it might result in some hurt feelings seems like a recipe for a) a dramatically reduced murder clearance rate and b) a vastly higher murder rate, once murderers realise it'll be much easier for them to get away with their crimes.
And this isn't just a "he whose ox is gored" situation, where I'm indifferent to this topic because it'll never affect me or anyone I care about. My uncle (Irish, like me) lived in Britain at the height of the Troubles, and was routinely questioned by police officers whenever there was a bomb scare (his bright red hair made him difficult to miss). His sister once cited this example (in a debate about present-day racial profiling) and said it was outrageous, but personally, I didn't really understand the complaint. During the Troubles, most Irishmen were not in the IRA, but most (if not all) IRA members were Irishmen. Whenever a bomb scare was called in on the British mainland, it was usually done by an Irishman. Of course there are familiar examples of miscarriages of justice in the period (the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four), but I'm not persuaded that the investigative method is fundamentally unsound. If the IRA calls in a bomb threat, it's reasonable to assume the perpetrator is Irish. If a man goes to a crowded place and bellows "Allahu akbar!" before attempting to blow himself up, it's reasonable to assume he is Muslim (and consequently that he is a member of an ethnic group disproportionately likely to practise Islam).
*Indeed, everyone accepts that most murders are committed by men, and I'm sure the police, knowing this, will much more aggressively investigate known acquaintances of a victim who are men than those who are women. Is this "sexual profiling"? Is it fair that men will attract disproportionate attention from the police on the basis of their basic demographic traits? As Rob Henderson recently noted, nobody interprets the overrepresentation of young men in prisons as evidence of ageism on the part of the criminal justice system.
FtttG
1d ago
It's all debit cards, I have one debit card associated with my current account and one associated with splurge. Salary gets paid into my current account, and on pay day I transfer funds from that into my savings accounts and the splurge account. Takes all of five minutes.
Finances: Made 3.8 (post tax) last month. Only spent 3.2k, which is about a 16% savings rate. Would like to get this closer to 20%.
For several years I've been trying to follow the savings advice laid out in The Barefoot Investor:
- In addition to your current account, create three savings accounts respectively called fire extinguisher, smile and splurge.
- Fire extinguisher is your long-term savings (e.g. if you're saving up for a car, a deposit on a mortgage etc., it'll be coming out of here).
- Smile is your short-term savings, a special treat you're saving up for that makes you smile when you think of it (e.g. a holiday, a new guitar).
- Splurge is for when you want to treat yourself that month, before your next pay day (e.g. dates, going to the pub with your friends, fast food etc.).
- All other expenses (groceries, utilities, rent/mortgage payments etc.) are paid out of your current account.
- The day you get paid, deposit 10% of your pay into smile, 10% into splurge and 20% into fire extinguisher.
- Do not dip into smile or fire extinguisher until using them for their intended purpose.
- If you're eating out, going out for drinks etc., you should only use splurge. If splurge is empty, you should not do any of these activities until you have replenished it. So if you splashed out the weekend after payday and now splurge is empty, it's quiet nights in and home cooking until your next payday.
Obviously it's a big ask to jump directly from saving 16% of your income to 30%. As an experiment on your next pay day, you might try putting 10% in splurge, 5% in smile and 5% in fire extinguisher. Then each month, increment smile and fire extinguisher by 1% apiece to steadily acclimatise yourself to this way of doing things, until you've met the target for the relevant account. (I always put 10% into smile, but have yet to manage putting more than 16% into fire extinguisher.)
The book also recommends putting two grand into an account in a completely different financial institution from your current and savings account. This is your rainy-day fund, for genuine life-or-death emergencies. The purpose of putting it into a different financial institution is to introduce friction so that you won't be tempted to dip into it to pay for your holidays. To this end, I put €2,000 in a government bond which pays out 10% interest if left to appreciate for ten years.
FtttG
2d ago
this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
I have no idea what this is meant to mean. Is it unreasonable to assume that a Hispanic person who doesn't speak English very well is vastly more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white person with a pronounced American accent?
FtttG
2d ago
"the salient thing about the Nazis is that they seized power and brutally eliminated all dissent, the Jew-killing just came later as a natural consequence"
I agree with @The_Nybbler that this is an ahistorical reading. The Nazis did not kill Jews because they were "dissenting" (indeed, the Nazis killed cooperative Jews: see part V here) – they killed them because they were Jews.
The public rehabilitation of Bush Jr. is one of the oddest things I've witnessed in my lifetime. It would be easy to assume there's some kind of statute of limitations element to it, but that doesn't seem to be the case: Reagan is just as despised as ever.
FtttG
2d ago
btw, what's a good word here? "terrorist" is too harsh a word, but "protestor" too weak, since they actively block and interfere with basic government work.
"Obstructor"?
In the EU, there's a concept called the "right to be forgotten", intended to recognise the idea that a crime or misdemeanour which one committed a long time ago and for which one has served one's sentence should not haunt one forever. There is a legal precedent that you can appeal to Google to remove articles containing your name from search results, and in some cases they will honour this request (funny story: several years after leaving school, a guy who was the year ahead of me in secondary school was convicted for possession of large amounts of illegal drugs which could not possibly have been solely for personal use, and in his trial his actual defense was that he was not a drug dealer, but simply a "sucker for a good deal". At some point after his conviction was spent he must have requested all articles about the case be purged from Google search results, because I can no longer find them.) As with anything else, this has its limitations: in the UK, sex offenders are forbidden from changing their names via deed poll. If an adult was convicted of a sexual offense involving children, I do think it's reasonable that this information be made publicly available, especially if they're seeking employment involving children. Likewise if someone was convicted of a severely violent offense and they're seeking employment in a job that involves safeguarding.
But broadly speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, if a person has a mental health episode in a public place, or if a university student has too much to drink and makes a fool of themself, that incident should not follow them around for the rest of their life. It should not be the first thing you see when you Google their name. I agree with Jacobin that police officers uploading bodycam footage of this sort of thing to their official YouTube channels is an improper use of bodycam technology, but really, police bodycam footage is only the tip of the iceberg. Whenever anyone has a mental health episode in a public place, you can be assured that smartphone footage of it from at least three angles will be uploaded to TikTok and Instagram within the hour. Videos like "Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired" being uploaded to official police YouTube channels are only a symptom of a broader cultural problem: everything is just #content now. Woman having a mental health episode in a supermarket? #content. The building you're inside catches fire? #content. Man gets struck by car? #content. Soldier stabbed to death by Islamist nutters? #content.
The canonical example of the casual sociopathy of bystanders is Kitty Genovese, a case which was widely misrepresented by sensational journalists. In light of this, it ought to be retired in favour of any of the above examples.
Scott talked about this in 2013 ("Not Just a Mere Political Issue"), even using the same example you gave of how opposition to gay marriage is seen as verboten in a way that other, more obviously consequential opinions aren't.
Agreed. This is the entire reason we recognise the age of majority.
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