FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5hr ago
It does not seem at all obvious that this action, where there was not only consent, but the children actively engaged in the behaviour themselves, suggesting they enjoyed it ("...then allowed both children...")
I assume that "they wanted to do this, and I allowed them to" was the defendant's account of what transpired. Obviously there were no adults in the vicinity who can corroborate it. You'll note that essentially every adult charged with sexually interfering with children will at some point claim that the child in question seduced or took advantage of him. It was a cliché when Lolita came out, which Nabokov was banking on the reader recognising so as to understand that Humbert is an unreliable narrator.
No, I do not uncritically accept a convicted pederast's version of exactly how his act of child molestation transpired. It rather alarms me that you, apparently, do.
FtttG
7hr ago
I had some thoughts about this back when that DignifAI thing was doing the rounds:
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent.
FtttG
14hr ago
I have to be real with you — infants being abused by their pederast father is not my idea of "fun".
FtttG
2d ago
Wow, I assumed you just meant no sex. Doing nofap on top of that sounds challenging, I commend your ambition.
Out of curiosity, supposing you meet the woman of your dreams next year. Would you ask her out, or wait until 2027?
In no particular order:
- At least one blog post a fortnight. As soon as I post something on my blog, the clock starts ticking for the next one, which must go up no later than two weeks thereafter.
- Gym at least 3x per week. With a view to being able to bench-press my bodyweight, deadlift 2x my bodyweight and squat 1.5x my bodyweight by the end of the year. As the new year begins on a Thursday, if I go to the gym twice between now and January 5th I will count that as a success.
- Dry January. May extend. The clock starts ticking from when I wake up on January 1st i.e. I can have a few drinks after midnight tonight.
- No fast food in January. Eating home-cooked meals wherever possible, may permit myself one date night in a restaurant. May extend this one past January.
- No snacking between meals in January. May extend.
- No porn. For the entire year. And as little masturbation as possible.
- Get SQL certificate. I found a free online SQL course which, upon completion, you get a certificate. I've been putting off doing it for well over a year at this point.
- Write, record and release album #2. The debut came out in January of this year and I'm pretty proud of it, though there's definitely room for improvement and I have lots of ideas for the follow-up. My plan is to spend January practising guitar for an hour every evening, and listening to heavy music for inspiration, then take a week off work in February to write the album, and record it in the following months.
- Increase earnings. Either get a new job with a 17% (or more) bump in salary; or failing that, stay in my current job but request a raise. By the end of the year, if I'm in the same job but making 10% more than I currently am, I will mark this one as a success.
FtttG
3d ago
Almost exactly seven weeks after I started reading it, I've finally finished Cryptonomicon.
Whew.
I've updated the list of books I read from start to finish this year accordingly. Cryptonomicon nudged The Remains of the Day out of my top five.
Seven-eighths of the way through Cryptonomicon. Determined to finish it before the year is out, which means thirty-six pages a day.
FtttG
7d ago
Adorable story, but I have to say, I find it a bit odd that your wife found a receipt for an expensive woman's gift and her mind immediately went to "it's for his mistress" rather than "it's a gift for me, because Christmas is right around the corner".
FtttG
8d ago
Highly recommended. I literally didn't understand the concept of master vs. slave morality until reading this post, and then huge chunks of modern culture began to slot into place for me.
FtttG
9d ago
The scene where Randy's family divvy up his grandmother's heirlooms by plotting their perceived financial value on the X-axis (north-south of a carpark) and perceived emotional value on the Y-axis (east-west) had me doubled over laughing.
Likewise the chapter describing how the mechanics of orgasm clouds Lawrence's thinking and his ensuing courtship of Mary Smith.
FtttG
11d ago
Your points about the relative privacy of the modern era are well-founded. On the other hand, in the fifties, if you checked into a hotel under an assumed name to bed your mistress and your wife's best friend spotted you in the lobby, it'd be her word against yours. If it happened today, she'd take a HD photo of you.
FtttG
11d ago
I watched this in the cinema with my ex years ago. She'd seen it years earlier as a child, and after we came out of the cinema, she commented that, upon a first watch, she hadn't appreciated the significance of the scene where Jeff presents Fran with her Christmas present: a crisp $100 bill. As a child, she'd thought – how kind of him! It was only later she was like ohhhh, he's just treating her like a prostitute.
If you haven't seen it, I'd also highly recommend Wilder's earlier film Double Indemnity, which stars Fred MacMurray (the actor who plays Jeff here). It's one of my favourite movies ever, literally in my top ten. Most "thrillers" from the fifties or earlier can be quite slow and dull by modern standards, and even the better ones are quite far from "thrilling". Double Indemnity is the exception, a movie which is just as tense and nerve-wracking as the year it came out
Almost exactly two-thirds of the way through Cryptonomicon. It might well be the funniest book I've read all year, aside from Rejection. If I can read 35 pages a day I'll be finished before the new year.
Edit: said "one-third". Meant two-thirds.
FtttG
11d ago
Just sounds like you're a straight man tbh. And I've yet to be persuaded that "cis-by-default" means anything.
FtttG
11d ago
Water boarding seems like a plausible enough metal band name to me.
Intelligence is increasing
If you look at buildings from 200 years ago, the door frames are much lower, because people were much shorter back then. All of those short people passed on their genes to descendants who were much taller than they were. The genes themselves didn't change, but because their descendants grew up in a caloric- and nutrient-rich environment, they were better equipped to fulfil their maximum height potential as encoded in their genes than their ancestors were.
Conceivably the Flynn effect could be partly explicable by a similar dynamic, as modern people have a much better understanding of the importance of early childhood nutrition and so on than our ancestors did. But other than that, I'm sceptical of the idea that intelligence is increasing over time. In point of fact our society seems profoundly dysgenic in numerous ways. Fertility rates are in freefall across much of the West, and the only solution suggested by elites is to import millions of people from cultures in which intergenerational cousin marriage is the rule rather than the exception.
FtttG
11d ago
I would recommend reading Scott's and Rob Henderson's reviews of it, and if it piques your interest*, give it a try. But fair warning: it's probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read in my life.
*Which is to say, if you feel personally attacked.
FtttG
12d ago
Wonderful Christmastime I hate the Beatles, which makes this pretty straightforward. Saccharine and awful.
pedant alarm Strictly speaking this is a McCartney solo single. Obviously I agree with you, I despised this song for years before learning it was written by a man widely considered to be one of the best songwriters of the twentieth century. What the fuck kind of off-day was he having?
My most boomer take, I hate the phrase Happy Holidays.
As part of my ongoing war against the intrusion of American culture into Ireland, I recently learned to my dismay that children in primary schools are now being instructed to say "happy holidays" rather than "happy Christmas". In Dublin, the river Liffey runs through the city, with the southside stereotypically considered more posh and affluent than the comparatively impoverished northside, and whenever I venture into the southside I discover that it's been so infected by secular woke nonsense that they literally aren't celebrating any religious holiday anymore. Seriously: the Christmas lights (for everyone knows that's what they are) fall under the banner of "Winter in Dublin".
Winter in Dublin. What the fuck. Every time I see that stupid sign I want to tear it down. I'm sure if I asked whatever idiotic gang of apparatchiks responsible for the decision why they went for "Winter in Dublin" rather than "Christmas in Dublin", they would be completely unable to articulate why, just listing off a string of incomprehensible woke word salad about "inclusive" and "modern Ireland". It's got me thinking about the concept of asymmetric multiculturalism: Christians in Christian countries aren't supposed to ostentatiously celebrate their faiths, but Muslims in Christian countries can do so to their hearts' content. No Muslim in Ireland is going to be saying "happy holidays" to any of his co-religionists when Ramadan next rolls around. But to my relief, I noticed that one set of Christmas lights on the northside wishes everyone a happy Christmas, not a happy (ugh) "winter in Dublin". Working-class Dubs evidently have no time for woke nonsense of this description.
(In Dublin City Council's defense, there's also this sign reading "Nollaig Shona Duit" on the southside's Grafton St, one of Dublin's main shopping streets. "Nollaig Shona Duit" is Irish for "happy Christmas". The message is crystal clear: you can celebrate your faith, as long as you do so in a language no Muslim is likely to understand.)
FtttG
12d ago
Even as a confirmed John Lennon hater (this article might as well have been written about me), I can't find it in my heart to get too up in arms about that one. It's inoffensive background music with a predictable melody and chord progression, and it seems that, for once, John was able to persuade Yoko not to do any atonal wailing and screeching atop it. Nowhere near as irritating as any of my least favourite Christmas songs, from a compositional, lyrical or sonic standpoint.
It feels like a dodge for you to claim that his version of events could be what really happened. My prior is that people accused of wrongdoing will almost always deny the thing they're accused of. If they do concede that they did it, they will do everything in their power to make it sound more understandable and less wrong. This goes double if they're accused of an exceptionally heinous crime.
So: because the perpetrator did not inform his wife of what he'd done, he obviously knew that he'd done something wrong (at the bare minimum, done something he knew his wife wouldn't approve of). Once the older of the two children told the mother what he'd done, then short of accusing his three-year-old of lying, the game is up. The only way he can make what he did seem less heinous is by claiming that the children wanted to do it and he just permitted them to. I do not accept this version of events for a second, any more than I would accept a rapist's claim that the victim was a tease or a wife-beater's claim that his wife provoked him. I would put money on some form of coercion, manipulation or outright physical force being employed in this case.
If he provided video evidence of the crime, I would believe his version of events. I would not be "okay" with what he did, because child abuse is evil.
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