FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
8hr ago
the defection dynamic causing the conflict is still observable today.
How are the Jews defecting now?
FtttG
9hr ago
2:41 is incredible. My PR is a hair under four hours and I was chuffed to bits with that.
FtttG
10hr ago
Having taken it for six months, I'm coming off Nutrafol tomorrow. It had the desired effect, more or less: my hair looks visibly thicker and far less of my scalp is visible. However, I think it made me gain weight, and I'm curious to see if my weight will go down in the coming weeks.
FtttG
10hr ago
New year's resolutions check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week, planning to go for the first time this week in ten minutes. Can deadlift 1.84x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.15x for 7 reps and bench press .87x for 6 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @falling-star, @Tollund_Man4 and @self_made_human?
FtttG
12hr ago
For many years I considered Twin Peaks my favourite TV show of all time, and everything from the pilot to the episode in which the killer is unveiled are pretty much perfect. But the back half of season 2 is painfully padded and drawn-out, just barely managing to pull a satisfying cliffhanger ending out of the hat. I watched The Return a few years ago and liked it, but watching it for a second time recently found it extremely erratic in pacing, with lore-heavy episodes that go nowhere and take forever to get there, to the point that I gave up on it halfway through.
FtttG
12hr ago
I'm not a big TV person, but Silicon Valley is probably the most consistently high quality TV show I've ever seen. Over on IMDb, the top-rated episodes are the season 1 finale and the season 2 finale, which is accurate, but having watched it several times there never comes a point where I feel like there's a major drop-off in quality, a sense of serious discontinuity with what has gone before. Some episodes are stronger than others, obviously, but none ever struck me as major duds. And you might say this is a bad example because it's a sitcom, but it's an unusually narrative-driven sitcom in which each season has an overarching plot arc, and there's real dramatic tension in watching the characters extricate themselves from the latest corner they've found themseles in.
FtttG
13hr ago
My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.
Isn't this just how style has always developed? Every expression we now consider clichéd was once a surprising and evocative turn of phrase.
FtttG
13hr ago
This sort of reminded me of Katy Waldman's essay in the New Yorker, "Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?". Waldman takes young novelists like Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan to task for their apparent belief that having their characters acknowledge how loathsome they are is sufficient to excuse their behaviour. But as the saying goes, admitting you have a problem is only the first step to resolving it. (Curious if Waldman ever read The Last Psychiatrist.)
The most beautiful passage about mercy in the whole English language is literally someone trying to persuade a Jew to be merciful to an outsider:
I have no idea what this is meant to prove. Go through Shakespeare's oeuvre and you can find eloquently-worded expressions of ideas lots of moderns would find repellent: use of the word "Ethiope" as an insult (Much Ado About Nothing), a thirteen-year-old girl marrying an adult suitor (Romeo and Juliet), treatment of physical disability as evidence of moral degeneracy (Henry VI Part 3). So the most revered writer in the English language thought of Jews in terms we would now consider bigoted – so what? You haven't begun to establish that he was justified in holding these opinions – we don't even know if he ever personally met any Jews in his lifetime. "Shakespeare said it, so it must be true" marries you to a lot of really backward opinions.
FtttG
1d ago
If your explanation for why so many people hate Jews is because they lack compassion for Gentiles, that invites an obvious question. Would you say the Israelis are less or more compassionate to outsiders than, say, the Palestinians, or the Arabs more broadly? What about compared to Muslims?
The Islamo-left doesn't seem have to much of a problem admiring Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims despite the fact that so many of them are openly hostile to infidels and apostates (not to mention their hostility to women, LGBT people and so on). To me, this suggests there's something else going on other than people correctly recognising that Jews lack compassion for outsiders and acting accordingly.
Additionally, for all your talk of Jews being hostile to outsiders, I don't think it's controversial to assert that an Arab citizen of Israel enjoys a higher standard of living and faces far less harassment and abuse compared to a Jewish citizen of any Arab country. Of whom there are vanishingly few owing to the Arabs' hostility and lack of compassion for outsiders.
FtttG
1d ago
This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.
This is a reasonable objection, but even leaving aside these marginal examples there have been a lot of civil wars, revolutions etc. just in the past eight decades.
FtttG
1d ago
I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.
FtttG
1d ago
No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).
FtttG
1d ago
I mean, the Persians aren't Arabs either, but many of them are obviously darker than white Europeans. While I'm sure there's nonzero shared heritage between Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, rounding this off to Mizrahi Jews being a subset of Arabs seems misleading and inconsistent with how we catalogue other ethnic groups.
FtttG
1d ago
Okay, well one example of the kind of "ideology" to which I refer is Hamas apologism, which I believe is not reducible to simple anti-Zionism. Supposing a non-Palestinian person who has never been personally victimised by Jews expresses support for Hamas and thinks that their actions on October 7th were justified. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that such a person simply hates Jews as a group, or could such a stance be compatible with anti-Zionism i.e. opposition to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds, without any concomitant antipathy towards Jews as a group?
FtttG
1d ago
Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred.
Sure. And what about antisemitic violence? And specifically antisemitic violence targeting Jews who've never set foot in Israel and who have no say in Israeli policy or IDF military tactics?
FtttG
1d ago
Are you saying Ashkenazim and Mizrahim are respectively sub-groups of Africans and Arabs?
FtttG
1d ago
It's one thing to be indifferent towards the feelings of Jews. When Israelis criticise Palestinian militants, they are not complaining that Palestinians don't care about their feelings. They are complaining that Palestinian militants are trying to kill them, because they are Jews.
Right. But we're now at the point where Gentiles feel no qualms about lending money at interest either to each other or to people of differing faiths. Probably there are thousands if not millions of people who've chanted "from the river to the sea" who support themselves by lending money at interest.
Group A despises Group B. When asked to explain the reason behind their antipathy, Group A explains they hate Group B because Group B does Activity X to Group A. Subsequently, Group A decides that Activity X isn't such a bad activity after all, and starts doing it to Group B (among other groups) e.g. a Jewish family who takes out a mortgage with a Gentile-owned bank. However, Group A's antipathy towards Group B doesn't budge an inch.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that Group A's antipathy towards Group B really has nothing to do with Activity X, and it's just a convenient pretext to ostracise a group they wanted to harass for unrelated reasons?
FtttG
1d ago
Unless you want to tell me that Jews aren't white.
I consider Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews white. But there are a few hundred thousand Ethiopian Jews in Israel, and more Mizrahi Jews than Ashkenazi. I doubt most pro-Palestine people could reliably tell the difference between a Palestinian Arab and a Mizrahi Israeli just from a photo.
FtttG
1d ago
It's not meant to console you in particular. I'm just trying to illustrate that, for reasons of demography, the outright extermination of Jews in a couple of generations is a live possibility in a way it simply isn't for white Europeans.
FtttG
1d ago
I think your conception of Israel being "awarded" to the Jews by Europe is a bit ahistorical. The country owes its existence to decades of tireless effort by Jews to buy up land in the region. It's not like the British looked at the Jews and Arabs, totted up who was higher on the Oppression Olympics totem pole, and decreed that the Jews were more oppressed so the land belonged to them now.
For example? "Progressive policies" is a large set.
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