Folamh3
User ID: 1175
they are pretty close to it, last time I checked
Check again, they get nominated for AAQCs, and deservedly so (https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/208068?context=8#context, https://www.themotte.org/post/987/quality-contributions-report-for-april-2024).
If you want a joke forum maybe you should consider reddit yourself?
I don't want a joke forum, but I do want a serious discussion forum in which cracking jokes and good-natured ribbing are permitted and even encouraged. Which is why I'm here.
low-effort punching-down
An anonymous rando cracking a joke about two fabulously wealthy and powerful women who each came within a hair's breadth of becoming the literal leaders of the free world (and one of whom is currently literally next in line to become the leader of the free world) now constitutes "punching down". Lol. But thank you for providing such an illustrative example of a point I made months ago regarding how the "punching up/down" concept is so prone to abuse:
In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)
Moving on.
But to me, it's not even a funny-mean joke, nor particularly inventive; it's just mean.
Fair enough. Doesn't mean it's against the rules. I never claimed it was "inventive" (and now the goalposts are moving again: "your joke did not reach @EverythingIsFine's minimum threshold for creativity, three-day ban"): it was just playful teasing, which this thread and forum are full of.
Last year I reviewed Barbie and Oppenheimer. I was very harsh in my critique of Oppenheimer, and my review included this sentence: "[Oppenheimer is m]iles and miles below the still-wonderful Memento, which I'm increasingly confident will, years down the line, come to be seen as [writer-director Christopher Nolan's] only film really worth discussing."
I rewatched Memento last night, and... wow. It's nowhere near as good as I remember it being. It's a puzzle to be enjoyed once and then discarded, gaining nothing on subsequent viewings - there's as much point in watching it again as completing a crossword a second time. It's interesting that, long before he was a big-budget Hollywood player, most of the elements of the Nolan "house style" were already on full display here (with the thankful exception of the omnipresent shaky cam, frenetic cutting and bombastic sound mixing). Excluding two secondary characters who receive barely any screentime and whose briefly sketched sub-plot is more affecting than anything in the A-plot, none of the characters feel like real people, but rather robotic ciphers completing their subroutines. On two occasions in the film, Lenny is confronting a man he believes raped and murdered his wife, with the intent to kill him - and he sounds no more angry than if the man in question had scratched the door of his car. And believe you me, there is no conflict between a film having a contrived plot and having characters you like or care about: Psycho, Vertigo, Secret Window, Seven, Fight Club are all psychological thrillers with no supernatural elements whose plots are at least as silly as Memento's (if not more so) but whose protagonists I felt invested in, one way or the other. The narrative structure of the film may be "innovative", but its very artificiality (specifically the overlapping between the end of one scene and the beginning of the next) calls attention to itself, disrupting the immersion every time it cuts to black. Nolan sets up rules for how Lenny's condition works and then constantly cheats them when convenient: Lenny can become distracted and forget where he is and what he's doing by the sound of a door slamming or the act of scaling a fence, but he can fall asleep for an hour with the explicit goal of exploiting his condition to trick himself into believing he is somewhere other than he really is (geographically and temporally) - but he still knows who the prostitute is and why she's there when he opens the bathroom door? The passage of time within the film makes no sense: Lenny murders Jimmy Grants in an isolated location, and seemingly the entire criminal underworld in the city (but not the police) knows about it in a matter of hours. Natalie talks about losing Jimmy in a manner suggesting he disappeared at least a few weeks or months ago, but at the end of the film you realise she was talking about:
- someone who vanished yesterday
- whose body still hasn't been found
- who's a drug dealer, and she knows it (how does she know he isn't just laying low after a deal that went sour?)
"Yeah, but Lenny showed up at the bar wearing Jimmy's clothes and driving his car, she knows Lenny must have killed him." Right, so her talking sadly about Jimmy disappearing is entirely for the audience's benefit. She's not manipulating Lenny in the long-term - that would be oxymoronic. He only can be manipulated in the short-term, which she does so successfully, in one of the only scenes in the movie that really works as intended.
At the time Memento came out, certain critics said that fans of The Usual Suspects were likely to enjoy it, which is accurate, but perhaps not the compliment the critics intended: both films are gimmicky schlock with contrived plots, and twist endings which come off as incredibly arbitrary and unearned, even anticlimactic.
As a pre-teen/teen, I said that my two favourite movies were Memento and Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko holds up. I suspect that a major reason I referred to Memento as one of my favourites was shoring up an inferiority complex: I was trying to conspicuously advertise how intelligent I was that I was able to follow this movie with an infamously convoluted narrative structure. Now, of course, I'm emotionally mature enough that I no longer think one's taste in films (or music, or books) has even the slightest bearing on one's worth or merit as a human being; and the way to show off how smart you are is to do things that only smart people can do, a category which does not include "follow the plot of a Hollywood thriller film". I suspect that a lot of Nolan fanboys are people who never actually progressed to this emotional stage and remain stuck at the mental age of precocious teenagers desperate to be taken seriously by the people at the grown-ups' table; it's notable how, whenever one of Nolan's movies comes out, the fanboys make such a conspicuous song and dance of how you have to be really smart to understand it, and that most of the people who didn't like it were probably just too dumb to get it. Such people bear a strong familial resemblance with those people who go out of their way to mention their IQ or MENSA membership, to compensate for their visible paucity of actual intellectual achievements. (There's a big difference between "dudes who like listening to Tool" and "dudes who think that the fact that they like Tool means they're smart".) Nolan seems to be aware of this aspect of how his films are received and seems determined to lean into it by topping himself at every turn, insisting that a perfectly conventional Hollywood biopic or WWII movie be told in anachronic order for no adequately explained or narratively satisfying reason; or adding an extra layer of impenetrability to his films by the rather crude device of simply drowning out all the expository dialogue under layers of music and sound effects.
Am I now at the point where The Prestige is the only Nolan movie I can honestly say I like, without any qualifications? Christ. Maybe I should watch Following, Insomnia and The Dark Knight Rises just so I can honestly say I've watched all of his films and thought that almost all of them were mid at best and embarrassing at worst - but I really don't want to.
The music was okay though, and Joe Pantoliano gave a good performance.
At the time, it was widely predicted that the first assassination attempt against Trump had secured him the election. As polling data seemed not to reflect this prediction, it was quietly discarded. But I genuinely think the attempt and Trump's reaction to it might have cinched it for him. Within 24 hours, everyone knew that this was the most iconic photo of the year, if not the decade (a decade which has already given us J6, Covid, probably the worst American riots since '92 and the invasion of Ukraine).
Folamh3
15d ago
You could also parse it as "a joke". Directly above me there's a guy saying Kamala only got where she is by sucking dick, and I'm sexist? Please.
Do better.
This isn't Reddit. Get lost.
Folamh3
15d ago
Richard Hanania was predicting the same thing. I wonder if he'll acknowledge that.
The last poll in 2012 projected Obama with a mere 0.7% lead over Romney. As late as November 4th, Gallup were projecting a Romney victory. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_2012_United_States_presidential_election). Obama ended up winning 51% of the popular vote.
The last Gallup poll in 2004 came to a dead heat with each candidate projected to win 49% of the vote. The margin of victory ended up being less than 2.5% in Bush's favour. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections#2004)
(And you know, there was this as well. Also a famously close race in which the margin of victory between winner and second place was less than 5%.)
Since the turn of the century, the average margin of victory in American presidential elections has been <=5%. Extremely close races are bound to be harder to predict than landslides, and polling data is bound to be noisier. The election with the widest margin of victory this century was 2008 when Obama defeated McCain by 7 points, and pollsters consistently got this right in the months leading up to the election. I'm not sure if anything else is required to explain the phenomenon.
Folamh3
15d ago
I like Tulsi, although admittedly I don't know very much about her. I think that the fact that she's a veteran would win over a lot of undecideds, and being good-looking never hurt.
Folamh3
15d ago
NYT putting a Trump victory at 89%.
Assuming he wins, all of the people who've spent the last few weeks posting blackpills in the main threads about how the election is rigged and the Democrats are just going to pull "another" 2020 - I expect to see some mea culpas out of you. You know who you are.
Folamh3
15d ago
We should do an annual census, I'd be curious to see if the demographics are changing over time, and how.
Folamh3
15d ago
I think the Democrat coalition contains a lot of small but important demographics (Muslims, evangelical blacks etc.) who are very firmly opposed to a female President, for many of the same reasons that they're opposed to LGBTQ stuff. This fact makes DNC staffers uncomfortable, so they ignore it, but if they want to win elections, they won't be able to ignore it forever.
I actually don't think the idea of the Republicans putting forward a successful female candidate in the next decade is completely implausible.
Folamh3
15d ago
I placed a bet a few weeks ago that Trump would win the presidency, and a second bet that Kamala would win the popular vote. Earlier this week I was thinking "well I'll lose the former, but I'll still win the latter".
But now it's looking like there's a good chance I might win the former and lose the latter! Never saw this coming.
Day 5 of NaNoWriMo. Day 1 was surprisingly fluid, especially considering that I didn't start writing until getting home from work, and had only gotten about 4-5 hours' sleep the night before as a result of being a good Samaritan. Day 2 was torture, getting the words on the page was like pulling teeth. Days 3 and 4 have been pretty plain sailing. On the whole I'd say I'm enjoying the process so far. I crossed the 7k mark this morning - perhaps the part of the experience I'm most surprised by is how easily I've found it to write on the train during my commute.
I tried doing NaNoWriMo before, I think in 2021, but gave up literally on the first day as I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted to write about. The difference in this case is that I've had a month's planning going into it, so at the outset I knew what had to happen when, the names of most of the major characters etc. This has made all the difference in the world in motivating me to keep writing.
RationalWiki used to call this "crank magnetism": people who are receptive to one "crazy" opinion rarely limit themselves to just that. In other words, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out". I'm not linking to RationalWiki, because it's RationalWiki.
Another way of framing it is that once you've established that conventional wisdom on some topic is wrong (perhaps even knowingly wrong i.e. the powers that be know what the truth is and are keeping it from you), it's only natural to wonder what other topics are so affected. To name but two people, Graham Linehan and Lionel Shriver have both admitted that realising the extent to which the mainstream lied to them about the transgender issue (as they see it) made them sceptical about whether climate change is real.
Folamh3
16d ago
I read Lying for Money earlier this year, and enjoyed it so much that I'm rereading it. Just as entertaining on the second pass.
Folamh3
17d ago
Forgive me if this question has already been asked. What would this medical report imply for Khelif's lawsuit against JK Rowling and Elon Musk, if anything? If Khelif has testicles (and is hence a man/male by any reasonable definition of either term), how can Khelif claim JK Rowling defamed Khelif by describing Khelif as such?
Folamh3
19d ago
Started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker around 11 last night and ended up staying up till around 2. Very absorbing, the methodical gameplay really appeals to me, and the zero-g six degrees of freedom movement with conserved momentum is nauseating (in a good way). My first death really took me by surprise.
My point is not that having lived experience will lead you to have a more accurate picture of how the world works. I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.
Could a novel written by an underprivileged black youth about his experiences growing up in the hood contribute to a progressive's erroneous impression that unprovoked police shootings of unarmed black men are widespread? Sure. But all things being equal, I would expect such a novel to be a lot more affecting and convincing than a novel on the same topic written by a creative writing MFA from a wealthy family who's never even set foot in the hood.
If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that.
Sure, but even having broadly comparable lived experience might be more beneficial to the creative process than just pure research. The experience of fighting a battle in Baghdad in 2003 is unlike the experience of fighting a battle in the Somme in 1916, but I would expect that the two experiences have far more in common with each other than they have with the experience of sitting in a warm cottage with a pot of tea reading a book about the battle of the Somme.
Brexit, Trump's first term, invasion of Crimea, the Great Awokening, Arab Spring (leading to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis).
More options
Context Copy link