Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
16d 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
16d 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
16d ago
We should do an annual census, I'd be curious to see if the demographics are changing over time, and how.
Folamh3
16d 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
16d 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
17d 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
18d 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
20d 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.
Folamh3
20d ago
I read The Hurt Locker, it was pretty good. Although I was really talking about movies etc. rather than books - did anyone involved in making the adaptation actually go to Iraq?
Folamh3
20d ago
According to his biography:
Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs
While I have mixed feelings about Oliver Stone, I have to concede that at least his confrontational "war is hell" movies about Vietnam actually drew on his personal experiences of serving there. Which leads me to an interesting question - have there been any films about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan written or directed by people who took part in said invasions?
Folamh3
20d ago
I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies
I have this thought every time I watch a movie directed by John Carney. It's as if he's an alien who's never met a human being face to face and only learned how they talk and behave from watching movies. Oppenheimer gave me the same feeling.
I keep coming back to this article by a guy talking about the National Book Awards, and how they've become increasingly insular and self-referential over time. He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college. Increasingly, the people winning or being nominated for these awards are people who hold MFAs in creative writing and have never lived outside of the academy for any significant period of time. They're books written by people who learned everything they know about life from reading other books, rather than from the primary sources of actually doing and experiencing things firsthand.
Pointedly, he notes that previous generations of award-winning books often had mass populist appeal and were just as widely read by ordinary people and educated people. Increasingly, National Book Award-winning novels are novels you've never heard of: they're written by and for MFA graduates.
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.
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