Folamh3
User ID: 1175
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture".
Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate. At no point did I claim that creepy fetish art doesn't significantly enrich human culture, but that non-creepy non-fetish art does significantly enrich human culture. Given the vast rate at which humans create art (e.g. 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day) and Sturgeon's law being what it is, the likelihood of any given artwork having a significant impact (positive or negative) on human culture is about the same as winning the lottery. Creating art is almost always done purely for the amusement of the creator himself, and I say this as someone who devotes a large chunk of his spare time to making and distributing music. Even the proportion of artworks which are created with the expectation of turning even a modest profit (or breaking even) are a small minority.
What I said was that depictions of Judy Hopps getting gang-banged fail to enrich human culture in even the most meagre way. That is to say, if someone draws Judy Hopps getting gang-banged, at best the existence of this "artwork" has zero impact on human culture whatsoever, and at worst it makes human culture very slightly worse (appeals to humanity's baser instincts, a waste of the artist's time when he could have spent it doing something more edifying, promoting gooning rather than self-improvement etc.). I'm not saying that art which depicts something beautiful or moving makes human culture significantly better; I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.
calling New Jersey trash or an “armpit” has been common for decades
100% confident that if Trump referred to Detroit or Baltimore or maybe even Louisiana as "trash" or similar this would be cited as a white supremacist dog whistle, for unsurprising reasons. Who, whom all the way down.
Folamh3
26d ago
Yep, I get it now, I had it all backwards in my head because I'm very new at this. Thanks a lot!
Since we're on the topic of the election, a question about betting odds from an almost complete n00b on the topic. Paddy Power is one of the biggest bookies in Ireland and the UK, and they're offering odds on the election outcome:
- Trump to win - 1/2
- Kamala to win - 13/8
- Kamala to win the popular vote - 8/15
- Trump to win the popular vote - 6/4
- Kamala to win the popular vote and Trump to win the election - 6/4
Am I tripping, or is something not adding up here? If they're placing Kamala as the favourite to win the election, surely any derivative bet from that conditional should also be the favourite, and vice versa. Why do they apparently think "Kamala wins the popular vote but Trump wins the election" is more likely to happen than not, but "Trump winning the election" is less likely to happen than not?
EDIT: Disregard, I get it now.
Folamh3
26d ago
This concept is as old as animation and cinema.
For years I've wanted to take part in NaNoWriMo, but was held back by lack of a decent idea going in: I didn't want to just start writing without even a basic premise to guide me. Four weeks ago, I was about to leave the office, when an idea I'd had years ago (but never really properly developed beyond a 500-word sketch) just popped into my head. Between walking from the office to the train station and getting off the train, I'd developed the idea into a full narrative. Over the last four weeks I've been developing the idea further and doing research (including asking you fine people technical questions, for which I'm grateful). With two days to go before the competition starts, I want to spend today and tomorrow coming up with names for my characters and fleshing out the setting and the backstory. It's going to be a busy month, wish me luck.
Only yesterday I discovered that the culture war has come for NaNoWriMo itself. I was under the impression that it was just an informal game with a website, forum and not much beyond that. I didn't realise that it's a bigger deal: they have people in leadership roles and do fundraising drives and corporate tie-ins. Earlier this year they issued a statement saying that they are totally fine with people using ChatGPT as part of their NaNoWriMo entries, and moreover, that opposition to generative AI is rooted in "classism" and "ableism". This ignited a firestorm within the community, with prominent members and published writers urging people not to participate. I can't help but feel a smidge of Schadenfreude of the "living by the sword" variety: I'm sure all of the people opposed to generative AI in the creative arts consider themselves very woke and inclusive, and must resent being accused of "ableism" for what strikes them as a perfectly reasonable position. First time?
The controversy isn't going to stop me from taking part - I think the wailing and gnashing of teeth about generative AI is rather overhyped, and in any case all I'm going to use the website for is log my progress. I have little interest in interacting with anyone else on the website who's taking part, and I certainly won't be donating to the organisation itself.
Folamh3
26d ago
I'm not a prude, I acknowledge that explicit sexuality (even unsimulated sex between actors) has its place in art. But your comment, while thought-provoking, has done nothing to dissuade me from my original perspective that human culture is not in any way enriched by a rendering of the bunny rabbit from Zootopia getting gang banged.
Folamh3
26d ago
Your own source says that Israel claims that 19 (not 9) of the people who perpetrated the October 7 attacks were UNRWA employees. Nowhere does it claim that Israel claims that these were the only people in the UNRWA who are also Hamas members, or sympathetic to Hamas's goals.
Not that I'm aware of. But I don't think this is to Hamas and co.'s credit: I just think the security apparatus Israel installed in response to suicide attacks have been effective enough to essentially nullify it as a tactic. Perhaps they've tried doing it in Gaza to attack IDF troop patrols, but I haven't heard anything to that effect.
This article from December last claims that terrorists have blown themselves up in Gaza to attack the IDF, but doesn't specify the perpetrators' ages.
Folamh3
26d ago
Wikipedia reports a lot more than that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups
Folamh3
27d ago
I know what you mean, but there's two different things going on here.
Over the last twenty years, the proportion of young people identifying as something other than heterosexual has shot up. But the proportion of young people actually engaging in same-sex sexual activity has plummeted (as part of a secular trend towards sexlessness which is also visible in trends in opposite-sex sexual behaviour in that generation). This is a negative correlation (and not causally linked: the increase in sexlessness is largely caused by technology, social atomisation, smaller family sizes and so on; the increase in LGB identification is driven by fashion and social contagion).
Over the last twenty years, the proportion of young people identifying as transgender (or related terms like non-binary) has shot up. The proportion of young people pursuing medical transition has also increased dramatically. Not at the same rate, of course: only a minority of people identifying as trans will even take hormones, never mind undergo surgery. But the two trends are positively correlated.
Folamh3
27d ago
I don't think underaged suicide bombers is anyone's idea of "classic" guerrilla warfare.
I'm sorry, did you just refer to Winston Churchill as pro-compassion? Churchill the same guy whose inaction during the Bengal famine probably caused millions of additional deaths, and who stated that any relief efforts sent to India would accomplish little to nothing, as Indians were "breeding like rabbits"?
On Native Americans and aboriginals:
I do not admit ... for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
On migration to the UK:
In 1955, Churchill expressed his support for the slogan "Keep England White" with regards to immigration from the West Indies.
On Arabs:
Churchill described the Arabs as a "lower manifestation" than the Jews, whom he viewed as a "higher grade race" compared to the "great hordes of Islam". He referred to Palestinians as "barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung".
On the Chinese:
In 1902 Churchill called China a "barbaric nation" and advocated for the "partition of China". He wrote:
I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China – I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
More on the Chinese:
Violet Bonham-Carter asked Churchill's opinion about a Labour Party visit to China. Churchill replied: "I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Churchill
The fact that you're arguing "Trump comes off as so racist and cruel - he should be more like Churchill" leads me to wonder if this entire thread is just an elaborate troll. Or if you're really just that historically illiterate.
or just infer from the fact that they're humans who just did a dangerous and difficult thing that they had a plan
What on earth is this meant to mean? "These migrants just made the dangerous and difficult journey to the US, obviously they fully intended to stay in Texas indefinitely"? How does the former in any way imply the latter? If they were planning to stay in New York, Massachusetts, Florida etc. they would almost certainly have had to go through Texas on their way, right?
Be that as it may, there's a world of difference between "authorities should look the other way while ordinary civilians dispense mob justice on the criminals who are victimising the ordinary civilians" and "authorities should look the other way while ordinary civilians go around beating up members of a specific ethnic group". Both assertions are troubling for different reasons, but I can imagine certain specific circumstances in which the former might be defensible (e.g. when the authorities are unable or unwilling to enforce the law themselves and ordinary civilians must choose between taking the law into their own hands or allowing themselves to be victimised - if I owned a grocery shop in the middle of the 1992 LA riots, I probably would have followed the rooftop Koreans' lead). I don't for a moment accept your inference that the former implies the latter. Ergo, I think your claim that Trump was directly calling for a pogrom is ridiculous, unless you're using an extremely expansive definition of "pogrom" in which you're essentially treating "career criminals" as an ethnic group.
Folamh3
29d ago
I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you're asking me by questions A and B.
Folamh3
29d ago
I'm by no means a fan of Donald Trump, and if I was an American citizen there's no question in my mind that I would've voted for Hillary in 2016. But regardless of my opinion of Trump's politics, his authoritarian tendencies, his disregard for principles, his emotional incontinence etc., credit where credit is due - the man is a remarkably compelling public speaker. I watched the first ten minutes of the podcast, having never watched Joe Rogan before, and I was riveted. People used to say that Johnny Cash could read the phonebook and make it interesting - I think I could listen to Trump go off on weird tangents about his real estate ventures and Lincoln for an hour and not feel like my time was wasted. This is not the rambling of a senile old man suffering from the onset of dementia: this is an extremely practiced, keenly honed skill. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Obviously the job of being a compelling public speaker and the job of being President are very different things, and I am confident that skill in the former is only very weakly correlated with skill in the latter. But to the extent that it's correlated at all - well, it's a skill that Trump and Obama have, Kamala and Hillary don't have, and that Biden probably had at one point but no longer has. Kamala appearing on the Rogan podcast would have been an awkward, unproductive and uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, and I'm sure everyone involved knows this, up to and including Kamala herself. If Kamala's campaign manager had made an appearance on the podcast, he or she would have come off better than Kamala herself.
Regarding Coen brothers, I thoroughly enjoyed Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading. The Hudsucker Proxy was decent, but not as successful a comedy as either Burn After Reading or The Big Lebowski. A Serious Man is weird, and I still have no idea what to make of it, ~15 years later. I only got around to seeing No Country for Old Men this year, and in all honesty I was decidedly underwhelmed, excellent villain performance from Javier Bardem notwithstanding. It's not at all representative of their oeuvre.
Folamh3
1mo ago
6 years should be plenty.
After Trump takes office, or leaves office?
I do think it's pretty reasonable to characterize e.g. this video https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1840483582433009711 as Trump calling for a pogrom, but the implication is that you're only supposed to get really violent with known thieves who are maybe even actively robbing you.
I don't see anything untoward about the claim that you're entitled to defend yourself if someone is trying to steal from you. It may not always be the best idea, and in many cases from a self-preservation perspective one might be better off just taking the L and letting the mugger take your wallet rather than fighting back and risking getting yourself killed. But in terms of ethics, if someone comes up to you on the street and says "give me your wallet or I'll stab you", you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself.
As an aside, the fact that Trump says "if someone's trying to steal from you, you're entitled to defend yourself using force if necessary" and you apparently hear "oh my God he's encouraging people to go out and beat up Hispanic people!" in itself strikes me as more than a little racist.
Of course you can and should use "this politician might do X" to inform your voting decisions. I'm just countenancing you that you ought to consider the fact that Trump has already been in office for four years and nothing remotely like the sequence of events you're describing transpired.
I mostly attribute them to weakness, not ideology.
How convenient, that whenever Republicans do something one disapproves of it's because they're moral mutants, but whenever Democrats do something one disapproves of (up to and including literally the same thing you were just criticising Republicans for) it's because their hands were forced. It couldn't possibly be that Biden (who co-authored the 1986 bill introducing sentencing disparities for crack vs. cocaine, widely criticised as racist; and who once eulogized a former Exalted Cyclops in the KKK) is more racist than he presents himself, or that spending 8 years as VP for a President who got elected on an anti-immigration platform might have rubbed off on him? No, perish the thought.
Fundamental attribution error in a nutshell. Out of curiosity, is there anything a Democrat President has done which you disapprove of and which you believe represents a moral failing on their part?
Folamh3
1mo ago
To reiterate, the OP quoted Yarvin as stating "there is no way [Bezos] can use the Post." Vetoing a specific news article or editorial absolutely counts as "using".
Folamh3
1mo ago
I don't think the rightness or wrongness of an action can be determined solely on the basis of which moods are missing.
Netanyahu: "I will not rest until Yahya Sinwar and the rest of Hamas leadership are dead in the ground, as punishment for the shocking cruelty of October 7th."
You: "Boooo!"
Alternatively:
Netanyahu: "While I'm not happy about it, the destruction of Hamas is the only way to ensure peace and stability in Israel, Palestine and the surrounding region. I wish there was another way, but we've exhausted all other possibilities."
You: "Yaaay!"
Followed by literally zero difference in the military strategy and tactics the IDF pursue.
I think you're putting far too much stock in the (intrinsically unknowable) motivations and psychological states of political leaders, as opposed to the actual actions they undertake. You seem to be saying that a just war, conducted with humility, a clearly defined goal and taking care (insofar as is practicable) to minimize civilian casualties is wrong if the people behind it are pursuing the destruction of their enemy as a terminal goal; whereas a brutal, bloodthirsty war, with no clearly defined end state, in which war crimes are a commonplace, and displaying utter callousness towards collateral damage - such a war could be a-ok in your book, provided the leaders make the right noises about the military action being "regrettable". (I leave it up to you to decide whether Israel's military action in Gaza is better described by the latter or former.) It's politics of the symbolic, again.
I could've written this paragraph myself. I used to write fiction and compose music quite a lot, but when I undertake NaNoWriMo this year, it will be the first significant chunk of original prose I'll have written since mid-Covid. Before that I wrote four novels or novellas (three as a teenager). The reason I haven't written anything since mid-Covid isn't because I've had writer's block (in the sense that I've been trying to write but the words aren't coming to me) - I just haven't had any ideas since. And it happened in two artistic media - it used to be I could write an entire song in my head without touching a guitar, the ideas would just come to me of their own accord. That almost never happens to me anymore, except sometimes with rhythmic patterns - with rare exceptions, writing a melody is something I have to consciously work at, playing a riff over and over until it congeals into something more substantial. It's hardly surprising to me that the best musicians tend to produce their best work in their twenties and peter out thereafter.
All of the foregoing is why it was such a surprise to me when the idea for this story popped into my head - I'd legitimately forgotten how pleasant that sensation is of being in a creative flow state and the ideas are just "coming" to you. I'm not going to say it's better than sex, because it isn't, but it's an intensely pleasurable intellectual sensation.
Why do ideas rarely come to me anymore? Half of the answer is just growing up and having a more keenly honed sense of what works and what doesn't. It's not merely that the four novels or novellas I wrote earlier in my life had a strong premise but were let down by the execution - I think even the basic premises of all of these novels were unworkable to start with, and I was too young/inexperienced/immature to recognise that at the time, so close to my creation and so caught up in the act of creating that I failed to appreciate how dumb my creation was. I remember a handful of the ideas for stories and novels I had when I was younger, ideas which I fully intended on bringing to fruition when I could find the time, and absolutely all of them were utterly terrible. (And that's not even getting into the ideas I've forgotten - I very much doubt there were any gems in there.) Like Scott talking about the Chamber of Guf, I think it's very possible that ideas for stories appear in my subconscious at about the same rate as they always did, but my quality control filter prevents them from rising to the level where I'm consciously aware of them. I'm very excited about the idea for this story, in large part because I feel like it has a very strong "elevator pitch" - even if I can't pull it off, I feel like someone could do something interesting with the same basic premise. This is in stark contrast to my third and fourth novels in particular, which were navel-gazing narcissism from start to finish.
But the "quality control filter" explanation doesn't explain why melodies don't come to me as often as they used to.
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