FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
Are you saying that white supremacist organisations are flocks of wolves?
Conservative estimates of when The Simpsons stopped being good put it at season five, while more generous estimates (I'm in this camp) put it around season ten. No matter how you slice it, The Simpsons has been bad for at least twice as long as it was good. It's weird to think of The Simpsons as having a net-negative impact on popular culture, with its molehill of classic episodes which left an indelible mark on the popular imagination being dwarfed by its mountain of unwatchably bad ones. But maybe I'm thinking of this wrong and entertainment is a strong-link problem, where it doesn't matter how much rough you create as long as there a handful of diamonds scattered throughout.
The Simpsons doesn't feel like the kind of show where they kept it going because the hardcore fans want it even if the quality is declining over time. It feels like the kind of show where the population of casual fans is big enough will keep watching even while the original hardcore fans look on in horror as it transforms into a shell of its former self.
I don't know how this didn't occur to me before, considering I just finished it recently. My girlfriend recommended a German black comedy series called How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), whose fourth and final season came out last year. It concerns a recently dumped teenaged boy who, in a quest to win back his ex, starts a darkweb site to sell ecstasy in a bid to impress her. Consistently funny and engaging throughout with a cast of likeable characters, and no major drop-offs in quality from one season to the next. I will admit that the pacing in the last season felt a little rushed, but not fatally so, and the ending felt earned and satisfying. The only major downside I can see is that it's so much a product of its time that it may come off as somewhat dated ten years from now. As black comedies about unlikely drug barons go, for my money it's a better series than Breaking Bad, and I mean that without a shred of irony.
I recently finished the fourth draft of my novel. In the next couple of weeks I'm hoping to submit the first three chapters to a competition, but I'm still not completely happy with them (particularly the first few paragraphs of the first chapter, which have been heavily revised since the third draft).
Would anyone be interested in acting as a beta reader for just the first three chapters (~5k words)?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
For example? "Progressive policies" is a large set.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
the defection dynamic causing the conflict is still observable today.
How are the Jews defecting now?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
2:41 is incredible. My PR is a hair under four hours and I was chuffed to bits with that.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d 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.
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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d 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
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Are you saying Ashkenazim and Mizrahim are respectively sub-groups of Africans and Arabs?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d 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?
I see your point. But as I'm fond of noting, contrary to claims that Israel is an ethnically homogenous ethnostate, Arabs make up fully 21% of Israel's population, while 6% are listed as "other", meaning ethnic Jews only make up 73% of its population. How does that compare to the other countries you mentioned?
The total population of the countries listed above is ~40 million, and the percentage of that population who are considered native to their respective countries is about 79%. So contrary to claims of it being an ethnostate, Israel is actually more ethnically diverse than the average of all the countries you listed. The only countries which are more diverse are Latvia, Estonia and Sweden (and that last one could well be a rounding error). And it hardly needs stating that, in pretty much all of the countries listed above, the lion's share of the non-native population is made up of people from ethnic backgrounds closely related to that of the native population e.g. 24% of Latvia is Russian, as is 20% of Estonia; Scandinavians often migrate to their Scandinavian neighbours and so on.
Frankly, based on the countries you mentioned, I don't really buy this narrative of conniving Jewish rootless cosmopolitans pushing for the great replacement in foreign countries while jealously maintaining perfect ethnic homogeneity in their homeland. Lithuania, Finland, Ireland etc. are far closer to being ethnostates than Israel is, or ever was.
You might well object that, even if Israel is more ethnically diverse than a lot of people acknowledge, the Knesset aren't exactly pushing for open borders or letting in asylum seekers in their hundreds of thousands. That's a fair point. At the same time, Arab Israelis can vote, stand for election, serve in the military and so on, a majority of Arab Israelis consider themselves proud citizens of Israel, and if there are serious plans to ethnically cleanse Israel of its Arab population by forcible deportation, I'm not aware of it.
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