FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
If you want mechanical gratification, that can be had for free.
Are you talking about casual sex, or masturbation?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Most junkies strike me as happier and more self-actualised than the modal anime/DnD nerd. In a weird way I respect their lifestyle – I just have no interest in subsidising it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
Grist for the mill for my conspiracy theory that China is pushing incest porn as part of a broader effort to promote dysgenic behaviour in the West.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
I Googled "arrested for death threats" and found a story from yesterday about a man who was imprisoned for threatening Kemi Badenoch. I get the impression that, on the rare occasions I hear about people facing legal action for making death threats, the people they threatened were usually politicians.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
I am very curious if it's still legal to watch a video in which one participant gets their head stuck in a washing machine and the other takes advantage.
Funnily enough Hanania made almost exactly the same suggestion.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
From an acquaintance who was a porn director
Does he have any juicy stories? Has he ever been intimate with any famous names?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
I've never played the original, but I'm curious if the soundtrack is intact? I was reading Pitchfork's gushing review of it, and apparently when the game was first remade for the 3DS, Koji Kondo went to great lengths to slavishly recreate the soundtrack exactly as-is:
A remake of Ocarina of Time in 2011 roused Kondo, like a great gatekeeper awoken by a sense of duty. He preached the necessity of continuity, giving employees strict instructions to stick as closely as possible to the original, watching out for fractional differences in tempo and timing that would ruin the malleability of the score. Tampering with the leitmotifs twinned with environments and characters was a cardinal sin: nothing could be worse than jeopardizing fond memories. Even basic SFX had to be recreated to transmit the feel of the N64 era on the handheld 3DS, despite the newer hardware being wired completely differently. Heads were scratched over a revamped “Title Theme” that Kondo kept rejecting, before his young team clocked that the N64’s characteristic reverb, used to mask the harsh compression, had been scrubbed. The opening ocarina no longer drifted into view from a far-off forest, but was front-loaded and far too clean in the mix. Once derided, the N64’s drawbacks were now cherished, imperfections to stimulate a flutter of butterflies in the gut.
I'd be surprised if they went to all that trouble, only to scrap the soundtrack and start over for the second remake.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
What is really wrong here may be the way judges make up whatever ruling they want and try to justify it in a way that sounds good. Naturally doing this will result in rulings that don't make sense and have bad implications.
Agreed, and I hope this judge's ruling (as contrived as its legal reasoning might be) sets a precedent that defendants in criminal cases cannot emotionally blackmail judges into doing their bidding. Better still would be if the entire English and Welsh judiciary simply pre-emptively announced that they will not be entertaining any requests of this nature, and so the defense's time would be better spent mounting an actual defense.
It is now a criminal offense to view or possess pornography that depicts "strangulation" including choking or "face sitting", incest including depictions of step siblings...
I'm not the first to note that it's pretty funny that watching two porn actors pretending to be adult step-siblings (not even blood relatives) is now illegal in the UK; meanwhile an outright majority of Pakistani Brits are married to their first cousins. A relative of mine teaches at a British school with a large Pakistani population, and he's told me that rates of deafness (because of consecutive generations of inbreeding) are through the roof.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
Huh, I should've put two and two together, I knew Walliams had been #MeToo'd. For some reason I thought PPT was someone younger, maybe an ex-footballer in his thirties.
Now seems as good a time as any to discuss our favourite Little Britain catchphrases. "I'm the only gay in the vill-age!"
Catch-22 IRL
CW: suicide, spoilers for Seven
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is justly revered as one of the best novels ever written about war, and one of the best novels of any kind from the twentieth century. The title refers to various paradoxical or mutually contradictory rules one encounters in the armed forces, the most famous of which concerns how a fighter pilot may take medical leave owing to psychic distress. If a pilot is crazy, he should not be flying any more missions and ought to be grounded. However, if the pilot, recognising his own mental illness, thereby requests to be grounded – the mere act of his requesting indicates a concern for his own welfare which is entirely rational. Conversely, a pilot would have to be crazy to volunteer for missions. "Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to."
Over at Unherd (archive link), Kathleen Stock presents an interesting real-life parallel of a case currently going through the court system in the UK (emphasis mine):
The unnamed celebrity in the news this week would perhaps agree. In the High Court judgment that ultimately rejected his injunction application, we were offered a fascinating portrait of two souls fighting it out in a single body: a sadly resigned victim (him), prophesying his own demise at the hands of a crazed and implacable killer (also him).
The goal of "PPT" — still his official name as this goes to press, pre-appeal — is to stifle allegations of inappropriate sexual activity, some of it potentially criminal. PPT asserts that publication of this material by the Guardian and ITN will very likely trigger a suicide attempt in him, thereby causing devastation to his son.
Understandably, most of the interest in this case pertains to the identity of the claimant and the precise nature of the complaints against him, but there are other revealing angles too. To my mind, one of these is the way that PPT pictures the state’s failure to quash a juicy story about him as equivalent to leaving razors lying around a psychiatric ward. A crucial part of his legal argument pertains to pre-existing problems (bipolar, a trauma background, "personality-related vulnerabilities"), a recent suicide attempt, and a current restraint under the Mental Health Act. Given this background, lawyers acting on behalf of PPT argue that the state has responsibility for his welfare, and that curbing press freedom is a way of exercising this duty of care. Nothing other than stopping the media can save him from himself, apparently, not even hospitalisation and appropriate psychiatric treatment.
Ultimately, the judge disagreed that PPT’s suicide was inevitable in the circumstances. Ironically, he did so on the grounds that the man was so miserable, he probably couldn’t see straight: "His prediction of his own future conduct is made in the context of depressive illness, hopelessness and catastrophic thinking … it is not a reliable basis for concluding that no future treatment or intervention could alter that risk."
Stock notes the parallels with Catch-22, though in this case the logical dilemma is almost the reverse of Heller's. In Catch-22, possessing the accurate insight that you are mentally ill (and acting upon it) is taken as evidence of your sanity. In PPT's case, however, the fact that he is predicting that X will cause him to take his own life is taken as evidence of his mental illness, which means that his prediction must be discounted as coming from someone lacking in mental acuity. The situation is reminiscent of what Eric S. Raymond calls "Kafkatrapping", wherein a person's denial that they are racist/sexist/homophobic etc. is taken as evidence of their guilt. As Raymond noted, this argument logically implies that everyone in the entire world is guilty of the sins in question, as it divides the world into a) those who freely admit to being racist or sexist, and b) those who, in denying this, implicate themselves.
This leads to an interesting philosophical conundrum. If a person predicts that, should circumstance X come to pass, they will take their own life – should we ever take that at face value, or should it always call their mental acuity into question? By the reasonable person standard, are there any circumstances such that, if they befell someone, we would reasonably expect a person otherwise untroubled by mental illness to take his own life? I'm not suicidal, I have no reason to believe I'm crazy, and yet I don't find it the least bit difficult to imagine hypothetical circumstances under which taking my own life would seem like a very compelling choice indeed.* But if I were to announce "if such-and-such happened, I would strongly consider killing myself", would the mere act of announcing this indicate that I was not of sound mind?
Granted, I don't think that's what happened here – I don't think the judge decided the defendant was depressed solely on the basis of his threat to kill himself. As mentioned above, PPT's defense team went to great lengths to demonstrate their client's neurodivergent credentials (bipolar, traumatic experiences), with the obvious goal of establishing that his threat to take his own life was not an idle one. But it seems to have backfired: the judge decided "you're obviously profoundly depressed and mentally ill, such that not even your threat to kill yourself can be taken at face value". Again, a very Heller-esque situation: PPT's threat to take his own life was taken less seriously because he claimed to have a history of mental illness (which implies the judge would have taken it more seriously otherwise)! Thinking about this is making me go cross-eyed.
Or perhaps the judge really does believe that PPT will attempt to take his own life if his conditions aren't met, but he simply has a policy of never negotiating with terrorists, including emotional terrorists. It would set a very dangerous legal precedent indeed, if defendants in sex crimes were allowed to dictate the terms of the proceedings against them on pain of suicide.
While we can of course recognise the existence of mentally ill people with diminished capacity, the minute the legal system explicitly and formally acknowledged this, it quickly created some very perverse incentives. I'm reminded (again) of the 1995 thriller Seven. After murdering five victims, the serial killer John Doe unexpectedly turns himself in at the end of the second act. His defense attorney presents the police with a very atypical plea bargain: Doe claims to know where two additional corpses are buried, and if the detectives in charge of his case (Mills and Somerset) agree to escort him to this location alone, he will immediately sign a full confession and plead guilty to all of the murders. But if the two detectives decline, Doe will instead plead not guilty by reason of insanity (the defense attorney notes that the extremely gruesome killings would make such a plea a cakewalk). Somerset points out that, if Doe was to plead insanity, the conversation they are currently having would be admissible as evidence: the fact that Doe is capable of forethought and blackmail strongly suggests his higher reasoning capabilities are very much intact. I'm curious if anything like this (in which a defendant threatens to plead insanity unless such-and-such) has any precedent in legal history.
The headline of Stock's column is "Stop weaponising suicide". While I agree with this sentiment,** I don't think PPT's case is actually an example of suicide being weaponised. Rather, the threat of suicide is being weaponised: it's just ordinary old-fashioned emotional blackmail. I've long thought that threatening to kill yourself if your demands aren't met is one of the cheapest, most contemptible bargaining tactics ever invented (especially given what a high proportion of these threats turn out to be empty), and that anyone who employs it no longer deserves any place in civil society.*** Perhaps one of the most disheartening trends in modern society is how certain political activists have realised they can employ this bargaining tactic in political contexts, not just interpersonal ones, in order to get their way. I don't want to delve into this too much as it's well-trodden territory, and this post is too long as it stands. Suffice it to say that, as much as the term "genocide" has been abused over the past few decades, the concept of a self-administered "genocide" (geno-suicide? sui-genocide?) makes an outright mockery of the concept.
If an adult threatened to kill themselves if you didn't do what they wanted you to, I think the only reasonable response is to stand firm. As much as it might pain you, if you give in to their demands, you're sending the message that they can threaten to kill themselves whenever they want you to do something for them – there is absolutely no way this will be the last time they use this dirty trick. It follows that when a political faction employs it – once again, the only appropriate response is to stand firm. We do not negotiate with terrorists, including emotional terrorists.
*I'm reminded of a profoundly disturbing anti-drink driving PSA produced in Northern Ireland, in which a drunk driver accidentally kills a small child, the tagline of which was "Could you live with the shame?"
**What do I mean by that? I think we should have an explicit policy that it is tasteless and disrespectful to politicise the suicide of someone you've never met, or who you barely know. If Alice takes her own life and Bob (who never met Alice, nor interacted with her in any way) announces "Alice would still be with us here today, if it wasn't for [Bob's political hobby horse]", we should collectively recognise that this is tacky, gross and disrespectful to Alice's memory. This is true regardless of what Bob's pet issue happens to be. If, however, we have very good reason to believe that Alice actually did kill herself for political reasons (say, setting herself on fire while yelling "free Palestine"), that's fair game.
***Some months ago, I read an article on Substack by a female psychologist (it may have been Hannah Spier, but I can't find the specific article I'm thinking of), in which she argued that, contrary to widespread claims that it's a personality disorder whose sufferers deserve our sympathy, borderline is in fact an evolutionarily beneficial constellation of traits which certain women use to accomplish what they want. She agrees with Scott that borderline (which is far more common in women) and antisocial personality disorder (far more common in men) are essentially the same condition. "Sufferers" of both conditions are prone to making violent threats in interpersonal relationships in order to get what they want: the difference is that, because men are bigger and stronger than women, these threats tend to be directed outwards ("if you break up with me, I'll kill you"), whereas women tend to direct them inwards ("if you break up with me, I'll kill myself"). It was a provocative and unsettling
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
Well, as obnoxious as the mods (and me, though it's not like my opinion carries any weight here) find his single-issue posting, he hasn't actually been banned for it, unlike the Hock guy. I really do think what the mods object to is repetitive one-note single-issue posting, as opposed to your apparent belief that they are censoring criticism of da Joos.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I know the feeling, East and Central Asian women are almost unfathomably beautiful.
I bought a new phone a few months ago, but still held on to the old one. I made a deliberate choice not to install Instagram on my new phone, but it's still installed on the old one, and as there's no SIM card in the old one it means I can only browse Instagram at home. This has greatly curtailed how often I get distracted by gorgeous Instagram models during the day.
I did it the other day, and it told me my type is "Instagram model" (okay, seems kind of underspecified – there are Instagram models from every ethnic background and body type) and "fox face", a term I'd never heard before. Apparently it means a triangular-shaped face with prominent cheekbones, or something? Anyway, when it showed me my type they were almost exclusively Asian women, which certainly checks out, although I'm attracted to women of other ethnicities too.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Twitter notices I stare stupefied at scantily clad Asian women doing various things
A man of culture.
He stopped writing those at a consistent pace due to badgering by mods.
Well, that's an inference you're drawing. There could be any number of reasons he doesn't post as often as he once did.
I don't know how to see modhat comments in the modlog
Ctrl-F "distinguished". You can also filter using the dropdown in the top right of the modlog.
This thread continues the saga. https://www.themotte.org/post/3421/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/394266?context=8#context
This thread does not contain any mod warnings, so far as I can see.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
There was a mass shooting in Kraków yesterday. The perpetrator, a 24-year-old man, killed his parents and sister in the family home, then drove to a public square and killed six more before being shot by police officers, succumbing to his injuries early this morning.
Unknown motive. Early reports claimed he had far-right politics, while others claim to have identified one of his social media profiles which prominently features a rainbow flag in the profile picture. I'm loath to speculate further until more details have been confirmed.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It is true
SecureSignals's profile is public, as is the moderation log. Why don't you share some examples of him getting modded merely for the act of "making a post... on things that he found interesting that related to the holocaust and zionism"?
I finished reading the comic book adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's interesting that I hadn't read the original book in about twenty years and yet I remembered the details of the plot perfectly. It was a faithful, well-crafted adaptation which for the most part quotes Lee's original dialogue and narration verbatim. Recommended.
Doing a complete ideological 180, I started on The Camp of the Saints. (The Amazon delivery driver called me to tell me he was on his way, and from his voice he was obviously a first-generation African migrant. Imagine if he'd known what he was delivering, lol.) Stylistically, it reminds me of Ayn Rand and, to a lesser extent, Milan Kundera, although it's hard to know how much of that is an artefact of the translation. What I like is that, although it's set in contemporary times (or perhaps the near future, at the time of writing), the narration has this sort of mythic quality. While not exactly a fast-paced book, so far I'm not finding it a chore to get through.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I think that that is less from any inherent differences in the religions and more from cultural differences in the places in which they are practised;
This sounds suspiciously like an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Ever since I was a child I've assigned sexes to letters in the alphabet. I didn't realise this was a form of synaesthesia until a few years ago. It sometimes leads me to assign unintuitive connotations to words based on what the initial letter is.
From the study each of your links cites:
Quality Assessment
Based on the NIH quality assessment tool, the majority of article [sic] ranged between “poor” and “fair” categories.
In the current study, we identified a total of 7928 cases from 14 different countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest attempt to compile the information on regret rates in this population. However, limitations such as significant heterogeneity among studies and among instruments used to assess regret rates, and moderate-to-high risk of bias in some studies represent a big barrier for generalization of the results of this study. The lack of validated questionnaires to evaluate regret in this population is a significant limiting factor. In addition, bias can occur because patients might restrain from expressing regrets due to fear of being judged by the interviewer. Moreover, the temporarity of the feeling of regret in some patients and the variable definition of regret may underestimate the real prevalence of “true” regret.
You've shared that airplane bullets meme with me in the past. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who underwent an elective procedure and doesn't regret it will be more willing to participate in a study about the efficacy of said procedure than someone who regrets undergoing said procedure. A person who sadly took their own life after undergoing one of these procedures wouldn't appear in any of these studies, and there's at least one study which found that trans people who underwent gender reassignment surgery were more prone to suicide than trans people that didn't. (I'm not claiming the relationship is necessarily causative, but simply illustrating that these procedures aren't the silver bullet they're commonly presented as. Note that this was a longitudinal study following participants over thirty years, over three times longer than the longest study included in the regret meta-analysis and four times longer than the mean.)
The authors tabulate all the people who participated in the original studies, but don't give us any indication of what the denominator is (as obviously they couldn't, this information not being available to them).
Suffice it to say that I think "gender-affirming care has lower rates of regret than knee replacement surgery" is an irresponsible claim to make in a vacuum and without qualification. If I cited an otherwise identical meta-analysis making the opposite claim, you'd be pointing out all of these methodological shortcomings.
In fairness, porn stars are selected for attractiveness and ability in the bedroom. They are not selected for acting ability, except in so far as faking an orgasm is a kind of acting. In porn with any kind of story, I imagine some people find the dialogue-heavy parts immersion-breaking.
More options
Context Copy link