FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
Finished The Mothman Prophecies during the week. Good spooky fun, although I hardly believe a word of it. Makes me want to watch the film for the umpteenth time, though I'll have to wait for spooky season. The "prophecies" part of the title refers to how various contactees reported foreknowledge of assorted international events after interacting with Indrid Cold and co. I had to laugh when the first example used to illustrate these entities' supposed prescience was something along the lines "there will soon be a major escalation of one of the conflicts in the Middle East".
My word. Who but a clairvoyant alien superintelligence could have predicted such a thing!
A few months ago on a whim I bought the comic book The Con Artists by the Irish artist Luke Healy, which I read from start to finish on my evening commute the same day I finished Mothman. It concerns two gay men who were childhood friends, one of whom fractures his arm after being hit by a bus, an incident that in turn exposes thitherto unacknowledged tensions in their friendship. Aggressively millennial: the protagonist is a shitty standup comedian who claims to suffer from an anxiety disorder, but can't stop cracking self-deprecating jokes during his therapy sessions. The artwork was clean and minimal to the point of lacking character. Healy is talented both in writing and artwork, but I think he could benefit from getting off Instagram and trying to carve out a more unique identity of his own.
On to The Age of Diagnosis by the Irish physician Suzanne O'Sullivan. My fiancée attended a talk by her to promote her new book and was very impressed: she read this one before I did. O'Sullivan's thesis will be familiar to many of us here: medics now diagnose and prescribe more than they ought, characterising problems as medical disorders when previous generations just considered them personality traits or ordinary slings-and-arrows. The first chapter concerns the ethical dilemmas surrounding whether to get tested for Huntington's disease. O'Sullivan's prose sometimes reads like a case history, but I'm interested to see what ground she covers and how deep into the culture war she goes (in the introduction she touched on "long Covid" and the skyrocketing rates of autism and ADHD diagnoses).
Crazy how you always use these rambling irrelevant "analogies" when someone points out a hole in your worldview. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
As ever, there's a rather obvious elision in your analogy which you seem determined not to acknowledge:
However, if her father were to refuse her request, in order to avoid the slight possibility of her getting away with anything, while subjecting her to the far larger likelihood of spending every night for many years terrified out of her wits
I agree that if a girl is scared of something in her bedroom and wants a nightlight, the most parsimonious explanation is that she really is scared of it. The ratio of girls who claim to want nightlights because they're really scared of something in their bedrooms vs. girls who do so for some ulterior motive must be heavily weighted in favour of the former category.
But for your analogy to work, we need a good reason to assume that "people don't lie about their gender identity" is the null hypothesis. You seem to have essentially decided that the number of people telling the truth about their gender identity is vastly in excess of the number of people lying about it for ulterior motives. I genuinely don't know how you arrived at this conclusion.
Bryan Caplan had an article this week talking about how many socialists (and progressives, by extension) seem fundamentally incapable (or unwilling) to grasp the basic concept that people respond to incentives. I feel like I'm going nuts, because proponents of gender ideology will scoff at the idea that anyone would lie about their gender identity – then immediately turn around and say "so, anyone who identifies as a woman should be permitted to compete in female sporting events, should be allowed to use dating apps for female lesbians, should be sent to a woman's prison if they're convicted of a crime, should be eligible for grants and scholarships earmarked for female people, and there should be no gatekeeping on any of this because People Know Who They Are, and anyone who suggests that people who've never been diagnosed with gender dysphoria aren't really trans is a Nazi, and it doesn't matter if someone only discovered they were trans after being convicted of a crime..."
"Why would someone lie about their gender identity?" My brother in Christ, you just told me. The policies you're advocating are the reason they would lie.
I suspect I'd know it when I see it.
First the definition of the word "woman" depends on the context, and has something to do with either having concave genitals or really wanting them. Then you admit that wanting concave genitals has nothing to do with it and it's all about self-identification. Then you admit that even self-identification has certain arbitrary carve-outs which you are unable to enumerate.
What this means in practice is that, in your framework, the word "woman" is undefined. It has no formalised definition. It is a floating signifier.
Do you understand how you've completely vindicated the effectiveness of the "what is a woman?" gotcha question, when by your own admission you literally cannot define the term under discussion and it ultimately boils down to "you know it when you see it"? Do you understand how frustrating it is to have a debate with you, when you're constantly changing around the definitions of the words you're using, how it makes the act of talking to you feel like a shell game? Do you understand why most people find gender ideology alienating, incoherent and intellectually unserious, when it proposes taking a commonsense word like "woman" with a simple and intuitive definition based on anatomy and replacing it with "idk whatever you want lol but don't ever make fun of us or we'll call for you to be murdered"?
The word "woman", as used by you, means nothing. In future, I will simply disregard any sentence you write which contains the word "woman" or it's derivatives, as I have absolutely no idea what entities you're referring to by the use of said words. By your own admission, neither do you. You literally cannot provide a working definition beyond "I know it when I see it". You cannot define one of the basic terms on which your ideology rests, and yet expect the rest of it to accept it at face value.
'[She's] a convicted rapist' is not such an indication because convictions for sexual assault are not the exclusive province of people born with male genitals.
Note the elision here. Yes, female people can commit sexual assault (although they commit a tiny, near-negligible proportion of sexual assaults every year). In many jurisdictions (including the UK, Ireland, Queensland and others), rape is defined as forcible or non-consensual penetration with a penis, which female people definitionally cannot commit.
I don't know if your acceptance of people committing the most quintessentially male of all crimes in the category "women" can be attributed to sheer unbridled gullibility, or an outright (but unacknowledged) hatred of women. What's that saying? Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice?
You casually describe others as misogynistic without once stopping yourself to ask if your own attitudes are misogynistic, in practice if not by design. A man using the word "female" is misogynistic. Forcing a woman to share a prison cell with a male person with an intact penis who has used said member to penetrate multiple females without their consent and proudly declared his intent to do so again at the earliest opportunity – progressive.
"Why should I have to share a cell with this rapist?! He's going to rape me too!"
"Well, he's a woman."
"He only started 'identifying' as a woman post-conviction! In what possible sense could be be considered a woman?"
"Eh – you know one when you see one. His raping is so femme-coded. It's like, yass kween."
Is that seriously the argument you would present in this case?
If so, does it seriously not strike you as utterly repulsive and abhorrent?
What the fuck is a female-coded rape with a penis? You ask your victim their star sign in the process?
The fact that you can look at a male person who has forcibly inserted his penis into a female person without her consent, has no desire to remove said appendage and proudly declares his intent to use it for that purpose again – you can look at him and announce "I know a woman when I see one, and boy are you ever one!" – just, honestly. This worldview, to my mind, seems far more misogynistic than those people who want to repeal the 19th amendment. After patiently listening to you expound on this ideology for months, the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that anyone who endorses this ideology is either ignorant about what it really entails, or has a profoundly deep-seated hatred for female people as a group.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
The lawyer actually said the famous words: “Permission to treat the witness as hostile”.
The only time I remember hearing this phrase was that one scene in The Dark Knight. What does it actually mean, in practice?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
Completely forgot she was in Into the Wild, shows what a big impression she made. I heard Spencer was pretty good.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
None of the other actors in this pretentious French movie struck me as exceptionally talented, and yet she was still the obvious weak link. Even Taylor Lautner upstaged her in the first Twilight movie.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I went to a gig on Thursday in which a moshpit ensued. It was the first time I'd been in a moshpit this year.
When was the last time you were in a moshpit? Which artist was performing? How old were you? Did you have a good time? Did you suffer any after-effects? Would you do it again?
There is no greater motivator than spite.
Some arsehole charted out a running route which spells out a political slogan, ran that route, then posted a screenshot of his Strava run on Instagram. A Facebook page I follow shared it, soying out over how "based" and "redpilled" he is. I pointed out that this is stupid performative virtue-signalling nonsense. Various people replied to me saying that I'm just envious that I'm not as good a runner as he is. I pointed out that I've completed three marathons with a PR of just under four hours, and also that this guy's stated pace (10km in 53:20) is not even particularly fast, and significantly slower than my PR for that distance. These people were incredulous. I was planning to go to the gym this afternoon anyway, so I dutifully hopped on the treadmill and ran 10k in 48 minutes exactly.
Mogged.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I'll begrudgingly admit she was alright in Love Lies Bleeding, but she's always been the weakest actor in anything I've seen her in.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Supposedly the director didn't want him in The Notebook as he didn't think he was handsome enough to be a romantic lead.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
My fiancée says Jennifer Lawrence. Obviously attractive, obviously a talented actress equally adept at comedy and drama, and yet has a certain girl-next-door quality that you could imagine shooting the shit with her over a couple of beers.
She also co-starred with him in Gangster Squad, and Crazy Stupid Love (the latter of which, despite the silly title, is actually well worth checking out).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Yeah. "That's XCOM, baby!" Still bollocks though.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
XCOM 2, Commander Ironman mode, of course.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Florence Pugh, by virtue of being Literally Me Her.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Malicious compliance, in other words.
Jason Arday hearing or reading about someone else's personal tragedy.
Apparently Jason Arday's resignation from Cambridge has not halted Simon & Schuster's plan to release his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. (Perhaps there's no such thing as bad publicity.) Someone at the Atlantic got their hands on a galley proof, and boy howdy, not even the autobiographical claims he's made about himself so far could have prepared us for its contents:
The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) ... Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school... Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic...
When Arday applied to university, his girlfriend, Debs—who had been teaching him to read—“wrote out” the application on his behalf, including the personal statement. In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s “the only reason I survived” university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter... His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style...
More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”... Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.
Unsurprisingly for such a compulsive fabulist, Arday can't keep his story straight from one year to the next, and the contents of the galley proof are markedly different from the synopsis described in its original proposal:
That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.
Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome...
The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.
Arday's memoir sounds like a textbook example of misery lit. It would be remiss of me not to cite the money quote from the Wikipedia article on the genre:
The Waterstones chain of British book retailers even instituted a discrete "Painful Lives" section; Borders Books followed suit with "Real Lives". At the WHSmith chain, the section is titled "Tragic Life Stories"; in each case side-stepping the awkward dilemma of whether to categorize the books under fiction or non-fiction.
I've heard this several times before. His sister also has a Substack and she once posted an utterly sophomoric article about how gender-affirming care is safe and effective, and she'd know because her own son daughter child has been subjected to it. Upon reading said article, an awful lot clicked into place.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Oh damn, I forgot all about him. You don't hear so much about him ever since BLM fell off.
The lies ballooned to such levels (running marathons with a fractured leg?) that the only possible reason nobody queried him is that he was indeed a pure DEI hire and nobody expected him to actually be able to do anything.
I speculate what happened was that, before becoming somewhat famous, he told Alice a relatively mild version of one lie ("I had a cancer scare a few weeks before my PhD viva, it was pretty stressful"), a mild version of a different lie to Bob ("I injured myself running a marathon"), a mild version of yet another lie to Carol ("I was actually non-verbal for the first few years of primary school") and so on. Each of these lies sounds plausible enough in isolation, although Alice, Bob or Carol would probably raise an eyebrow if they were aware of all of the lies. Having gotten away with it (successfully curried sympathy), he tells an embellished version of each lie to Dave, Ewan and Frederick, none of whom are aware of any of the lies told to the others. On and on it goes, Arday upping the ante each time, until eventually the lies have become so heavily embroidered that telling someone just one of them causes people to raise an eyebrow, at which point they start comparing notes and realising how preposterous the whole edifice is.
He's also obviously someone not bright enough to realise that being a Baron von Munchausen is no longer compatible with being a public figure. If he'd lived a couple of hundred years ago when there were no TV cameras and most people were illiterate, he could have happily told his tall tales as long as he pleased. If the listener noticed discrepancies or inconsistencies with earlier tales, they would probably have just shrugged them off or assumed that they (the listener) were remembering the details of the earlier tale wrong. But nowadays, any tall tale told via the Internet is there forever, as is any told verbally during a television appearance. Under these circumstances, being honest is the only viable option: you will eventually be caught in a lie and face the consequences. (Unless you're Donald Trump.)
Daniel Kinahan extradited from Dubai back to Dublin.
Daniel Kinahan is a member of the Kinahan crime family, who control much of the drug trade in Ireland and Europe more broadly. At one time the US State Department were offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest (apparently at one point it was as high as $15 million). In April he was arrested in Dubai (where he and several other members of the cartel have been holed up for years) and arrangements were made for his extradition.
I actually heard the plane taking him to the Casement Aerodrome flying overhead earlier this evening, and passed close to the Special Criminal Courts where he was taken for his sitting. There was a heavy police presence with roads closed off and armed guards patrolling the streets (most police officers in Ireland are unarmed). A lot of men want this man dead, as the Kinahans have a longstanding feud with another criminal gang, the Hutch family. Kinahan has now been transported to a maximum security prison in Co. Laois pending his trial. One wonders if he'll live to see it. Most likely he will have to be kept on 24-hour protection.
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