FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
Last Friday, I got married. It was fun.
For opsec reasons, I won't go into too much detail about the ceremony. We had a hard deadline on when the certificates of freedom to marry from our respective countries would expire, so we elected to get married abroad. My wife told me that, in her home country, it's not at all uncommon for couples (or their parents) to go into debt paying for their weddings, which was the last thing either of us wanted. We instead opted for a very small civil ceremony, a few photos during and afterwards, and going out for dinner in the evening.
Less than a week later, it hasn't really hit me that I'm a married man, and I still have to remind myself to refer to her as "my wife" rather than "my fiancée" (and I only started referring to her as "my fiancée" less than six months ago). We crack little jokes with each other: "oh, my husband looks after the finances". I'm still not used to my wedding band: as someone who doesn't wear much jewelry, it feels like I'm wearing a plaster on my ring finger.
The other day I stumbled across this thread about things that people have changed their minds about, and it's still surprising to me to be reminded that, as little as thirteen years ago, I was painfully woke; so much so that even some of our resident progressives might have been like "dude, chill out". Pronouns in bio, gender is a social construct, women in STEM, "from the river to the sea", Nice Guys™: the whole shebang. If it was woke, I was here for it. During this period, I often said I didn't want to get married, as marriage was just an oppressive patriarchical construct invented to control women, and that I wanted no part of it. Needless to say, I no longer believe this (horror stories about women getting trapped in abusive marriages aside, I don't think it would be too controversial to argue that women as a group have been net beneficiaries of marriage), and in retrospect this proclamation of mine carried a pungent odour of sour grapes. I'm not sure when I first began saying "marriage is a patriarchical construct used to oppress women", but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a period in my life in which I sincerely believed that I was – no, scratch that, a period in my life in which I was an unfuckable unloveable loser whom no one would want to marry. Under those circumstances, it was far less embarrassing to pretend that my decision not to get married was the product of a principled moral stance – indeed, to pretend that it was a decision at all, rather than a decision by default: it's not as if prospective brides were forming an orderly queue outside my front door.* (I recall @FiveHourMarathon describing a similar dynamic when he was pretending to be straight edge, which really resonated with me.)
During this period, I also said that I didn't want children, motivated by similar sour-grapes coping and also the fact that I was struggling with (what had been diagnosed as) depression – a condition I sincerely wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and which I feared might be hereditary. I'm obviously not the first person to arrive at this conclusion: as I noted a few months ago, it's surely not an accident that people who subscribe to /r/antinatalism are disproportionately likely to subscribe to subreddits like /r/suicidewatch, /r/depression, /r/lonely, /r/bpd, /r/cptsd, /r/latestagecapitalism and /r/antiwork (the latter two of which can be summarised as "I'm an unemployable loser who can't hold down a steady job – but this is a problem with society, not with me").
But a few years ago, I was visiting my friend Alice** who'd just had her first child, a girl. As I was holding her daughter, Alice said to me "you want to have children. I don't even need to ask – I can tell just by looking at you". And she was right: however much I might try to intellectualise and deflect, there was no point in trying to disguise the primitive joy and elation I felt holding a baby. I adore children. Even thinking about children while writing this – not even a specific child, just the idea of children in general – is making me feel a little teary-eyed. Not only am I not an anti-natalist, I'm about as far from an anti-natalist as it's possible to be: I want everyone I know to have children, and soon, and lots of them. It actually aggravates me the way progressives derisively refer to people like Victor Orbán and the policies he promotes as "pronatalist", like it's a dirty word. "Ugh – don't tell me you're one of those people who want to fill the world with beautiful children who make everyone around them happy by their mere presence." Well, guilty as charged!***
A few months after visiting Alice and her daughter, I decided I'd wasted enough time fucking around, waiting for good things to happen to me, and that it was my time to get serious about what I wanted from life and pursue. It was true: I did want children (plural), and I wanted those children to have the best upbringings I could possibly provide for them. A wealth of data from the social sciences indicates that children tend to have the best outcomes when raised by loving married parents. No doubt there's a heavy selection effect (people who get married are heavily selected for being intelligent, responsible, conscientious and so on; conversely, a children borne to a pair of junkies isn't magically going to have better outcomes just because said junkies are married), but the general point still stands. Ergo, if I wanted to have children and wanted those children to have good upbringings, I would need to find a wife. And while I consider a serious romantic partner a terminal goal, marrying that person was really just a box-ticking exercise, an instrumental goal in service of the other terminal goal of starting a family.
And while taking stock of my life, I realised that, as much as I might want children, I couldn't see myself having them with Barbara, the woman I was in a relationship with at the time. Don't get me wrong: Barbara would likely have been a good mother (for all I know, she already is, we're no longer in touch): but I didn't want children with her, and there was no point in wasting any more of either of our time.
So I broke up with her, and set about playing catch-up with the assorted milestones of adulthood I'd put off meeting for years. The next three-and-a-half years were devoted, in large part, to seeking out a wife and mother for my hypothetical children. Not quite as diligently and single-mindedly as I perhaps could have: at times it felt like a case of one step forward, two steps back, and I seized plenty of opportunities to sow my wild oats. Indeed, if you'd been an angel sitting on my shoulder during this period, you probably would have found my behaviour, in large parts, indistinguishable from a common-or-garden fuckboy. (Early on in this period, I even went back to Barbara for a bit of sex with the ex, a massive unforced error.) Nonetheless, I met a few women who would surely have eventually agreed to have a baby by me, and women who I wanted to have a baby with – alas, they generally weren't the same women; or they initially were, only for one of us to lose interest, or for me to experience an attack of my avoidant attachment style.
But after years of rejections, false starts and disappointments (and years of slow, gradual self-improvement), I finally met my wife. In a period in which I was seriously concerned that I might be suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, I noticed that I felt completely at ease in her presence. She makes me laugh without even trying to. She isn't afraid to disagree with me or contradict me, something Barbara hardly ever dared do (which, believe me, isn't nearly as desirable a trait as it sounds). After several years in which, nine times out of ten, a woman telling me she didn't want to see me anymore would inspire abject relief (because it saved me the trouble of breaking up with her myself), my wife was one I felt very deeply I had to hang on to. And so I hung onto her, through thick and thin, and I dare say we've had more than our fair share of thick: there have been disagreements, rows, tantrums, screaming matches, ultimata. But I still hung onto her. Of the three actual relationships I've had, this was the most serious by far, the first woman I've cohabited with. Pretty funny, considering we matched on a dating app and, as she put it, I only went on our first date looking to get laid. ("Yeah, well so did you," I retorted; she didn't even deny it.)
Some months ago we began toying with the idea of wedding. As much as I wanted children with her, I still felt some residual discomfort with the idea of getting married – why couldn't we just have a baby and worry about the marriage part later? But then I remembered: how many times have I criticised couples who've done just that, hitting all the milestones in the success sequence (marriage, children, buying a house), but doing them out of order, purely for the sake of being contrarian? Didn't I specifically criticise my friend Carol's mother, who has been in a relationship with Carol's father for decades and owns a house with him, but refused to marry him (despite his multiple proposals) out of sheer stubbornness? Maybe getting married in its own right wasn't that important (wasn't a terminal goal) for me – but it was for my wife, and it's objectively a sensible thing to do before having children. I just had to remind myself of the decision I'd made years before: marriage is not a terminal goal, but an instrumental goal in pursuit of the terminal goal of starting a family.
And now that we've tied the knot, we can begin trying for a child. (I mean, we started trying a few months ago, but haven't had any luck so far.) I want lots of children: she tells me she wants two, and if I want more than that, I'm going to have to pay for it, which is fair enough. Indeed, the fact that I want lots of children is one reason we're not waiting to buy a house before we start trying – why waste a year (or more) of fertility? It appals me how few Western women are familiar with the term "geriatric pregnancy". It's true that you save money buying a house as early as you can, but it's equally true that you save money getting pregnant before you need to pay for expensive fertility treatments, to the point that it wouldn't surprise me if it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.
My brother has several friends from secondary school who might charitably be described as "failures to launch" (not meaning to point fingers: around the time I met Alice's daughter, it would be entirely fair to describe me as such), all of whom were still living with their parents and all of whom claimed, with varying degrees of credibility, to be saving up for mortgages. My brother didn't believe them: he thought their purported fiscal responsibility was a fig leaf for Peter Pan syndrome, and couldn't stand the thought of all the positive life experiences and maturation they were missing out on by continuing to live under their parents' rooves into their mid-twenties and beyond. Two years ago, he hatched a plot: he invited these friends over for a party in his flat, with the goal of making them feel envious of his comparative independence, in turn motivating them to tear the plaster off, move out, and grow up. The plan worked: since said party, at least two of the friends he targeted have moved out.
I now want to take a leaf out of my brother's book. In our circle of close friends, there are plenty of people in stable romantic relationships, but very few of them have children. They generally claim either to be prioritising buying houses over starting families (a dumb idea in my opinion, especially for the considerable number of women whose biological clocks are on the verge of expiring), or offering bullshit excuses such as children being "too expensive". What I want to do is have a baby with my wife, and then take every opportunity to shove that baby in my friends' faces, confronting them with what they're missing out on. I want every woman in my social circle (and the men, too, if possible) to feel unbearably, intolerably clucky and broody. And I want our child (our children) to go on playdates with our friends' children.****
But that's a secondary goal, a nice-to-have: the primary goal is to start our own family and be on some fuck everyone else type shit. (And my wife likely is my biggest flex.) So: marriage first, pregnancy second, house next year.
Wish me luck, boys (and girls).
*While writing, it occurs to me that if a man declares that marriage is an oppressive patriarchical construct, it's even odds whether he's an unfuckable incel or a fuckboy who wants to put a feminist spin on his promiscuity and caddishness, leading to a rather peculiar bell curve meme. Lindy West should have been paying attention during a shoddy latter-day episode of The Simpsons.
**All names are pseudonyms, obviously.
***People in favour of abortion euphemistically describe themselves as "pro-choice", while people who are opposed call themselves "pro-life". (As someone who abhors euphemisms, I call myself "pro-abortion".) No one would ever dream of describing themselves as "anti-life", and I vaguely recall an old post of Scott's (which I'm unable to find) in which he criticised how certain Republicans characterise Democrats that way, as if they literally pursue death as a terminal goal for its own sake. I found Scott's argument persuasive – and yet there are times when I can't help but think that the progressive coalition contains a sizeable misanthropic faction with no equivalent across the aisle. I mean, when they literally think that wanting more people to be born is a bad thing, they're not exactly helping their case, are they?
****A few months ago I joked that I wanted to buy up cheap property in the countryside and found a compound in which me and all my friends could live, grow our own crops, have lots of babies and raise all of them in keeping with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. I was joking – and yet, doesn't the idea of a self-sufficient pronatalist homeschooled compound tickle your fancy just a little bit?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Didn't go to the gym last week as I was on holiday. Annoyingly, on the last day of my trip I woke up with a sore throat which developed into a headcold which has yet to clear up. Haven't yet been to the gym since I got back. Determined to go three times this week, even if I only end up walking on the treadmill for an hour. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x. I'm on holiday this week so won't get to the gym.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I used to hate Sundays, for reasons similar to those enumerated in High Fidelity:
All my life I've hated Sundays, for the obvious British reasons (Songs of Praise, closed shops, congealing gravy that you don't want to go near but no one's going to let you escape from) and the obvious international reasons as well...
When we were very small my mum would make us go to Mass, which probably only lasted half an hour and yet seemed to go on for an eternity. Later my sister and I joined an orchestra, for which rehearsals were held every other Sunday morning, which I dreaded. Often when I returned from rehearsal, my mum would invite my granddad over for Sunday dinner, which invariably consisted of mashed potatoes, boiled peas and overcooked roast beef that you would have to spend five minutes gnawing through before you could swallow it (the aforementioned congealing gravy not acting as much of a lubricant), and my granddad wasn't much of a conversationalist even before he lost his hearing. And once he finally went home, I couldn't enjoy the rest of the day because I still had homework to do before the next morning.
Now, however, I like Sundays. I wake up around ten a.m., get a coffee and go for a walk with herself, buy some groceries and do some meal prep for the following week, go to the gym if I need to meet my weekly quota, and still plenty of time left over to unwind.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Certain dishes certainly do (I made a seafood linguine the other day, which was delicious), but I'm not sure if an English-style bolognese or carbonara really qualifies.
I was away on holidays this week and read about 150 pages of The Best Minds on the second leg of my outgoing flight, bringing me up to about the 70% mark. Haven't touched it since, aiming to finish it next week.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
What do you mean by materialistic behaviour? Like spending a lot of money on cars and jewelry?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I echo the idea of making big batches of freezable meals that you can rotate around or pick out in a pinch. This doesn't even necessarily mean that you have to make the complete meal freezable -- one of my go-to freezer options is a classic Bolognese sauce; on a busy day I might cook the tagliatelle on the day and use a few frozen blocks of frozen Bolognese for the sauce.
This is great advice. I do the same thing with chilli con carne. Make a big batch, freeze half of it. A few weeks later, defrost it and all you need to cook is some rice.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Between myself and my fiancée, I do most of the cooking. For health reasons we've been trying to make our diet a bit more Mediterranean, so a few weeks ago I promised her that I'd prepare two Mediterranean dishes every week. That means less red meat, more seafood, more leafy greens, more olive oil. I usually find a recipe meant to feed four, and then we have enough left over to last for a day or two. I've never really cooked Mediterranean dishes before so it's a new thing for me, but I haven't felt disappointed by any of the recipes I've prepared so far (except the very first one, which I prepared in the wrong kind of oven dish and didn't come out exactly as intended: not a mistake I intend on making twice).
Before this resolution, my repertoire largely consisted of Asian, Italian and Mexican (well, Tex-Mex) dishes. Growing up we ate a lot of pasta, so that's kind of my comfort food when I'm too lazy to cook anything more complicated. Unlike most Irish people, I like a decent amount of spice (I remember once an Indian woman I was dating made me butter chicken, and was disappointed to find that it didn't burn the mouth off me). I enjoy cooking as I find that it relaxes me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I argued downthread that "Zionist" is often used as a codeword for "Jew", and that this may be one of those cases.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I think the chances of Hamas (in concert with Hezbollah, the Houthis etc.) defeating Israel in a direct military confrontation in either of our lifetimes is somewhere around nil. I acknowledge it could be a different story if a bigger power got involved (e.g. if Iran began waging war directly, rather than through proxies). But many Palestinian citizens seem to have this idea that Hamas will eventually invade Israel and conquer the entire nation, undoing the humiliation wrought by the Nakba and decades of uncontested Israeli military dominance in one fell swoop. That is a fantasy. It's interesting that no one seems to know this better than Hamas's leaders themselves.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I was arguing that, had Macklemore performed in blackface in the US in 2014, his career would have been finished. I interpreted your argument to mean "these actors performed in blackface on British telly in the 2000s, and still enjoyed thriving careers in the US thereafter". But I don't think that's much of a counter-example, because the shows on which they performed in blackface are essentially unknown among the kinds of Americans who initiate cancellation campaigns.
Israel says Hamas has been violating the deal... the Israeli military says four Israeli soldiers have been killed.
Since the ceasefire came into effect a week ago, the militant group has deployed armed police officers on streets from where Israeli forces have withdrawn, clashed with rival clans, directly fired upon and killed Israeli troops in multiple incidents, and staged at least one public execution of suspected collaborators.
anti-Zionist Jews are welcomed in anti-Zionist spaces
until they aren't. And there's always an "until".
He says things like “Islam is right about women” in an attempt to put progressives between a rock and a hard place. Is he an antisemite?
I understand this is a callback to an older post of mine, but I'm really not seeing the connection between the two sentences. Why would facetiously asserting "Islam is right about women" imply that one is antisemitic? Even sincerely asserting "Islam is right about women" (something no Western conservative influencer has ever done) doesn't imply antisemitism: "Islam is right about women, but wrong about Jews" is a perfectly coherent stance to take, even if it's not one anyone actually adopts.
I don’t think you can draw a line from Hamas to CUAD to Macklemore and keep the ideology intact.
I don't think Macklemore believes 100% of the same things that Hamas believes. (There's no question that he doesn't share their attitudes to homosexuality, for instance.) But I think the fact that he went out of his way to name-check a fairly minor group like CUAD is strong evidence that he endorses most if not all of their ideology: namely, that Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial apartheid state, the validity of violent "resistance" against Israeli "occupation", and the belief that all Israeli citizens (and the entire Jewish diaspora, by extension) are complicit in Israel's "occupation", thereby rendering all of them legitimate targets. The belief that every Jew is a legitimate target for violent assault (in other words, the belief that it's okay to murder Jews) is about as pithy a definition of antisemitism as I can think of.
As @The_Nybbler notes below me, the essence of a "dog whistle" is that it's a turn of phrase that sounds innocuous to most people, but which has a special secret meaning to those in the know. Like the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake.
"Zionist" is the opposite. While its literal meaning is simply "one who supports the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the middle east, regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnic background" – in practice, nine times out of ten when people use it, they simply mean "one of those people with a surname like Coen or Katz". (I dare say that many of the people using it as a term of abuse would literally not know the former meaning.) Everyone understands this, especially all of the people with surnames like Coen or Katz: "Zionist" simply offers merely the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability. When people hang up posters around Athens saying "Zionists out", every Jew (regardless of their opinion of Israel and its right to exist or lack thereof) understands that they're not welcome. When Palestine Action splatters red paint on Jewish-owned businesses around London under the pretext of intimidating "Zionists" – I mean, come on, you don't really think they asked the owners what they thought about the war in Gaza, and only targeted those with the "wrong" opinions, do you? When two Irish women approached an Israeli man in a restaurant, spat on him and yelled at him that "Zionists" aren't welcome in Ireland – likewise.
Yes, a Zionist is just someone who supports the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the middle east, regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnic background. Just like "urban youth" refers to affluent white college students who live in New York City.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Richard Hanania made a similar argument years ago: the conflict will only end permanently when most Palestinians understand that militarily defeating Israel is impossible.
Why does opposition to genocide require a "hippy-dippy peace-and-love" attitude?
It doesn't. But I think that's how Macklemore is trying to present himself: as an ordinary well-meaning guy who believes in equality and civil rights, who's appalled by the footage he sees coming out of Gaza and thinks something should be done to stop it. As controversial as his speech was, he never explicitly dedicated his set to "the brave Mujahedeen fighters of Hamas", or called upon the audience to stone the Jew wherever he lies: he's smart enough to know that doing so would make him look like a nutcase. Instead, he does the savvier (and more dishonest) thing of presenting himself like an ordinary well-meaning dude, while explicitly endorsing groups who've been much more open in their extremism then he has, and banking on most people listening not knowing the specifics of what those groups believe. This seems like the constant two-step with the "moderate" pro-Palestinians in the West (and the "moderate" left more broadly). They generally claim that they want to bring about a two-state solution via peaceful means like BDI or other kinds of economic sanctions – and yet you notice that they never offer any criticism of Hamas or the other violent pro-Palestinian groups whose ideology and methods they claim to decry, they amplify their propaganda at every turn, and seem exuberant when they achieve tactical wins (however brief and temporary).
Indeed, I'd respect Mackle- a great deal More if he actually came out and said "there's a genocide going on right now that's just as bad as the Holocaust, so we have to stop it the same way we stopped the Holocaust – by waging total war on the people committing it". The fact that he felt the need to equivocate, hedge and delegate his opinions suggests to me that either a) he doesn't consider stopping the "genocide" worth torpedoing his career over, or b) he doesn't believe it's a genocide either. The only thing more contemptible than a Jew-hater is a Jew-hater who can't even commit to the bit.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I personally find it hard to imagine that many teenage American fans of Doctor Who or Good Omens would have even heard of either Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, never mind watched any of the episodes featuring blackface.
I mean, Macklemore explicitly doesn't want Israel to exist. Per the lyrics of the song he performed immediately after that speech, he thinks its "occupying violent history" has been repeating for the last seventy-five years i.e. since the date of Israel's founding. Hard to square that with the belief that Israel has a right to exist as a nation.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6d ago
A rabbi, a Zionist Jew and an anti-Zionist Jew walk into a bar.
The barman says "we don't serve Jews here."
Even if I accept your claim that "Zionist" was not being used as a codeword for "Jew", this rather clearly demonstrates that Macklemore is lying when he presents himself as a hippy-dippy peace-and-love dude who is simply innocently horrified by "genocide" and "apartheid". He explicitly supports (by name) groups that support violent resistance against Israel i.e. he is a crypto-Hamas supporter.
1:19 is incredible. I'm doing a half-marathon by myself this weekend, and I'll be chuffed to bits if I can do it in 1:50.
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