FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
35m ago
I've never written fantasy, but
I've been having my alpha-reader-slave (ie my GF) read my chapters and then quizzing her on them.
Don't do this. There is nothing to be gained and plenty to be lost by showing someone else your work in progress: it will only break your creative flow and cause you to second-guess yourself even more than you're already doing.
Get the entire story down on the page as quickly as possible, don't look at your first draft for six weeks, complete a second draft, then you can show it to someone else.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
43m ago
Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault
From the Guardian:
Russell Brand has been found guilty of raping a woman and sexually assaulting three others over the course of five years of his showbusiness career.
Brand, 51, was described during his trial as a ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator. He was accused of raping women in a hotel room, in a bar toilet and at his luxury London townhouse. He sexually assaulted women in front of his entourage at their workplaces, including at a radio station and TV studio.
The Hollywood actor turned online influencer was accused of gaslighting his victims after the attacks, and treating women as a “disposable commodity” and a “means to an end” to satisfy his voracious sexual appetite. ...
He had pleaded not guilty to three charges of rape, three of sexual assault and one of attempted indecent assault against six women, in allegations spanning 10 years from 1999.
There was some contemporaneous discussion around these parts when these allegations first came out. At the time, I remarked on the widespread perception that rape is the product of sexual frustration (hence, that "incels" are more likely to rape women than sexually satisfied men), and how the best evidence from the social sciences and criminology points in the opposite direction:
men who have numerous sexual partners, one-night stands, concurrent sexual partners, visit prostitutes etc. are more likely to commit rape or sexual assault than men who do not meet this description. In light of this evidence, Brand probably sitting in the 99th percentile for sexual partners should significantly raise our priors that he is guilty of what he is accused of. The fact that he's famously promiscuous isn't dispositive, of course, but it's highly relevant to the accusations.
Brand wasn't merely promiscuous (he once claimed that to have had nine orgasms on a single night in Dublin; an Irish journalist wondered how many of those were prompted by him catching sight of his own reflection), or merely a cad. Perhaps his most infamous moment in the public eye came in 2008: after a brief dalliance with the actress Georgina Baillie, he recorded himself prank-calling her grandfather (actor Andrew Sachs, best-known for playing Manuel in Fawlty Towers) to gloat about fucking her, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 2. By her own account, Baillie was humiliated by the experience and didn't speak to her grandfather for eight years; I vaguely recall reading an interview with Sachs where he described the experience as the most upsetting and traumatic of his life (and this is a Jewish man who was forced to flee Germany as a child). Brand himself described the ensuing controversy, during which the BBC was slapped with a £150k fine, as "fun" (he begrudgingly apologised to Sachs six years later, and paid for Baillie's drug and alcohol rehab). Even at the time, some thought that the amount of press coverage the scandal received was disproportionate, which is not an unreasonable position to hold. Nonetheless: a man displaying such callous disregard for the privacy and sexual boundaries of a woman with whom he's been intimate (not to mention displaying such naked contempt for her family members) would be appalling even if he'd been a bit more discreet about it. But he behaved this way when he knew he was being recorded for an audience of millions. Can you imagine the kind of shit he got up to in private?
After his career in Hollywood plateaued, Brand reinvented himself as a political activist, then subsequently as a podcast conservative and born-again Christian (someone quipped that he'd given up "preying" for "praying"). His podcast tended to the conspiratorial, suggesting that nebulous elites were trying to silence him for daring to speak truth to power. It's not hard to join the dots and deduce that he knew these allegations were going to come out sooner or later, and that he was attempting to head off the problem by pre-emptively rubbishing them.
I have never had an easier time believing that a man convicted of rape is, in fact, guilty thereof. Pretty boy like him is going to have a rough time in prison: it wouldn't surprise me if he's placed on protection for a significant chunk of his sentence.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Surely you can agree that sending someone a thousand AK-47s is a very different proposition from sending them a thousand Kevlar vests.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Well, that seems misleading. The Iron Dome is exclusively defensive.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Nicole Shanahan
Huh. I thought Musk only dated weirdo art hoes, I didn't realise he was a man of culture as well.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
After looking up the data, Israel gets $350 per citizen almost exclusively for war.
By "exclusively for war" are you including funding for the Iron Dome and other defensive measures?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Are we playing five degrees of separation here? I have not seen credible claims that he is personally a member. His mother was reportedly active in the Egyptian MB (EMB, henceforth) in the 1970s, and reportedly he defended a friend who was imprisoned for funding the EMB in 2021.
One degree of separation is a lot less than five.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @ThomasdelVasto?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Forgive my sarcasm, but: yes, and some women are taller than some men and are really interested in computers.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I think Presidential races tend to be much closer (aside from Obama in 2008, the margin of victory has been 5% or less in every race this century), which inevitably leads to noisier poll results. Midterms don't seem to be as close, for whatever reason.
the most hardcore anti-Rowling folks on the left immediately stopped accusing her of being anti-semitic the moment October 7 happened.
Did they? According to Spiked they were accusing her of Holocaust denial as recently as March 2024. I think the specific claim was that denying that trans people were one of the primary targets of the Holocaust is tantamount to Holocaust denial, but they were obviously hoping people would interpret this accusation as a denial of the Holocaust in toto.
I'm more than a little alarmed by the number of people who actively foment hatred against Jews and yet who are willing to use baseless accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel against people they despise for unrelated reasons.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Also, maybe don’t make the gnomes working in the bank Jewish stereotypes.
I've heard this claim so many times and I still think it's a massive reach. The claim that was intended as a jokey allusion to the gnomes of Zurich seems vastly more believable to me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Seconded Hitchhiker's. I read the first one when I was about that age and loved it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
True, the Irish state doesn't directly furnish weapons to Hamas. It has, however, donated over €68 million to UNRWA in the last twenty years, and a significant proportion of UNRWA staff are known to have participated in the October 7th attacks.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I find the idea that Abdul would need to mirror the US support for Israel if it become pro-Palestine questionable I think I pro-Palestine America would look a lot more like Ireland than Iran.
I'm not sure if this argument expresses the point you intended it to. Most people in Ireland virulently hate Israel, turn a blind eye to Hamas's activities and are happy to donate money to organisations which are, at the very least, affiliated with Hamas.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Ender's Game has a child protagonist, but the violence might be a bit excessive for a ten-year-old.
When I was that age I read this collection of Philip K. Dick stories and don't remember any of them containing anything too objectionable.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I'm in exactly the same boat as you. It's still a funny line though.
(I'm also not bisexual, but on at least one of the three times I caught Covid, certain symptoms lingered for months after the acute symptoms had passed.)
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Are you going to shoot a guy in a wheelchair?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
IIRC Pinker quoted exactly this to buttress his argument.
I gave up on A Gentleman of Leisure about fifty pages in. It hadn't elicited so much as a chuckle.
Last year I bought my dad Steven Pinker's book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows..., about the concept of common knowledge. He enjoyed it and lent it to me. I wanted an easy read, so I started it on Tuesday. Richard Hanania's argument about the deficits of non-fiction books certainly applied here, and it did give the feel of being unnecessarily padded. In particular, even outside the chapter which was specifically about humour, there were an awful lot of references to sitcoms and jokes (I don't mean Pinker himself cracking jokes: I mean him reciting jokes told by other people to illustrate his points). I was also broadly familiar with most of the arguments he touched on. But for all that, it was absorbing enough that I'd finished it by Thursday evening.
Perhaps the only surprising part of the book came near the very end, in which, as part of a chapter about academic freedom more broadly, Pinker more or less outs himself as a HBD enjoyer. His argument, in effect, is that scientists should deliberately avoid investigating the question of whether there are differences in intelligence between the various ethnic groups, as it's simply something we don't need to know, and were it to be proven true, people would use that information to indulge their worst prejudices. I interpret this as a tacit admission that Pinker thinks that certain races are more intelligent than others, on average: if he didn't, why would he be advocating for intentionally burying our heads in the sand? This passage felt eerily familiar to me, and I realised that Scott (who wants to duel Pinker to the death) has already done the endorsing-HBD-without-technically-endorsing-HBD thing at least twice: once in Kolomogorov complicity and once in his review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart. (I'm curious if deBoer thinks scientists ought to investigate the question of whether races differ in average intelligence, and if not, why not.)
I received a gift, an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in comic book form. It occurred to me I haven't read the book itself since I was in secondary school, so this might be a fun way to reintroduce myself to it. A snack between meals before my copy of The Camp of the Saints arrives.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Hire a genuine leftist or two into the mod team and then consult them when issues arose in regards to modding leftists.
I have to be honest: implementing two-tier policing/sharia courts in moderation decisions is an objectively hilarious suggestion for how to run a forum.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
The ad explicitly claims that Americans cannot afford groceries because the money is being set aside to kill Palestinians, not Iranians, so I question the relevance of the war in Iran.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
"Occasional CIA informant" suggests to me something very different from "worked for the CIA" or "documented CIA handler".
True, and plenty of women allege that he groped them, exposed himself and similar in full view of TV cameras. So however he conducted himself in private was at least as bad as he did in public.
More options
Context Copy link