FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
The article you cite yourself cite claims that abortions per capita increased by 0.7 points between 2016 and 2020. (Which, incidentally, puts the lie to the hysterical comparisons of the USA under Trump to The Handmaid's Tale).
It's also not a like-for-like comparison, as fertility rates have plummeted since Roe v. Wade: can't get an abortion if you never got pregnant in the first place. What you'd really want to do is to compare the ratio of live births to abortions – or, in other words, what percentage of pregnancies end in abortion vs. end in delivery vs. end in miscarriage. I'll do an effortpost on this next week.
Have cases of infanticide increased since the legalization of abortion?
Again confounded by falling fertility rates, but quote Perry:
As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.”
If you want to say this is a policy you support, fair enough, but don't tell me it isn't happening.
I'm not even necessarily arguing that abortion and infanticide are becoming more common over time, but rather that the latter is becoming, for lack of a better word, "destigmatised". By way of analogy, no one disputes that homosexuality has become vastly more socially acceptable over the past few decades in Western society, even if the proportion of the population who is gay or lesbian has remained fairly constant.
I'm aware of all of this, and it was the reason I linked the Louise Perry article at the bottom. Infanticide was the norm prior to Christianity. Legal abortion was sold to Western societies with the promise that it would not lead to a renewed normalisation of infanticide. In retrospect, that promise seems to have been an empty one.
I saw a note on Substack claiming that Shiloh Hendrix was suffering from postpartum depression at the time of the altercation which landed her in hot water. I have no idea if this is true or not, but assuming it is, I imagine there's extremely minimal overlap between the people offering public (and, in some cases, financial) support for Clancy, and the people who think Hendrix should not have faced criminal charges for saying the gamer word.
An even more potent hypothetical, I think, is the observation that none of the women supporting Clancy would have done so if, in the throes of postpartum psychosis, she'd killed three dogs rather than three human children.
The slippery slope, my moral betters would have me believe, is a fallacy: legalising X does not inevitably lead to Y, which is like X but more extreme.
It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.
The Hendrix comparison is illustrative. One of the strongest surviving taboos in the Anglosphere is that white people should not say the gamer word. No excuses: not if they're singing along with a song by a black musician, not if they're a politician quoting something a black person said, not if they're an academic discussing a piece of classical music by a black composer whose title features that word, not even if they're a professor of linguistics using a word from a completely different language which sounds a bit like the gamer word. Woke people obviously feel that relaxing this taboo even a smidge would lead to an opening of the floodgates (almost like it's a... slope that is... slippery, or something). It follows that we cannot extend grace to any person who uses it, no matter how sympathetic they might be: not even a woman who may have been suffering from postpartum depression and who got into a public altercation with a nonce. This taboo is so rigidly enforced that not even the "be kind" brigade wants to extend any forbearance or forgiveness to Hendrix.
But compare with abortion. It started off with the morning-after pill, then first-trimester abortion, and before you know it, low-decouplers are correctly intuiting that, if a mother killing a fetus at nine months shouldn't be a hanging crime, why should killing a child at five years be? On what grounds can we possibly justify throwing someone in jail for doing the latter, but doing nothing to someone who does the former (perhaps even subsidising their decision at the taxpayer's expense)?
Louise Perry's "We Are Repaganising" continues to trouble me deeply.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Hinckley was the first person I thought of when Freddie deBoer said that an NGRI verdict means Clancy will never leave a mental institution.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I don't often find myself agreeing with @SecureSignals, but he's right in this case. Researching how long it takes to drive to a particular location, then sending your husband to that location to get him out of the house, is rather damning evidence of planning and forethought.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
AGHBRL? Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Greta Lee is to Celine Song as Daisy Edgar-Jones is to Sally Rooney.
OotL: Song and Rooney both wrote stories (Past Lives and Normal People, respectively) heavily drawn from their own experiences in which the protagonists are thinly-disguised versions of their respective authors. These protagonists were portrayed by actresses (Lee and Edgar-Jones, respectively) who each bear a passing resemblance to the respective authors, but who are vastly more physically attractive.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
It feels pretty mean-spirited to describe tech billionares as simply "nerds". Maybe they started off as humble computer nerds, but that was a long time ago and they've done a lot of other stuff since then.
Scott's working definition of "nerd" is something like "unusually intelligent, but lacking in social skills". Which still seems like an apt description of e.g. Mark Zuckerberg, in spite of his billions.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I didn't think journalists were supposed to do "If you don't like the speech they gave, imagine a better one and report on that instead".
When the journalist likes the politician in question, this is called sanewashing. When they dislike him, it's called "dog-whistle politics".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Yes, there are ~70k YouTube channels with 1 million subscribers or more, against a population of 115 million YouTube channels. She's more famous and well-known than more than 99.5% of all YouTube channels. That seems "popular" to me.
Those two videos were literally the only times I'd ever seen her.
Okay. So? Occasionally I'll be watching a movie, and I'll recognise an actor who had a small part in a movie I watched many years prior and whom I haven't seen in anything else since. (e.g. I watched Minority Report the other night. The guy in the opening sequence who tries to murder his wife after she cuckolds him once went on a date with Rachel in Friends, where she gets pissed and makes a fool of herself. Haven't seen him in anything other than that movie and that episode.) I would say I'm "good with faces", not that I have a "photographic memory". The latter term implies that you have total, perfect recall of everything you have ever experienced, even things that happened years or decades prior. It does not imply that you can identify the celebrity in a video after not having seen a picture of them for a long time. I'm sure you can't tell me what you had for breakfast on April 9th, 2015.
It is also my impression that most people don't remember exactly which random Internet conversations they have open IOU-a-sauce for over timespans of years.
Well, most people don't have random Internet conversations, so this claim might well be true, but vacuously so.
I don't think you have a photographic or eidetic memory. The abilities you're describing seem fairly typical of a person who's above-average in intelligence and conscientiousness, which describes most people who post here.
Only two million subscribers? Gosh, that only puts her in the 99.94th percentile of all YouTube channels. What a nobody!
ChatGPT tells me the videos on her channel have been watched a collective 247 million times. Even assuming that only one-tenth of those are unique viewers, a population bigger than Florida has laid eyes on her at least once. Maybe "extremely" was overselling it, but she's a very popular YouTuber by any reasonable definition.
New Year's resolution check-in:
- I realise that, for the last few weeks, I've been neglecting to include updates on my resolution to post at least twenty-six blog posts this year. Fear not: I haven't been slacking. In August I published two posts about the Jason Arday scandal, both of which I cross-posted here. I posted an article this afternoon, expanded from this post. That brings me up to twenty-one posts so far this year.
- Went to the gym three times last week and again on Monday evening. My lower back isn't fully healed and I have a big event coming up in two weeks so I'm not taking any chances with squats or deadlifts: just bench press, pullups and cardio until the week beginning the twenty-first. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.77x.
- 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.
4d ago
One of our friends in particular had plans that didn’t involve being unceremoniously fired while on paternity leave, just 9 days after the birth of her second child.
Huh? Is this a trans-identified female who was on "pa"ternity leave?
AIUI eidetic memory is quite common among the autistic, though admittedly not universal.
My understanding is that even the existence of eidetic memory is a controversial proposition among psychologists and neurologists, making me sceptical about any claims of its incidence within any given demographic. If you have any non-anecdotal evidence backing this up I'd love to see it.
No offense intended, but am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that you were able to recognise an extremely popular YouTuber? Surely this isn't what most people are talking about when they throw around terms like "eidetic" or "photographic" memory. If you have more impressive examples of your ostensibly eidetic memory, I would also love to hear about them, but if this is the best example of your capabilities, I'm highly dubious.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Yes, and exceptionally tall people sometimes bang their heads when walking through doorways. And yet, curiously, men are willing to shell out a quarter-mil to make themselves taller. You don't see a lot of people spending money to make themselves shorter.
Autistic savants are exceptionally rare (as my sister, a paediatrician, pointed out, the likelihood of an autistic child being a genius is roughly the same as that for an allistic child, which is to say, staggeringly low), and not a central example of how the term "differently abled" tends to be used. There are disadvantages associated with being exceptionally numerate, exceptionally strong, exceptionally fast, exceptionally attractive etc.; there may even be certain advantages on the margin associated with being disabled (blind people save a lot on their electricity bills!). But on net, virtually everyone would still prefer to be exceptionally fast vs. wheelchair-bound, exceptionally strong vs. paraplegic, sighted vs. blind and so on.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Did you hear they've come out with a meal plan specifically designed for plain-looking women?
It's called the
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Yes, I agree, I support Romeo and Juliet laws.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I don't consider "child sex abuse material" a dysphemism. Pornography, by definition, is produced with the consent of those depicted; children definitionally cannot consent to being sexually exploited; ergo, sexually explicit videos featuring children cannot be pornography.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Shit craic pal. Wishing you a speedy recovery.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
That was my first thought. But during the day, Substack shows me notes I agree with, many of them posted by Americans. In the wee hours of the morning, it shows me notes I disagree with, exclusively by Americans. I don't get it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I've made it abundantly clear that the "war" to which I referred was the recent escalation of hostilities which began in October 2023, not the broader Israel-Palestine conflict.
Don't you find it at least interesting that feminists are willing to support women even when they murder their children, but not when they say the gamer word? "I support women even when they use racial slurs when their blood is up" seems like it could be an equally effective costly signal, and yet it wasn't.
I'm sure you'll say something to the effect that supporting Shiloh Hendrix would mark you out as a conservative, so it's a useless signal to demonstrate that you are a feminist specifically. But if that's the case, your entire argument that they're supporting her solely "because she's a woman" collapses. No progressive feminist would be caught dead throwing her weight behind Hendrix. Very few will be caught dead throwing their weight behind JK Rowling. But quite a few absolutely will throw their weight behind a woman who has admitted to murdering her three children. The revealed preferences of this group are not "we will support women no matter what awful crimes they commit" but "we will support women unless they commit certain especially grave crimes, in which case they're on their own". The revealed preferences of this group is that they consider yelling racial slurs or criticising gender ideology less forgiveable sins than murdering one's children.
And the "same, Lindsay" trend on TikTok indicates that many of these women are supporting Clancy not "because she's a woman" but because they have personally struggled with the same urges to harm their children that she found impossible to resist. How many of these women, do you think, would admit to having felt the urge to yell racial slurs at misbehaving ethnic minorities while in the depths of their postpartum depression or psychosis?
I don't think my argument is silly, and I don't think these protesters' behaviour is explicable by a desire to show support for women no matter what they do. I think, rather, that progressive feminists have extremely strict criteria for which women they will and won't throw their weight behind. It disturbs me that a woman who murdered her three children is in the former category, and a woman who yelled a racial slur at a nonce is in the latter.
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