I'm aware that people misuse the term, but I was using it according to its literal (correct) meaning of "a person who would like to have consensual sex, but is unable to find a willing partner".

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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 14hr ago · Edited 12hr ago

It's fascinating that The Handmaid's Tale has been so widely interpreted as a satire of Christian fundamentalism, when my understanding is that Atwood intended it as a critique of radical Islam. She wrote it in the ~~seventies~~ eighties shortly after the Iranian revolution, and as I understand it, it was her way of trying to explain what Iranian society had become in an American context. "What if the ~~Shah~~ Ayatollah came to Wisconsin" sort of deal.

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Transnational Thursday for November 5, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 1d ago

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.

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Tinker Tuesday for November 3rd, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 1d 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.

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Transnational Thursday for November 5, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 1d 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.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026