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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
My favourite and least favourite novels I read last year (respectively, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Nell Zink's Doxology) featured an eerily similar literary device. Large chunks of Doxology are set in New York City and upstate New York in the 90s and 2000s; unsurprisingly, 9/11 figures heavily in the plot. While the first act of Tomorrow... takes place at Harvard, most of the book takes place in the west coast, and so the 9/11 attacks don't feature as prominently, though they are mentioned.
The literary device to which I refer is that, while the 9/11 attacks are explicitly referred to, they aren't referred to as terrorist attacks. Not only is no attempt made to delve into the perpetrators' motives, there's barely any acknowledgement that the perpetrators had motives, nor even that the attacks were perpetrated by anyone. The attacks are essentially reduced to the status of a horrible tragedy that simply occurred on the volition of no one in particular, like an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or meteoric strike. The election of Donald Trump strikes Zink as a moral outrage, but for her, getting angry at 9/11 would be like getting angry about a heavy downpour. This framing is particularly galling in the case of Tomorrow..., as
It seems that this framing — 9/11 not as an attack that was committed but as an event that occurred — will soon become policy in at least one North American progressive media outlet:
KINSELLA: 9/11 wasn't a 'terrorist attack,' according to the CBC
The Encyclopedia Britannica people define it this way: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create general fear in a population and coerce a government or society to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.”
By any reasonable and objective standard, that is what happened nearly 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.
This week, I received a memo — presumably confidential — addressed to CBC News staff. It is authored by one Basem Boshra, who is the “Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News.” In Boshra’s memo, reporters are editors are told this:
“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”
Boshra states that all in bold letters, italicized, as if to emphasize the point. To make clear it is a directive, not a suggestion.
It is not fair and it is in no way accurate. It is rewriting the historical record. It is manipulating facts to fit an ideological perspective. It is cruel and despicable. It is Orwellian.
I contacted a couple of CBC’s designated spokespeople to ask them why CBC has decided that terrorism is no longer terrorism. To ask them why “hijackings [that] led to passenger jet crashes” is not considered terrorism. I thought about asking them, too, if “murder” is considered involuntary cessation of biological functions at CBC. But I didn’t, because that might offend their sensibilities.
Here is what [Kerry Kelly] said: “CBC’s longstanding language guidance regarding the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ is a preference for the use of these words with attribution, a practice shared by many of the world’s top journalistic organizations. Our general manager and editor in chief has written publicly in the past on the subject.”
I find this kind of evasiveness extremely frustrating. Last year a colleague of mine (who, full disclosure, I consider a manchild, and hardly someone I come to looking for cogent political analysis) was talking about the conflict in Gaza and scoffed at someone (I think it was Gal Gadot) who defended Israel on the grounds that Hamas started the most recent conflict and Israel was defending itself. I immediately shot back "but that's literally what happened", which seemed to stop him dead in his tracks: the relentless focus on Israel's purportedly brutal conduct in Gaza has obliterated from people's minds the simple fact that it wasn't a war Israel started. Likewise, see this article from Spiked: even progressive journalists, with their obsessive fixation on the civilians regrettably caught in the crossfire in Gaza, have essentially forgotten that Hamas and the PIJ are military organisations, with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of soldiers on the ground in Gaza:
‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.
Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.
Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians. [emphasis mine]
If you put Hamas apologists on the spot and get them to begrudgingly concede that a) the October 7th attacks happened; b) it was not a "false flag; c) Hamas deliberately targeted civilians, and the overwhelming majority of civilians killed were not killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine — having conceded all that, these apologists will defend the attacks on the grounds that they were "inevitable", like an avalanche, or ice melting when it's left out of the freezer. Yahya Sinwar and his legion of followers, you see, simply could not have chosen to behave other than they did.
I'm reminded also of the massive "data desert" in the UK's Ministry of Justice conviction data. It's one thing to collect information about the ethnicity of offenders, but bury it somewhere it's hard to find or insist that it must be considered in light of socioeconomic disparities. But simply not bothering to collect the information in the first place is a whole other ball game. Also consider Coulter's law, or that peculiar journalistic tic in which a vehicle-ramming attack will be described as having been committed by "a car", as if non-self-driving cars possess agency.
I also think this framing is the underlying cause of the discourse around hypoagency, or the "women are wonderful" effect. A lot of people (both men and women) seem to really struggle with the idea that a woman could simply do something heinous without having previously had someone (i.e. a man) do something heinous to her. See the Lindsay Clancy truthers, or the people baselessly claiming that Aileen Wuornos was a rape victim who killed her victims in self-defense — some people even feel more comfortable believing that Elizabeth Holmes was manipulated by her Svengali of a boyfriend into committing wire fraud. The novel I'm currently reading, Penance by Eliza Clark, is illustrative. Her first novel, Boy Parts, was about an abusive woman whose lashing out at men is implied to be the result of her having been molested by her male secondary school teacher. Penance continues the trend: of the three female murderers, one (so far) is definitively stated to have been raped as a child, while another is implied to have been sexually interfered with by a transparent Jimmy Savile stand-in. (We haven't yet done a deep-dive into girl #3's backstory, but I'm not holding my breath for what awaits me there.) For all her talk of delving into the psychology of evil fucked-up women, for Clark, there is always a male first-mover skulking about in the background. Both of her first two novels are ultimately trauma plots: I don't think Clark could even conceive of the idea of a woman doing something awful without having been interfered with in childhood. by an adult male.
This is an interesting asymmetry. When conservatives/Red Tribers/Leave voters/gammon/Zionists/whites/cis people/men/heterosexuals etc. do something bad, you will know about it. When a member of group who doesn't meet that description does something bad, you might hear about it, as a page 4 story. But the fact that a member of that group did it won't be mentioned as prominently as in the former case, if at all. It may be framed as something that happened, rather than as something that someone consciously chose to do.
I'm reminded, lastly, of a tweet posted in response to a YouTube video titled "The Internet is Failing the Left":
The fact that this video is titled “The internet is Failing the Left” tells you a lot about the psychological / ideological differences between left and right, much in the mode of Zizek.
If I (or any other right-winger) were to make a video, similar to Burns, criticizing some larger creator like Matt Walsh, we would never title it “The internet is failing the right”.
It’s not even that my arguments against Walsh would necessarily be different than Burn’s arguments against Wynn. It’s that “The internet is failing the right” reads like a GRAMMATICALLY incorrect sentence. The non-volitional object is the active subject. The political agent is the passive object. This is not correct, linguistically. The correct language would read “How the right is failing to use the internet!” or “How our enemies who run the internet are attacking the right!”
All of this goes to show that the modern left sees itself as a passive object that is acted upon. It cannot fail, it can only be failed. Capitalism and Oppression happen to the left, and that’s bad. Maybe, in the future, change and revolution will happen to the left and that will be good. But the left doesn’t DO things. Doing things is not what the left does. It isn’t that kind of thing.
The left is like a tree in the storm that is capitalism / modernity. The rain and the wind are happening to it. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is that of the storm. The right is like a ship sailing through the storm that is Capitalism / modernity. It cuts through the tempest. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is on the part of the ship.
Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives. If progressives do things, it's only ever in response to things that were done to them. And if there's no possible way to frame something they did as something that was done in response to something else, then we'll simply say it happened, not that it was done.
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3hr ago
It's funny, although a bit irritating that the journalists who insist on calling him that are the same people loudly insisting that it's never acceptable to refer to a trans person by their "deadname", even if said trans person is a convicted rapist or murderer. They're also more than happy to refer to entertainers by their stage names provided said entertainers hold the "correct" opinions.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I think I'll probably have to do that until I'm recovered.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
The fundamental attribution error, essentially.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm wondering if maybe the belt is too loose and it's not providing enough support. I think I should probably ask one of the personal trainers for advice.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Yes, I use a belt. Maybe it's too loose for me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It's completely different from how actual trans women dress
Well, some and some.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I used to do a fixed number of reps, but now I just do five sets and rep til failure each time. (There have absolutely been days where I couldn't do all five sets.) My progress has been much faster using this method. I only do five strength training exercises (deadlift, bench press, squat, overhead press, pullup) and aim to do three each time I go to the gym, meaning I should be doing each of those exercises twice a week.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
My old gym did, but I don't think my current gym does.
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week and again yesterday evening. There's obviously something wrong with my squat form: the last two times I did squats, my lower back gave me hell that night. Last night was no exception, and it's still quite stiff this morning. Will have to drop down to a lower weight to correct my form. 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.
3d ago
Citation in case anyone doubts me:
CURRY BARKER: Well, it's interesting. I had this idea for a while about an obsessed person, and just the relationship and how that could go crazy, but it didn't have anything to do with the wish. It was just this idea of, like, an obsessed relationship and codependency and kind of diving into that.
What makes incompetence more likely than strategy?
Por que no los dos? Why is the null hypothesis that everyone throwing their support behind a cause is doing so for the exact same reason? Why is ideological and cognitive homogeneity more parsimonious than ideological and cognitive heterogeneity?
Not everyone is a Svengali playing 4-dimensional chess with public opinion. Some people really do just think This Is Bad and Something Must Be Done, and the proposed solution would in theory prevent the Bad Thing from recurring, but they're simply incapable of thinking through it to envision the second-order effects the proposed solution would wreak.
We have a dozen terms for situations like this (e.g. bootlegger-baptist coalition, "useful idiots"). I know lots of people who put their names to this petition know that nothing like it could ever be passed into law, but just want to voice their opinion that what happened to Arday was a Bad Thing. I also suspect that many people who put their names to it think that a piece of legislation like this is entirely feasible, and that if the government won't pass it, then that just means they don't care about black autists. And rather than just dismiss the latter group out of hand, I wanted to explain to them in exhaustive detail what legislation like this would entail were it to come into effect.
Have you heard about the latest TikTok trend sweeping across Ireland and the UK: stealing a car and then intentionally driving at high speed down the wrong side of a motorway?
The first of these incidents to cause a serious accident was about two weeks ago on the M50, the main ring road in Dublin. Two vehicles collided, resulting in eight teenagers and one man being hospitalised. When I first heard about it, my immediate thought was that it must have been tourists from a country where they drive on the right, who'd made an honest (if deadly) mistake. You can get a direct ferry from France to Ireland, and upon disembarking you will see signs warning you that we drive on the left here.
Then the following weekend, a second incident occurred in Kildare. Five teenaged boys deliberately drove a stolen BMW the wrong way down the M9 motorway three times, before finally colliding with another vehicle. All five boys were killed, while the four occupants of the other vehicle (including a small child) were seriously injured. Footage was recovered from one of the boys' social media profiles which he filmed during the escapade, emblazoning laughing emojis on top*. The realisation that they (and also the drivers on the M50) had done this deliberately for social media clout disturbed me profoundly. The Garda Síochána (Irish police) were heavily criticised for failing to pursue the vehicle, but they defended themselves on the grounds that most of their officers hadn't received appropriate training for dangerous chases like this. (Who could ever have foreseen that the police would need training in how to deal with someone driving on the wrong side of the motorway, not as an evasive manoeuvre, but literally for its own sake?)
Then, for the hat-trick, seven people were killed on Saturday morning when a car deliberately drove the wrong way down the A66 motorway in Middlesbrough (in the UK) and collided with another vehicle. The second vehicle was a police car, and the seven dead include the two police officers inside. Although police officers were pursuing the offending vehicle, it seems the police car they crashed into was not part of this pursuit and the decision had been made to abandon the pursuit seconds before the collision. Nonetheless, the Gardaí's decision not to pursue the M9 perpetrators seems a lot more defensible in hindsight.
A bit over ten years ago, I remember an idiotic trend of people getting themselves killed taking selfies in dangerous places (e.g. leaning out the windows of moving trains) or getting their friends to take pictures of them planking on top of tall buildings. As moronic as this was (and with such a laughably skewed ratio of risk to reward), at least the only people being endangered by these stunts were the people doing them. This is a whole other ball game: at least two bystanders have been killed so far, and at least five injured. I know teenage boys have a reputation for thinking themselves bulletproof, but this shower of arseholes seem wholly lacking in the most basic of self-preservation instincts.
And what scares me most is that I fear the breathless coverage of these horrific accidents will actually entice more teenagers to do likewise. Not in the sense of copycat crimes; not in the sense of glamorising the perpetrators, the way the media does (intentionally or no) whenever there's a school shooting; not even in raising awareness of the concept of driving the wrong way down a motorway to people who would otherwise never have considered it. The reason one carries out a stupid dangerous stunt like this (filming it all the while) is to demonstrate that you're a tough cunt who plays by his own rules. If people actually get maimed or killed while executing these stunts, then someone who does one and emerges on the other side unscathed seems like even more of a tough cunt than they would otherwise – the amount of death and injury that results quantifies how dangerous the stunt is. Thus, every additional corpse makes partaking in these stunts more appealing to someone eager to be seen as a tough cunt.
It also reminds me of a theory I've heard from multiple independent people that there's sort of a "conservation of rebellion" that comes with adolescence. Teenagers are driven to shock and appal their parents, but in the past all they had to do to accomplish this was dye their hair, get a tattoo or pierce their ears with a safety pin. All of those things have since become fairly normalised, but the adolescent urge to act out and disrespect one's elders hasn't gone anywhere, so teenagers are driven to ever more extreme lengths to do things their parents won't approve of.
And here's where it leads us, apparently.
*Even the footage that doesn't show any collisions is scary enough. If I was in the leftmost lane on the motorway and saw a car barreling the wrong way down the hard shoulder, I genuinely don't know how I'd react.
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3d ago
Meanwhile there's obviously people who belong to a British ethnicity (English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish)
Excuse me?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Sorry to hear that pal. Feel free to DM me if you need a sympathetic ear.
"Fabulist" is too strong a term, but for people working in the entertainment industries in Ireland and the UK, attempting to pass yourself off as coming from a more socioeconomically deprived background than you really did (class-Dolezalism) is the rule rather than the exception. If an actor, writer or (especially) musician claims (or implies) to have had a tough working-class upbringing, it's safe to assume they're lying unless they can provide receipts. (Prime example. You can just tell how fed up Beckham is with his wife's pretensions.)
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3d ago
This must be the most surprising "skill issue" I've ever gotten.
Last year my fiancée and I both read Eliza Clark's Boy Parts, which I thoroughly enjoyed (it was my third-favourite novel I read last year). A few months ago I bought her Clark's sophomore effort, Penance; she told me she enjoyed it, albeit not as much as Boy Parts. I started reading it on my commute this morning. It follows a muckraking journalist writing a true-crime book about a teenaged girl brutally murdered by three schoolmates in a small seaside town in the summer of 2016.
I'm thirty pages in and I'm enjoying it so far, although sadly the few tics and flourishes I found distracting in Boy Parts remain intact in the followup. Clark is a white Millennial Englishwoman who is Very Online and whom I presume had a middle-class upbringing: accordingly, her every waking moment is sodden with terror of getting cancelled for being insufficiently woke. (In the chapter in which the muckraking journalist introduces himself to the reader, he describes how getting cancelled in a Twitter pile-on temporarily derailed his career – something on your mind, dear?) To avert this fate, Clark interrupts her lengthy passages of sharply observed character details and pinpoint-accurate observations of British class dynamics with chunks of boilerplate, calcified woke orthodoxy e.g. going out of her way to mention that the "majority right-leaning" UK media largely ignored the girl's murder: the victim and three perpetrators all being white Britons, the case couldn't be cynically pinned on a grooming gang or an immigrant. It feels defensive and out of place, as if added just before publication at the behest of a sensitivity reader. C'mon Clark, show your power level already!
Last week I finished The Age of Diagnosis by the Irish GP Suzanne O'Sullivan. Her thesis, in short, is that medical diagnosis is more of an art than a science, and that in recent decades medical institutions have begun to err on the side of too much diagnosis rather than too little. This overdiagnosis comes in two main forms:
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Carrying out preemptive screenings and unnecessary tests on patients before they report any symptoms. Any oncologist will tell you that time is of the essence when it comes to treating cancer, and on paper the ability to identify and treat cancerous growths before the patient notices anything wrong sounds like a godsend. But O'Sullivan presents some disquieting statistics indicating that certain oncologists may not be as talented at distinguishing benign tumours from malignant as they claim to be, and that, as a consequence, many patients are being subjected to aggressive treatment regimens which deleteriously affect their quality of life for no good reason. Perhaps the most distressing example of this trend is women who undergo genetic testing to be told that they have an X% chance of developing breast cancer, and who undergo preemptive mastectomies before any tumours have been located (famous recipients of these procedures include Elizabeth Wurtzel and, most famously, Angelina Jolie). As O'Sullivan notes, while the margins of error on these breast cancer estimates have shrunk over time, they can never be zero; and even if they were, if you tell a large cohort of women they have an 87% chance of developing breast cancer in the future, the unavoidable conclusion is that some women have undergone mastectomies for literally no reason. We talk about medically unnecessary mastectomies a lot in this space, but it's sobering to be reminded that it's a topic of major concern even outside the domain of "gender-affirming care". O'Sullivan also cites some alarming statistics on the number of doctors who have admitted to ordering medical tests they did not think were necessary, purely to assuage a hypochondriac patient's worries (read: minimise the risk of a malpractice suit). This seems like a potentially under-discussed contributing factor both to lengthy hospital waiting lists and to Baumol's cost disease. When you hear that patients have to wait, say, 12 weeks to undergo an MRI, you can't help but wonder how many people ahead of them in the queue were not thought to be ill by anyone but themselves (not even by the doctor who ordered the scan).
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Existing diagnostic categories loosening and distending over time, until they include people who in previous generations would have been considered completely healthy. This is the story we're more more familiar with. No one is merely "shy" or "socially awkward" any more: every such person is now "on the spectrum". No one is "easily distracted": they have ADHD. Sometimes these diagnostic categories stretch to the point of becoming contested illnesses (e.g. "chronic Lyme" disease, "long Covid"). O'Sullivan reserves particular ire for the concept of "masking", wherein "mildly" or "high-functioning" autistic people can supposedly learn to hide the outward symptoms of their condition and pretend to be neurotypical – which effectively turns being autistic into an unfalsifiable claim*. O'Sullivan argues that the excessive focus on people at the "high-functioning" end of the autistic spectrum has resulted in a highly skewed public impression of what autism entails and, consequently, social policies which demote the severely autistic in importance in favour of their "high-functioning" brethren (in other words, autism and other disabilities have become gentrified). O'Sullivan is clearly afraid of being misconstrued as a right-wing culture warrior sneering at Millennial snowflakes diagnosing themselves with ailments they don't have for clout, and is even-handed and sympathetic to a fault, hammering home that suffering is not any less real for being psychosomatic in etiology, and that the people who stand to suffer most from a medically unfounded diagnosis of autism or ADHD are the diagnosees themselves. But there are brief moments where the mask slips, and her exasperation with and contempt for these self-absorbed malingerers is on full display: when she notes that some residents of Australia have diagnosed themselves with "chronic Lyme", despite that country being inhospitable to the tick whose bites cause Lyme disease; when she describes what a high proportion of people diagnosed with ADHD are comorbid with one or more other psychological ailments; when she describes a list of dozens of potential "long Covid" symptoms (including "loneliness") circulated by a woman with a PhD in a non-medical discipline who consistently refers to herself with the "Dr." honorific; when she argues that, in some cases, a nonspecific medical diagnosis is a convenient coping mechanism for people whose life didn't turn out how they thought it ought to have; and the banger quote below (emphasis mine):
Of the scores of people I spoke to, all of whom were adults, all perceived their lives to be better off thanks to a diagnosis. Every person welcomed the diagnosis into their lives. But almost all had left their job, dropped out of education and lost many old friends. Several were housebound.
A fascinating and eye-opening book, but there were parts in which I wished O'Sullivan would be a little less equivocal and even-handed, more willing to take activists to task for their selfishness, more willing to openly discuss how destructive the "self-diagnosis" trend has been. I'd be fascinated to see the first draft and see how many of the hard edges got sanded down by successive rounds of editing.
*As drily noted by Hannah Spier, "masking" is basically synonymous with "emotional self-regulation", something every adult, to a greater or lesser extent, eventually has to learn how to do. Dare I say that the legitimately autistic are distinguished by a literal inability to "pretend" to be neurotypical? Indeed, that they don't even understand the concept of pretending to be neurotypical?
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4d ago
And by Barker's own admission, the first draft of the screenplay was just a movie about a toxic abusive relationship with no supernatural elements at all. It was only a chance viewing of a Simpsons episode that inspired him to include the "monkey's paw" element.
I doubt Barker was consciously thinking "if I make a movie about a woman with borderline personality disorder who's the villain, people will call me a misogynist, so I'd better come up with some pretext by which a male character is really to blame for her villainy". It was probably more of a subconscious thing, where the "monkey's paw" plot device felt "safer" for reasons he likely couldn't put into words.
I don't treat the October 7th attacks as having
happened– look at that, you're doing the exact thing I criticised in the OP – having been committed in a vacuum. I'm aware that they were a reopening of hostilities in a conflict which has been ongoing for the guts of a century.But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate. Other things that are not open for debate: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians; most civilians killed were intentionally killed by Hamas and not by the IDF; Hamas intentionally chose to attack Israel. The October 7th attacks were not "inevitable", and to claim that they were is to, ironically, deny the agency of the Palestinian people.
Please show me where I said any such thing.
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