FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3d ago
Fascinating, I had no idea about any of this. All I'd heard about it was that it was an incel-inspired mass shooting.
Does that mean that there hasn't been even a single incel-inspired act of violence in the UK this century? No one in the UK has ever been called upon to Dodge the Rodge? This is a moral panic that Labour and the Guardian have ginned up out of literally nothing?
and will virtually only recognise "innate sex differences" in ways which justify special and preferential treatment for women
On the contrary: James Damore got fired from Google essentially for arguing that, because of innate sex differences in career aspirations, Google's efforts to provide special and preferential treatment for women were misguided and a misallocation of resources. It's my impression that most people in this space agree with him - certainly I don't think that qualified men who want to work in STEM should be passed over in favour of less qualified women just for the sake of gender equality. Likewise, I don't think fitness requirements for firefighters, soldiers etc. should be relaxed just because the candidate is female.
FtttG
3d ago
We even have a case of murder, thePlymouth shooting, where the perpetrator was knee deep in anti-incel online communities
Could you expand on this? I was under the impression that the Plymouth shooter was an incel, even though none of his victims were women who'd rejected him.
FtttG
3d ago
There IS a UK demographic in which knife crime is a huge problem. There IS a UK demographic in which systemic mistreatment of white teenage girls is a huge problem.
Neither of these demographics are the demographic to which the aggressor in Adolescence belongs, and I refuse to accept the claim that this was accidental.
FtttG
3d ago
I vaguely remember hearing something about architects in ancient Rome (?) being obliged to live in houses directly under the bridges they'd designed.
FtttG
4d ago
I'm having precisely the opposite problem, this shit is way too fucking long.
FtttG
5d ago
When reading Orbán: Europe's New Strongman, my main thought was "why are the EU so reluctant to have an illiberal dictatorship like Turkey join the EU? In Hungary, they already have an illiberal dictatorship in their ranks."
After reading your post - well, I'm not going to say that France is as bad as Hungary, but Macron certainly can't throw any stones at Orbán.
FtttG
5d ago
I presume I wasn't the only person to nominate @teleoplexy's post, but I feel it's worth mentioning I did so 10% for the social commentary and 90% for the density of creative "meth-" portmanteaus.
FtttG
5d ago
I've been sick since the 19th so haven't made much progress on my NaNoWriMo project (the organisation itself is now shutting down, so I completed it just in the nick of time). This afternoon was the first time I've done any writing in two weeks, and I crossed the 80k mark at lunchtime. I'm sick of the sight of this thing, and just want to finish a first draft ASAP so it won't be hanging over me every waking minute.
FtttG
6d ago
Finished Kiki de Montparnasse last week. It was okay.
Around Christmas I found a slim volume containing five short stories (including "The Garden of Forking Paths") by Borges, who I'd never read anything by before. I read the whole thing in one day and enjoyed it, it's easy to see how influential he is.
Currently on The Door by Magda Szabó (I read her book Katalin Street earlier in the year).
FtttG
6d ago
- Gabriel Fauré - Pavane in F#m
- Gustav Holst - The Planets (especially "Jupiter". My brother once told me that the "vaporwave" genre is intended to induce the sensation of nostalgia for a time one never personally experienced. By the same token, "Jupiter" makes me feel patriotic for a planet I'll never set foot on.)
- Edward Elgar - "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations
FtttG
9d ago
If that's an appropriate response, then it's also appropriate to tell a man who gets punched by another man in the street that he should just git gud.
I'm not talking about individual men and women. I'm talking about how society is organised. Much of our modern society only makes sense when you understand that there is a broad societal-wide recognition of the fact that women, as a class, are systematically weaker and more fragile than men, and as a result extra resources must be invested into protecting them. There are hundreds if not thousands of NGOs dedicated to combatting "violence against women"; the idea of founding an NGO dedicated to combatting "violence against men" (without qualification) would have caused people to look at you like you'd two heads until maybe five minutes ago. (This is not me making an MRA argument.)
FtttG
10d ago
Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men?
Basically this. I presume Randall would be a bit uncomfortable about his argument being used in the context of gender politics, but it's exactly as applicable (likewise certain varieties of the "female underrepresentation in STEM is caused by misogyny" argument, as I noted here).
Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.
Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men, if such an idea were true, it would obviate feminism as a political movement. After all, the only reason feminism exists is in recognition of the fact that women, by virtue of their relative physical weakness, need protection from violent and rapacious men. But if women were just as strong as men, an appropriate response to women complaining about male violence and oppression would be "sounds like a you problem. Git gud."
FtttG
11d ago
I'm not sure how similar frisbee is to disc golf, but men have a massive competitive advantage in the latter: https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/
FtttG
11d ago
Well the entire point I was making was that Western educated people are systematically politically biased in ways which give them a predictably inaccurate model of the world, and that this model of the world is systematically inaccurate in ways quite different from the model used by the modal uneducated person. Pretty hard to make my point without using specific political examples - it's a fundamentally political assertion.
FtttG
11d ago
While obviously the word "fair" is a normative word, my intuitive understanding is that the answer to the question "is it fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events?" is pretty much entirely determined by the size of the delta in athletic performance between males and females. No one argued that it was a category error to include "it is fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events" under the heading of "factual delusion", they simply disputed that it was in fact a factual delusion. One person said that, rather than segregrating sports by sex, we should segregate sports according to the things for which sex is a proxy e.g. bone density, T-levels etc., which just sounds like a sex-segregated league with extra steps.
Right. Woke people in the UK are constantly appealing to the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the British film industry to improve "representation" for BAME (black, Asian and Middle Eastern) actors in British TV and film productions (see the perennial demands for the next James Bond to be played by Idris Elba). Then someone ran the numbers and found that BAME actors and LGBT actors are dramatically overrepresented in British TV compared to their respective shares of the population - nearly double, in fact.
If you watch a lot of TV and notice that about a quarter of characters are portrayed by BAME actors, you routinely read editorials about how the BBC and Netflix aren't doing enough to improve representation for BAME actors (the implication being that the current rate of representation isn't commensurate with UK demographics), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that more than 25% of the UK population is BAME, if you haven't yet learned that people sometimes go on the internet and tell lies.
Many experts serving on governing bodies for their respective sports support trans women competing in the female divisions.
FtttG
11d ago
In my local Slate Star Codex WhatsApp group, one guy recently advocated for technocracy over democracy, arguing that our society would function better if educated experts made all the decisions. I strongly disagreed, arguing that a) expertise in a given empirical field doesn't qualify you to make normative decisions - these are separate magisteria; and b) within their own narrow domain, educated experts may have a more accurate model of how the world works than the lay person, but educated experts are also disproportionately likely to endorse a range of deluded beliefs that most uneducated people do not suffer from. When pressed for examples of what deluded beliefs I was thinking of, the first I offered was "the idea that the delta in athletic performance between males and females is narrow enough that it can be fair for a trans woman to compete in a female sporting event".
Unsurprisingly, some people in the chat pushed back and insisted that there was no way this belief was a delusion, thereby proving my point.
Bro's overdue for a trip to Istanbul.
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