In a week where I learned that octopuses (octopi?) are anti-semitic1
and that a 50 year old man competed with 13 year old girls at a swim event2, and that the word picnic is laden with some kind of hideous and racist connotation3. I desperately need to unhook a bit and do some serious binge watching on Netflix.
Of course freeing Palestinians will help save the planet too - it will reduce CO2, . . . or something. Nope. Not got a fucking clue. Can’t see what climate “justice”, whatever the holy fuck that is, has got to do with a bunch of extremist psychopathic Palestinians murdering (in seriously depraved and disturbed ways) any innocent person they could get their hands on.
I’m also still trying to figure this one out
Every baby you abort helps to free a Palestinian?
What are these gibbering morons trying to say here? It’s like they have this random collection of “causes” programmed into them and they just pick bits to string together into some nonsensical slogan4.
Talking about throwing random bits of things at something and hoping something sensible comes out at the end, let’s talk about entertainment.
How’s that for a segue?
It’s probably a very desirable and programmed response5, but I find myself more and more wanting to fire up Netflix and retreat into a vegetative state these days. I’ve always been a bit like this. After wrestling with mathematical squiggles all day I just wanted something that wasn’t too taxing - so my reading and watching over the years has mostly been decidedly low-brow; more spectacle than substance.
These last few years I’ve grown rather fond of Korean TV shows. I’ll probably go into why in a bit more depth at some point, but I think it’s mostly because the Korean writers are more interested in entertaining you than educating you.
If the story calls for some air-headed gushy romantic female, or some stoic and strong male - that’s what’ll go in - and stereotypes be damned. There’s plenty of the exact opposite to these stereotypes to be found also. If the story needs X, then X is what it’ll get.
One of my favourite shows, Strong Girl Bong-Soon, is an absolute riot.
It’s like the writers just threw, Pollock style, every trope in the book at a wall and out of it came what was, for me, a hugely entertaining show. It’s an almost insane mix of tonal elements - from the outrageously over-the-top slapstick and goofy humour, with more ham than a pig farm, with stereotypes on steroids, the sweet romance, the super-hero elements, the genuinely witty moments, the touching human moments, all the way through to a really creepy serial killer/abductor arc to the story. It’s a show that has no idea what it’s meant to be. But it works. For me, anyway.
A lot of the shows I watch require a considerable element of suspension of disbelief - and that’s fine by me. I don’t watch stuff to be reminded of the humdrum of daily routine and the fact that I need to wash the bloody dishes (yet again). In some respects, the less realism, the better. But there are some limits.
In one of the godawful new Star Wars movies they had this scene where a spaceship dropped bombs on another spaceship. In space.
And I always loved the (old) Star Trek episodes where space battles ended up with the enemy ship hanging down at an angle - to emphasize it had been vanquished.
In my last piece I talked a bit about conservation laws and how the wonderful Emmy Noether revolutionized our understanding of them, and so I wanted to address a well-known trope from action movies. This is the bit where the bad guy gets shot and flies backwards as a result. It’s a great visual, but does it make sense?
In order to get an answer to this question we need the law of the conservation of momentum.
What this says is that, in a closed system (where no external forces ‘cross’ the boundary) the momentum is conserved.
OK - that sounds nice, but what does it mean? It means that the momentum - the total momentum of everything inside the boundary, is constant. Each individual thing inside the boundary might have a changing momentum, but when you add all of the individual momenta up, you find this sum does not change with time.
We can get an intuitive idea of why this must be so from Newton’s 2nd and 3rd Laws.
Newton’s 2nd Law says that the rate of change of momentum is equal to the applied force. Newton’s 3rd Law says that for every force there is an equal, and opposite, ‘reaction’ force.
So, if we consider just 2 interacting objects - each exerting some force on the other - the forces are equal and opposite. When we add these forces up they cancel out. So the rate of change of the total momentum (of the two particles) is zero (because the total applied force operating adds up to zero), which means that the total momentum is constant.
This can, of course, be properly generalized to any number of interacting objects within a boundary.
One of the first applications we examine in elementary physics of this conservation property focuses on collisions. Well, being shot is a kind of collision. The conservation of momentum requires that the momentum of the bullet and the man before the collision (i.e. before the bad guy is hit) must equal the momentum after the collision.
If we don’t consider the bullet passing through the man, then this kind of collision is called an inelastic collision. This is a collision where the two objects are joined together after the collision.
Let’s assume the man is stationary. Before the collision the only source of momentum is the bullet and this is mv - where m is the mass of the bullet and v is the velocity of the bullet.
After the collision we have an joint object (man plus bullet) which has a mass m + M (with M being the mass of the man) and which is travelling (in the same direction as the bullet) with velocity V.
The conservation of momentum requires that
mv = (m + M)V
So, the man+bullet system is moving, after the collision, with a velocity given by
A bullet typically has a mass of the order of 10g which is 0.01kg. A person typically has a mass of the order of 100kg. A bullet fired from a gun is typically travelling at something like 1,000 m/s (a bit high for a typical hand gun).
So the bad guy plus bullet are going to travel backwards at something like 10cm per second (just a ballpark figure without consideration of other things like friction etc)
So we’re not exactly into flying back through a window territory here.
But, dammit Chloe, I don’t want them stop doing the whole fly backwards when shot thing. It’s a great visual and highly entertaining despite being about as real as Dylan Mulvaney’s new sex6.
Many of us want to go back to a world where women were women and men were men. I’d also kind of like to go back to a world where TV shows and movies were entertaining. There isn’t a law of conservation of entertainment, but I’d kind of like there to be one.
Peeps - sometimes a stuffed toy is just a stuffed toy - although why there was a stuffed toy in the image at all, and why it was this particular stuffed toy is certainly, shall we say, thought-provoking. I have, uncharacteristically, some sympathy with St. Greta’s claimed position on this. I had no fucking clue that an octopus was some anti-semitic trope, either. On the other hand, the brainless Swedish goblin was displaying a Pro-Palestine poster in the wake of some of the most depraved atrocities committed against innocent human beings since the fucking Middle Ages (where they specialized in particularly imaginative inhumane and cruel ways to murder people).
Ever since we learned about woodwork teachers in the country displaying their excessive buoyancy aids in public, it will come as no surprise that this happened in Canada. I’ve heard rumours that next year Canada is going to be renamed as Whatthefuckistan.
It isn’t. But the professionally offended (on behalf of others) have deemed it so. Is there anything in the world that doesn’t have some hidden tropey ist or ism connotation, these days? They are definitely not right in the head, are they, these woketards?
I kind of suspect this image is a photo-shopped fake - but who knows these days? It has been used by other writers on Substack who I think are much more diligent in “fact checking” than I am.
The “powers that be” do like their populations to be docile.
Great visual and highly entertaining are, it has to be said, not phrases that immediately spring to mind when considering Dylan Mulvaney.
Being the resident swede I'll just swing by and drop this off here re: Greta.
1) She's got no clue about the issue, she's just doing what people she identifies with as Good(tm) are doing. In Sweden, the party that is and always has been condeming terrorism, especially moslem terror against jews, is the Sweden Democrats - the "racists".
Must feel weird for our few remaining jewish congregations, that a party they have demonised and threatened numerous times over 30 years are putting themselves between the very few jews of Sweden and over 1 500 000 moslem migrants calling for their extermination (90%+ of moslems, you know - refugees, in Sweden support the destruction of Israel and the genocide of jews).
2) The Left in Sweden has always supported the moslems/arabs against the jews, even before 1948. The post-war hate has two roots: historical, as all socialist movements have always blamed the jews as a whole for whatever was convenient, and due to the Cold War:
2.b) Since the US and Britain (aka "fascists" according to post-WW2 lefties) supported Israel, and the USSR (and the worker's paradise DDR) supported arab nationalism since the latter made problems for the US/british oil industry, it came naturally for the Left to support the arabs: Komintern's officials in every western nations told the various red groups to do so, because Great Leader had decreed it.
This has since lingered and festered.
3) Hatred is a key component of the modern Left, yet they preach that hatred is wrong - effect is they bottle it up until a legal target presents itself. Psychologically speaking, this means they go looking for reasons. Hating Israel is simply their way of hating jews in a socially acceptable manner.
4) Octopi was a common symbol to indicate globalist capitalist conspiracies in communist, fascist and national socialist propaganda in the inter-war period. Earlier, it was also used to indicate the spread of socialism, but in this case it was used by liberal-capitalist propagandists. The value of asymbol in semiotics is not so much the thing itself but the user and the message being sent; any symbol can have positive or negative connotations and associations, and this changes over time. In the 1960s and 1970s here, Donald duck was among the bourgeois Left - Greta's mother was born 1970 - a symbol for US imperialist fascism (Vietnam war sure helped to cement that image and narrative).
Right, that's my fix of Hektoring for today.
What you need is a heavy dose of BBC drama serials. If you watch enough of them - and for long enough - you'll eventually become so Woke yourself that all the stuff at the start of this (absolutely delightful by the way) post will seem perfectly sane, sensible and dandy to you. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining