dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
YOU ARE THE REASON
Andulka
⁂
PR's Tumblrdome
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
if i look back, i am lost
AnasAbdin
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
oozey mess
almost home
★
ellievsbear
Sweet Seals For You, Always
RMH
One Nice Bug Per Day
No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from Switzerland
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from India
seen from United States
@ciphergoth
#good omens
oh this is phenomenal.
The fucking googly eyes
@yamisnuffles
I’ll have to make one next year.
Honestly everyone should get a biblically accurate angel. Here’s ours
Looks awesome on top of the tree
The only angel i accept on a chrismass tree from now on
Back when I was working at the factory (or really, "produce redistribution plant", but 'the factory' rolls off the tongue easier), there was only one female forklift operator in the whole plant. This story isn't about her, the point here is that it was a very male-dominated workplace.
Seeing them swoop by day in and day out, you got used to the forklifts, which were all more or less identical with each other save for some scrapes and bangs and signs of wear, except for one, which had a tiny, sparkling Hello Kitty -sticker on the side, scarcely larger than my thumb.
One night shift there were only two gatherers at work beside me, and only one forklift operator. On a particularly quiet moment of that particularly quiet night, the forklift driver and I were the only ones in the break room, and though we'd never really talked before, I remarked that he got the Hello Kitty one.
He, a sturdy man in his fifties, grinned in a way that made the ends of his moustache tilt up, made a pointed look around the obviously empty break room and leaned in towards me like men that age do when they've got a great and splendid secret to share.
He asked me, had I ever noticed that it was almost always him who is driving the Hello Kitty forklift? I had not, but that did not swing his glee about this to either direction. He nodded. That was his favourite forklift, it's the one that turns the smoothest, the one with the most even brakes and most comfortable seat. He had put the sticker on it, he had borrowed one from his granddaughter.
Ever since, even if he hadn't shown up to shift as the first guy on the job, his favourite was almost always still available. Like a magical, protective ward, the little sparkly sticker kept the other men away from his favourite machine.
***
And the Lord said: Depart from Me, for you did not serve Me, but followed false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing.
And I said, look, I was going to read the blog post on how to distinguish between the the Spirit of God and the Antichrist spirit, but it required a $7/month subscription and I just really don’t like paying for online content.
And the Lord said: Legit.
Thus Spoke Smash Mouth
I love this translation of All-Star into Aramaic and back:
It reminded me so much of the writing style of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that I just had to run it the other way:
Some BODY once taught me that animal begot me, and Ubermensch was next in the thread. He was looking kind of wild When he talked about the child and the lion and the camel in my head
WELL Mankind’s something that you’ll be overcoming Write in your blood and the depths you’ll be plumbing Doesn’t make sense just to read for fun Your brain gets smart but your spirit stunk Same as the man as with the tree So much evil you find with your roots deep You’ll never know if you obey You’ll never think if you don’t play
HEY NOW, you’re a dancing star Made of chaos, true way Hey now, become who you are, Burn yourself in your own flame All that soars in the sky Looks so small to those who can’t fly-y
Most discourse about self-driving cars and nuclear power:
“We need to be more careful about saving millions of lives! A few dozen people might die in the process!”
Honestly, I’m nonzero sympathetic to the viewpoint that technology can make things worse, and we should be cautious about it. You want to argue that social media and clickbait have made our lives worse? That’s a defensible position.
But that caution seems incredibly misplaced when the technology is specifically designed to fix one of the major causes of death in the status quo.
I feel like the main problem here is that people just entirely forget that, like, new tech should be compared to the status quo, not to perfection.
Imagine Toyota came out with a new car, which was half the price of existing cars, and also was twice as safe, and put out half as much pollution. It would be amazing!
Now imagine they didn’t call it a car, they called it a kuruma or something. Everyone would hate it! “Dozens of people are dying in kurumas!” “Kurumas are taking up lanes that could have been used by cars!” The media would report on “The Kuruma Menace”. Some poor people who couldn’t afford cars would buy kurumas, and everyone would complain about the increased traffic/pollution caused by them.
This is how I feel about people’s reactions to basically every transit innovation ever. Scooters, Uber, self-driving cars, Lime, etc. People always hate them even if they’re a strict improvement over cars. Because instead of comparing them to cars, they compare them to what if people stayed home and did nothing.
And, like, maybe that holds water if you’re the kind of person who think everyone should stay home and do nothing. But most of the critics are people who drive cars! I could talk about how not being stuck at home is a human need, that people are willing to pollute and risk their lives for, but I don’t need to, because these people already know that, that’s why they have cars!
Drilling down into specifics: A lot of the criticism of Uber comes because it’s taking people away from public transit as well as from cars. And yes, cars are in fact less safe, more polluting, cause worse traffic, etc, compared to public transit.
But, like, notice basically everyone I know who complains about Uber owns a car.
People who don’t own cars tend to like Uber. It gets them home when buses aren’t running; when they’re in a rush, it gets them in town in half an hour rather than three hours by bus; it lets them go places while being blind; or while in suburbs underserved by transit. It gets them to hospitals when they’re too sick to bike, for 1/50th of the cost of an ambulance. It lets children go places when their parents don’t feel like driving.
But the car owners? They’ll tell you all about how Uber is ruining their city, because it allows poor people and disabled people the convenience of a car every once in a while, and the convenience of a car just happens to come with tradeoffs.
i’d love to hear how your logic ties into nuclear energy
#im with you all the way on the other stuff even though id add in some points #but with nuclear energy im just not so sure #if the tech is as i recall - and this may not be so - the by products of that stuff are extremely deleterious to our environment #in which case perfection should be aimed for
Like the others, nuclear energy is one of those things where it always gets compared to “not using energy”, rather than to coal.
And as long as a single coal plant exists, the question isn’t “is nuclear power better than nothing?” but “is nuclear power better than coal?” – i.e. “should we replace this coal plant with a nuclear plant?”
Because you don’t need to get bogged down in the tradeoffs of “are deaths and environmental effects worth having electric power?” when we as a society have already said ‘yes’ to the same question regarding coal. If you disagree with those tradeoffs, you should be lobbying for dismantling coal, or at least for replacing it with nuclear as we move towards
Estimates for coal deaths range in the millions of deaths per year. Nuclear is responsible for, like, on average, one death per year? Most meltdowns result in zero deaths. Literal meltdowns!
(Nuclear is even safer than solar and wind – if you’re wondering how, people sometimes die falling off roofs while installing solar panels. Nuclear power hysteria kills more people than nuclear power itself does – more people died in the Fukushima evacuation than would have died if they just ignored it!)
Sure, nuclear energy has byproducts which are not great. But the question isn’t “are the byproducts better than nothing” but “are the byproducts as bad as millions of deaths every year?”
Which, even if you didn’t know anything about them, it’s probably less bad than millions of deaths per year, considering there are relatively few things in the world quite that bad, and we’d probably hear about them if they were. [1]
Casual research (skimming the Wikipedia article) confirms this: nuclear waste is being dealt with. There’s room for improvement, but considering there hasn’t been a single death involved, it’s clearly significantly less bad as millions of deaths per year.
It’s not like nuclear waste is magic. We have a pretty good understanding of it: It emits radiation which lessens over long periods of time, and we know how to block radiation, how far away from it is safe, etc etc.
[1] Fun fact: gasoline is one of the few worse things; electric cars are less bad per-mile than gas cars even if the electricity is generated from coal.
I know this has some good points, but please for the love of god do not try and convince people that nuclear energy is good. Nuclear waste is a huge issue actually and the u.s. technically still has no plan in place for it. Also meltdowns can have serious, long ranging and long term effects on people’s health.
Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes. Interactions with coal and muclear energy in of themself cause damage to the environment and to living things.
Do you notice that this is the exact thing I was talking about, though? I could talk about how you’re wrong about how big of a problem nuclear waste and meltdowns are, but I shouldn’t even need to, because they’re nothing compared to the widespread environmental destruction and death caused by coal power.
Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes.
Deaths aren’t less bad when they’re accidental… The deceased’s family isn’t going to feel any better if you tell them it was preventable.
The only way this matters if we’re talking about what we should do in the future, when these deaths can be entirely prevented. At that point, yeah, I agree, we should stop using nuclear power, and switch to, like, Dyson spheres or something. But that’s not relevant to what we should be doing now.
Also, if accidental deaths don’t count, Nuclear has zero deaths.
I have similar feelings for vaping/e-cigs. Studies show e-cigs can be bad! But there’s no way to jigger the numbers to make it anywhere near as bad as real cigarettes. This is clearly better.
“meltdowns can have serious, long ranging and long term effects on people’s health“ so can crossing the street. More importantly, so do coal plants, and a lot more so. The question is not “does this thing have any risks”, the question is “which of these things has fewer risks”.
The reason people are inherently wary of nuclear waste repositories isn’t just because of hysteria, it’s because of uncertainty that can’t be fully eliminated. Ramana does a good job of summarizing it here.
Here are some of the most relevant bits:
There “are a variety of factors that make it difficult to predict repository behavior over geologic time, including climate, saturated zone behavior, volcanism, unsaturated zone behavior… the environmental and chemical conditions of the repository environment as it evolves over time, especially the chemistry of the water that will exist in the repository.”
Adding to this technical complexity is uncertainty about how human populations will behave tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now. How are we to know, for example, that in the 29th century, people might not be mining in the vicinity of the repository to obtain some mineral that has become widely used at that time? Efforts to try and communicate about the dangers of buried radioactive waste through millennia border on science fiction, and believing that the proposed design elements would deter human intrusion thousands if not tens of thousands of years into the future strains one’s credulity.
The second factor that undermines claims about safety are failures of different kinds: design failure, human failure, or institutional failure. Even the limited experience with existing repositories provides ample examples of failure. […] If such failures have occurred just 15 years after the facility started receiving wastes, how is one to trust that other failures would not occur during the many decades it would take to construct and load large quantities of highly radioactive waste into a geological repository, let alone over the millennia that the waste will remain hazardous?
TL;DR:
1) We can’t actually guarantee the safety of repositories due to factors like volcanism, changing climate, and the chemistry of repository water.
2) We don’t actually have an effective way of communicating danger to humans 10,000 years in the future. (That’s how we end up with weirdness like the blue Yucca cacti, which for all we know will actually encourage people to go check it out.)
3) Humans aren’t perfect, which means even if we could guarantee perfect technological safety, we’re the weak link that could screw things up.
In addition, the question isn’t whether nuclear power is better than coal, it’s whether nuclear power is better than a direct transition to renewable energy.
And I’m saying that there’s degrees of uncertainty between “guaranteed safe” and “so dangerous it’s not worth doing.” There is a range of levels of risk such that the benefit outweighs the risk, and that range includes values other than zero.
“ In addition, the question isn’t whether nuclear power is better than coal, “
@kolleh why didn’t you tell that to Germany and Japan before they replaced nuclear power with coal power, leading to far more premature deaths than the Fukushima meltdown
It blows my mind someone would even try arguing switching to nuclear power would only ‘kill a dozen people’ like with self-driving cars. The reason people are terrified of nuclear power is because, even if it’s safe and efficient, if it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Wrong for generations and enough to fuck up the entire world in one blow.
The reason we learned about Chernobyl is because the wind dragged the huge amounts of radioactivity across Europe and other countries picked up on it. Across countries. Fish are being caught close to Fukushima that still have radioactivity levels above the legal limit to sell, and those things are just hanging around in our waters. There were fish caught near Canada who had radioactive elements only found in Fukushima; the radioactivity carried across oceans and countries in both these cases.
That’s why people are terrified of nuclear power, because even if it only goes wrong .0001% of the time, it goes REALLY wrong.
Man, I actually originally just wanted to vagueblog about self-driving cars (the Uber thing was in the news again recently), but here I am, knee deep in nuclear power discourse.
So, a worst-case scenario for a nuclear disaster might be something like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 28 deaths, and an additional 15 indirect deaths from the fallout.
If that’s not sufficiently worst-case for you, how about this? The nukes dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a lot of people. Combined, 200,000 deaths is an upper-end estimate, including all the indirect deaths.
No matter how bad a nuclear accident would be, you can’t imagine it’d be worse than the one time humans intentionally used nuclear physics to kill as many people as possible, right?
How much is 200,000 deaths? It’s so many deaths that it’s multiple weeks of coal power worth of deaths.
There have been 883 months since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let me drive that point home. If, instead of using coal power, we had magically converted it all into nuclear power, had just as many nuclear accidents per-kilowatt as now, and also literally nuked another two cities a month, we would still have had fewer deaths.
Yes, you’re right, “some people will have health problems” is a serious issue. It’s just, have you forgotten that the issue it’s up against is “millions of deaths per year worth of health problems”? It’s not like dying from coal is a “clean” death, or in any way better.
The worst doomsday scenario anyone has managed to provide is a series of improbable coincidences – what if we have some sort of apocalypse? And in the apocalypse, all scientific knowledge has been lost? And some people stumble across some nuclear waste and don’t know it’s bad?
Well, then, in this incredibly unlikely scenario, some people would die before they figured it out, and it would be tragic. But it still wouldn’t be as tragic as two nukes per month guaranteed.
And if radioactive waste is seriously more of a problem to you than multiple atomic bombs of deaths every month, well, for one thing, you don’t understand radiation very well, but for another, I have some news about coal…
this is the best thing i’ve ever made
Never meant to make your daughter cry
I am several fish and not a guy
Isn’t this where the switch to turn off safe mode is supposed to be? Where do I do that, if not here?
Not to be “Princess Bride” on main, but one of the most underrated lines in the movie is when Vizzini is being chased by boat and Inigo says (paraphrased) “He’s catching up!! I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using”
I love it because it’s clear Wesley has to catch up in order for the story to move forward, but it wouldn’t really make sense because that’s not how boats work. The line addresses that fact that you’d find in a nitpickers review (up there with “THE DEATH STAR EXPLOSION WOULD BE SILENT!!!”), but does so in a way that’s almost making light of the discrepancy. Sorta being like “huh, yeah…that doesnt make sense, does it, but hey we’re in this for a light-hearted story, not accuracy”. It’s probably the best example of Lampshade Hanging, since it keeps the tone light-hearted and it draws attention to it without actively saying “this doesn’t make sense” and breaking that sort of immersion.
I just really like The Princess Bride.
Agree the line is cute, but people do in fact race sailboats
The speed at which a sail boat moves is roughly based on the size/number of the sails and the profile of the hull below the waterline. A lighter boat (that thus sits higher on the water and has a smaller underwater profile) with more/bigger sails will get more energy from the wind, and need to push less water out of the way to move forward, and thus will achieve a speed closer to the speed of the wind than a boat with fewer/smaller sails and/or a larger underwater profile.
This is why one of things that sometime happen in sailing boat stories during a chase is that the chased boat will start dumping things overboard. The goal is to lighten the ship so that it floats higher, and thus isn’t slowed down as much by the amount of water it has to push out of the way.
Michael, I know when you posted this you were thinking “sometimes I have a difficulty talking to people who don’t race sailboats”.
i blocked out the single word that marks which side of the culture war this is on.
without looking it up: who is this about?
Seeing a discussion about a Telegraph article and what it tells us about the mindset of journalists.
What it tells is is that you shared and reblogged that article.
Everything is political, including saying “everything is political”, and especially selectively pointing out when things are political.
Zettai Tsuyoku Narimasu: You will definitely become strong
For most of my life, I’ve had a pretty disfavorable relationship with productivity. As a kid I was a lazy, dismotivated, never-crastinator. I seldom completed my homework, coasting by with mostly passable grades due to good test taking. I wouldn’t do my chores, racking up punishments for weeks. Despite an exhaustion that I experienced nearly every day, I couldn’t get myself off the computer and into bed until the small hours of the night. My first semester in college, I got such poor grades that I was placed on academic probation.
“You’re so smart; I know you’re capable of doing better. ” My mom told me. “Sometimes you just have to sit down and get a thing done,” my dad told me.
My dad ran his own company and my mom was a math and science teacher. Being naturally driven, self-motivated, and organized people, they didn’t know how to help me. I’m not sure they even believed me when I told them that I really did want to do my homework, and to go to sleep early. But none of the advice seemed to help me improve. Nothing I did seemed to break the cycle of procrastination. I felt like a failure.
Tsuyoku Naritai ( 強くなりたい ) means “I want to become stronger.” The Tsu is pronounced like the last phoneme of the word cats. Cats. Catsu. Tsuyoku. The R in Naritai is trickier. Think of the way you pronounce a soft t (or T-flap, for you linguistics nerds) in the word water or letter. Nari. Naritai. Tsuyoku Naritai.
Like I mentioned, I desperately wanted to become stronger. But nothing I tried solved my problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I gravitated towards Japanese media which, as Eliezer Yudkowsky famously wrote, “Embodies the spirit of Tsuyoku Naritai more intensely than in any Western literature.”(x) One of my favorite things was the Pokémon anime. In the early episodes of the show the main character Ash oversleeps, struggles to catch Pokémon, and fails in understanding even the basic principles of a Pokémon type match up, sending in Electric type Pikachu against a fully resistant ground type in his first big match. Over the course of the series however, he catches more Pokémon, wins more battles, and finally learns how to use strategy to choose the best Pokémon for the match.
It was undoubtedly cathartic for me to see Ash Ketchum grow from a flailing disaster child to a somewhat competent Pokémon Trainer. Perhaps it gave me hope. Or maybe I just liked the cute monsters and the badly translated puns.
Fast forward a number of years. I was thinking of applying to programming bootcamp. During a phone call with my mom, I expressed my worries: I did so poorly in school, collapsing under the workload. How would I manage in a rigorous bootcamp environment?
To my complete surprise she replied, “Honey, I should have said it more often but I’m so so proud of you. When you were facing dropping out of college, you turned things around and graduated. I was way too hard on you because of my own mindset and I really regret it.”
Like a seismic tremor, my foundation of self-image was shaken, as the entire way I had framed my academic abilities seemed to flip in that moment. Could it have been true that I actually did quite well in school? Were there some beliefs about how far I ought to have progressed, or what skills I ought to have mastered that were making me miserable?
I called my dad to talk about the bootcamp idea. He too, was confident I could do it. “Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, ” he said, “and underestimate what they can do in a year.”
I think that was my problem. Each and every day, I saw myself undershoot my goals. I had this firmly held image of success and what that would be like, and every day that didn’t fit that description was a failure.
Fueled by the newfound belief in my ability to succeed, and my plan to measure my progress over months not days, I launched into my work. I set intermediate checkpoints along the way to keep myself on task. I gave myself permission to write code sitting sideways on a couch, and I finally taught myself how to say no to requests for my time and energy.
And as of last week, I have graduated from my full stack programming bootcamp in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy.
And so I think I can say with confidence, looking back over my entire life, that I am longer quite the flailing disaster child I used to be. (Even though I still have a ways to go ;) )
So, do not let a thought like “I’m not strong yet” or “I didn’t do enough” color your perception of your journey. You may not see it, but every day that you don’t give up is the practice of tsuyoku naritai, (“I want to become strong.”) And trust me, you will definitely become strong. “Zettai tsuyoku narimasu.”
Massive congratulations! One of these days I should write up my own journey from “disorganized person who never does any work” to, well, pretty functional grown-up.
the parable of Toothpick Man
Months back, maybe a year, I was heading home from Manhattan on a late-night 4 train. There were only a few people on the train. One of them was Toothpick Man.
Toothpick man was a guy, maybe mid-30s, white guy, wearing a black leather jacket, one foot up on the subway seat, and showily clenching a toothpick in the side of his mouth. It occurred to me at that moment that Toothpick Man was everything that the internet would mock; he was a Mean Twitter wet dream. And yet something else occurred to me: Toothpick Man would not care. Toothpick Man’s toothpick might scream affectation in the internet era, but he projected such a natural confidence and unabashed self-possession that the idea of insulting him seemed absurd. Surely Toothpick Man would be happier than his critics, just as he was surely happier than me.
I know it’s not exactly groundbreaking to say that there’s a connection between unhappiness and a desire to crack jokes, or that humor is a product of insecurity. But I do think you’d rather be Toothpick Man than someone who tells jokes online. The question is whether Toothpick (Wo)Men are made or born.
Many of you will recognize the kid who, in high school when everybody starts drinking, sits back at the edge of the party and says, “It’s actually more fun to be the guy making fun of the people drinking than to drink.” And one of the things you learn as an adult is that this is absolutely not true.
After a lifetime of impeccably correct opinions, Ian Buruma found himself on the wrong side of the . . . .
Todd’s advice for our fellow-shamed was no better than mine. “When a tsunami is heading for your house, at a certain point you have to say, ‘I’m just gonna stand here and hold this piece of plywood and see what’s left standing when it’s all over.’” Arguing back is no use. “If you’re tweeting, you’re losing.” Even in the immediate aftermath of the C-SPAN2 incident, when Todd, on his blog, attempted to make his case at length against my evil beliefs, he saw his arguments get lost in the maelstrom—equally ignored by both supporters and detractors. If we had a breakthrough in our conversation, that was it: There is no content to a shame storm. It is mindless by its very nature. It is indifferent to truth, even in cases where the truth could possibly be determined. Therefore, like the Ring, it cannot be used for good.
The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful—and even necessary—but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. That would be true even if the shaming’s relics were not preserved forever by Google, making any kind of rehabilitation impossible.
Frankly, I found it impossible to keep reading once I discovered the author’s a Trumpist. That tells me that they have zero concern for the civility of the debate, so long as the bad stuff is happening to the other side, and also that however smart they are they have made themselves stupid and unreliable.
Gonna be president and make sure to drag the nattiest couch possible into the oval office.
movie idea: the president is like 85 and picked a cool young dude as his running mate to appeal to the youth vote, and while the president is away on some kind of state visit or something the vp invites all his college buddies over to the white house for a house party. in the third act the president is assassinated or has a heart attack in the middle of a summit or whatever and the vp becomes president but his frat buddies have to help him save america and avert an imminent war because he’s too high to do it himself
I think about this scene constantly. There’s so little other media that’s able to encapsulate so much of the cultural vapidity characteristic of the American bourgeoisie.
The intense, emotive language used to casually describe the hardship of maybe not getting a good table, in contrast to the flippant way that infidelity and casual drug abuse among peers is discussed. The conspicuous consumption of empty cosmopolitan artisanship (“The menu’s in Braille,” “do you think SoHo is becoming too… commercial?”) The way that Louis interjects “yes, I read that” to something his fiancee has said, adding nothing to the conversation except to remind people of his intelligence.
And then, the best part. Timothy’s retrograde masculinity. His one-upmanship, bashing others for the shallowness of their concerns by asking “Well what about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey?… I mean, do you know anything about Sri Lanka?” The fact that he clearly doesn’t even know what he’s talking about (“the Sikhs are killing tons of Israelis over there”), making it clear he has no concern for this very serious topic he’s raised, that his only concern is to loudly establish the superiority of his intelligence and social consciousness, neither of which he actually possesses.
Then, Patrick goes even further. With a passionate voice but absolutely no sincerity in his facial expression, he randomly lists off causes and goals. He name-checks issues which would have appeared regularly in the news in the 1980′s- apartheid, nuclear arms race, terrorism. He feigns concern for the homeless, civil rights, and women, and also calls for “a return to traditional moral values.” General social concern!
None of this means anything. Patrick Bateman holds no actual opinion about any of these issues. He has listened to people speak about social issues enough to know what is socially encouraged to believe, but also to know when he needs to stop short of providing any substance which evokes controversy. It doesn’t matter that he was talking about women like slabs of meat 30 seconds prior, or that he’s eating a meal that costs several hundred dollars in a thousand dollar suit- he’s talked his way into an image of a man who cares about women and who opposes commercial materialism. It has absolutely no content, but it sounds beautiful- it is the perfect speech.
This entire scene, every single thing which transpires in it, is completely pointless. None of these people actually like each other or have said a single genuine thing the entire night. The dinner is just a competition for social status using faux-worldliness and empty cosmopolitanism as metrics for victory, all under the auspices of a social gathering. These are hollow people, people without honesty or meaning, people who possess everything in the world except for a sense of humanity.
I wouldn’t say the scene is really an accurate portrayal of the class it skewers, but it is indeed an extremely effective portrayal for all the reasons given above.
Give Catholicism a gander
I was going to say “female”, based on the whole Holy Mother Church thing, but then I doubled-checked and saw I had misread the question.
Duck that.
