2rafa
13hr ago
Jews are of course overrepresented in leftism, but today wasn’t about Jews. The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.
The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.
SCOTUS: Catholics for Mass Immigration
As a gambit, Trump and Miller’s was always an extremely long shot, but it acts as an illustration of the seriousness of the national issue, and of the pernicious role of intellectual catholicism on the American right. This has less to do with lay Catholics, who are sometimes reactionary and sometimes liberal, or with very online rightist Catholics, whose devotion is questionable but who largely find the maximalist aesthetic interesting or more defensible than megachurch Christianity, which I sympathize with, or who find inspiration in its (arguable, the reality is rather mixed) historical antisemitism for their own LARPing.
One thing Roberts, Kavanaugh and ACB have in common is that they are all the court’s Catholic Intellectuals as an ideological grouping. This separates them from the other Catholics on the Supreme Court - Thomas left Catholicism and then came back to it but his conservatism is not distinctly Catholic (we can argue about this but it isn’t the thrust of my argument) and largely appears to view himself a jurist in both a conservative and a black conservative tradition that is not Catholic; his mentor and inspiration Sowell is (surprised to be writing is here - he’s 96 and still kicking) an atheist by all accounts. Alito is more devout but invented his own complex rationale for abandoning any form of integralism and essentially adopting WASPlite Conservatism With Ellis Islander Characteristics. Gorsuch rejected Catholicism. Sotomayor is nominally Catholic but openly lapsed as per her writings, so there is no need to even get into ideology with her.
Roberts, ACB and Kavanaugh are all much more products of the institutional Catholic Church. They continue to have senior roles in ‘official’ or semi official church organizations from which it would be extremely humiliating to be removed and where they ultimately, beyond many abstract layers of theological management, answer to the Pope, who is basically Zohran Mamdani if he was a little uncomfortable around abortion. If Thomas was denied communion on account of his politics I imagine he would laugh or ignore it; if ACB was I think she’d be very, very upset indeed, and it is laughable to think this isn’t the kind of motivator these people (who have spent most of their lives in this Catholic intellectual bubble surrounded by other Catholics) care about.
Catholicism is essentially a third-worldist institution - the largest, best funded, and most successful on earth - and has been for many decades. Third worldism as envisioned by its proponents was always more about the ‘south’ versus the ‘north’ (meaning countries with demographically european majorities, plus maybe japan) than it was about achieving socialism, which was really a second-tier target. Third worldism’s central organizing objective is ameliorating this supposed imbalance, this terrible and - in the eyes of the Church and its intellectual adherents - un-Christian state of affairs. Mass immigration is the central tool in this toolkit, since with enough of it (due to the vast majority of the world’s population being in the “global south”) the global north simply ceases to exist and one has won by Largely Peaceful™️ (and therefore very Christian) default. Catholicism is a global, transnational, extremely well functioning institution able to deploy tens of billions of (often tax) dollars towards this ideological aim; even more importantly, it has an entire ecosystem of forums, think tanks, colleges (including those on whose board the Roberts’ sit and with whom ACB has her central academic affiliation) and lobbying groups that exist to convince other ‘conservative’ Catholics (in the sense that they support some semblance of traditional marriages restriction of abortion etc) that mass immigration is actually lindy, wholesome chungus, and holy and you will go to hell if you fight it just as if you were a rapist, a murderer, or got ten abortions.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional. The Catholic Church is almost definitionally, as a transnational organization, less concerned with national borders. Far more of its adherents are would-be migrants and refugees than the people who would suffer in rich countries by their presence. Over the last two progressive papacies, by far the majority of the Catholic Church’s opprobrium for the United States has been about mass, and especially illegal, immigration. Of course, statistically, most Central and South American and Haitian illegal migrants - who are the migrants actually affected by the birthright citizenship debate since they can’t naturalize themselves - are literally Catholic.
This is part of the problem of talking about ‘social conservatism’ versus ‘economic conservatism’ or liberalism. If you hate abortion and have a kind of condescending pity for homosexuals but support the third-worldification of America, you are still a tradcon and the right will cheer as you’re appointed to the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family. She was never going to vote to repeal birthright citizenship which, for all the legalistic arguments, is an inherently nativist-sympathetic move (just as it was when England repealed it in 1981, and when Australia did 5 years later), even if its proponents profess to and indeed do support mass immigration in general. Is your country for the world or is it, at least, for you and the people you choose to let in?
In America, our Catholic rulers have decided it is for the world.
2rafa
14hr ago
Believing that it’s actually 5-4 requires believing that either Kavanaugh will fold or that Congress (to satisfy him) passes the requisite law with a 60 seat senate majority which the GOP is not going to have, and even if it did have it you’d need in the region of 65-70 GOP senators because the liberals will vote against it just like Roberts and ACB did.
2rafa
18hr ago
Unless you lived in the one city that had all the dragons until the war, you would probably never see a dragon in your entire life. There were like 10 and Westeros is the size of the Americas, north and south.
2rafa
4d ago
Did the common people know the dragons were extinct in Game of Thrones until long after it happened?
2rafa
4d ago
More the second, which is reasonable. When you donated to a thrift store traditionally, the expectation was that the profit from the sale at a modest price would go to some kind of charitable organization. Today, if you donate anything good, a thrift store employee will sell it to themselves for almost nothing, then sell it at a profit online. I have no problem doing a nice thing for charity, but that is no longer what that business is.
2rafa
4d ago
To me, Armadillo is very goofy and Mexico has plenty of goofiness. Even Blackwater does although it’s toned down considerably. The last third of the game is played broadly straight. Stuff like the medicine man fraudster and a lot of the interactions with the factions in Mexico are pure GTA and played for laughs.
2rafa
4d ago
In your memory no, but I played it again a few months ago on the Switch and it did, most of the missions are actually classic GTA humor/goofiness, even if the ‘plot’ isn’t and there are moments of greater depth - although the same was true for GTAIV which people remember as a ‘serious story’ even though probably at least half was classic GTA.
Still, I think it’s true that 5 aged worse than any of them, and even at its release was very dumb. Vice City still has a lot of great jokes, gags, clever innuendo, and 4 is a great time capsule to 2006-2009 era New York City. I don’t remember the plot to 5 at all, it’s just a bunch of barely related dumb shit that involves a few heists and some funny moments. I remember the torture scene caused some controversy. I remember the choice at the end, I remember the guy from the 4 DLC getting killed.
2rafa
4d ago
Yes I’d never do the Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace thing, too many petty thieves and hustlers out there, and a few people much worse than that.
2rafa
4d ago
Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor.
Red Dead 2 excised this first (the first game still had a lot of it, as did Bully and to some extent even Max Payne 3) and it was much better for it.
2rafa
4d ago
I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it, and it went pretty well. One person was unhappy with their item, but to be fair to them I had probably not described its condition as well as I could have. Put it in a box (which I don’t need to even do this time, since I can reuse the boxes they’re shipping them to me in from the store), take it to the post office a three minute walk from my house, send it.
I think it’ll be fun is my thinking, I guess. Plus, if I’m right and scalpers go crazy with limited demand (and the crazy woke but also well informed users of Resetera seem to think there’s a big supply crunch) and these shoot up like GPUs and memory (which is really all they are) then I think the margin on each one could be big, and I might make $1000 for an hour’s work, and also feel good about my foresight, which is a far bigger prize.
If not, I can probably still sell them at close to cost.
I’ve become a (possibly very bad) scalper.
Console prices are shooting up. Microsoft just increased the Series X/S’s price by like $150 across the board. Sony increased the PlayStation’s price by a similar amount recently.
There’s chatter that retailers are struggling to get stock for the anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI boom, which is going to sell a ton of consoles to people who never upgraded from last gen because they had no need to (I looked this up, and the *first current-gen-only Call of Duty is this year; the first current gen only EAFC game is also this year).
I had an Xbox for a while, but it broke, and I had a PS5 but it was lost / possibly stolen in an apartment move. GTA6 isn’t on PC, so I need one of them. So I went to a physical store about an hour ago with a minor (like 10%) discount on the window price for PS5s and I thought, on a whim, that I’d buy out the 4 other units and keep them all in a box until November, then sell them.
I will report back with my win or loss.
2rafa
5d ago
I think the main thing is familiarity, as mentioned below by @Bartender_Venator, unstructured interaction of the kind that happens constantly when you’re in other people’s presence.
For example, I have always had the suspicion that many people who work in a team or a small organization with, like, the same 5-10 people every day for many years or even decades are often far closer and more earnest friends than they care to admit, but because it’s considered loser behavior to say your coworkers are some of your best friends, people don’t discuss it.
2rafa
5d ago
What was the actual alcohol content of the alcohol they were drinking? Wasn’t beer back then like 2% abv? Even the Romans themselves diluted their wine until it was 3-5% according to many estimates.
It’s quite possible they were drinking “all day” and yet still much less drunk than a modern drunk (or college student) drinking 80 proof vodka.
2rafa
5d ago
I think it’s worth separating people like Dase, Kulak and others who have gone on to have the same arguments on slightly nastier and (at least in the latter case) more lucrative platforms from people who have actually ended their underwater basket weaving forum careers altogether (I like to imagine Hlynka is out there somewhere, having a nice time, but he’s probably on Boomer Twitter).
I’m trying to think of the longest I’ve left for over the last decade. A few months here and there, a few times. The thing about Britain is that the Summer always ends, and at some point it’s cold and grey (worse up where you are) and there really isn’t anything better to do on a quiet sunday morning than argue here. Maybe things change with a kid in tow (although there are quite a few parents here already), but I have my doubts.
I don’t know, I disagree that it seems staggeringly high. These are largely poor people who the ruling class basically never sees or cares about living in largely forgotten towns and cities outside of the wealthy southeast (where almost anyone with any influence, power or wealth in this country lives). Promiscuity is very common among the underclass including underclass girls, which is part of why so many were dismissed as prostitutes. I also think the nightlife dynamics are relevant here, even in many of these places where Mirpuris were only 2-4% of the population, they controlled and control large aspects of the nightlife economy including running convenience stores that sold alcohol, almost all taxis and later Ubers (before the Boriswave at least) late night food places etc. It’s not like they were equally represented across professions which also affects access to eg drunk girls.
1.4%? Yeah, a much larger proportion of women have been sexually victimized than that, especially among the poor,, and while a lot of that is domestic, 1.4% for organized or group based grooming abuse seems….possible? Police stats aren’t relevant here - even most middle class women who trust the police don’t report sexual violence. These girls definitely wouldn’t have. Instead you need to look at surveys of sexual victimization that suggest a large number of women are victims of sexual violence during their lifetimes, much of which will happen at a younger age, and which will happen disproportionately to the poor and underclass.
2rafa
7d ago
It was semi-public, and dozens of gangs were publicly tried and are still being tried. There were people (and not just the far right) low key talking about this for many decades. It was a perennial discussion on reactionary forums but also in a lot of social care and police circles; it was brought up in the mainstream conservative press occasionally and sheepishly by opinion columnists, heavily edited. It made the news a few times, just devoid of critical context and scale. It wasn’t a complete secret, it just wasn’t a scandal until in 2014 there was a lot of reporting and a Labour MP around Rotherham started talking about it publicly with parliamentary privilege after a report was published, which was itself because one guy at The Times had doggedly pursued it for several years in a corner of the mainstream press.
it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs.
Again, why? Consider an abused spouse who is forced into sex by her husband many times a week - she might be raped 500 times in a year. That’s one person.
Girls trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery / prostitution are often raped thousands of times per year. But some may only have been raped a handful of times before their parents physically stopped them from going out, they moved away, or they avoided their abusers themselves directly. It wasn’t like they were being chained up most of the time, they were plied with drugs and alcohol.
So the 250,000 would include women who, aged 13 or 14, were invited to a room about a kebab place or a bodega, essentially, given vodka / weed / coke, and then raped while high/drunk/unconscious and who then never went back, as well as cases where girls were trafficked to hundreds of men.
Why is 14,000 new victims per year unbelievable? There are say 8 million people aged 10-18, 4 million of them girls, at any given time. Through the period a much higher total number of girls passed through that age bracket. Through the period 2000-2018 probably 80% on average were indigenous.
The grooming gangs are best described as a cultural practice rather than a traditional form of organized crime, like the mob (which while an ethnic gang or group of gangs operated at least in some cases under a classic hierarchical structure). Obviously they engaged in other criminality in many cases, were tied to drug and human trafficking etc, but this wasn’t a ‘cartel’ or a ‘pimp’ with thousands of trafficked ‘employees’. These were local phenomena, just spread across the country. There was limited top down organization.
The UK is a pretty populous country. 15,000 girls a year out of 4+ million being involved in group based child sexual abuse like this is a tragedy and an outrage, but the numbers are not unbelievable.
2rafa
7d ago
I don’t think the 250,000 figure is far-fetched at all.
I think most people’s math is wrong. Many victims describe being raped by hundreds of men in relatively small geographic areas. There are communities where a very large proportion of Mirpuri men of all ages, from their mid teens to their sixties and seventies, first and second generation, may have been involved. There is documented evidence of this happening as far back as the 1950s, when there were just a few thousand (at most) Mirpuris in the entire UK. There are communities where documented evidence across enquiries suggests that the majority of girls in some poor estates or especially in care homes were abused. There are countless anecdotal pieces of evidence from hundreds of small towns, cities, villages across the UK - even some where the Pakistani population was less than 2-3% for much of the period, like Telford - where men and women will say “everybody knew” that there were teenage girls involved in this kind of purported prostitution work, people gossiped at schools, the kids all knew some girls who were involved, who recruited others.
Lastly, very very few women have come forward about being victims. Many are now adults, mothers, grandmothers in some cases, with husbands and families who may have no idea about the abuse they’ve suffered. What mother would want to subject her own children to bullying at school calling their mother a [slur] whore or whatever because she spoke publicly about her abuse. Many survivors just want to forget it. I don’t know many northerners closely but I’ve spoken to some - not from any of the infamous places for this - who say everybody knew it was happening when they were kids. And there’s almost no compensation for victims - if you were assaulted by a Weinstein or Al Fayed type, you can come forward and take legal action for millions (of course you can remain anonymous in some cases, but publicity can help there). If you were repeatedly raped by poor immigrant taxi drivers and kebab store owners, you’re not getting anything.
The math, when you consider this happened in pretty much every town and city in England for 40-60 years (in large volumes until 10 years ago, and in some cases still to this day), a country of 70 million people, easily supports a total victim count of 250,000 or indeed much much more.
2rafa
11d ago
They have no route to Iran without American landing vessels, and for a largely conscript army the casualties that would be incurred even if victory was possible would be so high as to existentially threaten the state. If 100,000 young men die in a country of 6 million (when you subtract the Arab and Charedi population who don’t fight) ie 3 million men total, 1.5 million young men, everybody loses people. Plus, there’s no game plan for that quagmire either. A tiny country can’t occupy a hostile major one for long. They can occupy an indifferent one (colonial India) or one where they have a centuries-ahead technological advantage, but no more.
They might, and that would be closer to an accurate interpretation of today’s decision than that of many a modern American political commentator.
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