CriticalDuty
No bio...
User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
21d ago
Five Eyes has functionally just been Three Eyes for a long time. Canada and New Zealand's contributions are negligible relative to the contributions of the US, UK and Australia.
CriticalDuty
28d ago
Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.
If there are no specific thresholds or expectations attached, then it may not be a paper guest pass, but it's certainly just a paper something. A renewable subscription? A season ticket? A no-show job?
Frankly it's incoherent for you to do all this harrumphing about how precious and sacred citizenship is, and how gauche and un-American it is to question the quality of someone else's citizenship, if you're going to then claim that it's perfectly fine and acceptable for someone to be culturally and socially alien while still retaining all the powers and privileges of American citizenship. If it's such a flimsy, ephemeral concept, no deeper than some words from a piece of paper somebody scribbled on a long time ago, why shouldn't it be subject to re-negotiation, attack, and even abnegation?
CriticalDuty
29d ago
Kuwait was a great success, in that the US achieved all its stated goals and Kuwait is today a rich, stable, pro-American state that acts as a crucial hub for US military operations in the Middle East. But Kuwait is also much easier to invade than Iran is.
CriticalDuty
6mo ago
Late last year I posted a comment here asking how I could convince my girlfriend to start eating more. Now, I'm posting an update.
Frankly I was annoyed by some of the replies to my previous post that said I should "enjoy my slim girlfriend", or that implied that I was making more of a problem out of it than it actually was. She actually lost more weight and now weighs 98 lbs. It took several months of patient intervention for me to convince her that yes, I do actually want her to gain weight, and yes, I absolutely would still think she was pretty if she weighed 120 lbs. Recently she finally caved and went to her doctor for a formal medical opinion, and he backed me up on this by telling her that she was at risk of osteoporosis and anemia if she didn't change her diet and gain weight. My cause has also seen some support from her older sister, a very intelligent woman whom she trusts a lot, telling her that she needs to start eating more red meat. So in theory, at least, I've been able to convince her that her ordinary diet and habits aren't healthy or sustainable.
The problem, at least as I see it, is that even with this realization it's been hard for her to break her habits. We go out to brunch and she still eats her little vegan salads. I tell her she should add some chicken or other protein to the salads and she declines. She still consults the app on her phone that counts all her calories for the day. It's hard for me to figure out what the line is between pushing her to be healthier for her own sake, and being outright controlling over her lifestyle. Do I just put my foot down and confront her, pushing her to be serious about her health?
CriticalDuty
6mo ago
I'm not a progressive and I wouldn't call myself a feminist either, but Sheridan also frequently has some of the worst written female characters around. The women were easily the worst part of "Landman", a show that is only watchable thanks to the Herculean efforts of Billy Bob Thornton.
CriticalDuty
6mo ago
Yes. The migrants you see milling around aimlessly in the public squares of London, Berlin, Rome etc. are largely poor, sporadically criminal, disorganized and disconnected. Their numbers will not stop a sufficiently determined Western state. What will stop that state is the lack of political will. There's plenty of capacity, but in a democratic state that capacity is always going to be subject to the whims of elected officials who all have their reasons not to use it.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
It's the courts that have the final say, and the courts have said it's not valid without further Congressional action, which is why the Archivist said she can't legally publish the amendment. I imagine that if she tried publishing it herself, the ensuing litigation would just end in the courts referring to their prior decisions and striking down her action.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I doubt there's going to be much of a legal battle. Laurence Tribe believes it's the law of the land, but Laurence Tribe believes a lot of stupid things - the more likely outcome is that the first plaintiffs who try to enforce it inevitably get slapped down by the courts, and this fades away to nothing.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Stapling a green card to college diplomas was always dead in the water because it's a fantastically stupid idea. Trump periodically voices his support for this idea (he did so in his first campaign as well) because he doesn't know any better, and various other GOP and tech figures support it as well, either because they don't know any better too or in many cases are eager to take advantage of the fact that Trump doesn't know any better. But it'll be dead in the water in Trump's second term for the same reason it was in his first term - by what can only be called divine intervention, amidst all the masturbatory paeans to migrant moxy, Donald Trump placed Stephen Miller in charge of his immigration policies, and Miller is not an idiot. Between Miller and whoever he recommends to be director of USCIS, the legal landscape for employment-based immigrants is likely to be harsher, not softer, just as it was in Trump's first term.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
In my own entirely unscientific personal experience, most Indian couples here in the Northeast tend to have one kid or none at all. It fits with the general trend of India's birthrate declining and the diaspora thus following the trend of their co-ethnics as well as the new society they're in. The birthrate is probably still at least somewhat higher than American tech workers, but I suspect that doesn't last a generation.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
How do I convince my girlfriend to eat more?
She's very skinny; usually not skeletal, but there are weeks where she oscillates between skeletal and skinny. She denies having an eating disorder and I don't think she does, but she is very finicky about her food and hardly ever eats meat (sushi being her one exception, she loves that). She says she's not a vegan, but vegan options are always her first choice and she'll only go non-vegan if there's no other option. She's 5'5'' and weighs about 100-105 lbs, so she's underweight, but not to the point where the casual observer would be concerned about it. I think she'd look and feel a lot better if she had another 10 lbs on her frame and a less restrictive diet, but when I raised the subject once she just said "You don't want me to get fat, right?" and insisted everything was fine.
I've never really had this problem with a girl before; it's usually the other way around where they might not stay in shape, and I've generally found that easy to handle because when I work out and stay fit it creates an impetus in their minds to do the same. Do any women here have any advice for how they'd like this subject broached if they were on the receiving end of the conversation, or if they think this sort of thing is fine? Do any men here have any experience with this?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Given the news recently about NASA turning to SpaceX to help bring the two stranded astronauts back to Earth, and pointedly rejecting Boeing's pleas that their Starliner capsule was fit for the task, I'd say they'd probably be more favorable to Musk if he were detained on foreign soil. They clearly don't like the guy, but it would require pigheaded dogmatism to overlook his benefit to the US government and leave him to languish in a foreign prison.
Then again, pigheaded dogmatism would not shock me from these people.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
You can see it if you sort of squint at it, since the loss of the titular ring and the fall of the gods of Valhalla have loose parallels in the Shattering and the subsequent destructive wars waged by Marika's children against each other. But that's stretching things. It is true, though, that Elden Ring has hardly any Japanese or Asian influences in it and is in its core sensibilities a thoroughly Western game. This is not really anything new since FromSoft has done this before and to even greater extents; they also did Bloodborne, which as a Gothic Victorian game with a Lovecraftian story could not be less Asian if they'd tried.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Yes, but the vast majority of migrants still go to the countries closest to them. Most Venezuelan migrants went to Colombia, Brazil and other Latin American countries, for instance.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
In this circumstance we haven’t yet seen a country this large in modern times collapse into Civil War and Bangladesh has a radical Islamic party waiting in the wings, Herazat-E-Islam.
Bangladesh collapsed into civil war in 1971 and millions of refugees did flee, but virtually all of them went to India. That's likely what will happen again.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
My only observation is that I have been told many times by smug Europeans and Australians, on this forum and many others, that they have found a way to "true multiculturalism" and "peaceful cohabitation" that continues to elude American society, with our polite segregation and constant miasma of racial tension. To which I have always pointed out that the only reason they are able to believe this nonsense is that their societies are still less diverse than ours, with national populations that are still, for the moment, supermajority white. They will learn better, one way or another.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
His whole schtick is posting this bait about how white people are subhuman and deserve to be replaced by supposedly enlightened subcontinentals like him, never mind that it's trivially easy to check the stats on how much his Muslim cohorts in Britain consume in services relative to the taxes they contribute. He should really just be blocked as there's no point engaging; it's just racial revanchism masquerading as bourgeois indignation.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
But again, how much criticism did Paul Ryan get for his own ethnic identity when he attempted to allow essentially unlimited immigration from Ireland to the US (something that no Jewish-American politicians have succeeded in doing for Israelis, I might add)?
Not to defend Paul Ryan or his immigration policies, but no part of his proposed policy could be construed as allowing "essentially unlimited immigration from Ireland" - what he was trying to do was give Irish nationals access to E3 work visas, which are currently reserved for Australians, and which have an annual cap of 10,500 recipients. At best there'd be a few thousand more Irish visa holders in the US per year, and realistically less than that - the E3's annual cap is never met because Australians prefer to remain in Australia than move to the US, and I doubt it would be any different for the Irish given that they have free access to both the UK and the EU.
More importantly Paul Ryan has never served in the Irish army, or paraded around Congress in the uniform of a foreign military, which is something we're supposed to just pretend is normal when IDF members do it.
Considering Kamala Harris's genetics (parents both PhDs, father a Jamaican econ professor at Stanford and mother a Tamil biologist at LBNL), the fact that she attended Hastings is surprising, and doesn't really lend itself to "probably at least as intelligent as Hillary", however snobbish that might sound. It's not even like Howard, where you can claim you attended because you were really committed to the cause of HBCUs - Hastings is just a really mediocre school.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
They won't charge you just for reading and replying to the email, though they will probably tell you that they won't discuss the particulars of your case until some payment is made.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I'm easily disgusted, and I became disgusted with myself. I was disgusted by the little bit of flab under my chin, I was disgusted by my skinnyfat paunch, I was disgusted by my weak forearms, I was disgusted by my diet of microwave dinners and Diet Coke. I resolved to have a body and life I could look at without feeling disgusted. I don't know if this is considered the "healthy" thought process or motivation for physical change, but I don't really care if it isn't. I like feeling the difference in strength when I move things around, I like being able to run and swim longer, and I like the difference in how women behave around me. But I've also been doing it for long enough now that it's become an integral part of my daily routine, so I just do it without thinking too much about it anymore.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
In my ideal world we would simply take a page out of the Islamic playbook and install a version of the kafala system in America. Immigrants work for fixed terms, with the privileges of the labor rights that don't exist in the Gulf states (employers can't withhold your wages or confiscate your passport etc.), and are rotated out at the end of their terms with no expectation of permanent residency or citizenship.
It's not complicated at all, and in practice we see Muslim states in the Gulf that are majority-helot and still structurally and culturally stable. I'm not advocating for anywhere near those proportions, but if the Kuwaitis and Qataris can understand that their supposed brethren in Pakistan and Indonesia will not be alchemically transformed into good Arabs by the magical power of ummah solidarity, we should stop pretending that our civic myths mean much to immigrants, who are by nature essentially just mercenaries.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
"What it would look like" in Europe would probably be the forced population swaps between Greece and Turkey after World War I, or the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. There already exists a model for this in Europe, it's happened before. But nothing like this happens without state force and a willingness to resort to violence, which means nothing of the sort will happen as long as people continue to believe (as they do in Europe) that they just need to vote harder to solve the problem.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that South Korea's birth rate is a product of gender war. It just seems like a miserable place to live, where children are drafted into the rat race as soon as possible, forced into 4 A.M. tuition classes for exams they're going to write a decade later, coming home at 10 PM, then doing it all over again, until you eventually graduate, get a job and can inflict the same rat race on a new kid who has the misfortune to emerge from a South Korean womb. An endless labyrinth of status games that makes the experience of parenthood and childhood uniquely awful, even by the infamously taxing standards of East Asia.
It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.
One point of commonality between Korea and the West is that these stories of "gender polarization" are really just about sharp radicalization of women, and the author's need to coach that observation in both-sidesism for political correctness. There's a graph that circulates on Twitter frequently about how Western youth are supposedly polarizing sharply away from each other, with women becoming more left-wing and men becoming more right-wing, and if you actually look at the graph it just shows men becoming mildly more conservative, a change that is barely perceptible, while women are stampeding to the left.
Beijing is far away. Washington is right next door, and will always be right next door. That was a lesson Caracas should have internalized prior to January 3rd, and if Ottawa doesn't realize that, they'll be in for a rough time. There's a lot of things that a sufficiently spiteful and motivated Washington can do to immiserate Canada short of an actual invasion, and the degradation of American hegemony across the planet will be very meager consolation.
More options
Context Copy link