CriticalDuty
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User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
There is actually a summer action thriller out in theaters right now starring an actor known for his membership (and not simply membership - in many ways he's been the mascot) in a controversial organization that's been accused of being a cult, and has been tied to various crimes including fraud, embezzlement, racketeering, stalking, harassment, rape, and abetment of suicide. But have you noticed that the reviews for the latest Mission Impossible film don't bring up Tom Cruise's membership in the Church of Scientology, or his endorsement of Scientology's many anti-medical claims about the field of psychiatry? Why do you think critics prefer to discuss Jim Caviezel's association with QAnon instead?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Logan is in the same vein; it ends with Wolverine dying in battle against a younger version of himself in order to save a group of Latino kids, who are the next and only remaining generation of mutants in the world (the original generation of mutants in the first X-Men was all-white with the exception of Halle Berry's Storm, and in this movie it's revealed that all of the X-Men are dead because Xavier had a seizure and accidentally killed them all).
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
This would never work for universities at large, but for certain select institutions like Harvard, I've pondered the idea of borrowing the West Point admissions process - let members of Congress nominate a certain number of students (say, 4 or 5 each every year) for admission to Harvard, after sorting through the applicants from their district/state. If diversity is the goal, this would ensure a wide range of racial, political and geographic diversity - how many Alaskans and Hawaiians get to go to Harvard otherwise?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
It's pretty obvious that Brandenburg isn't on the chopping block, and it doesn't make sense to imply that it is just because "the Court is changing precedent", when most of the precedents that are being changed are of the opposite political valence as Brandenburg, and often of the opposite legal conclusions given that this Court is clearly committed to an expansive view of speech rights.
Frankly everyone whines about the sanctity of precedent when, and only when, it suits them to do so, so I'm never swayed by appeals to stare decisis. The precedents overturned in Lawrence and Obergefell were a hell of a lot older than the ones overturned in Dobbs and SFFA.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
What's most remarkable about India for me is that despite the pronounced Indian presence in Western IT, there's basically nothing interesting happening in Indian IT. 90% of India's tech sector is just labor arbitrage for Western tech companies, and most of the remaining 10% is just local knockoffs of apps like Uber, Grubhub and so on. There was this recent tempest-in-a-teacup when Sam Altman was speaking at a college in India, and a partner at Sequoia's Indian branch asked him if there was a viable route for an Indian ChatGPT competitor on a $10 million budget, friendlier to Indian material conditions. Altman correctly replied that there was no point even trying to compete with OpenAI with those resource constraints, and a lot of Indian nationalists added that to the chip on their shoulder, but he was right - the fact that the question was even asked is something of a testament to how absurd Indian expectations are regarding what research and development looks like, because of course you can't do anything like ChatGPT on a $10 million budget. You wouldn't even get off the ground. There's a large, affluent, tech-savvy, internationally-mobile Indian diaspora, and still virtually no serious tech investments in India. China competes on this stuff and India doesn't even know where the venue is. You would think something would have happened by now.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't know whether my take is accurate, but if I had to guess I'd say that unlike Harvard, the military does actually struggle to find qualified recruits - and if they didn't have the flexibility to lower standards, it would have an impact on military preparedness and national security.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The WBC never filed lawsuits against anyone, to my knowledge. People they protested filed lawsuits against them, and they won those lawsuits because "being crazy" is not a bar to exercising First Amendment rights.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I would also say holding all religious people to the actions of a crazy church would be wrong too.
Do you genuinely believe "the actions of a crazy church" are comparable to malicious litigants attempting to create binding legal precedents that they can weaponize against their enemies?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
They actually didn't "ban Pride flags"; they banned flags of any race, religion, sexual orientation or political affiliation being flown on government property. If anything, the conservative Muslims of Hamtramck are taking a stand for classical liberalism by only allowing the stars-and-stripes on government buildings (and presumably the flags of the city and state). I don't think this would have been controversial even 10 years, and certainly not 20 years ago. The only totalizing religion at work here is homosexuality - the old refrain of "but how does it affect you?" rings very hollow when the faithful are demanding public displays of obeisance.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
It's not intellectually honest to pretend the world doesn't exist. It's just a dodge. The reality is that your views, if they are honestly held, are completely irrelevant, and nobody who matters subscribes to them. There's no value to engaging in a hermetically sealed cocoon that bears no reflection to the social dynamics outside of it.
The breakdown of the native crime rate is irrelevant. Letting in immigrants with a lower crime rate still makes the country safer overall.
It's irrelevant to the extent that you want it to be irrelevant. It matters a great deal where these immigrants are and who exactly they're victimizing - it is small consolation to a murder victim in Boise, Idaho if the inhabitants of St. Louis, Missouri are more violent than the illegal immigrant population.
Anyway, White Americans are not responsible for Chauvin's actions either.
It's nice that you believe so, just as long as you know that in the eyes of people with actual power and influence, they very much are responsible.
No one decided to deliberately let in murderers. Yes, if you let in millions of people, some of them are probably going to commit murder. But unless they commit murder at a higher rate, you are not actually increasing the natives' probability of being murdered. In that case, highlighting individual murders committed by immigrants is dishonest fearmongering.
No one decided to let in any of these people - they simply walked in and decided to stay.
Dishonest fearmongering is the order of the day, and as I alluded to previously, it is the prevailing philosophy of those with power and influence in America. Are you actually opposed to dishonest fearmongering, or do you simply object to the outgroup enjoying its benefits?
If you're killed by someone that the government had the power and even the obligation to remove from the country, but decided not to, then the government has played a role in your murder. That's an element that simply doesn't exist for the Gacys.
Apparently this is not the case and illegal immigrants actually commit less violent crime than natives.
Most groups in the world have lower violent crime rates than American natives, because the American native crime rate includes the absurdly large black crime rate. Disaggregation by race would tell a different story, albeit not one that people prefer to hear, since in the popular imagining an American "native" is just some cornfed Southern good-old-boy, and there's a great audience waiting to eagerly believe such people are more violent than one's cherished client groups.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Assuming you are a White American, I don't think you are in any way responsible for the actions of John Wayne Gacy. If you are from a different ethnic group, I'm sure it has produced similarly evil people, and you are not responsible for their actions unless you directly assisted them.
I don't think anyone makes the Gacy association, though I wonder to what extent this is because Gacy was a gay Democratic organizer, and thus has too many counter-signals in his identity. But we are told, every single day, by the dominant institutions of power and culture, that we are responsible for the actions of Derek Chauvin. We're told every single day that everything from microaggressions at work to the bullets from a policeman's gun are products of the swirling cauldron of whiteness, and that we all contribute to it from the day we are born, and that we must drain our lives and resources in silent deference and atonement. Comments like these only highlight that some groups get the privilege of nuance, while others must simply endure being treated as an amorphous mass of social toxins.
And that's setting aside that no one had the ability to stop Gacy from being in the country, since he was born an American. Mexican migrants, particularly illegal ones, are here as the result of deliberate policy decisions to do nothing about them. If a father who has just lost his daughter cannot even question the wisdom of those policy decisions, he deserves contempt. But my sympathy is limited, as I'm sure his daughter would have never questioned those policies either, even as the knife went in. Some people just bare their necks to the world.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
It's the parents of the Irish-Indian girl who are asking not for responses like yours, and that's because as Irish in Britain and Indian in Britain both of them are likely to have encountered some form of "your nationality is shit" (not as often as in the past, thank goodness, but there are still pockets of ignorance).
The person in the link in the OP appears to be the mother of Barnaby Webber, who was white English, so unless you've seen some other parent talking about this in some other source, perhaps you should read before harrumphing about your racial enlightenment.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I've noted commentary that argues The White Lotus and Succession are fundamentally aimed at the same audience - these are shows meant for middle class people who are well off but not truly wealthy, and designed to allow these people to poke fun at their class superiors and perhaps feel better about their own status on the class hierarchy. "These people aren't richer or more successful than I am because of some inherent superiority, and in fact are often quite stupid, but have found themselves at the top due to privilege/nepotism/manipulation etc." See also Triangle of Sadness, a very good movie that some eagerly claimed was a defense of socialism, an interpretation that is bewildering to me.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
If republicans only cared about vigor, why are they aligned around a spetegenarian?
Because Trump doesn't really come off as an old man. The NYT ran an article recently defending Biden's health after he slipped and fell (again) at some military graduation thing, in which they noted that voters don't think of Trump as physically unfit to the same extent that they think so of Biden, and sulkily attributed this to Trump's loudness and flamboyance.
Younger Republican challengers like Rubio and Cruz are all very wedded to the idea of courtly debate and dignified manner, which just codes as old. The main exception I can think of would be Chris Christie, who is desperate to paint himself as a Jersey tough guy, but I don't think anyone really regards him as a serious contender now or in the future.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Putting Kamala Harris in charge is how the Biden administration signals its indifference, not its commitment. She's both the border security czar and the abortion rights czar, neither of which are issues that have fared well in the last few years. I think they also made her the AI czar recently, which I'm sure must delight the alignment hawks.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
One of the seminal works of critical race theory in the law is a Yale Law Journal article from the 90's by Paul Butler, a black former federal prosecutor and current Georgetown law professor, in which he argued that there are no legitimate reasons for the overrepresentation of black people in American prisons besides racism, and encouraged black jurors to vote in favor of acquittal of black defendants as an act of racial solidarity. Butler prosecuted DC drug crimes and often saw black jurors vote to acquit black defendants even when the evidence was overwhelming, and even in cases where defendants practically admitted their guilt. These jurors told him they simply felt sympathy for the defendants regardless of the evidence, and Butler has spent the decades since framing this attitude as in line with an American tradition of refusing to cooperate with unjust laws, citing the example of John Peter Zenger, who published a newspaper insulting the British colonial authorities, but was acquitted at his libel trial by a patriotic American jury.
Personallly, I think Butler is just typical-minding his lower-class, lower-IQ co-ethnics, dressing up their acts of nullification as a noble struggle against oppression, when they're generally just acting out of base and atavistic tribal impulses or are just easy to manipulate by able and charismatic defendants. I recall the Chicago jury that acquitted R. Kelly of sexually abusing a child even when there was a VHS tape of him urinating on said child, and somehow I don't think this is what Butler had in mind. Or maybe he doesn't care.
Placing your fate in the hands of members of another tribe is always a grim proposition, particularly when these are people who were too stupid to get out of jury duty. But abolishing jury trials isn't always a solution - Scotland is currently doing a test run on abolishing jury trials for rape cases, because the Scottish government is unhappy with the number of jury acquittals for these charges. It's been almost unanimously condemned by Scottish bar associations as a political directive to circumvent pesky matters of civil rights in favor of a predetermined outcome, but the government is going ahead with it anyway, and I have no doubt that they'd make it permanent if they felt they had the political capital to do so. Would anyone accused of rape feel better about their rights under the law if their fate was being adjudicated by a judge who's been told by Lady Dorrian that these conviction rates are rookie numbers, we've git tae pump they numbers up?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
For future reference, archive.is is better for getting past paywalls.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Every time Balsillie got angry in this movie, it was impossible not to see Dennis Reynolds in Howerton's performance. I expected him to start screaming about being a golden god when he was attacking that payphone.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The Mexicans staying in Mexico still get very self-righteous about American attitudes regarding immigration - see AMLO's criticisms of DeSantis's immigration policies. Everyone loves talking about migrant rights when it's their in-group that benefits or their out-group that suffers. It's a different story when there are migrants who are driving up your own rent bill.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Imagine you're riding home on the train, you're tired, and you need a seat. You spot an empty seat, but there's a guy standing next to it who stops you from claiming the seat. The guy says he's already called dibs on the seat, even though he got up from the seat 40 minutes ago, and has been hanging around for 40 minutes not using the seat, but also not allowing anyone else to have the seat because he might feel like sitting down again. Would you consider this reasonable behavior, or would you call the guy a cunt? What would you call him if you were elderly, or pregnant? How long do you have to wait until it's no longer "his seat"?
I'm familiar with Darrell Owens from rw twitter hatereading his Substack, and his reasonable summary is predictably just an extension of his belief that black people are the protagonists of America, with everyone else existing only to accommodate them. He's from San Francisco, and back when there was a spate of black people assaulting and even murdering Asian women and elders on the streets of SF, he wrote a Substack explaining that Asians need to understand how angry black people are about immigrants gentrifying SF and voting against progressive politics. He's not a serious person. He's a "black intellectual", and like most black intellectuals, his intellectualism takes the form of projecting his own beliefs onto the actions and motivations of low-IQ lumpenproles who are often simply acting out of malice and entitlement rather than any political convictions.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
On the other hand, consider Charles Brown Jr., a career soldier who not only holds a higher position than Randy George (Chief of Staff of the Air Force), but was just today nominated by Biden to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest position in the US armed forces, short of being Commander-in-Chief. Besides being black, Brown came to national attention by releasing a video during the George Floyd riots where he expressed his sympathies for Floyd and displeasure with the law enforcement of the United States, and this video was released while he was a serving, uniformed officer, in flagrant contempt of the military code of conduct that frowns on servicemen weighing in on political conflicts while in uniform. Brown is also deeply concerned by how white the ranks of US military officers are, and intends to champion diversity and inclusion in future hiring and promotions of officers.
I think this is probably closer to what you'd expect to see from Democrats attempting to hollow out the military, and in fact today the Democratic President is proudly putting out press releases for Brown. For the record, I don't think Democrats actually want to hollow out the military or believe that's what they're doing, but I do think that, like many other issues involving race and culture, they are simply so far detached from reality that their intentions do not matter.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
My outgroup has had years to craft policy around these supposed "useful motivations and genuine concerns", which is how we have arrived at this juncture.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The reason you can’t just go to jail for shoplifting is the same reason you can’t have a working criminal justice system - any effective anti-crime policy will be functionally indistinguishable from an anti-black policy. Progressive policymakers and prosecutors have understood and internalized this lesson, and have decided to simply ignore criminal recidivism since the alternative is to throw thousands of black people in jail.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that, and it never has been. Crime wonkery always misses the point - these people aren’t looking for “new paradigms on public safety”; they are specifically doing everything they can to shield a favored demographic from accountability.
“Scientology is a religion” is a very feeble deflection, considering that’s very much up for debate, and in fact several governments have refused to consider it a religion, classifying it variously as a scam, a cult and even an organized criminal enterprise. QAnon being in the news of late is very much a function of who makes the news, and this is largely the same cohort that writes movie reviews for major publications. It was quite recently that Danny Masterson was convicted of rape, and his victims went on record accusing the Church of Scientology of harassment and intimidation on his behalf.
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