CriticalDuty
No bio...
User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
I think it's certainly true that white journalists and commentators are reluctant to put a spotlight on black criminality, but I also think there's an element of class-coding at play here. Tyson is of course a very rich man, but he codes as culturally lower-class. He's a boxer, he's got a tattoo on half his face, and while a lisp like his would make anyone sound dumber than they are, I doubt Tyson was ever very smart to begin with. I believe it's similar to what's going on now with Diddy, and the attendant rumors around Jay-Z - these guys may be rich, but they're rappers, which is inherently coded as culturally low-class, no matter how many times they get invited to the Met Gala. Accordingly there's an unspoken assumption that criminality is simply inherent to their milieu, and whether justified or not, they are ascribed lower moral agency when it comes to determining how bad their crimes are. "These people are just like that", etc. Whereas men like Bill Cosby (America's Dad!) and Jonathan Majors (He went to Yale! His characters are so artsy and sensitive!) come from a higher cultural standing, so they have no excuses.
CriticalDuty
7mo ago
She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces.
This is a flat-out lie that instantly betrays the fact that you have never read the book in question. The serial killer in question is a marginal side character in said book (whose plot is about the investigation of a woman's disappearance decades ago and the police's prevailing theory being that she was a victim of said serial killer, who refuses to talk about it). And at no point did he ever pretend to be trans, or claim to be trans; nor does anyone in the book attribute transness to him. He was abducting women off the street and from bars and bus stations after drugging them surreptitiously, not "invading women's spaces". The plot point about him (on one occasion) wearing women's clothing is used as an example of how he was able to get away with his murders for so long because he didn't conform to what people's ideas of what a rapist and serial killer looks and acts like - seeming pudgy, effeminate and non-threatening rather than a bearded, scowling thug in a dark alley.
Most people talking about Rowling this way are simply regurgitating motivated talking points they've seen from trans activists, and could not be bothered to actually look into any of these claims themselves. I doubt you could tell me the name of this book or the offending character without Googling it, but you're absolutely sure she "wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans" because Contrapoints or some other breadtuber said so.
CriticalDuty
8mo ago
I don't think that's their reasoning. Mostly they're reacting to the Nick Fuentes strain of antisemitism which is essentially third-worldist at its core, lamenting supposed Jewish predations against hapless black and brown people, who in the Fuentes-verse imagining are just trying to live in peace, and who would surely never be coming to the West in such large numbers were it not for the wars instigated by global Jewry.
My firm has contracted private detectives semi-regularly to do background checks on key figures in legal matters, including our clients and their associates. On occasion, we've also contracted them to "dig for dirt" on parties on the other side of the case (usually financial malfeasance and things of that nature), but this isn't a common thing. It only comes up in obvious cases when we already have strong reason to suspect there's been malfeasance.
Whether the portrayals are accurate depends on the kinds of fiction you're consuming. The NYPD and Scotland Yard don't work with "consulting detectives" to solve murders, so that part is complete fiction. I suppose it's possible that private clients may hire private detectives to investigate murders if they're unsatisfied with the police resolution or handling of the matter, but I've never personally come across something like that. My experience with private detectives as an attorney is that they're either doing corporate investigations that we can't be bothered to do ourselves, or they're snooping on wives and husbands for things to use in custody battles ("she has a drinking problem she's been hiding from the court", "his best friend is a convict on parole", etc).
CriticalDuty
9mo ago
Hanania is not opposed to lax border enforcement. He thinks Americans should embrace lax border enforcement and cultivate a servant class of Mesoamerican dwarfs similar to the domestic workers of Asia and Africa, and that failure to do so is self-sabotaging racism that stops us from living like feudal lords.
CriticalDuty
9mo ago
If the DA is using public funds to pay an inflated salary to her boyfriend who is prosecuting a defendant, and the boyfriend is spending that money on gifts and vacations with the DA, then the DA has a pecuniary interest in the prosecution and directly profits from it. That's essentially the conflict claim here.
CriticalDuty
10mo ago
By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.
You will find very few places in the world that don't follow this "empirically established model" despite having negligible white populations; in fact, this sort of thing is ubiquitous in the third world, just with much worse outcomes. Ghana cratered its own economy by abandoning the successful model left to them by the British and transitioning to a centrally-controlled, price-fixing regime set up in the name of social justice and wealth distribution; that decision was made by third-worldist hero Kwame Nkrumah, and persisted for decades until it was partially abolished by the coincidentally half-white Jerry Rawlings. India has a welfare state and affirmative action system that no Western state can match for its all-consuming presence in the lives of ordinary people. No one on Earth loves redistributionist politics more than black and brown people do. Europe is certainly more socialist than America, but relative to the rest of the world, not so much.
CriticalDuty
11mo ago
The term for invoking papal infallibility to establish doctrine is called speaking ex cathedra. Francis has never spoken ex cathedra, and in fact it's very rare for Popes to do so.
CriticalDuty
11mo ago
I don't think they'd ever dare to do this, even if they had the ability, because a sniper gunning down targets in a major city automatically sends off alarm bells at the federal level. You're basically asking for the FBI to crack down on you. Certain tactics just aren't worth the heat they bring. There's a scene along those themes where the state senator rips off Stringer, and Stringer tries to get Wee-Bey to kill the senator in retaliation - Avon immediately shuts it down because a political assassination means the feds take over from the local cops and life gets much harder for the Barksdale crew. The powers-that-be will tolerate petty handgun killings, or at least leave it to the cops, but anything resembling military tactics or political vendettas from organized crime will naturally be assigned a much higher level of importance.
CriticalDuty
11mo ago
Yes, the usual tactic is to present the problem as a fait accompli that must be grudgingly tolerated because nothing can be done to change it.
CriticalDuty
11mo ago
Shining Path in Peru was largely defeated militarily. The Peruvian government even armed, trained and deputized civilians with the authority to kill Shining Path members.
Generally speaking, I think people who say things like "you can't destroy a movement" or "there are no military solutions to this problem" are just people who do not want to see that particular movement or problem destroyed, and have to cloak it in the language of strategic wisdom rather than admit to their desires. I have a particular disdain for Arab liberal types like Shadi Hamid who claim destroying Hamas is complicated because Hamas isn't just a group of militants, but a government with a bureaucracy and employees and yada yada yada, we will need to find some way to live with them - the LTTE was all of these things and also considerably more advanced and sophisticated than Hamas, as pseudo-states go. ISIS had a government, a bureaucracy, courts, all of the mundane accoutrements of statehood, and somehow we managed to bomb it into oblivion. There are very few problems that violence can't actually solve, so long as you're committed to the necessary scale and force of violence required.
CriticalDuty
11mo ago
Plenty of Chinese illegal immigrants already arrive through legal avenues, mainly in the form of criminal organizations getting people tourist visas that they overstay on. That's how most of the girls in "massage parlors" in NYC and LA are trafficked into the country. They don't need to cross the border in the dead of night, they just book a flight and land at JFK or LAX. Why would a state need to resort to this sort of needlessly arduous infiltration when common gangsters have already figured out easier ways?
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.
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