I’m afraid that according to Boris’ own article on that 2006 incident, helpfully scanned here he was asked if he had previously held a US passport (and he answered yes). In fact, this was explicitly the question the agent asked him. He had also written many times about being a US citizen in articles one presume could be easily found on Google even back then.
A very different situation from the Italian in Count’s comment.
2rafa
3hr ago
I probably phrased that poorly. There are plenty of attempts, but I think a true success is rare. Usually one parent will surrender at some point.
2rafa
5hr ago
In the event of a truly accidental American the IRS never finds out. You’re an Italian businessman, you’ve never applied for a US passport, your parents travel insurance paid for your birth (or they skipped town and never paid), you travel to the US solely on your Italian passport if you ever do so and are welcomed as a foreigner. If Customs sees your ‘place of birth’ as the US, they won’t care, and in the very unlikely event they do, the businessman tells them his parents were diplomats or soldiers or UN. They will not ask for proof. The IRS isn’t going to track down hospital records in Philadelphia from 50 years ago to deduce that there might be an American somewhere in the world who didn’t pay taxes.
Most ‘accidental Americans’ are not accidental at all. There’s a huge growth industry of third world PMCs flying to the US to give birth so their kids get citizenship.
2rafa
5hr ago
In families where both parents speak eg English and another (but different language), the child usually adopts the host country language and the mother’s language. I’ve almost never encountered a true 3-language polyglot OPOL situation outside of like Switzerland, Luxembourg, or those African countries (and to some extent India) where speaking 3-4+ languages is semi-common.
In the more normal situation you discuss, I think it’s fine. Mom speaks Mandarin when she’s alone with the kids, you speak English together at dinner, you ship the kids off to their grandparents in China for a month every summer. Problem solved.
2rafa
7hr ago
I certainly didn’t move to London to get away from immigration (besides being an immigrant here myself, the demographics of London are pretty similar to NYC). I moved for work, stayed for the vibe (and eventually love).
2rafa
21hr ago
An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.
They might, and that would be closer to an accurate interpretation of today’s decision than that of many a modern American political commentator.
2rafa
22hr 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
23hr 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
1d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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.
This is quite the broad banded statement, though, or woolly as somebody else said below. If ‘taking in the needy’ includes opinions as diverse as ‘protect a white demographic supermajority, deport millions and ban all nonwhite immigration’ (the way Groyper Catholics like Nick Fuentes want) and ‘take in the entire world, legalize all illegal migrants, create legal routes for the global south’ (the way those on the radical left of the Church want) then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.
What we can actually observe from:
…is that the Church’s policy here is actually very clear. And the Catholic Church is actually an organization. It’s not an ideological grouping. It’s an actual club, with a members list and an initiation ritual and regular meetings and a management structure and a leader and if you are a member of it, then to some extent it is reasonable to expect that you broadly agree with the organization. This is different from Lutheranism or Judaism or Islam, which have religious organizations but none that can lay claim to the institutional support of anywhere close to a majority of adherents.
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