CriticalDuty
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User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't think it's comparable, because the British weren't signing a treaty with the IRA. Ireland had a fully-developed spectrum of normal political parties and civil organizations, and they signed the Good Friday Agreement as a reflection of the overwhelming popular desire for peace. After that, any Irish group that wanted further conflict would lack a credible basis to do so. Who are you supposed to talk to in Gaza? Hamas is the only authority there, and the population's views are more aligned with Hamas than peace advocates would care to admit. Peace is nice if you can get it, but when the other side doesn't want it (and probably couldn't agree to it even if they wanted to, being an Iranian proxy), there's not really any solution besides a total purge.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I won't split hairs over terminology. Regardless of the moniker, we live in an age where any useful action has been deemed verboten by our modern understanding of martial morality. This grants an advantage to any group that lacks similar moral compunctions.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I think this is an example of typical-minding a far-group that you don't really interact with in any meaningful capacity. Palestinians aren't regretfully killing or raping civilians because they are limited to those particular targets - they are happy to do so, proud to do so, and will shout their joy from the rooftops. Most of the videos of Palestinians dragging girls back to Gaza or desecrating corpses aren't from Israeli propaganda, they're from pro-Palestine Telegram groups where everyone is in lockstep approval of their actions.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Is South Korea all that feminist? Their current president was elected on a platform that included a promise to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, and his most committed supporters are vociferously anti-feminist. Hard to imagine such a man getting elected in, say, Sweden.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The decision to intervene in Haiti, and the choice of personnel assigned to that decision, will be made in Washington, not Mexico City or Rio, and the decision-makers in Washington are very much concerned with the optics.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Literally the only reason this is being done is because people are too concerned about the "optics" of a military force consisting of predominantly white or Latin soldiers laying down the law in uber-black Haiti, which is why the US, Canada and Latin America have refrained from sending troops. The black Caribbean states have no real military capabilities and no experience dealing with these conditions, so TPTB have been shopping the assignment around in Africa instead. They probably don't want to send the UN peacekeepers given their previous contributions to Haiti (mass rape and cholera).
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
A lot of Asiatic nationalism revolves around this sort of idealized, semi-mythological conception of a pure race undefiled by foreigners or untermenschen. A lot of Western nationalism too, but less so in Anglo countries. Hindus are a lot like Turks in this regard; the most virulent Turkish nationalists reject the obviously mixed nature of Turkish genetics and instead insist that they are a pure Turkic race, straight from the mountains of central Asia, the sons of Asena, etc etc.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Frankly this is just a form of special pleading that only ever functions to try and thwart discussions of large-scale problems by shrinking them down to a series of individual decisions. It's de rigeur to talk of pathological behavior among white people, white communities, "whiteness", etc., and most people who sniff about "canards" of Jewish influence and malign behavior will not think twice before agreeing that white people bear collective moral, cultural and (especially) financial responsibility for a litany of supposed historical grievances. In many cases this is actually the law! The nuance that you insist upon is something that's only ever applied to shield members of an ingroup from criticism of that ingroup as a collective, so that no one ever gets to ask questions about whether your ingroup really is a malign influence on society - now, regardless of how large the problem is, you get to insist that it's just hundreds or thousands or millions of individual bad apples, nothing more. Where, precisely, is the boundary between "it's all just individual Jews making individual decisions" and "white people need to spend their lives denouncing previous generations of white people"? At what point does it become fair to make systemic criticisms of your ingroup?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
This is a facetious comparison. Indira Gandhi jailed tens of thousands of her political opponents indefinitely and without a trial, and went so far as to forcibly dissolve lawfully elected state governments opposed to her rule and impose direct control of those states by the national government. There's no contemporary Western parallel to such practices outside of actual war conditions, a la Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, or Zelensky banning opposition parties after the Russian invasion. And Indira Gandhi didn't even have the excuse of an ongoing war, she just didn't think anyone had the right to take power away from her.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I'm inclined to believe the very concept of a "civilization-state", whether espoused by Hindu nationalists or Chinese communists, is simply historical revisionism - one big cope, since it allows motivated ideologues to pretend in the existence of a timeless core identity, unchanged throughout history, and most importantly unsullied by the presence of pesky minority groups, whether they be Muslims or Manchu or anyone else. For most of this "civilization-state"''s history, there was no such thing as "India", there was just a contiguous landmass occupied by different kingdoms and the occasional empire.
It also seems strange to me that Indian democracy should be considered stronger than most Western states when in living memory, an Indian prime minister suspended the constitution, canceled elections, jailed her opposition and ruled by fiat. And just three years after she was removed from office, she was reelected by the Indian public in a landslide. Is it supposed to be a knock against Canada that nothing of the sort ever happened in Ottawa?
but most immediately, that little bit of resistance might be the one thing that lets India maintain a 2.0 fertility rate, unlike the rest of the world undergoing population collapse.
The Hindu fertility rate in India has already declined below 2.0. Among religious groups, only the Muslims have a fertility rate above replacement in India.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I think you meant to post this as a top-level, not a reply.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't see how you could compel 80 IQ Punjabis to remain in the northern areas against their will. It would require a system of internal movement controls that Canadians clearly don't have the stomach for, since even by the low standards of the liberal West, Canada doesn't really have a "right-wing" of any significance.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
No, TSMC dominates the semiconductor foundry market by a wide margin. The nearest competitor is South Korea's Samsung, which is still at a very distant second place. And most of TSMC's competitors cannot compete at scaled manufacturing and development of 5/3/2 nm chips.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
It turned out that lot of his followers are Jews who do not appreciate being evangelized, especially by such D- apologetic piece. Massive dead bird storm ensued, and DC doubled, quartupled and octupled his efforts.
MartyrMade was actually responding to a comment from Rabbi Mike Harvey, who considers himself an expert on "interfaith dialogue" between Jews and Christians - and in the quintessential rabbinical fashion, this mostly involves cursing at Christians and calling for vague action against them. Rabbi Harvey has this odd habit of writing incendiary tweets calling Christians genocidaires, fascists, monsters, etc., then apologizing while claiming he was hacked, then deleting his account, and then doing the same thing all over again a few months later. He just deleted his Twitter account around the time MartyrMade posted that reply to him, and will probably be back by Christmas time to complain about the stifling environment of the holiday season. I don't know who he thinks he's fooling.
I'm sure Jews don't appreciate being mocked and evangelized, but posts like MartyrMade are really just returning the favor in kind. We put up with a lot of "interfaith dialogue" from them.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't expect a Muslim mulatto who traffics European girls to be greeted with open arms by /pol/, regardless of how "based" he is. It's the wrong audience.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I absolutely hated this movie. I don't know why people just go along with Nolan's awful sound mixing. There were many moments when I could not even hear the dialogue because Nolan insists of having that THOWWWOMMM sound playing over everything. You could definitely notice it in his previous films, but it feels like it's gotten a lot worse this time.
It's also very plain that even 3 hours isn't enough time for all the history Nolan wants to cover. He has no time to be subtle with his character's motivations, which is why towards the end you have RDJ going on an expository rant about why his character hates Oppenheimer, which sounds like he's rattling off the Wikipedia page on Lewis Strauss.
I also don't think this film was particularly coy about where its sympathies lie - you're supposed to sympathize with Oppenheimer and his entourage of remorseful nerds, and lament that the products of their work and research are not theirs to control. It's squarely in the "I believe SCIENCE" camp of liberalism that seems to believe scientists and the scientific establishment are just trying to be apolitical experts working for the betterment of mankind with no particular or personal biases of their own, and that they should be accorded authority over policy by virtue of their expertise, since it would be ugly to sully their position in society with something so uncouth as "politics", or democratic control over their work. Every government official in the movie is a bloodthirsty zealot, Edward Teller is a brute, and you have to feel sorry for Oppenheimer and how his lip trembles as he navigates these monsters.
I don't think Teller was being naive so much as he felt much more passionately about the cause of hydrogen bomb development than Oppenheimer did, because Teller's native Hungary was under Soviet occupation. John von Neumann felt the same way, and for similar reasons. There's an interesting discussion to be had about how Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues were Western Jews whose favorable opinions of communism came from academic hobnobbing and philosophical flirtation, and who were thus not keen on the idea of nuclear brinksmanship against the Soviets, versus other Jewish figures of the era like Teller, von Neumann and Ulam, whose native countries were under communist occupation. But the film doesn't have enough time to touch on that, and I doubt it would want to at any rate.
3/10; the next time I feel like watching a Nolan movie, I'll just have someone drive a pneumatic drill into my ears to simulate the experience.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Twitter is markedly worse for me. Setting aside the app frequently crashing or buffering endlessly, there's a very noticeable increase in the amount of crypto spam beneath comments, and every day I have to block some new porn bot that's decided to follow me. The basic functionality of the site has been compromised, but as long as journalists and government institutions are still using Twitter, it'll keep standing. I'm bearish on a competitor site taking over - if Threads (terrible name) can't do it even after importing users from Instagram, I don't see what will.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
If in 1814 you told a Russian soldier marching through the streets of Paris, or a French Senator signing the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, that 150 years hence half of Europe would be governed from Moscow, they might have find it quite conceivable. The history of the Russian Empire for decades prior had been one of constant expansion, and now they had defeated the most powerful empire in Europe. If in 1990 you told a white South African that 30 years of black rule would lead quickly to the abandonment of Mandela's professed principles, and their replacement by anarchy, national deterioration, and the codification of discrimination against non-black citizens, this too would have been quite conceivable - he had plenty of examples on the continent to consider.
These appeals to nuance and caution tend very often to be recipes for paralysis and the suspension of critical thinking, usually with the aim of avoiding drawing conclusions about the future that the appellant finds unsavory. Yes, certain radical events are impossible to predict. But it's futile to assume that some radical event is bound to happen that will make all future extrapolations suspect. Very often you can make reasonable predictions of what's going to happen in the future because you have decades or centuries of data regarding geopolitical conditions and human behavior to draw from, and I think those predictions are usually true. Obviously it gets shakier the further out into the future you go (I will never make any claims about what America is going to look like 200 years hence), but political arguments for a paltry few years or a couple of decades are perfectly fine.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
There are already plenty of Hollywood movies based around existing non-comic book IP - it's just that most of them fail. There was a Dungeons and Dragons movie released this year, and despite scoring well with critics and D&D fans, it failed at the box office. Pokemon is the biggest franchise of all time by some margin, but the Detective Pikachu movie underperformed. The Fantastic Beasts movie likewise sought to cash in on being part of the Harry Potter universe (for which there is still significant commercial interest - see the success of the Hogwarts Legacy video game, despite a media campaign against it), but that wasn't enough to halt declining box office returns for the Beasts movies (probably because they stopped being about magical creatures and switched to being about Dumbledore and Grindelwald shooting agonized glances at each other). There's a Gran Turismo movie coming out next month that will probably flop as well. The most recent Fast and Furious movie is going to lose money. This idea of leveraging existing IP is not new, but there are probably conservatively at least 5 failures for every success.
Romcoms are dead for reasons Matt Damon laid out in his appearance on Hot Ones - streaming has killed the DVD/Blu-Ray revenue stream that many films that weren't profitable in their theatrical run could use to get a second shot at profitability, which means they now have to make up all of their post-production, post-marketing costs on theatrical release. It simply isn't sustainable for romcoms to have to make $70-100 million at the box office every time in order to be worthwhile investments. Even a recent "success" like No Hard Feelings, which I liked, is probably not going to be profitable just based on its box office returns, since studios don't get all of that money, and will need to get a good licensing deal to make the money back. And the flipside of using a big star like Jennifer Lawrence to pull people into a dead genre is that big stars cost a lot of money - from what I've read, NHF had a budget of $45 million, of which Lawrence's salary alone comprised $25 million.
I have an AMC A-List membership because I watch a lot of movies in theaters, but I'm generally attending these either alone or with one other person at most. The rising costs of tickets and concessions means a family of four is probably going to be shelling out well over $100 at the movies, and unsurprisingly a lot of people have decided to just check out and catch the movie on streaming instead. Most people don't share my big screen autism.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
((And any look back that includes pre-1986 also has the problem the other direction: a lot of the explosive transmission of HIV and YOLO-esque behavior came about during the Ryan White-era, where people believed that standing too close to or using the same bathroom as a gay man could transmit HIV. Despite the wikipedia summary, they believed that because a lot of mainstream experts were cautioning about it! The devil-may-care behavior regarding condoms during a lot of that time period makes more sense when people reasonably believed that would have little impact.))
No, this is the product of historical revisionism aimed at making homosexuals seem more sympathetic than they actually were and are. The scientists and experts who were at Ground Zero of the AIDS epidemic noted several times that many of their HIV-positive patients were intelligent, savvy men who understood the risks and transmissibility of HIV/AIDS as it was explained to them. They chose to continue spreading HIV anyway, because they simply did not care. See Marcus Conant:
I can recall about that same time seeing a patient who was a young Ph.D. scientist from the Peninsula [south of San Francisco], a very good-looking man with Kaposi's sarcoma who I was caring for. He had AIDS. He was sitting in my clinic on Parnassus. He was kind of impatient. I said, "I'm sorry I'm running late; I can tell you're impatient. What's wrong?" He said, "I wish you'd hurry up; I'm going to the bathhouses." My reaction was, "Wait a minute."
See, I was being a typical physician. We all in this society forget--and I think physicians are the worst--that when people are diagnosed with a fatal disease, all of the desires and longings and drives that they had the day before they were diagnosed are still there. Everybody believes that patients who are dying of AIDS are no longer sexual. I have patients that have sex the day before they die. I encourage them to do that. And people believe that women who have had breast cancer are no longer intimate or have longings to be intimate. We need to begin to relate to people and realize that those human, very human, desires don't go away because you have now had a label of "AIDS victim" stuck on you.
But being the typical doctor, it just never occurred to me that he was still out there having sex. He had Kaposi's sarcoma--AIDS, this horrible new, fatal disease. My line to him was, "Somebody must think you're smart, because they gave you a Ph.D. How come you're still going to the bathhouses?"
He said, "There's nothing wrong with that. I probably caught it there, and so my view is, it's there and I'm going to have sex." I said, "Are you telling the people that you're having sex with that you're HIV-positive"--it wasn't even called HIV then--"that you have AIDS?" He said, "No. I figure that they ought to be smart enough to understand that there's AIDS out here, and that they can catch it. It's their responsibility as much as mine." I think that that, more than any other single event, called into focus for me the notion that someone needs to speak out.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Sure, but "feminism" is not a demographic group, and I consider there to be a qualitative difference between "doesn't have sexual freedom without corporate sponsorship" and "will literally die without Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD)".
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Condoms are cheap and plentiful already, often even free. Even so, 1 in 6 homosexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, with the number rising to 50% of gay black men. I'm unaware of any other demographic whose existence is only made possible by pharmaceutical companies stepping in to stop 16-50% of the population and its subgroups from dying in the streets due to self-inflicted pathogens.
Also lesbians have especially low STD rates. Shall I accept that as a reason to advocate lesbianism since we are apparently concerned with STD rates? Or is this concern selectively targeted?
Sure, go ahead. Lesbians mostly slap each other around AFAIK, but that happens behind closed doors and doesn't require billions in health spending to prevent national contagions, so I'll freely admit I don't care about it as much.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The main reason you don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality is that there exists a bustling antiretroviral industry that stops the gay population's numbers from collapsing practically overnight. Most other populations manage to survive without corporate sponsorship.
Yes, any war could be resolved by one side's unilateral surrender. Ukraine could end the war tomorrow too.
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