CriticalDuty
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User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't think the issue is being of British descent; Greeks, Italians, Germans and the like do not carry the "white man humiliated my forefathers and now here I am, powerful in his space" chip that the Western-born kids of Third World immigrants carry on their shoulder. A cursory Google search tells me your federal parliament is still over 90% white, which I found remarkable given how Australian libs rave about their multiculturalism. Talk to me when 20-25% of your parliament is non-white, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of positions in the bureaucracy that don't attract headlines.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Usually it starts around when their children begin taking political office at greater rates and assuming positions of power in media, civil society and corporate hierarchies, which are avenues that their parents generally avoided or did not have the capacity for. Like I said, you are still very new to all this.
Europeans do a lot of ethnic strife, it's why they sorted themselves out into ethnostates defined by the predominance of particular ethnic groups. Australia is like America in that as much it pretends otherwise, its culture is based around a Northern-Western European core that other European ethnic groups assimilated into because they didn't have the baggage of looking so different from the people who founded the country, or of bearing a sense of racial revanchism from being a descendant of a Third World colony that was ruled by people who looked like the founders of the country. Often the children of immigrants react to their deracination from their roots by clinging to an idealized image and history of their ancestral culture and weaponizing it against the culture they live in.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I've noticed that liberals in Britain (more so Scotland than England these days) and Australia seem to look at the racial strife in countries like America and France and think to themselves that their way is "better", that they've taken a more enlightened approach, or have somehow cracked the code to living in multicultural harmony. You're just living on a time delay, since Europeans still make up the overwhelming majority of your countries. This will change, as it changed elsewhere, and the racial dynamics of your countries will change accordingly. I've lost count of the number of American liberals I've seen bemoan the lost spirit of the 90's, when everyone supposedly seemed to get along, and everyone knew what an American was and wanted to be it. Usually they blame the media, or politicians, or activists, or some other scapegoat for the change, when really what changed was the racial composition of society, which allowed new avenues for racial agitation and spoils that simply didn't exist before.
Do you think any of this is new? I assure you that 10, 20 years ago, your counterparts in America and France were telling themselves similar stories about how we are "bound by so much more than blood". Really, what was their alternative? They had to find some way to accept what was happening, because to question it would be to question themselves. Wait another 20 years and see where you are once your racial group's position becomes more precarious, and all the other groups know it.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
This is an incredibly facile analysis that just handwaves various periods of history as "tolerant" or "intolerant"; most notable Muslim empires had policies regarding non-Muslim subjects, or non-core ethnic groups, that would be considered crimes against humanity today. If you squint hard enough, the Ottoman policy of creating a personal militia for the Sultan by levying, enslaving and castrating the sons of their Christian subjects might seem like tolerance of religious diversity, but this requires motivated squinting. Muslim imperial history is full of incidents of a core ethnic group being overthrown by a non-core ethnic group despite the "one big happy ummah" facade - the Mamluks were Turkic and Caucasian slaves who overthrew their Ayyubid Arab masters, Muhammad Ali Pasha was an Albanian who was sent to govern Egypt by the Ottomans and then decided to take it for himself. Most imperial history is full of such incidents, Muslim or not.
However, I think the reason immigration and assimilation is so attractive to so many intellectuals lies in the potential! If your culture can figure out a way to bridge gaps between different cultures, ethnicities, and groups, if you can truly make disparate peoples unite under one flag, one cause, one set of ideals, you can rule the world.
Sure. What happens if you can't figure it out? Then you're just stuck with a patchwork of mutually alien peoples with crisscrossing resentments and conflicting goals.
If I perform a chemistry experiment that fails, I can clean out my tubes and beakers and try again. How do I clean out my country if this experiment fails?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
“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.
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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
For future reference, archive.is is better for getting past paywalls.
CriticalDuty
2yr 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.
Because it's very easy to blend into a new culture when you already look like that culture. How is this difficult to understand? You will never have to be confronted by the skin and eyes and hair of people in history books and portraits and statues, and be reminded at every turn that this country was not built by people who look like you. The only way to stop being reminded of that is to resent and fulminate against the history books and statues, or to mangle them to soothe the beholder's sense of alienation.
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