Crowstep
11mo ago
I don't know. Perhaps if I thought Rishi Sunak actually believed in the roster of multi armed animal gods. But realistically, his Hinduism is just as fake as the fake Christianity of the average UK politician.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Perhaps not, but he's also the king of the commonwealth, and gospel is pretty popular in Africa and the Caribbean.
Don't get me wrong, I still hated it. It completely jarred with the rest of the service. But a Nigerian Anglican choir could have worked well.
Crowstep
11mo ago
I always start with 'do you have a boyfriend?' That makes it unambiguous that I'm asking her out and gives her a graceful way to reject me.
If she says no, then I'll suggest an event or drinks. Maybe there's a cool bar I've been meaning to visit or something.
One helpful tip I was told once is to go to more than one place in an evening. This makes it feel like two dates and moves her closer to the 'I can seriously consider this guy romantically' bit.
You'll have to adjust your approach given that she's a church girl I guess, but if she knows you then she probably already knows whether she'll say yes or no. You just need to give her the opportunity.
Crowstep
11mo ago
This is probably my favourite article by Matt but it's tough to pick. He really has a knack for taking vast and often obscure topics and making them interesting and approachable.
He also has some great history articles (Napoleon, the Aztecs), travel notes from a surprisingly large range of countries (Nigeria, Ukraine, Panama, Saudi Arabia) and personal challenges like going vegan for 30 days or sitting in darkness for 24 hours. I'd thoroughly recommend giving his blog a look.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Has anyone played Tears of the Kingdom yet? Sadly my copy won't arrive until Monday.
I was a big fan of the first game and the reviews are universally positive, so I'm pretty optimistic.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Finland deserved to win. Sweden's song was good, but it's not sporting to send a previous winner back, especially one with an established music career.
Overall not a particularly memorable contest in my opinion. The staging was great (as always) but very few stand out songs.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Sitting around in the park with my friends in the summer. My city doesn't get a lot of sun, so when it is nice the whole city comes out and it's easy to find people I know there. I can spend a whole day doing nothing but socialising and it doesn't even feel slightly wasted.
Crowstep
10mo ago
I had phimosis as a young man, but was able to stretch out the foreskin manually and desensitise the glans gradually in the shower. It took a couple of months but since then my sex life has been fine.
I also had mild frenulum breve (I think) and I was also able to rectify that through gradual stretching and simply letting my erection stay with the foreskin fuly retracted.
Are you in the US? I wonder if the use of circumcision to treat phimosis is an artefact of the fact the procedure is common there. When I spoke to my doctor about my phimosis, I don't think he even considered circumcision, although I don't think I asked about it either.
Crowstep
10mo ago
If you believe Albion's Seed, the proto-hillbillies (the Scotch-Irish borderers) were already lewd and vulgar when they stepped off the boats.
And I'm not even sure that half your hypothesis (white Christian conservatives have an above replacement tfr) is true. Depending on how you define them, this article suggests there are almost no Christian groups with a tfr above two.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
Crowstep
10mo ago
Our ancestors grew up in very close proximity to their close relatives and tribe members, but they also grew up separated by vast distances from other groups of strangers. I think that's the key difference between your conceptualisation and Ace's.
Crowstep
10mo ago
I had a lot of success with this routine. I do it once a day in the morning but you can do it more than that.
Crowstep
10mo ago
I don't know what the mods' position is, but I'm in favour of posters like you and Kulak linking to your blogs here (or indeed, anyone writing the kind of stuff popular here, even if they're not an established poster). I'd like to see more top-level posts outside of the CWR generally.
Crowstep
9mo ago
According to the chart in that article, Asian-Americans actually support racial quotas at college more than Euro-Americans (although both groups are still net disapproving).
You would think that as the people most disadvantaged by the quotas, they would be most opposed. I wonder if many of them are making the incorrect assumption that the race-based admissions policies are just benefiting minorities in general, rather than being targeted at specific racial groups.
Some disparate thoughts from me on the topic:
Harp - Needs a lot of fine motor control, so women are probably better at this. Plus it's very delicate and the player gets to show herself off to the audience, unlike something like the double bass or the drums where the player is behind the instrument.
Brass - Puffing your cheeks out is unflattering, teenage girls don't wanna look like this.
Flutes etc - High pitched tone and pursed lips, kinda girly so puts off the boys.
Drums - Big man hit thing hard with stick. Seems very masculine.
Guitar - This one I'm not sure about. My impression is that players are mostly male but the only reason I can see is that teenage boys think it'll impress the girls, maybe because it allows you to sing at the same time as playing. Electric guitar also means you can play in a band.
Crowstep
9mo ago
I find typing on my phone easy enough (although not as fast as on a keyboard). The hard part is opening other tabs to reference something. Editing is also easier on a desktop or laptop.
If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.
You're making the worst argument in the world.
The central example of 'racist' is a neo-nazi who yells racial slurs and innocent passers-by. You're purposefully conflating this (terrible) behaviour with the far more reasonable behaviour of having a preference over the type of immigrants ones country imports.
Crowstep
9mo ago
The actual policy we're discussing is an immigration policy that favours people who are similar to the existing (often native) ethnic group. In other words, a political manifestation of the preference for living near people who look like you.
And more or less everyone, from the immigrants themselves to the most full-throated supporters of multiracialism and immigration does prefer to live among people like themselves.
As far as I can tell, the only sin of the people you call racist is that they want more people to be able to act on the revealed preferences that we all share.
Crowstep
9mo ago
I think it's worth having the new thread start on Saturday. You're right about people having the most time to post at the weekend so it makes sense for a new thread to begin then.
I'm unsure about breaking it out into single-issue threads though. I don't want the forum to turn into all culture-war all the time and the roundup does serve to stop outrage-bait taking over everything.
Crowstep
9mo ago
Apparently a lot of critics saw this in Knives Out, where the wealthy WASP author leaves his estate to his diligent South American nurse instead of his spoilt kids.
Of course, that interpretation only makes sense of you subscribe to the American view that Spanish people are their own race instead of just another European ethnic group...
Crowstep
9mo ago
That's true in some countries but not others, the average person in Argentina is very much not mestizo.
And Ana de Armas (born in Cuba) who plays the nurse certainly isn't. She's as European as Mitt Romney.
I don't think you can reasonably conclude that Ana de Armas has any non-European ancestry. She's completely indistinguishable from a native resident of Spain. Her mother's parents migrated from Spain, and her father looks completely Spanish.
I compare her to Mitt Romney because while his ancestry is English and hers is is Spanish, both of those places are in Europe and both ethnic groups are equally European. The fact that you classify him as 'white' and her as 'latina' really highlights how bizarre both labels are.
A better solution would be to list 'European' and 'mestizo' on the census. That would more accurately capture the difference between Europeans from Latin America (like de Armas) and mestizos like Raymond Cruz.
Crowstep
9mo ago
They're going to struggle to get anglophones to use an umlaut when our alphabet doesn't have them.
At least one industry (weight loss centres) is already feeling the effect:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/28/business/jenny-craig-weight-loss-ozempic/index.html
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