Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Obviously I can't speak for the "Polish street," but their government has been unrelentingly hawkish towards Russia for over a decade.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
That remains yet to be seen; this thing is still barely a month old.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
I struggle to see what other kind of war could have been envisioned. Admittedly I'm not military myself, but I certainly hang out with a goodly number of current and former military personnel in various online and IRL spaces from several different branches -- they uniformly say that this is more or less a textbook example of the "American way of war." With focus on as-precise-as-technologically-possible aerial and missile strikes on political and military targets, down to the targeting of specific individuals, supported where possible by Special Forces/CIA paramilitary "dirty tricks" I don't see how this is functionally different from, e.g., the way we went into Afghanistan. The bombardment of Tehran, Isfahan, and IRGC infrastructure looks a lot like 2003 "Shock and Awe" in Iraq.
What, do you think Paul Wolfowitz was jonesing for the 82nd Airborne and 1st Infantry Division to be rolling from Turkey towards Tabriz?
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
France had no centuries long tradition of representative democracy and rule of law.
It did, just a much patchier one. The idea to call an Estates-General didn't come from nowhere - there was a known and remembered tradition of such assemblies. And, if anything, the ancien regime French had too much rule of law; the intransigence and excess legalisms of the various provincial parlements (a misleading name for regional judicial courts which also excercised forms of judicial review in the form of registering or declining to register royal edicts) blocked numerous attempted reforms prior to the revolution.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Masculinity and femininity as general pro-social concepts are only really useful when there is a division of gender roles.
Why would masculinity and femininity be downstream of social roles rather than biological tendencies? Regardless of social expression, there needs to have a framework for disciplining the excess physical energy of rambunctious teen boys, and the excess social power of young-adult women.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
While I get that Blackstone was an Englishmen, I find it a bit rich that US legal thought should be based on him.
It was the actual choice of the founding generation, who explicitly adopted the english common law in state constitutions and statutes (see the term "reception statutes").
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Foremost for Blackstone is allegiance (weirdly shortened to ligeance in a few places)
It's not a weird shortening at all; allegiance is all about who you recognize as your liege, i.e., your ruler.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
The British one seems pretty batshit, what with being somehow both fanatically culturally-progressive and also Islamist.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
Dizzy, do you believe that apartheid ethnostates are morally acceptable in the present age
Yes, the gulf arab states are perfectly legitimate, regardless of their appalling track record towards "migrant workers."
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
"Ethnic cleansing" plus 50 years is just a normal border.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
Because no-one wants to get stuck in the middle of a war zone. Same reason there were refugee columns out of Belgium and northern France during the early days of WWI.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
Personally, as a luke-warm supporter of the war, nos. 2-4 resonate with me, with a side-dish of "Israel probably told us their intelligence had penetrated the IRI governance and internal security structure enough to be able to achieve meaningful attrition/disorganization of regime-loyal elements."
Like, apparently things are so crazy that Mossad agents are calling individual district commanders of the Basij and warning them to stand down or get droned.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
Yet the persistence of this misuse indicates (at least to me) that there's something underlaying it other than just an inability to comprehend the scope of third world squalor.
If I had to guess, I would say it's not so much with the actual harm done the worker, but instead a discomfort with the idea of a westerner exercising power and control over a racially or ethnically-othered workforce. The journalist isn't looking at the worker and seeing Kunta Kinte from Roots; he's looking at the worker's boss and seeing Simon Legree, and backfilling everything else from there in horror.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
If we're going to stay faithful to actual latin pronunciation, apparently it would be "weekeh wersah" because latin "v" is pronounced like an english "u" and latin "c" is pronounced like "cat" not "cell."
Of course, as a proper anglophone of the 21st century, I find this abhorrent, and never actually use it. It's "Veni, Vidi, Vici" not "Wenny, Weedy, Weeky" damn it!
Supah_Schmendrick
27d ago
what kind of name is Markwayne anyway?
Strikes me as GenX Jimbob, personally, but YMMV.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
The wiki isn't fantastically put together, but I didn't know about the conflicting sources. I've only ever seen it posited as an established fact, including by some individuals who otherwise defended Churchill. Thanks.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Churchill gassing the Iraqis just entered the chat.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
The first duty of the American government is to obey the Constitution.
...and the first words of the Constitution are the Preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The lens through which the rest of the document must be read is one of in-group preference. In fact, just to hammer the point, home, the power (and, implicitly, the duty) to "establish a uniform rule of naturalization" - i.e., standards for who gets let into the in-group, and who has to remain on the outside - is explicitly granted to Congress by Article 1, Section 8. No need to muck around with "necessary and proper" implicit federal powers, like we do for such trivial things as setting up the Fed. No, establishing and policing the boundary between Americans and non-Americans is very much within the scope of the Constitution's mandate.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I'm not going to pretend I have a definitive answer to this or that I have direct access to primary sources, but I will say your assertion doesn't square with the histories I've read - there I've seen claims that somewhere between 50-80% of the population of al-Andalus were either Iberian converts or muslim transplants from the arabic world/the maghreb, particularly so in the southern bits around Cordoba and Granada. What sources do you have that claim otherwise?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Christianity also spread this way throughout much of history. Germany, Spain, and South and Central America aren't Christian because of gentle proselytism.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
On behalf of westernized secularized half-Jews, let me assure you that we find Christian Zionists like Huckabee just as weird and creepy as you do.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Not to be excessively nitpicky, but it's not just that the bodycamera footage shuts down narrative soft-control (e.g., leaving out unhelpful facts) - it's that it actively disproves a lot of the active lying that is done by private individuals either close to, or discussing these cases. All the way back to the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" lie around Michael Brown, the lies told about what Jacob Blake and Trayvon Martin were doing at the time they were shot, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
A baby wearing a shirt saying 'I love my two dads' isn't engaging in science denialism
At risk of drawing mod ire for being excessively glib, no, the baby isn't expressing anything because it can't read and didn't pick the shirt. It's being used as an ignorant/unwilling prop and/or billboard for its guardians' views. Just like if someone stuffs a chihuahua in a sweater that says "I love my mommy" they're not actually expressing any of the chihuahua's views - they're using the chihuahua as a prop.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
This is what grey hair and beards are for.
I haven't read Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow, or White Noise. However I adore Catch-22, and find Slaughterhouse 5 perfectly fine. YMMV.
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