Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Churchill gassing the Iraqis just entered the chat.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d 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
6d 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
7d 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
7d 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
26d 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
28d 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
1mo ago
This is what grey hair and beards are for.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
The coverage I've been seeing (admittedly from scattershot sources) has a fourth take, which is that regardless of the corruption allegations, the real reason Zhang was tossed was that he disagreed with Xi's alleged insistence that the PLA, PLAAF, and PLAAN prioritize having (or appearing to) have the capability to successfully invade and (re)conquer Taiwan by the end of 2027. Zhang allegedly believed that this was functionally impossible, and that the only way to even appear to comply with the political directive would be through a lot of boondoggles and diversion of effort away from other, more fundamental aspects of military training and readiness.
Again, I want to stress that I don't understand chinese and so can't read most of the coverage, and personally don't have much of a stake in this. However, I wanted to at least highlight that there's an alternative view out there, FWIW (which, again, may be nothing).
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Being a Great Man doesn't make you immune from mistakes and failures, even stupid ones. Napoleon - the prototypical "great man" - fruitlessly invaded Egypt, Haiti, and Russia, losing whole armies each time. In 1813-1814 he failed to make peace with his neighbors and preserve his dynasty, searching instead for a fruitless battlefield triumph. His attempt to reinstate himself in the 100 days was doomed from the get-go. He died on St. Helena in exile a broken man.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
It has been in the past, though. Chavez saved Cuba from just such a slow-rolling famine when he started shoveling oil money at the Cubans upon coming to power.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
The cult of action is not a new thing. It is, I suspect, a deep rooted psychological type. Speed, brutality, decisiveness - action for the sake of action - are conflated with effectiveness by certain kinds of people, while caution, planning, and introspection are viewed with contempt. Of course, it's hardly a universal perspective. You have plenty of people with pretty much the opposite view.
But this action was both. Yes, the incursion itself was accomplished very rapidly, but there were also breathless stories about the exhaustive preparation for the strike; how Delta Force built an exact replica of the building they snatched Maduro from to practice raid tactics and timing on (similar to how the SEALS practiced on a mock-up of Bin Laden's Abbottabad complex); how the administration was monitoring Maduro's comings and goings for months in order to build up a perfect picture of his habits and whereabouts, etc.
I don't think this can be pattern-matched to a fascist-futurist aesthetic "Cult of Speed" thing.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Famously, the Brits did the same thing with war hero Winston Churchill - out the door as soon as the war was clearly over, to make room for post-war economic concerns.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
You'd need to install a super-powerful non-delegation doctrine preventing Congress from passing broad enabling acts and then leaving all the actual regulating to executive agencies. And probably ban cameras/TV from the House/Senate floor. Otherwise they'll just keep doing that and resuming their job as Jr Varsity TV pundits.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system.
Because the one thing that doesn't work in the current system is the legislative branch. We're good at electing national avatars, "good" at constructing deep-state bureaucracies, and good at having hypertrophic judiciaries/legal oversight.
What we're NOT good at is actually doing representative legislation. Congress is increasingly a useless puppet show. Outright eliminating the independent executive and shoving everything at congress (or a new "American Parliament") is liable just lock in civil service rule as it has in much of the rest of the anglosphere.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Also the Days of Rage took place in a country that was much more homogenous ethnically and religiously
Not really; they took place before the great deracination of "white ethnics" - to say someone was Polish, or Irish, or Italian, etc. really meant something then. Additionally the 70's Days of Rage took place before the replacement of religion by politics as the self-described centerpiece of people's lives.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Understood. Sorry for not reading the room. Lol.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Then I guess I'm confused about who Fuentes is talking about....because a lot of the most obnoxious pro-Israel activists, even to me, a Zionist-sympathetic secular half-Jew, either have dual citizenship themselves or have close family who does who they talk about incessantly. I'm thinking of chattering class people like John Podhoretz, etc. I didn't realize that Iger, Altman, etc. were viewed as being particularly Zionist.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker
Zohran Mamdani got elected Mayor of New York on a DSA/third-worldist platform. Hasan is just modern-day left wing Bill O'Reilly. AOC, KBJ, Randi Weingarten, Brandon Johnson - all of these people hold significant office and/or policy influence.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.
Maybe, but there are a lot of potentially-billion-dollar-bills laying on the sidewalk which the US political system won't pick up for various reasons.
- highly taxing/regulating remittances
- vigorous enforcement of H1B and other educational/employment visa requirements
- ramp up of enforcement of existing Orders of Removal / hiring more IJs to help clear the case backlog
- increasing workplace audits/lawsuits against bad actors in immigrant-heavy employment sectors (agriculture, food processing, construction, hospitality).
Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them?
Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective, as well as just a general grass-roots push against the more obnoxiously-obsequious Israel focus. Barring that, just wait a generation - most of the well-assimilated liberal ashkenazi will just die off or fully submerge into the general population through intermarriage without any/many kids in a generation or two anyway.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Survivorship bias. There were lots of ugly buildings in the past as well; they just didn't survive because people didn't like them.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I knew a guy who worked at a specialist firm which almost exclusively dealt with gas station franchising and environmental cleanup/compliance work. Didn't make BigLaw money, but did a lot better than $50k/yr. There's lots of weird niches of law you can get into and pick up specialist work without stressing about billables. Not saying that having craptastic time management will be a good thing, but it won't be as automatically fatal as it would be in BigLaw, Insurance Defense, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
As a lawyer, there's plenty of smaller niches lawyers can fall into that don't go bonkers over billables in the same way the big firms do. For example, plaintiff's-side firms doing most of their work on contingency, or in-house regulatory compliance practice work.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Except that they lack any form of legitimacy other than raw force...
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.
More options
Context Copy link