Botond173
32m ago
That’s no ‘hentai shirt’. A hentai/ahegao shirt/hoodie looks something like this (Amazon URL) or this (Reddit URL). There are multiple variations and are well-known in the otaku subculture.
This shirt features simple pin-up girls (as correctly identified by Time magazine) in leather/latex, which has been a normie-adjacent heavy metal / sword-and-sorcery / fantasy aesthetic marketed to toxic white trash / working class dudebros for decades. It has nothing to do with hentai or anime for that matter.
Botond173
1hr ago
I think the unstated consensus among the normie masses is that being bullied is simply a sign of low status, so it's not their job to try fixing that.
Botond173
1hr ago
There has been an escalating trend for years by that point. It was probably the Tea Party movement that was the direct trigger. It had a cascading effect, and the Blue Tribe started radicalizing itself. See this Jezebel screed as one example. The writing was on the wall that things are about to get bad.
Botond173
3hr ago
So basically the Boomers paid lip service to feminism publicly while never taking it seriously but GenX adopted it unironically?
Botond173
3hr ago
The Great Awokening was already in full swing by that time. Shirtgate took place three years before that already. It was also the time of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, so the Blue Tribe was even more on edge than they normally were. It is true though that culture war events tend to happen in waves, I think, and the main culture war theme by 2017 was already race, not sex.
Botond173
6hr ago
Just bombing until they give up worked so well in Vietnam.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a joke.
Botond173
6hr ago
Hold up. The decisive factor behind the regime's fall in Libya was the NATO intervention, not any new piece of technology. Without it there'd have been a short civil war with the rebels eventually getting suppressed.
Botond173
6hr ago
I think the situation was roughly the following throughout the Soviet Bloc, not counting the USSR as a whole but do counting the Baltics. This will not be a post that much coherent but please bear with me.
Opposition to the regime took two main forms. 1a. Nationalist/patriotic 1b. Religious 2a. Reformist socialist 2b. Reformist social liberal and economic libertarian. There was no large difference between the subgroups. Anti-Russian sentiment was almost completely concentrated in group 1, and religious groups were almost always nationalistic. Group 2 generally agreed on the necessity of liberalization to one degree or another but the dissident reformists within the ruling parties preferred maintaining one-party rule.
Subgroup 2b got the most attention in the West because they appeared to be the most sympathetic and their activists were generally educated, Westernized and presentable. That does not mean they were the most significant in number. They generally prospered after the transitions of 1989, gaining positions throughout the media and founding parties that were initially successful whereas the reformist socialists lost a lot of their relevance after one-party rule collapsed.
One defining factor in the ‘90s was that group 2b largely decided that they have a lot more in common with group 2b than with group 1 and engaged in politics accordingly. Many functionaries formerly in high positions in the media who were disproportionately Jews, were never supporters of the opposition and then successfully took part in the privatization schemes after the transition decided to ally with group 2b and started promoting themselves as left-wing liberals. To the extent that a local version of the Blue Tribe exists in Central European countries, this is their origin. And the more US cultural influence there was present (various NGOs etc.), the more similar they became to the US Blue Tribe.
Regarding group 1, whatever level of sympathy they did initially enjoy in the West largely evaporated later, as they revealed themselves to be standard ethnic nationalist authoritarians not that interested in either economic or social liberty. Apparently there was some level of disillusionment happening because many Westerners erroneously viewed the European revolutions of 1989 (to the extent that those were true revolutions) as liberal revolutions whereas in reality those were mostly nationalist revolutions.
There are other peculiarities about group 1. In Poland, Galicia / Western Ukraine and (to a lesser extent) the Baltics, where animosity towards the Russians is more or less a cultural tradition, group 1 interprets the Soviet Bloc as a manifestation of the imperialist tendencies of barbaric Muscovite orcs. In other words, not something bad that the commies inflicted on them, but something bad the Russian people inflicted on them. This is pointedly not the case in Hungary where the same ethnic nationalist tendencies are present but usually target (communist) Jews and not Russians.
It's important to point out that there is basically no political force left that has sympathy for the Soviet era. The Boomers who were still nostalgic for the old times are mostly dead by now. The opposite is happening. That is, political groups are basically competing in the creation of propaganda associating their outgroup with the evil commies of the old days.
Botond173
17hr ago
During the Cold War the Soviet Bloc countries took the official stance of anti-Zionism after the Six Day War of 1967 and openly lent support to the PLO, Syria, Iraq and (until 1973) Egypt (the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict, essentially), all in the name of anti-imperialism and national liberation. This had a couple of cultural consequences. One was a general anti-Arab sentiment under the surface among oppositional/dissident social groups. Another phenomenon connected to the latter was that groups of the democratic opposition took on an attitude that was at least not anti-Zionist or even sympathetic to Zionism, considering Israel to be a member of the Western liberal democratic global alliance that they were hoping to transition their countries to. This is a sort of Randian narrative about Israel being part of Western enlightened civilization and her Arab enemies being against it.
This is maybe something many normies didn't notice either inside or outside Central Europe, but sometimes it appears on the surface. (In 2003 for example, when the governments of these former Soviet Bloc countries seemed to be rather keen on supporting the Iraqi adventure in service of the US neocons and the Israel Lobby.) The democratic opposition included both liberals and nationalists but this difference didn't become obvious until years after the transitions of 1989. The liberals generally held onto their Zionist sympathies with increasing resolve as they observed the nationalists parting ways with them in this regard. This is not to say that Western pro-Palestinian leftist activism has no cultural influence in Central Europe at all, especially not after Oct 7, but their relevance appears to be rather marginal even within leftist social spheres. They can only gain small traction against decades-long trends.
This is in short the Cold War legacy I mentioned.
With respect to the Holocaust, it's rather the opposite of guilt, if that makes any sense. The short story is that Hungary was allied to Germany in WW2 as a member of the Tripartite Pact (while having a relatively large Jewish minority). We can draw a parallel with the Italians here, who also allied with the Germans because both wanted to undo the perceived shame and injustice their nations suffered at the end of WW1. The Italians defected from the pact and agreed to a ceasefire when the Allied forces reached their shores in 1943 and eventual German defeat seemed inevitable.
The Germans understandably assumed that the Hungarians are likely to follow suit when the Red Army reaches their borders, and at one point it became clear that this is just a matter of time, so they occupied Hungary in a swift preventive operation in March 1944 and forced the government to step down. (Unlike Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary was thus unable to switch sides in WW2.) The deportation of Hungarian Jews, who did face legal discrimination but not genocide up until that point, was started a few weeks later and it was only the swift degradation of the Axis situation on the Eastern Front (as well) in summer 1944 that prevented it from being completed. The official figures say roughly half of Hungarian Jewry (400 thousand) fell victim.
All this later generated the right-wing nationalist interpretation that this particular aspect of the Holocaust was the sole responsibility of the Nazis and the Hungarian nation is blameless, because without the German occupation it was never going to happen. This is more or less the official line of the current right-wing government as well. The dissenting liberal leftist narrative is that the authoritarian rightist regime that made an alliance with Hitler was itself virulently anti-Semitic, passing anti-Semitic laws that were becoming ever more extreme after 1938 but also date back all the way to 1920, tolerated anti-Semitic propaganda, generally normalized the hatred of Jews, made Jewish conscripts do forced labor in the army and operated state agencies that were so full of Jew haters that they swiftly and efficiently carried out the deportations the German occupiers ordered them to without saying a word. And when the nation had her first and last free elections under Soviet occupation in November 1945, the results made it clear that the majority of voters support parties that have also been in parliament during the deposed regime. In other words, they displayed no willingness to clearly part with the shameful past.
I won't go into even more detail about this, suffice it is to say that this is a local culture war dispute that has been done to death, people have been repeating the same narratives for decades, nobody is giving one inch, the whole tiresome subject gets creatively brought up over and over in different contexts, and culture warriors are feeding off one another's outrage. The legacy of the Holocaust is that every Jew who's politically active is a liberal leftist, and everyone who's of the Blue Tribe in general (in US terms) promotes the narrative that anti-Semitism has been a huge cultural problem with a terrible legacy, the country is full of Jew-hating shithead goyim unwilling to face their sordid national past, not taking any responsibility, not coming to terms with the Holocaust etc. I guess it's akin to US Blue Tribe beliefs about anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery. And since these people generally disbelieve that anti-Israel tendencies can stem from anything but ignorant anti-Jewish prejudice, they are generally more likely to be pro-Israel.
The Charlie Kirk assassination was rather obvious culture war fuel. A Middle Eastern shooting war, while obviously a rather serious development, does not necessarily prove to be culture war fuel. What exactly would the culture-warring be about anyway?
The one thing I can surely say is that in my native Hungary the local Blue Tribe, which supports the main opposition party almost without exception and is otherwise heavily influenced by the US Blue Tribe in every other thing, is, due to the historic legacy of WW2 and the Cold War, largely supporting not only Zionism as such but also the project of Greater Israel (i.e. Israeli control over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon, if not more), and in this they are not a bit different from the government that they otherwise hate with a burning passion. And for this reason I rather doubt this will be fodder for any local culture-warring.
Botond173
1d ago
On a related note, what position did or will the Iraqi government assume in all of this?
Botond173
3d ago
Yeah, true in the case of rather negligent enemy OPSEC, which apparently did apply to Yamamoto's flight.
Botond173
3d ago
I'm assuming this type was meant to be operated in the airspace of enemies without efficient anti-aircraft defenses.
Botond173
3d ago
I guess normies correctly assume that a woman has to be a severely wretched creature in one way or another in order to become homeless due to society according them innate biological value. After all, a woman can normally avoid homelessness by, I dunno, just sucking cocks or something.
Botond173
3d ago
Bob Woodward didn't graduate from college either, if Wikipedia is to be believed. He did serve in the Navy though.
Botond173
3d ago
I guess trying to explain the benefits of networking to a Boomer is like trying to explain to a fish why it benefits from being underwater. The idea of scrutinizing stuff that works is not something that even occurs to most people.
I think Millennial and GenX people share cultural memory of a prosperous, cozy, modern society in wide consensus about social rewards and obligations. The message was: study hard, conform to social norms, don’t have a criminal record, don’t have children out of wedlock, don’t be an addicted lout, take care of yourself, make sure you graduate in time and look for a job. In return, society pretty much guarantees you a relatively good job worthy of your degree. This has fallen apart around the time of the financial crisis of 2008. It’s dead and gone, but again, people still remember it as something that was the norm for decades.
Botond173
4d ago
I guess the hope of most of them is a future Red return to cucks like McCain and Romney.
Botond173
5d ago
Guys at the bottom defect by not making an effort to turn into eligible husband candidates, because it's only marginally rewarded or even feasible. This is not a bit less of a social defection than that of certain elite males but it only has social consequences long-term and invites less attention, so it's easy to assume that it doesn't matter or that it's not happening at all. Indeed it's the men in the middle who have the least reasons to defect.
Botond173
5d ago
Calling it a 'strategy' is rather far-fetched considering that no other Japanese, Italian or German general or admiral was ever a target of US assassination throughout the war, as far as I know.
Botond173
5d ago
Its fascinating, because many people in the gen-z bracket were told to got to college, get a degree, and you'd have a nice cushy office job lined up.
I'm not sure if that has generally been the case since 2008 or so. For those who graduated from college until 2006 or so, maybe. But those people are GenX and Millennials, not GenZ.
Botond173
6d ago
I assumed a big factor in all of this was the prevention of crabs / pubic lice infestation? Anyway, I as just another dudebro can assert that I find the Brazilian wax rather cringe, whatever aesthetic value skimpy thongs may or may not provide. On the other hand, I find the argument regarding signals of sexual maturity to mostly just be motivated reasoning from lipstick feminists.
The ambiguity is by design, because this is another standard case of SJW journalists concocting arguments designed to appeal to normies and thus give them the false impression that they are culturally on the same side as these journos.
What are the normie boundaries that apply in this case? To expand on what you observed: 1. Scientists are serious people with important tasks; they should dress accordingly in public 2. Fanboying over latex-clad skimpy pin-up girls is sort of tolerable as long as you’re an unserious young dudebro; when you’re older, not so much; by that point you should marry some frumpy woman and throw such clothes into the garbage 3. Some hobbies are only appropriate to pursue in general during adolescence 4. Fat and ugly women exist and we need to tolerate them because they deserve a place in society. To rub under their noses the existence of hot women when they’re already miserable and dispirited most of the time is unbecoming of a decent man, who is supposed to be magnanimous and benevolent, not petty and snarky.
But do these journalists and bloggers actually subscribe to such norms unironically? Of course they don’t.
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