Ditto6687
1yr ago
The Germans cancelled Karl freakin' May for crying out loud.
Are you a friend of this Karl May? If not, this is still an "internet event" for you. My friend group has actual Marxists in it, and quite a lot of left-wing people, or at least people who strongly support LGBT or whatever the American embassy has cook up for them in a given month. Nevertheless, I have not seen a public meltdown once.
Then again, we are a homogeneous Catholic nation, and our only experience with immigrants was Syrians passing through, and then a wave of SE immigrant workers who everybody agrees are nice and doesn't really think about. Funny enough, we've held a couple of BLM marches (allegedly) but they mostly didn't register. I suppose our strongest leftist factions are LGBT and feminists, but no real tantrums happen (outside of popular instagram pages "calling out misogyny").
For a while Euros could enjoy the time lag between cultural changes taking hold in America before they made their way to Europe, but it's over.
I mean, I agree. It's just that nothing really important happens here in my country, and we have very little ammunition to cancel people with. Maybe Germany really has become like the US as of late (in terms of public-meltdown-having leftist activists gaining power), I just wouldn't know.
Ditto6687
1yr ago
Real life isn't the internet. The average Marxist friend is just a dude concerned with sounding smart and banging chicks. Maybe it's because I'm a European, but "Marxist" here doesn't mean "cares about microaggressions".
Ditto6687
1yr ago
Holodomor was a famine that also affected Russians. Russians were among the primary targets of political repressions. Ukrainian and other minority languages were enforced and supported in institutions.
The idea that they tried to rid themselves of "non-Russians" is ridiculous: several of their most powerful leaders weren't Russian, and Bolsheviks viewed supporting smaller nationalities as a way of internal powet balancing. Their first defining war was against Russian nationalists.
Ditto6687
1yr ago
Nobody yet seems to have considered that amongst normal 15-25 year old people, right-wingers are less pleasant to be around than "Marxists", and have comparatively much lower social status. I am not talking about behavioral extremists who interrupt lectures or something. I'm talking about how for some rando college student, their cool friend who is eloquent and gets invited to parties is far more likely to subscribe to some far-left ideology than a far-right one.
Who is more likely to bring you shame when you bring him around, your racist and homophobic programmer friend, or your Marxist friend who reads French literature and watches art films in his free time?
I feel like these dynamics are reflected in other age groups too, to an extent. Right wingers who are smart and eloquent have carved out their niche on the internet, but in meatspace there is a vast discrepancy in likable-human-capital.
Ditto6687
1yr ago
The public is not going to care (their faction has in large part seen to that) that "he's one of the good ones", even though that's obviously true
How is it "obviously true"?
Also, Eastern European SS sympathizers just looked to act out ethnic revenge fantasies on civilian populations. This is what Hunka's group did, mostly focusing on killing Polish civilians. Same thing in Croatia and doubtless other places too, where it was an excuse for killing local Serbs and Jews and stealing their property. What about that makes them "the good ones"?
Ditto6687
1yr ago
and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi
What standard of evidence are you looking for? When someone volunteers to join the SS, which requires swearing an oath to Hitler and probably a bunch of other stuff, hosts Himmler, carries out a genocide against Poles to Himmler's approval, etc., I believe it's fair to say that they are a Nazi. I am not saying that he personally carried out a genocide, of course: just that he willingly joined and armed group whose primary accomplishments and motivation was killing Polish civilians, when he had every option not to.
I mean any standard of evidence that excludes literal SS members from being Nazis is ridiculous.
It's not, because one could also argue that "capitalism is genocidal" if we accept those standards. Communism is bad because it impoverishes people and requires brutal oppression to sustain. But going beyond that, for example counting WW2 dead from both sides as "victims of communism", does disservice to good arguments.
Communism is just not a genocidal ideology in the way that Nazism is.
Ditto6687
1yr ago
Genocide requires intent to wipe out a specific ethnos. For example Nazism was genocidal towards Jews and Slavs. While Marxists certainly didn't shy away from political violence or bad policy, they were not "genocidal".
Ditto6687
1yr ago
List is used in court, by police officers, and by death squads. Fair to call it a kill list if international journalists who were put on it get killed.
That the authors of the list don't do the killings themselves but merely help in coordinating them is just a convenient cop-out.
Yeah I too saw this take on Twitter ;)
But I want to push back a little bit. For sure, "wokeness" does have a lot of official support and literal commissars in American HR departments. But it also has lots of genuine grass-roots support. As in, people who congregate on Reddit and Twitter and devote their lives to this "extremism" in varying degrees.
I'm sorry but someone who transitions and spends their time and money on an ideological crusades with very good results is a strong opponent. It's an insane level of fanaticism and commitment. I would wager this is an important factor that explains why wokeness is winning. And crucially for my argument, it's grass-roots support from actual true-believers, not a gerontocratic elite pushing unpopular views in a top-down manner.
If you like video games and talking about them online, your world has basically been taken over by these people. You want to talk about game X? How about instead of that we talk about the private life of a VA in that game that once said something transphobic. How about instead of that we talk about LGBTQA+ representation in the game. How about ------.
This happens IRL too. In a group of N friends, most people don't care about the woke stuff. But that one friend who does can decide to push that perspective. What are the others gonna do? They don't really care, and this one friend seems to really care. Through his tone and the very fact of what he's saying he has made it clear that he's willing to enter conflicts about this. So, he's unlikely to get any pushback. People aren't "beaten into submission by commissars" always, sometimes they're just too passive and don't want to upset the social dynamic, so the fanatics get the final say.
Ditto6687
1yr ago
Can you write a bit more on why you're playing Skyrim? I'm just genuinely curious. I want to motivate myself to play, and not give up after a week this time.
I'm endlessly drawn to Elder Scrolls games. They're near to what I would call "perfect" games for myself. My biggest complaint is the combat system. In Morrowind and (maybe) Oblivion I don't mind it, because the magic system is so open. You can craft your own spells, launch yourself all across the world map, nothing is restricted. In Skyrim however, the restrictions are there, and I can't give it a pass on the combat system. Not to mention that the quests are notoriously shallow. And that's something, coming from a person who usually doesn't notice such things and consumes most media passively.
At the moment I find it hard to not pick going for another Elden Ring run instead, even though that game is much farther from what I would call "perfect" (personally, although it is probably "perfect" in general).
Unfortunately, I have "gaming OCD" and just can't install any mods, except for bugfix or graphics mods. I want the vanilla experience in games, the way they're "meant" to be played. Not to mention the technical difficulties of installing mods. I've recompiled my kernel and have been an Arch user, but that shit is just too much for me.
Can someone redpill me on financial products like options, from the perspective of "how does this benefit society"? I understand why price discovery via supply/demand and markets integrating information is beneficial. What I don't understand is which contributions does a person who buys an option contract make to society, in theory. I want to be crystal clear that this is not a question about morality, I'm well aware that people are free to make contracts and profit. I'm just wondering if there is some benefit to options existing, and I'm maybe looking for some wider navel-gazing about how complex financial products are a social good.
My attempt at answering this is the following. Mind you I'm basically guessing from vague memory that options are a contract that you can buy, which allows you to buy another thing later at a specified price. There is no immediate benefit created by a person who profits off a correct bet he made. That part is zero-sum like gambling. However, there is a benefit when a market for such contracts exists, because it functions like a prediction market. People make real-money bets on how valuable certain products will be in the future. In this way, the options market aggregates information about predictions. This information may be useful to other people who observe the prices, because they can adjust their behavior accordingly. Maybe they are policy makers, for example, who can better stabilize their economies.
Is that correct? Furthermore, is there any simple real-world evidence that this happens, i.e. that people other than speculators benefit from complex financial products in positive-sum ways? For example, does this benefit the overall economy of a country? Does it benefit it in concrete ways so that politicians (or more realistically, economists) there might say, "hey, lets encourage options trading"?
The Russians just confirmed they had contacts on the Ukrainian side. They were caught trying to escape to Ukraine.
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