LetsStayCivilized
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User ID: 1036
LetsStayCivilized
5mo ago
Quatennens
He's since retracted his candidature, so there are no major problems on the Front Populaire side and I think overall they did a pretty good job of presenting a clean front; Quatennens was their main mistake; on the Hamas aspect they made a common declaration condemning it as terrorist, which addressed some accusations that LFI would never call Hamas terrorists.
LetsStayCivilized
11mo ago
Frenchman here - never heard of this, and googling for usages of the word "ag-gag" in French seem to mostly talk about them in the US or Canada, tho there's some talk of them coming to France.
LetsStayCivilized
1yr ago
nothing of value is produced any longer?
How about German cars? The Germans seem (rightfully) proud of them.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be, a potential ender of democracy, a dictator thug, or any other sort of authoritarian who would end the rule of law and instead rule by might?
Mostly no, I considered that such fears were overblown, that he was "just" an incompetent and boisterous asshole that people elected as a big "fuck you" to the establishment and especially the sanctimonious "I know better what's the best for you racist rednecks so shut up and listen to your betters" left.
However, I saw his refusal to accept the election outcomes as despicable, showing that maybe in fact he would have liked to strong-arm his way into staying if power if he could get away with it.
However, part of the blame for that seems to be the crappy electoral system in the US, especially the lack of voter ID which is just baffling. If people don't trust the system, the proper response is to make the system more trust-worthy, not to tar anybody voicing criticism as a fascist.
And if so, whose opinion on the matter did you value?
I mostly made my opinion of Trump by reading his Twitter. I don't trust journalists to give an accurate portrayal of Trump, they have a "boy who cried Hitler" problem.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
In real life, the answer is that aptitude testing is racist and doesn't actually measure intelligence anyway.
But, one might answer, how well do they predict one's ability to come up with unconventional ideas ? Because that's what would matter here.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
I might describe myself as a "rootless cosmopolitan", as someone who travelled a fair amount and has a pretty international family. I don't associate the word to jews, tho according to Wikipedia it seems to be that way originally. If I use it it would be semi-ironic, because I'm aware it has (mild) negative connotations, I just don't think that those connotations are particularly warranted.
I'd consider it somewhat equivalent to "citizen of the world", tho that version has a positive spin to the point of sounding haughty.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
the former has been banned because they used simple, working class language, and the latter hasn't because they used flowery prose free of profanity that only hinted (but did so obviously) at the same thing the other person was forced, by dint of their lesser ability, to state explicitly.
Does that happen ? My impression is that people typically get banned for getting into heated arguments, but not for controversial opinions (except for the ultra-controversial subset that used to get reddit admins interested, like types of parentheses). Maybe occasionally for stuff like "building consensus", but that's usually not banning material.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
it's that it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify shows that don't exemplify racial diversity. This forces a dilemma on anyone looking to tell historical stories situated in Europe's past. Do they risk the wrath of the media-activist complex ("yet another show about white people")
Is that really the case though ?
I would expect that if someone put out a show with an all-white cast (someone downthread mentioned TheNorthman), they wouldn't get a backlash strong enough to actually hurt their bottom line (as long as they don't go aggressively market their product as all-white/anti-woke etc.).
Some theories:
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True Believers: A lot of the people involved in media production care more about diversity than about being faithful to history / the original work
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Cowards: A lot of those people are in a disproportionally woke-leaning social environment, so even if the backlash doesn't hurt the movie's bottom line, it might still make their friends angry at them or make them open to careerist back-stabbing
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Profit maximizers: I'm mistaken and actually the backlash would be hard enough to hurt the bottom line
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No such thing as bad publicity: the problem isn't the backlash, it's that putting woke characters is good for the bottom line either directly (by marketing to minorities / the woke) or indirectly (because marketers can cherry pick (or fabricate) "racist" comments on the internet, make up a fake controversy, and get everybody to talk about their movie)
I actually suspect that the wrath of the media-activist complex could be good for the bottom line, if exploited in a similar way: find (or fabricate) the dumbest comments, blow it out of proportion, reap the free publicity. Though that only works if you don't care about your reputation in lefty circles, which tends to be important in the media world.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
it's practically mandatory for any show that doesn't want to be cancelled by internet SJWs
No, I think that that's hyperbole. If someone put out a movie with an all-white cast, there might be some grumbling on Twitter or whatnot, but no serious consequences.
it's crammed down my throat everywhere
But that seems to be true anytime there's a big show with a big publicity push. I remember when Game of Thrones was crammed down our throats everywhere too. That's just mass-marketing; I just avoid ads and places with ads as much as possible.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
England has about ten times the population of Scotland, so I'm not seeing anything very surprising there.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
Meh. This just looks like a gloomy and pessimistic worldview that conveniently absolves the one holding it from any need for action, while staying sufficiently vague to resist falsification.
Such people are ideal, from the perspective of Leviathan/Cthulhu.
Leviathan and Cthulhu are mythical creatures - they don't exist. You're talking about vague impersonal forces, but those typically don't act like agents that plan for outcomes - unless there is an actual organization making out those plans and carrying them out. There are two pretty different views:
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An actual conspiracy, with a shadowy group orchestrating the things you point at
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No such group, just a lot of people each following their individual incentives.
I find the "individuals and their incentives" story much more believable, and (to me) your post comes off as gesturing towards the "shadowy conspiracy" while avoiding spelling it out.
And the incentives are much more fruitful to talk about - you can actually talk about facts, about things that could be changed. For example, why aren't people having kids ? Could be the cost of real estate, could be the cost of schools, could be dumb laws about car seats, etc. - and each of those are topics that can be analyzed, evaluated, solutions can be found, etc.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
My understanding is that ethnicity is cultural: If a Hungarian couple adopts a Chinese baby and raises it in Hungary, that child will be ethnically Hungarian when grown up (but it will "have Chinese decent" or more controversial "be racially Chinese" or "be racially Asian").
I would find it a bit weird to label him either "ethnically Hungarian" or "ethnically Chinese", but if I had to pick, I'd find "ethnically Chinese" a bit better. Maybe "ethnically Chinese but culturally Hungarian". "Ethnicity" and "Race" are pretty fuzzy words with debatable edge cases, and that's because fundamentally they're labels about labels.
"English", "Chinese", "Hungarian", "Jewish", "White", "Han", "Mestizo", "Arab", "African-American" etc. are identity labels, and those often have their own idiosyncratic rules - some are defined by a state, some are associated to traditions of patrilineal or matrilineal descent, some are strongly associated to a language or a religion - often, they have a lot of correlated characteristics, such that people will disagree about membership of various people, or about which identities are mutually incompatible. And "Ethnicity" is an attempt to regroup some of those labels, and, sometimes, to resolve ambiguity, i.e. you can use "Ethnically French" to contrast with having French citizenship.
I'd say that ethnicity is a mix of ancestry, language, and self-identity (the three being often correlated), with a bunch of ambiguous cases - are the francophone Quebecois "ethnically French" ? Maybe, I don't know. They usually aren't described as such, whereas German-Americans who don't speak German might be more likely to identify as "Ethnically German" (right ?), which seems inconsistent, but eh, as I said, each label kind of has it's own rules and it's a fool's errand to expect consistency.
What's less fuzzy is that "ethnicity" is clearly distinct from citizenship - one can be "ethnically Japanes" while being a Brazilian citizen, etc. Same for the distinction between ethnicity and religion. I don't think that there's such a clear distinction between ethnicity and race or ancestry.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
We wouldn't have continually detonated any negotiations otherwise.
I haven't seen any evidence of that happening, unless you count "refusing ridiculous terms from Russia (like "Russia gets to keep all its captured territory, also Ukraine apologizes and disarms")" as detonating negotiations. And that's not "we", that's Ukraine refusing those terms. Which, well, of course they would. Maybe they wouldn't refuse the terms if they had zero Western military/financial support and felt that their back was against the wall.
LetsStayCivilized
2yr ago
Would "image uploads as part of submissions, but not comments" be difficult to implement or worth exploring?
Then people would include memes in their submissions, and progressively some would make the memes the main point of the submission, and before you know we turned into /r/funny.
How about: you can submit images in posts and comments, but that flags the post and it's hidden until a moderator approves of it?
Tho I also like the idea of "only paying users can post images". Or restricting them to certain kind of subboards / weekly meme threads.
@ZorbaTHut, what do you think ?
Nice post, thanks.
Interesting! And I wonder to what extent modern parenting & lifestyle - having few kids that don't spend as much time outside with other kids as in previous generations - is contributing to that. If you're used to unstructured play with kids of all ages, you adopt a wider variety of social roles than if you spend a lot of your "free" time at home with parents and older siblings.
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