Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
It would seem obvious to me that there are, in fact, a lot of Americans who like what the Democratic Party has on offer - obviously! A party can't survive for ages if no-one likes what it has on offer! - and are happy to have it represented by what has always seemed to me a basically (though not expectionally) competent politician (competent at politics, that is) who happened to have an off-season in 2020 and doesn't have an off-season now. Thus, there is not anything particularly special to what is happening now.
What I wonder about is how hard it seems to be for American conservatives to believe that there exists a non-astroturf sentiment (and what does astroturf even mean these days, anyway? Both major parties have well-honed political machines to make basically literally any movement existing within their purview at least partly astroturf if you choose to look at it that way) supporting American liberalism organically. Why wouldn't there be? The last four years have seemed to be quite good for a fair few Americans, materially, especially compared to what is the most natural comparison to me - Europe's continuing malaise and doldrums.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I've started retraining (returned to the university for a polsci degree), so hopefully I'll only be in the field for a few more years. (Partly preparation for if there's an unexpected leap in machine translation capacity that genuinely starts to eat into the job market, partly just that after ten years of freelancing and uncertainty a real job with a real salary and a real vacation has started to seem quite appealing).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I would guess that many translation companies that previously used boutique translation models are now just using "common" LLMs, which has constituted yet another step in machine translation improving. Still a lot of translate-from-scratch work sent to me, though.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
This was actually considered a reverse problem during the decades when women voted more conservative than men, i.e. until the 70s, roughly. One argument against women's suffrage presented in France was that women might vote in a monarchy and the army, stacked with more republican-leaning men, might step in to prevent it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.
Neverthless, it's true that Atwood's book never makes the sex seem appealing at all, and there's only a couple of instances of "sex scenes", if you can call them that. I haven't seen the show, either, but all the publicity makes it seem rather more culture-warrish than the book which, if I remember correctly, only contains one line about abortion (offhand remark by Offred that she can't even remember why everyone cared about legal abortion so much since in the book's present-day society everyone wants, more than anything, to be fertile) and scarcely more than that about gays or lesbians. It's really more of a personalized "what would I do if enslaved by a tyrannical society" thing than about the exact details of the society itself.
Atwood seems to have leaned into the narrative about it being modern-day anti-GOP commentary in recent interviews, but then again, she has just received quite a bit more of publicity than she had before and that sort of a thing creates an easy need to cater to your new audiences.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Also I've never seen a "cheese slicer" budget cut like this (as they are called here) actually being enacted without the proposing party, right out of the bat, going "well, of course, this sector is the exception" (typically defense) followed by "and this too... and this..."
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
If the Ukrainians believe there's currently more tactical/strategic value in making this incursion than using the same resources elsewhere, as there very well may be, then there's nothing odd about them making this incursion.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Switzerland literally has the highest percentage of foreign-born population out of all Western European non-microstate countries.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
The bigger problem is that gay and trans stuff is generally just not a good attack vector for the right. It's a red meat issue to fire up the activists, sure, which is also why the activists often concentrate on it, but insofar as I've observed the normie right-winger would just prefer to not think about LGBTQ-related matters at all, ever. Thus, if there are Pride parades or prominent trans celebs constantly on TV, or so on, it repels them, but if there are right-wing politicians constantly going on about trans or gay stuff it repels them, too, since it also forces them to think about things they would rather just not think about.
I could observe this very clearly about 10 years ago when the ex-leader of the local right-wing populist party, towards the end of his rule, really started banging on about anti-gay stuff all the time; eventually, the party's supporters started going "Uhm, why is this fatty so obsessed with the homos? Is he maybe a homo himself?", and others (probably correctly) clocked this as an issue he was trying to use as a deflection on his utter failure to limit immigration according to his previous promises.
Also, the "No, it's not us that are weird! YOU'RE weird!" attacks on Walz just look like the "Vance is weird" thing REALLY got under GOP's skin and that they're doing the thing that demonstrates an attack has been effective - mirroring the attack. This sort of mirroring rarely if ever works in doing anything more than just giving more strength to the original meme.
I cannot say I'm an expert on right-wing political strategy, but if I had to find an attack vector on Walz, I'd probably just hit him on 2020 and Floyd riots repeatedly. Potential pitfalls there, too, but less than with other stuff.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Making Covid stuff into a campaign issue in 2024 doesn't sound likely, and polling indicated there were a fair few voters back then (ie. the olds, some Republicans too) who liked the Stasi stuff and would have preferred more of it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
So basically the entire specific claim that "Kamala Harris is a whore who sucks dicks to get a job" is based only on her having been in a relationship with Willie Brown around the time when she got her first notable job, without a clear quid pro quo of any sort being established even in that case (even though it might be considered generally sus)? And people wonder why this might, in fact, just be considered general misogyny?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Considering that the numbers that initiated the "sex recession talk" were still at sexlessness for young people (ie. sex less often than monthly - even that would include many people that would not be "true incels") being around 30 % among young people, it would imply that the median young man is indeed having at least some sex and the median young man you know not being as representative as the median young men /u/TIRM knows (or, indeed, the median young men that I know).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
My historical read is that it's more that there's a pretty consistent core around the business/national/religious ideologies and goals around the Republican party, connected to a vision of who are "proper Americans" (which continuously expands as new groups assimilate to Americanness), and the Democrats have then been a looser coalition of those that don't quite fit into the Republican vision at the moment. So in 1800s the "opposing coalition" might include states righters, Catholics and classical liberals, now it would include left-wingers, various ethnic minorities and internationalist business types. In the future the Republicans would probably still develop along organic lines, but the Dems might be something else entirely.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
It also allows for varying stages of escalation in a potentially hostile situation (acting like there's no knife at all, patting a concealed knife, flashing it, taking it out etc.) before using the knife to draw blood.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Nellis, on the other hand, argued that Democrats have been too quick in the past to give up on constituencies that seem out of reach, like rural voters and white male voters.
Reminds me of this Hillary moment from 2008 that caused some debate back then but seems largely forgotten now.
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
"American meddling in Europe", as a whole, is not going to change, no matter whichever candidate wins the election. The methods and goals might vary a bit, though.
It's possible, of course, that Trump would screw up the elections so bad that Europe would finally cut the strings, but that's still not a particularly likely scenario.
So, a couple of months ago (I think - time is a flat circle), there was a conversation and some slight complaining about how center-right parties in Europe never work with "far-right" parties
But there's been several countries where center-right parties have worked with far-right parties? They're in the same government in Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland, at least, right now, and in a support arrangement in Sweden. In the past the nationalist parties have been in government in Austria, Greece, at least, and that's just going by Western European countries. If you mean Germany and France, it's probably better to say just Germany and France - plenty of countries in Europe besides of those.
(edit: and even there, Macron has never claimed to lead a center-right party - the actual center-right party, ie. the Gaullist remnant LR, split between those who outright allied with Le Pen and those who declared neutrality in the conflicts between the left and Le Pen, ie. did not withdraw candidates.)
When it comes specifically to the question of whether Europeans would normally prefer Harris or Trump, no shit they're not going to prefer the guy whose agenda is basically "Everything for the US, nothing for those outside of the US", and who specifically has multiple times challenged the current NATO arrangements and cast doubt on whether he'd prefer the US to actually intervene if there's a conflict between European NATO countries and Russia.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
When it comes to CIA conspiracies like this, it's quite easy to imagine why it would be easy to get people to not talk: CIA is presumably full of the kind of people who don't really see illegally surveying or harassing a bunch of communists as a crime at all, or as something that might technically be illegal but still fully immoral - after all, sometimes you need to break the rules to get to the bad guys. It gets more problematic where you have the idea of CIA, for instance, organizing the 9/11 to kill 3 000 innocent Americans to achieve... well, it's unclear what this would be, since there are presumably other, subtler methods to convince the government to go to war if that's what you want. Unless the organization is full of robots, there would be vastly more stakes for someone to get such a guilty conscience that they'd blab about it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Obviously there are also people who find weirdoes who flaunt their weirdness more distasteful than weirdoes who pretend to be normal. This would not be the group the Dems are aiming for here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
If it's not clearly meant to air on TV, how would it be intended to persuade voters or win elections?
It seems like a test to probe whether the "Republicans are weird" is a good line of attack. It might be a good line of attack, but this ad doesn't seem like it really gets what might be the most effective avenue, which is the recognition that while both the (far) right and the (far) left are full of outlandish and ludicrous weirdoes, the left-wing weirdoes at least usually acknowledge that they are weird (indeed, revel in it, consciously exaggerate their own weirdness to get scene points), while the right-wing weirdoes more often strive to present themselves as normies, creating an uncanny valley effect that repels the sort of people (generally speaking these would tend to be women) who are constantly attuned and trying to look at minor social clues that someone's presentation isn't quite demonstrating what they actually are.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
I'm afraid you've lost me there. People tend to generally write and speculate more about the possibilities of politicians (particularly US ones) being assassinated than them flashing anyone. I can't say I'm so well-versed in the mechanics of autocomplete to say for sure, of course, but my general feeling is that I'd expect "biden assassination" to bring up some results, and it not bringing up any would indicate similar manual cleaning of results to what's been done to Trump, ostensibly for similar motives.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Reminds me of how, some time ago, I was hanging around the centre of my old neighborhood and witnessed a drunk/drugged shirtless psycho, in a very short order, first going to the booth of the local Greens who were campaigning in an election and shouting how they were commies and traitors, then wandering off to shout racist slurs to passing immigrant kids, then going to the tram stop to harass young women and make them very uncomfortable (then the tram came and he took off elsewhere). It's the kind of an anecdote one can't even tell often because it sounds so stereotypical you'd get some right-winger accusing you of inventing it to make the right look bad.
I've always seen transvestigation as at least partly an evolution of the "if you watch this shitty vid where it looks like some celebrity's eyes look weird or their skin bulges unnaturally it proves they're LIZARD PEOPLE" conspiracy theories. After all, trans people exist whereas lizard people don't.
I've never seen one transvestigator actually show examples of what they'd consider properly "male" or "female" facial shapes or body language patterns on a non-trans celebrity, presumably since other transvestigators would then rush to claim that actually such shapes and patterns present telltale signs of secret transness. Peak transvestigating I've seen was a standard transvestigational body language analysis claiming that (I think) Chelsea Manning was actually a cis woman who is only pretending to be a trans woman for some unstated nefarious deep state reason.
From the comments I've seen on this topic, it's probably at least 90 % the latter. I share the view that Durov's arrest is very worrisome from a free-speech perspective vis-a-vis Europe, but it's almost guaranteed to be because they think he's hiding some secret connection to the Russian government and think they can wring info or concessions out of Telegram on that font. The European elites absolutely care way more about foreign policy and the Russia-Europe conflict more than they care about "dissident Right" or what have you.
The appeals by Russian opposition inside of Russia are probably going to be of scant help to Durov, since the standard European view is that pretty much all oppositional figures remaining inside Russia are fake opposition that actually serves Putin. Again, that's not the smartest way to view it, but that's how it is.
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