Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Within Finland (and as far as I know, other Nordic countries as well) there's a persistent pattern of women with high education having higher fertility rates than those with low education, which at least somewhat challenges the idea of education being universally disruptive to fertility. (Of course all these segments have fertility rates below replacement, but still, just limiting university education would not solve anything here, and there must be other factors keeping TFR low for those with lower education.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
To be fair to peak-oilers their argument was always that peak is different from running out and the danger is what oil getting more and more expensive would cause to the global economy and society.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
The Ukraine war clearly shows that naval area denial currently has the upper hand in a near-peer conflict, so all major surface combatants would be disabled or pinned in port within a few weeks of the beginning of such a war; and with anti-ship missiles taking some one-digit number of minutes to strike a target, an Incheon-style landing around Warsaw would be as unrealistic to stage from Åland as it would be to stage from Kronstadt (or more so, since it would be harder to get an air defense umbrella even over the staging area).
Whuh? Warsaw? Do you mean Gdansk?
Sure, you wouldn't get landings like this, but controlling the Baltic (or, even more importantly, preventing NATO control of Baltic) would still give Russians considerable strategic advantage, starting with the security of Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The Arctic circle even moreso - that's where the big missiles would be flying, after all.
They didn't attack Sweden in WWII either, when it still would have made more sense (as naval action had not yet been rendered quite as impossible by modern reconnaissance and targeting) and they had a bigger and better army; and even their action against Finland was decidedly half-hearted, seemingly only serving to loosen the Finnish chokehold on Leningrad's northern supply lines that gave them trouble during the first half of the war. (As much as it may be flattering to you, it seems implausible that they would have been unable to make it past Vainikkala after fighting their way through to Berlin, if they actually were equally motivated.)
If we're talking about 1944, we're talking about a completely different situation due to there already having been 3 years of war. And Winter War was precisely the sort of an invasion of a neutral country to obtain a strategic advantage in the midst of an ongoing separate greater-power conflict we are talking about here.
It seems pretty clear to me that the Åland/Gotland explanation was advanced by politicians who had personal incentives to make your respective countries join NATO, and lapped up by a media and population eager to see themselves personally involved on the right side in a conflict that they perceived as just
The scenarios that I described wasn't concocted in 2022 - they've been standard fare in Finnish and Swedish security debates from the times of Cold War on, a part of a greater security calculus of whether it makes more sense to join NATO and risk getting directly involved a great-power conflict or not join the NATO and still risk being targeted by a separate SMO in preparation of such a conflict or as a separate but still connected part of such a conflict.
For a long time, that calculus pointed towards the "not join" option, with majorities of both the population and the leadership of these countries sharing this view, but a full Russian attack on Ukraine of course upended the calculus almost completely (the year of Russia beating the war drum before the invasion had already started this process but the invasion made the opinion switch permanent) by demonstrating Russia's capacity for brash, previously unthinkable action, with both the people and the leaders basically changing course almost overnight. I live here and follow local politics closely, I am very familiar with how this process happened.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
Since Finland and Sweden hold important strategic locations in the Baltic/Arctic area (northern Finnish Lapland and Åland in case of Finland, Gotland in case of Sweden) that Russia might wish to control in the event of a wider NATO/Russia conflict.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
It may be fair to say that the war galvanised the cultural West, so Sweden and Finland (which realistically had nothing to fear from Russia either way) joined as a symbolic gesture of support
Completely untrue in case of Finland and almost certainly Sweden as well.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
My understanding on the basis of social media messages is that pronouns in bio have been on their way out in the American corporate world for months now.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
He's gonna lose all the libertarian support, all the weird center-left? populist RFK support and so on.
He's going to lose maybe 1/3 of those, if that. The rest will get into the Trump cult mindset where Trump is always right and will either change their own ideologies to match wholesale, explain away Trump's actions (5-dimensional chess!) or just ignore the cognitive dissonance. I mean, that's been the general pattern with so many others Trump converts previously, why would it change?
Rubio hasn't been formally confirmed yet, has he? It's "sources say" but sources have said all sorts of stuff that hasn't happened. One theory is that Trump team is leaking fake info to various sources to see who passes it on and thus reveals unreliability.
Assuming this is true, though...
This looks like the same mistake Trump made appointing Tillerson in his first term.
Tillerson was sacked for lack of personal loyalty and was replaced with even more hawkish and neoconnish Pompeo. If Rubio gets in then it's just proof that it's not a mistake, it's what Trump intends to do.
If the image that Trump supporters (and opponents) have constructed in their heads of Trump that goes majorly against the grain of the general thrust of postwar American foreign policy differs from reality... well, that can't be helped. In general, foreign policy tends to the be one thing where political changes don't usually lead to large differences in course.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
I guess this is also one of those things that are affected by how well you can do laptop work in a moving vehicle. I can work even while riding shotgun in a car if necessary, some people can't even do it on a train. A major factor for me to not own a car; train trips can actually be useful in themselves for doing work with limited opportunities for personal distraction.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
It all feels fairly high-decoupling to me, which was a surprise, as I'd assumed it was a solidly blue tribe rather than grey tribe show.
Once again, there's no grey tribe - there's just a particular disaffected part of the blue tribe.
Harris staffers seem to have been running a campaign that appeals to themselves, personally, with the celebrity concerts and so forth. A fun big party for the Dem staffer class. Of course what appeals to the Dem staffer class is not what appeals to the voting public, in many ways opposite to it.
While the sort of corruption where politicians misuse taxpayer money obviously gets more attention, the sort of lower-level corruption where political parties and organizations misuse donations, membership fees, money from ownings etc. for this sort of stuff is probably rather more common.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23d ago
Hamas calls for end to war
Putin ready to end Ukraine war
China wants to work peacefully with us
These have made occasional suggestions of such nature for years now.
EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
EU already buys a lot of US gas (19,4 % of all EU gas, according to this). https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-supply/
Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
All world leaders of note will congratulate whatever US president gets elected and will try to communicate with him as a matter of course. Harris would haev been no different. The only notable thing is Elon's participation in the call.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
EU countries continue to have separate foreign policies. Sure, they're coordinated, but there's no larger mechanism to ensure absolutely unanimous action in foreign and security matters, as Hungary demonstrates.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
We do well in strongman contests, though, or at least did in the 90s.
Apparently (according to some Instagram posting I found) Finland didn't send a weightlifting team to olympics between 1920-1948, which also represents (apart from 1952 and 1956) the golden era of Finnish Olympics success, with the general medal count beginning its fall to 0 (in the most recent Olympics) after that. Perhaps the strong athletes were just sent to wrestling or some other strong guy sport.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
I'm not sure about big accounts, I mean stuff of the sort that one can find in the comments and retweets of this tweet, for example. (though admittedly in a lot of cases it's more like "white adjacent" or "think they are white" or so on.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
I don't think there has ever been even one election anywhere where there hasn't been some faction of the losing side saying that the reason they lost was being too centrist and not running a clear ideological campaign. It's one of the easiest analyses to make and will always find at least some traction with the party's left-wing/right-wing/liberal/conservative/separatist/whatever faction that's been chafing under the party's attempts to moderate and become attractive to general voter base in order to win elections.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
It seems to me that one factor why the liberal reaction has been subdued is that this time Trump won the popular vote too, and the swing to him was universal all around the country. Can't just argue that his presidency is only because the Clinton campaign made the error in not campaigning in a few specific states, can't argue Russian interference at least as well etc.
Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Presumably he's not including parts where he thinks that the Dems are currently correct and should keep doing what they're doing (or where he thinks they should go left).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Parts of the global soccer community attempted to boycott the 2022 World Cup in Qatar for taking place in an authoritarian hellhole, to little success. Especially after this relative debacle it's unlikely the same will be attempted vis-a-vis Trump.
Trump himself, incidentally, apparently played soccer in high school.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Lichtman actually screwed the pooch as early as 2016, the year he got famous.. Before 2016, his model was supposed to predict the winner of popular vote (and the books had been carefully been written to indicate this); in 2016 he had predicted a Trump victory, and during that year Trump did indeed win, but he didn't win the popular vote, which Lichtman's model (according to his own words he had stuck by for several elections) was supposed to predict. However, he was only too happy to accept the fame for this "correct" incorrect prediction and make himself into an election guru. Wikipedia confirms it:
The system correctly predicted the popular vote winner in every election from 1984 to 2012. [23] Lichtman garnered attention for his call of a Donald Trump victory in 2016; some critics say the prediction was wrong because Trump lost the popular vote, but Lichtman said he had switched to predicting who would become president and was correct.[7] In the media he was widely credited with a correct 2016 prediction.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
28d ago
This includes a poll of various Euro countries on Trump/Harris. The countries preferring Trump to Harris are Slovenia, Slovakia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia and - at 78 to 22 % - Russia.
Of course such polls have a limited value in telling how the citizens in those countries would vote if they actually were American citizens. Insofar as someone living in Finland is concerned, what exactly would there be for us to gain in Trump becoming a president over Harris? The two most important ways US politics affects Finland are trade and security, and in both cases Trump causes at least some level of danger of those things going south, i.e. there being tariffs and a trade war or an US withdrawal - partial or full - from NATO.
Sure, at least the latter one didn't happen during the first term, but both are actually things, i.e. a change in trade policy and withdrawal from Europe that many Trump supporters, including prominent ones, actually want Trump to do, so they still exist as possibilities. Putting America first is what Trump would be specifically elected to do! OTOH, if one actually lived in the US, the priorities would undergo at least some revision.
I rather suspect that for most of these countries the poll mainly indicates opinion on Russia/Ukraine conflict - there's a rather amusing poll from Czech Republic on how the voters of various Czech parties would vote, and while the most Harris-voting segments are TOP-09, a center-right party, and the Christian Democrats, the most pro-Trump party is KSČM - the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.
The bulk of it is mostly upper castes and some middle castes who now call every white a Wignat (Wigger nationalist), a term no one outside of them and Nick Fuentes has used.
I've seen this term being used plenty in American far-right Twitter, though perhaps less than in previous years?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
28d ago
I've theorized for some time that one reason why intelligence agency types and pilots tend to be so into UFO stuff and believe UFO lore explanations for potentially more mundane elements is precisely because that's the type of a profession you get into if you want to "learn the truth", make first contact, get into space to see the secret alien moonbase and so on. In intelligence agency types you get into more of an X-Files territory, in case of pilots it's more like getting into astronaut training and then enacting Rendezvous with Rama.
It was my understanding that, at least among more casual strategy gamers, it's always been specifically III that's considered the stone-cold classic and the definitive entry in HoMM series, no? Olden Era seems to specifically harken to HoMM III.
To answer the original question, while not completely the same, Civ III tends to be considered one of the weaker iterations of Civilization, with Civ IV better appraised.
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