hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
My lived experience of actual Ukrainians is that they believe this narrative of the holodomor, whether or not you do, and discussion of it would be as welcome as bringing securesignals as a +1 to a bar mitzvah.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Mostly UGCC members, but American residents who speak Ukrainian(not Russian or Surshik) at home. I'll be the first to admit this is a biased pool towards anti-Russian hardcore nationalists, but I also remember them liking Assad for middle-eastern Christian reasons, which points to less influence on their views by the US media and state department.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Galicia is Latin for "land of the Celts" and was used as a term for difficult to control borderlands inhabited by ethnically distinct peoples in European state formation; at least for some of them, old habits die hard.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
America and Argentina were very wealthy by the standards of most of Europe at the time; really only the UK and the low countries could compete.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
I think you're way underestimating the difference in the way Fuentes vs Walsh come off. Walsh would not have said 'your body my choice'. He's just a lot less hoe-scaring. He talks like a social conservative who believes his own stated moral and practical reasoning and not one who's actually just bigoted.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
Ukraine's demographics are way worse than Russias. Of course there's a strong regional aspect- eastern Ukraine is starving old people currently getting bombed, western Ukraine was doing better than average for Europe before the war.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
This is how Russia treats its second class citizens, yes, but eastern Ukraine doesn't actually have young people left. Western Ukraine has demographics that up until recently were at least not worse than average for Eastern Europe(that is, still quite bad). Eastern Ukraine has demographics that are Manchuria-tier. Russia's not raising a big slave army out of it, no matter how brutal their conscription laws. That's why the Russian army is increasingly muslim- same reason.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
Improving things for prisoners is a regular low priority hobby horse for the christian right. They're much less loud about it than progressives but unlike the latter, they actually get around to trying it.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
I'll notice your solution is impossible to implement.
You accurately note that the vast majority of prison rape is committed by males. Did you know transwomen have the same rate of sex crimes as any other male?
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
Iced tea is actually widely popular in hot countries because it tastes pretty good when it's hot outside and is easy to make, including in countries that aren't known for their tea culture. You'll notice that iced tea is popular in the parts of the US that have truly sweltering hot summers.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
I've been told, verbally, but don't totally know how to confirm this, that lots of the immigration to the new world from poorer Euro countries in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was more of a policy on the part of the authorities to empty the orphanages, with immigrants sent to essentially random destinations rather than making rational choices on the basis of economic health.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Castration was done to prepubescent boys(that is, not soldiers).
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Russia has South Africa and Mexico tier income inequality with a mostly state controlled economy. I somehow doubt the average Russian was doing better than the average Ukrainian.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It is instructive to watch/read/listen to Ukrainian internal propaganda. Machine translation is fine. Very much not about freedom, democracy, and minority rights. A lot about how russians are dirty mongolians that need to be kept out of the White continent.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There are many people who do not live in France, Germany, and the Anglosphere countries, but who would like to. On the other hand, Ukraine is a postcommunist balkans country; even the majority of its own population doesn't want to live there, because it sucks. 'Mass immigration to Ukraine' is not a realistic scenario because even the migrants don't want it. Seriously, nobody wants to live in a burnt out rubble heap with a GDP per capita on par with India.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?
The pyrrhic and second punic wars would seem to qualify, given they consisted of the armies chasing each other all over Italy.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There isn't a singular 'Ukrainian people' now, there's a collection of different 'Ukrainian people'- and one of them(galicians) might have an above replacement fertility rate(although it's probably just below), one of the major undercurrents of the present conflict is Ukraine's attempts at turning its collection of different ethnic groups into a single ethnic group that's mostly galician aping. That's what started the donbas war.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
My experience with actual Ukrainians(and this is a biased sample but it is mostly the equivalent of normies, not actual Nazis) is that they do care about surviving as a people, and that that people is, to their mind at least, very different from Russia. Whether there's actually much of a difference or not probably depends on where exactly in Ukraine; Galicia at least is a lot more central European and less east Slavic in comparison.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc, and Russia will not allow them to do so. Russia persecutes the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives, etc.
To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference. But it's also hard for slavs to tell the difference between the blue and red tribes; why there's so much fighting about the narrative in public schools is likely tricky political analysis for the FSB. It's also vanishingly unlikely that Ukraine will see replacement migration, even Ukrainians don't want to live there, much less non-Ukrainians.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There's no shortage of middle income countries in the US orbit, though.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Have you considered that you're not really supposed to think about these things? Yes HR has picked a side but banging on and on about the israeli genocide is more than they're asking for.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It was almost certainly impossible to make a policy choice that would avoid Covid, certainly in 2017 or whenever.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
The patio method allowed the spanish to use silver ores that wouldn't have been profitable otherwise; like all pre-industrial regimes, their ability to mobilize labour(very much including soldiers but also the craftsmen, farmers etc to equip and feed those soldiers) was rate-limited by their net production of silver coins to pay for that labour(proles in history expect to be paid in silver, not gold, gold isn't the equivalent of a ben franklin- it's the equivalent of $100k bill, basically a year's salary for the upper end of the class that does actual work. Soldiers and labourers are paid in silver alloyed coins, gold alloys are used for big budget transactions between large companies[mostly reconciling accounts] and pure gold is mostly an accounting fiction for budgets and the like). Economics is just really different in an era where the labor theory of value isn't BS. The patio method allowed silver mines which had the high value ores tapped out to be continually exploited, giving Spain a revenue stream to equip its armies better(remember the labour theory of value is actually true until ~1750) and recruit more soldiers. Most Spanish soldiers, armorers, farmers feeding their armies, etc were Germans who had to be paid in cash to prevent defection; that's not to say Spanish armies in the eighty years war were particularly well run(they were a logistical disaster, the same as the modern day Saudi army- again, this is the equivalent of a third world country striking oil and suddenly having an unlimited credit line for military equipment) but at a certain point blacksmiths can just not cooperate particularly well, you have to fork over the money. Spanish army chits were worth the paper they were printed on because Spain had unlimited cash reserves due to the ability to reopen tapped out mines with superior refining methods- even the loot from the inca and aztec empires runs out fast.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Spain wasn't a dominant power in 1480, though, was it? For dynastic politics reasons Spain happened to be in command of the holy roman empire, but it was Austria that was dominant, not Spain.
Spain was on the upswing but being hapsburgs was probably a bigger part of it than superior tactics due to refinement in battle against the moors(after all, france was also in an existential conflict during the era, as were literally every balkans country).
I would agree that walsh and fuentes have more similar 'actual policy opinions' than in the popular consciousness. But this is the motte, we're not a representative sample. Walsh is much less hoe-scaring because he talks like he believes his social and racial conservatism out of moral and practical reasons, and not like he believes it out of bigotry. Non-ideologues, especially women, care about that a lot more than they do specific policies. Walsh and Fuentes both have blandly standard trad-cath policy views on abortion, the difference is that Walsh stopped going to Latin mass because some interpersonal drama with Candace Owens convinced him to go to his local parish instead, and as far as anybody knows Nick Fuentes is not a consistent church attendee.
Now I don't actually know Fuentes's motivations. I'm just saying, the way he talks makes a bigger difference than we're giving it credit for because we're weird policy autists. Shapiro didn't put out a special episode with no adds because of that, obviously- he did it because he's Jewish and feels threatened. This is the baseline state of being Jewish and doesn't tell us much, and I doubt that the employees had much room to tell him to stop. Not that I'm suggesting they tried very hard- Walsh, like most actual rad trads, very likely is used to seeing low-IQ antisemitism associated with schizophrenic drama queens and probably neither thinks it's a societal emergency nor feels much personal sympathy for its evangelists, although I obviously can't speak to his personal motivations. But the difference in popular perception? Walsh comes off as a true believer with a reasoned value system. Fuentes comes off as an unhinged bigot. Principles are important vs women are gross(and gay-as-in-literally-homosexual misogyny is probably going to be as big an issue for Fuentes appealing to the normies as the anti-semitism).
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