Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
I just today learned of a subreddit called r/somethingiswrong2024, where the crowd of disappointed liberals have already spiralled to QAnon levels of theorizing how somehow the election will be annulled and Kamala will win, and naturally the irregulaties surrounding the swearing in have ended up throwing fuel to the fire by shovelful.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
That was the vibe in the 90s if you were young, sure. The boomers, in my recollection, spent a fair amount of time during that period being suspicious of the whole tech book - not only in the sense of predicting disappointments and bubbles (including the ones that actually happened) but seeing the free online expression etc. as a path of dangers for their kids, filled with drugs and child porn and extremists trying to recruit them. (Quite as many of those who were kids in the 90s now see the Internet for their kids, of course). And the discussions about the dangers of corporate control and monopolization are nothing new either, or have people already forgotten the Microsoft antitrust saga?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
I was recently with a friend how the local SF/F fandom scene organizing the local cons etc seems like a bunch of rapidly aging Gen-Xers permanently stuck in the 90s, and one thing I observed was that kids these days don’t seem to get into the general ‘fandom’ but instead have a large number of individual fandoms around specific properties, ie Harry Potter fandom and Disco Elysium fandom and Cyberpunk fandom and what have you. Some overlap of course but less of an overarching idea of a whole genre with a history and unifying factors apart from the specific common series or other work.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I've read a fair amount of previous Gaiman discussions on Twitter, including from before the allegations, and the trans themes in A Game of You have been problematized exactly in this way approximately a 1,000 times.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I just reread the entire Sandman like a month ago and didn't remember that there was that much rape. I mean, of course I remember the most famous rapes (Calliope, Fun Land attempts to rape Rose, the diner scene etc.) but even beyond those there's quite a lot of it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Should be noted that the Trump movement is currently at a new situation with the strong influx of Musk and other tech right types, who are really not palingenetic at all in their thought, and are strongly future-oriented.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
I don't think there's ever been a war without deserters and draft dodgers. A better question continues to be: if the idea of an Ukrainian nation is as fake as Russians and pro-Russians claim, why have there still been so many willing to fight for it? You can only get so far with "they are all forced to do so", you don't survive 2,5 years against a stronger enemy with just or even mainly a gun-in-your-backs army.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
I think one might put it like "Trump isn't Hitler, but if there was an American Hitler, he'd probably look like a more racist and fascist Trump". Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power). Just crank his various attributes up to eleven, and you get an American variation of fascism - naturally different from German and Italian versions due to the considerable national peculiarities of base American nationalism, just as Italian and German fascisms differed from each other due to the national pecularities of base German/Italian nationalisms.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
I was genuinely surprised to learn that Tate is half black when I learned it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
If your definition of "East" is mostly just the specific areas that were taken by separatists/Russia in 2014 then sure - if you go by a map like this, the areas where Russian was given as the main language in the census outside of the cities pretty much cover those areas, with an additional zone in the Zaporozhye oblast.
Presumably many of those answering that they're Ukrainian-speaking would have indeed used mostly Russian in their daily lives, but that's precisely the difference between a prestige language and a non-prestige language. If Ukrainian-speakers have to become fluent in Russian to get by in life but the Russian-speakers feel it's not their duty to tarnish their mouths with what they see as a peasant dialect, it's Russian that gets spoken, and increasingly so as the years pass by, unless there's a concrete intervention to this matter.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14d ago
Apparently he started seriously studying it quite late in life (i.e. at 50, when he returned to Finland from Russian active service), but most sources I've seen say that by WW2 he knew if quite well. He retained a notable Swedish accent (it's obvious to me from a clip like this), but it's generally these days just seen as a part of his mythos as the last true aristocrat in Finland.
Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.
And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine.
If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
Well, they've said that autism is our national characteristic, at times. Finland has also had traditionally a high homicide rate compared to (other) Western European countries, though apparently it has gone down markedly in recent decades. OTOH we nevertheless have a high-trust, low-corruption, care-for-the-most-vulnerable society, so I guess one can't explain everything by alleles.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
I don't think anyone should take you seriously, and not because I dislike your constant agitating for violence and race war, but because it's so self-evidently as performative and fake as your "catgirl" persona, which so many of your Twitter followers inexplicably seem to have bought. Go figure.
I could buy that the Motte-posting ancap Kulak was just saying things he actually believed in a spicy way, but yeah, the catgirl Twitter fasho Kulak just seems like the product of constantly iterating one's online persona to appeal to newfound followers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
Perhaps I should specify I was talking specifically about vaccine skeptics (i.e. those generally opposed to mRNA vaccination), which Bhattacharya (or Tegnell, referred to in another post) wasn't.
Generally speaking what caused this thought was the Joe Rogan quote about "conspiracy theorists being right about everything", in which case it was Rogan implicitly dumping a lot of people with varying views in the same category.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
To me, it just seems like, for the last 3 years, many of the Covid skeptics and Covid conspiracists have been doing constant victory laps on evidence that is insufficient, to say the least. Yes, some of the contrarian things were correct, but there was a large number of wild claims about vaccine killing half or third of people taking in space of years, sterilizing people to the degree of "unvaccinated sperm becoming more valuable than gold", being filled with gunk that basically makes your veins look like huge black worms etc. that obviously didn't come true. Sure, not every Covid skeptic said this stuff, or even most of them, but the more moderate skeptics still seemed, at least to me, generally unwilling to start debunking the wilder variants. At least insofar as my personal experience goes, I do not know anyone who seems to have suffered a major vaccine injury (nor do I know anyone who has died of Covid, though one guy I know apparently came pretty close), which makes me question those who claimed to encounter vaccine injuries left and right.
There's Rogan saying that all the conspiracy theorists were correct on the basis of a report saying that "Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives", which obviously would be the complete opposite of reality if the mRNA drugs manufactured and distributed as a part of OWS were deadly poison. Indeed, a great number of Covid skeptics ended up fulsomely praising - not just supporting as the last bad option but actively campaigning for - Trump, who has never stopped bragging about his great vaccine and successful Warp Speed operation and, when pressed on the incongruity, usually resulting to "well, he didn't support a mandate!", as if it was still OK to use tremendous amounts of tax money in order to support a lie and actively push a deadly poison on people, which is what he would have been doing if the mRNA vaccine claims were correct.
As said, the mainstream Covid response was flawed in many ways, opened a room for a lot of corruption and included a push for mandates and vaccine passports in a way that almost certainly has caused more harm than good in eroding public trust to public health authorities and experts - but the "counter-experts" don't seem particularly willing to utilize the same standard of evaluation on themselves, or their own community.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Outage between undersea cable that connects Finish and Estonian power grids
This is not the first, or the second, cable that's gone out in the Baltic. It seems quite obvious that Russian and Chinese ships are cutting these from time to time deliberately.
This has been huge news in Finland, the Finnish Border Guards did specops to detain the suspected ship and the news have indicated the ship's been used for spying purposes. There's a wider discussion about Russian "shadow fleet", ie ships flying under third-country flags used for circumventing sanctions, operating in the Baltic, and increasing NATO presence in the Baltic to counteract this.
One of the reasons why it's easy for me to believe the perp is what he claims to be is that I actually know a local variant of this type. An immigrant from a Muslim-majority country, born a Muslim but now an atheist ex-Muslim, used to be on the left due to the association of secularism and leftism in the Middle East but left the left in a huff due to the lack of enthusiasm for his strident anti-Islam sentiment, has also burned briges with the other local ex-Muslims, now associated with the mainstream nationalist party though also critical of them for a variety of reasons including insufficient concentration on Islam, generally comes across as igh-strung and aggressive. (Of course he's not directly comparable to the terrorist in the sense that he hasn't threatened to kill anyone.) My guess is that there are more than a few ex-Muslims like this around. It's quite ironic that one part of the narrative that the Saudi terrorist was a secret Muslim practicing taqiyya comes from the claims of other ex-Muslims, the other ex-Muslims are reliable non-taqiyaish sources now?
Also what is this " car rammed into people" bullshit, the car didn’t do anything, the driver did.
It's been a perennial complaint of cycling activists that even normal, regular car accidents (in local news etc.) get reported as "car rammed into a person" or even as "a pedestrian/cyclist collided fatally with a car". There's something about cars that makes us conceive of them as autonomous objects, kind of like large animals or something.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
30d ago
That just doesn't add up. Why would he engage in years of carefully constructing a cover story for doing this sort of an attract that seems highly impulsive? If it's important for the authorities to not find him then why does he conduct the one form of attack that almost guarantees to end up with him either dead or being hauled off to hospital and then interrogation? Isn't this rather a convoluted explanation in comparison to him simply being pretty much who he claims he is?
And Muhammad Atta was drinking late into the night before 9/11 despite alcohol being forbidden by Islam.
That's just being a sinner, not a cover story. Insofar as I've understood he believed martyrdom would wipe the record clean, so to say.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
30d ago
How many cases have there been where an Islamic jihadist commits a terrorist attack and pretends to be something other than an Islamist while doing so? Being open that you are, in fact, doing jihad has always been one of the points of the jihadists.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
30d ago
No, I'm a millennial and ideal target audience for SMAC and played the hell out of it when it dropped, but when attempting to replay it, I just can't get over how ass the graphics and controls are by modern standards.
A Finnish nursery rhyme, too.
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