Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
Luckily MAGA influencers put out so many mutually conflicting explainers for what Trump's strategy actually is that they can always pick one narrative and say that this was the plan all along.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9hr ago
But the US also engages in obvious neomercantilism, and engaged before Trump, too. I mean, what the heck else was the whole TikTok ban affair? This would be a better argument if there was a lack of parity in such measures, but I don't see such a lack of parity existing.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9hr ago
Was just thinking yesterday that the one partial saving grace for Trump admin vis-a-vis the market reaction is precisely that all of this is so retarded; if it was just a smidgen less retarded then there would be a greater chance that the markets would price the possibility that he's for real, but this is retarded enough that it becomes easier for this to think that this level of retardation can't possibly continue for long.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12hr ago
Master and Margarita is arguably magical realism, which is at least speculative-fiction-adjacent.
One thing about the lockdowns was that they were always supposed to be temporary. Yes, the temporariness was stretched for a far longer period than originally intended, as mocked with endless "two more weeks to stop the spread" memery, but still, the official line at every point was that this was a temporary period of exception and at some point things would return to, if not the previous normal then at least something resembling normalcy. OTOH with these tariffs Trump's communications indicate that they're meant to last in some form for as long as Trumpism stays in power with even no-deficit countries getting a basic 10% rate.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
The desired cycle does seem to be of the "Hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times" version.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I suspect this is very much a country-to-country issue. When you live in a small country with a high income that is basically forced to be dependent on trade (not having all that much in the way of natural resource apart from lots of timber and some minerals), anything but basic-level protectionism is a dead issue, perhaps unless it's the whole of EU doing it. France is bigger and has former colonies it can still tap into and a general do-it-yourself culture insofar as political economy goes, it can afford to be protectionist in a way that Finland can't.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7d ago
I don't think that Rowling was ever an "old school leftie ultrafeminist" (if she was, one would have expected her books to have some other plotline than a traditional male-hero-saves-the-day-and-gets-the-girl one that they actually had). Even before the TERF thing she was basically a lib-centrist Blairite and occasionally criticized by actual lefties for the same.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7d ago
"Ex-Muslim who dunks on Islam" is basically a stock character among the European right at this point, at least.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
Sure, but that's still different from wartime, and is usually done around 19-20 when you have yet to be used having had decades of personal freedom and independent income.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
she is obsessed with "based Black MAGA conservatives" spouting GOP talking points or praising Trump (sidenote: it is truly bizarre how civil rites fetishism is so prominent in the generation regardless of political leanings).
"This guy would presumably be on the other side due to their demographics or status but is on our side instead" has always had great appeal, what's weird about it? Put the other way around, it's how Jackson Hinkle can have mass appeal in the Third World.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
Before Summer 2022, though, before the Kharkiv/Kherson offensives, even the mainstream pro-Ukrainian narrative was basically committed to the idea that Kherson and the areas taken in the north by AFU during that time were basically lost for good and any advance in those regions would only be the sort of small-scale grind that we've seen after that, from both sides. Only the more hysterically out-there pro-Ukrainians were saying that Ukraine could actually take large areas of territory back.
Isn't this just a normie vs. fringe problem? Greer and his politics are fringe. Whatever appeals to millions of normie zoomers is almost by definition going to be normie, just like with all generations, millennials included.
I've sometimes referred to what Greer calls "FanDuel Americans" as "lifestyle conservatism", ie. conserving a certain lifestyle that was common and aspirational in, say, the 90s, perhaps the 80s depending on generation. Apart from anti-immigrationism this sort of a thing seems to form the bulk of the politics of the local right-wing populists.
Support a (relatively, compared to the local baseline) free market, since this offers an aspirational vision of being wealthy enough to obtain a good lifestyle and material goods (a nice car, nice housing, good food, beer and sports, trips to the Mediterranean in the winter etc.). Oppose environmentalism, since a lot of environmentalism is about restricting your access to those things, whether it's limiting driving or making flights more expensive or advancing veggie food or whatever). Oppose feminism, since it restricts (men's) social access to other things, like worry-free casual sex or naughty jokes and so on. And so on, and so on.
The more fringe right-wingers commonly dunk on this sort of lifestyle conservatism, noting that it poses a natural limit to how far they can go, eg. it can be combined with "can you BELIEVE what they're trying to do in Brussels now?" style light euroskepticism but not actually going as far as to leave the EU since that would make travel harder, it can be combined with restricting asylum seeking but not actual They Must All Go style total anti-immigrationism since that would mean no Filipino nurses to keep the health system underpinning the unhealthier parts of the lifestyle (and as potential marriage partners for some). For others, the problem is it can at most be combined with cultural Christianity but nothing more hardcore (let alone more esoteric doctrines) and so on.
Not to mention that if one really believes that this country might be facing a WW2 style war in the future, well, the stated numbers of willingness to fight are high (even higher than before 2022), but if one's politics are based on good living, how far will they actually be willing to go to endure the required amount of hardship...?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Website content includes interface stuff, I should clarify.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Currently, the bulk of my work is website content.
Literary translation has some demand and I know people who do it, the main problem is that the pay is crap compared to technical translation and much of it is dependent on getting grants.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
Obviously one of the reasons, but if the role of the translator was to be a pure lawsuit tarbaby, they could just do things with AI and run it past me for my stamping for a fraction of the current cost. As it stands, some part of my work is MTPE (and even this is more involved and thus costlier for them than just giving it my imprimatur), but a large portion nevertheless still isn't.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
They still have Translation Studies at our university, at least, with new translators getting degrees and starting their studies. It might be interesting to talk to some of them to see how they feel about the profession though at the same time I guess that they have already had to respond to "Why are you studying this when AI?" style questions dozens (hundreds) of times already.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
There's at least one user (@ArjinFerman) who has said they use me and my professional career as a translator as an indicator of whether AI is making us useless or not. While I myself am no longer at all confident about the future of this profession (and neither are basically any of the colleagues I've talked with recently) and am thus in the process of obtaining a new degree (pol.sci with an intention of specializing in the interplay of politics and AI), for the last past months I've been swamped with work, and with quite traditional review work of reviewing human translation, at that. Of course that human translation might have been machine translation post-edit work but it doesn't feel like it is.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
But if it is understood as being leaked on purpose then it becomes just more public noise.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
But he is playing to ’a hit’ here. He’s repeated the 51st state line over and over and over again. A lot of his stray thoughts lately have concerned this subject or other potential annexations.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23d ago
You don’t need to blackmail rich American Jews into supporting Israel. This, to me, is the single most obvious argument against the entire alleged scheme as a Mossad project. The absolute majority of the important alleged co-accused were Jewish. For every Clinton (who was post-office at the critical time), Trump (random real estate developer at that time) and Prince Andrew (powerless) were at least as many Blacks, Dubins, Dershowitzes and so on, if not many more. Wexner himself (the source of pretty much all Epstein’s wealth) was and is a Jew and a Zionist. If you’re Mossad, you really don’t need to blackmail these people with videos of them fucking 16 year olds to get them to support Israel; they’ll do it for free. The whole point of blackmailing someone is to get them to do something they don’t want to do.
Other arguments are valid, but I'm not sure if this is a particularly good argument on its own. Sure, rich Jewish Americans (and a lot of other Americans besides) will revert to supporting Israel even without blackmail, but there's levels of support; someone who will offer Israel basic support might still balk at giving considerable proportions of their property, offering support in any and all cases including Israel committing a genocide (exceeding current actions at Gaza) or nuking something, committing potentially criminal acts etc.
Also, someone being powerless or low-powered now does not mean they'll be so in the future, at the alleged time of the acts Trump had already expressed interest in presidency, Bill Clinton was a very potential first husband of a future president, and Prince Andrew was a plane crash away from the throne. If you WERE an intelligence agency amassing a blackmail file, of course you'd benefit from a wide trawl among the elite class in general.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
My guess is that he just mostly lets the mothers name the children. The ones with the weirdest names are the ones with Grimes.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
While the specific derangement syndrome indeed originated with W, there was the concept of Clinton crazies before it.
Even going from the complete insanity of, like, a hour ago to something that is merely extremely risky would be beneficial from Musk's point of view.
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