Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Casual encounters and visits to England and Ireland might also leave one convinced that they are basically the same nationality on the basis of not only language but also surface aspects (left side of the road, two faucets, crap insulation etc.), and yet... (or England and US/Australia/Canada/whatever.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Crimea only became demographically majority Russian after WW2. Sure, it wasn't ethnically Ukrainian either, but the Crimean Tatars of the current day identify strongly with Ukraine, for understandable reasons.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Apart from Ukraine being conquered by Russia and forcibly assimilated, what would "Ukraine as a people to survive" mean here? Even if their population levels are drastically reduced, well, there are nations half the size of Ukrainians surviving as a people, even triple or quarter the size of Ukrainians. The Paraguayans were able to survive the War of the Triple Alliance. It would mean huge amounts of death, to be sure, but that's still different from national extinction.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
Most Islamic terror attacks in the West in the recent decade have been done under the rubric of ISIS, which opposes Palestinian nationalism and Hamas for being a distraction in their quest for the Caliphate.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
Isn't the more specific explanation that memes come from smaller discords/other chats/forums and get forced and amplified on 4chan?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
The purpose of the phrase "The purpose of a system is what it does" is what it does, which is insinuating your ideological opponents and their institutions do not actually want to do what they claim they want to do and are instead in a dark conspiracy to do evil.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
21d ago
The desired cycle does seem to be of the "Hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times" version.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d 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
23d 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
23d ago
"Ex-Muslim who dunks on Islam" is basically a stock character among the European right at this point, at least.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d 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
24d 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
24d 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
28d ago
Website content includes interface stuff, I should clarify.
Russian Empire was basically unable to utilize state power to anywhere close to the degree that a modernized state could, though it was starting to make up the difference already in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution.
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