Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
This really sounds like nitpicking and goalpost moving, setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.
Kendi's clear message in this chapter is that his youthful views are bad and it's bad to hold views like this. He could have very well chosen not to include a chapter on the book on why anti-white racism is bad, and yet he chose to include this. Furthermore, to my knowledge, it was only after this book that people even started to pay attention to what he said in 2003, so he was almost certainly the one doing the most to even publicize the fact that he had held these views in the first place - why would you manufacture plausible deniability to something you are promoting yourself?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
BY THE FALL of 2003, Clarence had graduated and I decided to share my ideas with the world. I began my public writing career on race with a column in FAMU’s student newspaper, The Famuan. On September 9, 2003, I wrote a piece counseling Black people to stop hating Whites for being themselves. Really, I was counseling myself. “I certainly understand blacks who have been wrapped up in a tornado of hate because they could not escape the encircling winds of truth about the destructive hand of the white man.” Wrapped in this tornado, I could not escape the fallacious idea that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” as I wrote, drawing on ideas in The Isis Papers. White people “make up only 10 percent of the world’s population” and they “have recessive genes. Therefore they’re facing extinction.” That’s why they are trying to “destroy my people,” I concluded. “Europeans are trying to survive and I can’t hate them for that.”
He calls it a "fallacious idea" right there.
More to the point, though, it's best read within the context of the entire book which, as said, is Kendi using examples of his own life as examples of fallacious ideas in general in the process of confession and self-contrition.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Whether one considers the pre-Crimea events in Ukraine as a coup, a revolution or something else, they were, in the main, internal events within Ukraine, not war. The Russian invasion of Crimea, on the other hand, was a clear act of aggression by one state against another (and, counter to the Russian narrative of bloodless takeover, there were several clashes between Russian and Ukrainian troops), meaning that is when fighting between the states, i.e. war, started.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Russia started the war in 2014 by invading Crimea. This should be a question of little doubt.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Expanding NATO for what? No one is going to face nuclear Armageddon to defend Joensuu, Finland.
Come on now, I no longer hate my old hometown that much...
Would US be facing nuclear Armageddon to defend Alaska?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
In case anyone's interested, I have little experience with pesäpallo (often shortened to pesis here), as we had to play the "national sport" a plenty in school and it burned out much of interest in me. Pesis has also traditionally been a rural sport, though recently my hometown (the nr. 2 city in Finland) has spouted a major top-tier team, so I might catch a game next summer if I have time. However, everyone who has experience both with pesis and baseball basically says that Tahko's changes are so large that they are two completely different games with different strategies and tactics and flow of game.
Also, if you're used to pesis, American baseball comes off just as strange when you first experience it as the other way around. I spent quite a bit of time as a child trying to figure out what the hell they were supposed to be doing in the Peanuts strips where they play baseball.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
I'm in the position of having just learned to really love soccer last year, and it's specifically the positional jockeying, the passing patterns etc. that make it so fascinating.
But, as said earlier, there is already a version of soccer with a smaller field, more goals and generally more "action" - futsal. It's a growing sport that's becoming more popular by year, there's no need for making major changes to actual soccer when you have futsal!
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
There's a short summary of the book's chapter, including chapter 10 that discusses the anti-white racism part, here
I'm sometimes convinced I'm the only person to have actually read this book or DiAngelo's White Fragility. The latter is complete empty-headed twaddle mixed with obvious bait for grifting (ie. not-so-subtle promotion of DiAngelo's course on this), the former, while not high lit, is at least interesting in the sense of being built around Kendi's personal narrative and continuous course of absolving himself of his past racism/sexism/homophobia etc. through the act of confession and self-contrition.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Kendi has a different race in mind:
I don’t hate white folk because I’m a Christian. How can you hate a group of people for being who they are? Similarly, how can you hate a turtle because it won’t keep up? That would be like parents hating their children because they are different. All of our children aren’t the same. Europeans are completely different from Asians who are completely different from Hispanics and so on and so forth. Europeans are simply a different breed of human. They are socialized to be aggressive people. They are taught to live by the credo, “survival of the fittest.” They are raised to be racist.
Caucasians make up only 10 percent of the world’s population and that small percentage of people have recessive genes. Therefore they’re facing extinction. Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far. This is where the murder, psychological brainwashing and deception comes into play. -- Ibram Kendi [as Ibram Rogers]: The Famuan. Sept 9, 2003
The similarity is quite remarkable. Whites for Kendi, like Jews for Hitler, are a race of (1) genetically disposed (2) deceivers and (3) capitalist (4) exploiters. They just can't help it.
It must be pointed out that Kendi's statements here are beyond the pale even for most woke pundits, and few of them would follow as far in Hitler's ideological footsteps as Kendi does. It must also be pointed out, however, that Kendi's comments were well known for years, and he was seldom if ever denounced for them by the woke left -- so, while unusual, these statements were not particularly unwelcome.
Well, there is at least one book by the woke left denouncing those statements - "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi, where Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views and uses it as an example on how, in the course of being an antiracist, one should not be an anti-white racist, either.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
As a professional translator, it always throws me off when I remember that pretty much every other wordcel field prefers page counts to word counts for some reason and I always have to specifically ask the word count when the (non-agency client) says something like "I have a will with 10 pages to translate, when could you handle it?".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Tuomas Holopainen's Scrooge McDuck concept album?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Zoomers know Little Dark Age, sure, but Millennials will at least instantly recognize Kids.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Wilders's party - though not Wilders himself - is currently in the Dutch government. It already had a confidence-and-supply agreement with a previous government in 2010-2012.
I'm not sure if there are too many countries with Germany-like nationalist right exclusion policies left. Even in France, the Macronist government ended up trying to work with Le Pen to maintain government for some months until Le Pen decided to collapse the cooperation - over standard political woes over budget balancing, not over the spicy issues. Belgium still maintains the cordon sanitaire against Vlaams Belang, I think, though that's also a bit of a special case considering that VB would like to urgently make the entire concept of Belgium nonexistent.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
EU also holds its own relatively well in one of the largest and culturally (including politically) most relevant forms of youth culture today - vidya. There just was a big discussion here on Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. And who here - or, I would guess, among the DOGE zoomers - hasn't played hours and hours of Paradox map games?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
And, of course, the immigrants have a fertility rate far above the Finns.
A large portion of the current rise of immigration is labor immigration from low-fertility Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Philippines (including changes like seasonal berry pickers being required to apply for residence when they didn't need to so permanently) or nonpermanent student visas for South Asians (see here. Presumably some portion of them will say, but it's not as such by itself the sort of a culture-destroying moment being portrayed here.
In any case, this is an odd reason for doing a military alliance rugpull. I'm not aware of the US tying its other alliances to migration policies.
Russia controlled Finland for a century and couldn't destroy the Finnish nation.
This happened specifically during a time when the Russian Empire was a ramshackle premodern empire that was, as a system, built in a way that facilitated Finnish autonomy (due to being a collection of nationalities under an Emperor) and quite simply couldn't assimilate minorities to the same degree as a modern state could due to having very little in the way of state instutions beyond the very basic ones to speak of. This was already changing during the last years of the Empire, which were also related to attempts to start Russification campaigns in Finland and, of course, changed drastically during the Soviet times due to rapid modernization, though this was counteracted to some degree korenizatsya. Still, it was the Soviet times when many Finnic nations in Russia that had survived thus far started disappearing. Finland being theoretically conquered by Russia - admittedly still a low probability - would face a completely different situation from the Grand Duchy.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
But it's not one! If it was one, our security situation would be better.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
So now we turn to military spending. Europe has failed at this from not only a monetary perspective, but from a readiness perspective to an even worse degree for decades.
So basically my country - which has maintained a huge land army through conscription, one of the largest artilleries in Europe etc., and which has coincidentally now committed to also defending the Baltic states while upending its past defence doctrine due to a recent NATO membership - will have to get screwed due to what other countries have done regarding their militaries? Of course that is the prize for putting one's trust in foreign countries, but still.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
America has been detaching from Europe for a long time now, through multiple administrations, including Bush, Obama and Trump I. Due to events this detachment slowed down, though did not fully reverse, during the Biden admin, but is now being made visible and turbocharged. It doesn't mean automatic hostility to Europe, especially considering there's a high chance that the European right-wing parties will continue to gain influence and become acceptable partners in a country after country, bringing the European mindset closer to what Vance's speech clearly has in mind, but it's all a part of the great pivot from the Atlantic to the Pacific that's been going on anyway.
I don't think that US is going to align with Russia. Some forces on the American right seem to want this, but this seems to be based on a misguided enemy-of-my-enemy (where "my enemy" is the local American libs) thinking or a belief of some sort of a grand Russian geopolitical pivot against China that doesn't really capture either the actual Russian ideological mindset or the reasoning behind the Russia-China alignment, which is probably quite a bit stronger than some American geopolitics brains seem to think.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
The current government still hasn't condemned the GLF and the CR so you can use this fact to criticize them and compare it with how the US celebrates the dismantlement of Jim Crow legislation.
Doesn't apply to CR, according to this:
2 The resolution describes the Cultural Revolution as “a catastrophe” and “10 years of turmoil” and holds Mao responsible for it. The resolution also reiterates the Party’s long-held position that the 1989 Tiananmen event was a “political turmoil” caused by both external and domestic forces. “Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe and Mao was responsible, China’s Communist Party upholds in landmark statement”,
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
grant unlimited 5 year work visas with pathway to citizenship to citizens of all western european nations (call it the ‘ellis island program’) if they have ‘distant family’ matches ithw Americans in popular DNA databases, adopt a foreign policy built around getting European countries to change immigration policy with the stick if necessary
If the first one actually worked to any appreciable degree, it would of course conflict against the goal of the second one (assuming that "change immigration policy" means "no third-world immigration to Europe"), considering how much of the latter is labor immigration to plug the workforce deficiencies caused by the birth rate crash.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
I don't think that Pentiment's African NPC (a briefly present visiting monk from Ethiopia) was supposed to be queer, and Pentiment also had a similar bit player Roma NPC. Pentiment had a couple of gay NPC monks and a female NPC peasant pair who were strongly suggested to be lesbians, but the only romance option for the player character is heterosexual.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
I really appreciate the first part of the post re: sports. I have a number of close friends who don't care about sports at all, and, although I bear them no animosity, I can't help but feel like they've missed this entire part of life that, if they engaged with it, would make every other part of their life better. My very best friends not only played and enjoy sports, they each have an attitude bordering on obsession with one or more professional or college teams. It means something. It means ... everything?
I just went from "don't care sports at all" to "care about soccer a great deal" last summer, and it really was just like a switch flip in brain moment. Like having children (obviously not like having children at all expect in this one sense), just can't explain it fully to those who don't have it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
Regarding Kim, one of the most fascinating things about Trump is that no matter how much he rants about communists and Marxists on a general level when it comes to his domestic opposition, this doesn't seem to translate at all to foreign policy, which is ruled by non-ideological "you like me, I like you" considerations as his other interpersonal relations, as shown by the recent U-turn on Maduro. (Sure, there are arguments to be made regarding the actual levels of Marxism within both Kim and Maduro administrations, but that's at least how they are generally seen.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
I don't even think it's meant to be a special punitive measure. I mean, it's phrased that way since basically everything in the new US admin is phrased as someone getting punished, but really, Trump's mindset just seems to be that tariffs are a positive good in themselves and the normal status of how things are that US has tariffs against here, there and everywhere, to protect US industry and to collect money (in lieu of using income taxes), as he has said many times.
We're so used to a free trade world where tariffs are a punitive expection (not an infrequent expection to be sure, but still, something that by definition has to be conceived as an expection) that this sort of a mindset starts to seem quite alien to us, even though the world being riddled with tariffs and duties used to be the standard setting to be cleared away by the free trade revolution. The free trade revolution was mostly good and this is bad, but it's also not a special form of bad but rather a very traditional sort of bad.
Yes, especially within the context of the book, the chapter is indeed an act of self-flagellation over having held views of the described sort in his youth. I'm not sure what sort of a further retraction than what was described you're looking for here.
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