Stefferi

Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 17hr ago

Pope Deep Dish Pizza instead.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 1d ago

I know it's not the same thing, I was just playing around with the literal meaning of the words.

It has always struck me that the American belief that the most likely chance to have to face down an oppressive government from the inside is a belief enabled by the fact of belonging to the most powerful country in the world without any conceivable external enemy that could defeat it in warfare; in a small nation with a powerful authoritarian neighbor, the threat matrix and the perceived ways to combat that threat are obviously different.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 1d ago

I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

I'd say that a clear supermajority of the Finnish people hold this belief, at least - with the caveat that the definition would have the armed people being the Finnish nation as represented by the conscription-based Finnish Armed Forces and the bad guys and their oppressive government being Russia and Putin.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 1d ago

Isn't it just a reversing of the "When you think about it, LoTR has a powerful queer subtext" style of thing?

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 1d ago

For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, with nerdy overtones. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close, yet so far.

I've never played Minecraft, is this more of a late-millennial thing? (I was born in 1984.)

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 1d ago

The Bush admin also didn't post any of those images, making this a strange comparison.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 4d ago

I mean, just for instance, compare the Dune novels and David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation I don't think Chani so much as smiles at Paul once, and they supposedly love each other?

Huh? She smiles throughout the entire main romance scene.

I don't think that Zendaya is a particularly good actor and the romance subplot wasn't handled all that well, but come on.

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Australian Federal Election, 2025

Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 4d ago

Whenever I try to look at Australian politics, I'm struck by how this guy Dutton is one of the most lizard-looking politicians I've seen. Just uncanny valley looks.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 7d ago

Well, no, you wouldn't expect large constituencies of "make [another country] great again" voters in another country, unless we're talking about special cases like Christian Zionists supporting Israel for religious reasons. Beyond that, why would one expect even right-wing Canadians to feel particularly positive about the guy who talks about annexing Canada and has just slapped Canada with punitive tariffs for... something?

Insofar as I've seen, the sort of Canadians who would actually support American annexation or at least be OK with it would be either disaffected forumlords who treat politics as an abstraction, general fringe loons, or recent immigrants - I remember seeing a post indicating that the Indian immigrants in Canada would be more likely to support annexation than the born Canadians.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 7d ago

It's the sort of an ideological position that you would expect to be committed to free trade in all conclusions. Minimum wage and basic income are separate questions, I'm not sure why they need to be mentioned here.

I've followed Scott's writing for over 20 years (before he started blogging, even!) and I'm not sure if there are any points where I would have expected him to support tariffs on the basis of his other ideological positions, is the point.

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Canada Federal Election 2025

Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 7d ago

The US House of Reps just in 2023 passed the resolution Denouncing the Horrors of Socialism with 109 Dems voting for it (86 against). Last year, the same House passed Crucial Communism Teaching Act which "makes optional educational materials available through the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to help educate high school students about the dangers of communism and totalitarianism and how those systems are contrary to the founding principles of freedom and democracy in the United States" with even more Dem support.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 7d ago

Scott has never been a standard left-liberal, though. "Liberaltarian" would probably be closer.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 8d ago

At what point of his ideological history would you have expected him to go "actually, tariffs are great and Trump is great for trying to do tariffs"?

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 9d ago

Not to forget that the Confederacy claimed several states that never formally seceded from the Union, seated their representatives in the Confederate Congress etc.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 14d ago

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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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 15d 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.)

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 15d 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.

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Stefferi Chief Suomiposter 15d 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.

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