Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
It still blows my mind that European NATO countries can do things like "miss NATO spending goals and fall behind on military readiness for years despite years of increasingly pointed US signals that there will be consequences for this"
But they had already started ramping up spending before Trump's election and were continuing to do it after he was elected. That's the point - yes, Europe has been failing in several aspects, but it's been in the process of improving on those, and the result has been a continuous stream of piss on the face by the Trump admin nevertheless.
"make preparations to literally give away territory that is crucial to American defense preparedness"
The Chagos Islands? That's the UK specifically, it's not within the purview of (other) NATO (countries) to intervene in this affair. Why take out complaints with the UK on Denmark?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
In fact, curiously, Iran is apparently giving up their greatest leverage by opening the straits.
Why wouldn't they do that if they get a deal? The whole idea is that they can open and close the strait with relatively little in the way of consequences (sure, Iran has suffered various consequences from this war generally, but the biggest ones were before they closed the strait), and that includes opening it as well as closing it if they get what they want (we don't know what they're getting yet, of course).
If there's a strike at some factory and the striking workers get a deal, they're not "giving up leverage" by returning to work, they've just demonstrated very concretely the existence of the said leverage.
America bombed Iran, decapitated its leadership
Has the regime collapsed? No? That would seem to demonstrate both that the regime is quite a bit stabler than most would have expected and that it's ruling regime do not have much in the way of personal fear of death.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
It's probably more (universally) popular in anglo countries. Yes, I know, that's not what "universal" means. Still...
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
Because it's one of the last really big, universally known rock songs before rock lost the last remnants of its cultural force (or was killed by poptimism, whatever?) Sure, there are some well-known songs coming after it (Sex on Fire, Chelsea Dagger etc.) but I don't think they compare in bigness. Seven Nation Army is a competitor.
Also, it came in just at the right time to lodge itself in the minds of the Millennials, a generation that's bigger (IIRC) than the generations coming both before and after it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
I don't think I've ever seen it used to refer to a man, and it's the literal counterpart to the "Man Child" in the original comic that popularized the phrase (which has left the original context specified in the comic - boring-ass Millennial slice-of-life webcomics).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
There's a large amount of contemporary fiction where there's a priest character who is a bastard/failure, but everyone else is basically a bastard/failure as well.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
I thought the US was full of safe constituencies.
You can still get primaried in a constituency that is "safe" from the opposing party, though, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
That's not too different from saying that obviously men like promiscuous women since women in the male equivalent form of fiction - porn flicks - are promiscuous, no? Fantasy is fantasy, reality is reality.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
29d ago
I don't think that's what Putin - basically an unimaginative relative centrist authoritarian operating within the limits of a demented/apathetic political culture - wants or is ready for.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
30d ago
Then there is the pour encourager les autres element: at this point there is a distinct sense that the Baltics are actively flirting with the idea of baiting the Russians into attacking them, because they figure that fighting against Russia does not actually look so bad away from the frontline and if they can secure NATO or EU support early on the frontline doesn't have to be on their territory (and Estonia's feelings about Narva getting the Vovchansk treatment probably amount to "don't threaten me with a good time" anyway).
"Baltics are just on the verge of baiting a general NATO-Russia war because they are INSANE RABID DOGS" has been a vatnik theme for the entire duration of the war and doesn't seem any closer to actually happening than previously.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
30d ago
Germany != EU
There almost should be a feature to automatically remind people of this extremely salient point every time EU comes up for discussion.
Also, of course, it wouldn't be the EU Russians would be fighting but the NATO - even if US bows out there would still be Turkey to deal with, for instance.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
It seems realistic to me, which of course is different from stating that it's true.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
There's a fairly balanced gender ratio among younger converts in my (Finnish) parish (60-40 with men predominant, perhaps?) with several couples and marriages forming, and I've still seen women complain about the dating prospects - though not due to the beards AFAIK (which are generally well maintained), just the general levels of tism.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
O'Neill's point is not really as much "the collapse following the loss of Roman power in the West didn't exist at all" but rather that the concept of Dark Ages is overextended to basically claim the entire period from the end of the classical era to the beginning of the Renaissance as a "Dark Age", use this as a stick for beating Christianity (which didn't cause the Western Roman collapse in any case), and when this point is challenged the anti-Christian polemicists will resort to motte and baileying.
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
The Easter is obviously a continuation the Jewish Passover with the death-and-resurrection-of-the-Christ thematic superseding it yet still being symbolically in many was a part of the Passover, no Christian (or O'Neill) would deny this. The Easter myths that O'Neill criticizes are the spurious claims of pagan origin, such as the idea of an obscure British goddess that might or might not have been celebrated around this period having anything to do with the greater global Christian concept of Easter/Pascha.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
This describes approximately 0 male-female friendships I've had, though some relationships may qualify.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Insofar as I can tell, the revealed preferences match the preferences stated in this study.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
One person full of anger and violence doing something bad shouldn't invalidate all the peaceful people at the rally who didn't drive their cars into a crowd, regardless of what their political beliefs are.
...the protestors were driven but mostly peaceful?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Yes, and the Francoist regime also repressed the liberal forces, until eventually it didn't. (Also, my understanding is that the black market was already quite considerable a force in the Soviet economy in the early 80s.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike.
Couldn't you describe the end of the Soviet Union roughly the same way, with some adjustments ("it became a market economy through black market in front of Gorbachev and he didn't care to stop it" etc., though also ideological liberalization in the form of glasnost of course), though?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.
It's this. More to the point, it is a human tendency to think that if someone's wrong and insists on being wrong, it's OK to solve this problem by violence. Individuals are just as prone as collective institutions to think that 'error has no rights'. The normal way to handle heresy used to be violence, the normal way to handle differences between ruling class (ie. factions fighting for kingship etc.) was violence, it was normal for the masses to use violence when they wanted to overthrow the elites and for the elites to repress the masses with violence to keep their power. In practice, premodern societies had to allow a certain leeway simply because they lacked state capacity to handle everything; modern societies have that state capacity.
It actually takes a lot of societal and governmental indoctrination to get societies to the point where people are able to live with their political and religious differences, United States certainly having the capacity to enact such indoctrination. Even then I suspect a lot of it is simple apathy, a tendency to believe that politics has been solved and society stabilized to the degree that there's no real reason to care about anything and we can allow all sorts of weird freaks to have their say. This seems to explain the congruence of the late-90s end-of-history thinking with the post-political-correctness relative cultural tolerance.
Communists, fascists, religious extremists etc., then, are more willing to continue to shut their opponents down, either through state or through individual violence, because they're the ones who actually believe that their cause is just, important, and worth it to restore the use of violence as a general principle of handling differences.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
While my primary source here is Case Closed, my understanding is that Oswald never abandoned communism. He was disappointed with the Soviet system in practice, but it just made him flirt with Trotskyism (though without full commitment) after moving back to US.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Vladimir Arutyunian? The motive seems comprehensible, even if GWB appears to have been a secondary target and there's nothing to indicate that he was insane, as such.
I would also consider Lee Oswald to go to this category, if we go by the formal story. He was not completely sane, but there was enough there to allow for Oswald to attempt to assassinate an US president as an expression of his communist ideology.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Adding A Disturbance of Fate. Warning: heavy doses of Kennedy idolatry and boomer leftist althist wank to be expected.
edit: Also A Short History of the Future and the classic After Man and the somewhat lackluster follow-up Man After Man.
So what? The point is that Europe is doing what the US claims it wants Europe to do and the result is, well, all the things that Trump has done.
I'm all for Europe distancing from US and developing independent capabilities, and have been so even before Trump, but it's also obvious that you can't just achieve a neat split where both commit to doing their own thing without the other - the recent events have made clear that whatever US does globally will in any case have a huge impact on Europe (and what Europe does of course also has some impact on the US).
Regarding Greenland, it's odd to argue for Greenlandic independence aims (without anything concrete about the details vis-a-vis relations to the Western alliance, or anything else really, on the table), considering that Trump admin itself attempted to present itself as some sort of an opponent of Danish colonialism on the island and what have you.
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