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5d ago
hack the US
What does that even mean? I don't think Manning hacked anything, let alone "the US".
I have also heard the part where Assange helped Manning with the commands to run to exfiltrate the data, but I wouldn't be so confident that to ban this would define a test that normal journalists would generally pass. Have none of them provided their sources with some kind of technical support, like "here's how you use this camera you asked us to lend you"? What about interviewers that help their interviewees tweak the formulation of a statement that winds up becoming the linchpin of the latter's violation of some confidentiality law, like "S: So what I'm saying is the US r... rev... - J: reverse engineered? - S: ... reverse engineered alien technology, right."?
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6d ago
My point is that it's unsurprising for people who are perfectly capable of watching gore/scat/gross video to still be viscerally disgusted by racist language, and therefore to want to terminate consumption for reasons that are not the gore/scat/gross content fundamentally shaking their worldview (any more than the people who were shocked by me intonation-matching their "poggers" with its ni- counterpart were so because the single word made them realise some truth they were suppressing).
Also, I've seen American flyover country content that is more viscerally disgusting to me. I can't say that rats bother me much, but I'd say a hot dog lost inside the folds of some trailer blob's gut for a few months before being rediscovered by EMTs is strictly worse than feces.
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6d ago
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation. If you've actually spent any amount of time on the internet as a rubbernecker motivated by something other than confirmation of your biases, you will know that most of the material India is being singled out for is hardly unique to it; in fact a 4chan white supremacist might be somewhat dismayed to find out that many a European has formed a mental image of their beloved all-white Middle America that is only somewhat more flattering than this movie's depiction of Indians. (A while ago I binged police bodycam videos that involved a barely verbal middle aged guy in sweatpants being questioned outside of a wooden shack over the apparent presence of his mother's week-old corpse in the bedroom; druggies reenacting the 2001 monolith scene over one of their count being arrested, someone with the build of Jabba the Hutt being dragged out of a trailer, etc.; all of the aforementioned being white) Admitting only a bit more diversity, there is good video material like this.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them. I have American friends who are perfectly enthusiastic to discuss all sorts of edgy voldemortean propositions but get physically uncomfortable if a hard-r "nigger" is enunciated in their presence (I learned that this is a good way to dissuade real-life usage of various twitchspeak inflections of "pog(ger)").
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8d ago
This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism. If we use the Wikipedia definition of totalitarianism as a baseline,
Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism.[1]
Political repression of opposition is present in all (Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey), though I'd broadly say the degree is Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China. In Ukraine this got much worse since the war; while before it they only banned the communist parties and engaged in soft repression of others, after the war started they went after more or less the whole opposition. Meanwhile, while Russia did visibly crack down on some of the most promising opposition parties (ex. Navalny's, Nadezhdin's), some manifestly oppositional parties like Yabloko are still operational and occupy positions of power, and the biggest one (the Communist Party) could be called cozy with Putin's but not exactly aligned either.
None of them have a real cult of personality around the leader, though China is the only one to come up with a construct like "Xi Jinping thought" so it gets close; I don't think any of them have controlled wages and prices; in terms of official censorship once again China is way in front of everyone (being the only one with a Great Firewall and actual proactive censorship regime), but my sense is that there Ukraine currently is actually ahead of Russia since they are thinking out loud about even banning Telegram; China is the only one with mass-surveillance policing of public places; for state terrorism none of them score particularly highly but Russia might win with the occasional false flags associated with Putin's rule.
This really does not seem to track with the definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism I'm familiar with. Would you call the PRC totalitarian? Ukraine? Turkey? Ukraine is broadly similar to Russia on every relevant metric now, PRC has much more political control and state meddling in private life (which I'd consider the definitional core of totalitarianism), and Turkey seems only slightly better (and their crackdown on Kurds and Gülenists still exceeds anything Russia did so far in scope, though you might pin this on those groups being more determined than any opposition in Russia).
It does strike me as a push against the frame of the gaslighting Overton window that Western media continues to present Grozev/Bellingcat as an independent journalistic outfit rather than the intelligence agency mouthpiece that it obviously is. It would be one thing if they acknowledged the suspicions but argued against it, but there seems to be a universal consensus that to treat them as anything other than brave and resourceful citizen journalists, who happen to have a particular knack for uncovering dastardly schemes by America's geopolitical opponents using Google search and tea leaves, would just be giving air to enemy conspiracy theories.
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9d ago
Tangentially, I've seen the story being rounded to "Marsalek is an Orthodox priest" as you do a lot, but when the story broke there was nothing indicating that he actually has taken on the role, but just that he assumed the identity of some Orthodox priest, who probably knew and may or may not have had a choice in the matter, for the purpose of crossing borders (with some interesting implication that there is a larger scheme of rural clergy donating their personae to Russian intelligence for such ends). Village priest is not a role that a random foreign business bro can just slip into, for reasons ranging from the linguistic to the Russian Orthodox church being socially quite tight-knit.
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12d ago
What's the attractivity metric here? If we define it in terms of absolute attractivity to the other sex, in the below-40 bracket most women are more attractive than the median guy (see also those OkCupid blog men-rating-women/women-rating-men charts). I'm not so sure that the "swiping on women more attractive than they are" thing is true if the rating is on the curve for their respective sex.
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13d ago
Everyone I talk to in real life regularly goes to the toilet, but that doesn't mean I want them to drop their pants and do their business as I talk to them.
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13d ago
This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.
This seems like it touches upon the same topics as all the secession/independence debates do - who is obliged to get out of the way? Do the people who want nothing to do with the secessionist project have the right to a state of their own, and who has the obligation to get out of the way for that? The idea that any group of people can consensually obtain their own clay on which they only answer to themselves is appealing enough to me in theory, but the practice of it runs into insurmountable problems. Any such group seldom already controls a contiguous piece of land, and fair division algorithms (forgetting for a moment about their asymptotic complexity) only work if the subdivision valuations are independent (so you don't have preferences like "I want parcel A iff I can have parcel B"), which is basically never the case for land.
In concrete terms, you can't build a viable country by aggregating the land held by all ethnonationalists in Europe - so either there is no ethnostate, or someone will have to move, or someone will have to forfeit their freedom of association. All to often, secessionists just wind up arbitrarily privileging their cause - their enemies should get out of the way of their clubhouse state, but they shouldn't have to get out of the way of the enemy enclave stuck in the clubhouse. (See e.g. North Kosovo) This is also what I wind up hearing when these people talk about "white racial solidarity" (as opposed to a more narrowly writ "solidarity among white nationalists") - it sounds suspiciously like a demand that I should have solidarity with them, and join their ethnostate against my will.
Also,
An Irishman can become an American, but a Nigerian simply can’t.
I'm not sure what the working definition of "American" is here; Black Africans have been part of the continent's population since before anything resembling the author's presumable definition of "American" emerged. If he means "White American", then sure, but then the statement is so tautological as to say nothing ("my favoured grouping is defined in such a way that Nigerians can never join").
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15d ago
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15d ago
The vast majority, even in campuses, is neutral and politically unengaged, but might range from mildly for to mildly against SJ if pressed. The latter group is a natural target for this.
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15d ago
Are you contending that, right now, transgenderism is primarily motivated by sticking it to Christianity, in the way that a Draw Muhammad Day would be wrt Islam?
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15d ago
I think this is overthinking/projecting too much theory behind what is a pure power move similar to those Trump is renowned for on the other side of the aisle. "Teach men not to rape" infuriates the political opposition (being loaded in the classic, "when did you stop beating..." way), but there is no way to speak out against it without either flagging yourself for cancellation (if your response is something similarly laconic of opposing valence) or looking weak (if your response is nuanced/lengthy/cautious).
The random mention of "goyslop" makes what would otherwise be a reasonable article to reference elsewhere impossible to use in "polite company". Why did you find it necessary?
To begin with, why would the Jewish/non-Jewish dimension even be relevant here? There may have been some case the JQ-posters could have made in the case of TV where I believe the term was originally coined, but Genshin Impact may be the biggest extreme spoonfeeding quest marker open world game out there at the moment, and it almost certainly has a higher fraction of Jewish players than Jewish developers.
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17d ago
Take the transitive closure of the inference steps you are doing here, and you basically arrive at "groups that are definitionally unsuited for governing roles should not self-govern". This may sound attractive to you as long as you can model the qualification as a one-dimensional parameter like IQ, but what if society develops sufficient complexity that a caste emerges which is (genetically, socially) optimised for politics in particular, rather than general intelligence? Would you then also consider it a failure of the system if any group is represented and governed by people who are not members of the caste of Superior Politicians, and thus either a born Superior Politician's potential was wasted, or administration is suboptimal? In that case, you've basically reinvented one standard argument for a medieval aristocracy.
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17d ago
Estimates for deaths that are more or less directly downstream from British colonialism also range in the tens to hundreds of millions, and it's not hard to draw direct connections between how British society at the time envisioned the relationship between adults and children, and how it envisioned the relationship between colonial master and colonial subject. On the US side, the Civil War was about in the middle of the Victorian era...
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22d ago
There was this cluster of reports carried by the WaPo and most major German papers. The Russian reaction at the time was that this is a lizard-cutting-off-its-tail release meant to pin it on "rogue elements in Ukraine that nobody with agency can be held responsible for" and the operation was actually executed with US backing. The reaction was mokusatsued in Western media.
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23d ago
This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written
What's the poem? Twitter stopped showing any responses/in-thread posts to users who are not logged in, and I can't find a working nitter instance anymore.
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23d ago
Yeah, but he's barely active anymore and really seemed to be at death's door in his most recent appearances. I imagine he gets a pass because of that and because how much of a childhood idol he was for many elites.
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23d ago
It would be going way beyond things like incorporating open Nazis in the ranks, blowing up Nord Stream 2, shelling Belgorod, trying to kill Dugin and killing his daughter by mistake, or blowing up Vladlen Tatarsky at a cafe.
You are saying that now, but many posters here said the same thing to argue that Ukraine would never blow up Nord Stream 2, before the articles saying it was likely them started appearing - it was all about how it would be stupid of them to engage in a terrorist attack against the infrastructure of one of their most important backers, and people in Germany would never forgive them if that turned out to be true, all for dubious benefit. Then the articles came out, and it was predictably crickets; ask anyone here or in Germany now and they'll affirm that surely Ukraine can't be faulted for protecting its interests like that (and are you really sure it was them anyway?).
People consistently overestimate how much they would actually be willing to apply principles if it turns out those principles favour the enemy team over their own. Condemning your in-group is painful, and people will be looking for any excuse to not do so, and anyhow we have the best excuse-printing machines in the world. If hypothetically this attack was actually ordered from Ukraine, is there any evidence that Russia could realistically obtain and present that would convince you of that, assuming Western media and governments just stuck to the line that it was independent ISIS adherents? Any statement procured from the perpetrators themselves can easily be dismissed as the product of torture or bribery, and supplying money and weapons untraceably in a country like Russia is trivial. Knowing this, though, any hypothetical Ukrainians considering to orchestrate such an attack would not need to include Western displeasure in their risk calculus at all - as long as governments and media in the West stay broadly on their side, no such displeasure can possibly manifest over this.
Has it? Americans understand Japanese culture far less than any European one, and conventional wisdom says that by V-J day the cold war was already going full steam ahead, so the Americans largely decided to leave the system that at least was manifestly not communist alone, rather than trying to impose some sweeping changes, fat-fingering them and risking another North Korea or China.
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