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28d 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).
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28d 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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28d 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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28d ago
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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26d ago
This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.
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26d 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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25d 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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22d 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.
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.
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).
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22d 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.
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19d 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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19d 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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18d 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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13d ago
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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12d ago
Eh, my sense is that we have maybe one-digit number of hardline American jingoist posters who overwhelm any remotely Ukraine-related thread by participation and effort, and many more people who just generally lower the sanity waterline by seeing it as yet another metaphorical battleground for the US culture war where the only thing that matters is Hunter Biden and which side is more (fake and) gay. This seems to be about what to expect for a topic that attracts agenda posters but lies outside of the specialisation of anyone producing the sort of deep dives that tend to cause productive discussion around here.
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12d ago
But why would Putin attack the Baltics? The only situation in which I can imagine it making sense for him is if they escalate their own hostility to the point that he has no choice with the alternative being a path that leads to him losing control internally - say, by them engaging in a boots-on-the-ground intervention to aid Ukraine, or a full blockade of Kaliningrad. Such actions would almost certainly be justified by rhetoric like yours, arguing that they must strike the Russians while they are weak because surely Putin will come for them afterwards otherwise, leading to the usual crybully escalation cycle that should be familiar from the CW setting ("They're dangerous! We must punch them! They punched back? See, I told you how dangerous they were! You were an idiot for arguing against punching them! In fact this situation is your fault, because we should have punched harder!").
Medvedev
The man has gone full shitposter in his political afterlife; quotes from him should be treated like the "former British intelligence specialists" Russian channels like parading around claiming that UA collapse is imminent every week.
Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries?
Well, they did that for America's middle eastern meatgrinders. Besides, Ukraine has shown how much the effectivity of any army is magnified when backed by operational depth and modern C&C (satellites, patrol planes, analysis) that for political reasons can't be touched by their adversary. I imagine the effect would be increased manifold if there were no sanitary barrier of the kind that requires manually preprocessing intel that is passed to Ukraine lest the crown jewels of alliance capabilities leak to an adversary. In a battle of Estonia plus NATO minus non-Estonian NATO meat vs. Russia on Estonian territory I would not bet on the Russians, and I don't think the Russians would either.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
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12d ago
For the same reason as why you want to cut the top off your power economy by having rule of law and a constitution, presumably.
More pragmatically, historical precedent shows that if you don't the plebs eventually rebel and you have to spend a lot more resources on suppressing them, or actually just wind up being hung from the lampposts.
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12d ago
What's the evidence that absolute poverty is what matters, rather than inequality? Many uprisings happened in societies where the 5th-percentile poorest person was better off than the 5th-percentile richest person in some historical society that remained stable. It seems to be a common belief in many circles that humans are mostly motivated by relative status.
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12d ago
Also in response to @georgioz's parallel answer, if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things. There were many good reasons for them to go for Ukraine, and few reasons against (with the main ones, their revealed ineptitude and everything downstream from it, being one that they presumably were genuinely unaware of).
this is applicable, and happened in Baltics, just a bit earlier
The military base reason loses weight if the base is already gone, and likewise none of those states have had Russian client governments since around 1990. Indeed, I think that in '91 it was eminently reasonable to expect a Russian invasion in the Baltics, but not in 2024. Conversely, if 30 years had elapsed after Maidan with nothing happening, the Russian bases in Ukraine were long gone, the ethnically Russian population thoroughly sidelined and Ukraine had joined NATO, I would also confidently predict Russia would not invade anymore.
And none of this were real reason for invasion of Ukraine (in my opinion, I may be wrong - or you may simply disagree about interpretation of situation).
What do you think was the reason, then?
This is not maximally evil thing Putin could do, I can imagine far more evil ones.
Sure, Trump was also generally not predicted to construct the Torment Nexus. It seems like the maximally evil thing that is still somewhat plausible and more importantly demands concrete action from Western governments and citizens.
I would note that this opinion is relatively well shared in Poland, even postcommunist and anti-Ukraine parties were supporting military builtup and fixing our military.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument. There are some pretty out-there things generally believed in particular countries, and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief. Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
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11d ago
How does it not? There is a bounded amount of things of value, and everything available for the use and consumption of Elon Musk is not available for the use and consumption of J. Random Janitor. Whether we directly confiscate Elon's land and redistribute it among the Janitor family, or reduce the number in Elon's bank account so that Elon's ability to bid and win in implicit or explicit auctions for things that the janitor also wants, making Elon poorer helps the janitor in expectation.
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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