Botond173
1yr ago
Let's keep the trivializing within limits.
The Roman myth is from antiquity. I need not say more.
Eagles, snakes and cactuses are mundane creatures that very obviously exist in Mexico.
Botond173
1yr ago
Let's not get carried away. Almost(?) the entire cast of Dallas was White. Most characters in Latin American soaps are White, and Black/Indigenous characters are there as essentially exotic tokens.
Botond173
1yr ago
You underestimate how recent the whole woke/proimmigration bent is.
Not towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.
Botond173
1yr ago
A bunch of suburban, socially isolated, well-off, middle-class women decided that their husbands, for no good reason, basically have it better in life than themselves. This simple sentiment was the main driver behind it, I think.
Botond173
1yr ago
You do know that Slovakia and Croatia entirely owe their existence to Hitler's legacy, don't you? Without him and his decisions, neither country would exist.
Do you still hold their independence to be legitimate?
You also know that Poland signed a nonaggression pact with the Third Reich, and took part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, don't you?
Botond173
1yr ago
Can we put this argument to rest?
We shouldn't, because expansion doesn't necessarily entail the use of force. Applying to join NATO doesn't automatically mean membership. On the part of the governments of NATO members, there needs to be a political will and decision to, technically speaking, invite those countries, and decide that they should join. That's still expansion.
Botond173
1yr ago
I suppose there'll be trans activists digging up all sorts of 'evidence' that the adult victims and the parents/grandparents of the child victims were/are horrific transphobe garbage humans who ridiculed/harassed/mocked/tormented the shooter.
Botond173
1yr ago
Yes, but that's not the point. My argument is that the whole woke/proimmigration bent is certainly not new a) in Western Europe b) towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.
Botond173
1yr ago
That'd just be a copout, for multiple reasons. One: the difference has existed before the founding of the Soviet state as well, and doesn't originate from Soviet politics. Two: the same argument suddenly becomes Nazi rubbish when applied to Africa and the consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (even on the the old subreddit, very few people dared to raise it), or to the Black population of South Africa during Apartheid.
In another type of society ignoring your sexual desire and doing something else might be workable as a last resort, but in a modern welfare state it is for many reasons a humiliating and degrading proposal. It’s well-known that women (at least in Europe) receive far more money from the state through welfare, maternity care and health care than they pay in tax, and that means all tax-paying men inevitably support women with their hard work.
I'm sure Western societies are already close to the point where women pay more than 50% of all taxes.
EDIT: looking back I think it's easy to interpret this comment as feminist or pro-feminist. It was never intended as such.
Botond173
1yr ago
Yes - "distinct parts" i.e. administrative areas and not nations, which is what they currently are, and claim to be.
Their independence after 1991 was, disregarding foreign help for a moment, only possible because they had a bygone legacy as independent states that was possible to resurrect, and they only existed as independent states pre-1945 due to Hitler's decisions and the Third Reich.
Botond173
1yr ago
England was still the only nation willing to care about them i.e. she was willing to annex them, at least.
Botond173
1yr ago
Within reasonable limits. Because trivializing is, at the end, normally just a cop-out.
Botond173
1yr ago
You're comparing apples and oranges. The original comment way above concerns male-on-female harassment on public transit. You're talking about stalkers following and threatening women when they're alone. These are markedly different issues.
Botond173
1yr ago
Good catch regarding G, I forgot about the Russian immigrants completely when drawing up that scenario (I guess it’s obvious at this point that I’m not from Latvia). But again, I think whoever starts the game of gotcha in this case is justified – in other words, I think it’s fair to argue that there should never have been a huge influx of Russian immigrants to Soviet Latvia, or that the settlement of Russians was deliberately implemented to change the ethnic composition of Soviet Latvia and erode the foundation of Latvian nationhood (although there’s supposedly no documented evidence of that), but that very obviously comes across as a double standard if it comes from the promoters of Wilkommenskultur, open borders and ethnic diversification through immigration.
Again, I don’t think the main theoretical question here is how it all could have been worse for Latvians, or minorities in Latvia. Of course it could’ve been worse, that’s not the point. The reality is also this: people compare their past to alternative scenarios all the time; after all, it’s the only way to evaluate the past. It’s normal, and certainly not something that should be seen as a waste of time. And demolishing a monument of this size in order to denounce actions in the past is a big deal for certain, so I think it’s fair to ask questions in case they aren’t asked yet. (I can understand if local Russo-Latvians, if that’s even a word, aren’t currently inclined to do that. But either way, I don’t follow Latvian media.)
For example, to expand on my original post, the monument-topplers certainly don’t object to the Red Army re-entering Riga and pushing the Germans out. Right? Or some of them do, but don’t want to express it?
Judging by the media commentary on this event, it seems what most locals objected to were the regular Victory Day celebrations organized at the monument, and attended by members of the Russian minority. If that’s the real issue, can’t the government simply ban celebrations of May 9th instead of tearing down the whole obelisk and the accompanying statues? Or was that done already? Or is it something they never decided to do?
Botond173
1yr ago
I think it's entirely fair to ask what exactly they are denouncing and why. If one's unhappy with something that happened in the past, surely that means one'd have preferred for something else to happen instead.
Botond173
3mo ago
No, you aren't crazy.
The most plausible explanation is that Hillary's campaign staffers in 2016, most of whom were probably single and childless cat ladies already caught up in the cycle of online feminist radicalization for years, convinced themselves that "Berniebros" (who actually never existed anywhere but the imagination of Hillary's propagandists and were simply a mirage), "Nazi" 4chan trolls and toxic male Trump supporters represent a worthy political target somehow, and thus convinced Hillary that it'd be a good idea to radicalize her own base by rallying against the "basket of deplorables". I imagine it wasn't her own idea actually, and most of this was simply about her staffers wanting to feel good about themselves.
Botond173
1yr ago
Color me shocked that nobody selected a peasant Anarchist who was easily duped by Bolshevik salami tactics to be the symbol of united Ukrainian nationhood. Instead they had to chose the cringe nerd for the sole but very obvious reason because they knew they could always portray him to the normies as a victim of Nazi repression, because "he was in a concentration camp". (In reality, he was under the equivalent of house arrest under comfortable conditions, because he had qualms about one aspect of the proposed National Socialist European New Order, namely that it didn't include an autonomous Ukrainian state.)
Europe is, and always had been, land of free market and LGBTQ+ rights
sure...lol. We'll see how much of a good political sell this will turn out to be. I suggest you don't hold your breath.
Botond173
1yr ago
In order to preserve a newly found national myth that is "pretty dumb"?
Botond173
1yr ago
Yes, any city dedicating a statue to its founder and leaving it to stand is a completely self-evident course of events. There's no need to back that up.
Botond173
1yr ago
There are two different types of political extremism, I think. A Republican wave would make the leftists desperate and more extreme outside power structures (to the extent that they even exist outside those). The opposite would make them arrogant and more extreme within them. The only things that would deescalate their extremism in the long run would be federal student debt cancellation, the nationalization of healthcare, a federal minimum wage and so on.
So I reckon they'd prefer to live in village shacks as barbarians (also in the original sense of the word) - i.e. not in a city - than to suffer that statue to stand?
More options
Context Copy link