Why do you and others keep lying about the Budapest Memorandum? I can assume that you know perfectly well that it wasn't a binding security guarantee (which is precisely why it was called a 'memorandum'), and that it was signed primarily because it served US interests (to curb the then-scary prospect of nuclear proliferation), not because it was meant to benefit Ukraine.
Why are you insinuating that the Ukrainians are a blameless party in this conflict who can be trusted all the time?
Also, where is your enthusiasm? All I was hearing throughout the war from Atlanticist mainstream media was triumphalism promising total victory, because the Moskal are just a bunch of freezing, starving orcs who will use up their last functioning tank, cruise missile, artillery shell and pair of socks in two weeks. Where is the victory? Where is the glorious counteroffensive?
Botond173
9mo ago
About a month age I made the argument that essentially, future historians will draw parallels between Gorbachev and the Kamala Harris presidency, which at this point seems to be rather likely to come around next year. I can understand why it was downvoted because I made it deliberately vague, thinking that spelling my assumption all out in detail would narrow the discussion down too much and derail it at the start. Anyway, I recently read the New York Magazine article titled The Joyous Plot to elect Kamala Harris... by Rebecca Traister, and while I wouldn't say that it strengthens my argument to the full, it certainly doesn't include anything that would contradict it, I think. She's being lauded as a champion of both Democrat party leaders and grassroots organizers (mainly of female ones, that is), ushering in a new era of hope and political change after long and disheartening years dominated by old farts in leadership positions.
Botond173
1yr 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
11mo ago
This assumption probably won’t count as anything new, but it seems to me that the overall leftist strategy in the current culture war over (in essence) MtF transsexual boxers in the Olympic games hinges entirely on the following unstated assumptions: a) TV viewers generally aren’t that interested in women’s sports in the first place b) the sort of sports where these particular MtF athletes seem to predominantly want to excel at are generally seen as low-status in the eyes of suburban middle-class Blue Tribe normies c) the relative number of cissexual women genuinely interested in such sports is insignificantly low.
Botond173
1yr ago
Doubt if I’d buy that piece of land in [Small Town, Southern US State] for fear of the ancestor’s spirits, Native and African slaves wandering around looking for descendants in 2024 to be released from their bondage and inequities thrashed upon them for wealth by its oppressors.
I strongly suspect she's otherwise a loud member of the "trust the science" tribe.
Botond173
2yr ago
So, out of curiosity, I looked at the r / hungary subreddit, which is yet another very obvious example of leftist platform capture through the actions of biased admins, meaning that it can be counted on to provide a good summary of the generated oppositional outrage. I was a bit surprised by the narrative that there's apparently an ongoing local epidemic of helpless women getting brutally raped and impregnated by, I don't know, hairy alt-right incel gamer programmers or something (we're supposed to assume they are all White, of course), therefore this new law will mean that hordes of women already deeply and tragically scarred by the psychological trauma of incel rape will, if they elect to undergo abortion, be forced by Nazi shitheads to undergo the additional trauma of having to listen to heartbeat of the rapist's "baby" (clump of cells, or something), which is, like, super terrible.
...huh? What? What % of female rape victims even get pregnant?
Is this theory also imported from US culture warriors? I really want to know.
Botond173
6mo ago
I wonder if any of you sometimes feel that someone of the outgroup just made a good move or just a good point (in other words, produced useful propaganda) in the culture war that takes you by surprise. A long time ago I noticed some liberals quoting a statement from a Christian pastor regarding abortion and I now decided to trace it back to the original source. According to Snopes it’s from pastor Dave Barnhart of the Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 2018:
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
I have to say that even though I doubt I’d ever agree with him on these issues, it sounds kind of…witty? Snappy? Clever? It all comes across as on point. It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it. If I had to find something about it to nitpick, the only thing I can come up with is that the people who usually resent the patriarchy, condescension and political incorrectness are normally suburban middle-class college-educated white liberal culture warriors and their mulatto allies of similar backgrounds, not any of the groups the pastor mentioned, especially not widows. I can’t even tell why he brought them up at all; maybe it seemed to be a better idea than to bring up single mothers. And I might also argue that yeah, advocating for groups that are morally complicated as hell is probably not a good political move. Which also makes me sound kind of an asshole though.
Botond173
2yr 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
21d ago
If one considers the same overall phenomenon from what I assume is women’s usual perspective, I’m sure one can’t help but roll the eyes at the recent discussion on Aella’s degeneracy, for example. Shaming and punishing e-thots can only work when alternative life paths are broadly accessible for average women.
The norm of enforced monogamy (heh) in the old days of Christian patriarchy (heh) basically functioned as a life insurance policy for women. Someone was surely going to marry each woman, with a few extreme exceptions, no matter how stupid, ugly or fat she was. The same path for heterosexual women today, on the other hand, is largely up to chance and luck, something that is pretty much optional – it may happen and may work out well, but there’s a significant probability that it won’t. Just listen to women’s usual complaint about men, which is usually that attractive men refuse to commit to an exclusive relationship. Of course we see the massive proliferation of e-thotting, sugar-mommying, gold-digging etc. when the social consensus is that a happy marriage is by and large off the table.
Botond173
4mo ago
I think it's fairly realistic to assume that many (maybe most?) of the civilian dead in Bucha who were shown on Western media were killed by Ukrainian units who reentered the town in retribution.
Botond173
1yr ago
Well, yes, I'm sure you'll not see any resentment expressed verbally and publicly, because it's hardly an issue normies are likely to complain about in such a social climate as the Finnish, or the German, for that matter. But logically speaking I just can't imagine that tension and resentment not being there at all.
Botond173
2yr ago
It's anything but. First of all, it completely ignores the jus ad bellum <-> jus in bello distinction and pretends it doesn't even exist. It also assumes that anyone ever tried to convince Russia with words (When? Who? Of what?), and claims to adhere to the universal moral code that only the side that attacks first bears any responsibility for the conflict (I'd be very, very surprised if these people actually believed that).
Botond173
10mo ago
You're aware that the male attributes that gain the respect of other men and those that sexually attract women are normally rather different, aren't you?
Botond173
10mo ago
Yes, basically. She's relatively new in the sense that she's much younger than either Biden, Trump or many senators and political bosses. Assuming that she wins the election one way or another, which does seem likely to me, she'll probably be promoted in the mainstream as a youthful (again, relatively speaking) reformer and the nation's new hope (but not an outsider by any means) after a long era of political gerontocracy (when the political class showed a clear unwillingness to entrust anyone under 65 or so with any significant responsibility on a national level), economic stagnation, vibecession and social anomie. And if Soviet history is anything to go by, she'll be a spectacular failure.
Botond173
10mo ago
What is pathetic is that the same people are praising this incursion as a good idea who have been trying to convince everyone for many months that the war will definitely be won in a short time by the Ukrainians liberating all their territories by force, without negotiating anything with the orc vermin, advancing to their post-1954 borders.
Botond173
1yr ago
Men’s desires are more debatable, since a large part of the incel phenomenon is (as you correctly suggest) anguish that they’re not ‘chads’ rather than actual discontent with the dynamics of the wider system.
I'll reply in a separate comment because it's a subject that deserves more scrutiny.
Can you please explain why you keep repeating this ludicrous claim with no basis in reality? Have you ever even seen an incel in your life, either online or offline?
Botond173
1yr ago
What will be left of Ukraine after Russia and the West are done with their proxy war?
Something akin to Pakistan, which is also an impoverished, US-aligned, authoritarian de facto rump state without authentic nationhood, ideologically founded on the rejection of the cultural and historical origins of her own people. In fact, Pakistan's situation is actually better in that regard, because at least religiously they are markedly different from India.
Or look at a similar country, El Salvador, which was a US-backed military dictatorship torn asunder in a lengthy civil war. After everything was destroyed and shot to pieces, the generals responsible for it all moved to Miami, where they went on to live comfortable lives as rich pensioners.
Botond173
2yr 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
2yr 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.
Botond173
9mo ago
It's not merely that she's relatively young, it's that she's much younger than the two presidents who'll have preceded her.
What issues can be her Perestroika, her Glasnost, her liquor ban?
You can also name about a dozen potential issues, can't you? The college debt bubble, the NIMBY vs. YIMBY struggle, the opioid crisis, economic stagnation, the housing bubble, Medicare, women's rights etc.
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
2yr ago
His stated stance is basically that Finland should refrain from condemning Israeli settlement policies in West Bank and should keep buying/selling weapons from/to Israel because that's the pragmatic thing to do, and this sort of a "moderately pro-Israel" stance is also common in the Finnish right simply because pro-Palestinianism is associated with the left.
Huh? Really?! Does this stance count as moderately pro-Israel "just" in Finnish right-wing circles, or also in Finland as a whole? Because if it does, I find it even more difficult to take any of this posturing seriously.
The simple truth is that nobody, either man or woman, should ever go hiking in the woods alone, with or without bears inhabiting those woods, period.
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