DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
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User ID: 180
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Yes, thank you!
I see them as perhaps the most ideologically confused people on the spectrum today. They wear the cloak of socialism while extolling authoritarian dictatorships, their words are like those I'd expect from Soviet career-bureaucrats with the KGB breathing down their necks. Because what else could possibly keep all these self-contradictions together?
It's not just that I disagree with them, I don't get them. I get why a dedicated right-wing culture warrior in the US today might support Russia's invasion, their reasoning is at least coherent. The only way I can make sense of tankies doing the same is if their fundamental moral axiom is just "USA bad", but that seems excessively uncharitable.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If we end up like the Greeks in Turkey or the Greeks in Lebanon, there is no recovering.
Or like the Germans in Königsberg? Russia is one of the worst offenders in this respect.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
In a now famous remark, Edward Gibbon observed that ‘of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct’
This is indeed a very amusing statement, considering that Claudius married his niece.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to.
What justification do you have for believing this? An 18-year old's vote is going to be heavily left-leaning pretty much no matter where you go in the democratic world, but you think the 16-year old vote would instead track the 45-year old demographic? Why?
Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?
I imagine most 16-year olds would vote Democrat because they're in roughly the same environments as 18-year olds and would therefore vote similarly. The fact that their environments encourage voting Democrat and not Republican is ultimately downstream of the Democrats being more effective at messaging to young people. That's just politics.
I'm not really sold on lowering the voting age, mind you, as the same-age-for-everything idea is very appealing. But I'm completely unconvinced by this idea that 16-year olds in particular would just ape after their parents and completely disregard all the other pressures around them.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
So what gives?
I don't think it's all that complicated. If they lift all restrictions right now, they're looking at a death toll potentially in the millions because their vaccine doesn't work (embarrassing in and of itself), and they're worried that the population will blame the party for this whole predicament (which they should).
The CCP is kicking the can down the road, or digging a hole for themselves. Whichever analogy you prefer.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.
Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.
I sometimes wonder to what extent our perceived lack of intelligence in animals is just a communication issue. A feral human raised by orangutans probably wouldn't seem especially smart, but there's a ton of potential locked behind the language barrier.
I don't expect a dolphin could become a nuclear physicist, but I seriously wonder if we could teach it to count to ten thousand if we could figure out a way to expand their vocabulary a little to introduce some new concepts.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
will have to cope with millions of African/South Asian/Middle Eastern immigrants
Ukraine will? What on Earth are you talking about?
Look up the demographics of any former Iron-Curtain country in the EU and see if you can find even one whose current population born in those region breaches a single percentage point.
This is entirely a choice of national governments, not the EU.
No it’s the migrants’ choice.
No it's not. Migrants choose to go to countries (through the asylum route) where they're unlikely to be deported (government policy) and where they're allowed to get into a benefits program and/or the job market (also government policy). It is entirely a government's choice to receive them, and a choice that EU countries are in fact free to not make, i.e. Denmark ever since their Social Democrats took power.
IIRC around 50k new comers
It's a good example because they're overwhelmingly not from those regions you thought Ukraine would have to cope with. Which is what I thought was your issue.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I would argue (North) Macedonia. In opposition to Bulgaria rather than Greece.
The Bulgarian perspective is that North Macedonia to them is a lot like what Moldova is to Romania, that is that it's an identity constructed in the past by a bigger power to strengthen their hold of the region.
Moldovans in general seem somewhat agreeable or at worst ambivalent towards the claim that they are Romanians, but the people of North Macedonia seem very invested in their new national identity. They've engaged in some weird historical revisionism over the years, and the Bulgarians have viewed this as a kind of erasure of Bulgarian history.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important
There is no way a European country of 40 million people can ever be considered "not particularly important" by the Europeans at the very least. It's also of great importance to the countries outside of Europe that used to import Ukraine's food, nevermind the untapped gas reserves that could go a long way towards replacing Europe's imports from Russia. All the fuzz around Ukraine is very much justified.
It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory'
This invasion is the third domino after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. What is there to doubt?
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The Winter War is in my opinion a very good example of a Pyrrhic victory.
she is a traditional third wave feminist
This might be nitpicking, but I've always understood TERFs as being perceived as a second-wave holdout that survived the post-90s intersectionalization of the movement (that being the third wave).
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The only true pathway to peace for Ukraine is NATO accession, which requires defeating the Russians.
From this perspective, the US is absolutely seeking peace.
The US has limited resources so needs to use them wisely.
Any true threat to US interests in the current geopolitical environment is always going to involve Russia, either directly or indirectly through supporting China. Taking an easy opportunity to weaken the Russian military is not just wise, it's a no-brainer on a silver platter.
It's absurd on the face of it to argue that being the top dog is somehow "not beneficial" to you.
Yes, being powerful is good. Being weak is bad.
To get into some specifics, even if the US were entirely self-sufficient (it isn't), the amount of inflation the US exports to the rest of the world through the dollar's status as the global reserve currency is hard to overstate. That's one of many things.
Were coal workers in the UK living it up
This era pulled most of the British population out of the rural subsistence poverty that the rest of the world was mired in, so yes.
Look at what happened with Rome
What typically didn't happen in Rome is their population being killed and enslaved on a massive scale by a stronger neighbor, because there was none. Although later on I'm sure there were complacent Romans talking about how they should just ignore the rest of the world while Attila the Hun was ravaging their borderlands again because there wasn't enough gold in the treasury to bribe him away for the seventh time.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The US blowing up Nordstream has always struck me as an extraordinarily risky gambit. There may be an economic motive, but if it were uncovered that the US is directly responsible for acts of terrorism on critical infrastructure in the heart of Europe, the diplomatic fallout would certainly outweigh whatever the US would make from the added natural gas exports.
Granted, I don't know how risk-tolerant the US covert-operations apparatus is. I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine.
The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.
The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.
Someone once wrote a post about sales being a bullshit job that spawned a lot of interesting economic discussion, which would be my pick. I'd appreciate if someone has a link to that, actually. It might have been KulakRevolt, although I'm not sure.
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