JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Yes but for over 90% of people both inside and outside Russia there's no dichotomy here. Theoretically it exists, and there are people very passionate about it, but in practice unless one needs to make a particular political point, nobody cares about it (by nobody I mean the majority of Russia's population, of course if somebody is a Tatar nationalist, they'd care a lot). In English, there's not even a word to separate these concepts - they are both described with the same word! - but even in Russian they are often used interchangeably. I.e. if some division of Russian army attacks under Pokrovsk, one could say "Russkie are attacking", and it wouldn't sound wrong, even though the actual soldiers could be 50% Buryat and 50% Tuvan.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Her insistence on (1) independent (2) city travel is to keep her options open for finding a better partner.
It may be not as cynical as that, at least not rationally. Seeing somebody twice a month, without trying for anything more, sounds like friendship situation. Maybe dear, close friend, maybe with, you know, benefits, but still a friendship. As an introvert, if I saw a friend twice a month, I'd say "we meet very frequently". So it may be just how this is for her - no more than that. And I would not tell a dear friend to the face "I don't want to see you any more than that, twice a month is plenty, any more and it'd get clingy" - but if that's what I want, that's how things will arrange themselves. I mean, a friendship is a wonderful thing too, just need to be clear what it is.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
There's want and there's want. I want to be a billionaire, who wouldn't? But do I spend every living second on thinking about new business ideas and trying to invent yet another startup that would make me one, or do I work in my decently paying salaryman job and enjoy my hobbies, neither of which has even a remote chance of making me a billionaire?
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Something I've read somewhere and it stayed with me something: How do you know the difference between a moral man and a jerk? A moral man says: I believe in X and therefore I must do Y. A jerk says: I believe in X and therefor you must do Y.
I'd say "emotional blackmail" is the closest term. "Manipulation" is more neutral.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Her response was that she didn't want to feel Beholden to me, and that was the end of the conversation.
Beholden in what regard? Does she feel it'd limit her freedom of movement? If so, is there uber/taxi setup that could solve it? Or does she mean she doesn't want to owe you? If so, why not - if you're going to be a family unit, there's shouldn't be a problem like that - unless she doesn't feel ready to get that close to you.
I am not sure if I will be able to afford a home in $(CITY) in any neighborhood that she would find acceptable.
I'm not sure where is she in this picture? I mean, if you're going to live together, is she expected to contribute to this arrangement? Right now, as I understand, she's living in an expensive city - so she must have some means to maintain this lifestyle? Isn't she expected to contribute something to the future living arrangements?
I broached the idea. She shot it down immediately, citing a new concern - she didn't believe that my area would allow for a career path for her. She also said that she knows it's hard for me to hear things like that without looking at it as a problem to solve.
Why is it it that I am getting a vibe that for her it is not a problem and the current arrangement works just fine for her and she does not want to change it? I mean, by this point it is clear what you want. But is it clear to you what she wants? And if it turns out she already has what she wants, then you have a choice: either you want the same and you walk this path together, or you want something different and you have to lay it in the open and consider that it's a point where you walk different paths. I realize this may be terrifying and painful, but if you want to solve this situation - as opposed to keeping dragging it on without ever knowing where you stand - you must have clarity there. Making huge life-changing investments before you have this clarity will only hurt you more in the future - you will put yourself in a bad situation and you would put her in a bad situation, making "sacrifices for her" which she maybe didn't want you to make, and this will just create more tension and pain.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I can totally understand it, when your country is being literally destroyed, you do what you have to do. I am sure if conducting daily gay parade in the Independence Maidan in Kiev would somehow get Ukraine enough weapons and power to kick Russia's ass, about 90% of the population would sign up in a blink of an eye. But it's not that simple, unfortunately. I'm just saying there's virtually no organic wokeness in Ukraine politics anywhere. Any wokeness you notice would be because they think it'll help them to achieve some practical purpose (and there's probably just one major practical purpose they need to achieve now). It's completely different from Western Europe where there's a large organic woke support. Again, if Ukraine would get peace and gets into the EU and so on, maybe in 20-30 years they'd develop their own woke class - EU certainly would work hard to achieve that. But right now it's just not the case.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
This concept isn't holding up well to replication btw
It certainly holds well enough for me.
you can be psy-op'd or placebo'd into having more after it's been "depleted"
Well, yes, but it's also true for many other things. Like, if you run until you exhausted and absolutely can't run anymore, if you get promised $1M or get attacked by a bear, you probably suddenly find it in yourself to run a little more. That doesn't mean however running doesn't get you tired, just that there are levels of tiredness.
I'm not claiming deep understanding of how exactly willpower works, I certainly don't have it. Just for me things that require a lot of it tend to be harder to maintain over the long time, and that seems to hold for other people too. If I hate something (exercise, diet, activity) I can push through it for a while, but the longer it goes, the more chance I'd find a way to stop doing it. On the other hand, if I feel good about doing it (note that doesn't mean it's easy - e.g. lifting or other exercise can be very tough and frustrating when doing it, or there were examples about martial arts - certainly when you're trying to get a complex technique or sparring with a tough opponent, you may experience a lot of frustration, but the whole package should still feel like you want to do it), I likely will keep doing it.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
If you aim to be an elite athlete, that makes sense. If you aim to be a reasonably healthy person with good fitness, this will get you in trouble. If you are not enjoying something, you are spending your willpower every time you do it. And however determined you are, the willpower is a limited resource. For which a lot of things are competing every day. If you do not enjoy it, you will start finding excuses not to do it. You will start unconsciously arranging things so that you would do less of it. And you will feel shitty about it, because you would know the excuses are bullshit, but you will still do it because that's the nature of human brain. And feeling shitty about it would drive you to do even less of it, maybe get rid of it altogether - with a very good and strong reason of course! - so that you stop feeling shitty. That's not a good way to do things. I mean, you can power through it - but statistically, the majority of chances are you won't. I am a big proponent of "do what works for you, and fuck any third-party opinions", but my experience tells me things I don't enjoy doing are much less sustainable than things I do enjoy doing. Even if it means I'd sacrifice some reps and some lbs for it - it's better to have some consistent reps than end up with no reps at all because you grew depressed by the whole thing.
Deportations are deportations, and genocides are genocides
True, and some deportations are ways to execute genocide. Some are not. That's what I was trying to explain. You seem to focus on "well, akshually, you should use a different word" instead of focusing on the substance. The substance is that under Stalin, there were multiple cases there whole ethnic groups were rounded up and moved to remote areas, leading to the death of some of them and destruction of their traditional way of life for all of them, in the service of soviet national policy. Which specific words you use to describe it may be an entertaining academic exercise, but it doesn't change the substantial point. Which is - the soviet modus operandi included using mass casualty actions on entire ethnic groups to further their political goals.
We can't say that the Russians were doing this to the Ukrainians
That is a good point, that there is a way of defining Russian national identity which does not make the actions of soviets "Russian", and in fact, the Russian national identity, when defined in that way, suffered as much - maybe even more - than other national identities under soviet rule. For example, the White movement (not the skin-color Whites, but the Whites who were opposed to Blosheviks about 100 years ago, those Whites) would have a good claim on that identity, and some people are still keeping it. However, one must also realize this way of viewing Russian national identity is not only a minority view, but a tiny minority view, endorsed by no official institution and only by a tiny part of Russian population. For the official Russia, and for vast majority of it population, Russian Empire, USSR, RSFSR, and current Russian Federation are largely the same, whether it concerns the culture, the official succession or the political goals. Average Russian is an imperial Russian, and he sees USSR national policy as a natural continuation of Russian Empire's national policy, and current Russia's policies as the natural continuation of those both. If for an average Lithuanian the soviet era was an era of occupation by foreign power, for average Russian - for almost every Russian, excluding a tiny minority I described above - the soviet era had been what "we" were doing, not what had been done "to us". It doesn't mean they would endorse everything that happened - surely, mistakes were made here and there - but it is still part of historical succession that most of Russians feel. For them, "the Soviets" doing something and "the Russians" doing something is virtually one and the same. The Westerners, in their common speech, follow the same pattern, USSR essentially had always been "the Russkies" - which could be attributed to ignorance, except that virtually nobody in Russia would object it either. For them, as for the Westerners, the Soviets are the Russkies. They assumed that identity and are completely comfortable with it - so there's no reason to deny them something that they believe to be true. Of course, as a logical consequence of it, that identity also includes shared responsibility for all the actions committed by the Soviets. You can't be proud of "our space program" without being also accountable for "our purges". Most normies, of course, are much more willing to talk about the former than the latter, but it comes as a package.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
I don't think that's true at all. If anything, the Western governments (at least as Europe and blue part of the US is concerned) are going to another extreme, treating any request for outside cultures to adapt their mores and behavior to the standards of Western culture as racist, and giving massive amount of deference to the foreign cultural standards. It's everywhere - from demands in schools for everybody avoiding pork in school lunches to not offend Muslims (while asking Muslims to stay away from any foods to avoid offending Westerners would be unthinkable) to criminals coming from outside cultures given massively more lenient treatment than native ones, because they are "unfamiliar" with local customs and thus should be considered exempt from the local laws. Anybody who had been reading news must be aware of it.
Note however that the case of Western governments and Stalin are radically different in one very important regard. In the case of Western government, the representatives of "diverse" culture come to the West, with their hands out for handouts, asking for help. Once admitted, they demand preferential treatment and deference to their culture - the same one that they just fled and claimed that it created conditions which require emergency rescue - and they get the full measure of that deference. Stalin, however, came to those cultures - where they lived, without being asked or invited - conquered their lands and set out to replace their culture and identity with that of "Soviet people".
If we were comparing this to, say, British conquest of Burma or similar events, then the comparison might be more appropriate - though even at the peak of their colonial pursuits, the Brits were much more adoptive of the local culture and willing to blend with it rather than eradicate it. But at least the ideological vibe had been the same. That vibe not only has long gone, it had been declared the ultimate sin of the West, for which it must be atoning forever, and this guilt is the main driver enabling the sorry state of affairs we are witnessing now on the West. Thus, your conclusion is diametrically opposite of what is actually happening.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Your argument here seems to be "what you are saying is reminding me of a meme". I am not seeing it as a refutation of anything, sorry. By necessity, wide terms like "deportation" can encompass a myriad of scenarios, from enforcing immigration law to genocide. It is impossible and not meaningful to say "every deportation is genocide" or "none of the deportations are ever genocide". The case needs to be considered on specifics - who had been deported? Why? What was the goal of it? How the process were conducted? What was the result? If you consider all these, you will be able to see, that in case of Stalin's enthic cleansing deportations, the goal was mass removal of certain ethnicities from their traditional territories, in order to destroy their way of life and national identity and transform them into "soviet people of enthnic background", and the process had been conducted with maximal cruelty and resulted in massive casualties. An action like that, undertaken now by any Western power (the other powers of course get a pass because you can't blame the oppressed people for anything anytime) would be undoubtedly called a genocide.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Not sure what you mean here, maybe speaking your point plainly would help.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
support the specific claim that the Soviets deliberately engineered famine specifically in Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian national identity
They did not engineer famine only in Ukraine. The famine had been widespread. But in Ukraine, both the food production and the opposition to soviet takeover had been based on wealthy landowning peasants. So destroying them as a power was a necessity, which inevitably led to more severe and comprehensive famine than in other parts. The soviets were not intending to let the kulak class survive, and if it meant millions of Ukrainians would not survive either, so be it. Wiping out national identity had been the official policy everywhere - everywhere any sense of national identity beyond funny ethnic dresses and composing odes to Stalin in national language had been brutally repressed. Not everywhere it had been done by the means of famine - it's just the conditions in Ukraine specifically made it a convenient way to go: soviets needed food, soviets needed to destroy the kulaks, soviets needed to get rid of any nationalism-inclined groups - in Ukraine, destroying the wealthy landowning peasants achieved all of those. I do not claim if there were a way to achieve the same without the famine and the way to achieve that with famine the soviets would insist "no, we want the famine, it's famine or no go" - maybe if they found the other way, they'd use that. I am just saying that was the way they actually used.
it’s a controversial claim that’s being actively debated by academics.
Everything is a controversial claim debated by academics. That's what they do their whole life, they debate. If you want evidence, just read that debate and you'd get plenty. I am paid for doing other things, so redoing the work of the academics to reproduce it here would be a prohibitive cost for me with zero gain. I mean, just following the links in Wokepedia in the Holodomor article would get you plenty of evidence.
I’m not sure that the famine in Ukraine was part of that
Partially. In the case of Ukraine, deportations did happen, but it was not feasible, as it was with, say, Crimean Tatars, to just round up most of the Ukrainians and send them to Siberia. Ukraine is too big and there are too many of them. However, you could subjugate them by ruining their economic basis - the same wealthy landowning peasants. Then their alternative would be submit to the soviets or die horribly. After millions died horribly, the rest submitted.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Deportation – to be more precise, the involuntary resettlement of a people – does not equal genocide.
The way Stalin did it, it does. The aim was specifically to destroy the group of people and their way of life. If it didn't include murdering every single one of them personally (though of course nobody was concerned at all if any of them died) - it certainly did intend to destroy them as people.
The Gulag system was set up not with the aim of mass murder
It included mass murder as one of the intended effects. I mean, if after decades of starvation, hard work and inhuman suffering you manage to survive, fine, but if you don't, it's as good. Especially if they could get some work out of you before you croak. Of course, soviets also did outright mass murder too if they thought a specific group is too dangerous, but they were practical enough to consider working someone to death as better way of execution.
for the purpose of extracting important natural resources through forced labor
Nope, Gulag was a punishment mechanism. The fact that it also produced some resources was secondary - like, if we need repress millions of people, we better make some use of them. Of course, it also had a theoretical basis - since the bourgeois are evil and the workers are good, it is clear that more you work, the better you become. So if you engage in wrongthink, it is clear that's because not enough work. Also, if you are stuck cutting trees in Siberia, you surely won't be able to spread your wrongthink to others. The fact that the trees themsevles are also useful is good, but there are many other ways to cut trees, this one in particular had been chosen because they needed Gulag as part of the terror machine, to control the society.
The majority of the victims of political purges were imprisoned or deported, not killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million.
That's only one episode of many. Really, where did you study history? Even Wokepedia is not trying to whitewash Stalin. Where do they teach that Soviet mass terror didn't happen?
JarJarJedi
10d ago
The kulak class does not equal the Ukrainian people. Not all Ukrainians were kulaks and not all kulaks were Ukrainian.
Both true of course, but it's not as big argument as you seem to think it is. A lot of Ukrainian food production relied on people who were classified as "kulaks", so with that destroyed not only kulak families themselves died, but everyone who relied on the food they produced did. And of course, the famine was not confined to Ukraine - it happened in other places too. In Ukraine these policies produced a particularly severe effects though.
the key words being as a class.
No, it's not the key. It's not like they were "reclassified" and that's it. They had been stripped of their property, deported, and often murdered. And their capacity to produce food ruined. "As a class" here means on massive, society-wide scale - it's not that some particular kulak was an asshole and had to be repressed, it's that all the backbone of the food production had been forcefully removed, which of course, predictably, caused lack of food. That policy was systemic. That lack of food was not accidental, and it did not cause anybody to stop and reverse the policy. On the contrary, it was largely accepted as the desired effect, and the confiscation policies became more severe.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Other acts of genocide? Where? When?
How ignorant are you in Soviet history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Meskhetian_Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmyks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportation and others.
Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes"
Dude, Gulag. Purges. I mean, they didn't exactly hide it.
Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?
Not necessarily, but the way Stalin did it - it frequently did. I mean, I understand that if you're completely ignorant of history, you find historical claims "baffling". But maybe you should fill up on that before arguing about it?
JarJarJedi
11d ago
If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class. Of course, to properly consider all that evidence, one would need to write a series of books - and there are many books on the subject, of course. I have neither ability nor desire to TLDR them all here, I am just saying this is a well-supported position, and dismissing it with a formula like "oh, that's consensus-building, therefore all that pile of evidence worth nothing" is not proper discussion of the subject.
he section on Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians in the wikipedia
I checked Wokepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and it says "Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made.[46] The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes",[47] though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies.". Now, I have very low opinion about the veracity of any Wokepedia claim on any politically charged subject, and again, seriously evaluating such claims would take much more than I am willing to give, but in short, virtually everybody agrees Stalin did it. Now, imagine - Stalin comes out and says "we will destroy kulaks, if necessary - we will kill them all". Stalin then does things. Kulaks are destroyed, many of them dead. Many other people are dead to. We can establish the causal link between Stalin's actions and the deaths. Now, you tell me that we should seriously consider maybe it all happened on accident? That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food? I don't know, to me it doesn't pass the smell test.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
It's a bit perverse way of saying things. Sure, if you brutally oppress a population for decades in the service of, say, vegetarianism, and then your vegetarian regime collapses, the people would acquire certain aversion to vegetarianism for a while. And maybe overall eating a more balanced diet would come out as good for them (please, vegetarians, it's just an artificial example!). But concluding from that that to achieve a balanced diet you need to brutally oppress people for decades, and that's actually a good thing because it leads to better diet, is a very perverse way of arguing.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Unless, you know, it actually was a) artificially engineered and b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians (more precisely, of course, by Soviets - which weren't all ethnically Russian, of course) and c) with genocidal intent. Given as Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose, for political aims, and their ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes, and their official position had been that any "nationalism" has to be completely eliminated (which they consistently did in all "national republics" - every single nationalist movement had been brutally repressed) - it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it's not a big stretch to argue it is a duck.
I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.
You can question it all you like, but as I noted above, there is very good evidence pointing to it. I am not saying questioning this evidence makes you literally Hitler, I am saying if you have equally strong opposite evidence, you are welcome to propose it. Or you are welcome to just say "I just don't believe it, whatever is the evidence", that's always an option. I know one thing - dismissing all that by just saying "oh, it's consensus-building, therefore you are wrong" is not an argument.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Due to all that long and messy history, no border is ever able to express the complexity - you'll always have people that think they are Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Hutsul, Romanian, Ruthenian, Czech, and a dozen of other options leaving next to each other. Sure, in some place people would say "we are Polish and we're living here since year X" and over the hill over there people would say "we are Ukrainian and we're living here since year Y". It's always easy to find some substantiation of some politician's grand "historic" claims - but it's also as easy to find a diametrically opposed evidence which the politician conveniently ignored.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
I don't need machine translation, I speak (and, of course, read) Ukrainian freely. So I know very well what Ukrainians thought about Russians in 1980s, in 1990s, in 2000s and now. And, also, I know how wokeness is not something that is a major concern there. In 20 years, if the war ends, and Ukraine survives, and joins EU, and EU survives that long, it may become a concern. There's much about freedom, but it's only freedom from being murdered by Russians, not about freedom to trans the kids. People think because the wokes prance around with Ukrainian flags, that means Ukrainians are woke. But that's silly - they would prance around with any flags the Central Committee tells them to, be it Ukraine, Hamas, Iran or Mexico. They don't know the first thing about the actual country, and making conclusions about the country based on that is insane.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
"Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.
Well, yes and no. You need to look at it in dynamics, not at one moment, but over the time. In early 90s, yes, things were pretty similar, except more money in Russia, but Ukraine had its share too. Then the paths diverged. Russia essentially rejected the "Western" way - in part because people implementing it were also grotesquely corrupt, though Putin's gang (which weren't strictly speaking his yet, just the one he belonged to) were about as corrupt, but not obviously so. There were also other factors, including the Chechen war, terrorism, etc. - and, of course, the conscious choice by Putin to set up Russia in opposition to the West.
Ukraine, while being close beside in corruption, has had also strong independence/nationalist vibes - which at times had been anti-Russian but not necessarily so. There had been a lot of fractions, and most of them were for at least keeping decent relations with Russia, while staying independent. Ukraine leaned towards integrating with Europe (remember, the explosive wokification by that time hadn't happen yet and "Europe" didn't mean "import Syrians, introduce censorship and trans your kids" yet). That said, for a while they hadn't been that far apart - in fact, at one time the most popular politician, among all alive, in Ukraine had been none other but Vladimir Putin. Putin overplayed his hand though, and helped to install Yanukovich, who had proven too much even for Ukrainians that were used to corruption.
And when it went sour, instead of taking a step back and trying to play the same long game he played before - after all, there were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine, and Putin probably could choose another one to puppet and keep manipulating Ukraine while seemingly staying out of the fray openly - he decided to put the boot down. In Russia, putting the boot down worked spectacularly well - billions of dollars invested in Russian opposition led to it having absolutely zero power very soon and Putin eliminating any trace of dissent. Not only that, but the "moral power" that the dissidents held in the USSR, is mostly gone too - except for rare personalities like Nemtsov or Navalny, who Putin just openly murdered with nobody being able to object, there's not ever any influential opposition figures. In Ukraine, however, it did not work at all. That's about where the trajectories, previously following if not the same then adjacent paths, split drastically. Putin chose to build his new Russian Empire, Ukraine preferred to stay out of it.
So yes, the genesis is common, and a lot of common themes, but there are very important differences.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?
Yes, as mostly everything else mass-cultural, Hugos are woke now. If you want many sad details, look up "Sad Puppies". Obviously, unless you want the woke side of the story, in places other than Wokepedia. But be warned, it won't make you feel any better.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities and I just can't get it. It just bores me so much. It's on practically every list of "best novels ever", and I feel weird about it. And it's not like my tastes are opposed to the general direction - I like historic novels, I've read Dickens before (though a long time ago), and I enjoyed a lot of other "classic" works on the same "best ever" lists - but this one somehow just does not "click" for me. Not sure if I'll try to get through it or just put it aside and try again, maybe in several years.
You build the clown world, you get the clowns. If nothing is supposed to make sense, it's not exactly a surprise a particular nonsense - a man claiming to be a "birth mother" - is demanded to be accepted. It's only basic logic - from a false premise, anything can follow.
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