Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
I've been thinking about how I've seen some racist accounts go "Of course the elites aren't trying to do population reduction expect among the whites, look at Africa!", and I'm like... do they just take the fertility rate crash in Asia as granted?
Because when it comes to population control efforts, Asia was until recently way more a target for them than Africa (often simply because the African infrastructure was not developed enough for basically any international efforts expect for very basic health measures and like to have any effect), such population control measures were often directly connected to Western efforts (like referred in this ACX post), and it should also be pretty uncontroversial that such population control measures have worked very rapidly, bringing TFR in many countries from 6-7 to around 1 in decades.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
The "man or bear" meme has not really seemed to have caught on that much in Finland, probably since going to the forest (to pick forests and berries, to hunt, just to walk around, even if you're walking from place X to place Y and the quickest route is through a patch of forest since there are patches of forests even all around cities etc.) is genuinely a very common activity to both men and women and you tend to typically run into other men and women all the time without consequences when you do it. (Encountering a bear is very rare, the numbers of the large beasts are strictly controlled.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
More than a few times when this has come up I've looked at the top-grossing ten films of the past years in the US and there generally tend to be more "main pairings" of white men and non-white women in them than the other way around. Of course many of them are with Zendaya with whomever the male lead is, but the sheer amount of complaining about how Zendaya is too ugly to be paired with Hollywood men should by itself indicate that this happens quite often.
Unless there are indications to the contrary, I'm fairly convinced that the "they're pairing black men with white women!" complaints have quite a bit more to do with the complainers themselves remembering such pairings due to getting incensed about them than the ones other way around.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23hr ago
Living in one of the rare other countries where soccer isn't the main sport, there really seems to be a something ostentatious about the way anti-soccer Americans go out of their way to talk unprompted about just how much they don't care about soccer and how un-American it is etc. that you don't really find here.
I suppose it's a culture war thing but even then, a self-aware person would at least consider that it really is then the culture war that's at fault, moreso than the game itself.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Eurovision is basically always two steps gayer than the rest of the society, so it's gayer than in the 90s, but it was already gay in the 90s by the 90s society standards. The gayness has never really been a huge hindrance to it being a huge popular spectacle, even many European conservatives are willing to tolerate gay and gender nonconforming stuff as long as the context is artistic expression.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
The one American who I think would legitimately love Eurovision if he was, for some reason, visiting the event by himself, would be Donald Trump. I won't elaborate further.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Windows95man has a decade of career as a DJ and a visual artist, he's not really a musician (well, unless you count his DJ career as being a "musician"). His selection was originally quite controversial in Finland as well, I think that it was an attempt to redo Käärijä's flamboyant personality from last year but forgetting that Cha Cha Cha was a legitimate banger by itself. Croatia's entry was Käärijä's true heir this year.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Israel's song was pretty good, all things considered, but the juries probably smelled an opportunity for shitshow of epic proportions to happen (riots in Malmö, riots in the hall itself, all the issues related to organizing the contest next year in Israel etc.) if it won and thus purposefully blocked it.
A lot of acts with queer themes did well. The UK act did badly because that guy just couldn't sing.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
The actual instability in many continental (ie. usually PR-using) countries is less due to the small parties (they're often easy to ignore - they're small!) and more because there are major parties that are politically toxic (due to being extreme right or extreme left, or separatists) and thus basically almost automatically out of the government, which thus forces the rest of the parties into ideologically amorphous, unstable coalitions, or alternatively leads o the creation of large ideologically amorphous, unstable "system parties" (like the Italian Christian Democrats, the hegemonic party due to the main opposition being the Communists who were kept out of the government) where political barons bring down governments and cut each other down due to byzantine political machinations or simply due to spite.
The reason why those parties exist is because there are or were deeper systemic factors in those countries leading to large portions of population choosing such extreme or separatist parties. The Weimar Republic was not unstable because of its electoral system but simply because huge portions of the German population distrusted democracy and supported antidemocratic parties like the Communist, Nazis and the DNVP. If unstable countries were using FPTP, the same factors would just express themselves otherwise; the extreme left and right would eventually affect and radicalize the mainstream parties, and separatist/ethnic parties are usually concentrated enough to elect MPs even in FPTP systems.
The main FPTP-using countries, ie. Anglo countries, have been stable because they have been wealthy and have had longlasting liberal democratic cultures with powerful mechanisms encouraging stability. Nevertheless, even they've seen increasing destabilization lately, and that destabilization has then channeled itself in different ways, so you have the Trump presidency, Corbyn leadership in Labour and the Brexit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Confusingly.
Basically, Eurovision has two separate votes: televote (ie. conducted among viewers) and jury vote. Both are organized country by country, with both the televotes and the juries awarding a maximum of twelve points to the top-voted country, 10 points to the second most voted, and then 8, 7, 6, 5 etc. to the next ones.
The implicit purpose of the jury vote can often specifically negate the televote when there's a feeling a "non-preferred" song (typically one that seems too much like a comedy entry and not like a traditional Eurovision winner ballad) might win (like last year...), so it's possible that Israel might, for instance, win the televote and not the jury vote. Then again it might also do quite well in the jury vote, Israel has not been a particularly bad performer there either in the previous contests, from what I've understood.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
162 million people The 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, organized by the European Broadcasting Union, reached 162 million people over the 3 live shows across 38 public service media markets.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Okay, can you list the "etc.", "etc.", and "etc."? Because whenever I've seen this claim the reference point is always the SCUM Manifesto, and that sort of a thing kind of makes one think there are, in fact, no other reference points.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
It's already been nearly a decade since mainstream economists stopped trying to say MMT is wrong, and switched to "we knew that already"
This might also be because talking with MMT'ers is often a constant exercise of dealing with motte-and-baileying with risible radical claims and commonsense stuff described in somewhat different words from usual.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
The smartphone map features are genuinely useful and I use them all the time to figure out what bus I need to take where, for example.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
The first answer to come to my mind on "Who is the most famous woman in history apart from Virgin Mary" was Cleopatra, though Queen Elizabeth II would be a great answer.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
Most vegans I know aren't particularly fond of Impossible Burgers and such, or other recent "meat imitation products" (non-meatish meat substitutes like tofu are another matter). The supposed constituency is probably "vegan-curious" hipsters who occasionally cook non-meat dishes, though it hasn't taken hold of them, either.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The most famous woman in the history of the world would be Virgin Mary, I believe.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Not to forget that just five years ago very few people would have considered there to be anything strange or political about a well-known American celebrity cutting an ad for a pharma company.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
I don't think they were, in the context of the great 90s/00s creationism/evolution online wars. The race/ethnicity culture war was at a low ebb and a lot of creationist types talking about this subject probably genuinely conceived themselves as, at least, non-racists if not anti-racists.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
I actually thought that the Civil War movie itself remarkably represented a CRPG. Quoting from a post I made on the basis of ACX comments:
I kept thinking about how this would still provide a good setting for a computer role-playing game (CRPG) (why are there comparatively few CRPGs situated in a present-day-style wartime setting?), and it then struck me that the plot, such as it was, was a CRPG plot already.
We start with a water-riot-based tutorial where we get a refresher on how to use action points, take photos, communicate and even transfer an item to a party member. Then, at the hotel, the main quest starts, and the party is assembled.
An early random encounter demonstrates that one party member is underexperienced or has the wrong skillset, and the narrative has told us that the main quest's final encounter is going to be difficult, so the party decides to grind side quests for levels. They even visit a literal shop and a literal rest site.
During one of the side quests the party encounters an enemy, a Nazi played well by Jesse Plemons, that's a bit too high for their current levels, so in addition to two temporary party members who were hardcoded to be killed anyway, they lose one of the main party members. After this, they find out that the main quest's time limit has run out and they're locked out of the best ending. However, the story graciously lets them go through the final battle for another ending.
Alex Garland has served as a video game writer as well, so I guess it sticks.
Yes, there was recently a bit of hubbub after it turned out that the government had sent four guys representing different parties (instead of, say, the female ministers theoretically in charge of such affairs) to a sauna trip to hammer out various details to the latest austerity package. Here's the Green Party's unofficial online magazine complaining about it (google-translated). However, such sauna sessions would presumably be expected to be chaste (if drunken), there's a bit of a taboo with associating saunas to eroticism in the Finnish culture.
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