Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, pretty much the only thing separating high-fertility (defined here as 4+) families from lower-fertility ones (1-2 kids, generally 1) is religiousness. Not all religious families I know are big but all the big ones are religious.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Deranged ranting on Twitter can make you a whole-ass US president, so presumably it will be adopted as a strategy by politicians all around the world (possibly adjusting for other social medias according to local popularity).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
It's no good to say that the progressive left and the far-right are similar. They have markedly different goals in most respects. The far left wants everyone to be the same shade of brown, they have a particular distaste for European just about anything, they want DEI which is the reverse of meritocracy, they want mass redistribution from rich to poor. The far right wants there to be more Europeans, they're super pro-European, moderately pro-meritocracy, reasonably happy with the market system though they want some constraints. They are much more meritocratic than the far left.
One could certainly be confused about this statement by reading American right-wing Twitter, which is replete with poasters continuously declaring how much Europe sucks, how Europe is bound to collapse and its all the fault of the Europeans, "enjoying having your women raped by browns Europoors?", declarations about the total ideological detachment of Americans from their European origin countries etc.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
It's a somewhat famous quote by Stokely Carmichael.
In November 1964 Carmichael made a joking remark in response to a SNCC position paper written by his friends Casey Hayden and Mary E. King on the position of women in the movement. In the course of an irreverent comedy monologue he performed at a party after SNCC's Waveland conference, Carmichael said, "The position of women in the movement is prone."[103] A number of women were offended. In a 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education article, historian Peniel E. Joseph later wrote:
While the remark was made in jest during a 1964 conference, Carmichael and black-power activists did embrace an aggressive vision of manhood—one centered on black men's ability to deploy authority, punishment, and power. In that, they generally reflected their wider society's blinders about women and politics.[104]
It's just a way to say "The role of the women is to satisfy men's sexual urges and nothing more", not more complicated than that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Everyone I've seen using the term "woke right" has belonged to the right-oriented anti-woke group themselves.
It makes plenty enough sense if one just interprets "woke" to mean authoritarianism. There certainly are plenty of authoritarian right-wingers.
Every movement looks more coherent from the outside than from the inside.
But yes, there is some coherence, but it's still not enough to make it a fully coherent ideology.
edit: I think that actually one of the biggest friction points is not as much ideological as aesthetic and rhetorical - progressive African-American nationalism was traditionally a fairly masculine movement (fiery mustacchioed preachers, Black Panthers with their leather jackets, "the only position of women in the movement is prone" etc.), and feminism obviously chafes with that, not only directly but also generally leading to a more feminine aesthetic and rhetoric being adopted - which in turn makes young men, in particular, disaffected, leading them to manosphere guys or recently even Trumpism.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
It's more complicated than that. Progressive African-American nationalism, due to its status of as the main political expression of the largest minority of the most powerful country of the world (and an expression, moreover, that is well-suited for coalition building and forming a template for others), has had enormous cachet globally generally, with minorities all around the world considering their struggle to be equivalent to that of the African-Americans (including white minorities. Progressive African-American leaders, like Dubois and MLK, have been aware of the effect of publicizing repression against the movement on America's soft power and have utilized that to their advantage, so that American policies have at least as much had to do with navigating this threat as with any conscious imperial ideological designs.
One of the problems is that some people just seem to use "woke" as a synonym for "authoritarian" or "illiberal" - usually authoritarian and illiberal leftism (chiefly forms that aren't Soviet communism), but in case of people talking about "woke right" it's obvious that they're liberal types who first got frightened of authoritarian tendencies in leftist communities, moved sharply to the right and then noted similar authoritarian and illiberal strains in their new right-wing communities.
Of course the problem here is that liberalism is taken as something of a given when the vast majority of people ever living in the world during the history of humanity have believed in authoritarian ideologies, it takes genuine work to make people truly believe in things like "you should let people speak even if they're wrong" or "people have the right to advance religious ideals even if you think they are rank heresy or mere superstition" or "innocent until proven guilty even if they really really seem shifty in an obviously guilty way" or a dozen other basic things underpinning liberal democracy.
When it comes to "woke" itself beyond the whole authoritarianism thing, it's really a combination of multiple things and ideologies, within the US chiefly progressive African-American nationalism (and other ethnic minority nationalisms usually deriving from the ideological work already done by progressive African-American nationalists, with "progressive" separating this ideological straing from non-progressive African-American nationalisms variously advanced by Marcus Garvey, NOI/Black Hebrewites/other cults or these days by black manosphere types like Tariq Nasheed), second- and third-wave feminism, and to some degree the sexual revolution and the related groups.
The whole "intersectionalism" things is an attempt to tie these, particularly progressive African-American nationalism and feminism, together to a coherent combination, but since there still is friction related to the importances of various causes, the coalition is straining all the time and wokeness doesn't seem to have that much staying power, as shown by the developments after Trump's election.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I use it as a test for simple reason; getting recommendations lists is one of the few things I actually personally use LLMs for. Another application is having them draw cute pics for my kids, but the basic Deepseek doesn't do that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Yes, much better. No hallucinations that I can spot, still contemporary and somewhat SF/F oriented, but perhaps that's also a reflection of what gets translated to English. Including an anthology is an interesting choice.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I tasked Deepseek with coming up with a list of 20 best SF novels.
Here’s a list of 20 of the most acclaimed and influential science fiction novels of all time, spanning classic and modern works:
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
- Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
- The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
- I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Pretty solid list, one might quibble about the order but they're all acclaimed SF masterworks, at least.
Then I tasked it with coming up a list of 20 best Finnish novels:
- Seven Brothers (Seitsemän veljestä) by Aleksis Kivi
- The Egyptian (Sinuhe egyptiläinen) by Mika Waltari
- Under the North Star (Täällä Pohjantähden alla) by Väinö Linna
- The Unknown Soldier (Tuntematon sotilas) by Väinö Linna
- The Maid Silja (Nuorena nukkunut) by F.E. Sillanpää
- The Year of the Hare (Jäniksen vuosi) by Arto Paasilinna
- The Sultan’s Renegade (Kaarina Maununtytär) by Mika Waltari
- The Highwayman’s Bride (Röukän mestari) by Kalle Päätalo
- Purge (Puhdistus) by Sofi Oksanen
- The Core of the Sun (Auringon ydin) by Johanna Sinisalo
- Compartment No. 6 (Hytti nro 6) by Rosa Liksom
- The Rabbit Back Literature Society (Lumikko ja yhdeksän muuta) by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
- Oneiron (Oneiron) by Laura Lindstedt
- The Man Who Died (Mies joka kuoli) by Antti Tuomainen
- The Howling Miller (Unohtumaton Myllymies) by Arto Paasilinna
- The Healer (Parantaja) by Antti Tuomainen
- The Summer Book (Sommarboken) by Tove Jansson
- The Book of Destruction (Tuomari-koiran muistelmat) by Marko Hautala
- The City of Woven Streets (Kudottujen kujien kaupunki) by Emmi Itäranta
- The End of the Game (Pelin loppu) by Leena Krohn
(Note: originally it presented 1-8 as classic novels and 9-20 as modern novels, I had to ask it to format the answer a bit)
A very odd effort, 1-5 and arguably 6 are indeed classics but 7 is hardly one of the best-known Waltari novels and has the wrong English name, 8 appears to be completely imaginary (and "Röukän" is in no way proper Finnish and does not even obey Finnish grammatical rules as a word), and while 9-20 contains unarguable classics it also has at least two completely imaginary books (18. and 20.) and is very genrefic-based, particularly focusing on SFF (perhaps the first query affected this?)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Eggs. 130 °C, 12 mins produces perfectly nice, somewhat soft eggs. Better than boiling water, especially for large batches.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
A Finnish nursery rhyme, too.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I just today learned of a subreddit called r/somethingiswrong2024, where the crowd of disappointed liberals have already spiralled to QAnon levels of theorizing how somehow the election will be annulled and Kamala will win, and naturally the irregulaties surrounding the swearing in have ended up throwing fuel to the fire by shovelful.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
That was the vibe in the 90s if you were young, sure. The boomers, in my recollection, spent a fair amount of time during that period being suspicious of the whole tech book - not only in the sense of predicting disappointments and bubbles (including the ones that actually happened) but seeing the free online expression etc. as a path of dangers for their kids, filled with drugs and child porn and extremists trying to recruit them. (Quite as many of those who were kids in the 90s now see the Internet for their kids, of course). And the discussions about the dangers of corporate control and monopolization are nothing new either, or have people already forgotten the Microsoft antitrust saga?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I was recently with a friend how the local SF/F fandom scene organizing the local cons etc seems like a bunch of rapidly aging Gen-Xers permanently stuck in the 90s, and one thing I observed was that kids these days don’t seem to get into the general ‘fandom’ but instead have a large number of individual fandoms around specific properties, ie Harry Potter fandom and Disco Elysium fandom and Cyberpunk fandom and what have you. Some overlap of course but less of an overarching idea of a whole genre with a history and unifying factors apart from the specific common series or other work.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I've read a fair amount of previous Gaiman discussions on Twitter, including from before the allegations, and the trans themes in A Game of You have been problematized exactly in this way approximately a 1,000 times.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I just reread the entire Sandman like a month ago and didn't remember that there was that much rape. I mean, of course I remember the most famous rapes (Calliope, Fun Land attempts to rape Rose, the diner scene etc.) but even beyond those there's quite a lot of it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Should be noted that the Trump movement is currently at a new situation with the strong influx of Musk and other tech right types, who are really not palingenetic at all in their thought, and are strongly future-oriented.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I don't think there's ever been a war without deserters and draft dodgers. A better question continues to be: if the idea of an Ukrainian nation is as fake as Russians and pro-Russians claim, why have there still been so many willing to fight for it? You can only get so far with "they are all forced to do so", you don't survive 2,5 years against a stronger enemy with just or even mainly a gun-in-your-backs army.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I think one might put it like "Trump isn't Hitler, but if there was an American Hitler, he'd probably look like a more racist and fascist Trump". Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power). Just crank his various attributes up to eleven, and you get an American variation of fascism - naturally different from German and Italian versions due to the considerable national peculiarities of base American nationalism, just as Italian and German fascisms differed from each other due to the national pecularities of base German/Italian nationalisms.
The first book is where he's the most unlikeable, the latter books increasingly make him trend towards being more of a rascally anti-hero rather than the complete shit he is in the first one. (He's still pretty monstrous in the few following ones but the process has already started.)
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