Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
If your definition of "East" is mostly just the specific areas that were taken by separatists/Russia in 2014 then sure - if you go by a map like this, the areas where Russian was given as the main language in the census outside of the cities pretty much cover those areas, with an additional zone in the Zaporozhye oblast.
Presumably many of those answering that they're Ukrainian-speaking would have indeed used mostly Russian in their daily lives, but that's precisely the difference between a prestige language and a non-prestige language. If Ukrainian-speakers have to become fluent in Russian to get by in life but the Russian-speakers feel it's not their duty to tarnish their mouths with what they see as a peasant dialect, it's Russian that gets spoken, and increasingly so as the years pass by, unless there's a concrete intervention to this matter.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Apparently he started seriously studying it quite late in life (i.e. at 50, when he returned to Finland from Russian active service), but most sources I've seen say that by WW2 he knew if quite well. He retained a notable Swedish accent (it's obvious to me from a clip like this), but it's generally these days just seen as a part of his mythos as the last true aristocrat in Finland.
Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.
And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine.
If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Well, they've said that autism is our national characteristic, at times. Finland has also had traditionally a high homicide rate compared to (other) Western European countries, though apparently it has gone down markedly in recent decades. OTOH we nevertheless have a high-trust, low-corruption, care-for-the-most-vulnerable society, so I guess one can't explain everything by alleles.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
I don't think anyone should take you seriously, and not because I dislike your constant agitating for violence and race war, but because it's so self-evidently as performative and fake as your "catgirl" persona, which so many of your Twitter followers inexplicably seem to have bought. Go figure.
I could buy that the Motte-posting ancap Kulak was just saying things he actually believed in a spicy way, but yeah, the catgirl Twitter fasho Kulak just seems like the product of constantly iterating one's online persona to appeal to newfound followers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Perhaps I should specify I was talking specifically about vaccine skeptics (i.e. those generally opposed to mRNA vaccination), which Bhattacharya (or Tegnell, referred to in another post) wasn't.
Generally speaking what caused this thought was the Joe Rogan quote about "conspiracy theorists being right about everything", in which case it was Rogan implicitly dumping a lot of people with varying views in the same category.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
To me, it just seems like, for the last 3 years, many of the Covid skeptics and Covid conspiracists have been doing constant victory laps on evidence that is insufficient, to say the least. Yes, some of the contrarian things were correct, but there was a large number of wild claims about vaccine killing half or third of people taking in space of years, sterilizing people to the degree of "unvaccinated sperm becoming more valuable than gold", being filled with gunk that basically makes your veins look like huge black worms etc. that obviously didn't come true. Sure, not every Covid skeptic said this stuff, or even most of them, but the more moderate skeptics still seemed, at least to me, generally unwilling to start debunking the wilder variants. At least insofar as my personal experience goes, I do not know anyone who seems to have suffered a major vaccine injury (nor do I know anyone who has died of Covid, though one guy I know apparently came pretty close), which makes me question those who claimed to encounter vaccine injuries left and right.
There's Rogan saying that all the conspiracy theorists were correct on the basis of a report saying that "Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives", which obviously would be the complete opposite of reality if the mRNA drugs manufactured and distributed as a part of OWS were deadly poison. Indeed, a great number of Covid skeptics ended up fulsomely praising - not just supporting as the last bad option but actively campaigning for - Trump, who has never stopped bragging about his great vaccine and successful Warp Speed operation and, when pressed on the incongruity, usually resulting to "well, he didn't support a mandate!", as if it was still OK to use tremendous amounts of tax money in order to support a lie and actively push a deadly poison on people, which is what he would have been doing if the mRNA vaccine claims were correct.
As said, the mainstream Covid response was flawed in many ways, opened a room for a lot of corruption and included a push for mandates and vaccine passports in a way that almost certainly has caused more harm than good in eroding public trust to public health authorities and experts - but the "counter-experts" don't seem particularly willing to utilize the same standard of evaluation on themselves, or their own community.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Outage between undersea cable that connects Finish and Estonian power grids
This is not the first, or the second, cable that's gone out in the Baltic. It seems quite obvious that Russian and Chinese ships are cutting these from time to time deliberately.
This has been huge news in Finland, the Finnish Border Guards did specops to detain the suspected ship and the news have indicated the ship's been used for spying purposes. There's a wider discussion about Russian "shadow fleet", ie ships flying under third-country flags used for circumventing sanctions, operating in the Baltic, and increasing NATO presence in the Baltic to counteract this.
One of the reasons why it's easy for me to believe the perp is what he claims to be is that I actually know a local variant of this type. An immigrant from a Muslim-majority country, born a Muslim but now an atheist ex-Muslim, used to be on the left due to the association of secularism and leftism in the Middle East but left the left in a huff due to the lack of enthusiasm for his strident anti-Islam sentiment, has also burned briges with the other local ex-Muslims, now associated with the mainstream nationalist party though also critical of them for a variety of reasons including insufficient concentration on Islam, generally comes across as igh-strung and aggressive. (Of course he's not directly comparable to the terrorist in the sense that he hasn't threatened to kill anyone.) My guess is that there are more than a few ex-Muslims like this around. It's quite ironic that one part of the narrative that the Saudi terrorist was a secret Muslim practicing taqiyya comes from the claims of other ex-Muslims, the other ex-Muslims are reliable non-taqiyaish sources now?
Also what is this " car rammed into people" bullshit, the car didn’t do anything, the driver did.
It's been a perennial complaint of cycling activists that even normal, regular car accidents (in local news etc.) get reported as "car rammed into a person" or even as "a pedestrian/cyclist collided fatally with a car". There's something about cars that makes us conceive of them as autonomous objects, kind of like large animals or something.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
That just doesn't add up. Why would he engage in years of carefully constructing a cover story for doing this sort of an attract that seems highly impulsive? If it's important for the authorities to not find him then why does he conduct the one form of attack that almost guarantees to end up with him either dead or being hauled off to hospital and then interrogation? Isn't this rather a convoluted explanation in comparison to him simply being pretty much who he claims he is?
And Muhammad Atta was drinking late into the night before 9/11 despite alcohol being forbidden by Islam.
That's just being a sinner, not a cover story. Insofar as I've understood he believed martyrdom would wipe the record clean, so to say.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
How many cases have there been where an Islamic jihadist commits a terrorist attack and pretends to be something other than an Islamist while doing so? Being open that you are, in fact, doing jihad has always been one of the points of the jihadists.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
No, I'm a millennial and ideal target audience for SMAC and played the hell out of it when it dropped, but when attempting to replay it, I just can't get over how ass the graphics and controls are by modern standards.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
...who did Tubman murder again? I'm not that familiar with her story, but a quick skim of Wikipedia entry would indicate that if she ever directly killed anyone, it would have been within wartime context.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Presumably this meant "the sort of useful feedback that a smart human could not already give you".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Yeah, I mean, the AI hype train people are aware that from the perspective of an interested but still fundamentally "outside" normie, the last years have basically consisted of continuous breathless announcements that AGI is six months away or literally here and our entire lifes are going to change, with the actual level of change in one's actual daily life being... well, existent, of course, especially if one's working an adjacent field, but still quite less than promised?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
My understanding is that Tubman's fame only shot up during/after the US Civil War, so that may not be the best finishing date.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
The middlebrow was cultivated and developed by the 00s hipsters, which would indeed probably be what Freddie deBoer's tastes probably run towards, considering not only his social status and age group but also his various stated preferences on his blog. Then the hipster culture either collapsed on itself or was mercilessly attacked from various sides and slunk back to forced poptimism or dumb contrarianism or whatever the evolutions were, and we now have what we have now.
There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so.
The first major Civ forum was Apolyton, established in 1998, which used to be considerably bigger than CivFanatics until it started dying sometime after mid-00s (around that time I also stopped participating, incidentally). Fond memories of that forum, including first encounters with a very smart teenager who later established a moderately successful blog.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers
Gandhi (Indian leader as far back as Civ 1) wasn't, and as said elsewhere, Civ 2 included a lot of optional leaders that didn't actually lead their countries or actually even exist.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Thomas Jefferson as the American leader, expect it is this Thomas Jefferson.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
My understanding is that RFH used to actually be on the dissident right but - as I've seen a large number of women on far-right movements do - eventually grew tired of the rank misogyny and general inceldom on that side and flipped towards some sort of a terf/right-wing split position, in practice taking the same woman-hating/incel attitude and just flipping the valence so as to start advocating man-hating and femceldom. In so doing she, apart from naturally attracting a large amount of hatred from former far-right comrades, she has also approached the position of some posters who are coming towards the same split from the terf side, chiefly Ana Slatz of Reduxx.
Slatz has posted what seems to be the Wisconsin poster's actual manifesto, which just seems like typical school shooter misanthrope blather and doesn't indicate a connection to RFH or any politics beyond admiration for some Nazi shooters, seemingly more for being shooters than being Nazis. Obviously this is not going to convince anyone who was only too happy to see RFH take one on the chin, whether this is due to hating her for bashing men or for bashing trans people or whatever.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Celsius is rather useful in a country that spends a considerable fraction of the year in temps that are on the Celsius minus scale. Important clothing decisions might depend simply on whether the temp on the weather app shows up in red or blue.
I was genuinely surprised to learn that Tate is half black when I learned it.
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