Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
27d ago
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
13d ago
If it somehow turned out to be true, the most embarrassed party would probably be Fidel Castro, in afterlife. A son that hides from the right wing instead of doing this?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14d ago
When I started lifting I got a PT who gave me a good routine, and when I ran the program he gave me through ChatGPT it said it’s a good programme with nothing much to add.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
Opinions on The Shogun? We just finished it, and I quite liked it all around. Solid plot, good visuals, great characters like Toranaga and Yabushige and Mariko (and acting performances), the Anjin grated me a bit at first but I got used to it. Probably the best miniseries of such kind in a long time...
...and yet, I don't think there's been an inlength discussion on it here. I suppose that's what happens when something is good; it's not as notable as when something can be complained about, especially since there's precious little of anything that might be seen as wokeness here. I haven't read the book (I tried some time ago but got sidetracked pretty quickly), but I haven't seen complaints about major deviations or deviations from (lightly fictionalized) actual history.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
One of the particularities of Finnish protest culture is that most activist-led protests, probably due to anarchist influence, will announce that political party signs and flags should not be brought in the protest, presumably to combat potential protest takeovers like that. Also there's no major Trotskyist groups to speak of, and the closest equivalent as a communist group that's experienced in organizing protests, the Communist Party of Finland, tends to have a subdued profile in the protest themselves.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
If the theory is that someone would have taken over and continued fighting anyway, sure, but you don't even need the West in that participation at all. There were plenty of figures in Ukraine who had already been convinced for years that Zelensky was a Russophile traitor. One does not take the job he did if they are that concerned over their own physical survival.
The point is that a lot rests on the assumption that the Ukrainians would have been ready to make peace - would have probably made peace - at this point, but the West somehow stopped them from doing this. This assumption is not built on particularly solid ground.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
"Ukraine will turn into a frozen conflict", no matter whether correct or not, is not a "new cope", it's been a popular prediction for the duration of the war.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not the same as the ethnic Russians, especially now. My anecdotal experience and what I've heard of Ukrainian refugees in Finland is that clear majority speaks Russian (they're usually from Eastern areas since that's where the fighting is) and a clear majority also firmly supports the Ukrainian war effort. The actual ethnic Russian areas (ie. the separatist-controlled areas before 2022 and Crimea) had already been detached from Ukrainian control before 2022.
Nobody thinks that the Irish speaking English means they consider themselves English, but for some reason the idea of someone speaking Russian yet not being Russian seems very hard to understand for many.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d 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
15d ago
Well, the Tories are hardly in a position to propose a solution to expensive real estate, as (as far as I've understood) their chief constituency still continues to be the sort of middle-class types who have owned their home for decades (perhaps specifically because of Thatcher and right-to-buy). If you're in such a situation, housing prices skyrocketing are a feature, not a bug. I don't know much about the Reform Party, but my impression is Tories but even more Brexit-y, and the Brexit, in addition to doing nothing about the housing problem (especially now that we know that the reduction in EU immigrants just led to replacement with non-EU immigrants with dividends), is generally massively unpopular with the youth, perhaps making a certain generation gone for good (or gone without massive efforts) for the Tories.
Also, even more speculatively, housing is an issue that can be exploited both by the left and the right, and I'd guess that the left-wing housing voters would be the ones who have managed to snag a place for rent in a major city and now want rent control to keep the rent from skyrocketing out of their reach, and the right-wing ones would be the ones who are living in a remote suburb or a dying rural region, want to move to a city, and want less immigrants so that the waiting list would eventually reach their number. Maybe the green belts mean there are less such suburban housing voters? Are the green belts even a thing any more?
At least the Finns Party has an interesting demographic regarding religious views: at least a while back, they're the most popular among "no religion" types but also the most popular among the "strongly religious" types, particularly those who belong to Protestant churces outside the Lutheran quasi-state-chuch. The party itself has MPs ranging from precisely such committed Pentecostals etc. to atheists: in one of the larger cities, they even have a council member who (probably mostly for reasons of edginess) has defined himself as a Satanist.
All of these cooperate rather easily, though, since they all share the same focus on immigration, and the party itself is mostly rather secular in both its policies and its communications.
While youth tend to be mostly secular, the ones who are strongly religious will tend to mostly congregate to non-Lutheran movements (there have been several stories in media, like this one, about a new trend of young men joining charismatic groups or Orthodoxy, for instance, the latter of which I can anecdotally confirm noticing myself).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
The EU states have tightened their general asylum policies since 2015 precisely because of that crisis. They were already doing pushbacks in Greece in 2020 as a response to asylum seeker entry wave at that time, it was big news before the Covid hit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
That's pretty much exactly the same feeling I got of Skyrim.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine.
My reading of this was not that Macron wants to send troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians but rather that it would be, essentially, a part of an effort to formalize a division into Ukraine and Russian-occupied/annexed territory - sort of like the Korean division, in other words. Of course that would quite a risky move, any way one would do it.
More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
This has been a part of the Western message for the entire war - Ukraine will join NATO after the war. Allowing Ukraine to join the NATO now does not still seem to be in the cards, since this would inevitably lead to direct Western war with Russia, something Blinken eschewed in the same statement.
Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine.
Well, why do you think they fight?
The entire war, the... well, not solely the pro-Russian side, but shall we say the Ukraine-skeptical side has talked about how it's the West that's forcing Ukraine to fight, how Ukrainians are dying for gay marriage, how the whole thing is just a proxy war with Ukrainians dying... and yet, the Ukrainians keep fighting. Not all of them, sure, some will avoid the draft, some will help Russia, so on. And still, there still seems to be a remarkable consensus on the Ukrainian side that fight they must and - even if this has been fraying a bit - the goal is still pre-2014 borders Ukraine in NATO and EU. One can always claim this is all just a lie and the Ukrainians are forced to fight, but you don't get troops staying in the kill zone so consistently just with a gun in back.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
I'm not sure why that should be compelling at all. "Science" isn't just one coherent entity where one scientist being wrong makes all of the rest in the vaguely same sector fundamentally wrong. One scientist, who might as well not even be alive any more, making a prediction in 1967 has no bearing on scientists making predictions right now. Much of the list isn't even concerned with scientists - neither Al Gore or Prince Charles are such - or is related to issues other than climate change, such as peak oil, which has plenty of advocates as a theory who don't consider climate change to be all that dangerous (Greer, say).
"Wow! Look at all these failed AI predictions!" is a lackluster argument in debates about when the AGI is coming, if it is at all, and this is similarly a lackluster argument in climate debates.
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
17d ago
Old soc.history.what-if newsgroup had a rather notorious poster who believed that we should reinstate feudalism and was also perfectly OK with the idea that under feudalism he'd be an equivalent of a peasant.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr 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
11d 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
12d 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.
If there's not enough food coming to your country due to external factors then you basically have to ration food or you start getting starvation and mass deaths.
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