Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d 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
15d ago
The point isn't the specific flags or the number of protestors, the point is that, unless someone proves otherwise, the resist libs and the pro-Palestine protestors would most naturally seem to be two specific constituencies, with one of them being prone to thinking that Biden is the only chance against fascism in the USA and the other thinking that Biden is a fascist, for example.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
I would expect those who are "waving the flag of Hezbollah" (I'm sure someone at the campus protests has done this but I'm not sure what the specific example is) to be the sort of radicals who make even other pro-Palestinians uncomfortable and those who ranted about "Trump disrespecting the troops!" to be normie libs who support the police clearing the campuses of protestors.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d 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
15d ago
Also the problem is that almost all modern paganism is a LARP. Since there are no unbroken continuities of pagan faith in Europe (apart from the Mari native religion within the Mari Republic in Russia - though Mari pagan organizations have cooperated with the Muslims in Tatarstan), any "revivalist" efforts are basically based on imagining what such a group surviving to modern age might look like.
Of course if you have a racist Asatru group or whatever, formed by people who have explicitly left the Christian tradition because they think Christianity is Semitic and cucked, you're going to have a group that's more racist than Christians on average, but that's also obviously pretty circular. Other pagan groups think otherwise - most pagans that I've met tend to be far left. It doesn't really explain in any way whether a hypothetical pagan Europe without Christianity would be more "based", or whether a hypothetical future one where Christianity has gone away would be.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
I think this belief is, for many, simply downstream from the idea that Ukrainians are just funny-speaking Russians, that the natural course of action for them would have just been to join the Motherland at a drop of a hat and the fact that this didn't happen is an aberration that needs an external explanation, ie. the evil West brainwashing them to fight. The references to videos of stragglers etc. are just marshalled to provide evidence for this preaccepted thesis.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
There are certainly hundreds if not thousands of Russians and pro-Russians on social media talking continously about how Russia will any day now take Odes(s)a (I don't fully understand why Russians are so obsessed with this particular city), which would put them within a striking distance of the Moldovan border.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
Okay, I shouldn't have used the word 'huge', but the point was the comment about how EU states did not "accept men fleeing the draft from Russia", which was not correct.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d 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
17d ago
Like said below, a huge amount of Russians were accepted. At least here, the eventual reason to close the door mostly had to do with the fears there would be infiltrators sent alongside the rest.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d 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
18d 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
20d ago
Back in the time when I encountered the blog, he wasn't rambling about The Simpsons, unless I missed something. That's precisely what I was referring to, he has been spiralling to the crazy direction quite fast before his final act.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
I had read this guy's blog before he got famous. I believe his main theory, the one he's held most consistently, is that Bitcoin is literally a vast Ponzi scheme concoted by some financial cabal intent on using it to crash the global economy. As a theory, it's not that much odder than your standard conspiracy theory stuff; what made it slightly notable enough to get my attention is that usually "there's a big financial cabal there trying to crash the economy for nefarious purposes" are pro-crypto and think that crypto's a tool to combat the financial cabal, not the tool of the financial cabal. As such, he didn't seem "crazier" than your average conspiracy guy; YMMV what the baseline of craziness for that crowd is.
That said, his manifesto and pre-suicide entry offer hints that he had been developing into a crazier direction (I suppose getting into the whole conspiracy milieu can't help), so when you get someone who is going down a slope that way and the somewhat notorious Aaron Bushnell immolation, well, that's what you get.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
The society 'discovered' the incel term due to the existence of a self-declared incel community that alternated between posting highly and violently misogynistic stuff and the sort of self-loathing, it's-over-rope-awaits material that seemed highly toxic for any new guys falling into the community, typically teenagers for whom it was certainly not all over, to assume as a mindset. Sure, the term is misused to all hell now, but any analysis of what started the processes leading to that misuse would have to take that into account.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Yeah. I mean, it would seem to be an obvious from even a cursory reading of Russian history that the one tendency that has stayed from Muscovy times to imperial times to Soviet times to current times has been the continuous tendency for expansion, either through direct annexation or the acquisition of extremely closely held client states. The only expections have been leaders who have been willing to permit territorial contraction for revolutionary purposes or to acquire personal power, and these leaders have then later been greatly denigrated due to this. The finishing of one annexation has generally just tended to be the beginning of the planning of the next acquisition. Much of the "aw, why be so scared of Russia? They clearly have very good reasons for whatever heist they're pulling now" discourse just comes off as an attempt to obfuscate this very obvious pattern.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
The amount of EU troubles and dysfunction that can simply be blamed on Germany being moronic again is not insubstantial.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
If an actual war would break out and Finland conducted a full mobilizatio, we would mobilize 280 000 troops, and at least an implicit common understanding is that a large portion of these would fight in the Baltics. With one of the largest artilleries in Europe and supported by Sweden's considerable air force and naval capabilities, these wouldn't be able to win by themselves, but are nothing to sneeze at.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?
That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Come now, we can go over the transcripts if you'd like. We can even go over Yanukovych's invitation for the opposition to join the government, which was the basis of Nuland's discussions of who would actually work well within Yanukovych's government which- again- was invited and being discussed in the context of Yanukovych running it.
It should also be remembered that the guys that Nuland and Pyatt were talking about - Yatsenyuk - was one of the main leaders of the main opposition party and had already been offered the PMs post by Yanuk as a compromise, making him the most natural leader to take this post after Yanuk and PoR had vacated power.
It's not like they just picked some guy out of nowhere to make him their puppet, the main thrust of the Nuland call was that they wanted to keep Klitchko and Tyahnubok marginalized since the first was too close to the Europeans and the latter was far-right (something that the pro-Russians never seem to mention - the US explicitly wanted to make sure the far right does not get too much power, something that doesn't fit in the idea of US gunning for Banderites to turn Ukraine into Banderastan).
The Nuland call is not inconsequential since it's evidence that EU should operate on its own and not just rely on the US, surely an important message to this day, but it's not by itself evidence that the entire Euromaidan sequence was just due to string-pulling by Americans with Ukrainians having no agency.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
The idea that Putin represents a moderate faction and that Putin is indeed single-handedly resposible for the current phase of war (ie. events after 2022) in no way contradict each other. When the drumbeat for war started in 2021, there were no indications that the situation in Ukraine was about to change in an essential way (ie. Ukraine was about to make a major assault to take back the territories lost after 2014 - if anything the Ukrainians had gone to great lengths to seem nonaggressive up until a few weeks before the invasion) and also no indications that Putin's strict grip on power in Russia was about to be challenged, by the more radical nationalist forces or anyone else. Putin simply saw that the idea that he'd get what he wants peacefully would not happen - the least anti-Russian politician that could get elected in Ukraine at this point, ie. Zelensky, would not budge or be able to do so - and took a gamble.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
The opinion of NAFOids and Redditors can be discounted on sight, but at least here, where the one thing the media or the public opinion beyond the most extreme loser circles is solidly pro-Ukrainian , the media has been bouncing the question of what the actual goals are or should be for quite a bit longer than that.
If this is the referred poll, 35% of youth are answering "don't know" and "won't vote", and right-leaning parties seem to generally be more popular than left-leaning ones.
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