Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d 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
27d 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
9hr ago
My wife (who has cut back on her social media quite radically recently) said that especially mothers with young children are suspectible to social media, since they are so attached to their children 24/7 that when they get a little break they have little time or energy to do anything else than browse a bit of Instagram.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11hr ago
I thought it was pretty obvious, even a given, that the "what happened in 1971" site had chosen the year 1971 deliberately to imply that the only/chief reason was that US scrapped the gold standard for good then.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Remember the "Muslim Demographics" style videos with unsourced claims that Muslim women would have an average of 7 kids per women? Islam certainly hasn't been much better than other faiths or creeds at preserving fertility once you have a country sufficiently exposed to the modern online world.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
/u/johnfabian referred to a good 15-year window after 1991, ie 1991~2006. Do you think this is the period when woke radical leftism had taken over the humanities? It certainly precedes the word "woke".
A claim that Soviets killed 10-15 million instead of 40-60 million would be an exceedingly odd one from a point of radical leftism, since it's still far too many killed people for communists to be comfortable with it, and anarchists and others would presumably not care that much either way, since they would see Soviet Union as a bad thing either way.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d 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
5d 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.
A lot of acts with queer themes did well. The UK act did badly because that guy just couldn't sing.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d 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
6d 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
17d 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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d 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
20d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d 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
22d 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
28d 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
29d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
Being really really pro-Ukraine (ie. above the usually required level in Western societies) is pretty male-coded too, though, in my experience. Most NAFOids don't seem to be female.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
I don't think that Musk is particularly a contrarian figure. He has drifted to a certain viewpoint and crowd - 'alt-lite', for the lack of a better word - and rarely seems to take an opinion that doesn't fit to that mold. (Indeed, he's already a meme for not taking a firm opinion on stuff where he seems to be doing so at all - "Interesting", "Looking into this" and so on.)
An actual contrarian in the sense that I'd mean would be someone like Michael Tracey, who has a tendency to drift into a certain crowd and instantly start taking viewpoints contrary to the ideas of that crowd, just to challenge them. Ie. when Tracey seems too close to the right he starts shitting on them, when Tracey got too appreciated by pro-Russians he started saying Russia is not right about everything, so on.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
The anti-Covid protests in Europe drew hugely from the related altmed and new age spheres, which are/were populated chiefly by women. This has had interesting sociological effects, for instance I've personally noted that shortly after this there was a new influx to churches (like my local Orthodox church) of women (and some men) from new age circles, and while I don't know if it's directly related to Covid stuff, one might guess it's at least partly related.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10hr ago
Even if they hadn't done it, a bleeding or otherwise clearly shellshocked kid would still be emotionally more directly affecting than a wanted poster. And, again, there's a lot of bleeding Palestinian kids.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Also Journey to Fusang by William Sanders, a much lighter book in tone.
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.
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