Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
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
4d 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
10d 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
1mo ago
I'd put it like this:
One of the problems is that we are so used to living in the World That Liberalism Made that we can't really often see how radical the core ideas of liberalism were and, indeed, are (if you don't take them as given). The core of liberalism - things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process and equality under law, representative democracy, rights of the individual etc. – had to actually be argued through and often implemented through revolution and war.
After all, why should someone be able to speak if they are – insofar as the society sees it – wrong? Why should someone be able to spread a false religious doctrine that leads people to hell? Why should a baron be treated the same for slapping some nasty unwashed little oik as the oik would be for slapping a baron, considering the baron is an obviously superior creature to the oik? Why should the have the same vote, in fact? Why should slavery be abolished or women have rights, considering none of the past societies abolished it or gave the women rights? And so on.
During the modern era, these liberal values won so throughoutly that even other ideologies have basically been leavened with liberalism so much that they often have more to do with liberalism than with the actual original ideology. What’s social democracy? Socialism plus liberalism. What’s the basis of modern rightist thought, at least in Europe? Nationalism plus liberalism. What’s Christian democracy? What you got when Christian thinkers decided it’s time to put the traditional monarchist and pseudo-feudal political philosophies aside and create a doctrine compatible with liberal values. And so on.
If we think about ideologies like fascism or Stalinism, they are basically what you get when you take an ideology like nationalism and socialism and remove all that liberal leaven, indeed replace it with open scorn for liberal values. During most of the Lenin-Stalin era, it was an open doctrine that religion needs to be extinguished and class enemies don’t have any rights, least of all a right to a due process the same way as a proletarian communist would have. When the Soviet Union started moderating after Stalin, it meant that it started lazily pretending that it respects liberal rights, even if it didn’t do so in actuality.
Likewise, the Nazis poured scorn on liberal values, like the idea that a Jew and an Aryan should be treated similarly. Even today, more extreme someone is considered, the less liberal they basically are, both implicitly and explicitly. 100 % nationalism (or racism, with race seen as an extended nation), 0 % liberalism. This framing explains, for instance, why the liberals see Nazis and Stalinists as two peas in a pod (“horseshoe theory”), but these ideologies themselves consider themselves wide apart. The liberals can see the lack of liberalism as an unifying factor to these ideologies, but the anti-liberals themselves, while they can grasp the idea of liberalism as an ideology in itself and not just the “water we swim in”, also tend to see it as something ephemeral and fake, not something where its lack by itself would be enough to bring those lacking it to the same camp.
Likewise, it explains why it’s so easy for many to think that moderate social democrats are basically just Communists in disguise and democratic nationalists are just Fascists in disguise; there is an unifying factor between the moderates and the extremists, and what differs is the degree of the liberal leaven in there. Thus, if one is predisposed to believe that liberalism is fake and ephemeral, destined to fritter away when the going gets tough when whatever disaster that one believes is going to hit the humanity will hit it, it’s also only too natural to believe that once that happens the “mask goes away”, the moderate social democrats instantly radicalize to communism and normie nationalists go Nazi.
Now, what about the situation described by Silver? We’re talking about an ideology that’s undeniably on the progressive end of the scale but not necessarily the same as socialism. Rather, I would say that it’s what you get when you take all the minor ideologies that have attached themselves to the liberal framework and then remove the liberalism in the centre.
Remember, we live in a society suffused with basic liberal values, which means that liberalism itself has started to seem like it’s unnecessary. Indeed, for a long time, liberal parties and movements in most countries suffered – the various social democrats, Christian democrats and others had taken up their values and combined it with other attractive ideologies. Likewise in the US both parties were basically representative of various forms of liberalism.
As liberalism started to lose its luster due to this, various other ideologies attached themselves to this framework. This was made easier by the liberal idea of free debate and the “best argument”, allowing new upstarter ideologies like environmentalism, third-wave feminism, various minority nationalisms etc. to get a hearing. Likewise, various liberal ideas were subtly molded by the ideological struggle with Marxism-Leninism, which left an imprint in the developing concept of human rights, the crowning achievement of Anglo social liberalism – affected by Soviet and Third World insistence that the same ideas of free speech should not apply to things like fascism and racism.
What you get when you have the “successor ideology”, “social justice” etc. described by Silver is what you get when you take these attached ideologies and start removing the liberal framework. It’s a liberalism built against itself, a collection of various ideas that have started seeming like natural parts of liberalism, yet which can be implemented without democracy, free speech or anything like that, should there just be enough political power. This is why it all seems like so mellifluous and hard to define. We’re not talking yet about a concrete ideology that can stand by itself – just a collection of ideas without the usual supporting framework. That’s what “successor ideology” seems to refer to, the idea that since liberalism is now useless, it’s being succeeded by an illiberal ideology that has not yet fully formed. It’s entirely possible that it all collapses before it has managed to form itself into something new.
These basic liberal values are, indeed, bread and butter for Silver himself, literally, as he has built his career on the back of the assumption that there are fair elections underscored by fair and free speech that he can pontificate upon and write about. However, he’s also been liberal in the sense the anti-racism and other such causes seem very natural to him – the idea that there are now activists who support them without giving much credence to the liberal values causes pain and confusion. It’s only too natural to fight it by referring to the lost liberal framework – we’ll see how it succeeds.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
The claim isn't that every single Ukrainian wants to fight, just that most do. If a country has conscription, there's bound to be stragglers even when most conscripts would not complain about going.
Making analysis of anything on the basis of online videos circulated with partisan debators with an obvious intent of altering the information landscape is generally not a good way to make sense of events in any case.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14d 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
28d ago
Muslim terminology is becoming popular online — I have seen cases of Muslim expressions like inshallah and mashallah entering terminally online lexicon (which is the first step to normie lexicon).
"The normalization of cyka blyat in terminally online lexicon - the first step towards Russianification of the Western mind"?
There's been decades of predictions about the weak secularized West falling prey to the Islamic influence ("strong horse defeats the weak horse"), and it never seems to materialize. The converts are the same as always - some (mostly women) converting for their spouse (and I rather believe that people tend to overestimate the number of such converts since they see white or light-skinned immigrant Muslims and confuse them for converted Western women), a smattering of criminals, a few "religious travelers" who might soon travel right out of their Islamic waystation after travelling in. It still is considerably more common for people wanting a "strong religion" to choose another variety of Christianity - say, Orthodoxy or Pentecostalism - from their usual one.
Meanwhile, at least this Substack article presented many strong arguments for Muslim integration (really secularization) continuing in France. Of course that can't be generalized, since France puts a specific attention on laïcité, and really all such statistics not only differ considerably country to country but also immigrant group to immigrant group.
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities.
If this did happen this way - millions of Jews were killed by disease and starvation, the Germans would absolutely be culpable for all of these deaths beyond what might be calculated an expected amount of disease deaths in a non-locked-up population, since they had spefically closed the Jews (and others) in these camps and were thus liable for their general welfare. This would end up being simply another Holocaust narrative. Gulag camp deaths caused by starvation and typhus are generally counted as Gulag camp deaths just as much as the shooting deaths, indeed many of the most notorious cases involve starvation.
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
So basically we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads), but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation and basically having a free pass to get the hell out of the collapsing post-Communist Eastern Europe by moving to Israel?
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
Some of the most popular "alternative theories" offered by denialists in past discussions have involved the Soviets conducting a genocide of deported Jews exactly like this - killing (perhaps not by gas but otherwise) hundreds of thousands of Jews in Central Asian camps with zero historical record, zero or close to zero camp guard memories of precisely this sort of an event happening (particularly risible since these guards would not be the most virulent 20th century European racists and indeed, as anti-Semites remind us, a number would have been Jews themselves) etc etc. Just vague gesturing that this must have happened since there has to be some, no matter how threadbare, explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question, and we know it can't have been that they were killed in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust didn't happen.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Germany actually recently did criminalize denying genocides in general and has also recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.. Holodomor denial is, unsurprisingly, already directly criminal in Ukraine, and the general denial of Communist crimes is criminalized in several Eastern European countries. By your logic, this should make you equally, or almost equally likely, to question whether the said Communist crimes happened.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d 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
5d ago
Yeah, but it manages to say fairly little about photography, either, and certainly nothing that needed the fictional second US civil war backdrop to say.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d 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
19d ago
Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?
Jordan allowed Israel to use its airspace to counter Iranian drones and shot some drones down itself. I'm not really sure how neutral that counts as, at this point.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
Okay, so how, exactly, did Boris Johnson stop them? What's the specific mechanism? Screaming? THat's not really enough to force anyone to do anything in geopolitics.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d 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
18d 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
8d 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
11d 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
11d 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
19d ago
The baby boom really defies easy explanations. In many countries it didn't even really peak with the immediate post-WW2 period but around the late 1960s - the UK, for example.. "A combination of sustained economic growth, hopeful prospects for the future and a strong family-based culture" would probably be the best explanation, since all of those are cultural trends that would cover all of (Western, perhaps in some ways even Eastern) Europe at this time - around the 70s you really start getting the fear of nuclear war and environmental crisis, societal atomization, and the waning of immediate post-war growth period in.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
"The Ukrainians only fight because they are conscripted and forced" is also something that I've seen for the entire war. The whole idea seems to have originated as cope by Russians and pro-Russians who claimed that since Ukrainians are just Russians who speak funny they'd run directly into the arms of Mother Russia once given an opportunity and who have then flailed to find explanations for why that didn't happen. You don't fight for two years with this intensity with forced and conscripted troops. It's possible that this might change at some point, but even then I'd need far more evidence to actually believe it to be true this time.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
This frankly seems like a bit of an overthink. The Fremen (canonically originating from Egypt or the general Nilotic area) are black or brown. The Great Houses, again canonically distantly from Greece and Russia (though it would be amiss from me to not to mention that the surname Harkonnen originates from Finnish), are white. Most of the nonwhite characters died in the previous film.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
Every major character apart from Chani was white (as in, portrayed by a white actor), though.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d 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.
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.
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