Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
Wait, Wikipedia says that KF and Konsum were specifically the predecessors of Coop?
The Finnish grocery market is similarly dominated by the co-operative S Group, which has also attracted the attention of American progressives, but co-operatives have also always been specifically an alternative to not only standard private enterprise but also public ownership, and have been pushed by non-socialists, too, as such an alternative.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
I continue to await for the rationalist crew to (re)discover Freemasonry, which offers a combination of a possibility for a Deist belief in an Universal Creator, cool mystical rites with actual historical heft, plenty of chances for networking, and a focus on personal development.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Yeah, like, even if you're a guy gooning to porn, you don't generally want to be reminded of being a guy gooning to porn instead of having sex or doing something not involving being ruled by your gonads.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23d ago
My understanding is that Mamdani's rise has basically been achieved mostly by hammering the housing issue. His policies would be unlikely to fix the issue, but that's still there.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
I think that's called "burying the lede". "There being a LGBTQ+" page does not give full picture of what he supports and plans to do.
I was specifically talking about the main thrust of his campaign (in this election), which is different from what he actually supports and plans to do. The campaigns that politicians run don't always correlate on what they will actually do.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
13d ago
Setting aside the whole sustainability of the idea that critiques from some particular viewpoint are somehow invalid because that viewpoint is different from yourself (and it is really a question of perspective - a Communist who attacks Obama for being a neoliberal could claim that the Tea Party types were just demanding Obama to be even more neoliberal than he actually was): no, the example is "There aren't enough Stalins".
Is this a meaningful distinction? It is in this case, since we're specifically talking about cults of personality. If we're talking about parties or ideologies, sure, I could see the point, but we're talking about specific personalities, and in this case a political cult of personality really generally demands complete fealty to the personality, independent of political ideologies. Attacking a personality from the "further same side" is the same as attacking them from the "opposite side" since both are evidence of disloyalty, "further same side" probably even more so. Again, Stalin vis-a-vis Bukharin and Trotsky is a good example.
Another Stalin-related example of how political cults of personality work is a demand that you follow the personality's line even if they make complete u-turns. When Yezhov is Stalin's guy, you agree he's a good Communist; when Stalin gets rid of Yezhov, you agree he was a traitor all along and edit him out of photos. When Stalin declares that Hitler is the greatest threat to Soviet Union there is, you attack Hitler; when Stalin declares that Hitler is OK now and the Western imperialists are the true treat, you change your line instantly and forget your attacks on Hitler even if you're Jewish yourself; when Hitler attacks Soviet Union and Soviet Union allies with the West, you change your line about Western warmongering in the middle of the speech if needed. And so on.
Does this apply to Obama and Trump? I can't think of good examples regarding Obama - Obama changed his line from anti-SSM to pro, but most of his partisans had probably already made the switch already. On the other hand, there just was a case of Trump's actions changing the views of at least a great number of his supporters instantly; the bombing or Iranian nuclear sites, making the GOP support for such strike go from 47% to 77%, meaning that there is at least a large number of Republicans willing to change their stance to Trump's instantaneously.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
If you're an (American - also applies to some degree to other Western countries) progressive Millennial, assuredly one of your chief political formational points was the Iraq War, where, in addition to various other forms of propaganda, you'd be suggested to a huge assay of talking heads, "warbloggers" and the like piously intoning that this is all a part of a battle against Radical Islamic Terrorist and unless you want to support exactly the wars the Bush admin wanted you to support or a course even more radical, it meant that you loved and cherished not only cruel dictators like Saddam but also Radical Islamic Terrorism (and even neglecting to use this specific phrase might mean you're symphatizing with Islamists!) and all of this proved that you were a part of an eternal alliance of Islamists and Leftists and also that you were naive and America-hating and what have you. I'm not talking about the official Bush admin point of view, which tried to avoid direct implication of this being a war against Islam after a few false starts, but the general connected propaganda machine around the WoT.
Then it all went belly-up and Middle East turned into a fire pit and the people who made it happen never admitted anything. I suspect that offered quite an inoculation against similar rhetoric for many Millennials, lasting until now and giving flashbacks right now of similar rhetoric being used by people who were supposed to be a reaction precisely to Bush-era warmongering.
The conflict between various Muslim states and Israel (which, really, is what we're talking about when talking about "Muslims and Jews" here, since there's only one Jewish state) is rather more complex and goes back way more than the 00s War on Terror, but one of the reasons why they get jumbled up is precisely because Israelis themselves worked to jumble them up in the public view when they considered it advantageous to do so.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
I don't think that it was only in that specific context (and a fair amount of things that we take for granted about the Nazi ideology was also at least partly about answering a specific context, such as their particular attempts to appeal to the working class in the specific context of a threat of Marxist working-class rebellion). The Nazis had a mission to combat traditional religious morality and advance a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.
It really begs the question of if the person making the proposal had any awareness of Gamergate back in the day
Probably not.
Even if you don't take the actual hobbies into account, concentrating on hobbies as a way to attract a male audience is utterly tone-deaf. When thinking about politics, men tend to be attracted to political tendencies that conceive politics, or world as general as a struggle - class struggle appealed very strongly to young men during the ascent of socialism, national struggle a bit later, individuals struggling to make a fortune in the market even later than that - and hobbies are what you do when you aren't struggling, even (especially) if they involve a simulated struggle, like video games and sports. "Fight for your right to party" is never an actual platform.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
I don't see why Trump gives a shit. He can't be reelected anyway, so who cares if the voters hate him?
He himself? He's quite obviously someone who is obsessed with whether the people, or at least his own voter base, like him or not.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14d ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat".
So? He's still a Democrat.
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism.
That's not what 50 Stalins means. As it was originally used, it was "Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”"
It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism, not an actual criticism that is simply coming from a different direction than where you yourself are coming from. If we loop back to actual Stalin, it was just as dangerous to attack him from the left (like Trotsky did) as from the right (like Bukharin did), originally even considerably moreso. The only way to stay say would have been not to attack Stalin at all but "attack the system" while praising Stalin, like the 50 Stalins example guy does.
And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this, and the whole piece starts with him taling about how his criticisms of Trump get him constantly attacked by dozens of readers. Not a particularly worthy example, this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14d ago
From the right of the party and from the left of the party. (Of course Sanders is technically not a Democrat, but in practice, he was and is.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14d ago
Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming
The QAnon stuff goes here.
and deifying him in art
...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
29d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant.
Uhh, which one is which? The timeline here shows both Nationalists and Labour holding power for long stretches. I checked some of the recent elections and Labour seems to win bigger victories when it wins, but still, winning is winning.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
But the obvious corollary to that is that if the "new right-wing counterculture" wins, it will then become The Man and there will be a rebellion against it, too, at some point, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
There's an obvious difference between tapdancing on a blurry line and flagrantly, obviously and unambiguously running hundreds of meters on the other side of the line, which is what sending the bombers would be doing.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
I don't think that Sam Hyde is all that well known, or at least much thought of, among the American left. I just checked and there's not even a Jacobin or Current Affairs article about him. Most of the people who do know about him would probably consider him yesterday's news. I recall some mild cancellation attempts during CumTown era on this axis but evidently they didn't much back then, either.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
I also said that there is a LGBTQ+ page. The point is that the main trust of the campaign is the lunchbucket stuff, not the woke stuff.
I'm not sure what the point you're striving to make here is? That he's not campaigning on lunchbucket stuff? The last person I'd trust on giving a honest estimation on what the particular place of importance of trans policies is in his current campaign is an one-issue anti-trans campaigner like Billboard Chris.
Apparently the rainbow was co-opted mostly from the hippies:
"A close friend of Baker's, independent filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr., pressed him to create a new symbol at "the dawn of a new gay consciousness and freedom".[11] According to a profile published in the Bay Area Reporter in 1985, Baker "chose the rainbow motif because of its associations with the hippie movement of the Sixties but he notes that the use of the design dates all the way back to ancient Egypt".[12] People have speculated that Baker was inspired by the Judy Garland song "Over the Rainbow" (Garland being among the first gay icons),[13][14] but when asked, Baker said that it was "more about the Rolling Stones and their song 'She's a Rainbow'".[15] Baker was likely influenced by the "Brotherhood Flag" (with five horizontal stripes to represent different races: red, white, brown, yellow, and black) popular among the world peace movement and hippie movement of the 1960s.[16][17][18][19]"
This seems credible, considering this was somewhat after the Rainbow Family of Living Light had started organizing the still-happening Rainbow Gatherings. I didn't manage to find an explanation of where the hippies took the rainbow from, but the rainbow Peace Flag and the general colorfulness induced by LSD probably play a large influence.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
I'm not sure even sure if that's miles away from Ignatiev's actual position, if you strip away Protestant Christianity or going to Israel and th elike. I was prompted by this whole discussion to go search for his actual comments on the issue and found easily a series of blog texts called "Memoir of an ex-Jew", where he suggests that one of the big problems with Zionism is precisely that it prevented Jewish assimilation:
What is the relation between Zionism and Jewishness? Within Palestine, Jewishness is the problem—not the Judaic religion or the Hebrew language or the commemoration of Jewish holidays, but Jewishness as an institution, an officially recognized identity carrying privileges enforced by the state. The aim of Zionism was to establish a regime of Jewish privilege. It succeeded, so that within the Zionist entity there is no legal distinction between Zionist and Jew. People seeking to establish residency there based on the Law of Return are subject not to a political but to a “blood” test: are they descended from Jews through the maternal line? No matter that the test merely pushes the issue back a generation or more, thereby failing Simone Weil’s logical objection: it works to maintain internal cohesion, and that is enough.
In Palestine the task is to abolish the “Jew” as a public identity. What about outside of Palestine?
As the apartheid regime in South Africa became isolated worldwide, public opinion in Holland was as unanimous as elsewhere, and it never occurred to most Dutch that they owed anything to their Afrikaaner cousins. (Like European Jews, Afrikaaners have their own tales of past persecution: the first concentration camps were set up during the Boer Wars.) No similar rupture between the “Jewish” settlers in Palestine and world Jewry has occurred; in fact, most Jews worldwide continue to identify with “Israel” in spite of all the United Nations resolutions condemning it.
...
So secular Jews fall back on “Hitler” and “Israel” to renew their Jewishness.[4] (“Hitler” and “Israel” are in quotation marks because in this context they do not represent actual determinations but are sacralized.) The Talmud gives way to a secular religion, making Jews the main base for a lobby that provides unconditional support to a regime which but for them would be universally quarantined, a lobby beating the drums for the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic policies of the world’s only superpower.[5]
Their reward is membership in a global fraternity, an exclusive club that allows them to hug their alienation to their breasts and paralyze all critics by waving the “Holocaust” in their faces. The founders of the Zionist movement advocated a Jewish homeland as a response to what they viewed as the rejection of Jews by the majority everywhere, which, according to them, made their assimilation impossible. As it turns out, assimilation has proven to be not only possible but a cause of alarm to Zionists, who see it as a grave threat, far greater than the threat posed by Judeophobes, to the survival of “the Jewish people.” Zionism is the remedy, the final solution to the “problem” of Jewish assimilation.[6]
The entire series is likewise an extended attack on Jewish identitarianism in multiple forms.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Yeah. I move in / post in / am at least aware of many different circles of guys (old high school friends, nerdy types, lefty types from my lefty activist days, church guys, football fans etc.), mostly millennials but sometimes trending towards zoomer, and in all of the circles a clear majority of guys is either married, in a steady relationship or has no trouble with dates, perhaps barring the church guys who obviously are playing a somewhat different game (and even there there's been a number of marriages recently, typically to girls from the same parish). Of course the traditional answer is that since I'm an (early) millennial I can't possibly know what it's like with zoomers, but even the younger guys in my circles seem to be doing OK.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
You can see all this commentary about how the aesthetic of the happy smiling white family is racist, fascist, possibly nazi - it comes from the left. I've yet to see any right-wing critique of such imagery. Discourse about liberating women from the burden of motherhood comes from the left, while discourse about the 14 words and fear of demographic replacement comes from the right.
While anti-natalism is indeed generally left-oriented, this is a bit of an odd argument. Have a happy smiling mixed-race family or an immigrant family in the West, and the negative commentary is going to come from a different direction. Fear of demographic replacement is related both to non-natality of one group and (often over-perceived) natality of another group. Heck, "billions must die" is a far-right meme.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control.
But that would have been right after the years the US federal budget had been running a surplus under the Clinton admin, no?
She was/is not showered with money, attention, fame and general encouragement exactly due to that but moreso for offering the direct possibility or at least a fantasy of sex with an attractive yet intelligent woman for the stereotypically sexless and nerdy rationalist community. It's not progressives in general who are obsessed with Aella (most would of course not even know of her and a large amount of her statements are offensive to progressives as well), it's this one particular group and its subgroups.
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