Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Isn't this just a normie vs. fringe problem? Greer and his politics are fringe. Whatever appeals to millions of normie zoomers is almost by definition going to be normie, just like with all generations, millennials included.
I've sometimes referred to what Greer calls "FanDuel Americans" as "lifestyle conservatism", ie. conserving a certain lifestyle that was common and aspirational in, say, the 90s, perhaps the 80s depending on generation. Apart from anti-immigrationism this sort of a thing seems to form the bulk of the politics of the local right-wing populists.
Support a (relatively, compared to the local baseline) free market, since this offers an aspirational vision of being wealthy enough to obtain a good lifestyle and material goods (a nice car, nice housing, good food, beer and sports, trips to the Mediterranean in the winter etc.). Oppose environmentalism, since a lot of environmentalism is about restricting your access to those things, whether it's limiting driving or making flights more expensive or advancing veggie food or whatever). Oppose feminism, since it restricts (men's) social access to other things, like worry-free casual sex or naughty jokes and so on. And so on, and so on.
The more fringe right-wingers commonly dunk on this sort of lifestyle conservatism, noting that it poses a natural limit to how far they can go, eg. it can be combined with "can you BELIEVE what they're trying to do in Brussels now?" style light euroskepticism but not actually going as far as to leave the EU since that would make travel harder, it can be combined with restricting asylum seeking but not actual They Must All Go style total anti-immigrationism since that would mean no Filipino nurses to keep the health system underpinning the unhealthier parts of the lifestyle (and as potential marriage partners for some). For others, the problem is it can at most be combined with cultural Christianity but nothing more hardcore (let alone more esoteric doctrines) and so on.
Not to mention that if one really believes that this country might be facing a WW2 style war in the future, well, the stated numbers of willingness to fight are high (even higher than before 2022), but if one's politics are based on good living, how far will they actually be willing to go to endure the required amount of hardship...?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Website content includes interface stuff, I should clarify.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Currently, the bulk of my work is website content.
Literary translation has some demand and I know people who do it, the main problem is that the pay is crap compared to technical translation and much of it is dependent on getting grants.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Obviously one of the reasons, but if the role of the translator was to be a pure lawsuit tarbaby, they could just do things with AI and run it past me for my stamping for a fraction of the current cost. As it stands, some part of my work is MTPE (and even this is more involved and thus costlier for them than just giving it my imprimatur), but a large portion nevertheless still isn't.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
They still have Translation Studies at our university, at least, with new translators getting degrees and starting their studies. It might be interesting to talk to some of them to see how they feel about the profession though at the same time I guess that they have already had to respond to "Why are you studying this when AI?" style questions dozens (hundreds) of times already.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
There's at least one user (@ArjinFerman) who has said they use me and my professional career as a translator as an indicator of whether AI is making us useless or not. While I myself am no longer at all confident about the future of this profession (and neither are basically any of the colleagues I've talked with recently) and am thus in the process of obtaining a new degree (pol.sci with an intention of specializing in the interplay of politics and AI), for the last past months I've been swamped with work, and with quite traditional review work of reviewing human translation, at that. Of course that human translation might have been machine translation post-edit work but it doesn't feel like it is.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
But if it is understood as being leaked on purpose then it becomes just more public noise.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
But he is playing to ’a hit’ here. He’s repeated the 51st state line over and over and over again. A lot of his stray thoughts lately have concerned this subject or other potential annexations.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
You don’t need to blackmail rich American Jews into supporting Israel. This, to me, is the single most obvious argument against the entire alleged scheme as a Mossad project. The absolute majority of the important alleged co-accused were Jewish. For every Clinton (who was post-office at the critical time), Trump (random real estate developer at that time) and Prince Andrew (powerless) were at least as many Blacks, Dubins, Dershowitzes and so on, if not many more. Wexner himself (the source of pretty much all Epstein’s wealth) was and is a Jew and a Zionist. If you’re Mossad, you really don’t need to blackmail these people with videos of them fucking 16 year olds to get them to support Israel; they’ll do it for free. The whole point of blackmailing someone is to get them to do something they don’t want to do.
Other arguments are valid, but I'm not sure if this is a particularly good argument on its own. Sure, rich Jewish Americans (and a lot of other Americans besides) will revert to supporting Israel even without blackmail, but there's levels of support; someone who will offer Israel basic support might still balk at giving considerable proportions of their property, offering support in any and all cases including Israel committing a genocide (exceeding current actions at Gaza) or nuking something, committing potentially criminal acts etc.
Also, someone being powerless or low-powered now does not mean they'll be so in the future, at the alleged time of the acts Trump had already expressed interest in presidency, Bill Clinton was a very potential first husband of a future president, and Prince Andrew was a plane crash away from the throne. If you WERE an intelligence agency amassing a blackmail file, of course you'd benefit from a wide trawl among the elite class in general.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
My guess is that he just mostly lets the mothers name the children. The ones with the weirdest names are the ones with Grimes.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
While the specific derangement syndrome indeed originated with W, there was the concept of Clinton crazies before it.
There are accounts (some notable Finnish ones here and here linking to a lot of foreign accounts of the like) that seemingly argue that basically every famous person, including historical ones, is transgender. (Including claiming that famous trans persons are double trans.) It could be a bit, but to me it smacks of actual crazy in a way that goes far beyond even a persistent bit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
...what does Finlandising mean in this instance? During the actual Finlandisation, Finland was neutral, while Canada is right now in a military alliance with the US. A Finland that was in a military alliance with Soviet Union wouldn't be Finlandised, it would have been an outright part of the Soviet block.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
No matter what you believe about the validity of polling, "Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%" does not pass a basic sanity check at any level. He's a wartime president, if his approval was really just 4% in a time like this he'd be shunted aside at warp speed. There are plenty of people in Ukraine at the moment with both the willingness and the ability to remove what would be a hysterically unpopular president with relatively little hassle if it came to that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Third.
I've read quite a few works by Mieville and the one I'd recommend the most is October, which, while obviously and openly biased towards the Bolsheviks, actually managed to give me a better view of the actual timeline of the events during October Revolution than any of the "real history" works I've read on the subject.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
But they didn't leave it at that. They wrote a whole chapter about how it's racist to hate white people within a book where they could have easily not done that and where, indeed, one would expect many if not most of the potential readers willing to agree with the general thesis of the book to find the view that 'anti-white racism' is even possible to be highly controversial.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Googling around, EU's temporary protection scheme was extended to 2026 and Finland, at least, has implemented this on a national level.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
It's unlikely that these people will be deported to Ukraine, as they will self-deport to Europe quite a bit before Homan can get to that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
It's probably comparable to school shooting in the copycat attack pattern way. News about school shootings make murderous loons think "Holy shit, I could shoot up my school!" News about cars being driven to crowds with fatal effects make murderous loons go "Holy shit, I could do so much damage just be driving my car into the crowd at a high speed!"
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
I'm not sure if he was right or not, mainly posted to make the Tsipras comparison which has been on my mind for a while.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Russia was first too ramshackle and corrupt to integrate and then too authoritarian to integrate.
I guess there would have been a window specifically around 2004-2006, but that's a pretty small window.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
W did have military experience, however one might slice the practicalities of his time in the Texas Air National Guard. You're probably thinking of combat experience here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Since he has already made not wearing a suit his "thing", it would have also been a signal for him to wear a suit. It would have probably signified a humiliation and subjection, a kowtow to the new Emperor.
I'm thinking of another leader who made disrespecting sartorial codes his "thing", the Greek PM Tsipras during the euro crisis, who made a point of not wearing a tie until there was a debt deal. Of course, when the debt deal was made, it was basically the same old austerity he had been elected to end, and when he wore a tie it was obviously an indication of submission (though the actual submission had been made far earlier).
Before Summer 2022, though, before the Kharkiv/Kherson offensives, even the mainstream pro-Ukrainian narrative was basically committed to the idea that Kherson and the areas taken in the north by AFU during that time were basically lost for good and any advance in those regions would only be the sort of small-scale grind that we've seen after that, from both sides. Only the more hysterically out-there pro-Ukrainians were saying that Ukraine could actually take large areas of territory back.
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