Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
If the contrarians have, indeed, went with the line "vaccine is not as efficient in combatting disease or particularly preventing its spread as was claimed particularly during the most fervent phase of vaccine advocacy", of course they don't have to answer for tinfoil conspiracies.
However, there are also people who did, say, claim that the vaccine is going to kill or sterilize something like a quarter or a half of the vaccinated population in a very short order, few months to an year, and who are now doing victory laps when it is revealed that, indeed, vaccine is not as efficient in combatting disease or particularly preventing its spread as was claimed particularly during the most fervent phase of vaccine advocacy, even though that's quite a different claim from the most lurid vaccine genocide visions.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
The women's movement and sexual liberation movements were separate movements, even if parts of them were at times connected and at other times different parts were counterposed to each other. (Many) women accepted the sexual liberation narrative for the same reason many men did: because they wanted to have sex. Some of these women called themselves feminist and others didn't.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
No, because I'm talking about the general form of popular antivaccine discourse that I'm encountering randomly online, ie. chiefly on Twitter.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
"Russian nationalists" is quite obviously a different thing than "Russians", just like "Jewish nationalists" (arguably a more compact name here is "Zionists") is different from "Jews". Russian nationalists, as a specific ideology, obviously didn't fare very well in the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union, but Soviet Union was still fundamentally mainly a Russian project (though, as said, often supported and advanced by Russified and Russianizinf minorities), a continuation of the previous Russian state, just as the current Russian Federation is the (direct) continuation of RSFSR, and Soviet Union more generally.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
What happens to Kanye himself is largely irrelevant. I mean, he is a schizo, both regarding his longtime erratic general behavior and the specific form of his theorizing - unless one believes that Black-Hebrew-Israeli generated narratives in general within the sphere of credible politics. The point was that even this schizo, fundamentally, cannot be stopped from spreading his point of view, and the effect seems to be rather a negative than a positive one for the Jewish community.
I guess that's how it must look from a de facto ethnostate.
One might look at it that way. From my perspective, though, all the Russian nationalist talk about "it was the JEWS who did the Soviet Union! Not us! The Jews!" just looks like fundamentally a gigantic pile of cope, a complete deflection of national responsibility.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
It's not like "crazy" is an on/off switch. There are examples of people where you clearly can blame insanity and not any particular ideologies (ie. James Holmes), but it's also perfectly possible to do an attack due to ideological motives while having some sort of a mental illness. Of course we don't know what's the case here, since we don't really know all that much at all about this case still.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Which NoI-aligned people have been involved in partisan politics?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I don’t think it was stylistically the same as that Carlsbad.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Whether it's correct or not, "Trump is a Russian asset" is far less crazy as a conspiracy theory than QAnon, as a whole. Imagining that a politician/businessman/public figure might be secretly in cahoots with a foreign country through blackmail or some other means is not an insane idea in itself, there have been plenty of such figures throughout world history. The QAnon metanarrative contains a huge number of intricate pieces and fantastical, improbable parts that would need to be true for the entire worldview to be true, not to forget that it involved a large number of specific date-based predictions on unprecedented events that didn't come to pass.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
As dreadfully offensive as they are, I don't believe any sane person will argue screaming nigger or insisting on Twitter that transwomen aren't real women is remotely equal in offense to a literal terrorist mass murder on American soil.
Uh, what? The equivalent of those things in this comparison is, of course, not terrorist mass murder in itself, but unsuitable political discussion of the response to the said terrorist mass murder, or discussion of terrorist mass murder in ways differing from the general narrative, or simply doing anything that might be considered as potentially offending people in the wake of the said terrorist mass murder.
I think that the go-to for the censorious right is the worst event in our nation's collective history and the go-to for the censorious left is being racist or anti-trans itself tells a story.
I'm pretty sure the worst event in your nation's collective history is, for differing definitions of event, either the American Civil War or the collective institution of slavery, both of which of course loom large in any discussions of left-wing cancel culture.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d 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
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
22d 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
22d 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
22d 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
23d 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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23d ago
Perhaps cramped was the wrong word, I absolutely do understand how different having one's own room is to not having one's own room. I was strictly talking about the square meters/feet as a metric here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Yeah, most of the stuff that people deride "brutalism" for is less a conscious choice of some boutique architechtural style and more just wanting to do stuff for cheap, something many countries particularly did in the 60s-70s when urbanization was in the full swing and housing needed to be created fast for millions of rural workers moving to the cities.
A lot of people want "prettier housing" but it's much rarer to actually want to pay the cost - one can see it in how often such desires are phrases like "they should have built that like this [decades ago]..."
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
On Earth 2 we're not surrounded by soul-sucking Brutalist architecture that seemingly popped out of nowhere
...you think that Nazi architecture was any less brutalist?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Again, I wasn't talking simply about Africa, and the sheer size of population alone would mean this sort of a policy would inevitably become costly. After all, it's not something that America is doing now in a major way at least, despite there being unfriendly regimes - Black Hawk Down is still a point of reference.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I thought Austin Butler was a great Feyd-Rautha. Great use of microexpressions in many scenes, like the one where Baron Vlad gets murked. Throne room showdown was OK as well.
There was a lot more of changes to the book than in the first movie, particularly Chani's expanded role. I had seen people complain about this before the movie and had dismissed it as similar to some people bitching about Lady Jessica's greater role in Part 1, but here the complaints had more valence - while I've never understood the people who think that Zendaya is ugly (unless it's just plain because of, well, her heritage), particularly since she's playing a survival-oriented desert nomad here, but she's just not that good of an actor, and I'm not sure how Villeneuve's going to handle Messiah with the changes they did here. OTOH a lot of cutting decisions were good (the confusing Gurney-vs-Jessica plot from the book, for instance, and I was even OK with how Alia was handled, probably better to do it like Denis did here instead of a murder toddler.)
I wasn't talking about Motters here, more referring to my observation of some local Covid dissident types.
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