Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Again, I'm not sure why people are insisting on this. Is there something particular gained, apart from - again - the geopolitical interest?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
Everyone I've seen using the term "woke right" has belonged to the right-oriented anti-woke group themselves.
It makes plenty enough sense if one just interprets "woke" to mean authoritarianism. There certainly are plenty of authoritarian right-wingers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
Perhaps I should specify I was talking specifically about vaccine skeptics (i.e. those generally opposed to mRNA vaccination), which Bhattacharya (or Tegnell, referred to in another post) wasn't.
Generally speaking what caused this thought was the Joe Rogan quote about "conspiracy theorists being right about everything", in which case it was Rogan implicitly dumping a lot of people with varying views in the same category.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Why would people demand such extreme interventions as imprisoning all of society to protect themselves from a spicy cold, while ignoring the 20 QALY bills littering the ground called "stop smoking", "stop being fat", "stop drinking" and such?
Well, one difference would be that Covid interventions were supposed to be temporary, which they indeed were.
If the government was so gung-ho for lockdowns, why did it then eventually stop wanting them? There's a pretty obvious narrative for why the public fear abated - Omicron meant that pretty much everyone got Covid and it was quite mild, so the fear abated - but I've never seen a proper explanation from Covid skeptics why this happened (after and during many of them were mired in doomerism about how the lockdowns would just go on forever and ever or would be reinstated "right the next winter when the cases start rising again" when that didn't happen), apart from saying that some protests in a few countries led to a worldwide ending of restrictions, which would probably make them far and away the most effective protests in the history of mankind.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Insofar as such half-joke-half-smear claims go, "JD Vance had sex with a couch" is rather benign compared to, say, "Big Mike Obama" or the implications of "I have information leading to the arrest of Hillary Clinton" and the like.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Trump had four years to make a deal with Putin already on Ukraine that would solve the conflict for good (after all, it started in 2014). The most notable attempt, the 2018 summit, achieved exactly jack and shit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
It's also quite likely that Republicans were implicitly or explicitly saying that Joe is demented long before he was actually exhibiting signs of it, which must have created a bit of a boy-cries-wolf effect for many Dems.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
In a way, though, I rather envy the Democrats' ability to snap quickly into place around a candidate, utterly unbothered by whatever claims they made or positions they staked out a mere week ago.
Republicans demonstrated much the same ability in 2016, though, albeit on a longer schedule.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Insofar as I've seen it here, the three main reasons to be pro-Israel are:
- religiousness (religious right might not be a potent force here but there are a number of people matching that category, and they tend to be evangelical and fervently pro-Israel)
- owning the libs (nobody cares who ADL or JIDF are here, of course, or even knows them - it's mainly that the left has traditionally been pro-Palestine for anticolonial/(post-)pro-Soviet reasons, so the enemy of my enemy thinking has quite naturally directed right-wingers to be pro-Israel
- related to above, pro-Americanism and the idea that to be America's best pal, especially now, also requires supporting Israel.
As /u/2rafa says below the Israel supporters tend to be center-right or right-wing, even among the center-left the sort of fervent Zionism one might encounter in Democrats or Labour is basically non-existent here and the explicitly anti-semitic far-right is a minimal force.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Okay, can you list the "etc.", "etc.", and "etc."? Because whenever I've seen this claim the reference point is always the SCUM Manifesto, and that sort of a thing kind of makes one think there are, in fact, no other reference points.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr 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
1yr ago
When I was little, I was disciplined a couple of times by hair-pulling, and it made me too fearful of parents and their reaction to, say, meet with friends outside of normal meeting times, which in turn contributed to my social life only really getting going once I moved away from home to university (19 in theory, 20 in practice since I returned to home city for conscription in the nearby brigade).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
If so, we'd be seeing more crimes in the advanced welfare states than in other states, which we aren't seeing.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I'm just reminded of how the Finnish Civil War is treated in Finland. The Finnish Civil War was an acrimonious conflict with consequences that reverbate to this day; I've met people still in the present day who basically define their political alignment through what side their great-granddad fought in.
Still, the society's grand narrative since WW2 has been reconciliation, with Winter War holding a particular mythological position as the war were the "sons of the Reds and the Whites fought side by side", and the welfare state has also been seen as the fulfillment of Red goals of social equality for the working class. The reconciliation also meant that, for instance, while there had only been markers and statues commemorating the White victory everywhere, it was also now OK to commemorate Red soldiers with graves and markers; during May Days left-wing orgs still ritualistically hold events at those graves.
However, I don't think anyone has ever proposed that reconciliation meant commemorating Red generals! Granted, they were, to put it mildly, not particularly militarily impressive figures, but I don't think there are any memorials for them anywhere. If someone even proposd to put one up, well - I'd guess they'd be seen as the deepest, dankest Stalinist in existence, the sort of a guy who goes through his daily life wearing a Soviet uniform and an ushanka.
OTOH, there are memorials to CGE Mannerheim, who led the white forces, in all of the major cities. During some statues fracas in the US a left-wing youth organization propsoed moving them to museum, this proposal was widely condemned by basically all of the other major political forces, and was then immediately shelved. Then again, Mannerheim also led the Finnish forces in WW2.
One thing I've never quite caught on is how may memorials to Northern generals there even are in the US, since all the culture war about Confederate statues gives the impression that the entire South (and some other states besides) is downright peppered with them, that there are memorials to Northern generals only comes up when someone poses a "They'll come after Grant next!" hypothetical, and I haven't seen basically any mentions of notable Black Civil War era figures getting memorialized, apart from maybe Harriet Tubman?
In the end, putting up a statue to some guy is basically equivalent to putting up a sign saying "This guy is a great guy! Everyone should emulate him and be like him!" and if the society has decided that he's actually not a great guy, it would seem as natural to put the statue away as it would be to put such a sign away, though it would indeed be more prudent to put it in a museum than destroy it entirely.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I meant the military fatigues, specifically.
Insofar as I’ve observed on social media, the online American factions really playing attention to Ashton-Cirillo are NAFO shibas, who would support anyone talking about killing Russians, and American conservatives who are casting out to find any evidence of Ukraine being ‘work’ for domestic culture war reasons and also probably because it makes them feel better about implicitly supporting the invading side.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
A rather simple explanation for choosing Ashton-Cirillo as a spokesperson would be being one of the few native English-speaking volunteer fighters with media experience compounded with a distinct lack of military experience.
Sure, the military fatigues are a media strategy, but do you really think that the main audience for that one is "only left wing of the Democratic Party"?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Trump wasn't running against some generic "Left", Trump was running against Biden, and Biden's practical policies towards China have been identical to Trump, if possible even slightly more hostile.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
In my experience the easiest way to deal with the various dietary restrictions is to just offer vegan food. It's not foodproof but it's usually suitable for most.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Well, why not blame Trump (even if you also blamed other figures, including great many Democrats)? After all, Trump has jocked his big beautiful vaccine every chance he's had. If there's a trial for Fauci, surely Trump face the same trial as well - unless the whole thing was just about going after the left/Democrats?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Remember when countries with no black people were having BLM protests?
As far as I remember, there were maybe one or two such protests in Finland, and they were typical fairly small solidarity protests that are very typical in European left scene regarding whatever issue is globally at stake in the media. Ie. one day you're organizing a BLM protests, another day
it's about Polish abortion laws, then on yet another day it's about Kurds in Syria or whatever.
On the scale of things the European BLM protests were very much a minor affair (outside of maybe UK?), yet they seem to be one of those things that continue to loom large on the subconsciousness of this forum, even though even among things that might serve as indicators of the spread of progressive American values globally or the general Americanization of European mind or so on, there are many better examples.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
COVID passed through their society in 2018 and served as an immunity buffer for the wuhan variant as did most of southeast Asia
Why didn't it pass through the entire world, then?
the reason has been their covid strategy despite other countries who didn't use their covid strategy with far more reliable numbers and still had similar outcomes in the first year
Which countries?
and other countries which did use their strategy and with far more reliable numbers and it failed spectacularly
Which countries?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Their "apply huge hammer any time there's been a case or two somewhere" strategy has worked thus far. Sure, they are probably not telling the whole truth about whatever epidemics there have been, but it's unlikely that COVID has actually passed through their society in a big way, like in, say, India; they're still virgin territory, and the reason has been their COVID strategy. There have been spates of large-scale authoritarian measures, but at some point COVID has then gone away, for a while.
Of course there's been a lot of countries that have applied a hard strategy until it was decreed that Covid has evolved to a status where nothing works any longer in keeping COVID out completely, or almost-completely; it's conceivable this simply is the point where China has to admit the same, though that won't stop them from trying for quite a bit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
During my over-a-decade experience in left-wing politics, I have in fact never, ever seen anone advocate for immigration for "displacing whites" in their own country. For full disclosure, over a ten years ago I was in a British Trot conference (SWP); apart from the whole business giving a good education on what Trotskyism is and why it absolutely is good there are almost no Trots in Finland, I listened to a speech by Tariq Ali where Ali offhandedly mentioned that white people are predicted to become a minority in US in the coming decades and the young British Trots cheered and clapped; then again, even in this instance, it was (at least for the clear majority) not their country that was being spoken of. (I'm not even sure if I should mention this anecdote since it feels like the sort of a thing where most of the replies to this comment inevitably would end up revolving around it.)
In a domestic context, though? Never, and I've had conversations on a wide variety of topics with people at all local levels, really, often with alcohol involved. The whole idea - and the right-wing obsession with this belief - is considered terminally strange.
Yeah, things like "40 years old childless women are viewed as empowered role models" always make me ask... by whom? Certainly not by the droves of guys posting about empty egg cartons on the social media? But somehow those guys never seem to make it into the assumed group of viewers indicated by the passive tense, as if they - and countless other people who might not post those things but still think that way - are somehow not a part of the society.
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