Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
It's like many other libertarian arguments in the sense that I get the feeling that I'm now supposed to be a libertarian because a libertarian called an institution they oppose a Bad Word. Governments are like drug cartels. You think that drug cartels are BAD, don't you? Taxation is theft. You think that theft is BAD, don't you?
The thing is, beyond that this is not really as much an argument as an appeal to kneejerk reactions related to certain terms, why do we think those terms are bad? Because what is good and bad is normally (which is not to say always) set by government, and "drug cartel" and "theft" refer to relations that government has set as bad. Drug cartels are business undertakings selling chemical products that government has set as illegal, instead of ones that the government has set as legal (the difference between the two not always being too large). Theft is bad, because it's the taking of someone else's property, and when you get down to it, property is also a relation set by the government; when something becomes your property, what happens is that in cases someone else tries to seize it, the government promises to attempt to recover it or at least compensate you, and to punish those violating your right to property.
As such, saying that government is a cartel is a nonsensical, since governments define what cartels are, and are not going to define themselves that. However, as said below, in the absence of a government, a drug cartel might become a government; it's just going to be an arbitrary and capricious one, perhaps preferable to some cases of formal non-cartel governance for some people, but generally not an ideal arrangement for anyone beyond cartel leadership. (And even in cases like Juarez, it's not probably as simple as drug cartel just replacing a government wholesale; there are probably going to be some government services left, for instance, and - without knowing more about the situation - it might even be that a drug cartel is going to operate with the tacit acceptance of government in some area, obviously deriving benefits that offer stability from this arrangement, even becoming in essence an informal paragovernmental unit.
Indeed, these comparisons just come across as libertarians saying that yes, especially in a modern society, there's always going to be a government ruling over you. If the current formal governments collapse, there's going to be a drug cartel government. This comparison is supposed to get me to oppose government, because of the associatin with the Bad Word 'drug cartel', but if anything it just reminds me to keep working harder and smarter to uphold the rule of actual governments, lest they be replaced with another, more capricious government-form institution, or weaken to the point they essentially have to offer that institution enough power to essentially become the formal government's sub-unit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Yes, the biggest Soviet killings would have been the Holodomor, Kazakh famine, ethnic campaigns and the Great Purge, the three first of which mainly implicitly or explicitly targeted other ethnicities than Russians (unless one is Great-Russian enough in mentality to just consider Ukrainians to be funny-speaking Russians) and the last targetting communists of all ethnicities.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
What carrot would he have had? Weapons shipment? Little need for those if Ukrainians were hell-bent for peace. NATO membership? Explicit Russian demand was for Ukraine to not be in NATO, at this point. EU membership? There was a certain event some years ago that means Boris Johnson did not exactly have leverage on this point.
I'm not sure what other stick there would have been apart from UK actually invading Ukraine itself, which, uh, would have certainly caused a lot of questions, home and abroad.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Still gets me that the word "fisking" - a word invented by online warbloggers for their supposed eviscerations of Robert Fisk articles and which, insofar as I remember it, often devolved to just laying the article out sentence by sentence and replying to individual sentences with "Oh come on!" and "Surely no-one can believe this!" -style fare - continues to live, even though most people would in fact probably agree that Fisk was more correct about whether Iraq War was a proper decision or not than the warbloggers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Yes, sure, all that is older than the Cold War, but it was Cold War that created the suitable preconditions for civil rights legislation to be actualized. Plenty of seeds existed, but the field needed fertilizer.
My understanding is that while the Northern public opinion, at least, was that segregation was a bad thing, there was a lack of political will to make the actual push, as there were fears that the South would get mad and violent (or at least cause political problems). The urgency of the global struggle was an essential factor in creating that political will, which was of course then compounded the fact that Southern resistance turned out to be largely a paper tiger.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Yes, but that's how it would be presented, at the very least.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
So the answer is "the deniers don't have a coherent historical narrative that makes sense"? Considering the manhours of energy spent poring over minutiae in camp construction and witness testimony, one would think that there would be at least one attempt at constructing an overarching history of the Jews in WW2 Europe from a denier perspective, without being tied to just being commentary on the mainstream historiography (which has produced a wealth of such narratives).
At least according to Wikipedia, the official German estimate of the deaths from Eastern European expulsions of Germans is in the ballpark of a bit over 2 million (which has always been the number I've understood to be correct, before this) and the theories that the actual number is around half a million continue to be "challenger" theories. Even so, whichever the number is, we're talking about whether the amount of Germans dying in Central/Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 is around 0,5 % or 2 %, not whether the amount of Jews dying in the same region in 1941-1945 is over a half or in low single digits; the sheer scales of population reduction in certain demographic group are completely different.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
It's my honest appraisal of the situation and the motivations among the politicians and other media types, based on a close monitoring of the situation and numerous conversations I've had with such people.
continue getting regular injections for all time!
But... that hasn't happened? How many people have gotten a Covid injection for the last year or so? Or in the future?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I think that a large part of public health authority decisionmaking was simply trying to take burden off their workers, who often were particularly horribly overburdened at the start of the crisis but without matching bonuses or pay increases (since the future of the budgets of those institutions had also, for obvious reasons, gone completely up in the air). Basically the only way to placate the workers they had at this point was lobbying for restrictions in hopes that it would somehow reduce this burden of work. However, increasingly as the crisis went on, this was also countered and balanced by businesses lobbying for reopening (including vaccine passports as a partial mean of reopening).
What about Ibram Kendi's whole oeuvre?
Kendi's most famous book - How To Be an Antiracist - actually mentions anti-white hatred as one of the types of racism to be opposed, which of course would be far cry from whatever the Five Percenters were saying.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Is there even formal affirmative action for LGBT+ people in firms like this?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I remember when "free helicopter rides" was a meme in certain right-wing circles, certainly. I've also seen enough far-right memes of trans people literally getting hanged or put to death camps to suit myself, but they're also kind of hard to search for due to various search algorithms in play, and so on.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
It's a bit hard for me to see it that way, since, as said, insofar as I've been interested in the whole debate, it's been through the demographic question, dovetailing with my interest in various other demographic questions. The whole debate about door hole placement in Auschwitz or the specific details of victim testimonies has never held my interest, and I have little to say about it.
However, howevermuch one would want to say "reversal of the burden of proof", the question is still there, isn't it? It doesn't just go way by such a reference. While the Holocaust has been, of course, related to many criminal cases, in the sense of this forum debate we're not talking about a formal criminal case debated by a court - it's a historiographical debate, one with many different varying facets, one of which seemingly is one that revisionists wish to avoid (apart from saying "Look, Sanning!")
Furthermore, Sanning's book is not just about debunking standard claims about the Holocaust - he makes some quite far-reaching claims himself, including one about there being a genocidal murder of the Polish Jews, just one done by Soviets instead of the Nazis. This highly unusual claim comes with precious little proof of this happening, especially considering - as linked previously - that we can now peruse Soviet files on this era, and they do not show a transport/labor camp operation of the claimed sort. If one uses Sanning as reference, shouldn't there be at least a bit more effort to offer proof for his particular claims?
That is a stretch, there is simply no comparison between the Soviet Atrocities and the Holocaust in the influence on American Culture and foreign policy.
This isn't just an American forum, though, and Holocaust revisionism is not just an American subject. I would argue Soviet atrocities loom larger than the Holocaust in Finnish consciousness, for instance. I am not quite sure whether the Holocaust has just the importance accorded to it by Holocaust revisionists in American consciousness, either, the explanations of American support for Israel that are just based on presumed Holocaust debt of guilt have always felt a little pat to me. Of course, not being an American, I can't feel this in my bones in the same way as an American presumably would.
Even beyond that, though, I'm not asking why Holocaust revisionists don't exert the exact same energy on Soviet crimes. I'm asking why they take it as given that (roughly) the mainstream narrative, or one more strident than the mainstream narrative, about the Soviet crimes is though even though they apply a vastly higher standard of skepticism on the mainstream narrative on the Holocaust, even though much of the popular understanding on Soviet crimes is similarly based on personal narratives and memoirs, Solzhenitzyn - still arguably one of the main sources on the Gulag camps, and Soviet crimes generally, on many - being an example of this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Have a Holocaust megathread and after it starts dying naturally put a moratorium on discussions on the topic (unless it's cleary a byproduct of some other topic, aka there's a new Holocaust-related film that causes a huge culture war or something) for some time.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Insofar as "globohomo" exists, surely Russians are as "globo" as the West, considering that they have no compunction about there being, generally, global organizations, global treaties, global frameworks etc. that nations are supposed to obey - they simply want the whole constellation and governance of the system to happen on a different basis than now (ie. one that would favor Russia more).
Thus, it all would boil down to "homo", which I'm choosing to interpret as meaning, obviously, homosexuality (I'm aware there's an explanation of the term where it means "global homogeneity" or whatever - this has always sounded, to me, as credible as "No, officer, don't ya know that ACAB means All Cats Are Beautiful?")m, and that would then boil down to it being OK for Russia to bomb Ukraine's infrastructure to smithereens, occupy vast stretches of land, kill untold numbers of Ukrainians etc... just to prevent there being a Pride parades in Donetsk and Sevastopol. Forgive me for not considering that enough of a reason for, well, anything resembling Russia's current actions, really.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Yes, that would be among the secondary effects (ie. lockdowns might cause some of it, but some increase of sedentary behavior, or a fair amount of it, might have also occurred due to avoidance of COVID without any lockdowns at all).
Good enough for Israeli Law of Return.
But also not enough to be sent automatically to the camps in Nazi Germany (unless there were other complicating factors, of course). Why would this be the relevant criteria, again, especially - as stated - as there is no evidence that Lenin was ever aware of his Jewish heritage?
Half of the top contenders in the Central Committee of the Communist Party to take power after Lenin’s health declined in 1922 – Lev Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev – were Jewish.
And they lost.
Jews made up 20% of the central committees until 1921, when there were no Jews on this leading governing body.
Which is more than expected on the basis of demography, but hardly anywhere close to anything forming a majority, or even a commanding plurality (especially considering that Jewish Bolsheviks often fought among themselves - Zinoviev and Kamenev turning on Trotsky etc.)
To me it seems that there are fairly good neutral explanations why there were more Jews than would demographically have been expected in early stages of Bolsheviks/CPSU; it was natural for Jews to gravitate to revolutionary left-wing politics in a situation where the right wing was openly antisemitic as a matter of course and centrism often meant the tacit preservation of antisemitic structures, and as an added factor Bolsheviks had a specific need for people who knew German (Yiddish would at least offer you a good basis for this) for diplomatic purposes in the early years, with many Bolsheviks of the Jewish ethnicity having prominent diplomatic roles, and also the language factor allowing many Jewish Bolsheviks to become exiles easily, benefitting from hanging around with Lenin who was also an exile. Once those factors became less relevant, the power of such people diminished rapidly, often with fatal results.
(Of course one could also argue that exactly none of them were Jewish in the religious sense, as Bolshevik Party required strict atheism of all of its members anyhow...)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
That's not true. They'd do it if they had no other choice, and had to wait for a better opportunity.
So how is this supposed to be falsifiable then?
What they want to do is clear from messaging sent to the public, which is still: immigration good, and skepticism of it is racist.
Literally the messaging sent to the public by EU is this:
Migration is a complex issue. The safety of people who seek international protection or a better life has to be taken into account, as do the concerns of countries who worry that migratory pressures will exceed their capacities.
To address the interdependence between Member States’ policies and decisions, the European Commission proposes a new EU framework that manages and normalises migration for the long term. This new system should provide certainty, clarity and decent conditions for the women, children and men arriving in the EU. It also allows Europeans to trust that migration is managed in an effective and humane way, fully in line with our values and with international laws.
Migration is context, you have to balance a bunch of stuff, the top message is that immigration must be managed - which by necessity means that the borders won't be open, which was the question being discussed.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Good wine, bad wine, fancy wine, cheap wine - as long as we're talking about red wines, more than one glass will inevitably give me a headache (like an instant headache, not hangover headache) anyway. Beer for me, too.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Another question: did they hurt their election chances by overplaying the trans issue?
Sure, I don't have anything to go for this one expect one tweet by an obviously hostile source, but still, it seems like an issue where a lot of normies are just going to be befuzzled by why this sort of a thing would even be worth an ad, or two.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Non-central to what? Right-wingers in general?
Are they just supposed to not mention his recently expressed political views in connection to an attack on a politician?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
In my experience, the altmed crowd is pretty flexible about this, ie. "anything goes as long as it's not conventional". And I've myself tracked a number of local health mommy / healing crystal types drifting steadily towards rightwards during/due to the COVID period, it's not just a theoretical movement.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I dunno? My occasional experience in looking at German news media content about Die Linke, which hasn't been necessary for some time considering how powerless Die Linke currently is, did tend to emphasize it's DDR roots.
I'd imagine that if we looked at recent German media coverage about Die Linke vis-a-vis FdI, it would probably not need to emphasize the DDR thing that much, since Germans already know what Die Linke is and how it came about to be, while they would very likely be encountering Meloni and FdI for the first time right now.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the problem is. The fascism thing absolutely is a part of FdI's party history, should they NOT mention it for some reason? Censor this rather important part of understanding Italy's political history regarding the election of this party?
Not national party boxes, but "Green Party voter some years ago, nudist activists, generally hippy-dippy, now posting Mike Lindell and conspiracy theorist stuff" would fit him quite well to new-ager-to-far-right-within-last-two-years QAnon/antivaxx pipeline box.
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