Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Okay, but paying for what purpose? What's the exact business case for a video showing yourself being threatened with an axe and a knife by an underaged girl?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Hillary's comment was aimed at Bernie, not Trump, though.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Mentioning Perry reminds me that one of the biggest "missionary" American ideological uplifting projects - the post-war reconstruction of Japan - was overseen by Douglas MacArthur, one of the most red-tribe figures one could imagine from that era.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing? Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
When you have a far right whose most important political principle is "whatever makes the libs cry is good", and also "libs" will always end up meaning whoever is the enemy at the time, it should go without saying that inter-far-right wars will always end up acquiring a specifically ridiculous character.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
During the Furry Wars of the 00s it was a common understanding that people who were really obsessed with hating furries were probably furries themselves, or at least felt the call of the fur in some way.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I'm not exactly sure how much the OSHA/FLSA graphs are supposed to prove. It's not like occupational safety laws and measures or general labor laws and measures where things that were nonexistent before OSHA/FLSA, right? Aren't these furthermore the points where these things passed from improvements being workplace-based and affected by labor union advocacy to the state taking control, making the anti-union point less clear?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
You still remember the ad and the company, so clearly it worked at some level.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring.
The NYT article (found a free link here, not sure how many times it can be shared before the paywall goes back up) is about how the ad is not racist (which you should have already guessed from McWhorter writing it) and ends with "Language changes; culture changes; labels are reassigned. And a blond, blue-eyed actress talking about jeans — or even genes — is just a pun, not a secret salute to white supremacy".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Speak out as the tide is changing a couple of years too early? Gulag and execution. Speak out a year or two too late? Irrelevant, timid, late. Timing needs to be perfect.
If we're talking about the period when Gulag camp and execution was an actual threat (meaning the Stalin era - the Gulag system was formally abolished in 1957), the timing was actually very easy - you just did like a loyal communist and condemned Stalin at the very moment when the Party, speaking with the mouth of General Secretary Khruschev, did so.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Also, it quit Warsaw Pact in 1968 due to its alignment with PRC.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I can find all of these within a 10km radius (assuming the Finnish state railroad station is valid for Amtrak and the nearest big box store for Walmart). The nearest farm I could find where I could definitely say what they farm produces potatoes.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
The modern-day anarchists and anarchoid types (not formally anarchist but obviously influenced that way) have rather clearly abandoned the goal of overturning the society totally and replaced it with the one of "existing in the cracks", ie. assuming that the regular square society will still exist in some form and they can get on by with various forms of leeching.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
If there was an actual collapse of the society with warlords roaming about, these would be more likely to be independently-operating army officers a la Chinese warlords of the Warlord Era, not... independent entrepreneurs like these people imagine it would go.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Rhodesia and French Algeria existed longer than Israel and had people who had lived there for generations.
I don't believe either of these is true for Rhodesia, at least, though the latter claim might be technically true extremely tendentiously. Rhodesia existed, either as a colony or a self-declared state, for 56. Since the first settlers moved in at 1890s or so, there might have been some families that would have gone back 3 or even 4 generations, but most white Rhodesians had moved in only after WW2 (the white population was 65 000 in 1940 and peaked at 300 000 in 1975).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
If there was a politician here who turned out to have acted in hardcore porn, it would probably affect their career negatively, but more due to this being perceived as unserious/frivolous than immoral as such. Whether it would be enough to tank the career would probably depend on the party.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
It's not like there's no history of Hitler being used in a jocular manner as well, considering the hundreds of Der Üntergang rant parody videos, including ones where Hitler's supposed complaint is a valid one.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
There's a fair bit of other work (truck driving, security work etc.) that wartime experience also permits in peacetime contexts. However, most of the presumed remittance-sending work would be typical blue-collar labor (plumbers, nurses etc.) that many Ukrainians can do on the basis of that being their job already.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I'm going to guess neither experiment is going to end well here. (I have, for what it's worth, seen a couple of "Adolf Hitler World Tour 1939-1945" shirts around, but have never seen a Stalin shirt.)
Even if we assume that the response would be considerably slanted towards the Hitler shirt getting the worse reception, isn't that quite nuts as a standard? The argument is that "Staling gets a pass", and if the standard of comparison for "getting a pass" is getting a better reaction than Hitler, pretty much everything ever gets a pass.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
The most likely current scenario for Ukrainians managing to claw back some semblance of prosperity is probably a combination of resource deals, adult Ukrainians (continuing their) working in Western countries and sending home remittances a la other Eastern European countries, and tourism to various war-related targets for Western Ukraine supporters and other interested parties once it's mostly safe to do so. These would probably be kneecapped by any scenario that involved a forced turn towards Russia.
While I am undoubtedly living in a country prone to see Stalin as particularly unfavorably (though I doubt the scientific factor of the quotes above), this prompted me to go find an actual poll on the topic. In a YouGov poll of 1000+ Americans, 68% view him as somewhat or very unfavorably (58% very unfavorably), 6 % as somewhat or very favorably, and 26% don't know. So, while there's a contigent who don't know him, "asking random normies about Stalin" does clearly show they do know who he is and view him (very) unfavorably.
Hitler unsurprisingly is better known and even less favored, and there are some other world leaders who surpass Stalin (Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein), but interestingly Hitler isn't even the least favored of the figures asked - Osama bin Laden is.
There has also of course been a push for more remiscining on the evils of Stalin around the West in the recent years due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to new visibility for Holodomor and comparisons of Putin to Stalin etc.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
During the 70s, when Green parties got going, there was a large amount of "new causes" in the air in addition to environmentalism (second-wave feminism, antiracism, pacifism rights for criminals/the homeless/the insane/other subaltern groups etc). Since the established parties were already run by powerful interest groups that would at most humor the new causes a bit as an extra to their established program, a lot of new cause activists attached themselves to the new rising movement, made easier by the shared social milieu and the general tolerance for the new weird stuff that the early Greens had on account of being quite weird themselves. You sort of see the same now from the other side with a large amount of right-wing "new causes", whether they're actually new or not, attaching themselves to the rising right-wing populist parties, which often tolerates these causes better than the established parties of the political right.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
I am not exactly sure how Stalin "gets a pass". If you asked people to list the most evil leaders in world history, there's a high chance that they'd list Hitler first and Stalin second.
One could say that Stalin "got a pass" in the way that he probably died from natural causes (unless one believes that he was poisoned) while Hitler desperately committed suicide, but that's because Stalin won a war and Hitler lost one, not due to the perceived virtue of their causes in the eyes of others.
The point being moreso the "by an underaged girl" part than "video showing yourself being threatened with an axe and a knife" part.
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