Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
The pro-Russians have called the slow pace of grinding village conquests by Russians an escalating pace or words to the same effect for close to three years now, the same time they've predicted the imminent collapse of the front, Zelensky getting couped and so on.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Insofar as I've understood the specific criteria for ineligibility for asylum in US is membership in a Communist or otherwise totalitarian party, which is something that might apply to a Pinochet regime opponent but by no means was guaranteed to be the fact.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Obama wasn't a community organizer when he ran for Senate, he had been a state senator and a constitutional law lecturer for years.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Countries like Sweden didn't go through the war, and the Communists (and socialist parties in general) were never as strong in Western Europe as after WW2 (countries like Italy, France and Finland most clearly, but most Western European countries saw stronger-than-ever numbers for the Communists in the immediate WW2 aftermath).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.
DRC (official population estimate: 100 million) has been in a state of chaos and civil war for decades, yet the amount of Congolese who have immigrated to the Western countries has remained comparatively small (120 000 formally in Western countries according to this link, even if you triple or quadruple this number to account for the illegal migration it would be less than a 1 % of that official estimate.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
My understanding is that the situation with American Orthodoxy is that there's a fair amount of new fervent converts, at least compared to the previous baseline, but the general trend of secularization is also causing people from traditional immigrant communities (Greeks, Russians, Serbs) to drop out, and that they thus far balance each other out. However, if this continues, at some point the growth in new convert-run parishes could be expected to overtake the secularization process, especially if there are marriages and natural growth (though that might require appeal beyond the current category of young men...)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
I don't think that Buddhism as such will become that important, but Buddhist stuff will continue to percolate to what could be called "Western folk religion" (compare to Chinese folk religion), ie the mix of vague Christian remnant beliefs, New Age / occult influences, Eastern influences, (often imagined) Western pagan stuff, superstitions, pseudoscience, modern cults like UFO/UAP enthusiasts and QAnon etc ec. that really characterizes what many "secular" people (and some ostensible trad religion believers) actually believe in, at least at some level. Perhaps at some point something new will come out of this mix.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
One thing to remember that the professions with the sorts of people who keep the UFO racket going - aviators, intelligence types, journalists, politicians etc. - probably contain a fair amount of people for whom "finding out the truth about the UFOs" has actually been a major motivator, or at least a motivator, for selecting the said field, and who are thus primed towards interpreting any potential evidence indicating likewise to that direction.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
If there was a blackmail info collection operation, I don't think the purpose would be directly "making Zionist billionaires turbo-Zionist" or something like that but more like "This info might come useful at some point. How? Who knows? Black swan events and all that" style.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
Liz Cheney is an unimportant bit player who hasn't been connected to the movement-right for years and Musk is specifically currently trying to start a party that's "neither left or right" (whether that's true or not, that at least is the self-description), so I'm not sure why these would be the figures for estimating this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
Whether "woke right" exists or doesn't, "The Right" surely does, and this US administration does rather effectively speak for the Right in the American context.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
Wouldn't one expect a cabinet secretary to normally speak, at least to some degree, with the voice and the authority of the President? Different in that way from legislators (or someone lower in the departmental totem pole, like Brinton).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
They think its a complete coverup, particularly the 180 turn of Patel and Bondi after an administration 'campaign promise' of sorts to get to the truth of things. Kash Patel's Joe Rogan appearance started the backpedaling with things like 'oh I didn't know the cell camera's were broken, but I've reviewed the footage'.
Are they fingering Trump too, or is it a case of good Czar, bad boyars?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
I'm interested. I'm in the same boat where the horror genre holds zero interest in me but films with horror elements can be good. Se7en is a good example of a film with horror elements that is not a horror movie, for me. (When I've mentioned something like this some people go "well, would you be interested in psychological horror instead of supernatural horror, then?", but it's not that, either, it's something else.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
(Hence the recent proliferation of militarist neocon feminist girlboss politicians all around the EU, for example.)
I'm not sure what this refers to. The two examples that come to mind, Sanna Marin and Kaja Kallas, were mostly elected for non-Russia-related reasons. Marin got his job due to internal Social Democratic party machinations, did this before the Russian invasion, and is not particularly militaristic for a Finnish politician. The biggest reason Kaja Kallas is in office is that her party, Reform, is Estonia's natural ruling party, and her father Siim Kallas was previously the PM (and Siim Kallas, in turn, got his job in the typical Eastern European way of having been a ranking CPSU member and making an advantageous switch to the capitalist side when the time was proper for that).
Which climate scientists have made a prediction including a date of extinction for the human race, particularly one with a date that currently counts as definitely falsified (presumably in the sense of having already passed)?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
It is amusing that it starts with "(I think this is a pretty important article so I’d appreciate you sharing and restacking it—thanks!)", since I would imagine that most randos exposed to arguments like "utilitarian veganism means that eating honey is one of the worst things that you can do" to conclude that utilitarian veganism is stupid and must be resisted, rather than stop eating honey. In general I cannot recall any thought experiment style arguments on ethical veganism that haven't just ended up pushing me towards a wholesale rejection of animal rights as an ethos.
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.
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