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Stefferi

Chief Suomiposter

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joined 2022 September 04 20:29:13 UTC

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User ID: 137

Stefferi

Chief Suomiposter

7 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 20:29:13 UTC

					
				

				

				

				

				

					

User ID: 137

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Just to be clear, I didn't try to imply it was a fat city - just commented on the basis of my own experience.

When I lived in Eugene for a few months in 2008, it certainly didn't seem to be particularly fatter than any comparable European city, save that there were slightly more of morbidly obese megafatties going around.

When the left talks about fatness being caused by society rather than the individual, well, one of the things is what the society might be able to do to try to get people be more athletic, such as the cities maintaining bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks and climbing gyms. They don't just spring out from thin air, after all - I guess that there would be a possibiliy for private ones, too (climbing gyms, certainly), but the others are a pretty classic case of things that localities do on public money.

When the right bangs on about private responsibility, it is, on one hand, just phrasing something that is self-evident and, on the other hand, does not seem to have the required effect; you just get fatties who recognize they're fundamentally at fault for their fatness, and then... just keep on being fat, as a group (obviously there are numerous individual cases where getting some tough love helps make life choices).

The American-installed Iraqi government, with the help of Americans, put down several rebellions against its rule, though, and is still standing. And - assuming we're referring to the American phase of Vietnam war - Vietcong in practice operated as a branch of the NVA, a regular army.

Well, yes, if you're motivated enough then you can go just about anywhere, I guess, but the border closure makes Finland a particularly pointless choice.

Actually, the Finnish government might have considered such an attempt a jackpot, since it would have meant that their plan for formalizing pushbacks as policy would have received a major boost and it would have been very difficult for the opposition to block it from being passed in expedited bill processing.

The Finnish-Russian land border is completely closed at the moment.

What is US supposed to do to get Maduro out of power that would work better than what it hasn't done already and wouldn't leave to a huge amount of migrants? Because to me all it seems there's left would be either an invasion or endless Cuba-style "well, if we keep the sanctions on a bit longer then surely they'll work this time".

While, as said below, the Harkonnens aren't humanized in any way (if anything their evil becomes of a more inhuman variety), it's always been a funny argument that GoT did not feature "good and evil but just shades of gray". Ramsay Bolton is absolutely evil to the core, Jon Snow a classic good hero character.

Villeneuve's interpretation of Harkonnens as quasi-alien type of evil with Gigeresque aesthetics was one of the best interpretative choices vis-a-vis the other interpretions and even the book that he made.

I would have also cast more Middle Eastern actors, but at least this argues that actually Fremen are Chechens.

But Americans have insistently told us europoors about how virtually all of Europe is poorer than virtually all of America anyway, over and over again.

"All of Europe" includes a large number of countries that, comparatively recently (merely a few decades ago) went through the failure and collapse of an entire economic system.

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]..."

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?

Königsberg

It's Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, more than anything, down to its name (Tallinn used to be named Reval).

I'm rolling my eyes when any kind of centrist/liberal content gets criticised

I think the burns on Moralism make the most sense when one understands two things: firstly, Moralism is basically EU: The Ideology, and secondly, Harry specifically choosing to be a moralism is basically him going "Yup, I live in a colonized hellhole that's being exploited by foreign powers and serve as their enforcer, and I'm completely OK with it, because hey, what's the alternative?"

Within the context of Revachol's particular situation, at least the other ideologies are trying to do something to the situation (even the ultralibs if Joyce can be trusted), while the Moralists are just sunk into self-serving complacency that allows this shit to go on indefinitely.

Disco Elysium goes hard after leftists, but it goes after them in a way how leftists go after leftists, ie. all the burns about leftists just infighting and getting nothing done are stuff I've heard about (and witnessed) countless times myself in leftist circles. Also, many of the most notable leftist characters in the game are the sort of types leftists would encounter themselves: I've noted a number of times to friends that Evrart Claire literally not only behaves but kind of looks like a somewhat notorious minor Finnish left-wing union boss who features in news from time to time, and "The Deserter" (an old bitter communist who thinks he's fighting fascists but is homophobic, racist and sexist enough to pass as one himself) is not an unfamiliar figure, either.

There's plenty of things in DE that would code as woke (fascists are consistently portrayed as bad and Harry becoming a fascist is basically equivalent to him choosing the "evil" path in a standard RPG, Harry's complicated relationship with women is on stage several times, "race-neutral casting" of NPCs etc.) but I rather feel people don't see it as woke simply because it's good; the same thing as with some other media with similar features I've seen like Bojack Horseman, The Expanse etc. that some anti-woke people evidently just see too good to be woke.

Yes, of course there are migrants coming. No-one has denied that. That's different from the dumb catchphrase "infinity migrants", let alone the implication that EU is specifically regulating AI to facilitate immigration.

There is, in fact, not a flow of infinity migrants into Europe, and this increased regulation of AI is happening at the same time as increased regulation of migration in EU generally at the EU level.

Just to clarify, I didn't really just comment on this referendum (there's probably indeed a large factor of the government just screwing up), or just Ireland in general, but - as is tradition in forums like this - just used the topic to pontificate on something else I've been thinking about recently.

My feeling is that Ireland, like many countries, has been for some time in the "happy valley of liberalization" (of course it's only happy if you support liberalization), ie. the moment after the previous religious basis of conservatism has been broken and hollowed out (often quite dramatically in Irish case with the Catholic church scandals and the like), but before a new nationalist basis for conservatism has been constructed.

The anti-immigration riots and such are signs that there exists an inchoate feeling that can later be used to construct the new nationalist basis (sure, "Irish nationalism is different, it's progressive etc." - the same has been heard in many other countries just before a new right-wing nationalist movement has started to speed up), but the pieces that would make it are still finding each other.

There are politicians and movements sniffing the air and figuring out whether to catch the train, but they are still either too beholden to the old, obsolete model of religious conservatism, too afraid to lose whatever influence they have in the current system, too extreme and offputting, or simply too crazy. At some point some of the the religious conservatives will find a suitable synthesis that allows them to tacitly downgrade the most musty-seeming views, some of the ones still close to the system will detach themselves or be pushed out, some of the extremists will learn to smooth away the sharpest edges, and the crazies... well, they probably won't get better, they'll just be sidelined.

Once this happens, there might be new parties growing so fast that the liberals will feel like the rug is being pulled out under them; of course, nationalist conservatism will be different from religious conservatism, but it can still at least throw a spanner some way in the general process of liberalization.

Nonsense. The Soviets never demanded high immigration from their puppets. Likewise, the Americans (at least those from the 1950s) didn't demand high immigration either. The "import third worlders en-masse" agenda is from the woke bug that bit all Western societies in the 2010s.

Most of the non-Western immigration to Europe is not due to any of that, but rather the need of labor hitting all Western societies after decades of low fertility.

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.

I'd say that the 1990s were a confusing era since there was a combination of general belief in optimism and progress and "all the big questions have been solved" coupled with a pop culture characterized by Twin Peaks/X-Files/Matrix style ide that this is all just a fake exterior and below it dark and evil things were happening. Musically you had grunge, NiN, Marilyn Manson, nu metal etc. - and the idea that all these were just fake rebellion for suburban kids whose lives were so good they had to create imaginary angst for themselves. Even the rave/dance stuff seemed to attempt to go for the "partying in the face of the apocalypse" vibes, even if it was, in the end, partying for the standard reasons of partying.

When it comes to the UFOs, there has existed a longrunning conflict, if you can call it such, between UFOlogists who subscribe to the "nuts'n'bolts" explanation - there's nothing supernatural here, they're beings from some other planet flying physical ships - and UFOlogists who subscribe to theories as UFOs as interdimensional creatures, ie. offer an explanation not covered by our current understanding of science, a supernatural explanation.

There's also a longrunning trend of nuts'n'bolts ufologists eventually becoming interdimensionalists and starting to include all sorts of woo in their spiel - the current congressional effort seems to be leaning that way already, and it's understandable that secular lawmakers, which Democrats would generally tend to be, would be leery of this direction, since there's a short skip, often barely disguised, from "UFOs are interdimensional creatures" to "UFOs are demons, let us pray".

Personally, I've argued for some time that this whole flap has other explanations already, but frankly, if I had to accept that the UFOs really represent something extraterrestrial, I'd go with an interdimensional explanation, too, since the interplanetary one doesn't really make sense logically at all. Why the heck would the ayyys be sending ships here just to... do stunts? Where are the promised goods?

Also, regarding conspiracies, I'd say that there are two separate reasons why different fractions of the left are leery of them. The more mainstream liberals have adopted a trust-the-science, trust-the-experts sort of a worldview, which doesn't really offer that much space for conspiracy theories, especially considering that most conspiracy theories usually just boil down to the supposed experts and technocratic governance just being a smokescreen for some sort of a sinister plot to tell lies to take power.

This doesn't mean a complete aversion to conspiracy theory - you can still decribe conspiracies by dark forces seeking to dethrone the benevolent experts to take over, like the idea of a Trump-Russia plot - but it's also not particularly necessary to do so, you can always just blame the forces of stupidity for the fact that the best and the most scientific advice is not being listened to.

Meanwhile, on the socialist left, where there's more distrust of the experts (particularly of the mainstream economic and foreign policy set in the West), there's an aversion to conspiracy theories, since it's seen as an "easy", lacking explanation for things that have deeper structural causes. Ie. socialists find it weird when right-wingers bang on about the WEF, specifically, despite WEF representing a group of capitalists, since the suggestion seems to be that the problem is just that there's this cabal of bad capitalists and if we just expose them and... somehow... get rid of them, then capitalism will start working properly and all would be good again.

Between these there has traditionally existed a populist left that's too left-wing to be liberals but not really socialist enough to be socialist, and this crowd has generally been more amenable to conspiracy theories, but there just seems to be less space for them than previously.

The Fremen canonically originally roughly from the Nile area. While there should have been more Arabic Fremen (i wonder if they're saving Rami Malek for Part 3?), having black Fremen is in no way against the canon, and there's nothing wrong as such with casting Zendaya as Chani.

It's probably common for fans of books with new movie/TV adaptations be overtly worried about new audiences understanding the plot without the (often frankly not all that necessary) context the books provide. I remember that when GoT TV series was announced a lot of posters on westeros.org were convinced that it's going to be pared down and dumbed down a lot since the "normie viewer" would never understand ASoIaF plots and so on, and then the first four seasons were pretty much straight adaptation from the books and the normies mostly understood it just fine.