Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Let's start off (unless someone fires a link earlier) with this one: Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics
“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden. Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative.
The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.
Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass.
The article goes on to show that previous generations in UK and US have indeed formed a remarkably similar pattern of starting out voting for left side main parties (Labour/Dems) and moving rightwards (to Tories/GOP) with age, but Millennials aren't doing that, and are if anything sticking firmer with the left side parties with age.
When it comes to Britain, in particular, I suspect that Brexit may have a lot to do with this. For Millennial Remainers, in particular, the whole thing has evidently been a horrorshow; from following various FBPE types and hearing from friends who have lived in the UK, the thinking basically goes; for your entire life your country has belonged to the EU, which has given you ease of travel and has seemed to be without issues, and suddenly a bunch of (mostly) Tory-voting boomers decides to take the country out of the Union, and no-one still has managed to explained to you exactly how Britain has benefitted from this, or what fundamental reason for this there even was for the whole Brexit, beyond "Well, it's not as big a disaster as Remoaners are claiming when you look into it" (or, possibly, "Fuck you, Remoaner! Elitist! Take back control!")
With the Tories then increasingly becoming the party of Brexit, it would be little wonder if such types would continue to give Tories the wide berth, even if they start getting to the age where traditionally Tories start becoming more and more attractive, as an option.
Of course, US and UK are a bit expectional in how strongly there's an age-related left/right split with young voting for left parties and the old voting for right parties. It would be interesting to see if this replicates in other countries where Millennials and younger voters have recently been trending rightwards and where centre-left parties have for some time been more popular among the old than the youth, like Sweden. (Indeed, I already saw on Twitter that the effect is not replicating in non-Anglophone West.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Covid global health emergency is over, WHO says
Yes, I know, Covid "has been over" for well over a year, pretty much no-one cares about this topic anyway, but I wonder if we'll now start more getting full appraisals of the entire Covid period. It is bewildering to consider how little people (apart from the two formed and ongoing "Covid tribes" - lockdown/vaccine skeptics on one hand, zero-covidists still wearing masks on the other hand) care about Covid now, considering how large it loomed for two years. For instance, I watched some Finnish election debates a few months ago, and the dire financial/general status of the health care system was frequently discussed with almost no mentions and indications that the Covid crisis and the decisions done during this period might have had anything to do with it.
What are all the ways people here would say the pandemic era changed the world? I don't think that all the effects will be visible or evident for years to come - there will yet be a lot of stuff where people in ten years might say "of course the Covid era changed that" but isn't properly yet considered to be a Covid effect.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9mo ago
Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.
Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
OpenAI announces leadership transition
The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
A member of OpenAI’s leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI’s evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company’s values, operations, and business, and already leads the company’s research, product, and safety functions. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
I posted this in Twitter and someone speculated that it's because Altman paused subscriptions on Tuesday, but that would alone seem like a pretty inconsequential reason for this sort of a major move.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.
It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.
CAN YOU RECOGNIZE LEFT-WINGERS FROM RIGHT-WINGERS FROM FACE ALONE?
I've seen numerous people on Twitter etc. claim that they can indeed do this, so I've created a quiz to test this claim. This quiz has 20 Finnish MP's essentially selected randomly (I took their photos from the Parliament's webpage, organized them alphabetically using medium icons and then just removed the middle part of this collage, leaving a bit over 20 photos: after removing the Swedish People's Party members for not fitting the ideological scale that well and taking one out for wearing a party pin, I was left with exactly 20 photos). Note: pics are displayed in randomized order.
The MP's represent six parties, but all you have to do here is select: Left or Right? Those representing the parties Social Democrats, Greens and Left Alliance are Left, those representing the parties Centre, National Coalition and The Finns are Right.
I will offer one hint: you cannot use tie color/dress color (ie. politicians wearing party-color dresses and ties) to make consistently correct guesses.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Ted Kaczynski - the Unabomber - is dead.
I always found it interesting how, when I first learned about this guy, he was mostly portrayed as an ecoterrorist. The spectre of ecoterrorism and animal rights terrorism actually probably loomed larger in the 90s and early 00s than now, which might explain this. There was even a popular quiz with Unabomber and Al Gore quotes, purporting to demonstrate that the former American VP was just as extreme as the Unabomber.
However, if one actually reads the manifesto, or his other work, it soon becomes fairly clear the ecological aspect was not the central point of his critique, and didn't actually feature in it too much at all. He clearly felt some sort of a connection to the anarchoprimitivist and eco-anarchist movements, but mostly in the way of believing they might be allies and converts to his cause, not in the way of actually being one.
No, Ted K.'s true problem with the technological society was that it made people leftist. Since this is immediately obvious when one actually reads the manifesto in even a cursory way, and since during the last decades, parts of the extremely online right seem to have adopted "Uncle Ted" as some sort of a prophet, I don't suppose this actually needs much demonstrating, but to quote it:
Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)
Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.
Not that this criticism is INVALID, of course, as such - I just always found it interesting how, despite the fact that Ted K. got what he wanted and his manifesto was printed very visibly in newspapers - the actual contents then went pretty much ignored until recently, and even now are acknowledged mainly in small and fringe circles. I don't suppose his death will ameliorate that situation.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
My understanding of American presidential elections is that they have always pretty much been a no-holds-barred cage match, behind the scenes, with both parties (not their ticket headers but lower figures) continuously accusing the other party's candidate of everything under the sun and negative campaign galore being the theme of the day.
However, there's now a suggestion that in this particular election, with this particular candidate, the Dems should have refrained from all this and, in effect, fought with one hand behind the back, that there was something particularly ungentlemanly about going after Romney in the typical way. And the people claiming this don't even really like Romney all that much!
FINLAND MOVES TO CRIMINALIZE HOLOCAUST DENIAL
I've been making some updates previously here on the new right-wing government including a nationalist party, Finns Party, and the ongoing racism scandal after it turned out that some of the ministers from that party had a history of racist comments, even playing around with Nazi implications. You can read this, this or this for more context.
For some time now, the actual survival of the government has been predicated on an "anti-racist statement" demanded by Swedish People's Party, the most liberal and pro-minority (chiefly their own Swedish-speaking minority but also all other ones, in some way) party in the government.
The statement was published yesterday and mostly just contained platitudes, basic repetition of already-existing laws and government program parts and promises to "launch programmes", "improve dialogue", "support the work done" etc that basically amount to very little. The actual actions also contains parts obviously intended to placate Finns Party, such as new campaigns against honor violence, gang violence and so on, as well as a promise to look into banning Communist symbols alongside with Nazi ones.
You can read it here if you wish. Its main purpose, of course, has been to allow everyone to save face sufficiently to keep the government going on, so that it can get on to doing the other tasks that the parties it consists of wish it to do, ie. implement a pro-business economic policy and limit immigration.
However, the one concrete detail that has aroused some attention abroad has been a promise to criminalize Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial has not been formally criminalized in Finland and before this Finnish governments have actually resisted proposals and demands by institutions like EU to do so, chiefly on the basis that antisemitic acts could already be charged under ethnic agitation laws if need be.
In practice Holocaust denial is very rare in Finland and there's been only a couple of cases that have seen court action, mainly since Holocaust in general is not as important in Finnish discourses as in many other countries. Finland has had a tiny Jewish community, maybe a few thousand at any given era, and during the actual event Finland deported eight Jewish refugees to Germany but otherwise did not follow German demands to relinquish the country's small Jewish community, and Jewish soldiers fought on the front while Finland participated in Operation Barbarossa, with three Jewish Finnish soldiers even being offered the Iron Cross by Germans, who had troops in Lapland.
In general, it might be said that one reason for the comparatively less attention being paid to Holocaust than in many other countries is that Soviet crimes against humanity loom so large. Thus far, for instance, while other European countries have commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, Finland has had a “Remembrance Day for the Victims of Persecutions", and the local press often uses this day to talk about Soviet persecutions, like the Soviet ethnic campaign against Finns in the 1930s. (This is one of the things that the anti-racist statement also promises to change.)
I have sometimes seen local Nazis post Holocaust denial stuff, but even this happens in a very perfunctory way and is clearly not a top concern in comparison to immigration or, say, GLBTQ+ stuff. Maybe that is because internationally a popular antisemitic argument has always been blaming the Jews for communism, socialism, feminism and the New Left, and Finland as had plenty of all of those (a socialist revolution, one of the largest Communist parties in Western Europe per capita etc.) with barely any Jewish participation.
One of the few actual instances to have actively demanded Holocaust denial criminalization and generally stronger actions against antisemitism are the Christian Democrats, a small socially conservative Christian party, which is firmly pro-Israel and based on evangelical movements that subscribe to dispensationalist theology, which is currently also in gobernment. As such, it's very likely that this was one of their demands. However, it doesn't seem to have been one that has caused particular troubles for the Finns Party to accept, since it's not related to their true concern - immigration - and the party also has some history of giving soft support to Israel simply on the basis that the Finnish Left is firmly pro-Palestinian.
As such, I don't expect this to be particularly consequential, since it basically criminalizes something that has very rarely happened anyway and which would arguably often already be banned under other laws. If anything I'd expect it to increase Holocaust denial, simply since there's already a conspiracy theory community suspicious of anything the government does and who might be expected to go "If it's banned there must be some truth to it, eh?"
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
In Ukraine news: Russia to withdraw from city of Kherson
As said in the article, this seems like big news, since Kherson was the only "big city" Russia has conquered in this period of war. Even the pro-Russian sources I follow on Twitter aren't trying to spin this ("Feint! Planned withdrawal! Actually good for Russia!") any more.
Of course this means that the new defensive line is harder to crack, but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed, at least. Where will the Ukrainians push next?
Josep Borrell (EU's top diplomat) summarizes EU's reasons for internationalism: EU is a garden, the rest of the world is a jungle
Mr Borrell said in his speech on Thursday: "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build - the three things together.
"The rest of the world [is] not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.
"The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means."
This really comes off as a Kinsey gaffe: Borrell is getting reactions of shock simply for elucidating what has been the actual motive for various EU policies for a long time. It's not really about humanitarianism, it's about maintaining EU's soft power and stature so as to keep "the jungle" sufficiently away from Europe in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways - ie. avoiding having to just push the refugees back to the sea, or shooting them at the border.
I summarized earlier how I view EU's migration policies - often portrayed as "open borders" or "EU working to fill Europe with Africans and Muslims" or whatever - like this, and I think it fits in with Borrell's comments:
EU is not taking in an "endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East". The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population. Out of this, ca 600 00 are asylum seekers. If EU was actually intent on ushering in an "endless number of migrants", this would be an incredibly weak effort, considering how many Africans and Middle Easterns are actually willing to move; it would also be strange for EU to run a whole agency (and keep giving it more and more funds, and turn a blind eye to its migrant pushbacks) to coordinate ways to keep unauthorized migrants, mainly from these areas, out.
EU countries do, indeed, wish to utilize migration to save the welfare state, but when it comes to first residence permits EU issues for employment/education purposes, far and away the biggest group, already in 2021, were the Ukrainians. That indicates who EU wants to work, currently, and it's not hard to imagine that there's a number of Eurocrats currently seeing the Ukrainian refugee flows to Europe as a major boon, presenting an employable and uncontroversial constituency for further work. EU does, at times, weakly try to get Eastern European countries to take in more refugees, mainly as a form of "burden sharing" to take the load off the Western countries, but as one can see from their demographics, these efforts are not really an example of "cajoling, threatening and twisting arms", since that sort of a thing would presumably actually get results.
EU migration policy can mostly be understood through three mandates: getting a modicum of labor-based migration (often from other, non-EU European countries, though that's a diminishing category) and then trying to balance the quest to maintain some sort of a de jure refugee/asylum system, since that is an important part of EU's self-image/external image as the bulwark of the international system and its underlying human rights treaties, and the quest to de facto ensure there's not too many asylum seekers and refugees, let alone illegal immigrants, since that would be destabilizing. The push/pull created by the conflict of the last two mandates then makes the whole immigration policy rather an unwieldy contraption, not really something that most mainstream EU forces are willing to discuss.
Good news everyone! We now have a formal, scientific scale for measuring wokeness! You can find the related preprint here.
Finland's newspaper of record, Helsingin Sanomat (HS) summarizes the meaning of "wokeness" (it's called "woke" in Finnish too, using the untranslated term - of course, it's an Anglo concept, after all).
In Finnish, woke means being awake, but it could also be translated as awareness.
Its supporters think it's relevant, and opponents think it's too sensitive to see things like racism, sexism and discrimination against gender minorities around.
There are two other English terms associated with the phenomenon: cancel and callout culture. Both mean actively intervening in the politically questionable activities or writings of others, for example on social media. Cancellation takes the interference up to a boycott of the person.
UNIVERSITY OF TURKU psychology researcher Oskari Lahtinen has developed a psychological meter that can be used to study the prevalence of woke attitudes. In his research, he calls them attitudes of social justice.
The research is now in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. You can read the preview version on the Psyarxiv service .
"I have been interested in how common such attitudes are in Finland," says Lahtinen.
"I take a small risk when I study the woke phenomenon, because people have really strongly differing opinions and strong feelings about it."
Later on some unsurprising results:
Lahtinen was not surprised that the strongest woke attitudes were in the humanities and social sciences, but the rise of psychology in his own field came as a nice surprise.
Among the students, the highest woke scores were obtained by psychology and social sciences students.
Natural science students, on the other hand, got the lowest scores on the scale. On average, they pretty clearly disagree with the woke claims.
AMONG THE UNIVERSITY staff, clearly the highest woke scores were in the humanities. Business scholars received the lowest scores. Those in the fields of natural sciences and medicine ranked in the middle, but they also disagreed with the woke claims on average.
Some other fields had so few respondents that the results are not reliable, according to Lahtinen.
It also turned out that in the entire material, women had stronger social justice attitudes than men based on the measure.
THE PARTICIPANTS also answered questions measuring anxiety, depression and happiness.
Those with high woke scores had more anxiety and depression than others. They were also less happy.
"It was interesting because this was the case regardless of whether the person had experiences of being oppressed themselves. The mere fact that you have such a worldview meant that you were also more depressed and anxious," says Lahtinen.
The differences in well-being were really big. Students with high wake scores had 71 percent more anxiety, 39 percent more depression, and almost seven percent less happiness than those with low wake scores.
HS has used this study to create an (intentionally facile) wokeness test. I'm linking to the original Finnish version, Google Translate couldn't get it to work. It's below the researcher guy's picture, clicking "Näytä lisää" will expand it. "Täysin samaa mieltä" means "Fully agree", "Jokseenkin samaa mieltä" means "Somewhat agree", "Jokseenkin eri mieltä" is "Somewhat disagree" and "Täysin eri mieltä" means "Fully disagree". The max score is 30.
The claims are:
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Human species has two biological genders.
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Trans women are women.
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It is not right to limit a privileged person's right to speech.
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Trans women in Olympics do not advance women's rights.
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One should not say things that might offend a disadvantaged person's feelings.
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We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.
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University reading lists should include fewer white and European authors.
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The police are by definition a racist institution.
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If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of oppression.
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A white person cannot understand how a black person feels.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Who has been following the drama around Disco Elysium? Disco Elysium, of course, is the 2019 CRPG that has received numerous accolades for being the savior of Western computer role-playing gaming, the best game in a long time etc. I've played it through, and it deserves the accolades; many here have played it as well, and it is not surprising that a forum like this would have many aficionados for a game that basically consists of reading vast oodles of texts about one drunken failure cop's personal psychodramas and politics and a well-realized fictional somethingpunk setting, and so on.
The game was been made by ZA/UM, an Estonian developer / art collective, around a world created by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, and is quite obviously Estonian-influenced if one knows anything about Estonia (starting with the fact that Revachol, the city where the game happens, is very visually remiscient of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, once known as Reval).
What's the drama? According to Wikipedia:
In October 2022, ZA/UM member Martin Luiga announced that he, Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere of ZA/UM had "involuntarily left the company", stating that ZA/UM "no longer represents the ethos it was founded on." Luiga also affirmed that the ZA/UM cultural association had also been dissolved.[92] In an interview, Luiga stated that the other three members had been fired under false premises.[93] A spokesperson for ZA/UM stated that "Like any video game, the development of Disco Elysium was and still is a collective effort, with every team member's contribution essential and valued as part of a greater whole. At this time, we have no further comment to make other than the ZA/UM creative team's focus remains on the development of our next project, and we are excited to share more news on this with you all soon."[94]
In early November 2022, conflicting reports of the events were announced. According to Kurvitz, Zaum Studio OÜ, the development studio, was originally owned in majority shares by Margus Linnamäe, was then acquired by Tütreke OÜ, a holding company owned by studio CEO Ilmar Kompus through a share purchase in 2021. Kurvitz and Rostov claimed that the funds used for that purchase were pulled from the studio itself, making it a fraudulent purchase, upon which they started to challenge the purchase and recover their IP from the studio.[95] Zaum Studio dismissed the charges in a statement, and said that former employees had been let go for creating a disruptive environment at the studio. Other employees of Zaum Studio speaking anonymously with GamesIndustry.biz claimed the situation lied between these points.[96] Kurvitz and Rostov were seeking legal options against the studio.[95]
How Kurvitz and Rostov explain it:
We have now learned that Tütreke OÜ must have obtained control over Zaum Studio OÜ by fraud. We believe the money used by Tütreke OÜ to buy the majority stake was taken illegally from Zaum Studio OÜ itself, money that belonged to the studio and all shareholders but was used for the benefit of one. Money that should have gone towards making the sequel. We believe that these actions — which in our view, and the view of our lawyers, amount to criminal wrongdoing punishable by up to three years imprisonment — were perpetrated by Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel with support from Kaur Kender, another minority shareholder. This is hardly surprising given that Tõnis Haavel, who we believe to be the ringleader, has been convicted for defrauding investors on a different matter in 2007 [https://www.riigiteataja.ee/kohtulahendid/fail.html?fid=303963621].
I've also seen suggestions that Kurvitz et al believe that Tütreke, Kender etc. are planning to compromise their vision specifically for upcoming Amazon Disco Elysium series, presumably so that the political (anti-capitalist - Kurvitz is a self-described communist, very much a rarity in Estonia) aspect of their work would be compromised.
Speaking to Estonian newspaper Estonian Ekspress (translated by Google), ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus said the studio suffered from a "toxic environment," and accused Disco Elysium designer Robert Kurvitz and 'Saandar Taal' of "humiliating colleagues and intending to steal IP."
ZA/UM confirmed that Saandar Taal is an alias of Aleksander Rostov.
Kompus accused Kurvitz and Taal of "belittling women and co-workers," claims that echo those made by GamesIndustry.biz's own sources.
"They treated their co-workers very badly," Kompus told the Ekspress. "Despite talking to them repeatedly, things did not improve. Therefore, the company was forced to fire them. Robert [Kurvitz] is said to have been known for belittling women and co-workers in the past, but this was previously unknown to the company. It would be very short-sighted of a growing international company to tolerate such behaviour."
More context from an Estonian Redditor
Anyway, so by the time we first heard the news of this video game project, Za/Um as a cultural movement was already dwindling. For an Estonian art-adjacent person, Za/Um has basically been dead since 2017. That's why Luiga's decision to disband the movement doesn't really raise an eyebrow here. It's old history, man.
Other than Kender, the rest of Za/Um was a bunch of nobodies to the mainstream. The members were well known enough in art circles, so they definitely weren't a bunch of amateurs or something like that, but they weren't well established figures in the broader sense. But first and foremost they are artists. Not aspiring video game developers but writers, painters, musicians. They went for a mad plan to do something completely out of their wheelhouse and I personally think this is what made Disco so interesting. It was an art project more than a video game but through some sheer genius it turned out to be a hugely successful and hopefully influential video game as a side product.
For me, Disco Elysium was the last hurrah for Za/Um, and what a hurrah it was. Of course I'm sad with the outcome but all you socialists out there, you saw it coming, didn't you? We got a miracle of a game out of this and there are only so many wins we get on the left.:
Perhaps it's not necessary to specifically mention all the ironic aspects involved in this, and if we indeed see Disco Elysium as an art project, it feels like a fitting capstone to the project, in a way.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
I've been thinking: what's the Palestinian path to victory? Ie. what's the course of action that would lead to an establishment of a from-the-river-to-the-sea Palestine? (Not focusing here on the desirability of that path etc.)
Any way one looks at it, the only way to get at this would be a war with Israel's neighbors joining in. Of course this hasn't happened since Yom Kippur War, and much of Israel's foreign and security policy has been successfully trying to make sure this doesn't happen. Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel and reasonably non-hostile governments (with their own reasons to hope that the situation stays stable), Lebanon and Syria are destabilized, Saudis are too dependent on US and too focused elsewhere to be a threat.
However, as far as I've understood, Egyptian and Jordanian populations continue to be strongly pro-Palestine, Jordan has a huge amount of Palestinian refugees, and Egypt continues to have many problems that make it a potential flash point. Would a sufficiently atrocious response by Israel have a possibility of leading to revolutions and strongly anti-Israel regimes taking power? Might Lebanon and Syria be stabilized, with Lebanon falling under Hezbollah rule? If all of Israel's neighbors started another big war, can Israel repeat the same as in 1947, 1968 and 1973? The traditional answer would be "probably", but the state of IDF currently looks like there's a lot of mythology and hot air underpinning that proposition.
I genuinely have no idea about these things, which is why I'm asking here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
There's a lot of people going "look at all these people proven wrong by not holding off conclusions" who aren't... holding off conclusions, such as the conclusion that this non-binary identification shuts out the possibility that the shooter might be anti-gay far-righter. One might quickly imagine why such a shooter might announce they-them profiles to be written in official documents: to own the libs. ("Lol! They have to call me by this shit now!") Of course, I don't know if that's the case - that's what holding off conclusions indicates.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9mo ago
Finland has a new right-wing government. It's been called the most right-wing one in Finland's postwar history, since it is headed by centre-right National Coalition, contains the right-wing populist/nationalist Finns Party and doesn't contain the Centre Party, which has been previously been in government with these two but is, as the name says, more centrist.
Essentially, the new government is combining an anti-union, austerity-oriented economic agenda of the center-right with a list of anti-immigration measures favored by the nationalists. However, while the foreign papers have mostly been concerned with the claims that the most important thing about this govt is far-right inclusion, the economic agenda comes first; the anti-immigration measures, while they probably will lead to immigration cuts, are still not as hard as , for instance, what a roughly similar coalition in Sweden has set last year.
Among other changes, a work-based residence permit would expire if an individual fails to find a new job after more than three months of unemployment. Those with a student-based residence permits would not be allowed to rely on Finnish income support, while the tuition fees of Finnish educational institutions are to be reviewed.
The annual refugee quota is to be cut by more than half to 500 people, down from the present 1,050. Asylum would be granted for a maximum of three years , after which the need for international protection should be reassessed.
In future, obtaining a permanent residence permit will require six years of residence, a language proficiency test, a two-year work history without long-term unemployment or income support, and a requirement of an impeccable record.
Citizenship rules are also to be tightened, with the minimum residence requirement extended to eight years, along with an income requirement and mandatory civics and language tests.
Insofar as economic measures go,
The four parties have agreed on many other changes to the labour market, according to STT. It says that in the future an employee's first sick day would be unpaid, unless otherwise stipulated in their collective agreement.
Iltalehti reported that – assuming the government's plans are approved by Parliament – in future it will be possible to dismiss an employee more easily, simply citing any "reasonable cause". It will also make it easier for employers to offer one-year fixed-term employment contracts without having to cite any special reason for them.
The future government also wants to expand local bargaining – as opposed to centralised national collective agreements – to cover all companies. It will also seek to curtail the right to launch sympathy strikes and politically based labour actions.
There's also two minor parties, the Christian Democrats who basically set no demands for participation and are just happy to be a part of this government and Swedish People's Party, a liberal party that watches over the interests of the Swedish-speaking minority and had considerable troubles fitting in with the Finns Party's nationalism and probably managed to prevent some of their more hardline immigration proposals from taking force.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
My country is being exceptional again on European polls. (If you don't want to click, it's a poll on how many agree with the question "One of my main goals in life is making my parents proud", and while in most European countries well over 70% would strongly agree or agree with this statement, and even in other Nordic countries the affirmative answer ranks in the 50% range, in Finland only 25% agree.)
Some explanations I've seen:
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The word "proud", or rather its translation, just has a different, considerably more negative connotation in Finnish. Like, if hearing this question in English, the idea of "pride" I'd get would just be a beaming parent going "So proud of you, son!" while imagining the same phrased in Finnish, using the word "ylpeä" (direct translation), has much more of a connotation of an arrogant, conceited parent going around their friends going "Oh, you didn't know my son/daughter is a doctor?"
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even taking this into account, the Finnish/Nordic culture of "collective individualism" (which I've discussed here) might play a role
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some have just guessed that Finns tend to answer surveys like this more honestly and bluntly, actually thinking about their priorities instead of just automatically giving the pro-social answer - yes, something of a self-serving explanation
How many here would answer this question in affirmative, anyway?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I think the idea is to use the troops to secure the "1000 km of frontline" to prevent any more Kharkivs and then just continue the slow methodical grind in Donbass (and other parts of the four oblasts they don't yet hold?). It's not going to be a tactic for conquering entire Ukraine, but I don't think that's in the cards, unless there's some complete collapse or something else changing the picture considerably. (Though Belarus joining in or a sudden surprise attack in the Northern front areas Ukraine has retaken might change the picture considerably.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
As I said elsewhere:
I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.
And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.
Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.
Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.
Like, even if you're going with "the Soviets lied about their numbers" narrative, why would NVKD lie about their internal numbers in their reports to the party? The NKVD's job, or one of them, was deporting people and putting them to camps. They're deliberately trying to diminish the job they're doing in internal party assessments?
If the refutation of the demographic question for revisionists continues to rely on one 50-year-old book relying largely on guesswork, anecdotes and guesses about information they didn't have access to (but later researchers do have access to), doesn't that at least somewhat indicate there's a problem here?
How many are thinking of deleting their Reddit accounts entirely once there's some confidence in this move succeeding reasonably well?
While I've occasionally commented on some other subs, chiefly SSC, I'm also a believer in pruning out the social medias you're not actually needing or using out of your life entirely, and the transfer would largely render Reddit into that category, for me.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Re the first one, does this extend to cases where someone's a dual citizen due to essentially not being able to get rid of their second citizenship? Dual citizenships have been a bit of a topic in Finland in the recent years since the most common dual citizenship is Russian but, for instance, I have a friend who has such a dual citizenship and would like to get rid of it but essentially can't, since he'd have to physically go to Russia for that and there's a high chance he'd get punished for such an attempt, particularly since he's been a vocal opponent of Putin's policies and they might as well just go and forcibly draft him and throw him at the front.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button
Like said below, it becomes a different thing if you imagine that everyone in some community has to make the choice, including small kids.
Would I trust my 3-year-old and 11-month-old kids to understand the subtle logic of the "everyone picks red" option, or just pick the pill that looks more like candy?
CULTURE WAR IN FINLAND: DEHUMANIZATION DERBY
(blog form)
During the present war the Finnish society has been firmly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian. Both the state and the civil society have found multiple ways to aid the Ukrainian war effort, and likewise expressions of anti-Russian agitation are, if not formally approved, at least given more leeway than previously. 90% of Finns continue to support giving lethal aid to Ukraine, even while the numbers are falling in numerous other European countries.
For some weeks, there’s been a debate over whether things have been going slightly too far. During this time, multiple celebrities and politicians, including Sofi Oksanen – one of the most important current writers in the country, half-Estonian, known not only for gothy looks but also as a longtime active critic of Russia – announced that instead of spending money on traditional New Year’s fireworks, they’d shell out money on shells – in particular, Ukrainian shells with messages on them.
There’s a service, signmyrocket.com, that promises that they’ll write your personalized message on a shell that Ukrainians will fire on Russian troops. (Some have speculated they’re just using one shell that gets wiped clean and a new message written on it every time the service is used.) Oksanen’s message was “Jaxuhalit” – a maddeningly stupid phrase that is hard to translate succinctly (literal translation would be like “I am giving you a hug for strength”, expect it’s obviously used sarcastically and also written in Finnish equivalent of “I can haz cheezburger?” style argot.)
Anyway, this led to a column (link goes to a fairly readable Google-Translated version) in a major tabloid about how this sort of a thing shows that many Finns have entered into a strange state of mind where they treat the war as a game, engage dehumanization etc. After the requisite accusations of Putinism, it hasled to a surprising amount of nuanced debate on whether this is really the case.
After some back and forth, Jussi Halla-aho, the most important nationalist politician in Finland, made his intervention. A little context about Halla-aho might be in order. He started his political career as a popular anti-immigration blogger, who used his blog followers to form a faction that joined The Finns Party, back then only a minor inchoate populist party, in the early 00s and took it over, turning it into a right-wing nationalist party with immigration as its main issue.
Halla-aho muscled out the former leader’s preferred candidate for party leadership in 2017, leading to some governmental drama as the other parties considered him too extreme, but only stayed in this post for a few years until relinquishing this post to a handpicked successor. Nevertheless, he continues to be the chief intellectual force of the party, and whatever he says will surely have an impact on Finnish nationalist thinking. These days his main method of communication is Facebook, not his old blog.
Now, Finnish nationalism has of course never been pro-Russian, but there has still been a certain amount of division on Finnish populist right on the question of Russian relations. After all, the Cold War era idea that neutrality serves Finland the best and Russia could offer trade opportunities if we ignore all the human rights guff and such continues to have adherents particularly in the older generations having grown up in that era, and pro-Russian narrative from the far-right movements in other European countries have also had some minor effect. Perhaps the only vocally pro-Putin politician in Finnish parliament right now is a conspiracy-theorist bodybuilder who was earlier kicked out of The Finns Party for other reasons.
Halla-aho, however, does not share this view – indeed, beyond being anti-Russia, he can be counted as a genuine Ukrainophile, one of the few Western European politicians to speak Ukrainian (his day job is a researcher of Church Slavonic, so it’s natural for him to know Slavic languages).
Halla-aho’s Facebook post is worth quoting here in full, translated by me by running it through DeepL and doing some light editing:
Halla-aho’s statement carries extra significance since he is the chair of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, the highest official post his party carries now. (In some other countries opposition parties might be shut out of parliamentary committee chairmanships as a matter of course, but in Finland they will be allotted posts according to their parliamentary strength, and since The Finns are the largest opposition party, they are entitled to this heavy committee and can nominate whomever they wish.)
Halla-aho’s statement has been condemned by many other politicians, and even the party’s new leader thinks it goes too far. Of course, the most obvious point of criticism is that even if one thinks that war requires dehumanization of the enemy, you know, Finland is not actually at war with Russia. There are no bombs falling here or soldiers desperately fighting in the freezing forests of Eastern Finland. Indeed, what annoys myself about the whole signmyrocket affair is that it almost allows chair-warring celebrities to pretend they’re fighting the war themselves, expect without actually having to get a frostbite while guard a snowy dark patch of a forest somewhere or risk getting a bullet in your throat.
Still, others claim that the whole thing is just being direct about what war entails, i.e., shooting and killing, and that the most important thing is supporting Ukraine whatever way there is, and if getting money to Ukraine involves this sort of a gimmick then so be it.
Since being vocally anti-Russia continues to be a right-coded thing in Finland, and worries about whether the society is getting too anti-Russian (in a way that might lead to, say, violence against Russian refugees in Finland) is similarly mostly left-coded (even if these might be the other way around in current America), the whole debate has some equivalence to various other political correctness debates on the left-right axis. Is it important to Say Things Like They Are, or might that lead to problems? Are things even as the people who Say Things As They Are claim them to be, or are they just being edgy?
Whatever the case is, this war is probably not doing good things for the Finnish psyche, but hey, that’s in the eyes of the beholder – there are factions in the Finnish extremely online right who have basically spent the whole war celebrating how the titanic clash with the ancient enemy is making the society more based. And if making Europe more based has ever been Russia's intention, as the narrative sometimes goes - mission accomplished!
*: Finland’s newspaper of record, which was one of the instances to comment negatively on the rocket-signers. Has been a frequent target for Halla-aho for his entire career.
**: The most famous character of Finland’s best-well-known war novel/film.
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