Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo 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
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
4mo 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
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
10mo 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
3mo 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?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
One of the things about the war I've been thinking about lately is how hard it has been to predict what's going to happen next. I'm not sure if there's anyone with a clear bill of being able to predict even the grand trends of the war for the entire duration. To have that you'd need to have:
- been able to confidently even predict the war is going to start, after several false predictions on dates (a lot of folks, me included, would be right out this stage)
- then go with the absolutely most bonkers pro-Ukrainian position until approximately autumn 2022 (insofar as I remember, it genuinely was only the most bonkers pro-Ukrainian types who were first able to predict that Russians would withdraw from Kiev and Ukraine wouldn't collapse right from the gate, then that Europe would do all the sanctions and support it has right now instead of chickening out immediately, then that the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives would actually be successful even after Kherson offensive had become a regular joke among pro-Russia types)
- then move smoothly to a moderately pro-Russian narrative (ie not go with the predictions of renewed Russian offensives pushing to Odessa etc., but also be able to predict there would be no further major successes for Ukraine after Kharkiv and that Russia would still make gains in Donbass)
- and, of course, all the while not predict that there would be further countries invaded, WMDs used, Western intervention etc., all of which were widely and often confidently speculated on at multiple intervals
All things considered, while my guess would be some sort of a ceasefire during this winter with frontlines wherever they are, I fully also acknowledge this has all the chances of being wrong with something else happening, though who knows what.
Culture War in Finland: Onrolling Far-Right Scandal Moves on to Forums Poasting
The Finnish government has been up for three weeks and pretty much all of that has gone to abjudicating the various comments and stuff said by ministers belonging to right-wing nationalist The Finns Party. The last few days in Finnish politics have focused on party leader Riikka Purra, now the Finance Minister (and the second most powerful member of the govt, at least formally), and her online posts from 15 years ago.
These posts were made in the online guestbook of previous party leader Jussi Halla-aho, the guy who basically is responsible for kickstarting modern anti-immigrationism in Finland and for the anti-immigration hardline faction taking over the Finns Party. Halla-aho got famous for running a blog and gaining grassroots support through it, and an important part of it was his "guestbook", an old-style webpage guestbook which eventually started functioning as an informal forum (imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread). The guestbook, alongside some other forums, was used for bringing together the faction that would eventually grow strong enough to elect several people as MPs, and these people (and people in their general orbit) now make up the party's elite.
The entire guestbook is still online and searchable, the original guestbook at Halla-aho's website is gone (apparently due to hosting troubles), but there's a mirrored copy of it elsewhere. A number of web sleuths found out that one of the guestbook's posters was nicknamed "riikka". Now, Riikka is a pretty common name in Finland, so that wouldn't alone be enough to connect this to Purra, but sleuths also found out that:
-
nickname "riikka" has stated that she comes from a left-wing home and that her parents had taken a pic of her as a child in front of Lenin's statue - Riikka Purra has told a similar story on TV
-
nickname "riikka" stated that she went to same school as leftist MP Anna Kontula - Kontula and Purra have gone to same secondary school in Tampere
-
nickname "riikka" sent the guestbook greetings from Barcelona on 25 August and 27 August 2008, dates on which Riikka Purra participated in an academic conference there
-
nickname "riikka" talked about moving to small town of Kirkkonummi in 2008 and asked about the number of immigrants in a specific neighborhood. Apparently the number was low, since Riikka Purra has indeed lived in that neighborhood in that town since 2008
And many other similar congruities, ie. it's pretty obvious to anyone that this is the same person. Nickname "riikka" had also posted on the guestbook posts, where she:
-
drops the Finnish n-word several times (it's a linguistic question whether that word is the equivalent of English n-word or the word "Negro", but these are angry enough one might say it's the former in this context), as well as talking about a Middle-Eastern man as a "Turkish monkey or whatever", as well as uses some more creative (common in the Finnish racism community) slurs, such as the ones translating to "mocha dicks", "somps" (Somali + chimp) etc.
-
ironically calls herself and other forums members "raycist" and "Nezi" (net + Nazi), including asking others for beer by saying "Any Nezis in Helsinki today up for spitting on beggars and beating up n-word children?"
-
states that "if I had a gun there would be bodies on this train" after hearing a black teenager say "I don't care about Finland" and going "BANG BANG!" with fingerguns at her on a train (this happened two days after a notorious school shooting)
-
After browsing a Finnish Islamic forum describes herself as "so full of hatred and rage she is going to melt on her chair" and says that things like this start to seriously bother her life since "there's nothing else running through [her] head"; also gets angry after seeing a fat Somali family eating at McDonalds at the same time as her family
And other such fare. In other words, at least the most notorious poasts are a mix of edgy injokes and weird ranting. Unsurprisingly these discoveries don't play well in the media, local or foreign (the Finnish foreign minister, while at the NATO summit in Vilnius, actually apologized to Turkey (our new NATO ally, mind) for the "Turkish monkeys" thing.
Purra has copped to being "riikka", and while she originally commented this by saying "there's nothing to apologize or explain", she ended up apologizing and saying that of course the government or she don't tolerate racism and so on. Many of the party's supporters are disappointed and believe that she cucked, but of course if you're in actual government with other parties you kind of have to occasionally do what they demand you will do, if the alternative is your party getting kicked out of the government.
All of this probably serves to indicate what happens when - basically - an Internet forum ends up taking over a political party, and potential for similar things exists might exist in other countries, considering the centrality of Internet in modern communications. I'm pretty sure that Purra, 15 years ago, didn't think that her ranting online might have any importance whatsoever regarding domestic politics or, indeed, that she would even rise to her current heights, but maybe you already have a bunch of groypers in America making edgy jokes on Twitter or wherever who will have to eventually explain that stuff 15 years from now when running for Senate or some other high post.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Okay, this is obviously a very minor point, but a Calvinist church... with a monastery?
Some of these criticisms are pretty odd. The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal, a lot of that was just dumped on Feyd-Rautha here, and I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon" thing and Austin Butler was great with microexpressions. The worst thing about the casting of the Emperor Shaddam IV (not a particularly major character anyway) is that it's impossible to see Christopher Walken as something other than Christopher Walken, but other than that, casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down. I don't understand the point about Irulan.
I understand the Alia criticism - I had been quite averse to early rumors on how Alia would be handled but ended up being OK with it, I guess that the murder toddler would have been something that might have become ridiculous too easily - and share the Chani criticism, though that might have also worked better if Zendaya was a better actor outside of the love scenes, which she handled well.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
The sub appears to be connected to the "black women divestment" movement. I've seen references to this a couple of times, but the whole idea seems to generally be connected to the idea that black women should detach themselves from the general "black community" (ie. black men), start dating white guys and concentrate on self-improvement instead of social justice causes. ie. according to this Medium post that I found and that bashes the movement:
Divest/ Divest Black Women/Divested Black Women
This movement is derived from BWE, but with a more intentional focus on “divesting” oneself from the Black community, from social justice (#BurnTheCape), and from issues relating to Black male oppression. Self-improvement (feminization training, weight loss, professional development) is promoted as a means of achieving hypergamy. Compared to BWE/BWGTOW, there is more of a focus on colorism and the disparate treatment of monoracial dark-skinned Black women (DSBW). Less centralized, and more spread out across social media platforms, this movement appears to be the most current as well as the most popular iteration of the BWE ecosystem. As I will explain later, this movement is also notable for its idealization of traditional gender roles, and its pointed interest in the perceived failure of Black men (especially in Western countries) in comparison to other groups of men. Predominantly Black neighborhoods are derisively called “Blackistan”. “Blackistan” is a conceptual place where Black dysfunction and violent crime flourish.
I would expect such a movement to have offbeat views on a great variety of things, and wouldn't certainly use it as a barometer for progressive thought.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
Is there something inconsistent about being right-wing and supporting fighting Russia? You would simply be one link in potentially numerous generations of right-wing local nationalists who have supported the same.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
"When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument."
I think that, fundamentally, most people just wanted Covid to go away and to return to normality as fast as possible. The governments, after feeling the initial high of the all-in-the-same-boat feeling of Spring 2020 and the relatively normal (in most parts of the West, if memory servers) summer 2020, got worried that they were in for a long slog after Covid "returned" in autumn/winter 2020/2021 and then got fixated on the idea that there is One Weird Trick they can do to make it go away. And there sure was a good candidate for One Weird Trick: the vaccines.
I think this really explains the rest. The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)
If one remembers initial promises about the vaccines, they were actually quite modest, in line to what we now know the vaccine does (ie. not that much). However, at some point the hype cycle got out of control and the governments and everyone else started believing that the One Weird Trick really was here, just vaccinate everyone and Covid is over and no large lockdowns are needed. (This was preceeded by a similar but smaller hype cycle around masks being the One Weird Trick, which was sufficient to make masking a thing that still continues among the hardcore Covidians).
The furious hatred against "grandma-killers" and "plague rats" was, then, really a feeling that it was those people, the anti-vaxxers and Covid-skeptics, who were responsible for the One Weird Trick not working. Politicians, media, ordinary citizens - what they felt was that the vaccines would really work as promised if everyone just was responsible and got the vaccine. And it was of course easier for public opinionmakers to blame a small, already-hated group (antivaxxers were a popular target for disdain even before Covid) than to admit that there really was no One Weird Trick.
Even after the initial vaccine hype cycle, there was another one over the Covid vaccine passports, but even here the tone was already different. The vaccine passports were presented as a way to run down measures for most of the population - only leaving the hated ones to suffer from the measures. Of course this was a doomed and idiotic attempt from the get-go, but it probably served for some to get them to the mindset where they could just start to let go of the measures and the fear. Perhaps this was the real purpose.
Thus, it also followed that once it became really clear the vaccine really wasn't what the hype cycle promised, everything just died down. It turned out that the way to make "Covid go away" was simply to run the measures down and stop worrying about Covid. At least here, this was aided greatly by Russia starting the Ukraine War and this, then, becoming the huge global thing to worry about. And once this happened people just mostly also actively started to forgot just how crazy the preceeding years were, precisely because they wanted to forget it all.
I've talked about this before, but me and my wife have had two kids at a comparatively late age, ie. the younger one is 11 months and the older one is 3 years and we are around 40. If we could magically become ten years younger we might have another child, now there's no dice - not just because the age makes it unlikely, but because we just wouldn't have the stamina for three little ones.
While we don't have that much money (especially when compared to my assumptions about the general earnings of this forum), the time and energy issues are absolutely more crucial as to why we feel burdened, not only because we are getting older but also because the most natural "extra nurses" apart from day care - the grandparents - are old too, around 80 (and my father dead), and also live on the other side of the country.
Once one's a parent, one quickly realises that your friend circle just isn't that much help - the childless ones just don't seem reliable enough, and the ones with children tend to have their hands full with, well, their children, who are often equally as young as yours.
One less-discussed fertility thing might be the culture where it's almost a rite of passage, at least in educated circles, to not only move away from home but frequently to a whole different city from your parents. It's fun when you can go out drunk and party without fearing you'll run into your older relatives and they disapprove, but once you're a parent, the far-away grandparents thing starts getting acutely more real.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
Why do you think the entire European right (apart from some very fringe groups) resisted USSR that strongly for its entire existence, then?
From an actual ethnonationalist point of view, people in Estonia, Latvia and to a lesser extent Lithuania certainly remember that rule by USSR meant a real, existing risk of their nationalities really, genuinely becoming minorities in their titular homelands, as temporarily already happened to the Kazakhs.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
This is very confusingly written, since no-one actually refers to anything as a "thought-crime" expect in reference to claiming a martyrdom/dissidence status for some view they themselves hold. Ie. "The fact that I can't tell the truth about vaccine deaths without being cancelled makes my vaccine skepticism a thought-crime", not "You are a thought-criminal for doubting the efficacy of the vaccine, even though the vaccine undeniably works". Or, if there are actual prominent examples of the latter as a mode of discourse, I certainly haven't encountered them.
The literal phrasing of the poll would probably exclude children, since it only talks about those voting in the poll, and presumably there wouldn't be too many 3-year-olds using Twitter (expect when someone accidentally posts awfoijgjdoindfnaofnbmadf,öd,dföl,bfbdfb,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)
Then again, if we go by the results of the actual poll, it would have comfortably over 60% voting blue, so voting blue would be safe anyhow.
I took Greenwald's comment mostly as a reminder that it was Trump admin who did prosecute Assange, since Greenwald has a lot of followers/fans who love Trump and also love Assange, and since Trump fans have often demonstrated a particularly remarkable talent for ignoring actual stuff that Trump does/did (which isn't that different from your standard "swampy" Republican) and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.
I haven't posted weekly Finnish news updates since I now post them on my blog, but the main topic in Finnish politics right now might merit more discussion.
A bit under two weeks from now, Finland got a new government, formed chiefly by center-right and nationalist parties. One of the ministers from the Finns Party, the latter one, has been very controversial right from the start, this being Minister of Economic Affairs Vilhelm Junnila. Junnila is one of the less-known Finns Party politicians outside of this home region, but he’s got a strong background as an anti-immigration hardliner.
It turns out that Junnila has, at the very least, a questionable sense of humor. Among other things, he has:
-
has made obvious 88 (ie. HH, ie. Heil Hitler) references during the election. In Finnish elections candidates are assigned candidate numbers (you vote by entering a number on the ballot), and Junnila happened to be number 88 in his district in the 2019 election. He had a campaign ad saying "Vote 88 on the 14th" (the election date in 2019) which yeah, could be excused, expect this year he was campaigning in some town where the local party branch manager also happened to have 88 as his electoral number this year, and Junnila went "First of all, congratulations for the excellent candidate number. I know it's a winning card. Obviously, this "88" refers to two H letters which we won't say more about." (he apologized for this particular one)
-
made a joke about building this KKK snowman in 2014 (he almost assuredly didn't build it, it can be found in Google Search)
-
also posted "there's a beautiful embossing on this gate"
-
spoke at a memorial event organized after a fatal stabbing by a Muslim immigrant - the controversy is not organizing a memorial, as such, but the fact that this event was heavily participated by violent street-level groups like Soldiers of Odin or (later-banned) openly Nazi group Nordic Resistance Movement
He's also made a speech in the parliament (link in Finnish) calling for the government to invest in "climate abortions" in Africa, which seems like the kind of a statement that's calculated to offend just about everyone. There's a bunch of other, less relevant controversies (posing with a statue of general Lee while visiting the US etc.) but those are less consequential and haven't featured that much.
Much of the local debate has concentrated on the fact that Junnila, as the Minister of Economic Affairs, is specifically in charge of Finland's trade relationships, including with countries where making these sort of comments, even as jokes, is not treated in as cavalier a manner as Finland, which would be at the very least most of the rest of Europe. Junnila's first visits are (at least according to some comment I saw) supposed to be in Germany and Israel, which certainly would be among the least likely countries to approve of this stuff.
Junnila and the whole government faced a vote of confidence over these comments, with Junnila in particular surviving a very close 95-86 vote only due to many opposition MPs not being present, presumably due to already having checked out of the parliamentary schedule. The liberal, ethnic-minority oriented Swedish People's Party extraordinarily mainly voted against Junnila despite being in government, where they very uncomfortably decided to participate after much hemming and hawing over the Finns Party's role - of course, in parliamentary systems, a party standing against its own government, even in case of one minister, is a highly destabilizing act, and it remains to be seen how, exactly, they're supposed to work with Junnila inside the government now.
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.
More options
Context Copy link