Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy
The bare minimum requirement to even begin considering the statement "vegetarianism/veganism has already been extremely popular on the left" truthful would be a majority of leftists being vegetarian or vegan, which isn't even true here, where these things probably have a stronger hold on left consciousness than most other countries, and hasn't been remotely true in any of the other countries I've visited and where I've encountered leftists.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
I'm not sure why that should be compelling at all. "Science" isn't just one coherent entity where one scientist being wrong makes all of the rest in the vaguely same sector fundamentally wrong. One scientist, who might as well not even be alive any more, making a prediction in 1967 has no bearing on scientists making predictions right now. Much of the list isn't even concerned with scientists - neither Al Gore or Prince Charles are such - or is related to issues other than climate change, such as peak oil, which has plenty of advocates as a theory who don't consider climate change to be all that dangerous (Greer, say).
"Wow! Look at all these failed AI predictions!" is a lackluster argument in debates about when the AGI is coming, if it is at all, and this is similarly a lackluster argument in climate debates.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
What carrot would he have had? Weapons shipment? Little need for those if Ukrainians were hell-bent for peace. NATO membership? Explicit Russian demand was for Ukraine to not be in NATO, at this point. EU membership? There was a certain event some years ago that means Boris Johnson did not exactly have leverage on this point.
I'm not sure what other stick there would have been apart from UK actually invading Ukraine itself, which, uh, would have certainly caused a lot of questions, home and abroad.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
Yeah. I mean, it would seem to be an obvious from even a cursory reading of Russian history that the one tendency that has stayed from Muscovy times to imperial times to Soviet times to current times has been the continuous tendency for expansion, either through direct annexation or the acquisition of extremely closely held client states. The only expections have been leaders who have been willing to permit territorial contraction for revolutionary purposes or to acquire personal power, and these leaders have then later been greatly denigrated due to this. The finishing of one annexation has generally just tended to be the beginning of the planning of the next acquisition. Much of the "aw, why be so scared of Russia? They clearly have very good reasons for whatever heist they're pulling now" discourse just comes off as an attempt to obfuscate this very obvious pattern.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
The opinion of NAFOids and Redditors can be discounted on sight, but at least here, where the one thing the media or the public opinion beyond the most extreme loser circles is solidly pro-Ukrainian , the media has been bouncing the question of what the actual goals are or should be for quite a bit longer than that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
Come now, we can go over the transcripts if you'd like. We can even go over Yanukovych's invitation for the opposition to join the government, which was the basis of Nuland's discussions of who would actually work well within Yanukovych's government which- again- was invited and being discussed in the context of Yanukovych running it.
It should also be remembered that the guys that Nuland and Pyatt were talking about - Yatsenyuk - was one of the main leaders of the main opposition party and had already been offered the PMs post by Yanuk as a compromise, making him the most natural leader to take this post after Yanuk and PoR had vacated power.
It's not like they just picked some guy out of nowhere to make him their puppet, the main thrust of the Nuland call was that they wanted to keep Klitchko and Tyahnubok marginalized since the first was too close to the Europeans and the latter was far-right (something that the pro-Russians never seem to mention - the US explicitly wanted to make sure the far right does not get too much power, something that doesn't fit in the idea of US gunning for Banderites to turn Ukraine into Banderastan).
The Nuland call is not inconsequential since it's evidence that EU should operate on its own and not just rely on the US, surely an important message to this day, but it's not by itself evidence that the entire Euromaidan sequence was just due to string-pulling by Americans with Ukrainians having no agency.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
I actually thought that the Civil War movie itself remarkably represented a CRPG. Quoting from a post I made on the basis of ACX comments:
I kept thinking about how this would still provide a good setting for a computer role-playing game (CRPG) (why are there comparatively few CRPGs situated in a present-day-style wartime setting?), and it then struck me that the plot, such as it was, was a CRPG plot already.
We start with a water-riot-based tutorial where we get a refresher on how to use action points, take photos, communicate and even transfer an item to a party member. Then, at the hotel, the main quest starts, and the party is assembled.
An early random encounter demonstrates that one party member is underexperienced or has the wrong skillset, and the narrative has told us that the main quest's final encounter is going to be difficult, so the party decides to grind side quests for levels. They even visit a literal shop and a literal rest site.
During one of the side quests the party encounters an enemy, a Nazi played well by Jesse Plemons, that's a bit too high for their current levels, so in addition to two temporary party members who were hardcoded to be killed anyway, they lose one of the main party members. After this, they find out that the main quest's time limit has run out and they're locked out of the best ending. However, the story graciously lets them go through the final battle for another ending.
Alex Garland has served as a video game writer as well, so I guess it sticks.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
Yeah, but it manages to say fairly little about photography, either, and certainly nothing that needed the fictional second US civil war backdrop to say.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
If an actual war would break out and Finland conducted a full mobilizatio, we would mobilize 280 000 troops, and at least an implicit common understanding is that a large portion of these would fight in the Baltics. With one of the largest artilleries in Europe and supported by Sweden's considerable air force and naval capabilities, these wouldn't be able to win by themselves, but are nothing to sneeze at.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?
That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
Perhaps cramped was the wrong word, I absolutely do understand how different having one's own room is to not having one's own room. I was strictly talking about the square meters/feet as a metric here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
I would expect those who are "waving the flag of Hezbollah" (I'm sure someone at the campus protests has done this but I'm not sure what the specific example is) to be the sort of radicals who make even other pro-Palestinians uncomfortable and those who ranted about "Trump disrespecting the troops!" to be normie libs who support the police clearing the campuses of protestors.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
Okay, so how, exactly, did Boris Johnson stop them? What's the specific mechanism? Screaming? THat's not really enough to force anyone to do anything in geopolitics.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
"Ukraine will turn into a frozen conflict", no matter whether correct or not, is not a "new cope", it's been a popular prediction for the duration of the war.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine.
My reading of this was not that Macron wants to send troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians but rather that it would be, essentially, a part of an effort to formalize a division into Ukraine and Russian-occupied/annexed territory - sort of like the Korean division, in other words. Of course that would quite a risky move, any way one would do it.
More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
This has been a part of the Western message for the entire war - Ukraine will join NATO after the war. Allowing Ukraine to join the NATO now does not still seem to be in the cards, since this would inevitably lead to direct Western war with Russia, something Blinken eschewed in the same statement.
Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine.
Well, why do you think they fight?
The entire war, the... well, not solely the pro-Russian side, but shall we say the Ukraine-skeptical side has talked about how it's the West that's forcing Ukraine to fight, how Ukrainians are dying for gay marriage, how the whole thing is just a proxy war with Ukrainians dying... and yet, the Ukrainians keep fighting. Not all of them, sure, some will avoid the draft, some will help Russia, so on. And still, there still seems to be a remarkable consensus on the Ukrainian side that fight they must and - even if this has been fraying a bit - the goal is still pre-2014 borders Ukraine in NATO and EU. One can always claim this is all just a lie and the Ukrainians are forced to fight, but you don't get troops staying in the kill zone so consistently just with a gun in back.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
No, it is simply the functionalism-intentionalism debate of the Holocaust, or the bottom-up approach of the Holocaust. It's been debated by historians for decades without, as far as I know, anyone being convicted of Holocaust denial charges simply for advancing a functionalist perspective.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
There are certainly hundreds if not thousands of Russians and pro-Russians on social media talking continously about how Russia will any day now take Odes(s)a (I don't fully understand why Russians are so obsessed with this particular city), which would put them within a striking distance of the Moldovan border.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
Okay, I shouldn't have used the word 'huge', but the point was the comment about how EU states did not "accept men fleeing the draft from Russia", which was not correct.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The EU states have tightened their general asylum policies since 2015 precisely because of that crisis. They were already doing pushbacks in Greece in 2020 as a response to asylum seeker entry wave at that time, it was big news before the Covid hit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Would you be equally liable to support a similar solution of removal of Jews from Israel, if the Arabs were powerful enougt to do it?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
The amount of EU troubles and dysfunction that can simply be blamed on Germany being moronic again is not insubstantial.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
18d ago
The idea that Putin represents a moderate faction and that Putin is indeed single-handedly resposible for the current phase of war (ie. events after 2022) in no way contradict each other. When the drumbeat for war started in 2021, there were no indications that the situation in Ukraine was about to change in an essential way (ie. Ukraine was about to make a major assault to take back the territories lost after 2014 - if anything the Ukrainians had gone to great lengths to seem nonaggressive up until a few weeks before the invasion) and also no indications that Putin's strict grip on power in Russia was about to be challenged, by the more radical nationalist forces or anyone else. Putin simply saw that the idea that he'd get what he wants peacefully would not happen - the least anti-Russian politician that could get elected in Ukraine at this point, ie. Zelensky, would not budge or be able to do so - and took a gamble.
"The Ukrainians only fight because they are conscripted and forced" is also something that I've seen for the entire war. The whole idea seems to have originated as cope by Russians and pro-Russians who claimed that since Ukrainians are just Russians who speak funny they'd run directly into the arms of Mother Russia once given an opportunity and who have then flailed to find explanations for why that didn't happen. You don't fight for two years with this intensity with forced and conscripted troops. It's possible that this might change at some point, but even then I'd need far more evidence to actually believe it to be true this time.
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