Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12hr ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
The reason being, historical revisionism is woke people’s favourite pastime.
Should be noted this isn't just a woke pasttime. Every culture warrior enjoys attacking the other side's guys. Sometimes (many times) same figures will get flack from the both sides. I've read countless right-wing articles and posts about how FDR was a commie symphatizer or JFK and LBJ and MLK were cheaters or (getting into Christian conservatives) how Darwin and Margaret Sanger were racists or (getting to more commie side of things) how Marx was personally filthy or Lenin continously said and did psycho things. I mean, I had thought of using the almost obsessive focus on Che Guevara, a figure more for the past generations (I have seen many more "revisions" of Che's history online than actual Che shirts) as an example, but you did it yourself! And during the War on Terror, of course, talking about it online, one couldn't avoid hearing about Mohammed and Aisha. One gets the idea.
Of course the conservatives would not think in the terms of progress and a "right side of history" as much, the point here is tearing down the other side's totemic figures with a gusto is a fairly natural part of the culture war.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
I don't think they were, in the context of the great 90s/00s creationism/evolution online wars. The race/ethnicity culture war was at a low ebb and a lot of creationist types talking about this subject probably genuinely conceived themselves as, at least, non-racists if not anti-racists.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
I'd guess that marriage and owning a house are generally somewhat correlated here, but I know a plenty of married couples with kids who rent.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Hell, Bernie Sanders came out swinging this week:
Should be noted here that while Bernie has rather tendentiously called for a ceasefire (while saying the same letter that the war against Hamas in itself was justified), saying that Netanyahu is bad is not the same as saying that the war is bad. Presumably something like a half of Israelis would simultaneously say that Netanyahu is bad while the war is good.
I went to see Civil War to a small local movie theater with friends yesterday. It was mostly a confusing experience.
Spoilers:
I knew that the movie would try to present an "second American civil war" without trying to get too political - a befuddling decision itself - but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative.
Is the WF justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe? They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!), but the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad (unless you count that fed riot cops are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment), and all the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops. But since there's no weight to either side it's not really a "war is hell, both sides are bad" thing either.
Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character as someone who is doing a toxic masculinity? Maybe? Is it bad that the one community has decided to go on conducting life as normal expect with snipers on roofs? Maybe? The clearest narrative ark is the Kirsten Dunst character being on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" (lol) and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny figuratively through the lens of a camera, but since we've established that photojournalism is basically useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, we should we care?
The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor (some said during Breaking Bad that Jesse Plemons is a dollar store Matt Damon, I argue that eventually we'll see Matt Damon properly as a dollar store Jesse Plemons), but also in large part because these guys at least seem to hold an actual ideology and be actually doing things that happen in actual civil wars, ie. running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some indicate that the whole rest of the movie is basically a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.
It was probably a good idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are a obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard, especially since I don't think the movie was advertised as concentrating as heavily on journalism as it was.
2.5/5, 2 for some cool shots and for not being too long (though you could have easily cropped out half a hour by cutting back on some early stuff and the unnecessarily long DC fight scene) and 0.5 extra for the Jesse Plemons scene.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
If it somehow turned out to be true, the most embarrassed party would probably be Fidel Castro, in afterlife. A son that hides from the right wing instead of doing this?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Yeah, this is probably a large factor. One of the main splits in Continental Europe is less that "young are right, olds are left", but rather that the olds vote for traditional boomer parties (social democrats and Christian democrats, and equivalents) and youngs vote for new "challenger" parties (right-wing populists and greens/new left parties, often split by gender). As dissatisfaction with the pensioner-focused boomer parties that wish to stay the course even while Europe is mired in 15 years of no growth and little development grows, the right-wing populist parties derive particular benefits due to several reasons (center-right parties have generally tended to be a bit more popular than center-left ones, right-wing populists are better at appearing to center-left voters than challenger left parties to center-right ones, the Greens in particular have become quite "pro-system" in recent decades etc.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d 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
4d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d 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
4d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
Also the problem is that almost all modern paganism is a LARP. Since there are no unbroken continuities of pagan faith in Europe (apart from the Mari native religion within the Mari Republic in Russia - though Mari pagan organizations have cooperated with the Muslims in Tatarstan), any "revivalist" efforts are basically based on imagining what such a group surviving to modern age might look like.
Of course if you have a racist Asatru group or whatever, formed by people who have explicitly left the Christian tradition because they think Christianity is Semitic and cucked, you're going to have a group that's more racist than Christians on average, but that's also obviously pretty circular. Other pagan groups think otherwise - most pagans that I've met tend to be far left. It doesn't really explain in any way whether a hypothetical pagan Europe without Christianity would be more "based", or whether a hypothetical future one where Christianity has gone away would be.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I think this belief is, for many, simply downstream from the idea that Ukrainians are just funny-speaking Russians, that the natural course of action for them would have just been to join the Motherland at a drop of a hat and the fact that this didn't happen is an aberration that needs an external explanation, ie. the evil West brainwashing them to fight. The references to videos of stragglers etc. are just marshalled to provide evidence for this preaccepted thesis.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
When I started lifting I got a PT who gave me a good routine, and when I ran the program he gave me through ChatGPT it said it’s a good programme with nothing much to add.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d 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
4d ago
Well, the Tories are hardly in a position to propose a solution to expensive real estate, as (as far as I've understood) their chief constituency still continues to be the sort of middle-class types who have owned their home for decades (perhaps specifically because of Thatcher and right-to-buy). If you're in such a situation, housing prices skyrocketing are a feature, not a bug. I don't know much about the Reform Party, but my impression is Tories but even more Brexit-y, and the Brexit, in addition to doing nothing about the housing problem (especially now that we know that the reduction in EU immigrants just led to replacement with non-EU immigrants with dividends), is generally massively unpopular with the youth, perhaps making a certain generation gone for good (or gone without massive efforts) for the Tories.
Also, even more speculatively, housing is an issue that can be exploited both by the left and the right, and I'd guess that the left-wing housing voters would be the ones who have managed to snag a place for rent in a major city and now want rent control to keep the rent from skyrocketing out of their reach, and the right-wing ones would be the ones who are living in a remote suburb or a dying rural region, want to move to a city, and want less immigrants so that the waiting list would eventually reach their number. Maybe the green belts mean there are less such suburban housing voters? Are the green belts even a thing any more?
At least the Finns Party has an interesting demographic regarding religious views: at least a while back, they're the most popular among "no religion" types but also the most popular among the "strongly religious" types, particularly those who belong to Protestant churces outside the Lutheran quasi-state-chuch. The party itself has MPs ranging from precisely such committed Pentecostals etc. to atheists: in one of the larger cities, they even have a council member who (probably mostly for reasons of edginess) has defined himself as a Satanist.
All of these cooperate rather easily, though, since they all share the same focus on immigration, and the party itself is mostly rather secular in both its policies and its communications.
While youth tend to be mostly secular, the ones who are strongly religious will tend to mostly congregate to non-Lutheran movements (there have been several stories in media, like this one, about a new trend of young men joining charismatic groups or Orthodoxy, for instance, the latter of which I can anecdotally confirm noticing myself).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
Old soc.history.what-if newsgroup had a rather notorious poster who believed that we should reinstate feudalism and was also perfectly OK with the idea that under feudalism he'd be an equivalent of a peasant.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
The society 'discovered' the incel term due to the existence of a self-declared incel community that alternated between posting highly and violently misogynistic stuff and the sort of self-loathing, it's-over-rope-awaits material that seemed highly toxic for any new guys falling into the community, typically teenagers for whom it was certainly not all over, to assume as a mindset. Sure, the term is misused to all hell now, but any analysis of what started the processes leading to that misuse would have to take that into account.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
I had read this guy's blog before he got famous. I believe his main theory, the one he's held most consistently, is that Bitcoin is literally a vast Ponzi scheme concoted by some financial cabal intent on using it to crash the global economy. As a theory, it's not that much odder than your standard conspiracy theory stuff; what made it slightly notable enough to get my attention is that usually "there's a big financial cabal there trying to crash the economy for nefarious purposes" are pro-crypto and think that crypto's a tool to combat the financial cabal, not the tool of the financial cabal. As such, he didn't seem "crazier" than your average conspiracy guy; YMMV what the baseline of craziness for that crowd is.
That said, his manifesto and pre-suicide entry offer hints that he had been developing into a crazier direction (I suppose getting into the whole conspiracy milieu can't help), so when you get someone who is going down a slope that way and the somewhat notorious Aaron Bushnell immolation, well, that's what you get.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7d ago
Like said below, a huge amount of Russians were accepted. At least here, the eventual reason to close the door mostly had to do with the fears there would be infiltrators sent alongside the rest.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
There was also a baby boom in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that stayed neutral.
Not to forget that just five years ago very few people would have considered there to be anything strange or political about a well-known American celebrity cutting an ad for a pharma company.
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