Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Nuclear power and how/why it become so polemicized. I'm sure that everyone knows the big incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but I'd be willing to bet there's a story to be told about the behind the scenes politicking that led to the current status quo where nuclear is toxic (heh) in public discourse.
In generally, in the US, what? How "toxic" nuclear varies hugely from country to country. In Finland, it's probably currently toxic to be anti-nuclear. However, several polls also indicate that the pro-nuclear view holds anywhere from a majority to a really comfortable majority of support in the American public, and at the very least there are no credible suggestions to actually start proactively running nuclear power stations down in the US, a la Germany.
Historically, I'd say the biggest motivator in anti-nuclear sentiment weren't the accidents, though those played a part, but rather the mental link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It's not an accident that Greenpeace has the word "peace" in name.
I've seen some writings indicate that Korean War was one of the most widely popular and unopposed wars in American history, with even most leftists supporting it (apart from CPUSA, of course, but it was at a very low point in public support or indluence), but what little opposition existed was mostly among the Right.
If there seems to be one fair constant in American history, it's that the South loves war and at the very least considerable and consistent parts of Northern states are far more resistant. As far as I've understood, whether it was War of 1812, Mexican-American War (as mentioned), both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan, (white) South eagerly went to war while there were comparatively more New Englanders and Midwesterners that resisted war. I'm not fully sure about the Spanish-American War, and of course the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War were sui generis events.
The switch between Dems and Reps as to which is more of a "war party" just so happens to be parallel to the switch of South from Democratic to Republican. Sure, there were other reasons for this switch, but it seems quite uncommon to specifically consider foreign policy one of the reasons for this switch, even though an argument could well be made that it must have played a part. Of course I'm not sure how the current conflict in Ukraine fits this schema, though it should also be noted that America is currently not fighting a direct shooting war in Ukraine, or at least there's no firm proof it's doing so.
Considering this, I've always kind of wondered about how many paleocons and paleolibertarians in the USA seem to combine nostalgia and admiration for the South as a region with a firm noninterventionist or even pacifist policy. It would certainly seem strange to admire and nostalgize by far the most constantly belligerent region in the United States and similarly advocate noninterventionism, without seemingly even feeling the slightest desire to explain this seeming contradiction.
Sure, I know, the argument is that it was that devil Lincoln and the Northern victory in Civil War that "led to the creation of the American Empire", but still, that same victory - and the marginalization of the South as a region - was followed by decades of relative lack of American intervention in the outside world. There was the Spanish-American War, occupation of Hawaii and such, but still, it took 50 years for US to get into its next major war - WW1, incidentally happening during the presidency of the first Southern president since the Civil War.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Yes, Ukraine cause is now strongly left coded. Someone flying Ukraine flag is going also fly BLM, rainbow and trans flags and pro vaccine signs.
At least in March, 42% of Republicans in the US still supported providing aid to Ukraine. Support for Ukraine tends to be left-coded, but I'd argue that it's not strongly left-coded, and it certainly doesn't seem to necessarily mean BLM, rainbow and trans flags.
Like Ukraine, I believe that being pro-vaccing, including pro-Covid-vaccine, still continues to be comfortably the majority position in the US, and this poll indicates that only 36% of Republicans are "unwilling or uncertain" to get vaccinated. It's not the same number as with Democrats, but it's not the majority.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
But that sort of a retributive honor code has also contributed greatly to American willingness to participate in foreign wars, especially after an incident in the style of Maine or Tonkin Gulf attacks.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Should also be noted that much of the tendentious Republican criticism of Ukraine War seems to be of the "US should not spend that much resources on Ukraine since it needs to put all the resources it can get to prepare for a war against China", which doesn't count as a particularly anti-war position in my books, as such.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
One weird thing that I tend to see is Canadians (Australians, too) thinking that there's a global problem with Canadian/Australian visibility in pop culture matters. Sure, their visibility does not equal US or Great Britain, but those are by far the two biggest cultural lodestones and content producers globally, or at least within Western context; no other country comes close to them, and even then GB does not come close to US. Compared to a country like Finland or hell, even Germany, both Canada and Australia have a considerable advantage in getting global recognition to local artists, or TV shows and such, for that matter, whether talking some sort of a per-capita rubric or sheer volume, just simply since they're a part of the Anglosphere.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
My practical experience in local youth politics basically indicates that almost everyone drawn towards politics is a bit "special" in some way, but generally speaking more popular one was, more likely they're simply to be drawn towards mainstream centrist politics, not any of the extremes.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
It seems so to me? For the entire duration of how long I've followed American politics - ie. since late 90s - I've seen Republicans, particularly the Republican right-wing, present PRC as a threat, though this was somewhat muted during the War on Terror due to focus on Islam. Insofar as I've understood the Republicans, or at least large sections of the party, genuinely believe that there's going to be an US/China war in the near future and it's important for the US to win since PRC is evil.
This has also been connected to a firm belief that the Democrats are subservient to China or just plain bought by China, no matter how much counterevidence there is otherwise (ie. Biden admin being just as belligerent towards PRC as Trump admin was) - though it's also possible the Republicans keep beating this drum to ensure the Dems don't go wobbly on China, since that would expose them to an immediate Republican attack ("See? Just as we said! They are bought by China!")
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
In case this means Die Linke, my understanding is that it's arguable that their bad fortunes are the direct result of power moving from the old East-German, SED-successor parts (who at least had a certain history of governance) to the anarcho-liberal West German radicals.
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
11mo ago
Weird. At least here, having just a single blanket (whether it's heavy or not) in a two-person bed is associated precisely with America, probably because that's how married couples (or unmarried, these days) are depicted in TV series. Every actual couple here uses two blankets.
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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
I see maskers from time to time. They're usually, from the looks, upper-to-middle class older people. I don't think it's meant to signal political allegiance, at least.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
I'd say that "politics nerds" and other special types turn up in numbers in all parties I've encountered, but in the mainstream centrist parties they'd be more than offset by normie types who got into politics because they wanted, for instance, to fix some particular local issue (of course local-issue stalwarts can also go pretty weird and feral over their particular issue), or who just "felt the need to serve" or whatever. Often the mechanism for latter seems to be that they participate in one of the youth councils set up in municipalities to "give the youth a voice" and then gravitate to the party that rules their municipality (or where they have a family background, or which simply annoys them the least), which almost always tends to be a milquetoast centre-right-to-centre-left party.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Yes, I'm talking about the very first chatter there was on the vaccine, ie. some months after March 2020. I didn't quite get /u/WalterOdim's point about FDA, and by Dec 2020 the hype cycle was already running hard.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Globally speaking there was, in the end, fairly little difference between right-wing and left-wing politicians in the harshness of Covid measures - or, rather, there were both right-wingers and left-wingers going with heavy, proactive measures approach (say, Orban and Ardern) or anything from light to non-existent measures (AMLO in Mexico, Bolsonaro in Brazil). It's not something one can strictly blame on progressivism, and the crisis certainly was also used for all sorts of agendas by all sorts of parties.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
I think that a large part of public health authority decisionmaking was simply trying to take burden off their workers, who often were particularly horribly overburdened at the start of the crisis but without matching bonuses or pay increases (since the future of the budgets of those institutions had also, for obvious reasons, gone completely up in the air). Basically the only way to placate the workers they had at this point was lobbying for restrictions in hopes that it would somehow reduce this burden of work. However, increasingly as the crisis went on, this was also countered and balanced by businesses lobbying for reopening (including vaccine passports as a partial mean of reopening).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
But those don't really explain the global strong media reaction.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
It's my honest appraisal of the situation and the motivations among the politicians and other media types, based on a close monitoring of the situation and numerous conversations I've had with such people.
continue getting regular injections for all time!
But... that hasn't happened? How many people have gotten a Covid injection for the last year or so? Or in the future?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
There was a similar small to-do in Finland about a planned screening of the Drag Kids documentary. It was basically stillborn since the cultural festival that had planned the screening quickly withdrew it from lists, citing threats sent. However, while the fracas was going on, much of the discussion basically consisted of both sides flinging "You're just importing American culture wars!" accusations to each other; pro-LGBTQ types saying that this is a copy of American conservatives tactically making up mountains from molehills over LGBTQ culture and conservatives retorting that the whole "drag kids" thing is just an American folly to begin with (even though the documentary appears to be Canadian, but that's not exactly a large difference from this side of the pond anyway).
Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.
The entire Finnish history consists of people importing ideologies from elsewhere. Christianity through Sweden and Russia, later Lutheranism from Germany, then nationalism from Germany (the founding father of Finnishness, J. V. Snellman, basically based his nationalist visions on Hegelianism), socialism from Germany, environmentalism from, yes, Germany... When one reads Social Democratic magazines from the start of the century they're already bashing each over basically over whether German Socialist 1 or German Socialist 2 was correct, and adjusting their own views on the basis of such debates elsewhere.
The biggest difference to past centuries is where the importation of ideology comes from, but that it's mostly imported from somewhere says.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
A large reason of why we're writing in Finnish is that a large group of Swedish-speaking gentry got enamored with the general European trend of national awakening and decided that such an awakening in Finland could only be done using the people's language (and, in Snellman's case, in large part due to his readings of Hegel), and because the Russian Empire happened to find it useful to foster such a movement. Of course it might have happened otherwise in other conditions. At the very least it must be noted that none of this happened in a vacuum.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe.
If there is, it's not a strong one. At least here, being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left, though there's a smallish far-right section with that view, too. Of course, one could argue that the anti-US far-left is not generally the wokest part of the left, but I know both anti-American woke and non-woke leftists with equivalent views on NATO/US/Ukraine.
However, at the moment, being pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine and concurrently pro-American is the view shared by the vast majority of the population, with NATO support being something like 80 % at the moment. Within this section, the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.
I have a lot of stuff that I've been intending to write about but have had so much work and family life etc. going that I haven't really gotten to them. I have had an effortpost about the Orthodox church and Ukraine situation lying around for ages, simply because after writing it, I'm not sure if I agree with it. I have also had a bunch of ideas about the conspiracy theory and its role in society, but this still needs a bit of formation.
I've also been intending to write a series of blogposts on the Covid situation in Finland, but again, that would require a bit of organizing. I have a bunch of themes lying around about AI, but I'm probably going to write about them in Finnish (since a lof of it wouldn't be that fresh in the context of this forum, for instance, but would be fresh when it comes to general AI-related public discussion in Finland, which is miles behind where it should be.)
If someone is interested in some aspect of Finnish society, feel free to suggest.
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