Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
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.
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.
When people in Europe think about the EU, they don't think about immigration or gay marriage or whatever, or even Russia (well, these days they might, but still, it's NATO that is more relevant as an actor here). They think about trade. Behind all other stuff, EU is still primarily a trade pact, and what it represents to your average European is wealth and stability. Of course both of these are extremely important to Eastern Europeans, for reasons that probably don't need explaining. It is impossible to understand the popularity of EU without this frame; it's particularly impossible if one insists on looking at European politics through American culture-war framings.
Whatever attempts there have been from EU to get Poland to be more socially liberal have obviously been failures, thus far. (It's worth remembering that the whole spat EU has with Poland is not EU saying "you need to take in more gays and immigrants and have abortions", it's been about EU being concerned with PiS court-packing and other challenges to rule of law.)
Regarding Russia, it's also worth noting that Poland is not "going toward more alignment with EU and US", Poland is significantly more anti-Russian than EU and US and Polish politicians have many times demanded these parties to take more aggressive action against Russia and to protect Ukraine, going as far as to flirt with direct intervention in ways that EU and US have refrained from doing.
This, of course, does not just come from nowhere. Throughout the war, social media has been replete with constant Russian TV clips going around in social media on how they hate Poland, in particular, and blame Poland, in particular, for brainwashing all the Ukrainians to believe Russia is not their friend, and how Russia needs to conduct a SMO against Poland as soon as possible. And there seems to be an even longer history of anti-Polish hostility from Russia (quoting from a Google-translated Finnish blog post):
A certain Central European state has constantly taken center stage in the Kremlin's calculations as the main opponent of the country, and the policy pursued by Russia in its immediate periphery would ultimately be easy to explain through this tension alone. In Vladimir Putin's eyes, one of the countries standing in the way of Russian hegemony stands out above all others: Poland.
The essay published by the Russian president in July 2021 on the historical connection between Russians and Ukrainians has been quoted widely, and is a telling example of Putin's understanding of history. The essay is a straightforward narrative about the destinies of Eastern Europe spanning half a millennium. Few readers paid attention to how, in connection with each historical turning point he presented, Putin specifically named Poland not only as Russia's main opponent in the Ukrainian region, but also as an incomparably worse oppressor of Ukrainians than Russia.
Putin's essay tells how history took a fatal turn already when, as a result of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, Ukraine ended up in the sphere of influence of Catholic Christendom, which broke the connection of the Eastern Slavic peoples. This was followed by the revolt of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky; the struggle for freedom, in which the Ukrainian people sought help against Poland from their brother-in-law, the Tsar of Russia. The divisions of Poland meant for Putin the return of the "old Russian lands" to their true state unity, and in the 19th century Ukrainian cultural identity naturally developed as a "Little Russian" part of the empire; the tsarist regime's censorship measures, on the other hand, were only a reaction to the efforts of Polish nationalists in Ukraine. After the collapse of the Empire, the Poles suppressed the independence of the Western Ukrainians and used the "People's Republic of Ukraine" founded by Symon Petlyura only as an intermediary in their fight against the Bolsheviks. In the period between the world wars, the Polish-administered western regions of Ukraine were oppressed. According to Putin, the current rapprochement between Ukraine and the EU countries is still underpinned by an "old Polish and Austrian project" — a reference to the cooperation between Polish independence activists and the Habsburg dual monarchy — whose purpose was to create an artificial "anti-Russia" out of Ukraine.
Rhetorical attacks against Poland have become a regular part of Putin's arsenal since the annexation of Crimea. In December 2019 , Putin accused the government of interwar Poland of colluding with the Nazis and named Poland complicit in starting World War II . A month later, the Holocaust commemoration held in Jerusalem turned into a new stage in the historical war between Moscow and Warsaw with Putin's speech . In June 2020, the ruler of the Kremlin continued on the same topic, declaring that the wartime suffering of occupied Poland was the fault of the country's own government. In Russian foreign policy, history has been turned into a weapon, and in this respect, the front of the hybrid war had been turned towards Poland long before the asylum seeker crisis at the turn of last year on the border of Belarus. The nationalist, right-wing populist government that has been in power in Warsaw since 2015, which, like the Kremlin, has enacted its own historical laws , has been a favorite target for Putin.
It is clear that the struggle for domination of Eastern Europe is defined in the Kremlin as a struggle primarily against Poland. Among the new EU and NATO countries after the collapse of communism, Poland is in a class of its own; For ten years, Poland's economic growth has exceeded all expectations , the recovery of the country's economy from the corona crisis has been fast , the country's armed forces are the fifth largest in the European Union , and from the beginning Poland has pursued an active neighborhood policy specifically in the direction of Ukraine, also using the means of economic cooperation.
Poland's eastern policy has a long history. The "Eastern Borderlands", Kresy Wschodnie , were once part of Polish nationalist nostalgia; the regions from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea appeared as a lost, beautiful Arcadia, the scene of the great days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The background of Poland's current neighborhood policy is more recent, and its starting point was the views expressed in the Kultura magazine by two émigré journalists during the Cold War, Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Mieroszewski . "The Giedroyc-Mieroszewski Doctrine"required Poland's unreserved support for the independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, rejection of the big brother and great power attitude, agreement on historical pain points, and the joining of all countries to United Europe. After the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Polish government practically adapted its Eastern policy to the Kultura magazine and tried to pave Ukraine's way to Western institutions. Although today's Poland has become more authoritarian and anti-EU than before , the country's commitment to Ukraine has not wavered.
Poland's neighborhood policy has been yet another "geopolitical" threat factor for the Russians, and as such a particularly painful one. It is no surprise that in the eyes of Vladimir Putin, Poland's rise to a new regional power factor and active politics in the neighboring regions are defined in the light of five hundred years of history. In this interpretation, the Warsaw elite is once again expanding its sphere of interest at the expense of Russia; Poles are at the forefront of challenging Russian supremacy in Ukraine; Poland actually threatens to question once again the entire Russian national birth myth dating back to the days of Kievan Rus; and at the same time, Poland, specifically Poland, is bringing Western weapons close to Russia's heartlands, whether it's NATO's missile shield or arms deliveries to the Ukrainian army.
It is also clear to Putin that, of all his opponents, Poland is the one that won't give up, and Poland is the only one of the EU countries that is ready to defend Ukraine, even on its own . Moscow's foreign policy has achieved results in a few countries of the former Eastern Bloc, above all in Hungary, but on the Polish side the contradictions are completely irreconcilable for historical reasons. Russia's goals in Ukraine therefore require action in relation to Poland and the isolation of Poland from its allies, in which case Russia could take the measure of its opponent alone — according to Pushkin, "only among the Slavs". Until now, the government in Warsaw has messed up its relationship with the EU itself — although one can ask how much the Union has benefited Poland against Russia, especially considering Germany's energy policy needs, in the end — but as a NATO country, Poland's shares are on a good course.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo 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.
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.
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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
In an another decade, this complaint would have just straightforwardly been expressed as "these unwashed hippies from San Fran-sicko say that they're about LOVE and HELPING YOUR FELLOW MAN, but they're all just a bunch of OVERSEXED PERVERTS praying on the CHASTITY OF THE YOUNG WOMEN!"
I'm not saying this to claim these women are wrong in their complaints, mind - it's just interesting, the degree this is basically a conservative complaint expressed in the language of the people who are so far removed from conservative culture that they can only express their conservative complaint in progressive language.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
27d ago
I'd put it like this:
One of the problems is that we are so used to living in the World That Liberalism Made that we can't really often see how radical the core ideas of liberalism were and, indeed, are (if you don't take them as given). The core of liberalism - things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process and equality under law, representative democracy, rights of the individual etc. – had to actually be argued through and often implemented through revolution and war.
After all, why should someone be able to speak if they are – insofar as the society sees it – wrong? Why should someone be able to spread a false religious doctrine that leads people to hell? Why should a baron be treated the same for slapping some nasty unwashed little oik as the oik would be for slapping a baron, considering the baron is an obviously superior creature to the oik? Why should the have the same vote, in fact? Why should slavery be abolished or women have rights, considering none of the past societies abolished it or gave the women rights? And so on.
During the modern era, these liberal values won so throughoutly that even other ideologies have basically been leavened with liberalism so much that they often have more to do with liberalism than with the actual original ideology. What’s social democracy? Socialism plus liberalism. What’s the basis of modern rightist thought, at least in Europe? Nationalism plus liberalism. What’s Christian democracy? What you got when Christian thinkers decided it’s time to put the traditional monarchist and pseudo-feudal political philosophies aside and create a doctrine compatible with liberal values. And so on.
If we think about ideologies like fascism or Stalinism, they are basically what you get when you take an ideology like nationalism and socialism and remove all that liberal leaven, indeed replace it with open scorn for liberal values. During most of the Lenin-Stalin era, it was an open doctrine that religion needs to be extinguished and class enemies don’t have any rights, least of all a right to a due process the same way as a proletarian communist would have. When the Soviet Union started moderating after Stalin, it meant that it started lazily pretending that it respects liberal rights, even if it didn’t do so in actuality.
Likewise, the Nazis poured scorn on liberal values, like the idea that a Jew and an Aryan should be treated similarly. Even today, more extreme someone is considered, the less liberal they basically are, both implicitly and explicitly. 100 % nationalism (or racism, with race seen as an extended nation), 0 % liberalism. This framing explains, for instance, why the liberals see Nazis and Stalinists as two peas in a pod (“horseshoe theory”), but these ideologies themselves consider themselves wide apart. The liberals can see the lack of liberalism as an unifying factor to these ideologies, but the anti-liberals themselves, while they can grasp the idea of liberalism as an ideology in itself and not just the “water we swim in”, also tend to see it as something ephemeral and fake, not something where its lack by itself would be enough to bring those lacking it to the same camp.
Likewise, it explains why it’s so easy for many to think that moderate social democrats are basically just Communists in disguise and democratic nationalists are just Fascists in disguise; there is an unifying factor between the moderates and the extremists, and what differs is the degree of the liberal leaven in there. Thus, if one is predisposed to believe that liberalism is fake and ephemeral, destined to fritter away when the going gets tough when whatever disaster that one believes is going to hit the humanity will hit it, it’s also only too natural to believe that once that happens the “mask goes away”, the moderate social democrats instantly radicalize to communism and normie nationalists go Nazi.
Now, what about the situation described by Silver? We’re talking about an ideology that’s undeniably on the progressive end of the scale but not necessarily the same as socialism. Rather, I would say that it’s what you get when you take all the minor ideologies that have attached themselves to the liberal framework and then remove the liberalism in the centre.
Remember, we live in a society suffused with basic liberal values, which means that liberalism itself has started to seem like it’s unnecessary. Indeed, for a long time, liberal parties and movements in most countries suffered – the various social democrats, Christian democrats and others had taken up their values and combined it with other attractive ideologies. Likewise in the US both parties were basically representative of various forms of liberalism.
As liberalism started to lose its luster due to this, various other ideologies attached themselves to this framework. This was made easier by the liberal idea of free debate and the “best argument”, allowing new upstarter ideologies like environmentalism, third-wave feminism, various minority nationalisms etc. to get a hearing. Likewise, various liberal ideas were subtly molded by the ideological struggle with Marxism-Leninism, which left an imprint in the developing concept of human rights, the crowning achievement of Anglo social liberalism – affected by Soviet and Third World insistence that the same ideas of free speech should not apply to things like fascism and racism.
What you get when you have the “successor ideology”, “social justice” etc. described by Silver is what you get when you take these attached ideologies and start removing the liberal framework. It’s a liberalism built against itself, a collection of various ideas that have started seeming like natural parts of liberalism, yet which can be implemented without democracy, free speech or anything like that, should there just be enough political power. This is why it all seems like so mellifluous and hard to define. We’re not talking yet about a concrete ideology that can stand by itself – just a collection of ideas without the usual supporting framework. That’s what “successor ideology” seems to refer to, the idea that since liberalism is now useless, it’s being succeeded by an illiberal ideology that has not yet fully formed. It’s entirely possible that it all collapses before it has managed to form itself into something new.
These basic liberal values are, indeed, bread and butter for Silver himself, literally, as he has built his career on the back of the assumption that there are fair elections underscored by fair and free speech that he can pontificate upon and write about. However, he’s also been liberal in the sense the anti-racism and other such causes seem very natural to him – the idea that there are now activists who support them without giving much credence to the liberal values causes pain and confusion. It’s only too natural to fight it by referring to the lost liberal framework – we’ll see how it succeeds.
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
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?
CULTURE WAR IN FINLAND: THE GREAT SÁMI SHOWDOWN
I haven't posted these in some time due to being busy with kids and stuff, but this one serves as a good writing exercise for me to organize my thoughts as well.
The Finnish government has spent most of the last weeks squabbling about a topic that is obscure even in Finland – Sámi issues. Most Finns, of course, know about the Sámi, ‘EU’s only indigenous nation’, but when it comes to the actual political affairs concerning Sámi, the common reaction is “I’m not touching that with a 3.048-meter pole”. Since I don’t know much about it either, I’ve tried to learn more about it by reading a fair bit of stuff concerning the topic. Here’s an overview.
WHO ARE THE SÁMI?
The Sámi are an indigenous nation in the northern regions of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia, stereotypically thought of as nomadic reindeer herders though of course these days working in numerous modern professions. There’s a total of 70 600-100 000 Sámi, most living in Norway. Approximately 7 000-10 000 of them live in Finland.
The Sámi generally differ from the national populations of these countries by culture and language, there being 9 living Sámi languages, three of which (Northern Sámi, Inari Sámi, and Skolt Sámi) are spoken in Finland. These also correspond to distinct Sámi peoples, though due to assimilation not all Sámi speak Sámi languages as their primary language. The Sámi have extensive and visible cultural markers; joik style singing, distinctive costumes including the gákti coat etc.
Sámi languages are Finno-Ugric, like Finnish. Linguistically they’re closer to Finnish than, say, Hungarian – the relation is easy for me to see – but still fully mutually unintelligible with Finnish unlike, say, Estonian. The ancestral population giving this language to Finns and the Sámi arrived to the area ca 3500 years ago, mixing and matching with previous populations, and there used to be Sámi in a far larger area, but the current formal ‘Sámi territory’, or the Finnish part of the general Sámi area Sápmi, now consists only of a few northern municipalities.
The Finnish Sámi have an organ called Sámediggi (in Northern Sami, the biggest of Sámi languages), the Sámi Parliament, that is funded by the Finnish state and is empowered to conduct activities for sustaining and bolstering Sámi languages and culture; there are similar organs in Sweden and Norway, though not in Russia. However, their powers are rather limited.
(It should be noted that this is a barebones definition, and even this much is not necessarily accepted by all factions in the debate. There exists a claim to a fourth Finnish Sámi nation, Forest Sámi, or Kemi Sámi. We’ll come to that later)
SO, WHAT MAKES THEM INDIGENOUS? AREN’T ALL EUROPEAN NATIONS INDIGENOUS TO EUROPE?
Anyone who has spent any time looking into indigenous issues will of course soon realize that the concept of “indigeneity”, as commonly used, is more than just being a people that has lived in some region for a long time. The concept of “Indigenous nation” is, in short, connected to European colonialism the conquest of the New World and all that; the whole idea of terra nullius led to a process which, stereotypically at least, did not led to the inclusion of the conquered nationalities to the new colonial societies rather than the colonial societies being built on, around and despite them.
Thus, there was later a push for specific forms of governance taking this process into account by countries like US, i.e., the various tribal agreements and governance processes; essentially, “indigenous nations” are those considered to be in a similar position to Native Americans, Australian Aborigines etc.
Are the Sámi in such a position? Well, their northern lands were some of the last lands in Europe to be brought under regular state authority (taxation etc.) with this happening during the general age of colonization, they do indeed form minorities in their traditional areas of living due to the settlement of those areas by peoples from down south, their livelihoods were until recently nomadic or seminomadic etc. As such, there is indeed a comparison to be made.
Of course, their situation is not completely analogous to Native Americans – one large difference would be that all sides acknowledge there has been considerable assimilation and intermarriage between Finns and Sámi, with many northern Finns having considerable Sámi blood and many Sámi families likewise possessing Finnish ancestry.
Perhaps most importantly, the governments of Finland, Sweden, and Norway themselves discuss the Sámi as indigenous and acknowledge themselves as such in some way – though only Norway has signed the ILO 169 convention on indigenous rights. As such, it’s small wonder that Sámi themselves have easily seen themselves as analogous to many other conquered nations; both sides of this ongoing affair frequently refer to indigenous rights to bolster their views.
WHAT’S THE ONGOING AFFAIR?
The Sámi issue is the consistency of the voter rolls of Sámi Parliament. However, behind this issue are wider questions of Sámi ethnicity, Sámi relations to the Finnish government and Finnish nation, and concept of indigeneity itself.
Basically, Sámi Parliament maintains a separate voter roll of people who can participate in electing the Sámi Parliament. There are currently ca 6000 people in this voter roll. The concept originally used for drawing up the voter rolls was speaking Sámi as your first language or having a parent of a grandparent speaking it. Later, an additional criterion was added – the so-called “Lapp paragraph”, stating that someone that could demonstrate their ancestor had been marked as a “Lapp” in state tax registers they could be potentially added to the rolls.
It’s this paragraph that is the source of the main controversy, with the majority of Sámi Parliament advocating for a new law regulating Sámi Parliament removing the Lapp paragraph. (“Lapp” used to be the word used to describe either Sámi or reindeer herders/nomads in the Northern/Eastern territories in general; in modern parlance it tends to be considered a slur.)
At first it wasn’t that controversial, since there was an implicit understanding that this paragraph would no be used for cases where “Lapps” have been registered prior to 1875 (it was considered that after that the livelihoods had settled well enough), but in recent decades the Finnish courts have adjudicated cases where people had sued to get to the voter rolls on the basis of farther-reaching “Lapp” ancestry, and some hundreds of people have thus been added to the voter rolls. There are some other issues here as well, but the Lapp paragraph is basically the central question.
The Sámi parliament majority (13 out of 21 Sámi Parliament representatives) is supported by the Finnish left, forming the majority of the Finnish government, and the Swedish People’s Party, which similarly represents a linguistic minority. However, an oppositional faction in Sámi Parliament (8 out of 21 members), along with the center-right governmental party Centre, oppose this, and the Centre has been threatening to bring down the government if the left pushes through the Sámi Parliament reform without the Lapp paragraph, or something like it.
(continues)
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
1yr ago
Big Serge, who I have followed on Twitter throughout the war, has a long record of being flagrantly wrong in his various war prognoses. Some examples include this (yes, I know, many people were skeptical about the ongoing eternal Herson offensive, including me, but in the end, one still can't deny he was wrong!), as well as tweeting this just before the Ukrainian victory at Lyman led to the Russian withdrawal from the entire Kharkiv area and this before that.
He's a perfect example of a very typical Russophile (I don't think he's Russian himself?) milblogger/miltwitter type: a continuous undertone and often overtone of "stupid Westerners soyfacing over Ukrainian propaganda will never understand that Russia is simply destined to win like it always does, unlike us clear rational thinkers" belying the fact that they keep predicting Ukrainian losses and Russian wins that then never arrive and never adjusting their priors when these predictions keep getting proven wrong. Of course, many such cases in all (geo)politics!
CULTURE WAR IN FINLAND: DEHUMANIZATION DERBY
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:
The pious complaints by Helsingin Sanomat* about the demonization of the Russians are as out of touch with reality as the recent outrage that Ukrainians may have also committed war crimes in the war, such as by executing surrendered soldiers.
The war was started and is sustained by Russia. The war will only end when enough Russian soldiers have been killed that it becomes politically or militarily impossible for the Russian regime to continue the war. Thus, killing Russian soldiers is a good thing, and the Ukrainians should be helped in killing them.
And that is, in fact, what we are doing. Why, exactly, does Helsingin Sanomat think that Finland is supplying Ukraine with lethal material?
We are thus unanimous in our view that the killing of Russians in this situation created by Russia is justified and necessary, regardless of whether the Russians being killed are on the front line of their own free will or as conscripts.
However, there exists a strong in-built inhibition in humans against killing other human beings. In normal times, this inhibition allows society to exist as we know it. In times of war, it is a hindrance. This inhibition is suppressed by stripping the enemy to be killed of his humanity, i.e., by demonizing him or describing him as a rat, cockroach or some other disgusting animal.
Corporal Rokka** sums this up when asked what it feels like to shoot a human being: 'I don't know. I've only shot the enemy."
If killing Russian soldiers in this situation is right and necessary, then anything that contributes to their killing is also right and necessary. Demonization and the carnivalization of killing are right and necessary. If we consider Russian soldiers as dignified human beings and are NEVERTHELESS kill them, this will, I believe, have far more damaging consequences, both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war.
Everything bad that is happening in this war is the result of Russia starting the war. If the war continues, the bad things will inevitably continue. The bad things will stop when the war stops, and since Russia cannot be convinced with words, the only way to stop the war is to kill Russians.
I bought one of the signed artillery shells from https://signmyrocket.com/. I urge all those who hate war and want peace to do the same.
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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
So blue tribers are retreating to their enclaves, and red tribers to theirs, while the grey folks (I love you, boo kiss) are rather being forced to pick a side. Scott Alexander, for all his criticisms of the left's approach to the culture war, is a polyamorous atheist living in the Bay Area; of course his allegiance is to the blue tribe, even if by their standards he's a heretic.
I grow increasingly confident about my claim that insofar as the color tribes exist, the gray tribe surely doesn't. It's just "blue tribe", expect, basically, super duper blue every which way. Not just urban, but chiefly concentrated in the citiest cities available. Not just secular but - as a rule - atheist/agnostic expect with a surprising interest in Eastern religions. Not just living in a post-Sexual-Revolution culture, but one big polyamorous cuddle pile. And so on.
The thing is, precisely, that the "gray tribe" is so super blue it actually alienates them from "regular" blue tribers, making them the folks that your regular middle class liberals can point to and laugh: "Whoa, look at those weirdoes!" Lots of commentary like that when people have discussed the FTX scandal, for instance. It's this alienation that frees them from the comfy social sphere that underlays the blue tribe attachment to general blue politics, taken as what all smart and moral people obviously believe as a matter of course, and leads them to potentially explore other political ideologies and avenues. (Of course, that's not the only necessary factor, there's plenty of weirdoes who largely stick with some version of more conventional blue politics.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I'm pleasantly surprised Biden blocked the railroad strike. It goes against the general theory of Biden as controlled by woke interests.
How? I don't think that basic labor union activism has ever been counted among "wokeness". If anything the narrative is that wokes are corporate-friendly and have turned their back on the traditional left-wing working-class base, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
"Ukraine will have to take loads of third world refugees by EU/NATO" is one of the most ridiculous predictions of this conflict. How many third world refugees, exactly, are there in Romania/Bulgaria/Croatia - the closest equivalents as the newest EU countries? What even is the mechanism how this is supposed to happen? There are currently no ways how EU could force an EU member state to take in refugees from (presumably) other member states, and all efforts to create one have been scuppered.
Of course, if the EU wanted a "soft" mechanism to considerably discourage asylum-seeking in general, a way to do it would be stating "sure, you can come, but you would have to settle in war-torn Ukraine"...
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?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
As I've noted before, the thing with women being more left-wing than men is actually quite a recent development; up until the 70s, in Western countries, women were more likely than men to vote for conservative parties, while socialist parties were more appealing to men.
Of course, what happened after that was the second wave of feminism, but also general secularization. Back when conservatism was more appealing to women, it was more out-and-out religious. Religious conservatism is rare in Europe and on a downward slope in America, and what replaces it as the bedrock of conservatism is nationalism, but that's not all that appealing to women; nationalism has always been very much a boy's movement, concentrated on warlike soldier imagery where women have at most the role of birthing the next generation of warriors. Christian churches tend to be male-dominated at the top as well, of course, but they have always also carved a wide role for women, both in things like the Marian devotions and in keeping the various parish functions and charity committees running - and the spiritual appeal of religion is quite universal.
I just yesterday saw this blog post on the curious little "MAGA Communist" groupings on... well, Twitter, mostly. These guys are often called tankies, but they seem different from "traditional tankies", who would usually be orthodox Marxist-Leninists, in that they combine Soviet-style trappings to agendas that aren't all that radical when you look at them - China-style state-oriented capitalist economics, anti-interventionism, and anti-liberalism of the sort that leads to appeals to the right wingers (who, of course, are usually flabbergasted why someone claiming to be a communist would see a common cause with them).
I think that it's important to try to figure out what the Soviet trappings - and sympathy for countries like China, Russia etc. - specifically represent here. This requires an intra-left perspective since, like it usually is when someone adopts a melange of views that looks like odd or contradictory, it's about various ways to create your own niche and self-representation within a certain ideological movement. What I think that the Soviet imagery often represents, within a left-wing context, is:
MASCULINITY: It's not exactly a particularly new observation that, whereas traditional socialist imagery was highly masculine, representing buff workers hitting anvils, aggressive strike action, guerrillas fighting imperialism with a rifle in hand etc., modern left-wing imagery is likewise rather more feminine. Indeed, up until 1970s, men were more likely to vote for socialist parties than women, and women preferred conservative parties. People who wish to return to a more manly left find Soviet imagery a good point of reference.
GROWTHISM: Yes, it might seem odd to associate Soviet Union with economic growth, considering the stall in growth before the fall of Soviet Union, but one thing that attracted people powerfully to communism in the 50s was the idea and promise that it would create more growth than capitalism. References to Soviet Union (or modern China) as engines of growth aren't meant to convey as much a belief to goodness of state economies in themselves but a rebuke to "degrowth" mentalities among the modern left, and an ideation of a return to an industrial, material-goods-oriented model; this is also why the MAGA Communist types seem to be enchanted with LaRouche Movement, which likewise talks a lot about reindustrialization and vast, Promethean projects.
ANTI-ANARCHISM: Modern leftist movements often refer implicitly or explicitly to anarchist goals and ideas (ie. Occupy was replete with anarchist symbology, the whole police abolitionist agenda is straight out of anarchism etc.) This reference to anarchism originated in the 90s as an explicit rebuke of Soviet times. People who don't like anarchism and anarchist for ideological or aesthetic reasons, or because they just see it as utopian and unworkable, then refer back to the Soviet imagery to try to "banish" this anarchist influence.
ANTI-LIBERALISM: There are people who explicitly gravitate to radical left because they find one or more aspects of liberalism to be wrongheaded. Maybe it's the technocratic, there-is-no-alternative rhetoric often associated with modern liberalism, maybe it's because they have social conservative impulses they do't even recognize themselves, maybe it's just contrarianism against the current hegemonic ideology. Soviet Union, of course, represented anti-liberal leftism.
ISOLATIONISM MASKING AS ANTI-IMPERIALISM: For people my age (ie. 30s to 40s), particularly Americans, political understanding was often formed in the crucible of the Iraq War era, which has left many left-wing people with a strong isolationist strain, as a reaction to the lies and bloodshed associated with the Iraq War and an automatic rejection of all American interventionism everywhere. If one ends up on the socialist far left, this can then often be represented as a principled anti-imperialist strand of thought.
In many ways, these sort of "tankies" are another representation of what I've called "ossified progressivism"in reference to TERFs; a progressive movement of a previous era is taken as a lodestone in a quest to bring clarity to spats and differences within a current left-wing movement. While it's not conservatism in itself, there's a certain conservative impulse in this attempt to preserve "the wisdom of the earlier movement", and thus it's not a wonder there's also an unstated belief there is a connection to actual conservatives here.
The Finnish election happened last Sunday. The ruling centre-left government and its parties lost seats, though the Social Democrats could recoup some of their losses from other governing parties. The right-wing parties won a resounding victory, though it remains to be seen whether the neoliberal National Coalition, now the top party, will build a right-wing government with the nationalist Finns Party or a centrist liberal government with the Social Democrats. Many options will be considered.
More on this and the past four years can be read from the following article.
Culture-war-wise, this election probably confirmed that 1. economic questions (the base for National Coalition's victory, particularly debt) still come first in Finland and 2. while immigration probably played a role, and perhaps stuff like trans issues or generic anti-wokeness, the main culture war in Finland still is basically what could be described as "environmentalism vs. standard middle-class way of life", ie. whether the so called green shift and strict climate targets are electorally compatible with people's fears over losing their job, seeing costs of living (fuel, electricity, food etc.) go up, and generally whether environmentalism is just an urban academic fad incompatible with normie life, particularly in rural areas. It's hard to see this one winding down in the future, either.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
People have been elucidating the reason why Americans and Europeans, in general, keep supporting Ukraine in many individual posts; one of the main pillars of the global international order is countries not altering their borders unilaterally through invasion and annexation, and whatever other violations to this principle there have been, none have been as flagrant as what Russia is doing now.
However, beyond that, is there any wonder why I, as a Finn, would have a special reason for hoping Russia loses, and loses badly? It's not just an abstraction when one lives in a country next to Russia, which used to be a part of the Russian Empire, which was for a long time in Russia/SU's claimed sphere of influence, which went through another "border adjustment" by Russia in 1939/1940. The said border adjustment, incidentally, meant my father had to leave his home while two years old, an event he would still recount on the phone while drunk and crying to his adult children decades after it happened. The said border adjustment removing my native Eastern Finland of what would have been its natural biggest city and a potential hometown for me, Viipuri, and turning it into a peripheral Russian wreck of a town. And a hundred other similar reasons.
What is crucial for Finland's future is one thing: Russia finally learning that it is not a special country. It does not have a sovereign right to adjust its own borders on a whim. Not for the "protection of Russian minorities", not for "russkiy mir", not for its ephemeral "security", certainly not because - as one tends to hear from countless Russian patriots when discussing this - because Russia's bordering countries just are puny and useless and will be dominated by one country or another anyway, so might as well be Russia. And there really seems to be no other potential way for Russia to learn this lesson than getting drubbed in Ukraine, and drubbed badly.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
One standard I can think of for whether someone is a Great Man in a world-historic sense is simple; if you took them out of history, imagined that they didn't exist, how much do you think history would change?
In that sense, it's too early to say if Jobs or Musk are Great Men, though I'd say that businessmen rarely are - if you took any single businessman out of history, their function in the global scheme of things would probably be replaced by someone else. "Too early to say" also goes for Zelensky, though from what I observed many prominent Ukrainian politicians also made a point of sticking around and being combative during the very early days of the invasion.
One guy I can feel pretty confident about saying would be an example of a Great Man in world-historic sense is Lenin; reading about the Russian Revolution, the rise of Bolsheviks (as a precise faction) to power in Russia was a wildly improbable event, there were several places where the party almost took decisions that probably would have led to them not attaining power and getting crushed, and Lenin almost singlehandedly steered the party into what turned out to be the correct decision. Without Lenin, the revolution would still have happened and it is likely that some sort of a socialist faction would have risen in power at least momentarily, but Bolsheviks were, even by the standards of Russian socialist movements or Marxist movements in Europe generally at the time, quite distinct in many ways, and without them Russia might have turned out quite differently indeed. Of course, it would have probably been better that day, being a Great Man does not mean you're a good man, or that you did good things, just that your actions had a world-historic effect.
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:
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.
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