Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
There was also a baby boom in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that stayed neutral.
I took Greenwald's comment mostly as a reminder that it was Trump admin who did prosecute Assange, since Greenwald has a lot of followers/fans who love Trump and also love Assange, and since Trump fans have often demonstrated a particularly remarkable talent for ignoring actual stuff that Trump does/did (which isn't that different from your standard "swampy" Republican) and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d 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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Germany actually recently did criminalize denying genocides in general and has also recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.. Holodomor denial is, unsurprisingly, already directly criminal in Ukraine, and the general denial of Communist crimes is criminalized in several Eastern European countries. By your logic, this should make you equally, or almost equally likely, to question whether the said Communist crimes happened.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d 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
17d 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.
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities.
If this did happen this way - millions of Jews were killed by disease and starvation, the Germans would absolutely be culpable for all of these deaths beyond what might be calculated an expected amount of disease deaths in a non-locked-up population, since they had spefically closed the Jews (and others) in these camps and were thus liable for their general welfare. This would end up being simply another Holocaust narrative. Gulag camp deaths caused by starvation and typhus are generally counted as Gulag camp deaths just as much as the shooting deaths, indeed many of the most notorious cases involve starvation.
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
So basically we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads), but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation and basically having a free pass to get the hell out of the collapsing post-Communist Eastern Europe by moving to Israel?
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
Some of the most popular "alternative theories" offered by denialists in past discussions have involved the Soviets conducting a genocide of deported Jews exactly like this - killing (perhaps not by gas but otherwise) hundreds of thousands of Jews in Central Asian camps with zero historical record, zero or close to zero camp guard memories of precisely this sort of an event happening (particularly risible since these guards would not be the most virulent 20th century European racists and indeed, as anti-Semites remind us, a number would have been Jews themselves) etc etc. Just vague gesturing that this must have happened since there has to be some, no matter how threadbare, explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question, and we know it can't have been that they were killed in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust didn't happen.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d 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
20d ago
The claim isn't that every single Ukrainian wants to fight, just that most do. If a country has conscription, there's bound to be stragglers even when most conscripts would not complain about going.
Making analysis of anything on the basis of online videos circulated with partisan debators with an obvious intent of altering the information landscape is generally not a good way to make sense of events in any case.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?
Jordan allowed Israel to use its airspace to counter Iranian drones and shot some drones down itself. I'm not really sure how neutral that counts as, at this point.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d 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
11d 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
21d ago
The baby boom really defies easy explanations. In many countries it didn't even really peak with the immediate post-WW2 period but around the late 1960s - the UK, for example.. "A combination of sustained economic growth, hopeful prospects for the future and a strong family-based culture" would probably be the best explanation, since all of those are cultural trends that would cover all of (Western, perhaps in some ways even Eastern) Europe at this time - around the 70s you really start getting the fear of nuclear war and environmental crisis, societal atomization, and the waning of immediate post-war growth period in.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
This frankly seems like a bit of an overthink. The Fremen (canonically originating from Egypt or the general Nilotic area) are black or brown. The Great Houses, again canonically distantly from Greece and Russia (though it would be amiss from me to not to mention that the surname Harkonnen originates from Finnish), are white. Most of the nonwhite characters died in the previous film.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
Every major character apart from Chani was white (as in, portrayed by a white actor), though.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d 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
16d ago
Back in the time when I encountered the blog, he wasn't rambling about The Simpsons, unless I missed something. That's precisely what I was referring to, he has been spiralling to the crazy direction quite fast before his final act.
I knew someone would ask so I just went through it to find them again. I will keep to the Winter War chapters since that's where I first spotted them.
p. 126. "The Russian Imperial Navy had once placed its headquarters in the Finnish port of Helsinki (then Helsingborg)." Helsinki was never known as Helsingborg. It's Swedish name is Helsingfors - both this and Helsinki are official names for the city. I think that McMeekin is confusing this with the fortress of Sveaborg/Viapori (now Suomenlinna) which is right next to Helsinki and did indeed serve as a Russian naval base during the Grand Duchy era, though I'm not sure if it can be described as "the headquarters".
p. 127. " Had Mannerheim’s connections with the Germans not been so strong, the British might have lent his Finnish guards more support in the critical days of fall 1919, when Petrograd nearly fell to the Whites." This makes hash of the post-Civil-War era events in the recently independent Finland. Mannerheim, who had been a general in the Czar's army, was actually one of the less pro-German White Finnish figures of the era. Though the English had doubts about the general pro-German tendencies of Finns in general, what really happened was that Mannerheim tried to convince the Finnish establishment to attack Petrograd in aid of the Whites, but the Finnish government (probably wisely) refused, believing that the Russian Whites might very well not recognize Finnish independence and considering that Soviets, if victorious, would never forgive Finns for getting Petrograd ransacked.
p. 130 "The Finnish Army had a few 1914-era water-cooled heavy machine guns, a few light machine guns (the twenty-three-pound Lahti/Saloranta), and handheld submachine guns or koonipistolit (machine pistols, known as the Suomi)." The Finnish word for machine pistols is "konepistoolit", it's like writing it "masheen pistols". "Konepistoolit" literally means machine pistols and "Suomi" (Finnish word for Finland) was the name of the well-known Finnish machine pistol brand, making this something of a dumb sentence anyhow.
p. 137 "The idea was that this new “Democratic Government of Finland,” headed by the fifty-eight-year-old Finnish politician Otto Kuusinen (a Stalin stooge and resident of Moscow since 1920), would invite in the Red Army in order to, as Molotov’s communiqué put it, “establish good relations between our countries and, with united forces, protect the security and inviolability of our nations." Minor points, but Kuusinen's government was called as "People's Government of Finland" (Suomen kansanhallitus), and Kuusinen had been secretly in Finland 1919-1921, so he couldn't have been a resident of Moscow since 1920.
p. 162 "Stalin did gain a bit more than he had demanded before the war. In addition to Petsamo, Hanko, and various Baltic ports, Stalin acquired the entire Karelian Isthmus, where the most bitter fighting had taken place, now styled the “Karelo-Finland SSR.” Soviet gains neutralized the Mannerheim Line and provided strategic depth for Leningrad, though, as one Soviet officer lamented, “we have won just about enough ground to bury our dead.” But Viipuri (Vyborg) and Helsinki were still Finnish, and there would be no Soviet military occupation." Probably the most egregious errors are found here. Finland dind't lose Petsamo (Pechenga) in Winter War but only after 1944. The Karelo-Finnish SSR (note the misspelling) didn't consist only of the Karelian Isthmus but was in fact the previous Karelian ASSR with the (now emptied) newly conquered territories attached. And saying that "Viipuri (Vyborg) was still Finnish" is not just erroneous - Viipuri was ceded after the Winter War - but also nonsensical, since Viipuri is on the Karelian Isthmus.
There were some minor points I considered including (like whether Enso, mentioned by McMeekin as a town bombed by Soviets in the early days of war, was actually a town at the era), but they're debatable. In general, McMeekin presents the thesis of Winter War ending due to Soviet fear of Allied invasion (and also throws in Turkey there since he's McMeekin) rather confidently, considering that it's still a major and not completely resolved debate in Finnish historiography.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d 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.
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
9d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d 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.
The most famous woman in the history of the world would be Virgin Mary, I believe.
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