Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Particularly since it was entirely possibly that Trump would spring a surprise veep announcement or that the veep candidate would even accompany him on stage.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
If Kolomoyskyi has an outsized influence in Ukraine, why did this happen?
In 2020, he was indicted in the United States on charges related to large-scale bank fraud. In 2021, the U.S. banned Kolomoyskyi and his family from entering the country, accusing him of corruption and being a threat to the Ukrainian public's faith in democratic institutions. Zelenskyy reportedly stripped Kolomoyskyi of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2022. Later that same year, those of Kolomoyskyi's assets deemed to be of strategic value to the state in light of the Russian invasion were nationalised. These included Ukraine's largest gasoline companies. In 2023, Kolomoyskyi was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on charges of money laundering and fraud, and placed under pre-trial arrest.
This is literally the third paragraph of the Wikipedia Kolomoyskyi page where your other quotes are from - don't you think it's more than a bit mendacious to not include this detail when discussing Kolomoyskyi's supposed influence?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
No matter what you believe about the validity of polling, "Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%" does not pass a basic sanity check at any level. He's a wartime president, if his approval was really just 4% in a time like this he'd be shunted aside at warp speed. There are plenty of people in Ukraine at the moment with both the willingness and the ability to remove what would be a hysterically unpopular president with relatively little hassle if it came to that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
Luckily MAGA influencers put out so many mutually conflicting explainers for what Trump's strategy actually is that they can always pick one narrative and say that this was the plan all along.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
"so is it an actually new variant of Christianity or just the Arian heresy expressed in pompous language again?"
laughs and says "it is a good belief system"
look inside
it is the Arian heresy expressed in pompous language again
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
There's at least one user (@ArjinFerman) who has said they use me and my professional career as a translator as an indicator of whether AI is making us useless or not. While I myself am no longer at all confident about the future of this profession (and neither are basically any of the colleagues I've talked with recently) and am thus in the process of obtaining a new degree (pol.sci with an intention of specializing in the interplay of politics and AI), for the last past months I've been swamped with work, and with quite traditional review work of reviewing human translation, at that. Of course that human translation might have been machine translation post-edit work but it doesn't feel like it is.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Since he has already made not wearing a suit his "thing", it would have also been a signal for him to wear a suit. It would have probably signified a humiliation and subjection, a kowtow to the new Emperor.
I'm thinking of another leader who made disrespecting sartorial codes his "thing", the Greek PM Tsipras during the euro crisis, who made a point of not wearing a tie until there was a debt deal. Of course, when the debt deal was made, it was basically the same old austerity he had been elected to end, and when he wore a tie it was obviously an indication of submission (though the actual submission had been made far earlier).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
Hamas calls for end to war
Putin ready to end Ukraine war
China wants to work peacefully with us
These have made occasional suggestions of such nature for years now.
EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
EU already buys a lot of US gas (19,4 % of all EU gas, according to this). https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-supply/
Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
All world leaders of note will congratulate whatever US president gets elected and will try to communicate with him as a matter of course. Harris would haev been no different. The only notable thing is Elon's participation in the call.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
This is, incidentally, why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers and the natural reaction was that stragglers were crazy and should probably be forcibly vaccinated. When the struggle had been getting enough vaccinations to cover even the poorer areas in various countries, hearing that scientists had cooked up an extra sciencey vaccine with a brand new mechanism was not a cause for concern but for joy and extra trust.
Same attitude applies to other topics - I once listened to an old local leftist lady recount how left-wingers of her generation couldn't quite always understand why the younger generation campaigned for more veggie food days for school meals, since her generation had campaigned for more days when meat was served in school meals, as one way to distribute the rising wealth.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
I just today learned of a subreddit called r/somethingiswrong2024, where the crowd of disappointed liberals have already spiralled to QAnon levels of theorizing how somehow the election will be annulled and Kamala will win, and naturally the irregulaties surrounding the swearing in have ended up throwing fuel to the fire by shovelful.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
Two things that strike me about Mamdani:
-
his main proposals really go beyond Bernie-style "Do what they do in Nordic countries!" style stuff. While there are still elements of rent control in Nordic countries, I haven't heard anyone put a total rent freeze, even in public housing, on the table. Free public transport is not really on the table either, apart from some small Danish towns (and Tallinn if you think Estonia can get into Nordic). I don't remember anyone even suggesting publicly owned grocery stores. Even a failed attempt to do these in the "capital of the world" would probably put all these on the table all around the West.
-
Mamdani's platform, as presented, seems like a specific attempt to do what many class-first leftists have proposed doing and run on lunchbucket issues instead of idpol. There's a LGBTQ+ page, sure, but if one drills down to proposals then there are some specific Black and Hispanic appeals but way less and way less prominently than I'd expect most Democratic candidates in a similar position to include. My understanding is that there's more idpol stuff if one drills down to Mamdani's old tweets and like, but if we're talking about a specific campaign strategy, it seems to have worked.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
More to the point, why would Russia ally with a country that has indicated willingness to do 180-degree turns in foreign policy and abandon previous allies at will due to local power shifts?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
This was actually considered a reverse problem during the decades when women voted more conservative than men, i.e. until the 70s, roughly. One argument against women's suffrage presented in France was that women might vote in a monarchy and the army, stacked with more republican-leaning men, might step in to prevent it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Minor celebrity Kyle Gass, who isn't particularly politically important, might have gotten away with it being a dark joke, but megastar Jack Black, who has frequently stumped for political causes, being involved means that it's on another level.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
Spitballing on the lower reach of influencers in Western Europe, but one thing I've noted about local political YouTubers etc. is that they often just seem to be doing a "Finnish version" of something (Finnish Rogan, Finnish BreadTube etc.), and they can't quite seem to get it right, being left in an uncanny valley zone where it's not properly like the original version but not properly something culturally Finnish either. Ironically one of the rare organic forms of video creation we've managed to get going is the "rappiotube" ("decadencetube"), where alcoholics (occasionally mixing alcohol with drugs) just get completely wasted and go out of control on live shows, though of course it would be hard to create a political/news project based on that concept.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, pretty much the only thing separating high-fertility (defined here as 4+) families from lower-fertility ones (1-2 kids, generally 1) is religiousness. Not all religious families I know are big but all the big ones are religious.
Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.
And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine.
If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
One non-assassination-related explanation could be that someone got an inside tip… of Musk announcing he’s going all in for Trump (ie 45 million donated per month) and took it as indication of a quid-pro-quo deal where Trump returns to Twitter, which would of course kill Truth Social instantly.
Mangione's Twitter (wonder if they'll scrub it) makes him seem like a centrist techlib quoting Harari and Haidt, maybe centre-right since he also reposts some right-wing stuff about immigration and so on. Basically the furthest thing from either anprim or populist one can imagine. An ACX poster, maybe even a Motte poster. Quoting Ted Kaczynski would then be more in the "look at this interesting and radical way of thinking" sense than an expression of any true agreement.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
If you think about Kulak, through, the character has gone through shifts. There was the ancap personality on this forum and - I think - the early days of the Twitter account, then the more fashy type of persona, now the same but with a strong pagan/anti-Christian component. Audiences shift and so do the characters.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
You don’t need to blackmail rich American Jews into supporting Israel. This, to me, is the single most obvious argument against the entire alleged scheme as a Mossad project. The absolute majority of the important alleged co-accused were Jewish. For every Clinton (who was post-office at the critical time), Trump (random real estate developer at that time) and Prince Andrew (powerless) were at least as many Blacks, Dubins, Dershowitzes and so on, if not many more. Wexner himself (the source of pretty much all Epstein’s wealth) was and is a Jew and a Zionist. If you’re Mossad, you really don’t need to blackmail these people with videos of them fucking 16 year olds to get them to support Israel; they’ll do it for free. The whole point of blackmailing someone is to get them to do something they don’t want to do.
Other arguments are valid, but I'm not sure if this is a particularly good argument on its own. Sure, rich Jewish Americans (and a lot of other Americans besides) will revert to supporting Israel even without blackmail, but there's levels of support; someone who will offer Israel basic support might still balk at giving considerable proportions of their property, offering support in any and all cases including Israel committing a genocide (exceeding current actions at Gaza) or nuking something, committing potentially criminal acts etc.
Also, someone being powerless or low-powered now does not mean they'll be so in the future, at the alleged time of the acts Trump had already expressed interest in presidency, Bill Clinton was a very potential first husband of a future president, and Prince Andrew was a plane crash away from the throne. If you WERE an intelligence agency amassing a blackmail file, of course you'd benefit from a wide trawl among the elite class in general.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
My image, as someone who had followed Ukrainian politics close enough to not have a particularly positive image of Zelensky before the invasion, is that when he was woken up and told that the Russians had started a full-scale invasion instead of a more limited op that they had probably been expecting, he probably freaked out a bit and then finally went "Ahh, shit, I have to 100 % commit to an image of a great wartime leader now, don't I?" and then did exactly that. Since he's an actor he found this relatively easy, and obviously when you act as something long enough there's less and less difference to being one, though it still doesn't make him a master tactician when he's committed to some military course of action instead of what the generals are suggesting.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
As a professional translator, it always throws me off when I remember that pretty much every other wordcel field prefers page counts to word counts for some reason and I always have to specifically ask the word count when the (non-agency client) says something like "I have a will with 10 pages to translate, when could you handle it?".
Harris staffers seem to have been running a campaign that appeals to themselves, personally, with the celebrity concerts and so forth. A fun big party for the Dem staffer class. Of course what appeals to the Dem staffer class is not what appeals to the voting public, in many ways opposite to it.
While the sort of corruption where politicians misuse taxpayer money obviously gets more attention, the sort of lower-level corruption where political parties and organizations misuse donations, membership fees, money from ownings etc. for this sort of stuff is probably rather more common.
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