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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo 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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo 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
10mo 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?
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.
A bit over a ten years ago I participated in a SWP event in London, at some local university. Around the campus, it seemed like every other Trotskyist group, and some others, were prowling around, trying to pilfer potential recruits from the SWP (back then still quite a bit larger - the Corbyn movement did a number on them, from what I understand, and so did a rape scandal which got revealed soon after my visit.)
I asked one of them, from some group I can't remember (wasn't SP) what their disagreement on current policy with SWP was, and the guy launched into a spiel on how the SWP had been on the wrong side on whether it was correct to demand the British troops out of Northern Ireland in the 70s, I'm not sure which side of this he represented. I asked what the difference was now and he just looked at me and relaunched the same spiel abut Northern Ireland in the 70s. I came away from the event mainly with a strong conviction that it's a great positive there's never been a sizable Trotskyist movement in Finland.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Based on what I know about the reality of sex differences, I'm sure the presence of large numbers of Ukrainian refugee women, I imagine a large portion of them young and single, in the EU has already generated high levels of resentment among local women, even if this is not visible in media reports.
Living in a country with a large Ukrainian refugee population, I have literally not seen a single indication of this. By all accounts solidarity with Ukrainian refugees remains high among men and women.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
And let's be clear about what "Zionism" is. It's the belief that Israel should continue to exist.
Yes, that's the motte.
FINLAND MOVES TO CRIMINALIZE HOLOCAUST DENIAL
I've been making some updates previously here on the new right-wing government including a nationalist party, Finns Party, and the ongoing racism scandal after it turned out that some of the ministers from that party had a history of racist comments, even playing around with Nazi implications. You can read this, this or this for more context.
For some time now, the actual survival of the government has been predicated on an "anti-racist statement" demanded by Swedish People's Party, the most liberal and pro-minority (chiefly their own Swedish-speaking minority but also all other ones, in some way) party in the government.
The statement was published yesterday and mostly just contained platitudes, basic repetition of already-existing laws and government program parts and promises to "launch programmes", "improve dialogue", "support the work done" etc that basically amount to very little. The actual actions also contains parts obviously intended to placate Finns Party, such as new campaigns against honor violence, gang violence and so on, as well as a promise to look into banning Communist symbols alongside with Nazi ones.
You can read it here if you wish. Its main purpose, of course, has been to allow everyone to save face sufficiently to keep the government going on, so that it can get on to doing the other tasks that the parties it consists of wish it to do, ie. implement a pro-business economic policy and limit immigration.
However, the one concrete detail that has aroused some attention abroad has been a promise to criminalize Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial has not been formally criminalized in Finland and before this Finnish governments have actually resisted proposals and demands by institutions like EU to do so, chiefly on the basis that antisemitic acts could already be charged under ethnic agitation laws if need be.
In practice Holocaust denial is very rare in Finland and there's been only a couple of cases that have seen court action, mainly since Holocaust in general is not as important in Finnish discourses as in many other countries. Finland has had a tiny Jewish community, maybe a few thousand at any given era, and during the actual event Finland deported eight Jewish refugees to Germany but otherwise did not follow German demands to relinquish the country's small Jewish community, and Jewish soldiers fought on the front while Finland participated in Operation Barbarossa, with three Jewish Finnish soldiers even being offered the Iron Cross by Germans, who had troops in Lapland.
In general, it might be said that one reason for the comparatively less attention being paid to Holocaust than in many other countries is that Soviet crimes against humanity loom so large. Thus far, for instance, while other European countries have commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, Finland has had a “Remembrance Day for the Victims of Persecutions", and the local press often uses this day to talk about Soviet persecutions, like the Soviet ethnic campaign against Finns in the 1930s. (This is one of the things that the anti-racist statement also promises to change.)
I have sometimes seen local Nazis post Holocaust denial stuff, but even this happens in a very perfunctory way and is clearly not a top concern in comparison to immigration or, say, GLBTQ+ stuff. Maybe that is because internationally a popular antisemitic argument has always been blaming the Jews for communism, socialism, feminism and the New Left, and Finland as had plenty of all of those (a socialist revolution, one of the largest Communist parties in Western Europe per capita etc.) with barely any Jewish participation.
One of the few actual instances to have actively demanded Holocaust denial criminalization and generally stronger actions against antisemitism are the Christian Democrats, a small socially conservative Christian party, which is firmly pro-Israel and based on evangelical movements that subscribe to dispensationalist theology, which is currently also in gobernment. As such, it's very likely that this was one of their demands. However, it doesn't seem to have been one that has caused particular troubles for the Finns Party to accept, since it's not related to their true concern - immigration - and the party also has some history of giving soft support to Israel simply on the basis that the Finnish Left is firmly pro-Palestinian.
As such, I don't expect this to be particularly consequential, since it basically criminalizes something that has very rarely happened anyway and which would arguably often already be banned under other laws. If anything I'd expect it to increase Holocaust denial, simply since there's already a conspiracy theory community suspicious of anything the government does and who might be expected to go "If it's banned there must be some truth to it, eh?"
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways. Some time ago I read a book of MLK's speeches, and MLK frequently appealed to the idea that unless America can show it offers equal treatment to AAs, it's going to lose the battle for hearts and minds in the wider global context.
Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad. It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are, from Chavists to parties like EFF in South Africa to radical Islamists (who surely would be willing to say that there's no racial discrimination in an Islam, whether that's true or not).
Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade (and the Houthis have just shown you don't even need to take over to do that), the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine. Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
What this really just reminds me of is that we really are, de facto, still living in the greatest time of free speech and free exchange of ideas ever. One could make a list of obscure and out-of-prints books like this with the expectation that someone who desires will find at least the great majority of these books with a bit of searching and an ability to look into the right places (like the Internet Archive for the older ones); in the pre-Internet times, even knowing about this stuff would require a huge physical effort. Sure, some of the books might get one punished for mere ownership in certain places, but I would guess that even in those cases the authorities finding out would require you committing some other crime of sufficient valence to get your hard drive examined, so the punishment for owning the PDF would be extra punishment on top of the one you'd get for committing a more concrete variety of a crime.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
Just as an aside, what value I continue to see in this forum is that it offers at least some sort of a dispassionate ground to discuss the tactical and strategic aspects of a conflict like this, which I find far more interesting than endless decriminations over modern dating or trans stuff or whatever. Twitter, certainly, is currently almost unusable for a discussion like this, even the local Twitter (in a country where the I/P conflict has far less valence than in many other European countries).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
What keeps going through my mind, apart from worrying how this will end and what the geopolitical implications are, of course, is how embarrassing it would be a Russia Stronk shill type right now. No matter how this ends, this sort of shit does not actually happen in nations that are actually stronk.
I repeat myself from previous threads, but a continuous talking point for Z patriots and their scarce American/Western hype men has been that Ukraine is embarrassing, cringe, Reddit etc. "fake nation", unlike Russia with its 1000 years of history and a populace willing to give their lives for the Motherland. It certainly, once again, seems that Ukraine is dozens of times more "real" than Russia, in the sense that Ukrainians have (after 2022, at least) been relatively able to keep an united patriotic front instead of tearing each other apart in a madcap struggle for power.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
My general feel is that, when the protests were taking place, the Western governments were already hard in the process of considering how to gradually start ramping down the unworkable lockdown/mandate/fear cycle that had characterized the Covid response. The most visible parts of the Covid response were generally wound down everywhere at roughly the same time, ie, Jan-Feb 2022. Of course at the same time Ukraine also started to gain more and more importance as an issue in the eyes of the political class, even before the invasion itself.
As such, I'm not sure if the Freedom Convoy propagated these processes or simply came at a time when the consensus had started to form that these things should be wound anyway. It might have even delayed the process (in Canada, at least) by making it an issue of maintaining face for Trudeau.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
There was a similar small to-do in Finland about a planned screening of the Drag Kids documentary. It was basically stillborn since the cultural festival that had planned the screening quickly withdrew it from lists, citing threats sent. However, while the fracas was going on, much of the discussion basically consisted of both sides flinging "You're just importing American culture wars!" accusations to each other; pro-LGBTQ types saying that this is a copy of American conservatives tactically making up mountains from molehills over LGBTQ culture and conservatives retorting that the whole "drag kids" thing is just an American folly to begin with (even though the documentary appears to be Canadian, but that's not exactly a large difference from this side of the pond anyway).
Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.
The entire Finnish history consists of people importing ideologies from elsewhere. Christianity through Sweden and Russia, later Lutheranism from Germany, then nationalism from Germany (the founding father of Finnishness, J. V. Snellman, basically based his nationalist visions on Hegelianism), socialism from Germany, environmentalism from, yes, Germany... When one reads Social Democratic magazines from the start of the century they're already bashing each over basically over whether German Socialist 1 or German Socialist 2 was correct, and adjusting their own views on the basis of such debates elsewhere.
The biggest difference to past centuries is where the importation of ideology comes from, but that it's mostly imported from somewhere says.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab.
But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
This continues to be in the same category of data as almost all ufology evidence: a guy says a thing, with apparently nothing concrete to show for it.
Maybe he’s a fabulist, or mixing up info from some terrestrial sources project - by American or other government - with the massive amounts of UFO lore swirling about in America, even in the highest circles. Maybe he’s engaging in some spook project, like what I theoretized about here.
Without anything more concrete to show for it than in previous ’high-level whistleblower’ cases, little need to adjust priors.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
Muslim terminology is becoming popular online — I have seen cases of Muslim expressions like inshallah and mashallah entering terminally online lexicon (which is the first step to normie lexicon).
"The normalization of cyka blyat in terminally online lexicon - the first step towards Russianification of the Western mind"?
There's been decades of predictions about the weak secularized West falling prey to the Islamic influence ("strong horse defeats the weak horse"), and it never seems to materialize. The converts are the same as always - some (mostly women) converting for their spouse (and I rather believe that people tend to overestimate the number of such converts since they see white or light-skinned immigrant Muslims and confuse them for converted Western women), a smattering of criminals, a few "religious travelers" who might soon travel right out of their Islamic waystation after travelling in. It still is considerably more common for people wanting a "strong religion" to choose another variety of Christianity - say, Orthodoxy or Pentecostalism - from their usual one.
Meanwhile, at least this Substack article presented many strong arguments for Muslim integration (really secularization) continuing in France. Of course that can't be generalized, since France puts a specific attention on laïcité, and really all such statistics not only differ considerably country to country but also immigrant group to immigrant group.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
OpenAI announces leadership transition
The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
A member of OpenAI’s leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI’s evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company’s values, operations, and business, and already leads the company’s research, product, and safety functions. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
I posted this in Twitter and someone speculated that it's because Altman paused subscriptions on Tuesday, but that would alone seem like a pretty inconsequential reason for this sort of a major move.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7mo ago
One is drawn to make comparisons with recent country renaming, the country of Cahit Arf.
For a moment I genuinely thought that some African country or whatever had named itself "Cahit Arf" and I somehow just hadn't noticed.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
I've sometimes theorized that there's a similar "race fandom", ie. people whose position (at least at first) is less like open racism but simply a deep fascination with the concept of race in a sociological sense, and who gravitate towards the online racist communities simply because the only spheres where you can really discuss this stuff deeply are the racist and antiracist ones and they don't feel they can identify with the explicit antiracist mindset to the sufficient and demanded degree.
Likewise, people tend to enjoy the same entertainment media: Strategy games, dialogue heavy RPGs, The Cyberpunk genre and it's associated political themes.
These are just some of the general cultural markers for current smart and disaffected young males, which would be the group to gravitate towards (extreme) politics.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9mo ago
No matter what either Falwell or the gay columnists or whomever say here, I'm really struggling to see how Tinky Winky would have been a "clearly gay and effeminate character" in Teletubbies, compared to the other Tubbies, all of which were basically weird sexless babies.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Finland has a new right-wing government. It's been called the most right-wing one in Finland's postwar history, since it is headed by centre-right National Coalition, contains the right-wing populist/nationalist Finns Party and doesn't contain the Centre Party, which has been previously been in government with these two but is, as the name says, more centrist.
Essentially, the new government is combining an anti-union, austerity-oriented economic agenda of the center-right with a list of anti-immigration measures favored by the nationalists. However, while the foreign papers have mostly been concerned with the claims that the most important thing about this govt is far-right inclusion, the economic agenda comes first; the anti-immigration measures, while they probably will lead to immigration cuts, are still not as hard as , for instance, what a roughly similar coalition in Sweden has set last year.
Among other changes, a work-based residence permit would expire if an individual fails to find a new job after more than three months of unemployment. Those with a student-based residence permits would not be allowed to rely on Finnish income support, while the tuition fees of Finnish educational institutions are to be reviewed.
The annual refugee quota is to be cut by more than half to 500 people, down from the present 1,050. Asylum would be granted for a maximum of three years , after which the need for international protection should be reassessed.
In future, obtaining a permanent residence permit will require six years of residence, a language proficiency test, a two-year work history without long-term unemployment or income support, and a requirement of an impeccable record.
Citizenship rules are also to be tightened, with the minimum residence requirement extended to eight years, along with an income requirement and mandatory civics and language tests.
Insofar as economic measures go,
The four parties have agreed on many other changes to the labour market, according to STT. It says that in the future an employee's first sick day would be unpaid, unless otherwise stipulated in their collective agreement.
Iltalehti reported that – assuming the government's plans are approved by Parliament – in future it will be possible to dismiss an employee more easily, simply citing any "reasonable cause". It will also make it easier for employers to offer one-year fixed-term employment contracts without having to cite any special reason for them.
The future government also wants to expand local bargaining – as opposed to centralised national collective agreements – to cover all companies. It will also seek to curtail the right to launch sympathy strikes and politically based labour actions.
There's also two minor parties, the Christian Democrats who basically set no demands for participation and are just happy to be a part of this government and Swedish People's Party, a liberal party that watches over the interests of the Swedish-speaking minority and had considerable troubles fitting in with the Finns Party's nationalism and probably managed to prevent some of their more hardline immigration proposals from taking force.
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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