atomised
1yr ago
I sympathise with your frustration: I note only that the reason the poster above you is doing that is because there is a sort of de-facto standard system of abbreviations for political parties in Sweden, under which Sweden Democrats are referred to as SD (and the Social Democrats as S, if you're curious).
atomised
1yr ago
A virus that predominantly kills people who are five pension cheques from the grave hardly seems worth the effort to me.
atomised
1yr ago
largest breach in American-German trust since the NSA spying debacle last decade
I would feel fairly comfortable in saying that it would be larger than that. Spying won't win you friends, but it's been a tacit axiom of geopolitics since the founding of Jericho that everyone spies on everyone. Damaging critical (not to mention obscenely expensive) national infrastructure, however? Wars have started over much less.
If this is Biden's doing I commend him for his pluck. I have my problems with NATO, but Ostpolitik really should've died with the USSR. There is nothing redeeming about Putin's Russia.
atomised
1yr ago
To me, 'psyop' has the connotation of an organised plot, rather than a largely benign corollary of the day-to-day workings of nation states.
'Financial speculator' is a good intuitive descriptor for the more abstract 'commodifier'. The essence of neoliberal capitalism is that it turns every human attribute into a form of capital and every cultural artifact into a commodity. Everywhere it seeks to produce systems of winners and losers, and it desires that everything be packaged up and sold. Are 'financial speculators' in the narrow sense responsible for all this? Not wholly, no, but they serve as a useful synecdoche. The mindset of the forex trader or the rolex flipper is very much the sentient manifestation of neoliberal ideology, just as the mindset of the brutal cop is a sort of sentient fascism.
I believe she is fundamentally correct that we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.
Pronouns are words that serve as stand-ins within a sentence for nouns, including the names of people and things.
You should be more precise here. Have we robbed the individual members of society of their individual identities? Have we robbed the individual members of society of some shared collective identity? Or have we robbed society, considered as a gestalt, of its identity, separate from the identities of its members?
The consumer stuff gets a little silly but whatever it sounds good. Need to have an enemy your fighting against.
I'm surprised that you consider modern society to be rootless but don't see this as downstream of consumerist ideology. This is something that is widely agreed upon in anti-neoliberal circles on both the left and the right. I think that you've actually misunderstood Meloni's argument - you think she positions herself as opposed to the nebulous enemy 'pronouns', as you yourself have. In fact, she positions herself as opposed to the globalising and commodifying trends in modern capitalism and views pronouns as being simply detritus strewn in the wake of these forces. Her vision is of a reactionary and illiberal opposition to neoliberalism; I would favour a more socialist and egalitarian approach - but in any case, we would find common ground in the idea that global capitalism makes homogenised consumers of us all. You say it yourself - empty people. Consider that this may be a direct consequence of the consumption patterns that we are subjected to.
atomised
1yr ago
Whatever you think of her character, I can't imagine anyone thinking she's a 'famehunting fake tanned slag', since she was already quite famous, is obviously not fake tanned, and is undeniably elegant and attractive - a world away from the stereotypical Essex sambuca girl.
atomised
1yr ago
Mainstream news media takes its foreign policy cues from the Government as a matter of state cohesion and security. If you want to call that a psyop then fine, but it's also the way the world has worked for centuries.
atomised
1yr ago
Germany and America not making a public display out of their misgivings for each other is quintessential diplomacy.
atomised
1yr ago
active media psyop
It's called diplomacy and it's ten-thousand years old.
atomised
1yr ago
A fairly large problem with this argument is that under 'the English gaze' Meghan doesn't parse as black. In this country our black communities mostly are only two or three generations old so there are relatively few very light-skinned black people. Moreover, this isn't Norway - even going back centuries there has always been a non-trivial proportion of ethnically English people at least as 'swarthy' as Meghan. Personally, I did not realise that Meghan was officially black until the media kindly informed me, and that's as a young person with an unhealthy interest in the culture war. I suspect this to have been a common experience among Brits.
So, if we are to argue that racism was a large factor in Megan's treatment by the Royal Family, we must suppose that either (a) the British aristocracy are unusually well attenuated to the American racial classification system or (b) that despite not sub-consciously categorising Meghan as black, the Royals were racist to her on account of the consciously received knowledge that she is of African-American descent.
Now I accept that an argument can be made for both these cases, but neither seems obviously true to me. More probable is the suggestion that she was disliked for being American.
Does this really come down to just a different work culture in the US vs UK?
It's a combination of factors. On the one hand I'm actually rather sympathetic to Meghan because I deeply suspect the palace is full of blue-blooded slackers earning extremely comfortable salaries from the taxpayer for doing not very much, not very quickly. On the other hand, unless you're a character in The Thick Of It there is a baseline expectation of politeness in the workplace in Britain that probably exceeds the American norm, and no-doubt this expectation is turned up to 11 at Kensington Palace.
This reinforces my pre-existing opinion on this entire saga, which is that I don't like anyone involved and would rather like to do away with the lot of them.
atomised
1yr ago
On the radio last night they mentioned she had a distinctively Roman accent. Is Rome perceived as a southern or northern city, or is it indeed viewed as its own distinct thing? If the latter, could this aid her efforts to be a unifying figure?
atomised
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure the only reason she's not openly euroskeptic is because the failure (perceived or actual) of Brexit has poisoned the well of euroskepticism for mainstream politicians on the continent. Perhaps also because she feels she will be able to find ideological allies within the EU (namely Duda and Orbán). In the abstract, euroskepticism should be a very natural corollary of her fundamental beliefs: anti-globalist, anti-liberal, pro-nation-state.
atomised
1yr ago
Yeah, it's the part of the law I have the most problem with. I've nearly done myself serious damage a couple of times (ab)using non-locking knives.
atomised
1yr ago
Many people say this, and you probably won't believe it because I didn't either, but until you get a pocket knife you don't realise how useful they are. They allow you to solve problems that beforehand it wouldn't have occurred to you to use a knife to solve.
atomised
1yr ago
Let's be clear here: pocket knives are legal to carry in the UK, at any time, without any specific reason. I carry one myself, for such varied uses as cutting sticks for cricket stumps and opening mayo packets at Weatherspoons. The catch is that such knives must be no longer than three inches and must not lock. For day-to-day usage, this is perfectly sufficient, and if you need anything more heavy-duty it's likely that you're camping or otherwise obviously engaged in outdoorsmanship, which is a problem that solves itself since such activities would count as a valid justification were you to be stopped by a policeman.
I'm not sure how I feel about the UK's knife laws personally, but they do often get misrepresented, and their nuance is not often fully considered.
atomised
1yr ago
If you're a Tory/voted Leave/support Brexit, swipe left
It's baffling to me that this is common in the Rep. of Ireland. Unless you live really near the border, I'm not sure who they're even talking about... Brits on holiday? Or have 'Tory / Brexit voter' somehow come to serve as political categories in a general sense, in a country where (by their literal definitions) virtually no-one is actually either of those things? In which case, why are these imported terms being used instead of indigenous labels ('If you're a Fine Gael voter, swipe left')? Very odd.
No doubt to many people these events will serve as further proof of the failure of Britain to integrate South Asians, yet if anything the reactions I've seen to them have bolstered rather than eroded my faith in multiculturalism. It's quite clear that many Leicester residents, both Hindu and Muslim, have strongly condemned the disorder and violence. Many are self-evidently proud of their city, and proud to be British Asians. They appear to deeply resent the fact that due to the actions of a proportionally small number of miscreants, very many of whom seem to be neither Leicestrian nor British, a negative light is being cast on their communities—for they understand that when it comes to brown people, many white Britons are not inclined to draw distinction between local and foreigner.
For those proud Britons, born and bred here, who have always struggled for acceptance because of their ethnicity, their religion, and the colour of their skin—I feel profound sympathy. When an Old Firm derby descends into carnage it is viewed with nothing more than muted disapproval, but when sectarianism involves South Asians it is framed as tribal warfare†. Let me be perfectly clear: I wish that the offenders be dealt with—yet I hope also that all those here who consider themselves to have a more clear-eyed understanding of masculinity than the progressive orthodoxy can recognise that the anger of listless young men who seek a flag to rally around is a trait shared by every swathe of humanity that lives under modernity.
† A proposal for reconcilliation in Leicester: a flag with three coloured stripes, one orange representing Hindus, one green representing Muslims, and one white in the middle representing lasting peace. Stop me if you've heard this one before...
I think the null hypothesis for all discussions relating to media preferences should be stated explicitly: you form your media taste when young from a variety of sources (included but not limited to critics), and then retain them for the rest of your life, slowly become more-and-more alienated by contemporary media and criticism. It's not your fault, it's not their fault, it's just the natural way of things.
atomised
1yr ago
British student debt, which is owed to the government and not private creditors, is unlike virtually any other form of consumer debt. You are only required to make payments towards it if you earn above a certain threshold, and the minimum annual payment is defined as a percentage of earnings above that level: essentially, it functions as a marginal tax. Student debt is not a hugely significant drag factor on middle class quality of life in the UK in the same way it seems to be in America.
atomised
1yr ago
some of the culture war fights have sapped a decent amount of people of what I would call life energy
I accept that this may have happened to some, but I doubt it is significant on a population level. The proportion of people who are genuinely 'in the trenches' of the culture wars is not very high. The vast majority of people are either passive consumers of a propaganda outlet of their choice or otherwise are completely grillpilled and let this stuff pass them right by.
I believe they've always been S but I don't know for sure.
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