georgioz
5mo ago
If somebody sincerely believes in Christian God, I think it is safe to assume that he also believes in Satan even if that is not the word you hear often. We can play the game all day long but it is not psychologizing to assume that.
Sure, I can agree also with that characterization. The main point being that relationship and marriage are of secondary importance. It is all about her, and the job of the man is to support the woman in her life path.
It is no armchair psychology to understand people on their own terms. A lot of feminists believe that men use sexism to gain power over women. It is literally what they believe, so why it should be "psychologizing" to say that maybe they also believe that women can also use sexism against men to gain power? Why is it psychologizing to just state what some people literally believe? If somebody believes that cabal of twelve Jews and Free Masons rules the world, is it far fetched to say that maybe they also can believe that another group of 12 "good" patriotic people can possibly also rule the world utilizing the same level of control and make it a better place? It has to be in realms of possibility that such a mind can contemplate, desirable even at least as some sort of second worst alternative to Free Mason Jews being on top, right?
My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs.
I think the point was something else. Imagine another test where people threw a dice and then they estimated what their dice throw was. Of course people who threw 6 could only underestimate or be correct and people who threw 1 could only be correct or overestimate.
So even if both the result and estimation was random, then you would reproduce Duning-Kruger effect due to autocorrelation. Result of “over/underestimation” is dependent and correlated to the measure you over/underestimate against which is also a variable. The correct answer is just that this is stupid statistical artefact.
I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.
Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.
In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.
So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.
Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.
I think that the New Atheist are "anti-west" in a sense that they have parasitic relationship toward western values that they nominally hate. It is very similar to some other anti-west or anti-Christian ideologies: they heavily rely on subversion of existing values to move forward with their goals. What I mean by that is to take some value that is part of the culture - e.g. "we were all created equal by god" and then just use it to ram through their own redefined version, e.g. that equity is just an upgraded version of whatever you believed before. But these values lack anchoring, as soon as the host you have parasitic relationship with dies, there is no longer any basis whatsoever to move these values forward.
If I don't believe in god or soul or equality as some god-ordained transcendental Truth, then why should I care about this or that disadvantaged group? Indians did develop literal caste system that prevailed for thousands of years, it is not as if equality is the only way we can conduct in this world. Maybe people are created unequal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing to keep it that way [hint - they are outgroup].
It is the same whenever somebody tries to poke a little bit into value system Sam Harris has. He uses some big words familiar to people in rationalist spheres such as "promote human flourishing" or "decreasing suffering" in a sense that he wants to move from the "worst possible misery for everyone", a thing very evocative of the image of hell. In the end similarly to rationalists he lacks grounding of his morality. If one takes this supposed "new" morality at face value, one quickly finds himself in realm of maximizing some hypothetical utils of unborn people by bombing datacenters or something, maybe alternatively one sees utils expressed as tons of biomass thus maximizing number of ants in existence or some utter nonsense - at least nonsense as intuitively viewed from somebody still at least partially partaking in western/Christian ethos.
It goes haywire real fast, so I agree that it is insanity to expect anything resembling western values by deconstructing and sawing off not only the branch you are sitting on but basically creating nuke and bombing the whole forest just to see what beautiful things will emerge out of the rubble. It is inherently self-defeating game, Sam Harris will not produce mini Sam Harrises as they will have no desire to study Christianity or religion as Harris did, they will bot be raised by people adhering to same values that formed Harris. And it is not as if it is impossible, but I find it interesting how many people use adding up to normality as some kind of stopgap for obviously intuitively wrong conclusions - like eating babies. Except apparently eating babies was literally seen as normal in some societies, I am not that sure if we are not building one such at this point.
You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
I actually don't think I understand your point overall but it feels like your point is we can't rationally prove that pain and suffering are bad, so checkmate rationalists, we're no better than anyone else. Which... okay.
No, this was not the point. Go and analyze pain and suffering of animals abused for bestiality compared to animals slaughtered for meat all you like in fine rationalist tradition. What I object is going to meta level of what are your personal feelings about this or that response to such thought experiments, in that sense a rationalist is not obliged to privilege your anecdotal emotional outburst. I may as well imagine somebody who is hurt by what you are saying - and believe me there would be no shortage of agitated people if I said that we are going to normalize bestiality.
And now voilà, you have some basis of understanding of what is going on, just by analyzing your own emotions. And we do not have to model other people as if they do not understand that pain and suffering is bad and they need you to explain it to them. They do understand it very, very well - only from their standpoint it is people promoting bestiality who are source of that pain and suffering for them. And it is you who opened this door for them by harping on your own personal feelings about the whole discussion, you made this meta discussion about how this original discussion makes people feel part of the game.
For the n+1-th time, emotions are not incompatible with rationality.
Write that to the OP.
Further, presumably @zataomm takes umbrage to arguments that rely entirely or mostly on emotion, not a claim that emotion is entirely out of place in an argument.
So do I. I do not understand why anybody should give a shit what reading some arguments made OP feel: if he is disheartened or if he hates humanity or if his hand hurts today as he slammed it against the table reading these arguments. It is tangential to the discussion and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is his incredulity with why people are emotional if somebody defends bestiality.
Which is BTW the hidden point that may have gotten over your head: the other people maybe also feel disheartened and lost faith in humanity and hate the society after reading arguments supporting bestiality. This would be equally emotionally "rational" response. So by rationally examining his own elevated emotions, the OP answered his question at least as it pertains to certain part of the outraged mob. Now I hope his curiosity is at least partially sated.
georgioz
6mo ago
This pattern of reaction is disconcerting. We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts. It's really hard for me not to feel disheartened or even adopt a misanthropic view when I see things like this.
I just really want to know if you are aware of what you did here. You are against "emotional outbursts" because they make you "feel disheartened" and move you towards misanthropy AKA hatred of humans? Does it not "feel" a little bit too melodramatic and emotional to you, the supposed rationalist?
I am by no means an expert, but I think this relates to the idea of Greater Israel. There even was an attempt to do that by Ariel Sharon in 1980ies at least according to Darryl Cooper of Martyrmade fame. The plan was to ethnically clense Palestinians from Gaza, West Bank as well as from Lebanon. Make Lebanon a Christian ally state and drive all the refugee Palestinian population to Jordan, where they can have their revolution creating a new Palestinian state by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy, which was imported by Brits in 1920ies anyway.
It is not without precedent - something similar happened to Germans after WW2. Not many people know about it, but Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers "to the left" and anexed/incorporated some lands into Russia//Ukraine at the expense of ethnically cleansed Germans from historically German cities like Breslau/Wrocław or Königsberg/Kaliningrad etc. The same happened in Czechoslovakia where millions of Germans were ethnically cleansed and relocated to Germany, Germans who lived there for literally centuries. Poland and Czech Republic became ethnically homogenous countries.
The analogy would be treating Gaza/West Bank as something akin to East Prussia or Sudetenland while Jordan - or any other Arab state for that matter - plays the role of post-war East or West Germany or Austria. So you will have two state solution in the end. And ideally nobody will bat an eye, the ethnic cleansing of Germans is nothingburger today. Nobody gives a shit, there is no whining on some supposed wound on the soul of Czech or Polish or Russian nation or anything like that. Most people don't even know this and life goes on, there is enough to do in the respective countries and the mutual relationships are cordial enough, event outright friendly.
georgioz
6mo ago
I don't think there is any confusion to be had. Polling is exactly about whether somebody would win in two weeks. Betting is if somebody is going to win in 2024.
I am not sure why this simple fact is somehow mysterious. There is a difference betting if some sports team wins head-to-head next Sunday or late 2024. There will be some underlying similarities, but a lot of things can change between now and then.
Reading closely it seems Macron and his former teacher consider Male-Form-As-Neutral a sensible rule for French; the governing body of language of Laplace, Liouville, and love agreeing with them.
In Slovak, the language where there is grammatical in a sense that really changes the structure, the "gender sensitive language" morphed into using both genders in a speech. It is very similar to English's actor and actress except for every occasion - so we now have "colleague and colleaguess" or "policemen and policewomen" and so forth.
This of course is a terrible solution, it sounds incredibly alien. First, nobody speaks like that in real life. Nobody says - "Hmm, I wonder how many doctors and doctresses work in that hospital" or "If you have a problem call waiter or waitress" etc. Second, as you mention it is already thing of a past. I have already seen "dear colleagues and colleaguesses and nonbinary persons" in an email. It becomes real dumb real fast - instead of focusing on aspect that binds us (we work in the same company) now you have to make it about sex and sexual orientation of everybody. You literally take something unifying (we are all colleagues) and make it a divisive category where everybody falls into a different box. It is absolute fail.
But in a sense I see this all as a huge win, it shows how foreign this wokeness is to many cultures. There are people profusely trying to import these concepts without any rhyme or reason. Genders are no problem in Slovak language, they are somewhat arbitrary and divorced from sex. As somebody said, girl in Slovak is dievča and it is neuter. Knife is nôž and it is masculine as is flower or kvet. And rifle or puška is feminine as is let's say crow or vrana. Generic masculinum for professions is just another of those arbitrary things and up until five seconds ago nobody cared. And in fact bringing actual sex of people into the language also brings weirdness and creepiness. If you ask for a waiter, you used to get a man or a women - waiter is a word for profession and it was not about sex or whatnot. Now if you ask for waiter do you specifically want a man or what? It is just weird and feels like mindfuck. Which I think may be a purpose of the whole excercise.
georgioz
6mo ago
It is not only loading. On average Abrams tank requires 8 manhours of maintenance for 1 hour of operation. That is one of the reasons why Abrams is so big with crew of 4 instead of 3 and autoloader for Russian tanks: the fourth crew member is indispensable when it comes to making sure the tank is operational, as crew of four working on a tank will decrease the ratio of 8:1 to 2:1 with some redundancy there.
The rules of Westphalian diplomacy aren't particularly concerned with proportionality, as it applies to wars. Instead, the rule is that, when one nation attacks another, the second nation can go to war. So, if Israel is attacked by the newly-formed nation of Gaza, is should go back to the siege listed previously.
I am not sure if it works that way anymore. I am no expert but to me it seems that more and more nations use paramilitaries/PMCs/terrorist groups to conduct asymmetrical warfare with the whole purpose of keeping plausible deniability. What prevents new government of Gaza to claim that they regret terrorist attack conducted from their territory by underground terrorist group? Or even better, they can finance terrorist cells inside Israel or Syria or Lebanon or West Bank and do similar things. Now this is nothing new, for instance Pakistan does this all the time vis-à-vis India, Iran itself has parallel government structure tied to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with their own network of companies and terrorist cells and unique capability of wreaking havoc without necessarily being tied to the Government. The same goes for Russia and Wagner's adventures in Africa for instance.
georgioz
7mo ago
There's been speculation that a ground invasion may not happen at all but rhetoric coming from Israel's defence minister would make it very hard to climb back from:
I actually think that it can be very easy to climb back from it, all you need to do is to claim that it was all just disinformation campaign and feint to force Hamas to concentrate their troops so they can be bombed from afar or some such. Given that many people do not want Israel to attack Gaza by ground forces, such a narrative would be picked up and defended by media as well as many world leaders as shrewd and prudent, even if they just have to pretend it to be that way so Israel can save face.
georgioz
7mo ago
Sure and I am using them as one of the examples now in this discussion, so we do give a shit in this sense. But it will not help Moriori people, so it is just discussion over spilled milk. Bygones are bygones, current ancestors of Māori people can just express some sympathy and move on fighting for the living nation instead of ruminating over the dead one.
I am pro-Israeli here, but I can easily steelman this. Yes, what Hamas did was your cookie-cutter attempt at ethnic cleansing. You see, the way ethnic cleansing works is to do horrible shit to women, children and elderly and then proudly shout that from the rooftops. If you instill enough fear in the opposing ethnicity, they will vacate the premises on their own.
This is how it was done by Israelis themselves in 1948, they massacred the village of Deir Yassin and then run around literally broadcasting to rest of Arabs that they are next. By the way the extremist Israeli militia that participated in Deir Yassin massacre called Irgun was led by Menachim Begin, later a prime minister of Israel who called the massacre as "splendid act of conquest".
There are numerous other examples of successful ethnic cleansing. I can mentioned the Operation Storm during Balkan Wars in 1990s, where Croats ethnically cleansed Serbs from their territory with tacit approval of western coalition, the international tribunal even rubberstamped that it was actually not ethnic cleansing despite hundreds of thousands Serbs being effectively expelled. The formula was the same: run in, massacre anybody who refused to leave: mostly infirm, children, elderly etc. Then just enjoy wailing of their wives running before you, as they are just cheap but very authentic signal booster for those Serbs who did not get the message so far to run on the double. And now you have nice ethnically cleansed Croatia, part of EU and Eurozone, full of nice beaches and good food prepared by former soldiers that participated in the operation, with main perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing - general Ante Gotovina - considered as national hero.
Another successful ethnic cleansing is that of Germans after WW2, nobody now gives a shit about atrocities they experienced in East Prussia, currently Russian enclave or that they were expelled from Poland because Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers to the west, which included German cities, or Czechoslovakia when Germans lived there for literally centuries. Nobody gives a shit about those Germans now, there is no wound on the soul of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles or Russians, this is the reality now and they will live happily ever after - until they themselves are ethnically cleansed sometimes in the future possibly.
As the last example I present the genocide of a tribe living on Catham Islands called Moriori. They had unique pacifist culture of nonviolence that was able to survive in isolation. That is until they got in contact with Māori people in 1835 - in paradox of history Māori themselves were the Moriori ancestors. Long story short, imagine slavery and genocide with the last descendand of the culture died in 1933, around 100 years after contact with Māori. Again, nobody gives a shit about Moriori, because there is now literally nobody to give a shit about, they are history complete with their unworkable pacifist culture. And Māori are now respected minority of New Zaeland complete with land rights recognition and all that.
And I think I will also close with another last example I ninjaedited here, that of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh as it is very pertinent to the topic at hand. This instance of ethnic cleansing was made possible because the main ally of Armenians - Russia - is unable to provide any assistance, but also because Azerbaijan now has a very good geopolitical situation as being key for non-Russian supply of energy to Europe, having good diplomatic ties to Turkey as their protector as well as being on the upswing economically. There are some performative declarations from the west, but nothing will be done on practical level.
So I guess my "steelman" is that this is the reality of human nature, this is how the world worked and will work in the future. If there is anything that needs any "steelamaning", it is this first principles morality and dream of multicultural peace loving society where the whole world is full of Moriori peoples singing kumbaya together. The reality is much more ugly and the fact is that ethnic cleansing was used and will be used in the future as solution of various conflicts. In a sense I think that the Hamas attack was a success to large extent, it shows that the support is shifting away from Israel. Europe is still dependent on energy from Arab countries, Germans recently signed 15 years long contract for LNG from Qatar, and guess who is one of the largest supporter of Hamas globally. Who knows, maybe in due time we will have the same situation as with Nagorno-Karabakh, which was also a long war until it wasn't.
georgioz
7mo ago
I don't want to be nitpicky, but lately I found that word "capitalism" really means a lot of different things to different people. Even the origin of the word is laden with preconception, as according to Marx the Capitalism was the overall system, the overarching ideology, the whole system of accumulating capital connected to bourgeoisie, class struggle, alienation and oppression of workers an all the rest. Socialism was not "just" some alternative, it was supposed to transcend and transform the society towards utopia. In that sense socialism is not an actual economic system, it is defined by negative of capitalism, it is a hypothesis. To use an analogy it would be as if I express my frustration that so far we only use very primitive modes of transportation (capitalism) that are very slow, and that there may be some way to achieve Faster Than Light travel (communism). And how it would be good to rethink modes of transportation so FTL drive can be achieved, maybe by starting with rethinking wheels or whatever.
To me it is hard to have any reasonable discussion around that as it is hard to define what are your objections to whatever economic system you think you criticize - be it China, Sweden, USA or South Africa or whatever else. Do you object environmental issues or maybe you object that there is some sort of alienation of labor, or maybe you object that we have some monopolies and the system should not have it or maybe you have a beef with corporate structure and corporate governance where small shareholders may be fucked, or what is the issue again and what do you think capitalism is?
georgioz
7mo ago
Ethnic cleansing was done before, even with tacit agreement of USA. One such example is Operation Storm that took place on the tail end of Balkan Wars, where Croats basically ethnically cleansed the area that was the stronghold of autonomous republic of Serbs. Croats killed several hundreds of Serbs and basically evicted hundreds of thousands from their land.
I don't think this is as easy mostly because of other regional actors like Iran or other Arab states who have exactly opposite aims and they also provide funding of their own for their own purposes. It is as if Ireland vs UK issues during the Troubles existed in the context of Irish were also being let's say French speaking with significance to the country of France.
The real world politics is not a game of civilization played from the perspective of godlike figure navigating the nation toward ultimate victory.
China is ruled by a regime for which Taiwan presents a constant threat on all sides. It is exactly because Taiwan is Han Chinese and successful, it provides a clear and visible alternative for all the subjects of CCP regime to ponder. Conquering Taiwan would be conclusion of revolution, a "dream" that even Mao could not achieve.
Taiwan has symbolical value beyond any realpoliticking about chips or even strategical issues of control of South China sea. One China policy is the cornerstone of Chinese foreign policy for a reason, any success on this front is question of legitimacy of any CCP leader.
It is a little bit more complicated. While Robert Fico won the election, his party got 42 seats. Together with Slovak National Party (SNS) who is also pro-Putin and "anti-war" who got 10 seats he only got 52 seats. He requires at least 76 seats but more realistically 80+ in order for his government to be stable. The issue with SNS party is that there is only one person who actually is a member of the party, the rest were internet celebrities who got enough personal votes to get into parliament. It is hard to see how SNS will be unified platform with so many idiosyncratic people in there to put it mildly.
Nevertheless Fico needs another party into the government, the Hlas party created in 2020 by former Smer (Fico's party) member, one Peter Pellegrini. Despite his party only having 27 seats, Pellegrini is now the kingmaker between Fico and anti-Fico bloc led by Progressive Slovakia. Pellegrini now positioned himself as he is in the middle of this conflict, playing potentially for both sides. However he is not only kingmaker, he requires that he himself will be prime minister despite his party having third largest number of seats. And the thing is, that Pellegrini wants to be viewed as a "standard politician" not pro-Putin but also not pro LGBT in order to keep his image. So I doubt that any government with him in it (which is basically 99% chance at this point) will change the stance too much.
Also just as an afterthought, I have to rant a little bit. Fuck Ukrainian government for their immense stupidity - and I am talking as somebody who supports the Ukrainians financially and who is not squeamish to buy guns by my personal donations. Literally days before the election in both Slovakia and Poland, Ukrainians decided that it is a good time to sue both countries for agricultural export/import issue. Of course this was picked up by all anti-Ukrainian parties where now they were the protectors of small farmers against Ukrainians and so forth. What a misstep - the glorification of the literal SS-man in Canada was also played on social media. So what I am saying is that there was no need for disinformation, all that was needed was for people to put together real compilations of how Ukrainians mean harm to Slovakia and how members of PS want to trans your kids and so forth. Who needs disinformation if information is damning enough.
As a resident Slovak here I can say that as usual there is conflation of true and false statements in there. As a quick rundown, the current election followed years of political instability of Slovak government that I think was led by genuinely mentally ill person in form of former prime minister. The period was marked by chaos and incompetence, paradoxically the last year we basically had so called "bureaucratic government" that had limited powers but provided more stability all around. As a result the parties that participated in that government fell precipitously and 4 out of 7 parties now in parliament were extraparliamentary or even nonexistent during last election - we are talking about 81 out of 150 seats belonging to these parties.
Nevertheless the election revolved around the person of Robert Fico, who is seen as Orban-like person except he is more malleable in his views and he changed his rhetoric several times in order to gather more votes. On the other side of the isle there was a lot of drama, we have a progressive party literally called Progressive Slovakia (PS) who ended up second in the election. This is the darling of the media, they are pushing the usual CW stuff one would expect, they literally have part of the program called "Equity" where they push for things like free contraception in pharmacies including for teenagers, trans identity (including government IDs) based on self-determination without any medical paper and so forth. They also have a lot of activists including people from Greenpeace in their party and so forth.
Now a lot of the "disinformation" claims revolved around tone policing and language policing of these facts. It is the usual stuff one saw for years everywhere, where you pick the most uncharitable argument against PS policies and at the same time take the most Motte-type reading of their proposition and explain how opponents only spread disinformation as PS only wants human rights or whatever. Of course the same benefit of doubt is not afforded to the other side: one of the most discussed moments of the campaign was when the chairman of Christian Democratic Party was asked what is worse in his eyes: LGBT or corruption. And he answered that "both are scourge" later in the same interview explaining that he meant not LGBT people but "LGBT ideology". Of course all respected newspapers and media selected that one sentence and claimed that he is homophobe who spreads hate against gays (no peep on T part of LGBT of course, people in Slovakia are not generally that keen on trans stuff). On rare occasions where the other part of the question was cited (about LGBT ideology) it was explained that "LGBT ideology does not exist" and it has to be hate against Gays and Lesbians. So again, you can literally insert into mouth of what somebody else is saying by defining words he says in your way. And this misinformation is claimed as protecting against misinformation.
Now also to be frank, there was a lot of very nasty parts of the campaign. There were private messages of politicians openly talked about by former prime minister where he claimed he got it from "somebody he will not name". You had open war where mistresses of other politicians also shared his private messages and it probably caused him to lose (I think deservedly). There were outright usual hoaxes on social media how this party wants to lower pensions etc. But in general the hardcore "disinformation sphere" represented by pro-Putin social media celebrities as represented by the party "Republic" failed, they had sub 5% result which put them outside of parliament despite having more than 10% in many of pre-election polls. The party of former prime minister now also faces accusation of buying votes from poor Villages as they have 90%+ results in places that are basically racially segregated Roma people. That one I think carries a lot of water, there is a practice where you can take votes of other parties except for party you are supposed to throw in and sell them for cash, it happened in the past in some of the places. But again this fraud is tied not to Fico but to his most vocal opponent, so there is that.
Anyway, long story short I think this is now a regular thing to accuse opponent of doing something you yourself are doing - using misinformation to accuse somebody of doing misinformation and then fighting against this percieved threat. If the other side reacts in some stupid way (e.g. saying that LGBT is scourge) then this is perfect, you can now say that you are only reacting and defending when going full force.
Sure, I understand that concept. Bellow I even used similar example of Christian with strong beliefs. You can observe him praying, visiting church services and praising god and all that. But by understanding his beliefs you also can infer that he also believes in Satan as a force of evil. It would probably not be very far fetched to say that maybe such a person can accept that somebody got ahead in his life - getting rich etc. - by having nefarious help from demonic forces. Heck, with very strong belief you can see demonic forces in most innocent aspects of your own life.
That is the gist of what I wanted to say - that having strong beliefs has consequences. And I do not think that feminists are against using sexism to advance cause of women in the same way Christians would be against using demon worship to get ahead - like achieving pregnancy or destroying their enemies. The bar would be much lower for feminists in this case as the belief system is identity based as opposed to outcome based. "Sexism" against men is not real sexism, a boardroom full of women is the most feminist thing ever and opposed to being sexist.
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