Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
You still remember the ad and the company, so clearly it worked at some level.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring.
The NYT article (found a free link here, not sure how many times it can be shared before the paywall goes back up) is about how the ad is not racist (which you should have already guessed from McWhorter writing it) and ends with "Language changes; culture changes; labels are reassigned. And a blond, blue-eyed actress talking about jeans — or even genes — is just a pun, not a secret salute to white supremacy".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Speak out as the tide is changing a couple of years too early? Gulag and execution. Speak out a year or two too late? Irrelevant, timid, late. Timing needs to be perfect.
If we're talking about the period when Gulag camp and execution was an actual threat (meaning the Stalin era - the Gulag system was formally abolished in 1957), the timing was actually very easy - you just did like a loyal communist and condemned Stalin at the very moment when the Party, speaking with the mouth of General Secretary Khruschev, did so.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Also, it quit Warsaw Pact in 1968 due to its alignment with PRC.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I can find all of these within a 10km radius (assuming the Finnish state railroad station is valid for Amtrak and the nearest big box store for Walmart). The nearest farm I could find where I could definitely say what they farm produces potatoes.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
The modern-day anarchists and anarchoid types (not formally anarchist but obviously influenced that way) have rather clearly abandoned the goal of overturning the society totally and replaced it with the one of "existing in the cracks", ie. assuming that the regular square society will still exist in some form and they can get on by with various forms of leeching.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
If there was an actual collapse of the society with warlords roaming about, these would be more likely to be independently-operating army officers a la Chinese warlords of the Warlord Era, not... independent entrepreneurs like these people imagine it would go.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
Rhodesia and French Algeria existed longer than Israel and had people who had lived there for generations.
I don't believe either of these is true for Rhodesia, at least, though the latter claim might be technically true extremely tendentiously. Rhodesia existed, either as a colony or a self-declared state, for 56. Since the first settlers moved in at 1890s or so, there might have been some families that would have gone back 3 or even 4 generations, but most white Rhodesians had moved in only after WW2 (the white population was 65 000 in 1940 and peaked at 300 000 in 1975).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
If there was a politician here who turned out to have acted in hardcore porn, it would probably affect their career negatively, but more due to this being perceived as unserious/frivolous than immoral as such. Whether it would be enough to tank the career would probably depend on the party.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
It's not like there's no history of Hitler being used in a jocular manner as well, considering the hundreds of Der Üntergang rant parody videos, including ones where Hitler's supposed complaint is a valid one.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
There's a fair bit of other work (truck driving, security work etc.) that wartime experience also permits in peacetime contexts. However, most of the presumed remittance-sending work would be typical blue-collar labor (plumbers, nurses etc.) that many Ukrainians can do on the basis of that being their job already.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
I'm going to guess neither experiment is going to end well here. (I have, for what it's worth, seen a couple of "Adolf Hitler World Tour 1939-1945" shirts around, but have never seen a Stalin shirt.)
Even if we assume that the response would be considerably slanted towards the Hitler shirt getting the worse reception, isn't that quite nuts as a standard? The argument is that "Staling gets a pass", and if the standard of comparison for "getting a pass" is getting a better reaction than Hitler, pretty much everything ever gets a pass.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The most likely current scenario for Ukrainians managing to claw back some semblance of prosperity is probably a combination of resource deals, adult Ukrainians (continuing their) working in Western countries and sending home remittances a la other Eastern European countries, and tourism to various war-related targets for Western Ukraine supporters and other interested parties once it's mostly safe to do so. These would probably be kneecapped by any scenario that involved a forced turn towards Russia.
While I am undoubtedly living in a country prone to see Stalin as particularly unfavorably (though I doubt the scientific factor of the quotes above), this prompted me to go find an actual poll on the topic. In a YouGov poll of 1000+ Americans, 68% view him as somewhat or very unfavorably (58% very unfavorably), 6 % as somewhat or very favorably, and 26% don't know. So, while there's a contigent who don't know him, "asking random normies about Stalin" does clearly show they do know who he is and view him (very) unfavorably.
Hitler unsurprisingly is better known and even less favored, and there are some other world leaders who surpass Stalin (Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein), but interestingly Hitler isn't even the least favored of the figures asked - Osama bin Laden is.
There has also of course been a push for more remiscining on the evils of Stalin around the West in the recent years due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to new visibility for Holodomor and comparisons of Putin to Stalin etc.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
During the 70s, when Green parties got going, there was a large amount of "new causes" in the air in addition to environmentalism (second-wave feminism, antiracism, pacifism rights for criminals/the homeless/the insane/other subaltern groups etc). Since the established parties were already run by powerful interest groups that would at most humor the new causes a bit as an extra to their established program, a lot of new cause activists attached themselves to the new rising movement, made easier by the shared social milieu and the general tolerance for the new weird stuff that the early Greens had on account of being quite weird themselves. You sort of see the same now from the other side with a large amount of right-wing "new causes", whether they're actually new or not, attaching themselves to the rising right-wing populist parties, which often tolerates these causes better than the established parties of the political right.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
I am not exactly sure how Stalin "gets a pass". If you asked people to list the most evil leaders in world history, there's a high chance that they'd list Hitler first and Stalin second.
One could say that Stalin "got a pass" in the way that he probably died from natural causes (unless one believes that he was poisoned) while Hitler desperately committed suicide, but that's because Stalin won a war and Hitler lost one, not due to the perceived virtue of their causes in the eyes of others.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
The pro-Russians have called the slow pace of grinding village conquests by Russians an escalating pace or words to the same effect for close to three years now, the same time they've predicted the imminent collapse of the front, Zelensky getting couped and so on.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Insofar as I've understood the specific criteria for ineligibility for asylum in US is membership in a Communist or otherwise totalitarian party, which is something that might apply to a Pinochet regime opponent but by no means was guaranteed to be the fact.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Obama wasn't a community organizer when he ran for Senate, he had been a state senator and a constitutional law lecturer for years.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15d ago
Countries like Sweden didn't go through the war, and the Communists (and socialist parties in general) were never as strong in Western Europe as after WW2 (countries like Italy, France and Finland most clearly, but most Western European countries saw stronger-than-ever numbers for the Communists in the immediate WW2 aftermath).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.
DRC (official population estimate: 100 million) has been in a state of chaos and civil war for decades, yet the amount of Congolese who have immigrated to the Western countries has remained comparatively small (120 000 formally in Western countries according to this link, even if you triple or quadruple this number to account for the illegal migration it would be less than a 1 % of that official estimate.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
My understanding is that the situation with American Orthodoxy is that there's a fair amount of new fervent converts, at least compared to the previous baseline, but the general trend of secularization is also causing people from traditional immigrant communities (Greeks, Russians, Serbs) to drop out, and that they thus far balance each other out. However, if this continues, at some point the growth in new convert-run parishes could be expected to overtake the secularization process, especially if there are marriages and natural growth (though that might require appeal beyond the current category of young men...)
I'm not exactly sure how much the OSHA/FLSA graphs are supposed to prove. It's not like occupational safety laws and measures or general labor laws and measures where things that were nonexistent before OSHA/FLSA, right? Aren't these furthermore the points where these things passed from improvements being workplace-based and affected by labor union advocacy to the state taking control, making the anti-union point less clear?
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