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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   4000 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 16, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The Eurovision Song Contest was held this evening, which I haven't watched in about twenty years. A friend of mine suggested that we watch it, but was unsure if she'd be able to host, as her flatmate was insistent on boycotting it in light of Israel being "allowed" to participate. In the end her flatmate was out of the house so we were able to watch it in her flat.

I'd assumed that, given the absence of her anti-Zionist flatmate, we'd be able to enjoy the Eurovision as the trashy, campy experience that was intended, without politics intruding. I was mistaken: my friend, her boyfriend and one of her friends insisted on turning off the stream during Israel's performance and made innumerable derisive comments about them during the night. I'm a coward who wants to keep the peace so I held my tongue for the most part.

Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)

I was rather dismayed with how quickly my friend retreated into semi-ironic conspiritorialism: saying that the Eurovision would have to investigate their voting procedures next year to ensure no ballot-stuffing was taking place, or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right". (The idea that foul play must have been involved seems to be a consensus opinion, if /r/Ireland is any indication.) The possibilities that a) normie Europeans legitimately liked Israel's performance on a musical level more than the other countries; or b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.

I am growing increasingly dismayed by the level of ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland, but it's comforting to be reminded that it's quite the outlier among European countries.

Things took an even weirder turn when Armenia performed and the conversation turned to the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. My friend's Turkish boyfriend, who'd been enthusiastically participating in the Israel-bashing, suddenly became rather defensive, explaining how it wasn't a genocide but merely ethnic cleansing, and anyway forced marches are completely different from genocide, and anyway how do you even establish intent to exterminate a particular ethnic group, and it's hypocritical of European nations to accuse the Turks of genocide when they've done things that were just as bad if not worse* (it was a real mask-off, vino veritas moment, and even my friend seemed to be a bit taken aback by how worked up he got). I felt like saying - it's a bit rich of you to accuse Israel of genocide on the basis of their having killed ~110,000 Palestinians in the span of 75 years, but dismiss the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in one year as "mere" ethnic cleansing. My girlfriend, who's nowhere near as sympathetic to the Israelis as I am, admitted that I had a point here. I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.

*On this point I agreed with him: the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo.

Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)

Australia and Estonia were robbed, man. Estonia should've won (okay, Tommy's live performance didn't live up to the music video, but the music video and the song itself were gold) and Australia should've qualified for the finals over any of the boring shit that got in over them, particularly Armenia and fucking Denmark. Holy shit were those two painfully boring.

Before seeing Germany and Latvia, Estonia was my personal favourite. Good clean silly fun.

or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right".

Wait, I thought "the right" are supposed to be all Nazis? So all the Nazis are voting for Israel now, against Austria, where literally Hitler was born? That's hilarious.

ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland

On a more serious note, a disappointment of a decade, tbh, how quickly and easily Ireland turned anti-Semitic (let's not be coy, that's what it is). What did the Jews ever done to them? I have always been a fan of Irish and wider Celtic culture, but this thing makes me sad.

Wait, I thought "the right" are supposed to be all Nazis? So all the Nazis are voting for Israel now, against Austria, where literally Hitler was born?

In the 2020s, the "far-right" are people who think it's bad to massacre Jews for the crime of being Jewish, and who think Jews are entitled to defend themselves against attempts to massacre them. Whereas the "anti-racist left" are the people making excuses for people who want to massacre Jews, insisting that the reasons they want to do so are perfectly legitimate and not at all related to blind ethnic hatred, suggesting that it's the Jews' own fault if people want to murder them, and saying that the Jews are in the wrong if they attempt to defend themselves against attempts to murder them.

I have no idea how we ended up in this place, but I hate it.

On a more serious note, a disappointment of a decade, tbh, how quickly and easily Ireland turned anti-Semitic (let's not be coy, that's what it is).

A year ago I would have disagreed with you, but at this point I'm struggling to think of alternative explanations which could explain this degree of ire. Conspiratorial ranting about how Mossad are buying up Irish SIMs en masse in order to manipulate Eurovision voting for hasbara purposes - I mean, come on. Don't tell me this has anything to do with "anti-colonialism".

I have no idea how we ended up in this place, but I hate it

I have been meaning to write an effort post on this. The reason is that the modern woke worldview is already 9/10s of the way to being an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It holds that a certain ethnic group (white people) is responsible for all the problems in both America and the world. The way this ethnic group did that is by displaying racist high in-group preference, conspiring that all high ranking positions in society are controlled by that ethnic group. That way they can control the flow of wealth in the entire world away from those who need it, and to themselves and themselves alone. The ethnic group has also enforced this racial dictatorship by developing a years long stranglehold of not just politics, but of media and culture as well. All you need to do to turn that into something out of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is drop in a single triple parenthesis so that instead of white people it’s (((white people))). This is not helped by the fact that Jews are often high achieving and end up in many high positions of power and cultural authority in the society that the woke despise so much. Karl Marx said that antisemitism is Communist class warfare for morons, and surprise surprise, when you try to Communize a bunch of college morons, you are going to turn a lot of them into antisemites.

I think there are some other factors too, but this is the main one.

That said, if it's Reddit we're talking about, it's kind of self-selected for the worst excesses of woke, so maybe overall picture is not that bad. No idea, I am still holding some stupid hope that they'd wake up one day and figure out this is all BS. Probably won't happen though.

Reddit is certainly crazier, but among my university educated friends it's not rare at all to claim that the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted and besides, it's exaggerated anyway. I usually don't prod further, but when I confronted a friend who is unusually tolerant of different opinions with well, imagine yourself to be an Israeli: What if you're wrong? What if you let them in, and the murderous hatred does not immediately vanish? He just retreated to the motte that Israels' behaviour is immoral either way. At least I could get him to agree that maybe a slower process that doesn't have catastrophical fail states is better.

the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted

That had already been proven wrong, it's not a theoretical question, Israel gave up all power in Gaza and actively tried to not intervene there as much as possible for 20 years. What we have now is the outcome of that policy. Israel has its own left, and it operated exactly based on that concept - in fact, it was the dominating concept over the majority of the establishment, however they color themselves on other issues - that the hate will recede once Israel administration is gone, and the residual hard core of haters is going to be easy to contain since it would be small and isolated. That went catastrophically wrong of course.

It's like somebody would say "if we only had a socialist country" ignoring the USSR ever existed. Which I guess what the left is routinely doing, so not much new here.

I agree - but to them, the situation in Gaza was sufficiently bad that it doesn't count. It's just a fairly simplistic moralistic view that doesn't really account for agency on the alleged victims side or pragmatic solutions.

Yes, and the /r/Ireland subreddit has unambiguously undergone a purity spiral in recent years.

Leftist screeching is never about moral clarity. No comparisons will cool people off who are programmed to dislike what they are told to dislike. Israel hasn't been the best but I doubt Palestine would let jews live if they were as strong.

NRx people got a lot of this stuff right.

I object to Israel being in the Eurovision contest on the extremely pedantic basis that Israel is not, in fact, in Europe.

Boy, have I ever got some bad news for you.

What's the reasoning behind this? Did they just decide that it's good business to keep expanding the contest year after year? Is it eventually going to turn into a worldwide contest?

Despite the name, the contest has nothing to do with the European Union. Any countries which are members of the European Broadcasting Union (itself, counter-intuitively, not limited only to European broadcasters) are eligible to enter. At various points, entries from China, Kazakhstan and Qatar have been considered.

Cool, thanks. That's the first time I've ever heard of the European Broadcasting Union.

Seems like the US is also a member!

Nah, Turkey's got that little bit to the NW of Istanbul that I think counts, so partial credit. I guess historically it's more a production of the "European Broadcasting Union" as a media co-op, but still, what sell-outs

Azerbaijan is also considered to be partially in Europe, due to the funky way Europe's usually defined (part of it is north of the Greater Caucasus, and Europe is defined with the boundary being Urals-Caspian Sea-Greater Caucasus-Black Sea).

@FtttG

Hot take: "Europe" is only a separate continent because geographers have a very eurocentric view in drawing the lines. Every other continent has a pretty clear separation from its neighbors by sea or at least small isthmus. "Eurasia" makes more sense from the map.

Not Eurocentric; Med-centric. This one goes back to Ancient Greece, and when you're a maritime civilisation in the Mediterranean there are three big lumps of land of relatively-similar coastline around it: Europe, Africa, and (West) Asia. From the Med's point of view, Europe and Asia are separate, because of the Turkish Straits; it's only if you know/care about the far shore of the Black Sea that they seem connected.

EDIT: It's dubious how much relevance this has to history, but it should be noted that there have been times within human habitation that the Caspian Sea has become connected to the Black Sea. There may be again, if we melt the Antarctic Ice Sheet. With the Caspian connected to the Black, and thus the Med, Europe starts looking considerably more like its own thing.

Tired: Europe is a continent

Wired: Europe is not a continent

Inspired: Europe is a continent, and so is India

Yeah, admittedly Turkey and Azerbaijan are edge cases as far as geography goes. Culturally, on the other hand...

Might as well add bangaldesh at this point.

I think a Bollywood dance number could really liven the thing up. Something like this would make for a nice change of pace from the monotony of sombre ballads, Eurodisco and reggaeton.

Is the melody that is played on the strings the same in many Indian songs? You know, how The Ink Spots started every song with the same tune or how Johnny Cash used the same two chords for like half of his songs?

Or is the timbre of this instrument so distinctive it overrides my perception of the melody?

It's probably different lol. Though people use the same sample in most pop music on various regional TV channels is different.

@FtttG do people in the west mostly see Indian pop music? Indian exports at one point were more classical in nature.

I guess this song is simply so memetic that I must have heard samples of it a gorillion times in various videos.

I think it was used in that movie The Dictator.

Honestly, I didn't even know Indian classical music was a thing before reading your comment.

I know extremely little about music from that part of the world so I can't comment. @self_made_human, @mrvanillasky, care to weigh in?

I'm far from an expert, but this is a quintessentially Punjabi melody/beat.

It's far more representative of India as perceived by non-Indian, but the former is the association that one of us who isn't irony poisoned would make. I think very similar beats are in vogue for mid 2000s Punjabi music, not so much so today.

Lol, my aunts a popular folk singer, the kind of dance we have is quite mellow, ghoomar since Rajasthan is hyper conservative.

Are there any performances that you really liked in any eurovisions?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w07N2nfB7KY

I haven't watched it for about twenty years. Of the performances last night my favourites were Germany and Latvia. I can actually see myself listening to the German entry for pleasure, which is unprecedented for me I think.

Ban them! BAN THEM ALL!

the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo

Could you elaborate on this? I've been seeing a lot of arguments lately to the effect that the Belgians weren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop. So far when I look such things up I first find that the official story is everywhere, but when digging deeper it falls apart. At this point I don't know what to believe.

On the other hand (jeez no pun intended) I can very easily believe that it's massively overblown for to cast colonialism in the worst possible light.

e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop.

That part isn’t actually considered to be controversial at all. Leopold ordered a local armed force (gendarmerie) to be set up, commanded by European mercenaries and recruited from locals, with arms and ammunition being shipped in at great expense from Europe. As the officials were worried that the recruits would use the ammunition to poach local wildlife, they forbid hunting and ordered the hands of any killed rebel/saboteur/bandit/deserter etc. to be severed, collected and presented to command as evidence. Instead of suppressing poaching, this resulted in a black market where soldiers bought up severed hands from local tribesmen. It’s a simple case of perverse incentives. Everybody in power knew well that cutting of the hands to plantation workers for whatever reason is counterproductive and thus not to be condoned.

The time during which the Congo was the personal property of King Leopold was so bad that the Belgian parliament took it away from him. The time of being a Belgian colony was not as bad.

It’s funny how practically every poster on the Motte suddenly turns into SecureSignals when any other tragic mass killing in human history is mentioned. “Only 200,000 Congans died at worst! Mostly from typhus!”

Hah I love how inside baseball this comment is.

The situation in the Belgian Congo was poorly documented and almost none of the survivors had their stories documented.

Colonial ethnic violence in general took many forms, some are closer to the Holodomor than the Holocaust, for example. It’s disingenuous to suggest that King Leopold wanted all the Congolese Bantus (primary victims; the pygmies were considered too small to work for the most part and had already been genocided by the Bantus during the great migration) dead or expelled. The transatlantic slave trade was brutal and cruel, but it likewise wasn’t a ‘genocide’.

That’s the exact same spiel that any good motivated tankie would use when talking about the Holodomor.

The mainstreamed Atlanticist narrative is that the Soviet famine of 1932-33 was a genocidal policy of mongolized Russian imperialists masquerading as Communists specifically intended to exterminate the proud and ancient Ukrainian nation. It should be pointed out that questioning any part of this claim openly will earn you condemnation for being a Russian agent.

IMO it wasn't really about ethnicities. Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one. Sure, there was a dimension to suppress the nationalist movement, but the main idea was to exterminate the class of independent farmers who were completely incompatible with the collectivist centralized agenda of the new power. Holodomor wasn't engineered to destroy Ukrainian nationalists (though by exterminating their base, it was a side benefit), it had been engineered to destroy Kulaks and the concept of independent self-sufficient agricultural production. I'm sure you can play with the definition of "genocide" to place it one way or another, but in my book a concerted social engineering effort to destroy a wide group of people is something that is horrible, and happens often enough that we need a term to call it. If you don't want to call it "genocide", you'd have to invent a new term with exactly the same semantic connotations, by which point there's not really any reason not to just use "genocide".

Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one.

True. But it weren't Americans who invented the ethnicist narrative that has been mainstreamed in the West, it was Ukrainian nationalist immigrant activists in America, Canada, the UK etc.

Well, if you target the cultural elites, the narrative "racists tried to ethnically cleanse my people" gets you lots of sympathy, but the narrative "commies murdered 5 millions of my people while trying to establish the worker's paradise" gets you shrugs and "well, you can't build worker's paradise without breaking some eggs...". So it's hard to fault them for playing with the deck they've been dealt.

Love how starvation and disease suddenly become acceptable excuses.

Yeah, how do you think most people died in concentration camps ? (Extermination camps != concentration camps)

Well, at this point I think it's an observable truth that the history of colonialism is generally presented in, to put it charitably, the least-charitable possible light.

That isnt my experience. Colonialism is frequently presented as one/all of.

  1. Yes it was extractive, but still more competent than the natives.

  2. Yeah, but we civilized them.

  3. They killed themselves in civil wars after we left anyway.

Worst of all, even in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.

France still lays claim to the 150 million in Haitian ransom. The British refuse to accept blame imposed on Churchill for the Bengal famine. The portugese inquistion was famous for grotesque torture in Goa. The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it. Not many apologies to go around.

Yes, they werent as effective as communists or nazis at killing. And they werent as comically cruel as imperial japan. But, these were still fairly fucked up periods for the colonized nations. IMO, Pretty close to slavery.

The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it.

[citation needed]

The first microscopes capable of seeing "animalcules" date back to 1674, and as late as ~1850 we still have people like John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis still fighting an uphill battle with their controversial theories of "cholera can spread in drinking water" and "doctors should wash their hands in between examining corpses and delivering babies".

Back in the 1500s understanding of disease was so bad that we still don't even know which diseases were responsible for the majority of New World deaths. The earliest massive plague was smallpox, but the dozen-odd plagues of "cocoliztli" are still named by that generic Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "pestilence" because nobody knows which of a half dozen candidate germs were the actual cause.

For that matter, some diseases spread so much faster than the conquerors who first transmitted them that we don't know how bad the death toll was! In hindsight we believe that a lot of European colonist reports of "gosh, look how beautiful this unspoiled wilderness is" in North America were from people describing recently-carefully-tended forests whose caretakers had just been devastated by epidemics.

This isn't to excuse any of the colonists' deliberate crimes, of course. After the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been killed by an epidemic, the proper way to treat Squanto should have been sympathy and charity, not abduction. Some of the colonized nations' treatment was "Pretty close to slavery", and some was literal "we'll take you to the slave market to sell now" slavery.

I don't know where you grew up, what media you consume, or who you're talking to, but this is not my experience whatsoever. The first time I encountered anything like an opinion that colonialism wasn't an unalloyed evil was in spaces like this one. In school we spent a lot of time hammering home the point that colonialism (and American slavery) are the worst things that have ever happened excepting the holocaust.

'Decolonization' is a popular buzzword all over the place.

If you don't mind me asking, about what time period were you in school? I only got the slavery part and some whispers of "Columbus was evil actually", around 2002-2008ish. I first heard the word decolonization somewhere mid-late in the 2010s. Just trying to pin down an approximate timeline here.

90s and in California. Granted 'decolonization' wasn't a thing at the time but now the local school has it painted on their walls.

Figures it was California, though I'm surprised that this was in the 90s. I guess I shouldn't be though, just because I wasn't old enough to be aware of it doesn't mean it wasn't there. New York metropolitan area for me.

Okay. Even granting all that, what now? Blame current-day Europeans for the sins of their forefathers? Spend all of eternity re-heating old grievances concerning harm done by dead people to other dead people? Try to conclusively settle that which is impossible to settle, so that the next generation can turn around and call a foul and claim that the settlement was in itself unjust, so our descendants can all have another go at the merry-go-round?

in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.

The colonial powers of yestercentury don't exist anymore. You can go and extract apologies from the current French, Spanish, British or Belgian governments and what the hell are those worth? The people in charge now and the people who live in those countries now aren't the same people who committed whatever crime happened in the colonial era. It's trivially easy for them to apologize; especially in the current environment of "colonialism bad, europeans bad, africans good" in which you can thus put yourself on the right side of history, no matter whether there is any substance to the subject matter of the apology.

And that's completely eliding the question of whether we need to also account for the good the colonial powers may have done if we already weigh up the bad. Let's say there was no good, for argument's sake.

What would you want us Germans to do? Kowtow even further to Israel? Bend over backwards a little more to accept our great German guilt?

Fuck. This is the Friday Fun Thread?

And even if you, for the sake of argument, assume Erbschuld is a thing, you're still a long way from actually establishing a connection to the current countries. As far as I know, my ancestry is entirely lowborn small-scale local farmers and workers, with a small admixture of lowborn inter-european wage immigrants. Let alone me, wtf do my ancestors have to do with what some aristocrats got up to? Why do we have to pay penance & higher taxes now to assuage your guilt?

Another fun aspect is - what about the former colonial powers the current countries of which have enjoyed significant immigration from their former colony countries? Have those immigrants now also assumed part of the guilt?

Lmao this is true. Reminds me of this.

I have a Belgian friend who told me he learned in school that the death toll was in the same ballpark as the Holocaust, but I haven't personally researched the topic.

Just reading the Wikipedia article leaves me with the naive impression that we know that it was a horror show of abuse and barbarism but that we have a very poor idea what happened on a demographic level (what percentage of the population died? How much of the decline was reduced briths as opposed to deaths? Was the decline 10% or 50%? Etc.) and to what degree the Belgians were directly responsible as opposed to criminally negligent.

There genuinely has been concerted, ideological voting for Israel in this and previous Eurovision, I don't know how one could deny this. At least last year, people were organizing "vote for Israel" campaigns in evangelical Facebook groups at least here with indications that many of those voting didn't even watch the contest. The primary motive isn't as much political as religious, ie. Christian Zionism, though of course politics and religion overlap here. This is helped by Eurovision allowing people to vote as many as 20 times for their favorite.

At least last year's Israel entry was quite good musically. This year's was the height of mediocrity.

This year Finnish media didn't even focus on Israel that much, as the main topic of interest was the fact that there were in practice two Finland entries as far as the media was concerned - Finland's own entry Erika Vikman and Sweden's entry KAJ, sung by a group of Finland-Swedish comedians from rural Ostrobothnia. This was actually a topic of a mini culture war, contrasting Erika Vikman's hypersexualized "feminine empowerment" style favored by liberals with KAJ's national-stereotype-oriented light rural comedy favored by more conservative/normie types, though the entrants themselves got along quite well at the contest.

I'm also pretty sure the jury votes were rigged to favor the Big Five funder nations. Nothing else can predict UK's absolutely dire entry getting so many jury votes. I also lost a bet on this exact topic.

There genuinely has been concerted, ideological voting for Israel in this and previous Eurovision

Even if that's the case, it doesn't prove that it's "the right" doing this. Normies, liberals and centrists can engage in concerted ideological voting just as well as anyone else.

Erika Vikman's performance was hilarious, probably the purest embodiment of the ethos of the Eurovision.

Again, I don't think it's as much "the right" as a political movement as it is evangelical religious communities, which are of course generally often related to "the right" but not the same thing.

Also, probably the most Eurovision thing at yesterday's contest, and in long time generally, was the Baby Lasagna / Käärijä interval show.

I'll add Eurovision to my list of awards requiring the 'correct' ideological adherence.

In fairness, Eurovision faced repeated demands for Israel to be banned from competing, but stuck to their guns, and there's no question that Israel would have been given the award without fuss if they'd gotten the most votes. Some people have drawn analogies with how Russia was banned after the invasion of Ukraine, which seems like a transparent false equivalence to me: Ukraine was invaded by Russia and Ukraine fought back, therefore we ban Russia from competing; Israel was invaded by Palestine and Israel fought back, therefore we ought to ban - Israel?* I mean Palestine aren't in the Eurovision so you can't ban them, but why should you ban Israel?

*I know, I know, Israel "really" invaded Palestine 75 years ago, but come on, surely no one really thinks they started the current war.

I know, Israel "really" invaded Palestine 75 years ago

Nah, around 1200 BCE actually. But that's not the reason not to acknowledge the unceded claim of Canaanites to the land, of course.

Russia was invaded by Ukraine and Ukraine fought back, therefore we ban Russia from competing; Israel was invaded by Palestine and Israel fought back, therefore we ought to ban - Israel?

As worded, this is almost perfectly symmetrical.

I could very easily write you up four different arguments for which country is equivalent to which, depending on the particular political axe you want to grind:

  1. Russia is Israel and Ukraine is Palestine (I hate Russia and Israel)— Two countries vastly more powerful than their smaller neighbor carry out a blood-thirsty invasion, then play the victim and pretend they are trying to fight terrorism. The only reason they have any problem with “terrorism” is because they were trying to steal the land in the first place. They loudly propagandize the threat the smaller neighbor poses as a cover for their own imperialist land grab. Both theatrically sob and moan about the terrible horrors they suffered during World War II as justification even though it has nothing to do with the present situation

  2. Russia is Israel and Ukraine is Palestine (I like Russia and Israel)— Two strong yet mostly peaceful countries are both antagonized by their smaller neighbor. These small neighbor states are so possessed with bloodthirsty ethnic hatred of their larger neighbor, to the point that they are willing to commit national and ethnic suicide just to spit in the face of the hated larger state. Both the small states commit horrific acts of terrorism, then play the victim when the larger state retaliates to protect its safety. The two smaller states both openly valorize the Nazis out of spite, because the Nazis murdered the hated ethnicities of the large states.

  3. Ukraine is Israel and Russia is Palestine (I like Ukraine and Israel)— Ethnic group has suffered terrible persecution in the past during the Holodomorocaust. Ethnic Group decides that the only way to prevent such deprivations in the future is to have a state of their own. They bravely set out to create an independent state. Their neighbor(s) seething with baseless genocidal hatred and justifying themselves with their own completely false historical claims to the land immediately try to snuff out this small base of safety for Ethnic Group. Ethnic Group State fights bravely and secures its existence and independence.

  4. Russia is Palestine and Ukraine is Israel (My brain has been melted by years of dank 4chan may mays)— Two based and trad-pilled peoples heroically fight against the evil (((them))). It’s an uphill battle for both of our heroic groups of Chads, because their degenerate enemies are both supported by the hated ZOG empire of America and NATO. For some reason, people keep telling me to “post hand”.

Fuck, thanks.

There is something rather reprehensible about picking up on certain events that happened 100+ years ago and then insisting on prefixing every mention of a nation with that event like a Homeric epithet. It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.

In 1915 something like a quarter of the Muslim population in Anatolia were recent refugees ethnically cleansed out of Caucasus and Balkans in very similar ways to Armenians. Country was fighting for its survival against the Entente that had explicit plans to further this ethnic cleansing from both western and eastern directions until Russia collapsed. Probably a majority of non-Kurdish population of Turkey today has near ancestry who were ethnically cleansed out of their homelands during the events of late 19th-20th century. Something like half the countries in yesterday’s Eurovision rooster holds some significant responsibility for these series of cleansings which included the 1915 Armenian one too. Somehow as long as they don’t challenge NATO consensus these countries never get to carry a genocide epithet.

It’s commonplace for Turks like your friend’s boyfriend to act opportunistically hypocritical but I am generally quite proud that our population at larger never succumbed to the propaganda regarding their own ancestors unique evilness.

Would you acknowledge the evilness of Armenian genocide if we agree to drop the "unique" part?

Yes of course.

I got a lot of pushback here, but I still think my standard of "anything over 50 years ago should be dropped" as a current-year topic still works pretty well, not ideologically obviously but as a more pragmatic principle that preserves at least some notion of evenhandedness. 50 years later, most everyone in power then is dead now, or dying, so it seems increasingly pointless to try and get reparations or impact current policy. For Israel, that means the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War both ought to be non-factors, but the Oslo Accords and first Lebanese conflict might still be fair game. For Ukraine, that would mean you can't hold Stalin against Russia, but you can look at some of the last decade of the USSR. For Turkey, that would mean a lot of the PKK conflicts are still relevant. Does that imply that an Armenian shouldn't feel ill-will towards Turkey still? No, that's understandable, I would more say that it implies that you can blame their upbringing or current education system for mis-educating people still, but that at the same time pursuing any kind of reparations would be a fool's errand.

More controversially, your reasoning would imply that the following are off the table:

  • Every former British colony griping about British colonialism (including the Great Famine of Ireland, the partition of India and Pakistan, and on and on)
  • Jews griping about the Holocaust
  • Black Americans demanding reparations for slavery, or even bringing up Jim Crow
  • Aboriginal Australians griping about the Stolen Generations
  • First Nations people griping about residential schools
  • Native Americans griping about the Trail of Tears

Interestingly, the Rwandan genocide and South African apartheid are still within the statute of limitations.

I'm actually ok with those being disallowed from the complaining zone. I get quite sick of being held to collective blame (as a white American) for things that happened before I was even born. Slavery and the Trail of Tears happened before my ancestors even came over to the country! It doesn't seem very fair to hold grudges against a group of people who couldn't possibly have committed the wrong to begin with.

I basically agree, though I'd prefer an exponential function with a half-life of 25. But I guess that will be too complicated.

I don’t think eternal guilt is viable, but Turks could behave a little more like - say - principled British Empire defenders and admit the atrocities but say by and large it was a proud history in their opinion.

All large scale population transfers (ie ethnic cleansing) involve great suffering and usually many civilian casualties. Nevertheless, in the case of the Armenians the death toll and much of the historic narrative suggests at least some genocidal behavior, many outright mass killings of civilians in huge numbers and so on, and the death toll speaks to that (because as a percentage of Armenians at that time, it was an order of magnitude if not more greater than the casualties of the Greek-Turkish population transfers for example).

Greek-Turkish population transfers were negotiated between Greek and Turkish states at peace time with no direct urgency or threat. It’s not a good comparison at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I also wish my countrymen could be more enlightened about their patriotism. But then I should ask, as I know many British people personally from various backgrounds and education levels, where are these principled defenders of the British Empire? I certainly haven’t encountered many. What sort of effect do they have on the national consciousness of the general public? Close to none. The country we are supposed to imitate according to you is so lethargic that it cannot even react to the organised race-based rape of digit percentages of its young girls. Fuck no thanks I will take jingoism over that.

It's one thing to refuse to allow your national identity to be defined by a horrendous crime committed generations ago. It's quite another to pretend it never happened at all, as modern-day Turkey quite explicitly does.

But in practice the first is much harder than the second. Telling someone, “Yes, my ancestors killed millions of people not very long ago, but I choose not to let it define me,” is very difficult, especially if your conversational partner is related to the people they murdered.

It’s much easier to say, “nah, that stuff’s all exaggerated,” or as e.g. the SNP do, “no, you don’t understand, all that British Empire stuff was the evil hateful ENGLISH really, they oppressed us too, please don’t look at any of the Mac names on the memorials…”

Of course it's easier. And I'm not singling out the Turks for criticism as uniquely evil: this whitewashing of history is reprehensible no matter who does it, whether it's the Americans, the Japanese, the Belgians, the Brits etc.

For sure. I’m just saying that I don’t think the first approach is actually viable and I can’t remember seeing any examples, except when the genocide is centuries old and long forgotten except by revisionist historians. Can you think of any examples?

Germany is the obvious one, to the point that a lot of people think they take it too far (e.g. deporting people who criticise Israel). Arguably Australia and Canada, although I don't really believe either of the latter two were really guilty of "genocide" as such, but certainly genocide-adjacent activities. I've heard that American high schools have gotten a lot better in recent years about teaching pupils about slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Vietnam etc. (even if I'm sure it likely often devolves into lists of atrocities those horrible Red Tribers committed, which we noble Blue Tribers opposed at every turn).

The interesting thing going on right now IMO in high school history classes is we're starting to see them teach topics like the 80's, which is that awkward frontier where it's like, definitely starting to be established history in an important sense, but it's also still very impactful on current politics, so you theoretically still have to tread carefully. It seems like history classes in high school typically roll up to like a 20 to 30-year lagging window or so. APUSH for example technically covers "1980 to present" as a whole category, but in practice it usually starts petering out around the mid-2000's, with the last official topic being the Obama presidency, so about 10 years ago. But most history classes won't push that frontier as much.

OP said

It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.

Those seem to me classic examples of OP’s first case. Modern Germany defines itself (negatively) in relation to the Nazis, while Australia and Canada are constantly weeping performative tears (and arson campaigns, cancellations, affirmative action etc.) on behalf of the ‘genocided’ peoples.

Yeah, I think that's a fair characterisation.

Israel has done very well with audience votes in the past few years for basically one reason, in Eurovision, you can't vote against a country.

If I'm a pro-Israel partisan, I can vote for Israel 20 times. If I'm an anti-Israel partisan, who should I vote for? Palestine isn't in the contest (lol) and there are 25 other entries to pick from. If I know who the favourite is I can vote for that country, but that can be hard to guess. Sweden was the favourite this year and didn't do particularly well from either the juries or the audience.

I wish Israel had won, for the ensuing political drama. But hey, I'm sure they're very happy with second place, even if their contestant had to perform with a booing crowd (kindly edited out by the producers).

I was also surprised at the dearth of Palestinian flags in the arena. They were allowed (I think I saw one) but people mostly waved the flags of their own countries. I didn't see any keffiyes either. Maybe people are just getting bored about Israel as a topic?

b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.

I don't know whether this is true or not but I think it's at least not unreasonable for people to get the impression that the support for Palestine is far more universal than it is, especially among people older than 25.

Its mostly the far left that is concerned enough about the topic to publicly talk about and organise protests about the issue, which can leave the impression of much more widespread support than actually exists. Furthermore, the far left is also pissing people off by being histrionic and obnoxious which can lead to people opposing Palestine out of spite rather than opinions on the conflict.

Just looking at my own friend group this is pretty much the case. The only one that brings up the topic is the far left guy, but at a poker night when he didn't show up and the topic came up, it turned out everyone else is either apathetic or quietly pro-israel/anti-Hamas, people just didn't want to get into a fight with the pro-palestine guy.

I think this a fairly frequent thing happening and especially with the left due to their ability to organise protests.

So frequent there's a term for it.

Kind of but it isn't necessarily a right/left thing and people don't necessarily falsify their opinions.

I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.

Nah, this is just the media and culture war riling people up, plus recency. You could argue that maybe media coverage is due to antisemitism.

It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women. The Austrian homosexual hapa won. Hazel had joke during one of the set changes about the prevalence of homosexuals at Eurovision.

Whose coverage did you watch? We watched on ARD. I miss Terry Wogan. Tried Graham Norton on the BBC after Wogan died, Eurovision is gay enough without the extra help.

My wife was surprised by the seeming overperformance of Isreal. In her experience the majority of European homosexuals are pro-Palistine.

My favorite were the Icelandic boys. I enjoyed seeing Baby Lasagna again, I still think he was robbed last year.

10 years ago we won with a drag queen, yesterday with a countertenor. Double gay, yes, but also in some sense balance restored.

I'd thought Conchita Wurst had been more recent, but it was 2014.

Somehow last year and this year were gayer than the year a literal drag queen won.

It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women

It's not for nothing that Eurovision is known as the gay olympics. But never forget Poland. The red-blooded man often makes his voice heard.

My favorite were the Icelandic boys

Same, it was classic Eurovision. The audience in the past few years seem to be going for technical proficiency over feel-good nonsense.

I was happy with the prevalence of violins and key changes this year.

Whose coverage did you watch? We watched on ARD. I miss Terry Wogan. Tried Graham Norton on the BBC after Wogan died, Eurovision is gay enough without the extra help.

Just a YouTube livestream, but one of my friend's friends was this bitchy gay guy who had us falling about the place laughing with his snarky comments. It was almost like having our own personal Norton.

Greek performer appears on camera with her huge glasses

Guy: "She looks like she's dressed for the wedding of someone she doesn't like very much."

(on the Swiss singer) "She's hot by the standards of women who work in accounts receivable."

Israeli journalist appears onscreen to announce the results of the Israeli jury vote

Guy: "Who's this IDF slag?"

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