domain:nunosempere.com
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
It's Eurovision Song Contest time, and words cannot describe how crazy Finland has been over this year's Eurovision and Finland's predicted chances to do well. This thread is just a short list of stuff revolving around the Finnish Eurovision entry that's been seen here.
GeneralElephant
11mo ago
We’ve discussed this before & I will just have to say that you must be lucky since I have been menaced by crazy homeless people a couple times (both times late at night past 2am) since moving to NYC last year.
TheGodhead
11mo ago
Counterpoint: The Chronic still slaps
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
(I had a different reply here but I deleted it because I was triggered by stuff that resembled something that you weren't actually saying. Sorry.)
But how much better is it? Perhaps less than those numbers would imply, on many metrics.
What metrics are there, out of curiosity? I've only really seen "outcomes" mentioned but in my surface view these are confounded by issues of affluence (e.g. more obesity, more driving everywhere). Also it seems like ass-covering and hostility-to-rationing drive up costs as well; a socialized medicine death panel could cheerfully say no that test is expensive and highly unlikely to find a problem so there's no rx for it end of story, but in the US an indicator that you could have a 0.01% chance of a horrific disease justifies the test so end of story.
jeroboam
11mo ago
It's been tried before though, hasn't it? Twice, in fact. And both times Israel was able to repulse massive armies before the U.S. got involved. In fact, the U.S. had to intervene because Israel was TOO successful.
Raw numbers don't mean that much in the face of massive organizational, technological, and motivational superiority.
I suppose you could theoretically zerg rush Israel with like 1 million poorly trained soldiers and win. I don't think that's possible right now absent a major casus belli to motivate the troops.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
it seems to me that humans are very fragile creatures where the line between merely stopping an oppositional person with force and killing them is extremely fine.
Put more precisely, the line between incapacitation and killing is very fine. People can stop an action of their own volition whenever they want. It's making them stop against their will that's fraught.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’m sort of libertarian adjacent, so my thinking is that it’s because of state power being able to reach into everything in ways that tyrants of 100 years ago could only dream of. Through the civil rights act and liability issues stemming from them, the state can force your boss (for fear of lawsuits) to insert himself into what used to be private matters between employees. You’re an ass if you’re touching women on the ass, or deliberately antagonizing LGBT people, or using the N-word as a descriptive term. But such things should be able to be handled by those involved. I’m perfectly capable, as a woman, of telling you to cut it out. I think any functioning adult should be able to politely but firmly tell the person to stop being an ass.
There’s also the technology. It used to be (pre-cellphone) that unless someone in power happened to overhear the conversation or a tattletale did, it was perfectly reasonable to ignore it. Nobody could find out what you really think about and issue unless they heard it themselves or someone tattled. Internet, cameras, and social media have changed the game, and effectively collapsed the private sphere (unless you take great pains to lock down everything and only talk freely among trusted people) meaning that now any powerful person in your life can freely judge your opinions and words even if they weren’t said to that person or anyone who knew that person. I can watch you on camera and see (and sometimes hear) if you’re doing things that indicate crime-think.
All of this power, imo turns politics into a toxic stew. When the state can dictate the ethnic and gender ratios of your staff, when they can determine if you’re doing enough to not be liable for a “toxic work environment”, and can determine which groups are more worthy of protection, this makes politics much more high stakes. And I think the same is true of the regulations around safety and health and quality and so on. When a state becomes powerful enough, everything becomes political because you can use a powerful state to get your way in whatever form that takes. The government can force educators to teach a certain way and keep secrets from parents and so on, and thus angry parents yell at the school board. It’s now politically charged.
To me, the way to depolarize it is to go back to the antiquated notion that the government is not supposed to be your parents. It’s not supposed to protect your feelings or baby proof your environment. It’s not supposed to enforce quotas or workplace behaviors. And barring really catastrophic danger, I don’t think the government should be heavily involved in safety issues. And once the government stops regulating and enforcing such things, I think the temperature on political debates goes back down. If the state isn’t going to make your business liable for every word your employees say and maybe not having enough trainings, then I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
11mo ago
Look, you're allowed to care about the clothes you wear. Where it becomes a dick move is when you start looking down on others for not caring as much as you do. Lighten up.
Astranagant
11mo ago
It looks like the encampment has since been destroyed as the right-wingers burned it down in the night. Not the first time people have burned down asylum seeker accomodation but the other instances were in small towns rather than in the middle of Dublin.
I cannot believe I, an Englishman, am looking with envious eyes and a hopeful heart at Ireland.
hate speech bill
Oh right, nevermind. Although I do remember it being widely unpopular? Not that that matters.
So for the unfamiliar, why is Ireland the leader in pushing back against the tide of refugees? What unique facet makes its population so much more willing to resist than other Euro nations? And how to we emulate, amplify and export that factor across the continent?
Gdanning
11mo ago
Well, I am rarely on the subway that late. I am sure it is more likely at that hour. But my point is that this trope that people are constantly being menaced on the subway is just silly. It would be like me thinking that people are constantly in fear of being shot in open carry states.
The medical system in the UK is unusually bad. I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one of the three has no case for better socioeconomics). The US one was also superior, but (at least in the incarnation that you get as a PhD student at a reasonably rich university) still inferior to the three continental European countries above. My one encounter with the Canadian medical system put it only slightly below the Europeans. It's not clear to me if it's something cultural, or a consequence of the specific implementation and incentives it produces (I have low-confidence information that Sweden, which has the most similar medical system to the UK out of the ones I sampled so far, is similarly bad), but nowhere else have I encountered the combination of doctors who were this aggressively unwilling or unable to bring their brains to the job and just stubbornly prescribe heavy-duty medication which at best did nothing and at worst had nasty side effects based on an autocomplete-tier diagnosis (or actually googling the symptoms right in front of me) and complete lack of any equipment to even do something like basic blood tests (you get a referral to a lab and have to get another appointment once the results are in before they look at them, and the hope is clearly that in the >=7 days it takes the problem will resolve itself one way or another).
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
11mo ago
It's not without precedent. According to Wiki, "A law in place until the 1850s stated that no member of the Jewish religion could be elected to Parliament. Some Christian denominations were similarly prohibited. If elected, a member would be excluded if he refused to swear an oath of abjuration with a strong Christian wording."
anti_dan
11mo ago
I dont understand your theory of the case at all. It is that 15 years in prison is an appropriate sentence for... being inexperienced at restraining violent crazy people?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Because an army of mindless psychopathic murderers is a bad way to conduct wars. And releasing them into society when they're done service would be even worse.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You made a big deal about the severity of the punishment. Whether his actions were justified is not dependent on whether someone died, but the level of punishment, if a crime was committed, very much does depend on whether someone died. Why did you bother to make a big deal about the size of the punishment? Either he was justified and there will be no punishment, or he wasn't and is guilty killing another person, in which case a significant punishment is clearly appropriate.
The question is whether Penny's actions in putting him in a chokehold and thereby risking Neely's death were justified, not whether Neely's death was justified.
I think this is just semantic games. We have legal standards for when civilians can use lethal force (for what I hope are obvious reasons) which amount to "it is justified to kill this person." Using lethal force does not always result in death, but death has to be a justifiable outcome in order for the use of deadly force to be legitimate.
anti_dan
11mo ago
Speaking as someone with an extensive combat sports background, this idea that training should have helped him is highly dubious. I'm sure he was given some training, but probably never used it in real life, and hasn't kept up with it. Indeed, it probably makes things worse. He kept trying to do the thing he was trained to do, but kept getting it wrong, which is made very difficult by being in real life (not on a mat) and battling a live opponent (who also probably was giving off odors that made him less able to focus).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
This needs to be dwelled upon, because if you compare European-Jewish conflict to European-European conflict, you quickly see that Jews were the least attacked and the safest group in Europe by a large margin.
The logic in this claim seems completely wrong. You're comparing the number of times, say, England and France declared war on each other, to the times they declared war on Jews. Only, the jews are living in England and France; when an invading English army sweeps through the French countryside, they don't carefully avoid the Jewish settlements. So the jews get hit with the same attacks as everyone else in their country, and they get hit with specifically targeted attacks against jews also. That's a lot more threat, not a lot less.
MaximumCuddles
11mo ago
I dunno, man.
All I’m saying that outside a handful of situations, having a very limited variety of clothing is highly unusual.
Not something I thought would be particularly controversial, but there you have it.
If you met someone who got about half their calories from chicken nuggets, you’d think it’s weird too and you wouldn’t be wrong to feel that way. The situations are not entirely analogous but while they aren’t in the same ballpark they are definitely in the same sport.
In Central Europe during 30 years war:
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545974
The rewards for their cooperation began to accrue to the Jews directly following the crushing of the Bohemian rebels at the Battle of the White Mountain, in November 1620. With the Protestant forces dis-persed, the city of Prague was ruthlessly sacked, all that is except for the Judenstadt. The emperor's soldiery were under strict instructions, which they obeyed, not to enter the Jewish quarter.
The privileged treatment continued under the new governor of Bohemia, Karl von Liechtenstein, a nobleman with close links with Jacob Bassevi, the Jewish financier who was at the center of the efforts to raise Jewish cash for the emperor and who had been ennobled--the first Jew to receive such an honor from a Holy Roman Emperor--by Rudolph II, in 1614.
In conclusion, it does seem that previous views of the fate of Central European Jewry during the Thirty Years' War stand in need of revision. The influence of certain preconceived notions appears to be widely dis-cernible in the historiography, ideas which have tended to distort our view of the question. On the one hand, there is an entrenched expecta-tion that as a defenseless and supposedly constantly victimized group, the jews of Germany and Austria must have been "easy prey for the marauding soldiery."
On the other, there is the marked tendency in pre-1939 German Jewish historical writing to flatly deny that the Jews were affected by or experienced major historical events differently from other Germans. The truth is that the terrible upheavals of the Thirty Years' War mostly worked in favor of German and all Central Euro-pean Jewry, appreciably enhanced the Jewish role in German life, and prepared the ground for the "Age of the Court Jew"-the late seven-teenth and early eighteenth century-the high-water mark of Jewish influence on Central European commerce and finance.
Note that 30% of HRE population died (though, unsure how many from violence and starvation rather than disease; perhaps 3-6% of that number) during the Thirty Years’ War. I also can’t find a number on the the number of Jews in the HRE at that time, but we can be certain they died less due to starvation, pillaging, and combat.
As for all of European history? I don’t think any Academic has crunched those numbers.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
11mo ago
Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia, iirc. They would live in close proximity to the King with whom they had a unique economic partnership. There were no agricultural Jews in Northern, Southern, or Central Europe, unless I am mistaken.
So there really is almost no Jewish history from roughly Romans to 1800? That was one thing I posted for. Like they rebelled against Roman’s some. Invented Christianity. Then sort of chilled for 1800 years. Made Hitler hate them. Then invented a ton of stuff in the 20th century.
Like that’s kind of a simpleton 30 second elevator speech but if I explained Jews to someone who knows nothing is that largely correct?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Perhaps but Jewish immigration to the U.S. didn't take off until very late into the 19th century.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I think the distinction here is that a President can credibly claim to promise to enact federal legislation (still a bit dubious given his party may have a slim or no majority but still) given how prominent they generally are in directing the legislative activity of their own party these days. Law and order though is not even federal level, mostly anyway, so the influence becomes more obscure. He can as you say use the bully pulpit but that is hardly the stuff Presidential campaigns are made of. 'If I am elected, I will ask state prosecutors very nicely to please crack down, or something'.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
The cliche woke academic line is that illegal undocumented immigrants do the jobs Americans won't do. But I think it's more accurate to say that they do the jobs that the establishment doesn't want to pay for, or at least not as much they really ought to
I agree with this, there's a weird "alliance" between the proles of the third world and the elites of the first. That is also why, incidentally, the embrace of neoliberal economics by the conservative movement was a major historical error. At least conservatives in the US have stopped being braindead gung-ho war supporters of the kind we saw during the Bush era. Perhaps there could be a further evolution to a more organic skepticism of endless GDP growth, which is the underlying ideology justifying mass migration.
I have basically no 1st hand knowledge on the subject, but any time I hear from people who have actual knowledge of combat (e.g. mixed martial artists or law enforcement), it seems to me that humans are very fragile creatures where the line between merely stopping an oppositional person with force and killing them is extremely fine. I'm sure there are techniques that maximize the chances of someone surviving when holding/disabling them, but the chaotic nature of a physical altercation makes it so that there's a lot of variance and unpredictability in the outcome. So my thinking is that it's very possible that he tried his best to disable him without killing him but failed at that endeavor, for whatever reason. Whether that was due to reckless negligence is up to the courts to decide, I suppose.
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