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Comments
Frankly speaking, I think what's more important than labeling people is labeling their actions.
And for that matter, people can change based on their actions.
Also I heard a bunch of them were killed and there was a dispute over who did that.
Either way, they're kinda not as relevant as they used to be.
From my understanding, monkeypox transmission just has to do with physical contact. Sexual congress just happens to involve a lot of physical contact.
And HIV is transmitted through bodily fluids, including but not limited to sexual fluids.
I have no idea what Yarvinism is, but yeah, the tl;dr version is "hey, this guy is nothing like we preach, but we like how he bullies people we'd bully too if we could, so we'll come up with a fancy excuse for us shilling him anyway".
Explainers; right-leaning, centrist. Interview with Tucker Carlson (I have not watched it).
There was some intense drama with him doing a Lord of the Rings metaphor a few weeks ago in an article (this one if you care to read) that suggested who even knows what but I didn't read it and I don't intend to ever do so.
People like Yarvin a lot and think he's really smart but I draw the line at liking Sam Francis.
There was a big wave of "take that gays" when this article finally confirmed that it was probably all the non-stop sexual contact rather than more generalized physical contact. Certain sensitive cavities (such as the mouth or nether regions) were being more affected than others and this was judged to be the result of that being where the body first came into contact with the disease.
If you look at the CDC numbers you'll see that uh... well, yeah, it was (is) all the rampant non-stop homosexual contact.
Similarly guys like these didn't really help the cause (extremely NSFW). As for their enablers, there's people like this who really, really need to calm it.
Anyways my point is no matter what the facts are it didn't stop people like this being well... like that.
(To be clear it seems one dog ever got monkeypox from sharing a bed with a gay couple).
To be clear I wasn't arguing with this, all I was doing was relaying information from others who have chosen to become willfully uninformed (or conspiracy minded) because it sticks it to groups of people they don't like.
Anyways this is starting to seem like one of those 'you really dun screwed up, ya back-stabbers' situations like in Pakistan re:Imran Khan where you want to get rid of the guy in charge right now so bad you get rid of him right before all the major crises hit the country and so to everybody not paying much attention (the majority of the electorate) seems as if last guy actually was keeping the country stable and now the new people are just screwing it all up and so you have to literally just arrest the old guy so he doesn't come back to power.
Well, maybe not that last part.
Also honestly Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid are literally the worst because not even they really cared about inebriated Chris Pincher grabbing junior MPs butts ('Pincher by Name, Pincher by Nature' - Boris Johnson, reportedly). Truss played brutal by not even shaking Sunak's hand when she won even though Sunak was sitting right there and trying to extend his hand but the dude deserves it (but it's always better to be nice and conciliatory, especially when there are cameras).
Overall this upcoming cost of living and energy crisis in the UK is going to make Boris Johnson seem like some sort of Messianic figure by the time Liz Truss is done being PM.
Not sure if I should.
But I guess I have de facto done so by posting the above.
Which in turn gives me an excuse to use this as a place to post this entertaining zinger.
Context:
this is a tragedy, and Reeves is a horrible person
Unrelated; there's a lady on twitter who has very like... classical trad takes that basically don't actually make much sense or are just combative for no reason, but I check out her account because... well specifically because of that.
Anyways this week she was on a Catholic men's podcast about the death of masculinity and before I even got to the part she was at I heard an amazing conversation.
I don't really know if inter-student violence should have a place at school (I lean heavily towards no but I am okay with "boys being boys" if the boys aren't making a thing of weaker targets).
This podcast doesn't have a lot of views but honestly if somebody came to these guys and suggested "You just want bullies to be allowed to do whatever they want to the weaker effeminate boys!" it'd be hard for them to claim that isn't what they wanted.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately just because "I had five brothers and so I was effectively deputized to show the ~pansies~ how the real world works." is not something I thought any sane, well-spoken adult would ever say. I mean I've paraphrased but that's what he's saying.
Also, this reminds me. Recently I was told by a person who spoke with her, that a distant acquaintance of mine sent her son to some sort of weird-ass trad-catholic all-boy school. As the story was told to me, the woman was all giddy over the sight of her son getting in a brawl with the other boys in the absence, very much intentional and aware, of the teacher. Because you know, boys will be boys. This is, admittedly, a friend-of-a-friend kind of story, so I looked up the website of the school. There were no overt red flags, but it was a bit weird compared to the kind of schooling we're used to.
My only concern with that is that there's the common problem of bullies and other troublemakers playing the part of tempting people to react physically and getting other people in trouble for it, when such incidents should of course be blamed on the instigators rather than the reacters.
So maybe there are instances where violence, while still ill-advised, may be justified.
Meanwhile, in anime: the answer is "yes, as long as they have magical powers".
Well I think if inter-student violence is going to happen, then teachers should not approve (even tacitly) but also I guess Catholics are just more violent than I thought in general. I guess maybe my view would be "if students are caught fighting they should be sent home for a few days to think about what they've done* but not treated as if they've caused the end of the world".
Also I do think maybe getting the urge to commit violence under control at a very young age is vital for living in a modern society unless you want to end up with a parliament that operates like some obscure Eurasian country.
I mean I don't want some 24 year old guy punching a gas-station attendant because he can't get his temper under control, but I also don't mind it if some guys duke it out behind a seedy nightclub or something (mostly because I avoid such places anyways).
*I'm aware "being sent home" is probably not a problem for the sort of kid who would get in a fight.
By the way whilst the world is basically exploding Turkiye changed it's name.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/20/fastest-growing-city-america-florida-cape-coral-215724/
This is an article, about a city in southwest Florida.
It was written and posted just about 5 years ago.
Cape Coral is right on the gulf coast, a peninsula of the mainland across a river from Fort Myers, and due east of a barrier island named Cayo Costa.
Cayo Costa is which is where Hurricane Ian made landfall. The whole Fort Myers area is basically the hardest-hit metro area in this hurricane.
So it's sadly not a surprise now to see stuff like this: https://news.yahoo.com/cape-coral-residents-worn-ians-023722680.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xsvssz/to_what_extent_did_postussr_russia_attempt_to/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i98k60/why_didnt_the_united_states_create_a_marshall/
Dude, that's sick.
I generally wonder how safe it is to live seaside but peninsulas and gulfs seem particularly like they should be avoided. Then again I believe in freedom of movement and association so people should move wherever they want.
However when sales tactics like this come into it stuff does tend to get out of hand.
Thanks for the info however;
Does everything always have to be pretentious and know-it-all? The problem is that the place is a danger-zone, not that they wrenched civilization out of the jaws of swamp (though again, doing so is a bad idea).
Sorry this information is about 70-80 years past the cutoff of point re:Russian History I'm interested in.
I guess I should explain but I won't; I'll just say I'm a Nikolas II fan now.
As for the conflict... I have many thoughts, but I think it's best summarized as anti-interventionist. I'll admit I didn't think the incursion would happen, but I did think it was inevitable (eventually). Now I think it probably won't happen again anytime soon (to the extent that this current incursion is on it's way out).
I don't know how ordinary Russians feel about it with the (state-sponsored) pop concerts and annexation parties but I very much doubt they're cool with how it went and for the number of lives lost on both sides they have basically nothing to show but the landbridge to Crimea (IIRC they couldn't even keep Odessa).
Not to make light but man, if only somebody had told Putin he'd come out of this looking like a lame duck.
That's still not an excuse at sucking really bad at statecraft, which Russia has for like... the whole time it's tried doing statecraft basically?
Speaking of sucky statecraft, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are out there doing their best to make everybody wish they'd been #Ready4Rishi.
Anyhow it's rather hard to prevent people from moving to a place, though it's somewhat easier -- at least in modern times -- to prevent people from building in a certain place. Since they generally need infrastructure and the cost to set it up can be prohibitive. Though, simply having cost as a barrier has turned out to be not very reliable for getting people to do things sensibly, particularly whenever at least some people can have access to immense amounts of wealth anyway, without the ethical compunction to know not to do certain things.
(Or, in other words, a place being way too difficult/expensive to build in can help deter people from settling there, but this deterrence doesn't work well when people can also have way too much money while also having bad ideas.)
Also, after people do establish themselves in a place, it's extremely difficult to remove them from said place with any permanency, while adding services tends to be a lot easier in the short run, both from a sense of compassion and by way of being short-term fixes to problems for which long-term, more advisable fixes would involve totally changing things in ways that people often find anathema.
(Or, in other words, if people are already living in a place, adding various services and giving them various forms of help is easier than telling them that they shouldn't be living there in the first place.)
If you're talking about the phrasing in that quote, that has a bunch of words I wouldn't use (since they're just not the way I write things, pretentious or not), though I would say as far as a description it's not too far off the mark. It was a wetland that wasn't very suited for (sub)urban development (to say nothing of its function as storm surge protection for more inland developments), yet it was developed, financed partly by grandiose dreams, and now people are stuck with the reality that there are a shitton of people living there and there aren't very many easy answers for what to do at this point.
I get the appeal, but AFAIK the man was, like, responsible for some 2/3rds of the mess that swept him away, and he didn't even have ill intent.
Hard to say. Non-Russian sources are full of gloating. Russians on easily accessible social media seem, as far as I can judge, jaded and bitter, but hostile towards everything rather than either "the West" or their own government alone. Russian social media are watched and they know it. Russians not on social media don't really get their story through.
Florida Man Pronounced Engineer Of Bewildering Dreamscape Forged By Greed, Flimflam, Grandiose Visions Out Of Watery Wilderness
I'm guessing the dude's name is "Zielinski".
----
Meanwhile, in Poland:
Posting this here because this is a little not-very-funny and also feels a little too political for a less-political humor thread and because the Ukraine stuff is already here.
It's found in this tweet:
...which is a reply to a thread about infighting between Russian soldiers.
It's a specific form of soldier-on-soldier bullying. In Polish, it's called fala, "the wave", and was associated with old conscription-based army. I was told the Russian version is more extreme, because everything in Russia is more extreme, but the source of that story was also extremely dubious, so, I dunno how the two styles compare. I'm gonna tell you about the Polish one.
The relation of Polish to Russian is close enough that the term has an immediate negative ring to the Polish ears, but I'm not quite sure if I could give a direct translation. "The old man stuff" or "the lame old stuff" are best I can come up with; note again, this is translation of a Russian word on the basis of Polish language.
I'm speaking off memory, so keep in mind there's a chance I fell for some false etymology or something.
When obligatory military service term was two years, it was sophomore soldiers (dziady, "the gramps"; the Russian term is etymologically related and it might be a borrowing from Russian, I dunno) bullying the freshmen (koty, "the cats").
(Am I using school terms correctly?)
As far as I know, professionals (trepy, a term which I believe can be rendered as "jarheads", but literally, I'd say "the boots".) knew perfectly well what was going on, but considered themselves a separate sort to the draftees, just stood on the metaphorical sidelines, and let the draftees do their own thing. Apparently the current volunteer army doesn't do that anymore, merely standard NATO issue sexual harassment and pointy-haired bossery.
One story I remember from newspapers was about some sailor who died of exhaustion after the elders had him do a number of squats equal to the number painted on the ship's board. (274 IIRC.) Another, which I draw from borderline urban legend rather than news, was about sweeping the barracks hallway with a toothbrush. But when a buddy a year older than me got drafted in like the last or next-to-last year of conscription, he only had to tell the stories of silly ways of dealing with boredom and picking up girls.
~~EDIT~~
I have also noticed the spelling is inconsistent with official rules of transliteration of Russian into the Latin alphabet: I believe the correct form would be "dedovshchina". See if that Wilcham fellow wasn't Polish, the "w" is a bit of a giveaway.
I remember that in the American context, 'zoning laws' are the enemy of both left and right wing types depending on the circumstances (ex. suburbs vs. urban planning respectively, though older left-wing types tend to start developing a form of unspoken NIMBY-ism that puts them on the right re:zoning laws).
Isn't this what also happened with all those 'It'll be beautiful!' condo schemes from the 90s and early 2000s?
Oddly enough this seems to apply no matter what wealth group you're in, considering every story about flooding in Sudan will inevitably feature the odd family that is waiting the floods out so they can re-build their destroyed homes for the 10th time in a decade.
Well it's just that right now (or for at least a year and a half now?) I've been into the politics of pre-and-post WWI and I'm mostly learning about this through various biographies of the leaders at the time.
My focus has been George V (King, England), David Lloyd George (PM, England, yes the British had a King and Prime Minister with the same name during WWI), Wilhelm II (King, Germany), and Nikolas II.
George V is a little too generic (though it could be argued he was the autist of the group and therefore I should like him best), DLG was a Liberal (proto-Labour essentially) so even if I liked him as a person I couldn't like him best because of optics (also, not a king), and Wilhelm II just seems like he was the most generally inbred* of the royals at the time.
That leaves Nikolas II, who has a super-tragic and extremely romantic life story, what with the sick kid, the really weird Rasputin stuff, and the getting murdered by (literal!!!) communists (or more accurately, Latvian soldiers conscripted by a communist government plus one really angry communist guy). Reactionary dude, perma-conservative, took captivity well, etc. Lots to like.
Relatedly there was no saving Russia from some sort of power-sharing with non-Monarchs but by the time the newer version of the Duma was set up there was basically no way the Monarchs were going to make it. Also all the hilarious (not really) adventures that led to him accidentally abolishing the Romanov dynasty are very memorable.
*Speaking of inbreeding, it's totally possible that the chain of events that led to Mohammed Bin Salman becoming de facto next in line to become King of Saudi Arabia are due to the male heirs of his father's first wife dying off in their early 40s due to faulty genetics (since the Saudi Arabian line is still like...second generation from the same one man).
I did hear on the radio about some folks in SW FL (I forget where) whose mobile home community was, as of the last time they saw it, literally flooded out and occupied by gators (they didn't dare to even go near their house), and when I heard that they lost an earlier home in South Carolina to Hurricane Hugo (back in 1989), my first thought was "they should have known better!"...but then my second thought was, if they are living in a mobile home, that probably means they don't have the financial means to get something more likely to survive a hurricane.
This wouldn't be the first instance of economic conditions causing people to live in areas that are priced more cheaply due to being less desirable due for being prone to environmental/natural disasters.
Well, WWI was happening at the time and he was away from Tsarkoe Selo* and near the German border, which complicated matters with him being able to understand what was going in within the country. If you're going to stage a revolution, it's probably a good idea to do it when the leader is not physically present and distracted by well, WWI.
However, it's notable to mention that he did not directly lose the country to communists. That was the Pre-Soviets's own fault because he was already being held captive by the time the Soviets went full red.
After he was put under house arrest, it was power-jostling with Chairman Alexander Kerensky and his would-be-overthrower General Kornilov that led to the October Revolution cementing communist power.
*Also yeah probably shouldn't have been living outside of St. Petersburg considering he had to rule the country.
Do you mean the February Revolution versus the October Revolution, or do you mean the one way before 1917 that led to the changes in the Duma?
If it's the first two, then once again he was already in captivity (with no formal power) by the time the October Revolution occurred. The 1915 resolutions mainly go with my point that the Monarchy was not going to survive their own changes in trying to reconcile Tsarism and representative government.
As for being a conservative, I didn't mean that he was a winner (though I'd argue that he never let himself become a loser). I meant on a personal level, his habits and demeanor. It's a trait I like. Combined with the whole 'went down with the ship' thing, it's not hard to romanticize his martyrdom.
See, the British somehow could pull it off. He could've settled into some sort of constitutional arrangement after 1905 and perhaps that's be enough for him to at least die of old age, who knows. Too bone-headed for that, though. He and his ministers spent like ten years dismantling anything that came out of 1905, so when push came to shove everybody knew it's time for Part Two. He seemed to have really believed that whole crap about the Tsar being almost literally sacred, and you know where that took Russia.
The way I was told about it was that it's yet another example of buying into that tsarist ideology. In a personal autocracy, the leader must appear the solver of problems and cutter of the red tape, too bad it doesn't work in war.
To be honest I don't understand the kind of distinction you're trying to make.
I've heard he was a quite pleasant fellow in person, and devoted to what he saw as his duties. So, yeah. But that story then followed by accusing him of having just the wrong skillset for being a tsar. Like, compare to Louis XVI. The fella also was a nice chap, he just happened to be a king in a system built on the assumption the king is a gregarious, larger-than-life figure who likes ritual and to be the center of attention. He was none of that. So, yeah, that's kind of a Greek tragedy about a man who botched like every chance at not ruining his country.
Aye. Though I'm sure there are better examples of leaders willingly going down with the ship; if you are locked in the ship's cupboard then it's not really your decision. It also requires to whitewash that whole believed-their-own-bullcrap stuff, but people have done that many enough times already.
tl;dr general early 20th Century Russian politics thread
Yeah he definitely believed in the Divine Right of the Tsar. I think the only Tsar who possibly didn't was Alexander II (and look what that got him).
Yeah I think the British and Russian systems were worlds apart. Tsarism was probably always going to fall around when it did.
I mean Tsarism was always about following the religious doctrine with intense zeal whereas when push came to shove the British were always willing to 'modify' things so they worked best for the current situation (see also modern Anglican church).
IIRC he mostly spent his time sitting as close to the front line as possible and giving the soldiers pep talks, so yeah.
He spent his time in isolation maintaining whatever dignity he had left and giving support to his family (including giving them all the possibly worst education in all the subjects the remaining tutors couldn't cover).
Related to the Tsarkoe Selo thing; he lived there because the city wasn't good for kids and he wanted to be a family-man as much as possible, unlike basically anyone who came before him. The place was extremely inconvenient for political activity (again, being outside St. Petersburg).
Another thing is he married a woman who kind of had the same demeanor/outlook as he did with being very set in Tsarism, religious zealotry and the devotion to family (not above Mother Russia but as high as you can go with that). Basically I imagine him as being the soft pseudo-millennial son of a great man who didn't exactly ever need to 'get' the serious things until the moment he was Tsar. He was also really, really bad at statecraft and didn't really ever try and improve on that because of the aforementioned 'Divine Right of the Tsar' thing.
Not to be overdramatic, but this is like leaving your husband/wife for your potential soulmate out there in the universe. I found Nikolas II so I will stand by him for as long as this WWI thing is a thing with me (possibly forever?).
It was actually amazingly hard to get any Romanovs to leave Russia of their own free will, including his mother and sister (who did eventually go because thankfully they were in Crimea at the time).
Admittedly after the very start and the move away from Tsarkoe Selo to Siberia there was no way it was going to be possible any more.
A lot of the time towards the end (or at least right until they got to Ipatev House/Ekaterinburg in general) it seemed like he honestly thought something would happen to save them all (even when they were at Ipatev, IIRC one of his daughters wrote a very detailed letter re:the layout though there was no rescue attempt planned by the person who she sent it to who was also just some random low-ranking princess from wherever).
Why though? It's how he was, it adds to his character for me. I don't like when people think history was pretty and Hallmark-style romantic and all; the uh... brutality; adds to the romance.
tl;dr 14w declares Nikolas II his husbando