I think it’s not about money. It’s the audience.

Maybe this arc leads somewhere better though. He might be big enough to cause a paradigm shift eventually.

Yeah, since we have a long history of having been part of the Russian empire. Sweden and Russia warred over our land for centuries. There are a lot of various Finnic tribes within the borders of modern Russia, such as the Mari, the Ingrians and the Karelians. Just to name a few. Before Russia really ramped up their cultural “genocide” (not sure what the word is where they suffocate the cultures and force the languages and traditions not be practiced at threat of jail or such, and moving native Russians to their lands while forcefully spreading the locals across the other lands to be alone and not among their own culture) there were very colorful and lively Finnic traditions quite far, even into Siberia, and with a shared language roots the communication was easy, and as such, trading. It wasn’t until Russia started snuffing out all these other cultures and their members, that the borders and differences became so stark. Before that, it was almost as if they were Finnic lands, though under Russian rule. Modern day Finland was under the same rule at times, too, so in a sense it was just internal movement at those points of time, not even crossing any borders.

It’s a fairly modern and recent development that the differences have become so stark and deep. We only have to look back a couple of centuries and the Finnic tribes across these lands, deep into modern day Russia even, were strong and alive. What we call Russia today, or Finland today, are very recent things. Even Russia has changed by the way of Russification or just suffocating and killing other cultures from its lands, from just what it was a century ago.

But during the Soviet rule, and after it too for a while, it was very common to travel as tourists between us and them. We were very common tourist location, and in the Eastern Finland all the shops had a lot of extra cheese and stuff because so many Russians just on a normal day came to visit and buy the cheese and whatnot. Same went for Russia. The “Suomettuminen” (something probably like Finnification or similar in English, not sure) was a big part of the post-war Finland and USSR, and that meant close relations, even if not really wanted or equal in balances.

Even in the 2020 you read a lot about big Russian money coming into Finland in the form of them buying up vacation places, even whole islands and whatnot. It’s been a bit chilly between us always, even more so after 2014, but it never stopped the somewhat close exchanges of stuff and people. I think 2022 was the final nail, the turning point there. Not sure we ever get back to that type of relation. And honestly, don’t think many want that either. Our relations have always been about self-preservation and not true will to be friendly.

But that is true for all of Europe, and here I’m just giving some tidbits less known to foreigners, there are similar things in every modern day nation and region, so it’s not really useful to know or to compare.

I was originally just commenting on the present contrast there. Not thinking too deep about it.

Well, not much deep green there outside of Greece, which is a country I love precisely for standing out in the region in a brilliant way. But it is true that despite the border lengths not being comparable in length, they have even tougher relations with the deep red neighbor.

Second, there has been a lot of exchange between our nations. It’s not so long that we gained our independence from them in the first place. I would guess it’s been much more extensive for this very reason. But it’s an apples to oranges kind of comparison, and doesn’t make sense to compare even if it wasn’t.

Finland is among the top 5 greens as far as I can tell with a basic eyedrop on the image. Russia is among the deepest reds. So there is nuance in that vs. the balkans especially, that are mostly in the yellow-orange shades.

But either way, just an observation. Not intended to belittle other countries. It is a stark contrast, which I just found noteworthy enough to bring up.

It’s a little bit illuminating seeing the stark contrast of deep green vs deep red at the Northern Russian border, whereas in the more central Europe, or the rest of it for that matter, sees a gradual tend towards the red across the eastern bloc.

That’s a daring thing to be. Such a progressive, healthy country, with all that border with the deep red orcs. But has to be a little bit lonely, too. Not many deep green countries having such stark contrast to a direct neighbor. Not many will understand the extra pressure or weight it carries.

You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.

For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.

Thanks for the perspective!

Fair enough, those are good points.

I might have gotten a little defensive there for no real reason. It’s a thin line to walk, and unfortunately I find myself often approaching the forbidden (and rightly so) lands of some variation or cultural exceptionalism, and even worse, based on nothing actual or concrete, just vague “what-if”s and imagination.

Sorry about all that

I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.

But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.

But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.

Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.

I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.

Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…

But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.

I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.

That is naive and reduces the entire argument to black and white.

The world is not black and white. Its not even shades of gray. It can not be simplified like that, even less the way you attempt to.

Paradox of tolerance and whatnot… It’s not ironic. Not only is it compatible, it is essential to its existence.

Knowing humans, this is probably the best way to ensure someone goes experimenting like that.

Future people find warning signs and a sealed container. You think they would not open it just to sate their curiosity alone, and once they find human remains there… you know they are at most some hours away from inhaling the sweet air of experiments and discovery.

Unfortunately, while a respectable and understandable sentiment, there are wars other than the class war. The class war does extend to those other wars too, in that the distribution of those sent to their deaths and those eating caviar at home while crossing off numbers and names from lists are almost always in direct correlation with the concept of class, but the war itself is not merely about class or even the sides of the class war.

There’s more to life than the material. There’s culture, there’s identity, and there are individual humans that do exist standalone outside of their “class”. While the classes and the oppressing hierarchies of the world do play a part in everything, and anything can’t be entirely isolated from those, from that reality, it’s not the sole disagreement between people and bodies of people.

We hold immaterial things valuable, which I think is natural and very human. Some of those exist entirely outside of the class distribution or distinctions. While some immaterial things like power and influence do correlate with material possessions and thus, the hierarchies at large, the classes, some do not. And sometimes things like national identity, attachment to the language you were taught and you speak, your preference in music, sexuality or otherwise, can be the thing you either fight to forbid and exterminate (such as Russia is doing here), or you fight for, to preserve, to defend, to hold dear and be able to hold dear in the future too.

Life is complex. Humans are complex.

Not everything can be simplified and reduced to simple power hierarchies. There are strong, powerful stuff that exists exclusively outside of those definitions. And that’s only because we are irrational, feeling, dreaming humans. And we’re better for it, too.

Yeah that was how I read it, and I assume from the downvotes a lot of others too, but I guess it was a bit ambiguous. To be fair, here’s their elaboration: (Comment)

Make of that what you will.

Fair enough, I see your point now. I don’t know enough about the US side of the sanctions, or more in-depth details from any side, so I can’t say if that is wrong or right. But I do know that the wording in your earlier comment had very different implications than what you are now saying. But maybe that’s on me for not asking clarifications.

Fuck, never thought I’d agree with something like this and actually think the reasoning I give myself, to let myself agree with such obviously bad stuff, makes sense.

It’s so fucking depressing. While I don’t live in Poland, I live in a Russia-bordering country with similar stuff having been debated for a very long time, and still today, though as I understand it, we never gave up our mines in the first place, for reasons that now make perfect sense and seem good, but without hindsight never seemed good in the past and seemed simply wrong.

We do A, that’s very bad and leaves us open for attack, which doesn’t seem like such fantasy today, when Ukraine is under such an attack. But say we do B… that’s morally reprehensible and just outright bad, too.

I can’t reason about these things, because it just ends up feeling like I am abandoning my principles and some ethical standards I’ve long held… but then again I can’t rightly go against these things either, because they seem perfectly rational deterrents right now, to avoid a majorly fucked up situation down the road.

I feel like I’m losing myself as a human, as a conscious being, because the reality no longer matches the expectations I’ve had and the “rules” I’ve long maintained do exist.

But is it better to now feel like you’re betraying yourself, to potentially help defend future generations from having to lose themselves in a similar manner? Or is it better to stay true to myself and potentially help the fall of our current progressive, socially even impressive situation, after which the principles I stood so true to, are no longer even a possibility? Or does choosing the former actually lead to the increase of the chance of future looking equally bleak and unstable?

I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. And I hate it.

It’s not just US though. I think a sovereign country should have a say in who they trade with and who they do not. Thinking USA somehow holds the puppet strings was probably plausible before Trump, but right now I’m simply surprised they have managed to survive this far without collapsing completely. It’s not in any way plausible that the country led by that baffoon, doing all the things he’s doing currently, is somehow the puppet master of the western world, straight dictating who does what.

No, it’s been a choice by the EU to also join USA (or is it the other way around? I think the US propaganda machine could’ve managed to make it seem like US-led effort, but is it?) in these economical battles against an aggressor attacking a sovereign European country. And it simply makes sense, don’t need any large conspiracies to explain that. Just sensible. Europe defending Europe.

Regarding Israel though… I guess the military power of the US, no matter how much of a buffoon is ultimately at the helm, causes some to consider twice before putting on sanctions against them. But that image is largely falling apart right now, and I’d love to see Europe uniting in sanctions against Israel, too. Those disregarding others’ sovereignty and attempting to assimilate them, deserve nothing good from us or as many of others we can sway.

I mean they are the single most powerful military force in the world right now, with no one even close to equal them. It holds some weight necessarily, when they choose to do something. Or choose not to do something.

But that alone being enough to simply dictate what other nations do? I think not. And it’s becoming more and more clear to me that it probably never was like that. But they have a ridiculously large backing for soft power too. Maybe this image we have about this is purposefully build to make murica seem like such a power player. Maybe it’s all just bark, little bite? They do have the biggest set of teeth though, so if they do bite, it might hurt unless you have a lot of friends to stand with you.

You are mad and just keep stating the same bollocks over and over, as if your take on the world and this situation is the only relevant and correct one.

You should be ashamed of this entire exchange, yet you maintain some misguided sense of superiority.

I have tagged you three times with this exact trait before, so you definitely have a habit of doing this. Each time you’ve been called out, and each time you maintain you are the only one who knows the truth and speaks true.

The problem is in you, not “us” who can’t see the light you pretend to share.

This is the fourth tag your account gets. But I won’t be blocking you, I will continue to call you out, unless or until you embrace your ignorance and block me too.

Happy solitude, you god.

Oh wow, are we getting a world war with China and Europe allied against Russia and the US?

Things are all wonky

While your frustration is shared, and understandable, let’s not start throwing death around like it’s some little thing

Personally I map the game pad keys to keyboard keys and have some under chords, I.e press one button and all other buttons behave differently, so it’s basically just like using only keyboard and not mouse, but also having the convenience of a mouse for the rare situation where there isn’t a keyboard shortcut bound

Edit: chords are just the equivalent of pressing crtl/alt/shift+something but the modifier is just whatever game pad button is comfortable for the user (for me, the background finger buttons I.e R/L4 or for the deck, also 5 for some