• @UnderpantsWeevil
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        -911 months ago

        This but a little bit unironically. They and their Scandinavian neighbors went unaligned during the Cold War and reaped an enormous peace dividend.

        Now that the country is getting sucked into the Ukraine-Russia mess, they’re pivoting towards domestic spending cuts and tighter immigration rules and a big new military budget.

        • @[email protected]
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          611 months ago

          went unaligned during the Cold War

          Finland didn’t have many options in the matter, you know

        • @PunnyName
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          11 months ago

          Strange that, when a country invaded another country, invades that same country again a handful of years later, and then that same invading country threatens to invade your country if you try to join a certain group of people, that you might go ahead and try to prevent that country from invading you.

          Very strange.

    • Cylusthevirus
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      4011 months ago

      This is a profoundly racist sentiment. There is nothing special about Nordics. They’re just people from a place. There’s nothing about being born somewhere that makes you vibe with people from that place and agree on everything. Ask the Baltics or the Middle East.

      • @Asafum
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        11 months ago

        It’s the American right wing way of convincing the population that 1: you’ll never have peace with a mixed population and 2: we can never have the nice things other countries have because we’re a mixed population.

        They get to keep the status quo of “everything gets worse so businesses owners make more” and they get to use the racist dog whistles to keep those racist asshats on their side by “proving” race mixing makes things worse…

        It works because people don’t really think about what’s being said. :(

    • @blackbelt352
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      1811 months ago

      America also has a lot people who have lived here for generations too, at least long enough generationally to not particularly matter much any more. That’s not something particularly unique to Finland.

      America just more uniquely treats some people much worse than others. For example parts of my family came to the US as immigrants around the turn of the 1900s and it took a while for italians (who at the time were the “dirty brown people bringing drugs and crime to our streets”) to gain “white people” status around the 1970s. I have friends who’s families have family trees much longer rooted in America, but have historically been treated a lot worse than I or my parents ever have even into the present day.

        • @blackbelt352
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          811 months ago

          If we really wanted to explore the concept further there’s also been a not insignificant about of cultural exchange that happened between the Scandinavian area and numerous regions outside their immediate area, as vikings traveled around, they encounter the early British, Normans and Franks, the had encounters with the late Christian and early Muslim world surrounding the Hagia Sophia, as evidenced by the viking graffiti carved I to stonework in there. They’ve had Christian missionaries proselytize their lands and convert them to Christianity away from the Norse traditions and dramatically retold those traditions from a christocentric framing.

          Finland isn’t some culturally untouched place, left to their own devices for centuries. They both invaded others and were invaded, they engaged in trade and cultural exchange, they influenced other cultures and other cultures influenced them.

            • @blackbelt352
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              511 months ago

              Glad to bring another perspective to the situation. I’m tired of the “Nordic countries are a culturally cohesive population” argument while ignoring the centuries cultural exchange and interaction with the world beyond their borders. it’s lazy right wing “rationalization” about how social safety nets and better public policy that helps people can’t work in the US because of “cultural disunity”

    • @Zehzin
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      1511 months ago

      Careful, you might attract racist dogs with that whistling

    • @[email protected]
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      1011 months ago

      Yeah, same wavelength, right, there was bloody civil war in Finland just bit over 100 years ago. Whites (the right) and reds (the left), with 10 000 executions on losing side.