This is a quote from the resolution:

contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance

It’s not specifically against nazis. It’s against things like putting minorities into labour camps, jails, etc. You know, the kind of thing a lot of the places that voted green actively do this very moment.

But let’s not let that bring our great ideals down. Surely they truly are against the very thing they do, they just can’t help themselves and need the rest of the world to make them stop. Or something?

Do let me know if you have the time to read it. I’ll do the same if I find some myself.

Precisely the Russian rhetoric on and around the Ukrainian war was what got me suspicious.

It could be that western countries just generally are not against nazis or neo-nazis and actively shoot down resolutions against negative things about nazis. That is not however my experience at all, or the de facto state of the law in many countries, such as Germany, that very strongly condemn any nazi associations or symbolism as unlawful. Do note that they also abstained for this one. There’s a reason for that, and while I could be entirely off base, I’m pretty sure it’s not that the western democracies just like nazis and Russia for example is just so nice and honorful to dare go against the western consensus on liking nazis.

This seems a bit too convenient a spread to be as simple as that. The resolution very likely was phrased in a loaded way or had some bit that was dubious. Seeing as the second red one is Ukraine and all of the west is yellow, while Russia, Iran, China, India etc are green, there very likely is context that isn’t being given to us, either intentionally or by accident.

Edit: With Russia, China, India, especially, I mean their adventures with oppression of minorities and unequality in general between cultural groups or heritages. I’m not saying the West is without fault or anything, but clearly the ones voting green are neither. They probably wouldn’t vote against their own alignments here unless it’s just word salad without meaning or responsibilities. Which is something I’m confident would lead a lot of Europe at least not accept it because it’s just a watered down version of something actually desirable.

Yeah. The controls, the fighting. Even with all the patches and community stuff laid on top, it was a bit too uncomfortable to actually play through for me.

The second one was brilliant. And to this day, despite me having almost 200 hours in Witcher 3, the only Witcher game I’ve actually finished. I think second’s format was perfect. 3 is just too open and beautiful, I get lost in wandering around too easily.

This is a sane take, though I personally do generally tend towards understanding and even valuing the walled garden to some degree. But this is what I’ve always felt underneath it, you found the words.

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.

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