#unreal claims on Russia

[jalshristovski]

List of Hetalia ships I cannot fucking stand and why, in no particular order ✨

UsUk: I don’t even think I need to explain this one but I will. They call each other brothers, England raised him, they call each other brothers, ENGLAND RAISED HIM, THEY ARE BROTHERS, ENGLAND RAISED HIM, THEY A-

DenNor: This one I don’t see as problematic, more just my personal views. I see the Germanic Nordics as brothers. All 4 of them. And to add onto that, they have referred to each other as brothers, and I just think it makes more sense for them to be brothers, and not lovers. So this includes DenNor, SuDen, SuNor, and ESPECIALLY ships with Iceland. He is too young. He is a child. Anyway

PruAus: They’re… canonically… cousins… no… just no… they don’t even get along…

TurkGre: No. Absolutely the fuck not. 1. Turkey killed Ancient Greece, aka Greece’s mother, would you date your mother’s murderer? I thought the fuck not. 2. Greece is SO much younger than Turkey is. 3. I am Turkish and we and Greeks do not get along in the fucking slightest so even if the first two weren’t relevant, we literally just don’t like each other

RusPol: If you ship this I will actually avoid you like the plague. Russia has done so much bullshit to us, so the toxicity level in this ship is unreal. It’s toxic AND abusive. Historical context makes this a HUGE no no.

Spamano: No. No. No. NO. Romano was a CHILD. Spain made a child do hOUSEWORK. He was a CHILD. A TODDLER. A TEENY GUY. HE WAS LIVING WITH SPAIN WHEN HE WAS STILL WETTING THE BED. WHY. WHY.

TurkIce: I don’t think this one needs much explaining but here we go: Iceland is a child. He is a minor. His country may be old but he is physically 17. Which means developmentally he is 17. He has the mind of a 17 year old. He is 17. He is 17. He is 17. Turkey is OLD. EW. WHAT IS WRONG WITH Y’ALL???

RusLiet: Have y’all ever read about what Russia has done to Lithuania??? This is abusive as fuck. Period.

RusAme: I just can’t see it. On a world stage, America and Russia are enemies, and have been enemies for a long time. I cannot see an “enemies to lovers” type deal either. I just can’t

LietBel: This one I used to not hate until I figured out what kinda relationship Lithuania and Belarus actually have. I’ve yet to see one Lithuanian person who doesn’t claim Belarus rightfully belongs to Lithuania. Not only that but most of them refuse to call it “Belarus” and will usually call it “Belarussia”, or even more often, “White Russia”. This would be abusive, not from Belarus to Lithuania, but from Lithuania to Belarus.

PruLiet/PrusPol/PrusPoLiet: The only reason I categorise these as one is because I usually see them all lumped together anyway. But anyway, abusive. Abusive. Abusive. Abusive. Prussia had a TERRIBLE history with both Poland and Lithuania, especially when they were one country. The commonwealth and the Teutonic Order were constantly fighting each other, not to mention when you read up on how the Knights would talk about Lithuanians especially, it would be highly abusive. Read any part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. The Teutonic Knights were literally read pro-Teutonic, anti-Lithuanian propaganda poetry to increase morale.

Germano: This is just eh to me. Could not care less. These two haven’t had near enough screen time (both in the show and manga) for this connection, and when they have communicated it wasn’t super pleasant. I wouldn’t call this ship abusive or toxic, not that far, I just don’t believe they’re close enough for this relationship.

BelaLiech: I am BAFFLED at how popular this ship is. Definitely not as popular as UsUk for example, but still concerningly popular. Belarus is 19 in canon, and Liechtenstein doesn’t have a canon age, but the fandom site says 12. I’ve seen people say 15, so she’s 12-15 years old. Aka: A MINOR. A CHILD. A C H I L D. NO.

EstLiet: Not much of the fandom knows this I think just because of his appearance and his mannerisms, but Estonia is 17. His physical age is 17. He is the same age as Iceland. While Lithuania’s canon age is 19, he is still an adult. Estonia I don’t think should be shipped with anyone older than 17, or younger than 16. My personal opinion.

Here are the ones from Balkantalia, aka not canon (mostly) but still relevant enough to include here

BulMace: This shit makes my blood fucking boil. It makes me want to commit a crime (for legal reasons that is an exaggeration). Bulgarians are so fucking terrible to us. Not even as a joke, Bulgarians hate us. They want to claim our country, they want to eliminate Macedonians as an ethnicity and a culture, they recognise Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian (we don’t even use the same letters???), and there is laws that prohibit us from identifying as Macedonian.

GreMace: I don’t know if that’s the correct ship name but regardless, this one is CONSIDERABLY worse. I haven’t seen it too much, but the fact I’ve seen it at all disgusts me. Did y’all ever hear about the Macedonian genocide? Did you know Greek neo-Nazis just tried to march in Lerin (the city my Macedonian family is from) to protest our existence? Did you know Macedonians are regularly attacked for being Macedonian on our own ancestral land? That we are not legally recognised as people in Greece? That Macedonians face police brutality in Greece? They want us fucking dead. My family did not flee genocide in Macedonia for you to make cute art of them kissing. Fuck you. Personally, and with full disrespect.

SerbCro: I am appalled at the amount of Serbs and Croats who actually ship this. Serbian and Croatian history is FULL of violence and bad blood, and the things they’ve done to each other historically is disgusting. Not only with the Ustaša and Yugoslav massacres. Not only do I HC the Serbo-Croats as brothers, but brothers who cannot go 5 seconds without fighting. Why? Because that’s how they are in real life. They cannot get along. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a Serb and Croat not fighting, I’d maybe have 50¢.

SerbMonte: No. No ❤️. Absolutely not. At least from the POV of one of my Montenegrin friends who used to live in Belgrade, Serbs do not like Montenegrins. They get bullied, harassed, and they’re considered to be second class Serbs. So no. Absolutely not.

I’m here to remind you guys this isn’t a show like most others, where the characters are fully made up and have no actual context. Hetalia, while a comedy show, is still based on history and culture of actually countries personified to be people. You cannot erase historical, cultural, or social context.

When I see my countries being shipped with their aggressors, or being shipped with people they aggressed, it doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t just “Ope well they’re characters oh well” those are representations meant to show you a little bit of the history.

They’re not always accurate, because one man from Japan who writes manga about countries he isn’t from will not always be right, but these are still representations.

Historical context in Hetalia is crucial. ESPECIALLY when it comes to shipping.

[darkmaga-retard]

COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong, I find it incorrigible that everyone now claims recession when they have never predicted a recession before. That was clear from the video you had of Larry Summers, who admitted nobody could do that. It is very strange how you are the only person who has ever forecast recessions and new highs in markets when everyone was calling the opposite. Even in August, you had these people clamoring for an emergency rate cut while you said it was a three-day plunge and a new high would follow.

I looked back, and even in your April 25, 2024 post, you said a recession would follow the ECM turn on May 7th. Nobody gives you credit. They all copy you. But without you, they have no forecast. They are stupid, for what you have done is essential for society. These people want to pretend they are something they are not.

They do not even understand what makes a recession unfold.

Thank you so much. I wish people would be honest and give you credit, for that is the only way to hope for what comes after 2032. All they do is plagiarize you.

Peter

REPLY: Sadly, what you are describing is human nature. We are a flawed species – tragic in so many ways, like a Greek play. We seem to cling to our expectations of a just and moral world when history records anything but morality. And Thraymachus basically said JUSTICE is always the same – the self-interest of those in power – JUST US is the real spelling.

We have Europe and South America censuring free speech because the LEFT does not believe in civilization; they only see their own self-interest. Their failure in life is caused by the success of others—never themselves. As a species, we seem to believe there is ethical meaning behind everything when we live in an unethical and meaningless world that bathes only in self-interest.

I understand what you mean. Only this model has projected booms, busts, and recessions decades in advance. We have to learn to live with the cycle. Pretending you called a recession from a gut feeling or just looking at US statistics is a joke. We are all in this together. The US cannot withstand a global recession. That is why I say we are all connected. When you have the Neocons threatening war on four fronts, China, Korea, Russia, and Iran, the future is colored with uncertainty. That results in the contraction of spending.

Then, inflation is set in motion by shortages and tax increases. Throw in Kamala’s taxation of unrealized gains and make it only the billionaires. They are then forced to sell stock to pay the tax, and you create the biggest crash in history that wipes out people’s pensions. NOTHING takes place in isolation. NEVER do the Democrats ever once question their spending. They are Marxists and must constantly promise more, never less, and that necessitates endless tax increases that always reduce GDP.

[bondsmagii]

Ngl I’m beyond disturbed at some of the jokes about Ukraine/Russia I’m seeing online rn. People are being murdered and their homes are being destroyed, it’s insane to me how someone outside that situation can laugh at it

in regards to the TikToks/memes/etc, I imagine four probable reasons:

they're young and immature and stupid, and don't know how to deal with a massive global situation that's scary and uncertain, and they deal with it in a tasteless way because they lack the experience and maturity to do anything else. not ideal and certainly not an excuse, but anyone who claims they never made tasteless jokes as a teen is a liar. a vast majority of them will grow up, mature, and develop the empathy and coping skills they need to approach these things with respect and understanding as they get older.

they're young and terrified, and resorting to extremely dark humour to cope. this is a recognised coping mechanism and while it can seem heartless it's just the reaction of somebody bricking themselves who doesn't know how to deal with it because they likely feel stupid for feeling afraid of something that likely won't affect them. again, not a great excuse, but definitely something that's common and says nothing about the person's character, either presently or in the future.

they're young and Terminally Online, and this is what's getting Content, and they do it to fit in. straightforward and pretty dire, but again, something the vast majority of people will grow out of. people mature at different levels. some of them will realise and be mortified later; others will learn from criticism now and be better for it. in this situation it's important not to equate malice to something that can be explained by straightforward stupidity.

the rarest of all: they're an internet edgelord who just likes to revel in people's suffering and genuinely thinks war is funny, because they're unintelligent, lack empathy, and have never had to experience any kind of serious threat like it. it's unreal to them. it's a TV show. they cannot comprehend that these are real people, and in real life, they're probably a huge asshole.

as a general discussion and not directed at you specifically, I find jokes like this to be tasteless as well, and I think it's highly inappropriate. but I'm not going to sweat about it, because there are bigger issues at hand here, and at the end of the day a vast majority of these cases are dumb kids being dumb kids. I did similar shit when I was younger. I grew out of it. the majority of these kids will, too.

I have to admit I find it similarly tasteless that so much attention is being paid to this. a major criticism I saw was people being like "Americans making it all about themselves again!", but in a way, all of this shouting at one another for Doing Social Media Wrong is also another way of making it about yourself. there is a war on, as you said. people are dying, as you said. arguing on the internet -- especially in the form of posts that the people behaving badly aren't even going to see -- is absolutely pointless. donate to funds if you can, and then move on. there is nothing you can do here.

personally I think that this is a case of a lot of young people facing the very first global crisis that they're utterly helpless against. all of the previous huge crises were things that online activism actually assisted with -- awareness was spread, protests were organised, funds were donated to, and solidarity could be found. this is a lot of people's first taste of being absolutely helpless in the face of terrible events completely and utterly beyond their control. posting will not help here. in desperation to feel as though they're doing something, people are just... attacking one another. that's also not going to help anyone.

I say this as somebody who literally grew up in a war zone: take a step back. donate, or spread the donation posts if you can't. then move away. you do not have to monitor this situation 24/7. stay informed, but do other things. and stop getting into internet slapfights. people in war zones benefit from it 0%, and to be honest, in the face of what they're suffering, seeing people getting into a twist over people posting online wrong is so detached from the real world that it's offensive in its own way. people are reacting to a real-life war as though it's fandom drama, and everyone sincerely needs to log off and reassess their priorities.

[hawkinsschoolcounselor]

Do we know who is filming at the airport? It's possible it's a flashback or unreal element of Hopper's journey through the Upside Down. (If, as we speculate, the place he got yeeted to isn't really Russia.) The airport could be a flashback it him returning from Vietnam, or the day his wife left for good. Or maybe the "plane" is metaphorical, like the train Harry has to decide whether or not to take in Deathly Hallows, to "go on".

I saw nothing to confirm it, but I saw a Twitter fan account claiming that Jonathan, Argyle, El, Will, and Mike were there. It could easily just be BS to get likes. The only actual photo I saw were of 80s era cars lined up.

[glorifiedsnickersbar]

Farthest North

Chapter 11 - The Second Meeting

Word count: 1260

     The second meeting had ended some time ago, but America was still in his seat. He stared at the empty space where Alaska had stood, dumbfounded. Not only was she one meeting closer to being a Country, but most everyone was agreeing that she should become one. Even U.N. himself mumbled something along the lines of 'thank goodness' when the vote was cast. America had no say, her being his State. This was her decision, and his vote may sway the whole of the congregation. He wanted to scream his say so badly though.

         "Absolutely not! It's a terrible world out here!"

He wanted to keep her safe from those who wanted her out of his protection. North Korea was already creating plans of his own to go against her, having heard something of three military bases already established on her land. 

     His head began to throb, forcing the man to lay it on the cool, polished wood of the desk. He stared at his faint reflection, swearing that he could see his 50 waver to 49, but he blinked, and it was gone. He wondered if this would cause his other States to revolt, claim independence, want out of some sort of unrealized abuse...

He was a good father, right?

He did his best with at least his 49 other States, right?

         "The States!"

     America burst from his seat, running out the door and through empty hallways, dashing down the stairs with his coat flying behind him as he tried to put it back on. He had left the States at home, not wanting to have to deal with vertigo and trying to find each one in their designated lands. The star clad patriot had made it a block from the meeting hall when he heard keys in his pocket, remembering he had driven there... no, bad idea in his state of mind. Instead he used his ring, despite the pounding headache equivalent to a gunshot roaring through his skull.

     Standing on the front porch, America slowly opened his door after unlocking it, peering into the foyer of his mansion. He saw little Virginia staring back.

         "Are you okay?" the young girl questioned, looking at her father curiously, and somewhat skeptically.

         "DAD HELP!"

America jumped as Tennessee latched onto his leg, her little hands like glue as she refused to let go in her panic.

         "What's the matter?" he looked at her with a panicked expression.

         "Texas is making flapjacks again!" she screeched, and the father rolled his eyes.

Oh dear.

         "Just because he burnt the last batch doesn't mean he's going to-"

         "Someone get the fire extinguisher!"

He heard Arkansas holler, and immediately protective father mode was activated as America limped down the hall into the kitchen, finding Texas spluttering on a stool as Georgia tried to fan the smoke out the kitchen window.

         "You guys, what did I say about cooking while I'm not here?" he questioned, "And without your apron?"

The five States look to their feet, even Tennessee as she let go of her father's leg.

     Three others came back into the kitchen, each with a fire extinguisher, freezing once they realized America was home. Mississippi set his tool down, while North and South Carolina held theirs until America sighed, shaking his head.

         "We just wanted to make you feel better..." Arkansas shuffled a foot, "you know... since... little sis is leaving and all."

The rest of them nodded with a whimpering of 'mm-hm', a symphony of apologetic children.

         "You guys-"

         "We found the oranges!" Louisiana, Alabama and Florida came with great big smiles at their victory, only to frown at the sight of the kitchen, and a very amused America.

         "Orange juice, Florida?" He chuckled, and the State nodded with a shrug and bashful smile, "Come here you guys," he opened his arms for a hug from his States, each running to him with big goofy smiles, mostly relieved that they weren't in trouble, "Thanks."

         "Anything for our pops!" Alabama grinned, earning a poke from America as they all giggled.

He wanted to share these moments with Alaska too... 

(*)

~.~

         "Isn't it exciting?" Japan bounced, "One more meeting, and you'll be a full fledged Country!"

Alaska remained sober as she nodded with a small smile, and Germany leaned in his seat to peer at the State.

         "Some-ting zhe matter?" he questioned, ignoring the drunken snoring of a very much so dead to the world Russia.

         "I just... wish I could be as excited as you guys," she gave a melancholic smile, "I feel no pain from it, but America..."

A solemn silence fell on the group, Canada breaking it as he sighed.

         "He'll be fine," the syrup loving Country assured, "in no time at all, we'll have to get a sixth seat so you can join our usual get-togethers."

Alaska's smile widened as she thanked the group, earning a loud and obnoxious 'velcome' from Russia as he looked up for the two seconds it took to say it. The group laughed, and Alaska agreed to take Russia to his house once they finished up their last conversation, Germany giving her a small 'thank you', since he didn't have to return the drunkard to his house once again. 

     Fishing through Russia's pocket, Alaska found his ring, and told him to think of his living room. Not the best tactic but she couldn't use his ring, neither could any other Country. The man sloppily threw it, and Alaska was glad he at least thought of his house, coming up to the front porch as she carried him like a sack of potatoes. She checked the door. Locked. Sighing, Alaska rummaged through her little brother's pockets, failing to find his house keys.

         "If only you were as trusting as Canada," she huffed, knowing he didn't lock his door at all.

         "Dhat's probably my fault."

She froze at the voice of USSR, a familiar, painful sound.

         "Father," she greeted curtly, and he nodded with a soft smile that put her on edge.

         "Best you come in before eidher of you catch cold," he warned, making Alaska huff.

         "Said the Country who always needed an extra parka when you visited."

         "Touche," he tipped his Ushanka, old and somewhat matted.

     Alaska dragged Russia in, setting him on the couch.

         "Risking anodher treasonous act for family?" he questioned with a sly expression, earning a sour one in return.

         "The second meeting was today," she announced, "As of an hour ago I am allowed to meet whomever I please without the possibility of a penalty from my Country."

The Eskimo fixed her parka before turning on her heel to walk out, only to be stopped by the slamming of the front door in her face.

         "Do not dhink I am blind," he growled, "dhese Countries see an innocent State. Have dhey seen your past?"

Alaska trembled, an old fear creeping back up into her spine as it prickled in remembrance of countless broken vodka bottles piercing her skin. She growled, hating this power he has over her while in truth he lost it all.

         "Dhey have seen vhat dhey are villing to see," the woman glared back, pushing her father out of the way before he could block the door completely, "I find Russia vith vun mark on his body," she held up a threatening finger, "I vill kill you myself."

And with that, she stormed off, flipping the hood of her parka over her head to keep out the biting wind that had grown.

--------------------

*These are/were the infamous Confederate States

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | AP FACT CHECK: Trump's week of unreal claims on Russia, NATO

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/MJjLt8

WASHINGTON | AP FACT CHECK: Trump's week of unreal claims on Russia, NATO

WASHINGTON — It was a week of bewilderment over what President Donald Trump really thinks about Russian interference in the U.S. election and what he and Russia’s Vladimir Putin told each other in their private meeting. The confusion was fed by Trump’s vacillating statements about the summit.

On other fronts, Trump inaccurately claimed Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him an honor that she had never before granted during her reign and, when the president was back in the U.S., he gave a faulty account of improvements in health care for veterans.

A week in review:

TRUMP: “The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media. I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear … proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more. There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems … but they can ALL be solved!” — tweets Thursday.

THE FACTS: Trump implies that he reached broad agreements with Putin during the Helsinki meeting that the two countries “can start implementing” with a second meeting. If he did, his own White House and State Department seem not to know about it.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders mentioned humanitarian aid for Syria, Iran, Israel, arms control, Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and its meddling in 2016 U.S. election as having been discussed. When pressed for details on any planned action, she could not provide any.

“This is the beginning of the dialogue with Russia and our administration and theirs and we’re going to continue working through those things,” Sanders told reporters Wednesday.

The State Department offered its own take on the Helsinki meeting, saying no agreements were reached and that there just general proposals on matters mainly related to economic and strategic cooperation.

___

TRUMP, addressing whether Russia was interfering in the 2016 election: “The whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before, but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election — which, frankly, they should have been able to win, because the Electoral College is much more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. We won the Electoral College by a lot — 306 to 223, I believe.” — remarks Monday.

THE FACTS: Trump makes the misguided assertion, again, that Democrats have an “advantage” in the Electoral College. Its unique system of electing presidents is actually a big reason why Trump won the presidency. Four candidates in history have won a majority of the popular vote only to be denied the presidency by the Electoral College. All were Democrats.

In the 2016 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton received nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump after racking up more lopsided victories in big states such as New York and California, according to election data compiled by The Associated Press. But she lost the presidency due to Trump’s winning margin in the Electoral College, which came after he narrowly won less populous Midwestern states including Michigan and Wisconsin.

Unlike the popular vote, Electoral College votes are set equal to the number of U.S. representatives in each state plus its two senators. That means more weight is given to a single vote in a small state than the vote of someone in a large state.

Trump also misstates the Electoral College vote. The official count was 304 to 227, according to an AP tally of the electoral votes in every state.

___

TRUMP: “I want to have choice, just like we have now with the veterans, all approved, which nobody thought would be possible. The vets now, instead of standing on line for two weeks or one week or three months, they can go out and see a doctor, and we pay for it, and it turns out to be much less expensive. And they are loving it.” — remarks Wednesday at Cabinet meeting.

THE FACTS: The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Choice program for veterans that Trump refers to is not “all approved.” Nor are veterans necessarily loving the private-sector health care program, as measured by the average amount of time veterans must wait for a medical appointment with a private doctor. Trump’s suggestion that veterans are getting immediate care because of Choice does not reflect the reality.

Trump did sign into law last month a bill that would ease restrictions on private care. But its success in significantly reducing wait times depends in large part on an overhaul of VA’s electronic medical records to allow for a seamless sharing of records with private physicians. That overhaul will take at least 10 years to be complete.

Under the newly expanded Choice program that will take at least a year to implement, veterans will still have to meet certain criteria before they can see a private physician. Those criteria will be set in part by proposed federal regulations that will be subject to public review.

Currently, only veterans who endure waits of at least 30 days for an appointment at a VA facility are eligible to receive care from private doctors at government expense. A recent Government Accountability Report found that despite the Choice program’s guarantee of providing an appointment within 30 days, veterans waited an average of 51 days to 64 days.

___

TRUMP: “We met with the Queen, who is absolutely a terrific person, where she reviewed her Honor Guard for the first time in 70 years, they tell me. We walked in front of the Honor Guard, and that was very inspiring to see and be with her.” — remarks Tuesday during a meeting with members of Congress.

THE FACTS: No, Queen Elizabeth II did not review her Honor Guard for the first time in 70 years when Trump visited last week. She’s only been on the throne for 66 years.

The queen regularly inspects her Honor Guard as part of royal duties, often during visits from foreign officials. That included when President Barack Obama visited in 2011.

___

TRUMP, when asked Wednesday during a Cabinet meeting if Russia was still targeting U.S. elections: “No.”

THE FACTS: Trump’s apparent response that Russia does not pose a risk to future U.S. elections contradicted the warning from his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, days earlier on the threat of Russian interference in the 2018 elections. Coats compared the cyberthreat today to the way U.S. officials described before 9/11 the risk of a terrorist attack as indicated from intelligence channels: “Blinking red,” with warning signs of an imminent attack.

Sanders said later Wednesday that Trump actually was saying “no” to answering additional questions — even though he subsequently went on to address Russia.

___

TRUMP, on his intelligence officials on Monday: “They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this — I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

TRUMP, reading from a statement, on his intelligence officials on Tuesday: “I accept our intelligence community conclusion that Russia meddling … took place” and the “sentence should have been I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.”

TRUMP, when asked by CBS on Wednesday if he agrees that Russia meddled in the 2016 election: “I have said that numerous times before, and I would say that is true, yeah.”

THE FACTS: Was Trump’s comment Monday a misunderstanding set off by his saying “would” instead of “wouldn’t”? Or was his rare admission of a mistake rooted in the ferocity of the stateside response by those — Republicans among them — who said he undermined U.S. intelligence services by seeming to side with Putin?

Whichever the case, Trump at various points in his Monday news conference made clear that he found Putin’s position on the matter compelling.

“I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said at the joint news conference. He made the untenable assertion Monday that “I have confidence in both parties” — his intelligence officials, who say Moscow interfered, and Putin, who says it didn’t.

Trump has been a nearly solitary figure in his administration in holding onto doubts about whether Russians tried to sway the election. Trump’s top national security officials, Democrats and most Republicans in Congress say U.S. intelligence agencies got it right in finding that Russians secretly tried to sway the election. The special counsel’s continuing Russia investigation has laid out a detailed trail of attempts and successes by Russians to steal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign communications and to leak embarrassing emails and documents.

Putin denied anew that the Russian government interfered, but he acknowledged Monday that he favored Trump in 2016.  “Yes, I wanted him to win because he spoke of normalization of Russian-U.S. ties.”

___

PUTIN, referring Monday to Bill Browder, a prominent Putin critic and investor charged with financial crimes in Russia: “Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia. They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States, and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent huge amount of money, $400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.”

THE FACTS: The notion of a $400 million donation to the Democrat’s campaign is a stratospheric exaggeration. On Tuesday, the Russian general prosecutor’s office said, to little fanfare, that Putin misspoke and meant $400,000.

The Clinton campaign committee raised less than $564 million. With supportive political action committees added to the equation, Clinton’s effort drew $795 million in donations. Putin’s initial figure suggested a huge chunk of her money came from a small cabal of financiers.

The reality is much less dramatic.

Browder’s New York financial partners, Ziff Brothers Investments, donated only $1.75 million in the 2016 campaign, spreading it among candidates for many offices in both parties and favoring Republicans in congressional races. The watchdog site opensecrets.org shows it giving only $17,700 for Clinton’s election and less than $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee, as well as smaller amounts to other entities.

Donations to Clinton came from diverse sources: the financial industry, education interests, Hollywood, unions, the health and pharmaceutical sectors and many more.

___

TRUMP, on increased military spending by NATO countries: “I had a great meeting with NATO. They have paid $33 Billion more and will pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars more in the future, only because of me. NATO was weak, but now it is strong again (bad for Russia). — tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: No, increased military spending by NATO members is not “only because” of him. The broader move toward rising spending by NATO countries began under Obama.

NATO members agreed in 2014 to stop cutting their military budgets and set a goal of moving “toward” spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their own defense by 2024. Most NATO members are spending less than 2 percent, though more are moving in that direction. The issue is not one of payments to NATO, as Trump repeatedly puts it, but how much members spend on their own armed forces.

After being prodded by Trump to give him credit, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg indicated that Trump’s big demands had some effect on the military spending. He estimated European allies and Canada will add $266 billion to their military spending by 2024 and said of Trump, “This is really adding some extra momentum.” By one NATO estimate, alliance members apart from the U.S. collectively increased their military budgets by $33 billion last year.

___

Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher and Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

By HOPE YEN and CALVIN WOODWARD,  Associated Press

[180abroad]

Day 145: Schindler's Factory and St. Mary's Basilica

On our first full day in Krakow, we took a walk out of the central city to see something that Jessica had missed out on eight years ago: the Oskar Schindler Factory Museum. We weren't sure exactly what to expect, but it was highly recommended by all the guidebooks and everyone we'd mentioned it to.

It ended up being one of the most memorable museum experiences of the entire trip.

If you've never seen Schindler's List and don't know who Oskar Schindler was, here is a (somewhat) brief summary. Schindler was a German Czech businessman. He was also a Nazi spy who leaked information to the German army before they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. He also aided the Nazi invasion of Poland and was given the lease to an enamelware factory that he could use as a cover--getting rich off of cheap prison labor while continuing to work as a Nazi spy.

He was not a nice guy.

The longer he ran the factory, though, the more his outlook began to change. It started as rational self-interest. Other German factory owners were mistreating their Polish and Jewish workers so badly that it ruined their productivity. But when Schindler gave his own workers plenty of food and refrained from torturing them, his profits grew.

As the Holocaust intensified, Schindler began to actively protect his Jewish workers. For all his other sins, he drew a line at abetting genocide. He hired elderly and disabled Jews who couldn't actually work. He spent more and more of his own money to provide them with food and medical care. He leaked lists of prisoners to outside Jewish organizations and got himself arrested multiple times on suspicion of being a Jewish sympathizer. He bribed the local concentration camp commandant--a sadistic man who enjoyed performing random executions--for permission to move his workers into a private subcamp at his factory. Schindler built and ran the camp as humanely as he could get away with, at his own tremendous expense.

In 1944, Schindler compiled his most famous "list." The Soviet army was advancing into Poland, the Nazis were consolidating their resources, and all non-essential factories were being shut down. The Jewish slave laborers, no longer needed, were being sent off for extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau. But with yet more bribes and manipulation, Schindler managed to relocate and convert his factory into a munitions factory, sparing it--and his camp--from being shut down.

When the war ended, Schindler was absolutely destitute--and 1,200 Jews were still alive in his camp.

It's an amazing story, but it isn't actually the focus of the museum. In the entire complex that Schindler's enamelware factory once occupied, only the two rooms of Schindler's office are preserved and dedicated to his story. The rest of the museum is an engrossing and immersive experience of Krakow's tumultuous journey through World War II.

It starts with the end of World War I in 1918, when Poland was finally reunited as an independent country. For over a century, it had been divvied up like a shared dessert between the great Continental powers of Prussia (Germany), Austria, and Russia.

Fast-forward 21 years–the Great Depression had hit Poland just like everywhere else, but things are turning around. Krakow is expanding and modernizing under the leadership of an educated liberal government. The people of Poland have great plans, and they are celebrating the anniversary of their independence.

The people are optimistic–excited, even. They still think that Hitler is full of hot air and that if he ever does invade, France and England will come to their rescue and send the Nazis scurrying home. It is August of 1939, and in less than one month, Poland will be back under the iron heel of foreign overlords for another fifty years.

France and England didn't lift a finger to stop the invasion, and the Polish government surrendered before most of their soldiers even had a chance to fight.

The museum was unlike any other we’ve seen before. Rooms were made up to look like streets, shops, and bunkers. Period posters plastered the walls, and we couldn’t help but feel–in a small way–the oppressive unreality of the world that the people of Krakow were suddenly dropped into.

From day one, the German occupation force was intent on wiping out Krakow’s Polish identity and replacing it with a concocted German one. Polish monuments were demolished and replaced with Nazi ones. Polish street signs were torn down and replaced with new names in German Gothic print. The main square, "Rynek Główny," became Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

Reading the transcript of an interview with a German bookseller who had set up shop in Krakow, it seems they genuinely thought of themselves as some sort of cultural evangelists–that the Poles needed only to be shown the light of Hitler’s wonderful vision and would happily fall in line.

When it quickly became clear that this wouldn't happen--which was probably the plan all along--the Poles simply became another problem in need of a solution. Radios and independent newspapers were banned. Civilian travel was restricted, and those caught trying to smuggle food into or out of Krakow were beaten and sent to labor camps. Universities and seminaries were shut down, and their professors were sent to labor camps. Polish children were to be raised as an uneducated slave race, utterly subservient to their German masters and ignorant of their own cultural heritage.

From the age of 14, all Poles were required to work 60 hours per week. Their jobs were printed on their IDs and could not be changed without government approval. Those without jobs were required to report to the government for job assignment, and anyone caught without an employment card was arrested and sent to Germany as an indentured farm labor. Around 13,000 Cracovians were deported in this manner.

Meanwhile, even the smallest infraction or insubordination committed by a Pole was punishable by death. "If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot," the Nazi governor-general boasted, "the forests in Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper." Loudspeakers set up throughout the city continuously announced the names of  people who had been sentenced to death.

Even as the crackdowns became bloodier and bloodier, the occupied government issued propaganda celebrating the increasingly friendly relations between Germans and Poles.

When France surrendered to Germany in June of 1940, dozens committed suicide in Krakow alone.

But the Poles didn't bend over without a fight. Teachers hosted illegal night classes, protesters printed counter-propaganda in their kitchens, and homeowners hid weapons for the Resistance.

The museum then dove into the Jewish experience of Krakow's occupation. At first, most of the city's Jewish population was simply driven out of the city. Krakow had been made the capital of the German-occupied government, and the prospect of high-ranking German officials having to even see Jews in their daily lives was unthinkable. Over several months, more and more Jews were ordered to leave, and they were allowed to take less and less with them.

Eventually, the remaining Jewish population of the city was relocated to the designated ghetto and literally walled in. For years, the Nazis had been running a propaganda campaign claiming that Jews carried disease, and the move was justified as a public health emergency. The governor-general publicly celebrated the formation of the ghetto and told Germans to write home and reassure their families that things are getting better with "the lice and the Jews."

The ghettos soon became a health emergency, however. Around 17,000 Jews were expected to live in 320 houses. They were issued rations of less than 300 calories per person per day, and anyone who failed to maintain employment was "deported" to the nearby Płaszow forced labor camp . Any Jew caught trying to escape the ghetto was executed on the spot.

Finally, in March 1943, the ghetto was liquidated without warning, and all of the Krakow's remaining Jews were transported to Płaszow.

At Płaszow, thousands of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Romanies were worked to death in the quarries. Despite the constant inflow of prisoners, the population stayed relatively constant between eight and ten thousand. In the summer of 1944, as the Soviet Army was bearing down on Krakow, the Nazis destroyed the camp to hide what they had done. Corpses were dug up, incinerated, and scattered. Survivors were sent west for extermination in Auschwitz.

The museum culminates with a walk through the fall of Krakow to the Soviets. The Germans had heavily fortified the city with weapons caches and concrete bunkers, and the generals were confident that the city would not fall. But when the Soviets finally arrived, they took the city in a single day with minimal fighting.

We were coming to the end of the museum, but this was far from the end of Krakow's suffering. The city had simply changed hands from one foreign oppressor to another. The museum ends with an unsettling walk through a dark, featureless corridor that opens into a monument to the Jews of Krakow and the Poles who helped them.

We were moved far more deeply than we'd expected, and our walk back into town was somber. We stopped for lunch at a counter-service restaurant that our host had recommended. We had breaded pork cutlets and fried meat pierogis (a type of dumpling similar to Chinese potstickers or Japanese gyoza). It was simple, cheap, and absolutely delicious.

And of course, there were those impossibly folded, parchment-thin napkins.

We made our way up into the old town from the south, passing by Wawel Castle and many churches. We took another stroll through the market hall, which was mainly filled with amber jewelry and wooden chess sets. Poland is one of the world's largest sources of amber. I'm not sure about the chess sets.

Hot and footsore, we stopped for a rest and iced coffees at a café, then decided to make one last stop before heading home for an early evening.

As familiar as Jessica was with the history and legends of St. Mary's Basilica, she'd never had a chance to actually go inside on her last visit.

It was stunning. At almost every cathedral we visited in Europe, we'd heard stories of how the walls and statues used to be brightly colored before they were whitewashed during a relatively recent wave of conservatism. St. Mary's is an eye-opening example of one that was never whitewashed.

For a major Gothic church, St. Mary's isn't especially large or architecturally complex. It is made of brick instead of stone--a sure sign of an unwealthy congregation. But the joyfully painted, carved, and gilded artwork adorning virtually every surface of the interior transforms the space into something almost otherworldly.

Looking up at the intricately carved wooden altarpiece, backed by colorful stained-glass windows and flanked by brightly painted and patterned walls–one can’t help but need to sit down and soak it all in with slack-jawed awe.

Next Post: Auschwitz

Last Post: Going East

[coinwealth]

Crypto News Rewind 2021: Q1

Source: Adobe/trekandphoto

  Here is what happened in the Cryptoworld in the first quarter of this year:

Total crypto market capitalization in Q1

Source: CoinGecko.com

January

This year started with bitcoin (BTC) rallying above the USD 29,000 level for the first time, pushing its market capitalization to above USD 0.5trn. Over the first week of January, bitcoin continued its upward trend with more momentum, jumping over USD 41,000.

Following the footsteps of bitcoin, ethereum (ETH), which had recorded an all-time high of around USD 1,400 back in January 2018, was also rallying but failed to impress Chinese crypto users, who were favoring BTC.

Notably, bitcoin and ethereum total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) saw a plunge of 50% and 30%, respectively, with the number of coins staked in the Ethereum 2.0 increasing. Meanwhile, Ethereum fans started ‘bragging’ about rising fees.

Later in the month, ethereum managed to reach its ATH territory in USD. Meanwhile, some mining pools banded together to try and stop the much-anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559.

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said ETH reached ATH because of demand to use it as collateral in DeFi, while BTC was rallying because of demand from new, large investors.

The most popular joke coin Dogecoin (DOGE) also soared 270% in January, reaching the USD 0.07 level and entering the top 10 for the first time.

More bad news for XRP was compiling as major exchanges were delisting the coin, though the crypto market resumed its trend, proving that it has matured. Further, despite fintech company Ripple confirming a failed settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), XRP rallied.

Crypto platform Bakkt unveiled its plans to onboard nearly 20m users by 2022 and claimed their post-merger enterprise value might reach USD 2.1bn, adding that the crypto market would grow to the USD 3tn mark by 2025. (Spoiler: this milestone was achieved by November 2021).

Investment company Ruffer poured GBP 550m (USD 748m) into bitcoin, and justified its move by saying that BTC “is a unique beast as an emerging store of value, blending some of the benefits of technology and gold.”

American financial advisors revealed that they aimed to increase their crypto holdings.

Russia’s Central Bank announced new banking regulations, enabling financial institutions to freeze or block crypto-related bank accounts.

In Hong Kong, regulators gave a green light for the first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).

US Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen hinted at a new crypto environment saying that cryptocurrencies were a concern when it comes to terrorist financing. She also suggested the idea of taxing unrealized gains, while stating that crypto had some benefits.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced that it would work on a new blockchain-powered tokenization incentive, while the UAE financial watchdog said it was set to regulate crypto by 2022.

The Central Bank of Bahrain issued a license to a new crypto exchange to offer Sharia-compliant crypto services.

In Davos, banks were warned that they risked falling behind digital finance networks and providers.

By late January, the WallStreetBets saga was intensifying, pushing the price of GME, the stock of videogame retailer GameStop, to record highs. At this time, the crypto market got a new entrant, a ‘wrapped’ GameStop token.

Source: Adobe/Игорь Головнёв

February

By early February, Elon Musk said BTC was on the verge of getting broad acceptance by the “conventional finance people”. However, back then, he had no “strong opinions on other cryptocurrencies.” Hinting at DOGE whales, Musk said there was too much concentration in the meme coin, stating: “I will literally pay actual $ if they just void their accounts.”

Likewise, the Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said that “blockchain-driven assets legitimately became stores of value.

Meanwhile, two prominent economists warned that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could ‘flop’ if they weren’t designed as stores of value.

The central Bank of Japan announced that it aimed to launch a pilot for a digital yen in the following spring.

In Colombia, banks started to work with some of the nation’s biggest crypto exchanges on a year-long crypto transactions pilot.

Ukraine revealed that it aimed to bolster its budget with nuclear-powered crypto mining.

The payments giant Visa partnered with neobank First Boulevard to pilot its crypto APIs offerings, which involved “digital assets” held by the American crypto custody firm Anchorage.

Following Visa’s footsteps, payments giant Mastercard announced that it would start supporting “select cryptocurrencies directly on our network” – but at least in the initial stage, it was about stablecoins, which are not cryptocurrencies.

Major crypto exchange Binance quietly launched the Beta version of Binance Pay, while Gemini announced a new product, Gemini Earn, which offered customers rates of up to 7.4% APY on their crypto deposits.

The US-based business software firm MicroStrategy hosted over 1,400 firms at their Bitcoin for Corporations event, while major consultancy company Deloitte released a guide for corporations looking to invest in BTC.

Then MicroStrategy raised over USD 1bn to purchase additional bitcoin. Similarly, major asset manager BlackRock started “to dabble a bit’’ in bitcoin.

In mid-February, Tesla announced USD 1.5bn worth of BTC purchase, stating that it aimed “to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future.” The news prompted a new BTC all-time high of USD 48,000.

America’s biggest tech titan, Microsoft said it had no plans to follow in Tesla’s footsteps. Also, Bill Gates distanced himself from bitcoin buying, assuring that he had no intentions of acquiring crypto assets.

The major derivatives exchange CME Group launched the trading of ethereum futures.

America’s oldest bank, BNY Mellon, announced that it aimed to hold, transfer, and issue BTC and other unspecified crypto assets on behalf of its asset-management clients.

US money-transfer giant MoneyGram claimed its support for Ripple was in place despite all the controversy surrounding the XRP-associated company.

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s banking giant with assets of almost USD 1.8trn, took the plunge into crypto custody.

Also, German-listed cannabis company SynBiotic announced that it “started to shift some of its free liquidity into bitcoin.”

Major consulting company PwC researchers found several Mexican companies were developing an interest in delving into crypto.

Chinese online sports lottery service provider 500.com acquired Bitcoin miner BTC.com.

Nigerian Senators criticized the Central Bank of Nigeria’s clampdown on banks facilitating crypto investments, calling for a reversal of the ban.

As bitcoin was soaring over USD 50,000, American politicians engaged in high-stakes crypto pledge wars.

South Korean Gyeonggi Province announced an “intense” crackdown on crypto-flavored MLMs.

Major crypto exchange Bitfinex and Tether, the issuer of the most popular stablecoin, tether (USDT), reached a settlement of legal proceedings with the New York Attorney General’s Office (AOG), pledging to disclose how USDT were backed in more detail.

New Zealand’s collapsed crypto exchange Cryptopia, which was hacked in January 2019 and lost an estimated USD 30m in crypto assets, was once again hacked for some USD 45,000 worth of digital assets.

Meanwhile, Craig Wright sent his lawyers against Bitcoin developers, and bitcoiners decided to strike back.

Source: iStock/AleksandarGeorgiev

March

The cryptoverse started March with Cardano (ADA)’s Mary update going live, bringing native tokens, decentralized finance (DeFi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the ADA network.

Ecosystem of blockchain software products Enjin (ENJ) announced two scaling solutions meant to remove gas fees and bring support for NFTs from any blockchain.

By early March, NFT overtook litecoin (LTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), and XRP among the searched terms on Google Trends, suggesting the start of the NFT mania. Soon ‘NFT’ surpassed ‘Ethereum’ on Google as well.

It was also reported that swaps and NFTs were accelerating MetaMask’s growth. This was the time Jack Dorsey auctioned off its first-ever tweet as NFT, which fetched bids by Justin Sun and Sina Estavi. And artist Beeple’s USD 69m NFT entered art history.

As Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong weighed in on NFTs, sharing their thoughts on how to improve this emerging industry, Tron (TRX)’s Justin Sun managed to win a bid for a Beeple artwork. Sun had previously lost a chance to win Beeple’s ‘Everyday: The First 5000 Days’ NFT.

Auction house Sotheby’s followed Christie’s with an NFT collaboration with popular artist Pak.

Meanwhile, the award-winning Canadian musician Grimes and the celebrity socialite and singer Paris Hilton went full NFT.

And while we saw attacks on personal tokens and NFTs, the USA’s Saturday Night Live attempted to explain “what the hell is an NFT?”

Source: A video screenshot, Youtube/ Saturday Night Live

MicroStrategy continued its foray into bitcoin, using dips to buy BTC 328 and BTC 205, respectively, while Hong Kong-based app maker Meitu made a USD 40m investment in BTC and ETH.

The American asset management firm BlackRock said gold was failing as a hedge against inflation. Meanwhile, US-based investment banking giant JPMorgan Chase revealed that it wanted to offer its clients access to the crypto market, major investment bank Morgan Stanley revealed that it aimed to offer three bitcoin funds to its rich clients, and major cryptoasset management firm Grayscale launched five new trusts, after which the native digital currency for the Livepeer Network, livepeer (LPT), skyrocketed.

South Korean commercial banking giants Shinhan and LG CNS unveiled their joint pilot platform for CBDC.

Binance was investigated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission over concerns that it allowed Americans to place wagers that violated US rules.

The US SEC said Ripple attempted to “divert the court’s attention” with invalid fair notice defence claims.

MoneyGram got slapped with a class-action lawsuit over the use of XRP tokens, which was viewed as an unregistered and unlawful security by the US SEC.

After all the trouble, MoneyGram eventually ended its partnership with Ripple, in a move that pushed XRP higher.

Ripple soon agreed to acquire 40% in Tranglo, an Asian cross-border payments specialist, and then its executives picked a fight with Bitcoin advocates, attacking the Bitcoin network’s often-maligned proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

Newer stablecoins like USD coin (USDC), binance USD (BUSD), and DAI continued to rise, eating USDT’s market share. By early March, tether’s supply dominance hit a record low.

Tether’s independent accountant’s report claimed the company’s assets exceeded its consolidated liabilities as of February 28.

Vitalik Buterin said Tether was Bitcoin’s ticking time bomb demon, referring to the lack of transparency around assets backing USDT tokens.

As Ethereum’s long-awaited EIP-1559’s launch date was approaching, dissatisfied miners planned “a show of force” against the update, which provoked countermove by the Ethereum developers.

Trading platform eToro reached the 20m users milestone by mid-March, and said it aimed to go public via a merger, while the European trading platform Bitpanda was valued at USD 1.2bn.

Bitfinex announced the launch of Bitfinex Pay, and Coinbase announced its ‘business presence’ in India, saying that it would “benefit from its huge pool of world-class engineering talent.”

Meanwhile, South Korea’s largest exchanges said sales and income figures were rising through the roof.

BTC ATM operator CoinFlip added dogecoin to its network.

Mitsubishi along with banking and telecom giants invested USD 62m in DeCurret, a Japanese crypto exchange.

BNY Mellon invested in Fireblocks, a digital asset storage, transfer, and issuing platform.

Tesla started accepting bitcoin payments and said it didn’t plan to convert it to fiat.

In late March, PayPal announced the launch of a service that would allow its customers to pay with BTC, ETH, LTC, and BCH, while Visa partnered with Crypto.com to settle transactions in USDC on Ethereum.

And this was the end of the first, eventful quarter of an equally eventful year. Just wait to be reminded what Q2 brought to the table.

____

Learn more: – Bitcoin and Ethereum Price Predictions for 2022 – Crypto Adoption in 2022: What to Expect?

– 2022 Crypto Regulation Trends: Focus on DeFi, Stablecoins, NFTs, and More – DeFi Trends in 2022: Growing Interest, Regulation & New Roles for DAOs, DEXes, NFTs, and Gaming

– Crypto Security in 2022: Prepare for More DeFi Hacks, Exchange Outages, and Noob Mistakes  – How Global Economy Might Affect Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Crypto in 2022

– Crypto Exchanges in 2022: More Services, More Compliance, and Competition – Crypto Investment Trends in 2022: Brace for More Institutions and Meme Manias

source https://usapangbitcoin.org/crypto-news-rewind-2021-q1/

source https://usapangbitcoin.wordpress.com/2021/12/29/crypto-news-rewind-2021-q1/

[jack-manpain-zimmermann]

My first year of hockey fandom on tumblr and yikes. Everyone who posted about concussions and CTE and calling out NHL Player Safety is really just gliding on past the fact that this team once again used targeted head shots made by a player with a long history of targeting head shots, in a series against a team whose captain already lives in fear of CTE.... in large part because of said team who once again, targeted his team with concussions.

(please don’t reblog - replies are fine but just know I’ve been into this sport too long to be interested in having my mind swayed in favor of being nicer to male athletes)

And wow. I gave most people the benefit of the doubt that they absolutely knew their perceptions of hockey players as lovely sweethearts is almost entirely fiction crafted by PR and social media, and that duh of course male professional athletes should be viewed as default assholes until fairly unorchestrated proof shows otherwise. That’s just common sense. I didn’t watch hockey games as a 90s teen thinking I wanted to take these guys into my heart and good graces. But I also didn’t want to be that old person in fandom who took fandom stuff too seriously. I’ve never had a team affiliation or preference so I never get touchy about a team or players getting grief from opposing fans. So I didn’t get too in my feelings when I saw people getting gushy about their favorite teams or players either, even if it did seem pretty removed from reality. I figured people knew what they were doing.

But I.... think people actually believe Ovechkin is a sweetheart and that the Caps deserved a win out of this series. That’s ummm. A step away from logic and reality that I can’t inflict upon myself. I had no horse in this or any other playoff race and yeah, the Penguins absolutely have shit to be critical of. But the Caps straight up haven’t cared if they’re shortening someone’s life or not. Again. They support someone laughing at having laid a player out on the ice. They have a history of head shots as a way of removing players from the game. ??????

If someone wants to just fantasize online about an Ovechkin who’s everything the commercials, PR, enormously biased team mates and his very young girlfriend/wife say he is then it’s fine. So long as that fantasy knows to hold off in the face of real life things that you can’t ignore and that people are rightly outraged about.

Especially when these same people claim to be outraged about head shots and goons. 

Real Life Ovechkin is a sexist, egomaniacal pig who I wouldn’t want anywhere near me, my female friends or female relatives. I’ve met Ovechkins, I have friends who’ve dated Ovechkins. He offers nothing in his flimsy public persona to make me assume he’s anything different. No one should be shocked by this. The warning signs are there, folks. That PR veil of cutesy doofuses is paper thin. You lose nothing by admitting that he, like most of these players, is a waste of space not worthy of struggling to find good qualities about. Watch him play all you want but don’t let him into your feelings. He and all these men gain a lot from people perpetuating public images they haven’t earned. You’re playing into that.

Sorry, it’s just genuinely scary. People hating Crosby (so long as they don’t dip into misogyny or homophobia for it) and people hating the Penguins or just not wanting them to keep winning is whatever, that’s a normal part of competitive sports. But for all that I thought I saw a public outpouring on here for ZAR, I’ve seen chillingly little responsibility held over Ovechkin, Trotz or the Caps as an organization that employs guys like Wilson and Ovechkin who deliver high hits that get called ‘playing hard’ or ‘beastmode’ and waved away by the league. And now I guess fans who claim to be against goon behavior.

It’s fine if people wanna pretend cute stuff about hockey players and teams fully knowing it isn’t real. But this sport repeatedly exhibits it’s most repulsive side in the team that won last night. It’s something they and their players are known for. 

Bear in mind that I had to watch Paul Kariya’s brilliant career get broken apart and reduced to nothing but his history of concussions because of the types of guys that the Caps and many other teams are employing. Paul Kariya, who won the Lady Byng multiple times but who stated that he realized he’d have to start playing dirtier just to protect himself. Hell, I remember Gretzky himself (another Byng recipient) still being known as a “whiner” because he used to speak up about bad hits. I remember that he gave up and stopped criticizing the players who targeted him because he was shamed out of it. I can’t believe hockey fans, even supposedly progressive ones, are no farther along than they were then. And that now it’s all because they think grown men are their own sweethearts to protect and defend.

Side note that shit like this makes me think every non-Penguins fan in hockey fandom truly believes that their team wouldn’t have gone to the White House and had the exact same responses about it. Despite so many of their faves having visited a Bush White House and now the Women’s Olympic team going this year. And the resoundingly ambivalent or supportive reactions that 2016 teams had about the Penguins visit, especially from white players. 

Either it’s the league that’s to blame or it’s the teams and players, or it’s everyone. You can’t pick and choose who is more to blame and who has no choice based on the circumstance. 

I’m just. There are genuinely people who look at a Putin buddy and say how “gay” and liberal his team is and mean it, and who don’t realize that his level of physical affection with men is normal in Russia and yikes if it isn’t tone deaf to call it gay and actually think it is. Yes, all Russian players have to toe the pro-Russia line no matter what, but this guy is literally Putin’s friend. He’s not. Cuddly. Or. Sweet. Holtby going to pride parades and saying nice stuff is ... so? That’s nice and all and worth a reblog and folks can gush as if it means more than it does. Lord knows we’re starved for it. But it’s the barest fucking minimum and the dude is a heterosexual. Has zero impact on what his other team members think or do. 

Again, I really was operating under the belief that all the Ovi/Nicky pseudo shippy stuff and the Cuddly Bear Ovi stanning was people posting it but knowing how absurd and unreal it all is. That it’s a bit of fun to have while watching hockey but ultimately knowing that the truth is pretty gross and disappointing. I can kinda see that, even if I don’t get into it myself much. But god, not if people are actually starting to let their reactions to concussions and dirty hits and actual personal political affiliations be swayed by it. 

(And if anyone reads this and does separate their fandom fantasy from reality then just know I’m not addressing this at you anymore than I am myself for occasionally dipping my toe in it. I took part in protesting the Pens WH visit despite reblogging Pens stuff sometimes.)

That’s a terrifying amount of bias based on nothing more than the odd team member going to a pride parade or posting cute stuff with children on their instagram and indulging fans in the fantasy that all their relationships with women are perfect and wonderful. This league is infested with toxic masculinity as it always has been. It’s almost creepier that men who are remorseless thugs on the ice are able to use social media and a prevalent NHL public relations presence to seduce supposedly progressive fans so easily by making the barest minimum effort at presenting a likeable persona.

I think it’s uhhhh time to back away from hockey tumblr now. I’m glad I didn’t get too deep into it.

[random-notes-and-jottings]

American unreality

In breaking the link between politics and objective truth, the United States seeks to fashion a new world – but it is one built on shifting sands.

By John Gray, New Statesmen, October, 2020

The unmasking of the bourgeois belief in objective reality has been so fully accomplished in America that any meaningful struggle against reality has become absurd.” Anyone reading this might think it a criticism of America. The lack of a sense of reality is a dangerous weakness in any country. Before the revolutions of 1917, Tsarist Russia was ruled by a class oblivious to existential threats within its own society. An atmosphere of unreality surrounded the rise of Nazism in Germany – a deadly threat that Britain and other countries failed to perceive until it was almost too late.

For the Portuguese former diplomat Bruno Maçães, however, the decoupling of American culture from the objective world is a portent of great things to come. Finally shedding its European inheritance, America is creating a truly new world, “a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilisation, rooted in new feelings and thoughts”. The result, Maçães suggests, is that American politics has become a reality show. The country of Roosevelt and Eisenhower was one in which, however lofty the aspiration, there was always a sense that reality could prove refractory. The new America is built on the premise that the world can be transformed by reimagining it. Liberals and wokeists, conservatives and Trumpists are at one in treating media confabulations as more real than any facts that may lie beyond them.

Maçães welcomes this situation, since it shows that American history has finally begun. As he puts it at the end of this refreshingly bold and deeply thought-stirring book, “For America the age of nation-building is over. The age of world-building has begun.”

The truth is America cannot help thinking of itself as a world apart. At an academic meeting in the US years ago, I smiled when a speaker declared that the cause of America’s declining power and influence was its deplorable system of campaign financing. As heads nodded sagely around the table, no one seemed to have considered the possibility that, say, the rise of China might have something to do with events originating in China.

Many influential American thinkers are similarly introverted. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) became celebrated for its assertion that in the future global conflict would be between civilisations not ideologies. Yet the book was only superficially concerned with world order. The civilisations between which conflict would occur were never clearly enumerated, and on closer inspection turned out to be indistinguishable from American minorities. For example, Huntington referred to “African civilisation”. But surely the indigenous peoples of that continent created many civilisations. Plainly, Huntington was not talking about civilisations at all. His real subject was American multiculturalism.

Not discussed by Maçães, Francis Fukuyama’s claim that history ends with “democratic capitalism” was a flattering résumé of American society as it appeared to the country’s elites at the end of the Eighties. There was no reason, even then, to suppose that Soviet communism would be replaced by liberal democracy. Given Russia’s almost unbroken history of authoritarian and totalitarian rule, any such development was inherently unlikely. It was not Russian history that informed Fukuyama’s storyline, but a highly idealised reading of American history projected throughout the world.

[see also: Claudia Rankine and the construction of whiteness]

American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes “whiteness” accounts for all the evils of modern societies. America’s record of slavery and racism is all too real. Even so, passing over in silence the repression and enslavement of peoples outside the West – Tibetans, Uighurs and now Mongols in China, for example – because they cannot be condemned as crimes of white supremacy reveals a wilfully parochial and self-absorbed outlook.

Wokery is the successor ideology of neo-conservatism, a singularly American world-view. That may be why it has become a powerful force only in countries (such as Britain) heavily exposed to American culture wars. In much of the world – Asian and Islamic societies and large parts of Europe, for example – the woke movement is marginal, and its American prototype viewed with bemused indifference or contempt.

While Maçães welcomes the morphing of American politics into a never-ending reality show, he is fully aware of the perils that come with basing foreign policy on virtual worlds. He cites Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff in the George W Bush administration, as telling a journalist in the summer of 2002: “We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.” Maçães comments:

Many of us will shudder thinking how the most powerful country on Earth could have been organised around the deliberate denial of objective reality and acted accordingly in its foreign relations, where every issue raises powerful passions and deadly risks, where prudence and moderation have a particular urgency.

As he goes on to point out, the invasion of Iraq provided some hard lessons on the limits of American world-building. He writes:

The point of the enterprise was to act decisively against an old foe and bring him down. What might happen after that was never considered. The connections linking the invasion to the surrounding context, the parallel plot lines, the vast network of unpredictable consequences the war would inevitably bring about, or the new possibilities it would open up – all these elements were ritually ignored.

****

Reflected in varying degrees throughout the west, America’s immersion in self-invented worlds contrasts starkly with Russian practice. Like the US, Russia conceals awkward facts behind a media-created veil. Unlike those in the US, Russia’s ruling elites know this virtual world is deceptive. The point is not to create a new reality but to obscure what is actually happening. When Vladimir Putin asserted that Russian forces had not entered Ukraine, no one apart from a handful of anti-western ultra-leftists believed him. When the Kremlin denies Russian pilots are targeting schools and hospitals in Syria, there is well-founded disbelief. When officials deny that the Russian state had any hand in the 2018 Novichok attack in Salisbury and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, hardly anyone believes this is true. Nonetheless, the continuous repetition of these falsehoods has succeeded in clouding perception of the behaviour of Putin’s regime.

There can be no doubt that Maçães is on to something important when he claims American politics has decoupled from objective reality. The proposition that human beings create fictional worlds is not new. The German philosopher Hans Vaihinger – deploying some of Nietzsche’s ideas on the conscious cultivation of illusions – argued in The Philosophy of “As If”: a system of the theoretical, religious and practical fictions of mankind (1911) that ideas known to be defective or false are indispensable in human life. Before Vaihinger, a theory of the social role of fictions had been developed in the early 19th century by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the English founder of utilitarianism. The idea of fictional worlds has been around for much longer than the technologies that now daily create them.

What these early theories could not foresee is the role of mass media. This was the theme of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), in which he coined the expression “the medium is the message”. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the neo-Marxian Guy Debord argued that capitalism had come to depend on an all-pervading image of society that erases the past and any alternative future. The cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (cited critically by Maçães) suggested in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) that reality had been overtaken and replaced by what he called “hyper-reality”.

One of the problems of Maçães’s account is that it does not clearly distinguish between different ways in which human consciousness can be detached from the real world. For those who construct it, a fiction is not an illusion but a tool for shaping the perceptions of others. A virtual world is not a fantasy, which may be personal and private, but an alternate reality that is necessarily collective. Lying behind these conceptual slippages are deeper ambiguities. Are virtual worlds deliberately manufactured, or do they emerge – like myths in past times – from the depths of a common form of life? Might not a society produce radically antagonistic virtual worlds? American society is polarised between a view in which the country is a flawed but basically benign experiment and a vision in which it has been irredeemably racist from its foundation. Will one of these virtual worlds triumph in the up-coming presidential election? Or will the division in America persist regardless of who wins?

Under what conditions do virtual worlds disintegrate? Some – such as the one Karl Rove inhabited – are self-destroying and essentially ephemeral. Others – such as the Trumpian view that the virulence of coronavirus has been nefariously exaggerated – may suffer a shock from reality, only to subsequently grow stronger in the minds of tens of millions of conspiracy theorists.

Above all, is there a realm of discoverable fact behind these virtual realities, or are we left with divergent world-views that cannot be rationally assessed? Maçães wavers on all these questions. Throughout the book, he oscillates between a buoyant relativism and a peculiarly European scepticism – detached, ironic, and darkly playful – about America’s future.

****

Maçães recognises that the US is not the only country reinventing itself. Much of the world no longer aims to emulate any liberal model of society or government. Like many, however, he conflates a rejection of liberalism with rejection of the West. Russia has repudiated both, and for that reason is most feared by western liberals. For the Bolsheviks Soviet communism was an avowedly westernising project, a combination of French Jacobinism with American Taylorism – the ideology of “scientific labour management” which Lenin admired and Trotsky tried to implement. Nothing could be further from the future Western liberals imagined for post-communist Russia than Putin’s blend of autocracy, anarchy and Orthodoxy. Despite being much more repressive and vastly more costly in human lives, the former Soviet Union is far less alien.

[see also: Would Biden or Trump end America’s forever wars?]

A similar attitude can be discerned towards Xi Jinping’s China. Regime-friendly Chinese intellectuals are fond of telling western visitors that China is not a nation state but a “civilisation state”, and there has been a shift towards touting the merits of Confucian governance. Yet in many ways Xi’s regime is copying the homogenising national states constructed in Europe after the French Revolution. Like them, it aims to impose a monoculture where different ways of life existed before. In Revolutionary France, which under the ancien régime contained many languages and peoples, this was achieved through military conscription and a national education system. Another, more violent process of nation-building by ethnic cleansing occurred in central and eastern Europe after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.

Following these precedents, Xi is using the state machine to fabricate an immemorial Chinese nation and obliterate minority cultures. As in its pursuit of maximal economic growth, China is building a future imported from the Western past.

This may be why one can detect a sneaking admiration for Xi’s tyranny among Western progressives. Rightly, they perceive that he is promoting an Enlightenment project; although not the liberal project of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, or the communist utopia of Marx, to be sure. Xi’s dictatorship is more like the enlightened despotism of the early Bentham, who aimed to reconstruct society on the model of a Panopticon – an ideal prison designed to enable total surveillance of the inmates. How curious if, as the 21st century staggers on, a hyper- authoritarian China emerges as the only major state still governed by an Enlightenment faith in progress.

Much of the last quarter of the book concerns geopolitics. Yet Maçães says little of how this connects with his overall argument. How does the EU’s hallucinatory self-image as a developing super-state square with the fact that Germany – its leading power – has a growing dependency on Russia for a crucial part of its energy supply? More importantly, Maçães devotes little space to the impact on politics of the increasingly unstable biosphere. At a time of rapidly accelerating climate change and pandemic, it is a telling omission. Most of his analysis focuses on shifts in human consciousness, but it is changes in the material world that will be decisive in shaping the next stage in history.

It may be true that America is drifting away from what used to be called Western civilisation. That does not mean it can fashion a new world disconnected from the past. In America as in other countries, history does not begin, any more than it ever ends.

History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America

Bruno Maçães

Hurst, 208pp, £16.99

[expatimes]

UFC lightweight champion Khabib retires after beating Gaethje

Khabib Nurmagomedov chokes Justin Gaethje unconscious to retain title, announces retirement following death of his father and coach.

UFC superstar Khabib Nurmagomedov has announced his retirement after defeating Justin Gaethje to successfully defend his lightweight title and retain his perfect record.

The undefeated 32-year-old mixed martial artist from Dagestan, Russia, collapsed in the center of the octagon and sobbed after choking his American opponent unconscious at UFC 254 on Saturday.

On getting up, he took off his gloves and left them on the mat.

“This is my last fight in the UFC,” he said.

His father and coach Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov passed away in July due to complications caused by COVID-19.

This one was for Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov 🏆 pic.twitter.com/ZZdywrlE5e

UFC (@ufc) October 24, 2020

Nurmagomedov said in the post-fight interview that he talked to his mother for three days before deciding to accept the fight against Gaethje in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi.

“There's no way I'm going to be back without my father. I spoke to my mother. She don't know how I fight without father, but I promised it's going to be my last fight, and if I give my word, I have to follow it. ”

The American troubled the champion with leg kicks but succumbed to a triangle choke in the second round as Nurmagomedov cemented his claim to be the most dominant MMA fighter of all time with a 29-0 record.

Social media erupted in celebration and tribute following Nurmagomedov's win and retirement announcement.

Congratulations to the greatest champion in @ufc history. What a career, we are forever grateful for the time we got to spend with you my brother. 29-0 undefeated and undisputed. #weareaka #eaglesmma #fathersplan #heissoproud @TeamKhabib pic.twitter.com/uXjiT34JuV

- Daniel Cormier (@dc_mma) October 24, 2020

I want to congratulate Khabib for an outstanding career. I know he made his father along with millions of fans around the world incredibly proud today. May God continue to bless him on his journey.

- BONY (@JonnyBones) October 24, 2020

Good performance @TeamKhabib. I will carry on. Respect and condolences on your father again also. To you and family. Yours sincerely, The McGregors.

- Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) October 24, 2020

Unreal. One of the greatest performances I've ever seen. 🙏🏼 #KhabibTime

- Dan Hardy (@danhardymma) October 24, 2020

If it's truly the end @TeamKhabib thank you. You, your legacy & your father shall live forever in MMA history. Measures beyond all control meant me leaving FI early but I watched from home as a true fan of MMA. Thank you for your contribution, congratulations & happy retirement.

- Marc Goddard (@marcgoddard_uk) October 24, 2020

. #world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=12575&feed_id=11599

[cyber-front-blog]

How social media became a weapon of war

What Taylor Swift and ISIS can teach us about cyberwar.

By Sean Illing

We live in a world of bots and trolls and curated news feeds, in which reality is basically up for grabs.

A new book titled LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media explores how this is transforming our culture and upending the old rules of politics and even war. In it, authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson Brooking argue that the distinctions between entertainment and politics, war and peace, and even civilian and soldier are gradually disappearing.

Social media, the authors claim, is now the site of a globe-spanning information conflict being waged by millions of people in dozens of countries across a variety of platforms. It’s changing how we think, how we acquire information, and how we make sense of the world around us. And it has created what they call a global “battle space” in which pop stars like Taylor Swift and terror groups like ISIS use the same tactics to fight for your attention online.

I spoke with Singer, a leading expert on 21st-century security issues, about the implications of these changes, and why tech companies have so far failed to take responsibility for the platforms they’ve created.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

What is social media doing to us?

Peter W. Singer

Social media has simultaneously connected us and disconnected us. Whether we’re talking about our personal lives or politics or wars, there are no longer any gatekeepers; we can all collect information and share it. And so we’re empowered in a way we couldn’t be previously.

But it’s also meant that we’re constantly being pulled in a thousand different directions, usually away from what’s most important, and that we can be manipulated, because all of this information is being dumped onto a few massive platforms that are designed to make money above all else. What it’s created is really akin to a battle space for attention and manipulation.

Sean Illing

You use the phrase “battle space” very deliberately, and much of your book is about how social media has become a weapon of war. Is it now the cheapest and most effective weapon?

Peter W. Singer

The internet began as a place for scientists to share computer time, then it quickly got repurposed into a social medium. But by creating this tool of mass connection, it became the nervous system of everything from commerce to news, and like everything else, it’s weaponized.

Very soon, it’s being used by everything from terrorist groups to online fans of Kanye West and Taylor Swift, all of whom see it as a way to achieve their goals. Whether it’s to recruit or change the conversation or narrative to their benefit, or to gather intelligence that can be used to guide physical operations, the internet is this incredibly cheap and diverse tool. And regardless of who’s using it, it basically follows the same rules.

Is the internet the most effective or powerful weapon? In some cases, it clearly has been. Some nations have used it to achieve the traditional goals of war without ever having to fire a bullet. And some nations, like Russia, get it in ways other nations, like America, don’t. And that’s why Russia has been so successful at advancing their interests in the last couple of years.

Sean Illing

Is Russia the best at this cyber game?

Peter W. Singer

They’re definitely top of the class right now, but it’s not just Russia. ISIS is another big winner in this space. Their mastery of social media was essential to their rise to the top of the terrorism game, surpassing al-Qaeda and the like. People look at ISIS and they wonder how a group with a seventh-century worldview could become so popular today, and the answer is that they’re really good at using 21st-century technology.

So when ISIS decided to invade Mosul in June 2014, what do they do? They announce it with a hashtag. Like Russia, they understand the rules of the game: that the world is watching, that you can’t keep things a secret, so you should embrace it and use social media to turn your own message into a viral campaign.

Sean Illing

I don’t think our society can adapt quickly enough to these technological changes — they’re running so far ahead of our laws and culture and institutions that we’re essentially hostage to them.

Peter W. Singer

I don’t know if I’d use the word “hostage,” but we definitely have a problem. All of this has happened in the last 10 years or so, and you have this new battle space that’s very hard for people to wrap their heads around.

In the book, we interview one of the leading political campaign experts about the 2016 election, and he talks about how, by all the known rules, Trump should not have won. There were too many competitors, he had no newspaper endorsements, hardly any campaign offices, fewer TV ads, etc. But those were the old rules, and in the age of the internet, they don’t apply anymore.

So we need new rules, and that also applies to each of us as individuals. Because if you don’t understand all the ways you’re being distracted and manipulated by social media and the internet, you’re going to be a mark. If you’re online, you’re constantly under assault by people looking to monetize your attention or your outrage or whatever the case may be.

Our entire country was caught off guard in 2016, and that’s why Russia was able to cause such chaos in our society. If we don’t recognize how much the world has changed, we won’t be able to protect ourselves. Because the world has changed, and it will keep changing at a faster and faster rate.

Sean Illing

You use the phrase “unreality machine” in the book to describe social media’s essential function. Is that the political utility of social media now — to manufacture reality?

Peter W. Singer

You can use social media to achieve your goals, whatever those goals might be. And for many groups, it is literally to create a new reality, because the target audience derives its understanding of the world — not just the news, but the way it frames the world — from what it views through social media.

So in many ways, it’s a flip on the old adage that you can’t have your own facts. Actually, you can have your own facts now, and what’s scary is that all the factors driving social media, including the algorithms and the marketplace, reward this kind of thinking. So everyone who uses social media, whether it’s individual self-promoters or companies or terrorist groups or partisan news outlets, is leveraging it for their own goals.

Sean Illing

The odd thing about social media is that, on the one hand, it has reduced everything to theater, where it’s all about performance and branding, and yet, on the other hand, it has raised the stakes and made it easier to spread actual violence and chaos across the globe. I don’t think we’re close to figuring out how to navigate this tension.

Peter W. Singer

One of the challenges of this book was trying to deal with the duality you’re pointing to. We tried to pepper it with scenes and characters that are genuinely scary, like the failed rapper who is radicalized online and becomes one of ISIS’s top recruiters; but we also show the good side of online life, like a Muslim American woman who created what she jokingly calls Dumbledore’s Army, which is this group of teens who go after extremists online using their own tactics and language — and frankly, they’re doing a better job than the State Department.

The second part of what you said really cuts to the heart of why the technology companies have had such a difficult time. In many ways, it’s like they’re going through the stages of grief over what happened to their babies. They’ve created these platforms that they effectively lost control of, and now they’re coming to grips with the consequences. But the contradictions persist, and I’m not sure they’re truly facing up to the realities.

Sean Illing

Can you give me an example of what you mean there?

Peter W. Singer

Take Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Right after the 2016 election, he kept insisting that disinformation couldn’t have swayed the election — and he was making comments like this while at the same time telling political campaigns that Facebook is the best place for you to spend your money to influence people’s votes. So there is still a kind of denialism at these tech companies.

So we’re in this bizarre situation in which a handful of tech geeks are some of the most powerful actors in war and politics, because they control the platforms that literally set the rules of the new game. And they never set out to be in this role and aren’t particularly interested in war and politics, and yet they’re the deciders in a way that was previously unthinkable.

Sean Illing

I recently interviewed Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and a managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm. He made the case that technology, the child of capitalism, might ultimately be its destroyer. Do you think the same could be said about the internet and liberal democracy?

Peter W. Singer

That’s a great question. We live in a system of government that is a child of the Enlightenment, which was made possible by the printing press. Today, we’re finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the changes not just in our politics but in our broader information ecosystem.

But we have to remember that the argument can go both ways. For all the bad examples of how social media has been weaponized and used to weaken democracies, there are also examples of how it’s allowed a level of citizen involvement that hasn’t been possible since the time of ancient Athens.

Local governments are using it to engage citizens in new and creative ways, and national governments like Switzerland and Australia are incorporating it in interesting ways as well. And it wasn’t that long ago that social media was credited with inspiring the Arab Spring.

The bottom line is that these technologies are here to stay, so we have to adapt and learn to live with them. We have to develop 21st-century approaches to everything from voting to commerce to citizenship, and we have to defend ourselves against external attacks. We simply don’t have a choice.

Sean Illing

You end the book with a plea to tech giants like Twitter and Facebook, asking them to do a better job of policing their platforms. But that seems unrealistic to me, since their entire business model rests on turning users into products for advertisers, and that will always trump any commitment they have to democratic norms or civil discourse.

Do you really believe they have the will to make these changes, even if doing so means sacrificing the bottom line?

Peter W. Singer

Well, that last part is the caveat, because I think these companies are starting to ask themselves if allowing their customers to be targeted is actually good for the bottom line. In the end, these companies cannot avoid being drawn into issues of politics and war and propaganda, because that’s what their platforms are being used for. It’s not in their DNA to get involved in this way, but this is where they are, and they know that governments will eventually intervene if they don’t deal with these problems.

What they can’t do, and what they’ve done in the past, is assume that technology is somehow going to solve our political problems. This is a cycle they’ve been caught in for years, and it’s obviously not working. They have to recognize that these platforms are not merely for-profit enterprises; they’re also the nervous system for our personal and professional and political lives, and they have a responsibility to treat them accordingly.

So what we ask for in the book is totally reasonable. It’s fine to beta-test a product like a restaurant-rating app by pushing it out in the world and just seeing what happens, but that’s not fine when it’s a product that the world depends on and is likely to be used in crime and violence and war. They need to do what the military often does, which is war-game a scenario ahead of time and anticipate all the bad things that can happen, and develop responses to them.

This is their civic responsibility, and they can’t bury their heads in the sand any longer.

[deantemjitunit5unit13]

Task 2 - Planning

After the research has been completed on the modernist architecture and the three art & design movements. It is now time for me to produce floor plans, front, and side views of my museum.

From the information I’ve gathered on modernist architecture, the key design elements of the building will include: 

Clean lines

Simple geometric shapes

Cubic forms

Ribbon windows (A series of windows set side by side to form continuous band horizontally)

Flat Roofs

Flexible open interior spaces

To successfully plan out my museum, I’d need to design a floor plan of my intended museum as well as deciding which room is going to display the information, how many floors, where is the entrance, and what is going to be in my museum.

This gives me a greater understanding of how many rooms there are going to be, where to display my information, and where to place the doors and entrance. After getting a clear idea of how my building would look like, I then draw my intended museum in a two-point perspective.

Having drawn the museum in a two-point perspective gives me a visualization of the designs of the building on the outside, and I can add more details into the planning, such as where to place the windows and entrance and it just gives the viewers and myself a better idea of how the building would actually look.

In extension to that, I have begun to draw the interior of my intended museum as I wanted to get a better visualisation not only on the outside of the museum but the interior as well. The drawings of the interior are drawn in small thumbnails as this gives me greater access to design the interior faster without the need to draw a big piece as I could be changing things at any time.

I then draw my intended museum in side view to get a better understanding of how it would look. Moreover, drawing a side view could be useful when I am designing this museum in Unreal Engine, and when I wanted to look at the reference of how the side of the building should be looking.

Although I have already drawn my plans for my intended museum, it could change at any time in the design process because, in Unreal Engine, things may not work as it should be in the software, and in any case, I may have to change some of the things.

After I have completed the plans for my intended museum, it is now time for me to create a clear idea of how I am going to be presenting the key information on the three design movements. In addition to that, I have researched modern museums and how they present their information to get a clear idea of how I am going to be displaying the information.

This really helps me plan how I want to display the information in my museum as well as outlining how big this display stand going to be, and where I am going to place it. I then draw the display stand in my sketchbook with how the information is going to be presented, as this gives me a visualisation of how this is going to look.

For the three art & design movements, I have decided for each of the design movements, I would include vital information such as the context, function, and design characteristics. The context is there for the viewers to get a better understanding of the introductory of the specific art & design movement. The function is the gives the viewers an idea of what these movements stood for and what was the reasons behind their work. Finally, the design characteristics are to provide the viewers with a better understanding of the specific movements.

After many thoughts have been put into the planning process, I have decided to create a more basic version of the building and not complicate things. I changed the floor plans a little bit by removing some of the additional rooms that are not going to be displaying anything. 

I then draw my building in a two-point perspective to get a good idea of how the building should look.

I have used a variety of different materials such as pencil, colour pencil, markers, and digital painting. I wanted to go ahead and try creating the different design of the building as much as I can in different mediums, not only to get a different perspective of the design, but it is so that I could understand more on the modernist architecture by creating a different variety of design, which I would then be choosing the final design that would work in Unreal Engine.

Planning - The Bauhaus

Context

Bauhaus was a German school of design, architecture and applied arts that existed in Germany. Bauhaus in full was called, ‘Staatliches Bauhaus’ and was in operation from 1919 to 1933. The design school was based in Weimar until 1925, Dessau in 1932, and Berlin in its final months in 1933. 

Function

The key idea and what led motivation behind the Bauhaus movement lay in the 19th century. It began when arising in the anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing its products, and in fears that art may lose its purpose in the society. The movement’s purpose was to unite creativity and manufacturing again, as it fears that it could be drifted apart from focusing the mass manufacturing its product as opposed to being creative with the product.

Design Characteristics

Form follows function

Louis Sullivan is an American architect and was the first person to use the famous expression ‘form follows function’. This became the very foundation of the Bauhaus. ‘Form follows function’, means that form should be applied of its function and comparing it to the traditional buildings, there are significant changes to the appeal in the buildings in modern society. It focuses more on the functionality of the building as opposed to their appeal.

True materials

Materials should reflect the true nature of objects and buildings and honesty as a designer was the most important. True materials term means that they didn’t try to hide the materials for the sake of the ‘appeal’.

Minimalist style

The minimalist style of Bauhaus art reflected on the ideas of functionality and true materials. It is influenced by movements such as Modernism and De Stijl and focuses more on linear and geometrical forms while avoiding floral and curvilinear shapes.

Gesamtkunstwerk

The founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius was the first person to apply the notion of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. It combines multiple art forms such as fine and decorative arts unified through architecture in the case of Bauhaus.

Uniting art and technology

The Bauhaus school of design organised an exhibition in 1923 which shifted the Bauhaus ideology. The exhibition was called ‘Art & Technology: A New Unity’. The workshops at the Bauhaus was used as laboratories prototyping products as well as the suitability for mass production.

Once the planning for the Bauhaus is completed, it is time for me to create a design that will have all of these pieces of information in it. It will have to be designed in Adobe Photoshop, which in the later stage - it would need to be exported as a PNG which I would be able to import into Unreal Engine and use it as a texture.

Final results:

The grid system I used for this design:

Planning - DADA

Context

The DADA movement is claimed to be “anti-art” and had a strong destructive and negative element to provoke people’s expressions such as shock and outrage. It was a rejection of tradition and the seeking of complete freedom from past traditions.

Function

DADA art movement was a form of artistic anarchy born out of disgust for the social, political and cultural values of the time. The art movement embraced elements of art, music, poetry, theatre, dance and politics. It was the opposite style of art movements such as Cubism or Fauvism, yet it was more a protest movement with an anti-establishment manifesto.

Design characteristics

DADA began in Zurich and became an international movement. Or non-movement, as it were.

DADA only had one rule: Never follow any known rules.

DADA was intended to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer such as shock or outrage.

DADA art is nonsensical to the point of whimsy. Almost all of the people who created it were ferociously serious, though.

Abstraction and Expressionism were the main influences on DADA, followed by Cubism and Futurism.

The movement that is supposed to mean nothing, yet DADA certainly created a lot of offshoots. In addition to spawning numerous literary journals. DADA had also influenced many concurrent trends in the visual arts.

DADA self-destructed when it was in danger of becoming “acceptable”.

Final results:

The grid system I used for this design:

Planning - Russian Constructivism

Context

Constructivism was a particular austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915. The Russian Constructivism is aimed and believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Pablo Picasso’s Cubist constructions were Vladimir Tatlin’s influenced, in which he saw in Picasso’s studio in 1913. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials.

Function

Tatlin’s Corner Counter-Relief work in 1914 was a vital work that made him develop ideas, and form a bridge between the influence of Cubism on his work. However, his work would conform neither to the conventional format of painting or sculpture as Constructivism would aspire to display those old fashioned forms. In which, Tatlin suggests that modernity and experiment should be Russia’s new gods.

Design characteristics

Constructivism aimed stood for three ideals – abstraction, functionalism, and utilitarianism. The Russian Constructivism focused more on the construction of the art rather than the composition, in turns – it distinguished them from the traditional art movements and their aim is modernity.

The movement tried to attain universal form. The work produced consisted of three as well as two-dimensional art forms. The general themes that were often used are geometric, minimal, experimental, and rarely emotional. Furthermore, the artwork produced is broken down to its basic elements – the art form simplified everything on the fundamental level.

Materials that would be considered modernity were used such as glass, steel, and plastic were used in the artwork creation.

The artwork produced combine different sans serif fonts for their visual properties as well as their meanings. Moreover, simple colours, flat, and symbolic elements would be used in the artwork. A lot of the time, rather than hand-drawn illustrations were used in the artwork, the photo-montage technique was often used.

Final results:

The grid system I used for this design:

These research information are going to be displayed inside the museum, and I do intend to use a series of collected images to showcase the artwork of each movement to make things interesting.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

Misinformation and Disinformation 101

To illustrate the distinction between misinformation and disinformation, we’ll use the late, great Roger Ebert’s opinion of The Hangover, Part II. In reality, Ebert gave this movie two stars and included the review in A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck. 

Misinformation: In passing conversation, your friend says, “Roger Ebert loved The Hangover, Part II.” This isn’t correct, so it’s misinformation. This doesn’t tell you anything about intention, though. Your friend could have confused one Ebert review with another, or be repeating something that they heard from what they thought was a reliable source.

Disinformation: Warner Brothers puts this out as a press statement:

Critics loved The Hangover, Part II! Here’s Roger Ebert:

“'The Hangover, Part II' plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness. It gets laughs …..There's a wedding toast that deserves some sort of award for deliberate social embarrassment….I wonder if there will be an unrated director's cut. The sequel repeats the...miracle of the first film...”

This is grossly disingenuous, even if there’s nothing you can point to as an outright “up is down” untruth. Did “critics” love The Hangover, Part II? Well, in the whole universe of critics who may or may not have seen the movie, you could probably find two or more of them who enjoyed it; in any event, you can’t prove a negative. It implies – but does not outright state – that Roger Ebert is representative of those hypothetical critics who loved the movie, even though he did not. And the quotes attributed to him do, in fact, appear in the review. Unlike your friend’s statement, there’s no question about the intent here: cherry-picking lines from the review requires reading the review, and the review is unambiguously critical of the movie. It’s a lie spun out of facts.

But the point of a press release isn’t to persuade you. It’s to communicate with the press. So now imagine that instead of your friend saying “Roger Ebert loved this movie,” it’s a writer in the arts section in your local paper, who saw the Warner Brothers press release but didn’t bother checking the original review. They didn’t consciously mean to deceive, but they were grossly negligent: someone who writes about the arts would be familiar enough with Ebert’s opinions that this claim should’ve smelled off, but they didn’t bother to check it out, despite how easy it is to find the original review. Their intentions wouldn’t matter to the impact they’d have on your decision if you picked this to watch on movie night. Now you’re annoyed and disappointed, because you spent time and money on something that was supposed to be more fun than it was.

Now imagine that Warner Brothers does this with every movie it puts out, and your local paper falls for it every time. Unless you’re a movie buff, you probably don’t care enough about who produces movies to notice a pattern in which reviews are credible. You just go to the movie that sounds best – and a movie that’s dishonestly but enthusiastically sold is going to sound more enticing than a good movie that a studio wanted to advertise accurately without giving away the plot. You’re going to be disappointed with the next few movies you see. You’re not going to bother with movie reviews generally, since the ones you’ve seen didn’t match your experience. You’re going to start thinking, quite unfairly, that Roger Ebert is overrated. You might like movies less overall, because you’re disproportionately seeing crappy ones, or you might just develop a taste for bad ones.

That is a disinformation campaign.

(To be clear: you’d also refer to classic double agent stuff as “disinformation,” and that kind of tactic, while sneaky, isn’t necessarily sinister. I’m going to focus on how a disinformation campaign against the public works because that’s what you need to know. If you’re someone who needs to know about spy-vs-spy disinformation tactics, you’re learning about them from people who are way above my pay grade.)

This is closely related to the phenomenon people were trying to define as “fake news” until the Trumpers did their Orwellian jujitsu and started defining “fake news” as “accurate reporting that makes Trump look especially bad.” Disinformation can include misinformation, but doesn’t necessarily depend on it. The more verifiable facts disinformation includes, the more effective it can be. If you try to fact-check one storyline of a disinformation campaign and parts of it are verified, this might get you to assume that the rest of it is true – or it might make you doubt the credibility of the resources which seem to corroborate some aspects of the overall fishy story. Some specific lies attempt to convince people of something favorable to the perpetrators’ interests, but that’s tactical and sometimes even incidental. The overall strategic objective of a disinformation campaign against the public is to make people give up on trying to know the truth. Basically, it’s mass-produced gaslighting.

A disinformation campaign is insidious for reasons that are obvious, and for reasons that are not. It’s relatively straightforward that someone might read an incorrect article and come away with an incorrect understanding of the facts. More elusive, though, is the way in which it can control the background noise until it distorts the way large groups of people understand the world around them. Background noise matters. Imagine if you went to a yoga class and there are a couple of people in the back row making obnoxious comments and snickering the whole time. You probably wouldn’t hear every judgy thing that they said. But you’d hear enough to know that they were being mean, and even when you don’t know exactly what they’re saying you wouldn’t be able to forget that they’re there.

You don’t have to purchase a copy of the National Enquirer and read it cover-to-cover in order to be affected by their pro-Trump bias. In fact, actually reading it might mess with your perception less in some ways, because it would be hard to miss how bonkers it is. They’re still sitting right in the corner of your eye whenever you’re standing in line at the grocery store, blaring “HILLARY [MISOGYNISTIC TROPE] SHOCKER!!!” headlines that prime your subconscious to absorb a certain narrative.

And that’s just about the paper, which has to be printed, shipped, and stocked. Now think about what can happen on your Facebook feed. The internet didn’t create this problem, but it did allow disinformation tactics to become exponentially more effective.

“Disinformation” is a relatively new word in the English language. It’s a 1980s Anglicization of a Russian word, transliterated as dezinformatsiya, which describes the Big Brother-style head trips perpetrated by the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency (the KGB, now called the FSB). If you see the Russian word, or “deza” for short, used in conversation about current events, it usually means that the person wants to emphasize specifically the Russian intervention into American politics and to contextualize it with the similar ongoing assaults on European democracies.  

That isn’t to say the Russians are the only perpetrators of disinformation campaigns. Climate change denialism is another example of a dangerously successful disinformation campaign.

There are people with a lot more expertise who are thinking about how to deal with this, but my personal approach has been to take another page from the Russians’ book: trust, but verify. It’s as important to think critically about every allegation you see online as it is to retain your ability to believe things that do hold up logically. Prepare yourself to accept things that are shocking, but don’t actually believe them until you see them in a couple of reliable sources. Be skeptical, but not denialist. Easier said than done, of course, but being conscientious enough to make the effort will put you ahead of a lot of pros.

That’s the basic concept, which understandably gets buried in the jumbled and still largely unknown narrative of the hacking of the 2016 election. Understanding the process that’s one of the major through-lines is helpful.

Further Reading

Deeper dive: a couple of articles which were written before 2016, so they’re not shaped by the specific conversation we’re having now.

Russia and the Menace of Unreality

The Kremlin’s Troll Army

Down the rabbit hole: Tons of books about this, but I do want to specifically recommend The Plot to Hack America by Malcolm Nance, which was written in early 2016 and turned out to be uncannily prescient. It’s written by a former spy for the general population, so it walks you through how all this was accomplished and clarifies a lot of the language and shorthand you’ll hear from people who are talking about the issue.

[kittoforos]

A Beginner’s Guide to the Music of Aleksandr Bashlachev

By popular demand, here is a starter kit, in mostly English, to help anyone interested get into the work of my absolute favorite late-Soviet poet (/rock poet/singer-songwriter/guitarist of sorts) and one of my best beloved poets, as they say, всех времён и народов: Aleksandr Bashlachev (Александр Башлачев, or, if you’re feeling extra helpful, Александр Башлачёв— that last “e” is always pronounced “o”). 

Aleksandr Bashlachev was born May 27, 1960, died February 17, 1988 (by his own hand; sometimes people count him in the so-called “27 Club”), and left around 60 poems/song texts and various recordings (audio and some video), many of which are available on YouTube (a lot of his stuff is on Spotify, too, if that’s your thing). Despite the short length of his life/career, his body of work was/is a sort of massive hidden influence on Russian rock music/the associated culture from Perestroika forward; he’s not at all well-known among the general public in Russia today, but if you’re at all interested in any of that cultural history (or if you just like Russian rock), he’s worth at least a passing familiarity.

I’m making this post partially because I just love him and want to share his brilliant work,*** but also because his poetry (like, frankly, a lot of Russian poetry) is graceful and rewarding on its own, but also densely loaded with intertextual meaning, and his performance style (messy snarly vocals, messy acoustic guitar, just a bit of a mess really, albeit a through-composed one; also incredibly intense, somehow simultaneously explosive and hypnotic— one of his contemporaries, Yuri Naumov, used the term “thermodynamic”, which I like a lot) can be a rather “acquired taste” for a lot of people, especially for those who aren’t already familiar with the stylistics of Soviet bardic music or, like, garage folk-punk or something idk. I know it took me a long time to get into his stuff, at any rate (but once I did, I didn’t listen to anything else for months).

Themes and frequent images in his work include: Russia’s fate, politics (complicated ones, for which he got “shaken down” by various “security” organizations a couple of times— they only stopped doing that in 1987), spiritual freedom, spiritual honesty (”it’s impossible to sing one way and live another”), human contact, human nature (each unique individual as part of the whole), words, bells, birds, heights, Leningrad, love (unconditional and all-encompassing: “even those I hate, I love— they’re just not good enough people to realize it yet”), the sun, the role of the artist in society, the utopian future, suicide.

Also a key point here: SashBash (that was/is his nickname) wrote not so much songs, as fellow rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov put it, as entire emotional spectacles, so when you watch a video of him singing, there’s a helluva lot to take in on top of the words and music themselves, even though he was given to keeping the mis-en-scene pretty minimalistic (just a snarly Russian dude, his guitar, and his bell bracelets). It can be pretty intimidating stuff overall, (especially if your first language isn’t Russian! and/or you’re not used to listening to poetry in Russian, in which case I’ll tell you up front that this is gonna be really rough, but ultimately totally worth it— all the time I’ve spent listening to this stuff and frantically trying to decipher it has helped me a ton with my Russian!) and it can be hard to know where to start with him because his poetry is very complex and he wrote in a couple of different “genres” (to use the term loosely); hopefully this guide will help.

So with that, here are ten (10) songs (plus important musical/poetic background) to get you started— all listed, linked, and commented on under the cut!

(i love this pic there’s something magical and telling about the combo of rocker-style leather jacket and komsomol lapel pin)

***and because this man desperately wanted to be remembered (he believed that people are reincarnated as soon as they are forgotten, and absolutely did not want to ever come back), and I get so much out of the art he made, I feel like i should try at give back at least a little, if only now, and like this

I see you’re still with us! Excellent! Поехали!

Okay, so, the first thing to know with Russian rock music is, a lot of it is based on (at least) two traditions: Western rock music (and/or the contemporary Soviet perception of it) and the Soviet bardic song genre of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Okudzhava, Vysotsky). Russian rock tends to be heavily text-based and very individual-driven (in the sense that the lead singer of a group is often pretty much synonymous with the band— it doesn’t really matter who’s playing backup to Boris Grebenshchikov, as long as he’s there, the band is “Akvarium”), and SashBash’s work is definitely no exception to those rules— if anything he takes them to even higher levels. He worked almost exclusively alone, and a lot of his singing uses a dramatized speech-like recitative timbre; his main concern was not so much with rock music as such as with the poetry, with the Word, with expression through the Russian language (великий, богатый и проч. и проч.). 

Although that artistic concern remains fairly constant throughout SashBash’s repertoire, his genre choices are less consistent. Roughly speaking, his work can be divided into short comic songs, short serious songs, and long-form epics or meditations. Texts for all the songs I’m about to list can be found at http://www.bards.ru/archives/author.php?id=1927.

Short Serious Songs: (i’m starting with these because because there’s a lot of them, because they include some of his best known songs, and also because they’re just a good place to start to get a feel for what he was about as an artist without buckling in for a twenty-minute Suffering Session— that comes later)

1. Время колокольчиков (The time of little bells) — SashBash’s most famous song, just generally a famous song, gave its name to the whole era in Soviet music culture. If you’re only going to listen to one of these, this is the one, and I highly recommend watching the linked video of him performing it (all of the videos I’ll link here are from a квартирник (apartment concert) at Boris Grebenshchikov’s place— there exist other videos of SashBash performing, but a lot of them are from large concerts which he was very uncomfortable playing, and a lot of the time it shows). Rock and roll, the role of the artist in a time of individualist upheaval, the fate of the Russian soul, and more. (3:20)

2. Лихо (Likha (Slavic mythological personification of Evil); Dashingly) — One of SashBash’s major influences on the Russian rock scene was an eye toward Ancient/Medieval Rus’ as both a source of contemporary Russia’s problems and model of possible futures, whether good or bad. These certainly weren’t new ideas in Russian literature (see: Westernizer vs. Slavophile debates of the 19th century), but SashBash’s deft, unforgettable phrasings (and passionate, agitated delivery) brought rock and roll into conversation with these classic Russian arguments, and imbued them with new urgency. (2:41) 

3. Влажный блеск наших глаз (The wet shine of our eyes) — This is a bit sexier. Actually it’s all about sex. And love? And misery. And sex. (3:08)

4. Поезд №193 (Train №193) — This is a straight-up suicidal ideation song, an attempt to catch at a working definition of love, a swift pile up of quick-fix definitions, desperations. A genuinely short song with a pointedly circular structure. (2:16)

5. Вишня — This is the last song Aleksandr Bashlachev wrote whose text and audio survive. It’s a relatively melodic, life-affirming song full of fairy-tale imagery and general generosity of spirit, and the advice the singer gives to the princess character is actually pretty solid imho, especially for the 1980s (be brave, be kind, rejoice in all the things that please your heart and especially in your own freedom/will). (4:17)

6. В чистом поле дожди косые (In the open field slanting rains) — A treatment of a lot of the same themes as Время колокольчиков, but more explicitly and imagistically Russian (as opposed to Soviet), with the theme of rock and roll expanded to art/literature in general, a lot more Orthodox Christian imagery and ideas (anticapitalist), a less ecstatic and more lachrymose ambiguous ending...  A lot of people claim this to be the best song he wrote. (4:57 (song starts around 30 seconds in))

Short Comic Songs: (We need a break...such as it is. Soviet humor. If you don’t know the drill, you will shortly. I’ll go ahead and put trigger warnings in for these.)

7. Подвиг разведчика (The feat of an intelligence agent (title of famous WWII movie)) An average late-Soviet asshole with a brutal hangover daydreams about going on Cold War spy adventures, is ridiculous. The linked video has a pretty solid translation in the drop-down. (4:55) TW: alcohol, food, domestic abuse, poison, homophobic slur, torture mention, guns, suicidal ideation, rape mention (casual use of term)

8. Верька, Надька, Любка (Faith, Hope, Love (girls’ names)). Sometimes subtitled Исповедь весеннего рака (Confessional of a spring crab). A very strange, ultimately sweet and oddly earnest song that starts fairly concretely and gets rapidly, cosmically out of hand. A giant confused metaphor for a single Leningrader’s personal ideological development, with metamorphoses. (5:20) TW: food, suicidal ideation, religion, alcohol/drugs, brief casual transphobia (? tbh i’ve been chewing on this line for two years now and in context i’m still not quite sure), unreality

Epics/Meditations: (ok here we go, от винта!)

9. Имя Имён (Name of Names) — A chant of shifting rhythms over a monotonous pair of guitar chords, an uncertain, lurching, demanding, overawed and underserved Credo. (8:19)

10. Ванюша (Vanyusha (boy’s name, affectionate)) — This is an arc-structured song, about trying to understand the loss of a loved one, of a child, to find or make meaning out of that suffering (Bashlachev, whose philosophy in total seems to me simultaneously very Soviet and very Orthodox Christian, believed that all personal development, and indeed all that, which is worthwhile in life, comes to us through suffering— “if your soul hurts, it means it’s working”). It uses a lot of Russian folk structures and motifs, both lyrical and musical. (11:53)

Please note that these are not my personal favorite songs of his, necessarily— just a good first set that I hope represents and can act as a starting point for his whole body of work. Thank you for reading!! Спасибо за внимание!!

BONUS SashBash singing Russian 19th and 20th century pop hits with some friends. Laughter, joy, and contextually inappropriate quotations of Lenin ensue

[collin-outten0f0m4]

Fact check: Trump’s week of unreal claims on Russia, NATO, the queen of England

Fact check: Trump’s week of unreal claims on Russia, NATO, the queen of England: This might have been Trump’s work week in his presidency. His lies didn’t help. The Associated Press fact check. #news This might have been Trump’s work week in his presidency. His lies didn’t help. The Associated Press fact check. copyright © … Continue reading Fact check: Trump’s week of unreal claims on Russia, NATO, the queen of England from WordPress https://ift.tt/2y5ocrK via Fact check: Trump’s week of unreal claims on Russia, NATO, the queen of England