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See How They Run is a movie now on streaming that riffs on Agatha Christie’s murder mystery play The Mousetrap (a title derived from that of the play within a play in Hamlet) that has run for 29,000 performances on London’s West End since 1952, and on Tom Stoppard’s brilliant parody of Christie called The Real Inspector Hound.
A delegation from Hollywood is in London in 1953 to begin turning The Mousetrap into a film noir movie, but they all hate the play and have discordant ideas of how to revamp it for the American audience. For example, Adrien Brody plays an obnoxious Hollywood director who wants the climax to be the Scotland Yard inspector shooting it out, guns blazing, with the bad guy. The supercilious gay black English screenwriter played by David Oyelowo informs him that English coppers aren’t armed.
There are a ridiculous number of blacks in the cast — e.g., Agatha Christie’s archaeologist husband is black — perhaps as compensation for Christie’s most popular novel And Then There Were None referencing a nursery rhyme using the N-word. But there’s no attempt to make this movie any more realistic than the two hyper-stylized plays it is based upon, so that seems okay to me.
My view is that the type of show determines how racially realistic the casting should be. Operas are pretty random in terms of casting since what matters most is singing ability, and the whole genre is pretty nuts anyway. Feature film biopics, in contrast, need realistic-looking casting: e.g., Joaquin Phoenix as Ridley Scott’s upcoming Napoleon seems plausible, while Cillian Murphy as Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Robert Oppenheimer could be very good — high cheekbones! — or not good — Nolan’s pal Murphy is Irish, not Jewish. We shall see.
This extremely stagey movie falls toward the operatic end of the spectrum.
And Oyelowo is pretty funny in a role much like a super snobbish half-black Anglo-Irishman I knew in MBA school who, when I asked him what he expected in the 1982 World Cup informed me that only louts cared about soccer, while he of course, being a gentleman, followed cricket.
But then the annoying Hollywood machers start getting murdered and Scotland Yard is called in.
Sam Rockwell plays the lead, Inspector Stoppard (nudge, nudge), and Saoirse Ronan is his righthand woman, Constable Stalker.
Saoirse is a delight.
So it’s a good movie, right? I mean, who ever heard of Sam Rockwell being bad in anything? He was great in Moon, he was great in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and he was ideal as George W. Bush in Vice.
Oh, well, in See How They Run, Rockwell is a snooze as the depressed and hung-over detective. I wouldn’t have believed Rockwell could be dull if I hadn’t seen it.
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Christie’s most popular novel And Then There Were None referencing a nursery rhyme using the N-word.
The original title, used in the UK until 1985:
Don't blame you one bit. 😂
Well – I like you people who still watch movies.
I grew tired of them.
When I think of it:
1. when I was around 8, I ceased to be thrilled with circus
2. when I was 14-16, I was bored with comics
3. when 25, I found sci fi novels not interesting anymore
4. when 35-37, I ceased do read novels (great ones, Flaubert, Conrad etc:) & watch movies. Also, even the best TV series.
In the audio-visual world I find only some science or short YT videos, 10-20 minutes, watchable. The rest – sorry, not interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSsb9B1163kReplies: @Steve Sailer
So, Christie’s husband is a negro? Pass.
This title is as likely to evoke “Lady Madonna” as it is “Three Blind Mice”. McCartney’s description of the origin of that song is rather innocent, but I’ve seen the interpretation that the days and times refer to her appointments as a call girl. That may be reading too much into it, as with Lucy and LSD, and Puff and pot.
wonder how she manages to make ends meet?
(the song follows a rather idiosyncratic logic*** - as does its afterlife/ reception: To This Day on this blog...)
***Twisted/ - as sung by Joni Mitchell
Just about the best damn song they ever did. And of course it's all Paul.
It is disappointing to see mentioned in this column a mythical “black English” person.
While there are a couple of million of black British people (black people born in the UK or at least holding UK nationality), there are not any black English people (people of English ethnicity). English people are – and always have been – white.
It needs saying.
Mrs C and I just watched ‘See How They Run’ this week also.
I agree it’s generally disappointing. It looks good, and there are some amusing sequences, but overall it’s stodgy and stagnant.
I also agree about Rockwell — as we were watching, I thought of about half a dozen British actors from crime dramas set in past and present who could have done much more with that role.
I disagree, though, that this production was sufficiently mannered to excuse casting a black actor to play Max Mallowan, Christie’s husband. Mallowan was a real person who died in the 1970s. He’s not Tristan or Hamlet. I think in cases like this your guidelines for keeping at least within shouting distance of reality should apply.
The casting of Christie herself was also terrible. Shirley Henderson, the character actress who played her, has featured in some Christie adaptations in the past, so maybe it was some kind of in-house/in-jokey thing, but with her diminutive stature and distinctive screechy voice, Henderson is nothing like Christie. Again, Christie is not a fictional character or someone separated from us by sufficient time and cultural churn to allow for such fanciful casting.
The issue of real identity vs casting also arose in the context of another movie we watched recently, ‘The Lost King’.
(Spoilers to follow, so more after the tag if you’ve seen it/don’t plan to/wouldn’t mind some forewarning that won’t lessen the tepid suspense much.)
‘The Lost King’ is a ‘based on a true story’ docudrama BBC job telling the tale of Phillipa Langley, a UK amateur historian/writer who sparked and to some degree (and here’s the rub) led the ultimately successful archeological efforts to find the remains of Richard III in a car park in Leicester.
‘The Lost King’ really should have been a treasure-hunt movie. It could have been really fun. But instead, its events are hammered not very subtly into a tired and tiresome victim-overcoming-adversity narrative.
Langley is played by Sally Hawkins, who does a nice job portraying what the script and the director were no doubt calling for: a waiflike, emaciated, health-compromised (she has ME, which is UKese for chronic fatigue syndrome) victim who never the less triumphs through her grit, her perseverence, her smarts, and, yes, through trusting her feelings, as one arrogant and unsympathetic white man after another tries to derail her quest.
The focal villain is a smirking bureaucrat from the University of Leicester. He’s first seen sneering at Langley’s proposal to dig for Ricky, but then swoops in to steal the glory as it’s becoming clear the body is really there. In this he’s a synechdoche for the University of Leicester itself, which is depicted very unfavorably, i.e. as essentially stealing Langley’s credit for the discovery to boost its international image.
After watching the movie, I was thinking about how very specific the implied criticism of Leicester U was, so I looked up the movie’s wikipedia page to see if there had been any blowback. And indeed, the university issued a defensive press release right after the movie premiered, claiming that they’d never stood in Langley’s way, and in fact supported her all along.
I was shocked to find that the evil bureaucrat in the movie was based on a real person, Richard Taylor, whose name is retained. I had assumed the scriptwriters had made up a generic/composite bad guy, but nope, they followed the iSteve rule and kept to history (very recent history; the body was found in 2012). They turn Taylor into The Evil Face of Male Whiteness: he’s a sexist, he’s a bully, he’s a glory-hog and credit-thief, and the movie implies he’s anti-ableist, which in the context of Langley’s own ME/CFS, may be the biggest slur of all.
The wikipedia page mentions that Taylor is considering legal action against the filmakers for defamation, and if his character has indeed been impugned as badly as it appears, I hope he does so and wins big. One clue that he’s probably in the right (other than the possibility that a senior adminstrator at a contemporary university exists who acts like the movie Taylor is zero): Langley herself thanks him and the university for their support in the book she wrote about this project:
There’s more on this controversy in a good BBC review of the film here: LINK
There is also a detailed article on the controversy from British Archeology magazine that can be downloaded here: LINK. It’s also pretty much on Richard Taylor’s side.
Secession for whites is fading as an option. The latest white numbers in 2022 for the states still above 75%.
Maine
88.9%
West Virginia
88.8%
Vermont
88.2%
New Hampshire
85.6%
North Dakota
83.1%
Iowa
82.1%
Montana
81.5%
Kentucky
80.8%
Wyoming
80.8%
South Dakota
79.0%
Wisconsin
78.4%
Minnesota
75.9%
Ohio
75.7%
Missouri
75.6%
Idaho
75.5%
Indiana
75.2%
Nebraska
75.0%
Basically, the core of traditional America--the midwest--is--ignore Chicago--down to about 75% white. Beyond that only some very low population states in the upper inter-mountain West and New England are still mostly white.
The core of this is simply the massive Latinization of America the past few decades. The Asian thing is significant on the West Coast and the NE--esp. NYC super-metro. But beyond that is just sprinkled around major metros. The Latinos while SW concentrated and now spreading out everywhere and are the only group with replacement fertility.
But the even more scary part, the potential "finishing blow" is the open border and Steve's "World's Most Important" graph. America--which was healthy and prosperous when I was born--could literally be over before I die. A failure to stop the Parasite Party's open border in the next few years and we could end up slumping right past Brazil and onto South Africa.
Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 Death on the Nile is cast blind to race and ethnicity, although set in the 1920s-30s, when upper class British society most certainly had a color bar. Fine, it’s a modern ensemble piece, forget color.
Except…there is a backstory about the black American characters being mistreated because of their color. Never forget color.
There was absolutely no need for a lame remake.
It was cast specifically with a point to make.
Sam Rockwell was good in Seven Psychopaths, and I think he was the lawyer in Richard Jewell.
Success of Murder on the Orient Express(2017) seems to have brought crime mystery movies back into the fold. Now we have Game Night(2018), Knives Out(2019), Death on the Nile(2022), See How They Run, Amsterdam, Glass Onion, The Pale Blue Eye(that one looks quite serious). Also A Haunting in Venice scheduled for the next year.
…children at her feet
wonder how she manages to make ends meet?
(the song follows a rather idiosyncratic logic*** – as does its afterlife/ reception: To This Day on this blog…)
***Twisted/ – as sung by Joni Mitchell
A real-life murder mystery in Minneapolis:
https://www.channel3000.com/i/police-mall-of-america-on-lockdown-after-reported-shooting/
The shoppers in MoM ran, real good, but not even the bystander whose expensive jacket got torn knows who dunnit. Quick, get Agatha Christie to this crime scene because Chief Hodges is absolutely stumped by this crime.
Someone could make The Courier’s Tragedy from “The crying of Lot 49” a real play and then update it so that that social media companies replace the secret courier services.
Saoirse is a delight.
My own precious 2nd daughter is getting married in late January, my last born boy is having his first born daughter, my first grandchild, in early January.
Can life get any better than this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3J_2R9rAp8
> My view is that the type of show determines how racially realistic the casting should be.
I agree, and not just in terms of race. But almost all movies are about the human condition; our nature, our interactions, and so forth. Therefore, it seems to me that when you depict human nature in unrealistic ways, it’s offputting.
That’s why I dislike most children in movies. If you portray them realistically, they can’t really do anything except play, which isn’t terribly interesting. If you make them wiser then their years, it’s silly.
It’s also why I find the most annoying trend is to portray women as masculine. That is, they are routinely aggressive, goals-oriented, sassy, vulgar, and even physically strong. We’re no longer in the world of Vasquez from Aliens, where it was obvious to everyone that she was the exception.
The setting doesn’t matter. People say things like “You’re telling me that you don’t object to this guy casting fireballs and flying, but you find a women being the dominant warrior unrealistic?” Yes, because in the movie, fireballs and flying are part of the setting. If a movie makes it clear that in its setting, human nature is different from ours, then I don’t object to Amazon warriors — at least not on the grounds of consistency. (In the modern day, I would assume such a setting is part of an agenda, and would be annoyed by that).
> Operas are pretty random in terms of casting since what matters most is singing ability
Agreed. Operas are a performance first, and a portrayal second. In that way, they are a bit more like sports. No reasonable person thinks black dominating as NFL cornerbacks is from an agenda.
I agree it's generally disappointing. It looks good, and there are some amusing sequences, but overall it's stodgy and stagnant.
I also agree about Rockwell -- as we were watching, I thought of about half a dozen British actors from crime dramas set in past and present who could have done much more with that role.
I disagree, though, that this production was sufficiently mannered to excuse casting a black actor to play Max Mallowan, Christie's husband. Mallowan was a real person who died in the 1970s. He's not Tristan or Hamlet. I think in cases like this your guidelines for keeping at least within shouting distance of reality should apply.
The casting of Christie herself was also terrible. Shirley Henderson, the character actress who played her, has featured in some Christie adaptations in the past, so maybe it was some kind of in-house/in-jokey thing, but with her diminutive stature and distinctive screechy voice, Henderson is nothing like Christie. Again, Christie is not a fictional character or someone separated from us by sufficient time and cultural churn to allow for such fanciful casting.
The issue of real identity vs casting also arose in the context of another movie we watched recently, 'The Lost King'.
(Spoilers to follow, so more after the tag if you've seen it/don't plan to/wouldn't mind some forewarning that won't lessen the tepid suspense much.)
'The Lost King' is a 'based on a true story' docudrama BBC job telling the tale of Phillipa Langley, a UK amateur historian/writer who sparked and to some degree (and here's the rub) led the ultimately successful archeological efforts to find the remains of Richard III in a car park in Leicester.
'The Lost King' really should have been a treasure-hunt movie. It could have been really fun. But instead, its events are hammered not very subtly into a tired and tiresome victim-overcoming-adversity narrative.
Langley is played by Sally Hawkins, who does a nice job portraying what the script and the director were no doubt calling for: a waiflike, emaciated, health-compromised (she has ME, which is UKese for chronic fatigue syndrome) victim who never the less triumphs through her grit, her perseverence, her smarts, and, yes, through trusting her feelings, as one arrogant and unsympathetic white man after another tries to derail her quest.
The focal villain is a smirking bureaucrat from the University of Leicester. He's first seen sneering at Langley's proposal to dig for Ricky, but then swoops in to steal the glory as it's becoming clear the body is really there. In this he's a synechdoche for the University of Leicester itself, which is depicted very unfavorably, i.e. as essentially stealing Langley's credit for the discovery to boost its international image.
After watching the movie, I was thinking about how very specific the implied criticism of Leicester U was, so I looked up the movie's wikipedia page to see if there had been any blowback. And indeed, the university issued a defensive press release right after the movie premiered, claiming that they'd never stood in Langley's way, and in fact supported her all along.
I was shocked to find that the evil bureaucrat in the movie was based on a real person, Richard Taylor, whose name is retained. I had assumed the scriptwriters had made up a generic/composite bad guy, but nope, they followed the iSteve rule and kept to history (very recent history; the body was found in 2012). They turn Taylor into The Evil Face of Male Whiteness: he's a sexist, he's a bully, he's a glory-hog and credit-thief, and the movie implies he's anti-ableist, which in the context of Langley's own ME/CFS, may be the biggest slur of all.
The wikipedia page mentions that Taylor is considering legal action against the filmakers for defamation, and if his character has indeed been impugned as badly as it appears, I hope he does so and wins big. One clue that he's probably in the right (other than the possibility that a senior adminstrator at a contemporary university exists who acts like the movie Taylor is zero): Langley herself thanks him and the university for their support in the book she wrote about this project:There's more on this controversy in a good BBC review of the film here: LINK
There is also a detailed article on the controversy from British Archeology magazine that can be downloaded here: LINK. It's also pretty much on Richard Taylor's side.Replies: @Wokechoke
Jesus. They Dean Wormsered the guy.
To my first grand daughter and my precious 2nd born child about to get married may you bring me 3 boys.
Last night I watched the Glass Onion. 2 out of the 9 principal characters were black, which was at least one too many. But not just that. One is a black supergenius scientist, Leslie Odom Jr.. The other is a black supergenius businesswoman, Janelle Monáe, who was cheated out of her company by white guy Edward Norton, who is revealed to be really stupid and evil.
In fact all of the white characters are stupid and evil, with the while females only slightly less so than the males. The detective character played by Daniel Craig is revealed to be gay, so he gets a break. The hierarchy of good and evil is as rigid and predictable and stylized as anything found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, it’s just that the totem pole is now turned upside down. Nowadays the Indians must always beat the cowboys.
The ending of its predecessor Knives Out made no sense to me, Daniel Craig's Southern accent was the worst I have ever heard, and only the lovely Ana de Armas made the movie at all bearable.Replies: @Jack D
It grated throughout.
Steve, what did you think of Zelensky’s outfit as he demanded money from American tax payers at our Nation’s capital?
Meh.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn't gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
https://preview.redd.it/wg6xpd0uua381.jpg?width=962&auto=webp&s=c28b4c9e2f68e18a1b67b2092e2b21f796dd165a
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it's different.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @J.Ross, @Mike Tre, @Dube, @Mr. Anon
Hard pass.
I don’t mind seeing blacks in movies where appropriate (e.g. Glory or Denzel Washington in just about everything), but the rampant overuse of blacks in film (or adverts) for the sake of ideology is a complete turnoff to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/09/oscars-diversity-rules-hollywoodReplies: @Brutusale
In fact all of the white characters are stupid and evil, with the while females only slightly less so than the males. The detective character played by Daniel Craig is revealed to be gay, so he gets a break. The hierarchy of good and evil is as rigid and predictable and stylized as anything found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, it's just that the totem pole is now turned upside down. Nowadays the Indians must always beat the cowboys.Replies: @Art Deco, @Jim Don Bob, @Telimektar, @Bill Jones
One person with whom I correspond is a lapsed clergyman who collects American history textbooks. His oldest is a volume published in 1933. He said his has yet to find an example in those old textbooks of something analogous to the ‘whiteness’ discourse in the most recent history textbooks (and in the ‘diversity’ training his wife had to undergo at the business concern where he works). It’s not the totem pole turned over. This is something novel.
I try to collect old textbooks. I find the twelve volume Golden Book American history encyclopedia set to be awesome. There's a splash page illustration of New England Indians brutally attacking settlers which I cannot upload or find online, but it's pretty unpublishable now.Replies: @Brutusale
Expert noticers tend to observe that Gays tend to be quite good at writing ensemble stories about rich people.
The 1978 version is far superior. No inclusion and no diversity because it is not needed and jarringly out of place.
There was absolutely no need for a lame remake.
the media on the media on the media. this movie is pure shit just like steve.
Genres may determine the level of multiracialism today, but that will change. Just as there isn’t cinema anymore — rather, there are television series on the silver screen — movies will go through other changes. Period films will come to be billed as “reimaginings.”
Such as… THIS SUMMER, COME SEE JADEN SMITH AS HERCULES IN JORDAN PEELE’S REIMAGINING OF THE EPIC TALE OF HEROISM AND HONOR!
Oh, so it’s an anti-American subplot!
Meh.
The scene where all the suspects are gathered together in the food court for Poirot to reveal who-done-dat could get a little shooty though.
In fact all of the white characters are stupid and evil, with the while females only slightly less so than the males. The detective character played by Daniel Craig is revealed to be gay, so he gets a break. The hierarchy of good and evil is as rigid and predictable and stylized as anything found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, it's just that the totem pole is now turned upside down. Nowadays the Indians must always beat the cowboys.Replies: @Art Deco, @Jim Don Bob, @Telimektar, @Bill Jones
Thanks for the Glass Onion review. Now I definitely won’t watch it.
The ending of its predecessor Knives Out made no sense to me, Daniel Craig’s Southern accent was the worst I have ever heard, and only the lovely Ana de Armas made the movie at all bearable.
Madelyn Cline is very easy on the eyes and since the film is set on a Greek island she spends a lot of her screen time in swimwear. But she is a rather peripheral character and not enough to redeem the movie.
In fact all of the white characters are stupid and evil, with the while females only slightly less so than the males. The detective character played by Daniel Craig is revealed to be gay, so he gets a break. The hierarchy of good and evil is as rigid and predictable and stylized as anything found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, it's just that the totem pole is now turned upside down. Nowadays the Indians must always beat the cowboys.Replies: @Art Deco, @Jim Don Bob, @Telimektar, @Bill Jones
That’s just the way the Jews demonize White folks for being at the top (they aren’t) while the Blacks are being put down by “The (white) Man”. Hollywood has ALWAYS been that way, and Western European film/music/literary industry is no better, that’s just called projecting, good divided Goys are good Goys.
I saw the remake of Murder on the Orient Express that came out a few years ago. They managed to make it fashionably woke. It was crap.
Sam Waterston played Oppenheimer in a 1980 BBC mini-series. He wasn’t bad in it either:
Why not focus on what appears to be a surprisingly good period piece set in post-Colonial America, The Pale Blue Eye, from Netflix of all places?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None
https://archive.vn/MZgCM
Cover of first UK 1939 edition with original title
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Little_Niggers
https://archive.vn/soZ0a
While there are a couple of million of black British people (black people born in the UK or at least holding UK nationality), there are not any black English people (people of English ethnicity). English people are - and always have been - white.Replies: @Bill Jones
Thanks.
It needs saying.
No. It wasn’t .
It was cast specifically with a point to make.
Sure, history books were never that explicit. Of course, (almost) all of the people who “made history” were white men – the “Founding Fathers” and so on. But it wasn’t rubbed in your face – that’s just how it was. They weren’t going to retcon history and put black women at the signing of the Declaration if they weren’t actually there.
Of course if you looked closely, blacks were there all along – they were just lurking in the background.
Here is a Turnbull portrait of Washington and next to him is his valet, Billy Lee. Then again, next to him is also Washington’s horse.
Of course, in the modern discourse, this is a portrait of Bill Lee only. The name of the file in which this photo is stored is “William-Billy-Lee-by-John-Trumbull-1780….jpg”. Who is that dead white guy standing next to Billy Lee?
Maybe in the old history books they should have said “Portrait of George Washington and William Lee”, or “Portrait of George Washington , William Lee and Nelson the Horse” instead of “Portrait of George Washington” but they had their reasons given that Washington was the military genius who won the revolution and Billy Lee took care of a horse. But calling the portrait “Billy-Lee-by-John-Trumbull” is just idiotic. They are just making themselves look stupid, like the way that we laugh at photos of Stalin where his enemies are airbrushed out of the picture.
In fact all of the white characters are stupid and evil, with the while females only slightly less so than the males. The detective character played by Daniel Craig is revealed to be gay, so he gets a break. The hierarchy of good and evil is as rigid and predictable and stylized as anything found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, it's just that the totem pole is now turned upside down. Nowadays the Indians must always beat the cowboys.Replies: @Art Deco, @Jim Don Bob, @Telimektar, @Bill Jones
I agree, you saw the same movie I did.
It grated throughout.
Murphy is good and that should work.
The absolute BEST J. Robert Oppy was Joseph Wiseman who is still remembered as DR NO in the very first James Bond movie, 1962.
Wiseman played Oppy in the 1969 Broadway play, “In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”. He bore an amazing resemblance tot he original.
You’re off on some tangent of your own.
There is a ridiculous number of blacks in the cast because Hollywood has a self-imposed rule that at least 40% of a movie’s cast must be POC ( usually black, lest a Hispanic without an accent be mistaken for white) and that no more than 30% be caucasian males.
Every single Hollywood product. It’s one of those things that you can’t unsee once you notice it, like how the line “let’s get out of here!” appears in almost all movie scripts, or how most married couples in television commercials are interracial (as Brandon has boasted).
This is in addition to new Academy award eligibility requirements, which set forth that to get a trophy, the movie must have plenty of non-whites and/or non-straights on both sides of the camera. According to The Advocate, the new rules call for “at least two of the following creative leadership positions and department heads — casting director, cinematographer, composer, costume designer, director, editor, hairstylist, makeup artist, producer, production designer, set decorator, sound, VFX supervisor, writer” to be from underrepresented grups [sic].” They must be “women, LGBTQ+ people, nonwhite people, and people with ‘cognitive and physical disabilities.’ ”
I’ve seen plenty of movies that appear to have been directed by a person with cognitive disabilities – but now Hollywood will have a ready excuse for that.
All of this reminds me of how deftly one person, Jada Pinkett Smith, hammered the final nails into the coffin of the Oscars as a highly-rated television broadcast. In 2016, she boycotted the ceremony, bitching about “Oscars So White,” thus prompting the academy to give the best picture statue to the mediocre (but all black!) Moonlight the following year.
That movie was so wildly unpopular that it failed to make the list of the top one hundred grossing films of the year. But, in stark contrast, Metacritics rates it as the ninth greatest movie of all time. Most of us don’t know what we’re missing.
Then, in 2022, she motivated her husband to begin an involuntary ten year boycott by giving him the stink eye when another black man made a joke about her hair. She also ruined whatever chance he may have had at an NAACP Image Award.
How about this for a sense of entitlement.
And naturally there’s more:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/alleged-37-page-staffer-guide-for-kyrsten-sinema-it-is-your-job-to-make-her-as-comfortable-as-possible
Musk does good.
https://vancouvertimes.org/former-twitter-ceo-parag-agrawal-arrested-for-child-porn/
How many black screenwriters were there in 1950s British cinema? You get sick of the lies.
Oh, and Agatha Christie wasn’t a coalburner.
I grew tired of them.
When I think of it:
1. when I was around 8, I ceased to be thrilled with circus
2. when I was 14-16, I was bored with comics
3. when 25, I found sci fi novels not interesting anymore
4. when 35-37, I ceased do read novels (great ones, Flaubert, Conrad etc:) & watch movies. Also, even the best TV series.
In the audio-visual world I find only some science or short YT videos, 10-20 minutes, watchable. The rest - sorry, not interested.Replies: @Anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @Truth
you should perhaps try to regain your sensitivity to aesthetic experience
“See How They Run”
Huh, when I saw the title of your post, I thought it’s a return to the McKinsey/Alison Mariella Désir re the unbearable whiteness of running and ‘See How They Run’ is a meditation on the movement of Black bodies through space. Turns out I was right.
Several years ago, the msm replaced the word “gang(s),” in the context of shootouts, riots, executions, etc. with “group(s).”
Gentlemen,
Merry Christmas…
https://i.ibb.co/0YtRNbf/CFD3-F98-D-E2-EB-4821-A672-585234008-E94.jpg
I suggest using “buffoonery,” which is the name for a group of orangutans
Agatha Christie’s archaeologist husband is black — perhaps as compensation for Christie’s most popular novel And Then There Were None referencing a nursery rhyme using the N-word.
Such reasoning is as absurdly disingenuous as the reason that white women reject asian men because of 19th century railroad labor and Japanese-American internment camps.
White women matched with black men is the new standard in just about everything. Not a one-off thing because of an Agatha Christie novel but all over commercials and movies.
The original title, used in the UK until 1985:
https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/deka-mikroi-negroi-agglika.jpgReplies: @Kylie
You really enjoyed posting that pic, didn’t you?
Don’t blame you one bit. 😂
This is made up, right?
South Asians do think that child molestation is normal, but then they also think that slavery is normal, so in their hell-societies the one generally takes care of the other. You don't need a hard drive when you can just buy an actual child.
It is true and massively under-reported or censored that Twitter (likewise YouTube) were a new Tijuana or Bangkok of tolerated pædo activity, however, no one has shown that top leadership were in on it. There is huge overlap of antifa types and pædos, so there is a likely pædo presence in a place being administered by antifa types; the way twitter works, there has to have been rank and file infiltration (some of the people Musk fired). But yeah I would expect to see sources apart from the same regime propaganda trash that censored Hunter's China bribery. NY Post and UK Daily Mail at a minimum.Replies: @Mike Tre
The ending of its predecessor Knives Out made no sense to me, Daniel Craig's Southern accent was the worst I have ever heard, and only the lovely Ana de Armas made the movie at all bearable.Replies: @Jack D
Well if you think the ending of Knives Out made no sense, you’re gonna LOVE the ending of Glass Onion. Knives Out at least did not stray into the realm of science fiction.
Madelyn Cline is very easy on the eyes and since the film is set on a Greek island she spends a lot of her screen time in swimwear. But she is a rather peripheral character and not enough to redeem the movie.
1. He didn’t “demand” anything. He pleaded.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn’t gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it’s different.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn't gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
https://preview.redd.it/wg6xpd0uua381.jpg?width=962&auto=webp&s=c28b4c9e2f68e18a1b67b2092e2b21f796dd165a
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it's different.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @J.Ross, @Mike Tre, @Dube, @Mr. Anon
Whatever you think of Zelensky, he is a courageous guy because in the long run he’s a dead man. Putin will have him killed sooner or later.
VPs capacity to make things happen has in the last 10 months been revealed to be vastly overrated.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn't gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
https://preview.redd.it/wg6xpd0uua381.jpg?width=962&auto=webp&s=c28b4c9e2f68e18a1b67b2092e2b21f796dd165a
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it's different.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @J.Ross, @Mike Tre, @Dube, @Mr. Anon
A t-shirt or a sweatshirt isn’t a uniform, it’s exercise gear. After all that January 6th talk he effectively addressed congress in underwear.
Gigantic story if true, yet only on two “fake news” looking sites, plus the “Vancouver Times” says they actually talked to Musk himself for the story, which sounds wildly wrong.
South Asians do think that child molestation is normal, but then they also think that slavery is normal, so in their hell-societies the one generally takes care of the other. You don’t need a hard drive when you can just buy an actual child.
It is true and massively under-reported or censored that Twitter (likewise YouTube) were a new Tijuana or Bangkok of tolerated pædo activity, however, no one has shown that top leadership were in on it. There is huge overlap of antifa types and pædos, so there is a likely pædo presence in a place being administered by antifa types; the way twitter works, there has to have been rank and file infiltration (some of the people Musk fired). But yeah I would expect to see sources apart from the same regime propaganda trash that censored Hunter’s China bribery. NY Post and UK Daily Mail at a minimum.
https://vidmax.com/video/216776-video-of-children-being-sold-in-india
Maine
88.9%
West Virginia
88.8%
Vermont
88.2%
New Hampshire
85.6%
North Dakota
83.1%
Iowa
82.1%
Montana
81.5%
Kentucky
80.8%
Wyoming
80.8%
South Dakota
79.0%
Wisconsin
78.4%
Minnesota
75.9%
Ohio
75.7%
Missouri
75.6%
Idaho
75.5%
Indiana
75.2%
Nebraska
75.0%Replies: @AnotherDad
Thanks 103. It’s good to have commenters pulling out the data and showing the scale of the catastrophe.
Basically, the core of traditional America–the midwest–is–ignore Chicago–down to about 75% white. Beyond that only some very low population states in the upper inter-mountain West and New England are still mostly white.
The core of this is simply the massive Latinization of America the past few decades. The Asian thing is significant on the West Coast and the NE–esp. NYC super-metro. But beyond that is just sprinkled around major metros. The Latinos while SW concentrated and now spreading out everywhere and are the only group with replacement fertility.
But the even more scary part, the potential “finishing blow” is the open border and Steve’s “World’s Most Important” graph. America–which was healthy and prosperous when I was born–could literally be over before I die. A failure to stop the Parasite Party’s open border in the next few years and we could end up slumping right past Brazil and onto South Africa.
Thanks.
I try to collect old textbooks. I find the twelve volume Golden Book American history encyclopedia set to be awesome. There’s a splash page illustration of New England Indians brutally attacking settlers which I cannot upload or find online, but it’s pretty unpublishable now.
I loved playing the haughty theater critic Birdboot in Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, who gets drawn by intrigue onstage from the vengeful cast into a surprise gunshot and his own Agatha Christie murder. While I made Birdboot’s megalomaniacal declamations onstage withinin the action of the plot, my bright director had me pour a glass of stage booze from a decanter, take a big slug and hold it in puffed cheeks, while looking unsuccessfully for a place to spit, and then swallow the reality with disgust. Whereupon, a shot, and I drop to the floor. I’d say my floor drop is as good as anybody’s.
Merry Christmas...
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ef/58/65/ef5865cd2986de8b446d7a9d87bdace9--black-magazine-guernica.jpgReplies: @Stan Adams
…and a Happy Schwanza to you and yours:
Such reasoning is as absurdly disingenuous as the reason that white women reject asian men because of 19th century railroad labor and Japanese-American internment camps.
White women matched with black men is the new standard in just about everything. Not a one-off thing because of an Agatha Christie novel but all over commercials and movies.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
But in a biopic film, it’s best to go for a semblance of historical accuracy. Christie’s husband was white.
https://www.shared.com/content/images/2017/09/agatha-christie-promojpg.jpg
It’s not a biopic, it’s a quasi-Stoppardian riff on a Stoppardian riff on an extremely stylized Christie play.
https://vancouvertimes.org/about-us/
I’m not sure I’d take this story at face value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbL9jvg77wReplies: @Brutusale
They had me at Bale and Duvall.
OMG. Two of the greatest film actors ever.
I guess they have me now, too.
Thanks.
I try to collect old textbooks. I find the twelve volume Golden Book American history encyclopedia set to be awesome. There's a splash page illustration of New England Indians brutally attacking settlers which I cannot upload or find online, but it's pretty unpublishable now.Replies: @Brutusale
Look for old encyclopedias. My friend had a full set published in 1910 that he got from his grandfather, and there were things in it regarding a whole host of issues, not just race, that would cause it to be burned today.
It struck the perfect note because dressing up like a Generalissimo in a dress uniform with a chestful of medals would also come off badly in the modern context. You may not like Zelensky (and therefore wouldn’t like him no matter what he wore) but to his target audience it is pitch perfect. Militarish without being actually military.
We’ll see who lasts longer. There are plenty of people in Russia (including some very close to him) who would prefer to have Putin dead right about now.
There’s nobody who prefers Zelensky, those are zombies who would be okay with Putin.
In the long run, we’re all dead. Here and now, he’s 25 years younger than VP and is not suffering from an essential tremor.
VPs capacity to make things happen has in the last 10 months been revealed to be vastly overrated.
It’s not just the nursery rhyme
Apparently based on Burgh Island off Devon.
True or not you’re only seeing now because she’s symbolically snubbed the Democrats
South Asians do think that child molestation is normal, but then they also think that slavery is normal, so in their hell-societies the one generally takes care of the other. You don't need a hard drive when you can just buy an actual child.
It is true and massively under-reported or censored that Twitter (likewise YouTube) were a new Tijuana or Bangkok of tolerated pædo activity, however, no one has shown that top leadership were in on it. There is huge overlap of antifa types and pædos, so there is a likely pædo presence in a place being administered by antifa types; the way twitter works, there has to have been rank and file infiltration (some of the people Musk fired). But yeah I would expect to see sources apart from the same regime propaganda trash that censored Hunter's China bribery. NY Post and UK Daily Mail at a minimum.Replies: @Mike Tre
Video allegedly showing the cash sale of children in India:
https://vidmax.com/video/216776-video-of-children-being-sold-in-india
Even the Daily Jumble puzzle on the comics page has reached a bizarre point where half the characters are shaded in to indicate they’re black. If Peanuts was still being drawn today Linus and Lucy would be black and Schroeder would be gay
By Russian standards, Putin is a moderate. What makes you think that Putin’s replacement will be a docile Washington puppet?
For certain values of nobody:
Jack, you set me up for that one.
Russsia is wrong; however, Zelensky is no Churchill and we need to be careful not to get into WW3.
What unites them is a lack of historical consciousness & sense of justice.Replies: @Jack D, @RadicalCenter
Yeah, but it made you look.
I was gonna keep it til April first but who knows if we’ll get there?
Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” was even more obnoxious in this regard. When Poirot finds out Daisy Ridley’s character is having a romance with Leslie Odom’s character he asked her why she felt compelled to hide the relationship. He reminded her, “It’s not as if we’re in the American South”. Yeah, because it’s not like anyone outside the White trash living in the American South ever had qualms about interracial relationships… in the 1920’s.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn't gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
https://preview.redd.it/wg6xpd0uua381.jpg?width=962&auto=webp&s=c28b4c9e2f68e18a1b67b2092e2b21f796dd165a
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it's different.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @J.Ross, @Mike Tre, @Dube, @Mr. Anon
If you want to write Zelensky a personal check then by all means go ahead. The fact that you feel that every US taxpayer should be forced at gunpoint to give money to Ukraine or any other foreign nation is exactly why you’re the irredeemable piece of garbage that you are.
Wisely he decided against a head bandage.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn't gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
https://preview.redd.it/wg6xpd0uua381.jpg?width=962&auto=webp&s=c28b4c9e2f68e18a1b67b2092e2b21f796dd165a
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it's different.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @J.Ross, @Mike Tre, @Dube, @Mr. Anon
https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwjdzcTSv5X8AhXEA60GHayZDeYYABAFGgJwdg&ae=2&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESbeD2obSAWg52HFXWbGmzoLr6nSimUIxKJOIal0K423bSQdmvzLkDE5bXnD9j5SifAZRD2s36AGeDUJ-FaPT9i1TSQCCvd_DgyVPyEFyIfFsP-al1QvmSluxzNKLDm_9jIUzyf0kmJsJ9yYW93HQ&sig=AOD64_3uJ9TruigMNypBEyMhjtk4VlXD0A&ctype=5&q=&ved=2ahUKEwj1jL7Sv5X8AhWhCjQIHTzfDUwQ9aACKAB6BAgDEBY&adurl=
FDR topped off the meticulous civilian image with a magnificnt Inverness cape, which is a Naval officer’s cloak.
“They had me at Bale and Duvall.”
OMG. Two of the greatest film actors ever.
I guess they have me now, too.
Thanks.
I grew tired of them.
When I think of it:
1. when I was around 8, I ceased to be thrilled with circus
2. when I was 14-16, I was bored with comics
3. when 25, I found sci fi novels not interesting anymore
4. when 35-37, I ceased do read novels (great ones, Flaubert, Conrad etc:) & watch movies. Also, even the best TV series.
In the audio-visual world I find only some science or short YT videos, 10-20 minutes, watchable. The rest - sorry, not interested.Replies: @Anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @Truth
Here is Bardon on an airplane:
A big bunch of nobodies.
Jack, you set me up for that one.
Russsia is wrong; however, Zelensky is no Churchill and we need to be careful not to get into WW3.
2. The fact that his outfit pissed you off shows that it is working. As an actor, Zelensky knows that a leader is playing a character on TV and right now he is playing the character of the leader of a beleaguered wartime country. If he had worn a Savile Row suit you would have complained that he was using American taxpayer money to buy fancy clothes. He wasn't gonna win with you whatever he wore.
Here are another couple of wartime leaders who came to see the POTUS in uniform:
https://preview.redd.it/wg6xpd0uua381.jpg?width=962&auto=webp&s=c28b4c9e2f68e18a1b67b2092e2b21f796dd165a
American Presidents have a custom of never wearing military uniforms even though they are the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. In other countries, it's different.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @J.Ross, @Mike Tre, @Dube, @Mr. Anon
Pleading that insistant amounts to a demand.
Yeah, and both of them did anything in their power to drag us into their war too.
Nordstroms? Nerdstroms?
As Joe Biden would say, you ain’t black.
His target audience? You mean Raytheon and Lockheed Martin?
There are a few categories of Americans who are either for Putin, or, at least, not for Ukraine.
What unites them is a lack of historical consciousness & sense of justice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSsb9B1163kReplies: @Steve Sailer
Great reference.
It’s a rule so if you want to watch anything new, get used to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/09/oscars-diversity-rules-hollywood
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/12/25/hollywood-lost-more-than-500-billion-in-market-value-in-2022/
You'd better hit the theater, as it's up to you to do the job that wipipo don't want to do.
Netflix isn't fat and happy anymore.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/netflix-customers-could-face-criminal-charges-sharing-their-passwordReplies: @Truth
I grew tired of them.
When I think of it:
1. when I was around 8, I ceased to be thrilled with circus
2. when I was 14-16, I was bored with comics
3. when 25, I found sci fi novels not interesting anymore
4. when 35-37, I ceased do read novels (great ones, Flaubert, Conrad etc:) & watch movies. Also, even the best TV series.
In the audio-visual world I find only some science or short YT videos, 10-20 minutes, watchable. The rest - sorry, not interested.Replies: @Anonymous, @Mr. Anon, @Truth
Smartest post you’ve made on this site.
I didn’t say he would be. After the death of Stalin his successors were not Washington puppets but neither were they Stalin.
That’s not how representative government works and if you don’t know that you’re an idiot.
Sure, but Christie was a dude.
A good illustration though because it reminds us that the issue isn’t racism, the issue is dishonest and murderous hatred of America. Racism is perfectly acceptable in Israel, China, or Morocco. The American idea must be stamped out, defamed, and forgotten.
What unites them is a lack of historical consciousness & sense of justice.Replies: @Jack D, @RadicalCenter
As I said before, no one thinks of themselves as being a Nazi, not even Nazis. In their heads, they are filled with historical consciousness and a sense of justice. It’s just that they are wrong.
By Russian standards, Putin is a moderate.
What, you mean it’s a ‘moderate’ viewpoint in Russia to (a) invade a neighboring country in an attempt to conquer it offering (b) a mess of excuses about non-existent Nazis and (c) harboring the notion country has no legitimate existence because there is no such nation, pace what the people who actually live there say while (d) demanding a rival military alliance expel 10 members which have joined over the previous 25 years?
And, Putin's most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin's.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian "democrats" such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn't be that big. Now the experience of the 'stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes - you can't let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller - maybe its borders circa 1600.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svgReplies: @RadicalCenter, @BB753, @Hibernian, @Art Deco, @Art Deco
Every sort of public expenditure is contrary to someone’s preferences.
BB is not wrong. Putin has killed or exiled or at least silenced anyone in Russia who was more moderate than he was, while tolerating (to some extent) criticism on the right (“Russia should be nuking Kiev and maybe Washington too – I don’t know why they are holding back.”) so the public political spectrum STARTS with Putin and only goes further right. And this is not just elite opinion – 20 years of non-stop propaganda has gotten a lot of the Russian public to buy into these views, which are not that far from Soviet views (and historic Russian nationalist views) and so were not a hard sell. And again, a lot of people who would be against these views have voted with their feet and no longer live in Russia.
And, Putin’s most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin’s.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian “democrats” such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn’t be that big. Now the experience of the ‘stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes – you can’t let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller – maybe its borders circa 1600.
The Ukraine War is a project of the country's political elite. The bulk of the Russian public will assent for a time because they trust Putin. Up until 24 February 2022, he'd earned a degree of deference by being consistently in the black on his calls. As the butcher's bill adds up, there will be more public disaffection and grumbling.
Russia since 2004 has not been some totaliarian hell hole. Dmitri Simes referred to it as 'managed pluralism'.
Our single best guess is that the share of the Russian public willing to give their assent to the Party of Incumbents bounces around 55% of the total. The remainder of the public is divided about equally between Soviet nostalgiacs, Russian nationalists, and the occidental spectrum. The Russian nationalists have been split between the Zhirinovsky fan club and the non-personalist Rodina outfit. The occidental spectrum is split between a vaguely social-democratic and collaborationist set and a social-liberal non-collaborationist set. The Ukraine war is an extension of Russian nationalist thinking and the first step in re-assembling the old East Bloc in some measure (Putin's preferred goal and that of some portion of the Soviet nostalgiacs).
Here's a hypothesis: this thing costs too much, the public at the bottom and the careerists at the top will adjust their expectations and goals.
As for Russia's problems with constitutional government, I wouldn't blame the areal extent of the country. (In any case, 2/3 of the territory is nearly empty. Fully 96% of the population occupies 2 million square miles of territory; the continental United States amounts to 3 million sq miles). I'd blame the events of 1989-99. The catastrophic flailing about of Boris Yeltin's administration discredited parliamentary government in Russia. The economic performance of Russia, the Ukraine, and White Russia has been inversely associated with their degree of political competition and open public discussion. That was not the case farther west. Eventually, rule by autocrats (Lukashenko) and machine bosses (Putin) may lose its lustre. Not yet.Replies: @Jack D
I wouldn't take his feelz too seriously. The Soviet Union fell apart like a cheap tent. Four months and it was gone. No such thing happened in the old RSFSR. There was some separatist sentiment in the Caucasus and in the Urals. (Chechenya accounts for < 1% of the country's population and < 0.5% of its production. Tatarstan accounts for about 3.5% of the population and productive base). The notion that the country is suffused with crypto-Turks is not based on their observable political behavior.Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
And, Putin's most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin's.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian "democrats" such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn't be that big. Now the experience of the 'stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes - you can't let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller - maybe its borders circa 1600.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svgReplies: @RadicalCenter, @BB753, @Hibernian, @Art Deco, @Art Deco
“It seems like so far” the US hasn’t figured out how to democratically or justly rule an area with five time zones. Maybe it needs to be broken up into more manageable pieces.
The US also hasn’t figured out how NOT to murder, paralyze, terrorize, and displace millions of civilians 5,000-miles-plus from its borders with the resources it derives from having so much territory, so many people, and so much revenue. Time to break it up for the sake of the lives, health, safety, and sovereignty of the rest of the peoples of the world.
Fixed it for you.
Merry Christmas — or should I say a belated Chappy Channukah — and good luck to Russia.
Nobody has in mind to send 100’s of billions of tax dollars to other countries when they cast a vote, you silly little troll.
A non-moderate Putin would have taken Kiev by now. Instead of waiting to negotiate after invading the Donbass in support of the militias and pressuring Kiev, Russia could have started attacking Ukrainian infrastructures in February instead of waiting till September. By now, there would be no Ukrainian army.
Chuckles.Replies: @BB753
And, Putin's most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin's.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian "democrats" such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn't be that big. Now the experience of the 'stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes - you can't let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller - maybe its borders circa 1600.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svgReplies: @RadicalCenter, @BB753, @Hibernian, @Art Deco, @Art Deco
Why do you see Russia as a threat? Don’t you realize that the US and NATO pose a greater threat to world peace than Russia and China combined? Who has started more wars than America since WWII? Live and let live. You neocons are gonna destroy America and part of the world because of your petty understanding of world diplomacy.
I wish comments on articles that aren’t about the Ukraine, Putin etc wouldn’t become clogged up with OT posts on the subject.
What unites them is a lack of historical consciousness & sense of justice.Replies: @Jack D, @RadicalCenter
There are a few categories of people who pretend to be Americans (or to care about us) and then write off whole categories of actual Americans.
What unites them is their indecency and dishonesty, and a willingness to slur rather than provide evidence and argument.
What sometimes unites such people even more tightly is a tribal racial (“religious”) identity that leads them to lie, exaggerate and slander for the benefit of their racial group with no shame at all.
After a certain young age, most normal decent people (ie not you and jackstein) realize that people can strongly disagree with us, without necessarily being dishonest or evil.
Those who tend to be on the Russian side (and, let's be frank, against Ukrainians) can be divided into a few categories:
1. people who believe that there is some conspiracy of Western elites to create an imagined New World Order of replaceable people, establish some "globohomo" order & are inimical to all organic collectives (family, people, religious tradition,..). Apart from Masons & plutocrats (Bildenberg, The Club of Rome, Davos,..) , many believers in this conspiracy blame elite Jews, especially in the US, either as masterminds or at least vocal loudspeakers/media promoters of such nefarious endeavors.
This is what I'd call "global conspiracy", because it seems to be bent on destruction of America & Russia, but in some future also China & the rest of the world. These are people who believe that the goal of supposed shadow-masters is to destroy organic collectives & world civilization as it exists, with the result of creating some global government of small elites ruling over billions of dispossessed.
2. then, some people believe that it is basically American imperialism- with or without Jews- which threatens Russia as the last bastion of "white civilization". That would be the ideology of American plutocratic elites, "enriched" with CRT, trannies etc. depravities. They want to destroy European-derived Christian civilization, while China, India, Latin America, Africa.... are issues that will be resolved later.
3. also, there are individuals who consider Russia to be aggressor & not right, but are somehow condoning Russia's war because it was, in their view, forced as a preventive war against NATO. Here, it is not about destroying European civilization, but about isolating Russia (and then, perhaps, China) & marginalizing it in the struggle for resources and geopolitical influence (Asia, Middle East,..).
4. the last group is what I call "I care for my ass only". War is not convenient, there is inflation, prices go up,... and these people would say: Look, we know that Russians are aggressors & that Russia is an imperialist piece of crap we detest. But, since we value our comfortable lives, we'd rather that Ukrainians surrender because we are afraid of nuclear war and, above all, we want our safe good secure life. We don't want to think about: What next.
What all these groups conveniently "forget" is:
a) Russia signed various treaties & broke these promises (Budapest 1994, but there are more. When someone mentions the Minsk agreement, I retort: Russia broke that, too. But, I always add: USA & other countries which forced Ukraine to sign that immoral piece of garbage should be held accountable, because that treaty was no better than Munich agreement, appeasing the aggressor).
b) Russia's war is full of evident lies & barbarism: denial of Ukrainian nationality, ethnocide (forced transfer of occupied Ukrainians into Russia, similar to what Soviet Russians had done to the Baltic peoples in the 1940s), culturocide, mass murder & rape, .. They've done such things that most of their European neighbors, all of them who lived under Soviet occupation, would gladly flay Russians alive if they could just put their hands on them. That is the dominant atmosphere among peoples that lived under Soviet rule.
This is not the position of Italians, French & Germans, whom most of ex-Soviet vassals loathe so much they would literally vomit when they see them. These peoples know what justice is, what freedom is & what servitude is. They have no illusions about the US and traditional West, but they know that, taking into account all ups & downs, they, in the past 30 years, finally breathe freely- and they would never even think of making any compromise with Russian Euro-Asian yoke.
So, if you shit your pants at the very idea of nuclear war, better rewire your brain & start thinking: if any bully with nukes can enforce his will on others just because of nuclear arsenal, then it is life not worth living. Reasonable people will always try to reduce the danger of nuclear apocalypse, but if you think that others will submit to slavery because of your fears- you are wrong. Dead wrong. Literally. Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D, @BB753
Often rightly so.
And, Putin's most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin's.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian "democrats" such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn't be that big. Now the experience of the 'stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes - you can't let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller - maybe its borders circa 1600.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svgReplies: @RadicalCenter, @BB753, @Hibernian, @Art Deco, @Art Deco
What if somebody proposes that we the US go back to the Proclamation Line of 1763? That the UK be reduced to England only? Italy and Germanny broken up? Israel back to pre-1967 borders? Is Russia really a uniquely evil nation? Also I doubt that all of the democratically inclined Russian people have emigrated, or anywhere near all. They’ve likely just gone underground, as in the Communist era.
No clue what you’re free associating about. What the western governments ‘propose’ is that Russia withdraw from the Ukraine.
And, Putin's most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin's.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian "democrats" such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn't be that big. Now the experience of the 'stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes - you can't let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller - maybe its borders circa 1600.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svgReplies: @RadicalCenter, @BB753, @Hibernian, @Art Deco, @Art Deco
Huh?
The Ukraine War is a project of the country’s political elite. The bulk of the Russian public will assent for a time because they trust Putin. Up until 24 February 2022, he’d earned a degree of deference by being consistently in the black on his calls. As the butcher’s bill adds up, there will be more public disaffection and grumbling.
Russia since 2004 has not been some totaliarian hell hole. Dmitri Simes referred to it as ‘managed pluralism’.
Our single best guess is that the share of the Russian public willing to give their assent to the Party of Incumbents bounces around 55% of the total. The remainder of the public is divided about equally between Soviet nostalgiacs, Russian nationalists, and the occidental spectrum. The Russian nationalists have been split between the Zhirinovsky fan club and the non-personalist Rodina outfit. The occidental spectrum is split between a vaguely social-democratic and collaborationist set and a social-liberal non-collaborationist set. The Ukraine war is an extension of Russian nationalist thinking and the first step in re-assembling the old East Bloc in some measure (Putin’s preferred goal and that of some portion of the Soviet nostalgiacs).
Here’s a hypothesis: this thing costs too much, the public at the bottom and the careerists at the top will adjust their expectations and goals.
As for Russia’s problems with constitutional government, I wouldn’t blame the areal extent of the country. (In any case, 2/3 of the territory is nearly empty. Fully 96% of the population occupies 2 million square miles of territory; the continental United States amounts to 3 million sq miles). I’d blame the events of 1989-99. The catastrophic flailing about of Boris Yeltin’s administration discredited parliamentary government in Russia. The economic performance of Russia, the Ukraine, and White Russia has been inversely associated with their degree of political competition and open public discussion. That was not the case farther west. Eventually, rule by autocrats (Lukashenko) and machine bosses (Putin) may lose its lustre. Not yet.
Even assuming Putin keeps it all together for the rest of his life, how much longer does he have left? Will the yes-men that he has surrounded himself with be able to keep it together without the Boss? The most ruthless (Prigozhin, Kadyrov) might be able to seize the reins of power but will they be able to hold them?
And, Putin's most likely successors come from his inner circle such as Patrushev, who have openly expressed views that are even more hard line that Putin's.
Not only that, but Kamil Galeev (admittedly a Tatar with his own bone to pick) feels that even Russian "democrats" such as Navalny have their own racist Great Russian views and would not be much better. He feels that the only solution is to completely decolonize Russia and break it up into a number of countries on an ethnic basis. He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
It seems like so far, no one has figured out how to democratically rule a country that spans 11 time zones so maybe it shouldn't be that big. Now the experience of the 'stans has not been that good either. Most of them reverted to dictatorship also. No doubt Kadyrov would rule as the dictator of Chechnya. But some of the ex-Soviet Republics (and some of the future constituent states) have done OK.
Of course the big fly in the ointment is what to do with all those nukes - you can't let a guy like Kadyrov have nukes. Just as in the last round, the little breakaway states would have to give up their nukes. There would still be a Muscovy but it would be much smaller - maybe its borders circa 1600.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svgReplies: @RadicalCenter, @BB753, @Hibernian, @Art Deco, @Art Deco
He also feels that the Russian position that the country as a whole is 80+% Great Russian is based on phony #s and that a lot of that 80% are really ethnics who have taken Russian identity because that was the thing to do. If the $ was in being non-Russian, they would revert back to their other identities.
I wouldn’t take his feelz too seriously. The Soviet Union fell apart like a cheap tent. Four months and it was gone. No such thing happened in the old RSFSR. There was some separatist sentiment in the Caucasus and in the Urals. (Chechenya accounts for < 1% of the country's population and < 0.5% of its production. Tatarstan accounts for about 3.5% of the population and productive base). The notion that the country is suffused with crypto-Turks is not based on their observable political behavior.
I was replying to this:
and this:
I wouldn't take his feelz too seriously. The Soviet Union fell apart like a cheap tent. Four months and it was gone. No such thing happened in the old RSFSR. There was some separatist sentiment in the Caucasus and in the Urals. (Chechenya accounts for < 1% of the country's population and < 0.5% of its production. Tatarstan accounts for about 3.5% of the population and productive base). The notion that the country is suffused with crypto-Turks is not based on their observable political behavior.Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
Normally I would discount someone like Galeev but his crystal ball on the Ukraine War has been, at least up until now, perhaps the very best on the market. Read his February 27 predictions:
I think they are nothing short of amazing, given that they were written at a time when all Rushists and most Western analysts were counting the hours before Zelensky was going to “commit suicide” or get on a helicopter bound for Warsaw. Maybe he was just lucky with that prediction but I think it was more than just luck. Galeev has that double perspective of being both an insider and an outsider in Russian society that allows him to see more clearly than either one alone.
And even assuming that he’s wrong about people’s ethnic identification, there’s no rule that all Russian speakers have to live under one flag – look at South America (or for that matter, North America or Europe). Galeev thinks that it is wrong that the areas where the resources in Russia are located get nothing while people in Moscow, which produces nothing, live like royalty in comparison. If living like royalty means that you have indoor plumbing and can afford a washing machine.
As for the other commenters in this thread, regarding breaking up Russia, this is Galeev’s take, not mine. For those who are asking why I am so eager to see it broken up, I would ask you why you are so eager to see it held together? I don’t think the US should use military means to fracture Russia but neither should we have to go out of our way to keep it together, except to the extent it implicates control of their nuclear weapons. For people who are supposedly advocating a position of neutrality for the US, you don’t really sound truly neutral or indifferent but almost panicky and teary eyed at the thought of Mother Russia breaking up.
If any of y’all don’t like Galeev’s take on breaking up Russia, take it up with him, not me, but prepare to be humiliated because his knowledge in this field is both broad and deep. I don’t think that Galeev envisions that the US is going to fracture Russia – he thinks that it is going to shatter from its own centrifugal forces.
The Ukraine War is a project of the country's political elite. The bulk of the Russian public will assent for a time because they trust Putin. Up until 24 February 2022, he'd earned a degree of deference by being consistently in the black on his calls. As the butcher's bill adds up, there will be more public disaffection and grumbling.
Russia since 2004 has not been some totaliarian hell hole. Dmitri Simes referred to it as 'managed pluralism'.
Our single best guess is that the share of the Russian public willing to give their assent to the Party of Incumbents bounces around 55% of the total. The remainder of the public is divided about equally between Soviet nostalgiacs, Russian nationalists, and the occidental spectrum. The Russian nationalists have been split between the Zhirinovsky fan club and the non-personalist Rodina outfit. The occidental spectrum is split between a vaguely social-democratic and collaborationist set and a social-liberal non-collaborationist set. The Ukraine war is an extension of Russian nationalist thinking and the first step in re-assembling the old East Bloc in some measure (Putin's preferred goal and that of some portion of the Soviet nostalgiacs).
Here's a hypothesis: this thing costs too much, the public at the bottom and the careerists at the top will adjust their expectations and goals.
As for Russia's problems with constitutional government, I wouldn't blame the areal extent of the country. (In any case, 2/3 of the territory is nearly empty. Fully 96% of the population occupies 2 million square miles of territory; the continental United States amounts to 3 million sq miles). I'd blame the events of 1989-99. The catastrophic flailing about of Boris Yeltin's administration discredited parliamentary government in Russia. The economic performance of Russia, the Ukraine, and White Russia has been inversely associated with their degree of political competition and open public discussion. That was not the case farther west. Eventually, rule by autocrats (Lukashenko) and machine bosses (Putin) may lose its lustre. Not yet.Replies: @Jack D
“Not yet” could be decades from now, but it could also be tomorrow. Look at the Soviet Union or the downfall of the Czar or Yanukovych or Ceaușescu – when the time comes for it to fall apart, it all falls apart much faster than anyone can imagine. One day it looks as if the status quo that has existed for decades or even centuries will endure and a few days later the dictatorship has crumbled like dust.
Even assuming Putin keeps it all together for the rest of his life, how much longer does he have left? Will the yes-men that he has surrounded himself with be able to keep it together without the Boss? The most ruthless (Prigozhin, Kadyrov) might be able to seize the reins of power but will they be able to hold them?
Yet while we are at it I might as well post my memories of the Russian invasion of Crimea. One moment in the predawn hours I was preparing for a day’s fishing, when suddenly out of the darkness the Russian fleet appeared, approaching at high speed and firing heavy ordnance. All I had was my pair of pearl-handled .38’s and a bandolier of ammo, but I made them pay for every inch they took. I helped cover an orderly Crimean retreat and was the last man across the land bridge from the peninsula. Sadly, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
I wouldn't take his feelz too seriously. The Soviet Union fell apart like a cheap tent. Four months and it was gone. No such thing happened in the old RSFSR. There was some separatist sentiment in the Caucasus and in the Urals. (Chechenya accounts for < 1% of the country's population and < 0.5% of its production. Tatarstan accounts for about 3.5% of the population and productive base). The notion that the country is suffused with crypto-Turks is not based on their observable political behavior.Replies: @Jack D, @Jack D
BTW, this is a vast understatement, like saying “there was some separatist sentiment in the US South in 1860”. Russia fought not 1 but 2 wars to bring the Caucasus back into Russia and had to basically level the place and commit war crimes (as they usually do) in order to win .
Kadyrov, in typical Muslim fashion, switched sides and swore loyalty to Russia in exchange for being allowed to stay on the throne as the local warlord, but he could switch sides again at the drop of a papakha.
Very few people have anything but the vaguest idea of how federal funds are distributed between different functions.
A non-moderate Putin would have taken Kiev by now.
Chuckles.
https://www.economist.com/zaluzhny-transcriptReplies: @Jack D
The who-dunnit is a pretty bleak genre but I liked the first hour of See How They Run. I didn’t find Rockwell uncharismatic as a drunk, apathetic detective and, as you mention, Saorse (? not looking) was delightful.
I was going to mention Glass Onion which currently sits at 93 critic and audience score on RT. It’s over 2.5 hours of trash script, bad acting, current year moralizing and then a bad CGI finish. Daniel Craig’s character was interesting in Knives Out but this movie follows the Disney formula to make the lead take a backseat to the strong, black female genius.
I also found Banshees of Inisherin tiresome (currently 98 on RT). This was not a good year for movies with wunderkind Damien Chazzelle (what is with these names?) movie Babylon getting trashed by everyone. At over 3 hours, I don’t have it in me but I liked Whiplash and First Man. La La Land was neat too but I guess they gave the kid too much rope for this one.
If you read what I wrote, you know what share of Russia’s population and output are found in Chechenya
What a shame that “the moderate” Putin was in charge of Russia instead of a master hard ass (armchair) strategist like you. Forget about Kyiv, Russia would be in Berlin by now.
I suppose by very low (Hitlerian) standards, Putin is “a moderate” but what he really is is not insane. He has (not very successfully) been trying to walk a fine line between achieving his goals in Ukraine (being the annexation of parts of Ukraine and turning the remainder into a Russian puppet state like Belarus) and not starting WWIII. When his Plan A failed by early April, there was no real Plan B because they were 100% sure that Plan A would succeed. All there has been since then is a series of unsuccessful improvisations, the latest of which is the targeting of civilian infrastructure.
Doubling down on war crimes earlier wouldn’t have been any more successful than his other strategies. Destroying civilian infrastructure would have done nothing to create a situation where there was “no Ukrainian Army” – the Ukrainian Army does not bivouac inside of power plants and transformer stations. The point of this (not that it will succeed) is to demoralize the Ukrainian population so that they will sue for peace, not to erase the Ukrainian Army. Putin is not that deluded.
As for destroying the infrastructure, it's a basic military tactic when you want to invade a territory and you want to nullify the enemy military. BTW, it's similar to the American doctrine of warfare of Shock and Awe without the psy-ops component aimed explicitly at the civil population as well.
And when will we start the human-rights/war-crime prosecutions for the military and political rulers of the US for their intentional widespread destruction of power plants, water treatment plants, and hospitals serving civilians in countries 5,000-plus miles from our borders?
Crickets, eh Jackie?Replies: @Jack D
If Chechnya was so insignificant, why did Russia fight so hard for it? What % of US foreign trade did Vietnam represent? Some things can’t be understood by reference to an almanac.
I am not saying that pro-Putinists are “evil”. Or that American pro-Putinists are different from those from various other, especially European countries.
Those who tend to be on the Russian side (and, let’s be frank, against Ukrainians) can be divided into a few categories:
1. people who believe that there is some conspiracy of Western elites to create an imagined New World Order of replaceable people, establish some “globohomo” order & are inimical to all organic collectives (family, people, religious tradition,..). Apart from Masons & plutocrats (Bildenberg, The Club of Rome, Davos,..) , many believers in this conspiracy blame elite Jews, especially in the US, either as masterminds or at least vocal loudspeakers/media promoters of such nefarious endeavors.
This is what I’d call “global conspiracy”, because it seems to be bent on destruction of America & Russia, but in some future also China & the rest of the world. These are people who believe that the goal of supposed shadow-masters is to destroy organic collectives & world civilization as it exists, with the result of creating some global government of small elites ruling over billions of dispossessed.
2. then, some people believe that it is basically American imperialism- with or without Jews- which threatens Russia as the last bastion of “white civilization”. That would be the ideology of American plutocratic elites, “enriched” with CRT, trannies etc. depravities. They want to destroy European-derived Christian civilization, while China, India, Latin America, Africa…. are issues that will be resolved later.
3. also, there are individuals who consider Russia to be aggressor & not right, but are somehow condoning Russia’s war because it was, in their view, forced as a preventive war against NATO. Here, it is not about destroying European civilization, but about isolating Russia (and then, perhaps, China) & marginalizing it in the struggle for resources and geopolitical influence (Asia, Middle East,..).
4. the last group is what I call “I care for my ass only”. War is not convenient, there is inflation, prices go up,… and these people would say: Look, we know that Russians are aggressors & that Russia is an imperialist piece of crap we detest. But, since we value our comfortable lives, we’d rather that Ukrainians surrender because we are afraid of nuclear war and, above all, we want our safe good secure life. We don’t want to think about: What next.
What all these groups conveniently “forget” is:
a) Russia signed various treaties & broke these promises (Budapest 1994, but there are more. When someone mentions the Minsk agreement, I retort: Russia broke that, too. But, I always add: USA & other countries which forced Ukraine to sign that immoral piece of garbage should be held accountable, because that treaty was no better than Munich agreement, appeasing the aggressor).
b) Russia’s war is full of evident lies & barbarism: denial of Ukrainian nationality, ethnocide (forced transfer of occupied Ukrainians into Russia, similar to what Soviet Russians had done to the Baltic peoples in the 1940s), culturocide, mass murder & rape, .. They’ve done such things that most of their European neighbors, all of them who lived under Soviet occupation, would gladly flay Russians alive if they could just put their hands on them. That is the dominant atmosphere among peoples that lived under Soviet rule.
This is not the position of Italians, French & Germans, whom most of ex-Soviet vassals loathe so much they would literally vomit when they see them. These peoples know what justice is, what freedom is & what servitude is. They have no illusions about the US and traditional West, but they know that, taking into account all ups & downs, they, in the past 30 years, finally breathe freely- and they would never even think of making any compromise with Russian Euro-Asian yoke.
So, if you shit your pants at the very idea of nuclear war, better rewire your brain & start thinking: if any bully with nukes can enforce his will on others just because of nuclear arsenal, then it is life not worth living. Reasonable people will always try to reduce the danger of nuclear apocalypse, but if you think that others will submit to slavery because of your fears- you are wrong. Dead wrong. Literally.
Does this not apply to America as well? People all over the world, including Americans, are sick and tired of America's military presence everywhere and of the State Department and CIA stirring up trouble anywhere it pleases its neocons overlords. Not to mention the use of American toxic culture to destroy foreign cultures: gay pride parades, enforcing gay marriage, trans-kids, crass consumerism, moral relativism, hostility to any kind of religion, etc. Those are cultural "nukes".Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D
Those who tend to be on the Russian side (and, let's be frank, against Ukrainians) can be divided into a few categories:
1. people who believe that there is some conspiracy of Western elites to create an imagined New World Order of replaceable people, establish some "globohomo" order & are inimical to all organic collectives (family, people, religious tradition,..). Apart from Masons & plutocrats (Bildenberg, The Club of Rome, Davos,..) , many believers in this conspiracy blame elite Jews, especially in the US, either as masterminds or at least vocal loudspeakers/media promoters of such nefarious endeavors.
This is what I'd call "global conspiracy", because it seems to be bent on destruction of America & Russia, but in some future also China & the rest of the world. These are people who believe that the goal of supposed shadow-masters is to destroy organic collectives & world civilization as it exists, with the result of creating some global government of small elites ruling over billions of dispossessed.
2. then, some people believe that it is basically American imperialism- with or without Jews- which threatens Russia as the last bastion of "white civilization". That would be the ideology of American plutocratic elites, "enriched" with CRT, trannies etc. depravities. They want to destroy European-derived Christian civilization, while China, India, Latin America, Africa.... are issues that will be resolved later.
3. also, there are individuals who consider Russia to be aggressor & not right, but are somehow condoning Russia's war because it was, in their view, forced as a preventive war against NATO. Here, it is not about destroying European civilization, but about isolating Russia (and then, perhaps, China) & marginalizing it in the struggle for resources and geopolitical influence (Asia, Middle East,..).
4. the last group is what I call "I care for my ass only". War is not convenient, there is inflation, prices go up,... and these people would say: Look, we know that Russians are aggressors & that Russia is an imperialist piece of crap we detest. But, since we value our comfortable lives, we'd rather that Ukrainians surrender because we are afraid of nuclear war and, above all, we want our safe good secure life. We don't want to think about: What next.
What all these groups conveniently "forget" is:
a) Russia signed various treaties & broke these promises (Budapest 1994, but there are more. When someone mentions the Minsk agreement, I retort: Russia broke that, too. But, I always add: USA & other countries which forced Ukraine to sign that immoral piece of garbage should be held accountable, because that treaty was no better than Munich agreement, appeasing the aggressor).
b) Russia's war is full of evident lies & barbarism: denial of Ukrainian nationality, ethnocide (forced transfer of occupied Ukrainians into Russia, similar to what Soviet Russians had done to the Baltic peoples in the 1940s), culturocide, mass murder & rape, .. They've done such things that most of their European neighbors, all of them who lived under Soviet occupation, would gladly flay Russians alive if they could just put their hands on them. That is the dominant atmosphere among peoples that lived under Soviet rule.
This is not the position of Italians, French & Germans, whom most of ex-Soviet vassals loathe so much they would literally vomit when they see them. These peoples know what justice is, what freedom is & what servitude is. They have no illusions about the US and traditional West, but they know that, taking into account all ups & downs, they, in the past 30 years, finally breathe freely- and they would never even think of making any compromise with Russian Euro-Asian yoke.
So, if you shit your pants at the very idea of nuclear war, better rewire your brain & start thinking: if any bully with nukes can enforce his will on others just because of nuclear arsenal, then it is life not worth living. Reasonable people will always try to reduce the danger of nuclear apocalypse, but if you think that others will submit to slavery because of your fears- you are wrong. Dead wrong. Literally. Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D, @BB753
Addendum: https://qr.ae/prtF58
We need to resurrect Agatha Christie so that she can solve the Idaho murders.
I keep seeing short videos online about the after effects of this horrendous crime in Moscow, Idaho.
It seems that everybody wants to avoid talking about catching the murderer and the fact that local residents are terrified that they might be next, and preferring to use phrases like “find closure” or “resolve this issue”.⁹
Apparently the cops are paralyzed because they have been presented with 10,000 tips, so apparently everybody except the police knows who dunnit, but no one has been named as a suspect or arrested.
(I suspect that the police have some ideas and are perhaps trying to lull the murderer into a sense of false security.)
Those who tend to be on the Russian side (and, let's be frank, against Ukrainians) can be divided into a few categories:
1. people who believe that there is some conspiracy of Western elites to create an imagined New World Order of replaceable people, establish some "globohomo" order & are inimical to all organic collectives (family, people, religious tradition,..). Apart from Masons & plutocrats (Bildenberg, The Club of Rome, Davos,..) , many believers in this conspiracy blame elite Jews, especially in the US, either as masterminds or at least vocal loudspeakers/media promoters of such nefarious endeavors.
This is what I'd call "global conspiracy", because it seems to be bent on destruction of America & Russia, but in some future also China & the rest of the world. These are people who believe that the goal of supposed shadow-masters is to destroy organic collectives & world civilization as it exists, with the result of creating some global government of small elites ruling over billions of dispossessed.
2. then, some people believe that it is basically American imperialism- with or without Jews- which threatens Russia as the last bastion of "white civilization". That would be the ideology of American plutocratic elites, "enriched" with CRT, trannies etc. depravities. They want to destroy European-derived Christian civilization, while China, India, Latin America, Africa.... are issues that will be resolved later.
3. also, there are individuals who consider Russia to be aggressor & not right, but are somehow condoning Russia's war because it was, in their view, forced as a preventive war against NATO. Here, it is not about destroying European civilization, but about isolating Russia (and then, perhaps, China) & marginalizing it in the struggle for resources and geopolitical influence (Asia, Middle East,..).
4. the last group is what I call "I care for my ass only". War is not convenient, there is inflation, prices go up,... and these people would say: Look, we know that Russians are aggressors & that Russia is an imperialist piece of crap we detest. But, since we value our comfortable lives, we'd rather that Ukrainians surrender because we are afraid of nuclear war and, above all, we want our safe good secure life. We don't want to think about: What next.
What all these groups conveniently "forget" is:
a) Russia signed various treaties & broke these promises (Budapest 1994, but there are more. When someone mentions the Minsk agreement, I retort: Russia broke that, too. But, I always add: USA & other countries which forced Ukraine to sign that immoral piece of garbage should be held accountable, because that treaty was no better than Munich agreement, appeasing the aggressor).
b) Russia's war is full of evident lies & barbarism: denial of Ukrainian nationality, ethnocide (forced transfer of occupied Ukrainians into Russia, similar to what Soviet Russians had done to the Baltic peoples in the 1940s), culturocide, mass murder & rape, .. They've done such things that most of their European neighbors, all of them who lived under Soviet occupation, would gladly flay Russians alive if they could just put their hands on them. That is the dominant atmosphere among peoples that lived under Soviet rule.
This is not the position of Italians, French & Germans, whom most of ex-Soviet vassals loathe so much they would literally vomit when they see them. These peoples know what justice is, what freedom is & what servitude is. They have no illusions about the US and traditional West, but they know that, taking into account all ups & downs, they, in the past 30 years, finally breathe freely- and they would never even think of making any compromise with Russian Euro-Asian yoke.
So, if you shit your pants at the very idea of nuclear war, better rewire your brain & start thinking: if any bully with nukes can enforce his will on others just because of nuclear arsenal, then it is life not worth living. Reasonable people will always try to reduce the danger of nuclear apocalypse, but if you think that others will submit to slavery because of your fears- you are wrong. Dead wrong. Literally. Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D, @BB753
If anything, you, as an intelligent person, state the position of the pro-Putinists too well. I find most of them to be just drooling idiots and contrarians – they hate the American establishment so much that whatever the establishment is for, they are against. If Joe Biden was for some reason against Ukraine, they would be cheering for it just not to have to agree with him about anything.
Their hatred of America morally blinds them and they fall for Russian “but-what-about-ism”, which is just a cheap trick. America is not perfect but Russian crimes are on a whole different level. They are not comparable at all. Until the Russians have “visited” your country it’s impossible to comprehend. Most Westerners just don’t have that sort of brutality in their life experience. The closest thing would be something like the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas. Putin’s enemies keep falling out of windows. Every day another oligarch falls out a window.
This isn’t about demoralization. It’s about supply interdiction. Uncle Sam launched unrestricted submarine warfare and the mining of Japanese waters in WWII to starve the Japanese population and military alike. I’m as supportive of Ukraine as anyone else, but to classify this as “war crimes” is to define war crimes down. If the Holocaust and the Holodomor were war crimes, then they were felonies. These are misdemeanors by comparison, the equivalent of simple assault.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/when-are-attacks-civilian-infrastructure-war-crimes-2022-12-16/
It's not really a question of felony vs. misdemeanor (cutting power in winter can cause a lot of deaths) but whether the targets are of mixed civilian/military use or PRIMARILY civilian. That you can describe some remote way in which the civilian infrastructure indirectly or somewhat benefits the military does not make it a legitimate military target.
Also standards have evolved along with technology - area bombing as done in WWII would now be a war crime because the military has the ability to precisely target military targets while sparing civilians. In fact Russia has this ability and uses it to precisely in the opposite way - to target CIVILIAN targets while leaving actual military targets untouched. Because they WANT to spread terror.What you are saying is just more butwhataboutism. What the West does on a bad day is something to be avoided, but the Russians look at it as a floor of what they can get away with - we can do things AT LEAST that bad.
Sam Rockwell seemed constrained by having to use a British accent. It also made him hard to place class-wise which is highly important for any period Brit movie. Since he seemed to be doing an impression of Tom Hollander’s general affect they probably should just have cast Hollander, or if they wanted another American star alongside Adrien Brody just made up a story about how he was a visiting American cop.
I was going to mention Glass Onion which currently sits at 93 critic and audience score on RT. It's over 2.5 hours of trash script, bad acting, current year moralizing and then a bad CGI finish. Daniel Craig's character was interesting in Knives Out but this movie follows the Disney formula to make the lead take a backseat to the strong, black female genius.
I also found Banshees of Inisherin tiresome (currently 98 on RT). This was not a good year for movies with wunderkind Damien Chazzelle (what is with these names?) movie Babylon getting trashed by everyone. At over 3 hours, I don't have it in me but I liked Whiplash and First Man. La La Land was neat too but I guess they gave the kid too much rope for this one.Replies: @Steve Sailer
And David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam” is lousy too.
2019 was a year with a lot of movies better than you’d expect, while 2022 has basically the Top Gun movie being better than you’d expect and most everything else being about as good as hoped (Avatar) or worse.
Here is a fair treatment of the subject:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/when-are-attacks-civilian-infrastructure-war-crimes-2022-12-16/
It’s not really a question of felony vs. misdemeanor (cutting power in winter can cause a lot of deaths) but whether the targets are of mixed civilian/military use or PRIMARILY civilian. That you can describe some remote way in which the civilian infrastructure indirectly or somewhat benefits the military does not make it a legitimate military target.
Also standards have evolved along with technology – area bombing as done in WWII would now be a war crime because the military has the ability to precisely target military targets while sparing civilians. In fact Russia has this ability and uses it to precisely in the opposite way – to target CIVILIAN targets while leaving actual military targets untouched. Because they WANT to spread terror.
What you are saying is just more butwhataboutism. What the West does on a bad day is something to be avoided, but the Russians look at it as a floor of what they can get away with – we can do things AT LEAST that bad.
Chuckles.Replies: @BB753
Of course, according to CNN’s news, Zelensky is about to take Moscow. In reality, the top Ukrainian general all but concedes defeat.
https://www.economist.com/zaluzhny-transcript
Plan A was to take Dombas and force Ukraine and the West to negotiate. Plan B is to totally destroy the Ukrainian and NATO military in the area, and to seize all of Ukraine East of the Dnieper. Plan B is the consequence of the West forbidding Zelensky to negotiate and forcing Ukraine to fight till the bitter end.
As for destroying the infrastructure, it’s a basic military tactic when you want to invade a territory and you want to nullify the enemy military. BTW, it’s similar to the American doctrine of warfare of Shock and Awe without the psy-ops component aimed explicitly at the civil population as well.
Those who tend to be on the Russian side (and, let's be frank, against Ukrainians) can be divided into a few categories:
1. people who believe that there is some conspiracy of Western elites to create an imagined New World Order of replaceable people, establish some "globohomo" order & are inimical to all organic collectives (family, people, religious tradition,..). Apart from Masons & plutocrats (Bildenberg, The Club of Rome, Davos,..) , many believers in this conspiracy blame elite Jews, especially in the US, either as masterminds or at least vocal loudspeakers/media promoters of such nefarious endeavors.
This is what I'd call "global conspiracy", because it seems to be bent on destruction of America & Russia, but in some future also China & the rest of the world. These are people who believe that the goal of supposed shadow-masters is to destroy organic collectives & world civilization as it exists, with the result of creating some global government of small elites ruling over billions of dispossessed.
2. then, some people believe that it is basically American imperialism- with or without Jews- which threatens Russia as the last bastion of "white civilization". That would be the ideology of American plutocratic elites, "enriched" with CRT, trannies etc. depravities. They want to destroy European-derived Christian civilization, while China, India, Latin America, Africa.... are issues that will be resolved later.
3. also, there are individuals who consider Russia to be aggressor & not right, but are somehow condoning Russia's war because it was, in their view, forced as a preventive war against NATO. Here, it is not about destroying European civilization, but about isolating Russia (and then, perhaps, China) & marginalizing it in the struggle for resources and geopolitical influence (Asia, Middle East,..).
4. the last group is what I call "I care for my ass only". War is not convenient, there is inflation, prices go up,... and these people would say: Look, we know that Russians are aggressors & that Russia is an imperialist piece of crap we detest. But, since we value our comfortable lives, we'd rather that Ukrainians surrender because we are afraid of nuclear war and, above all, we want our safe good secure life. We don't want to think about: What next.
What all these groups conveniently "forget" is:
a) Russia signed various treaties & broke these promises (Budapest 1994, but there are more. When someone mentions the Minsk agreement, I retort: Russia broke that, too. But, I always add: USA & other countries which forced Ukraine to sign that immoral piece of garbage should be held accountable, because that treaty was no better than Munich agreement, appeasing the aggressor).
b) Russia's war is full of evident lies & barbarism: denial of Ukrainian nationality, ethnocide (forced transfer of occupied Ukrainians into Russia, similar to what Soviet Russians had done to the Baltic peoples in the 1940s), culturocide, mass murder & rape, .. They've done such things that most of their European neighbors, all of them who lived under Soviet occupation, would gladly flay Russians alive if they could just put their hands on them. That is the dominant atmosphere among peoples that lived under Soviet rule.
This is not the position of Italians, French & Germans, whom most of ex-Soviet vassals loathe so much they would literally vomit when they see them. These peoples know what justice is, what freedom is & what servitude is. They have no illusions about the US and traditional West, but they know that, taking into account all ups & downs, they, in the past 30 years, finally breathe freely- and they would never even think of making any compromise with Russian Euro-Asian yoke.
So, if you shit your pants at the very idea of nuclear war, better rewire your brain & start thinking: if any bully with nukes can enforce his will on others just because of nuclear arsenal, then it is life not worth living. Reasonable people will always try to reduce the danger of nuclear apocalypse, but if you think that others will submit to slavery because of your fears- you are wrong. Dead wrong. Literally. Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D, @BB753
“if any bully with nukes can enforce his will on others just because of nuclear arsenal, then it is life not worth living.”
Does this not apply to America as well? People all over the world, including Americans, are sick and tired of America’s military presence everywhere and of the State Department and CIA stirring up trouble anywhere it pleases its neocons overlords. Not to mention the use of American toxic culture to destroy foreign cultures: gay pride parades, enforcing gay marriage, trans-kids, crass consumerism, moral relativism, hostility to any kind of religion, etc. Those are cultural “nukes”.
Their hatred of America blinds them to a lot of things, such as the fact that Russia is no moral paragon either and the fact that Russia is not "taking on America", they are taking on (and not doing well against) a weaker neighboring country (bullies only attack the weak). The BS about how America is going to turn your children trannie is just kayfabe for the rubes. If the West is so rotten, why do the children of all the top Russian leadership live there?Replies: @BB753
Deluded Spider-Man’s fans?
Does this not apply to America as well? People all over the world, including Americans, are sick and tired of America's military presence everywhere and of the State Department and CIA stirring up trouble anywhere it pleases its neocons overlords. Not to mention the use of American toxic culture to destroy foreign cultures: gay pride parades, enforcing gay marriage, trans-kids, crass consumerism, moral relativism, hostility to any kind of religion, etc. Those are cultural "nukes".Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D
First- the US did not threaten anyone with nukes, so this is a clear difference. No person of sane mind condones American interventions, 2-3 of them in the past 20 or so years. For instance, Stephen Kotkin was clear that, while he condemns Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was also opposed to the Iraq war:
There is no causal connection that would politically, economically, culturally ..between US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most people who are against Russian aggression were also against American meddling into the Syrian war- although these systems are simply incomparable & respective regimes are completely different: Ukraine is a flawed European democracy, while Syria is a Middle Eastern tyranny.
As far as gays & trannies go, this is a part of degenerate cultural revolution. Even in affluent Europe, for instance in Italy and France, most people find these issues laughable & dismiss them out of hand. Moderate position in most European countries is that American public discourse is full of nutters & that one should let this lunacy to run its course. “Gay indoctrination” is something absolutely marginal & only Orban and Putin make some fuss about it, because no mentally sane child will call their parents number 1 and 2 or go gay. No one thinks that trannies are women, and trannies simply don’t exist here.
But- virtually all people find Iranian public executions of homosexuals absolutely disgusting: As they find Russian legal tolerance of incest disgusting, too
Nor did Russia.I find it interesting that you brush off the US-financed and social engineered promotion of feminism, gayness and tran-mania as laughable. It's not a joke: it's destroying society and the very core of civilization from within. Are you that blase or part of the problem? "As they find Russian legal tolerance of incest disgusting, too"Well, sadly most of Western Europe seems fine with incest, excluding Britain and the Scandinavians.Replies: @Jack D
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/09/oscars-diversity-rules-hollywoodReplies: @Brutusale
Well, yeah, as long as survival isn’t a concern.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/12/25/hollywood-lost-more-than-500-billion-in-market-value-in-2022/
You’d better hit the theater, as it’s up to you to do the job that wipipo don’t want to do.
Netflix isn’t fat and happy anymore.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/netflix-customers-could-face-criminal-charges-sharing-their-password
I gotta disagree, Mike. A major selling point for a Trump vote was his lack of interest in getting into wars. The M-I-C couldn’t let someone like THAT get elected again, could they?
Were people (the real ones anyway) going to polls thinking “I support Biden sending billions to any country to help them facilitate a drawn out war!”?
“the US did not threaten anyone with nukes”
Nor did Russia.
I find it interesting that you brush off the US-financed and social engineered promotion of feminism, gayness and tran-mania as laughable. It’s not a joke: it’s destroying society and the very core of civilization from within. Are you that blase or part of the problem?
“As they find Russian legal tolerance of incest disgusting, too”
Well, sadly most of Western Europe seems fine with incest, excluding Britain and the Scandinavians.
What feminism, gayness and tran-mania have in common is that they are naturally self-limiting phenomena - their practitioners take themselves out of the gene pool. So the next generation of people are the kind of people who are socially and genetically less interested in feminism, gayness and tran-mania.
Of the three, feminism is the one that is actually destructive but also the one that is hardest to resist. Feminism is a universal problem of modern societies that is in part driven by the fact that most work no longer involves feats of physical strength. But what is the alternative to feminism? The Taliban?
Feminism is destructive because it is highly dysgenic - the females who should be reproducing the most are the ones who are reproducing the least. It's fine for gays and trannies to take themselves out of the gene pool but it's not fine for highly intelligent women to do so.
BTW, the birth rate in Russia, esp. among the white population, is just as abysmal as other European countries.
It really wouldn't take a massive revolution to slightly rearrange things and say return to the order that prevailed until the 1970s - highly intelligent women should FIRST get married and have 2 or 3 or 4 kids and THEN return to the workforce. But no one has figured out how to do this.Replies: @BB753
https://www.economist.com/zaluzhny-transcriptReplies: @Jack D
You must have read a different interview. That’s not what he says at all. Maybe you are just used to reading Russian propaganda where you never admit that anything is not going perfectly.
Does this not apply to America as well? People all over the world, including Americans, are sick and tired of America's military presence everywhere and of the State Department and CIA stirring up trouble anywhere it pleases its neocons overlords. Not to mention the use of American toxic culture to destroy foreign cultures: gay pride parades, enforcing gay marriage, trans-kids, crass consumerism, moral relativism, hostility to any kind of religion, etc. Those are cultural "nukes".Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Jack D
Bardon – see, this is what it comes down to. The pro-Putinists hate America (or at least America as it currently exists, which is the only America that we have) so Putin, who promises to cut America down a notch, is their hero, along with Iran and N. Korea – anyone willing to kick at America’s shins is OK by them.
Their hatred of America blinds them to a lot of things, such as the fact that Russia is no moral paragon either and the fact that Russia is not “taking on America”, they are taking on (and not doing well against) a weaker neighboring country (bullies only attack the weak). The BS about how America is going to turn your children trannie is just kayfabe for the rubes. If the West is so rotten, why do the children of all the top Russian leadership live there?
You must learn to read between the lines. In asking for weapons and trained troops presently unavailable and in quoting fellow Nazi-adjacent Finnish Marshall Mannerheim, he tells an intelligent reader everything he needs to know.
Mannerheim comes to mind because Finland (newest NATO member - heckuva job you did there, Puttie) was also a country that bravely resisted Russian aggression. As for Mannerheim being Nazi adjacent, war makes for strange bedfellows. Is Putin now Ayatollah adjacent because the Iranians are suddenly his best friends/drone suppliers?
As for WWII victory euphoria, it's Putin that has made WWII victory the centerpiece of Russia's legitimacy. Nothing like the Russian WWII cult exists in America. For most Americans today, WWII is a distant memory.Replies: @BB753, @David In TN
Their hatred of America blinds them to a lot of things, such as the fact that Russia is no moral paragon either and the fact that Russia is not "taking on America", they are taking on (and not doing well against) a weaker neighboring country (bullies only attack the weak). The BS about how America is going to turn your children trannie is just kayfabe for the rubes. If the West is so rotten, why do the children of all the top Russian leadership live there?Replies: @BB753
You’re seriously deluded. First WWII victory euphoria, then the Cold War and the transformation of America into a war-machine economy, hijacked by neocons like yourself, have made ordinary Americans blind to the threat to world peace their country has become.
Nor did Russia.I find it interesting that you brush off the US-financed and social engineered promotion of feminism, gayness and tran-mania as laughable. It's not a joke: it's destroying society and the very core of civilization from within. Are you that blase or part of the problem? "As they find Russian legal tolerance of incest disgusting, too"Well, sadly most of Western Europe seems fine with incest, excluding Britain and the Scandinavians.Replies: @Jack D
Transmania is not destroying civilization. It’s like gay wedding cakes or some other cultural wedge issues that pushes people’s buttons but whose actual impact on the average person is nil.
What feminism, gayness and tran-mania have in common is that they are naturally self-limiting phenomena – their practitioners take themselves out of the gene pool. So the next generation of people are the kind of people who are socially and genetically less interested in feminism, gayness and tran-mania.
Of the three, feminism is the one that is actually destructive but also the one that is hardest to resist. Feminism is a universal problem of modern societies that is in part driven by the fact that most work no longer involves feats of physical strength. But what is the alternative to feminism? The Taliban?
Feminism is destructive because it is highly dysgenic – the females who should be reproducing the most are the ones who are reproducing the least. It’s fine for gays and trannies to take themselves out of the gene pool but it’s not fine for highly intelligent women to do so.
BTW, the birth rate in Russia, esp. among the white population, is just as abysmal as other European countries.
It really wouldn’t take a massive revolution to slightly rearrange things and say return to the order that prevailed until the 1970s – highly intelligent women should FIRST get married and have 2 or 3 or 4 kids and THEN return to the workforce. But no one has figured out how to do this.
Perhaps you're too old or out of touch to not downplay the deleterious effects of "gay" marriage and LGBTQ everything including transmania. Believe me, it's gonna destroy the fabric of society faster than feminism.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
Of course he is asking/begging for more weapons. That’s the whole point of giving interviews to the Western press.
Mannerheim comes to mind because Finland (newest NATO member – heckuva job you did there, Puttie) was also a country that bravely resisted Russian aggression. As for Mannerheim being Nazi adjacent, war makes for strange bedfellows. Is Putin now Ayatollah adjacent because the Iranians are suddenly his best friends/drone suppliers?
As for WWII victory euphoria, it’s Putin that has made WWII victory the centerpiece of Russia’s legitimacy. Nothing like the Russian WWII cult exists in America. For most Americans today, WWII is a distant memory.
I think there’s a significant difference between casting a vote against foreign spending and casting a vote for it.
Were people (the real ones anyway) going to polls thinking “I support Biden sending billions to any country to help them facilitate a drawn out war!”?
What feminism, gayness and tran-mania have in common is that they are naturally self-limiting phenomena - their practitioners take themselves out of the gene pool. So the next generation of people are the kind of people who are socially and genetically less interested in feminism, gayness and tran-mania.
Of the three, feminism is the one that is actually destructive but also the one that is hardest to resist. Feminism is a universal problem of modern societies that is in part driven by the fact that most work no longer involves feats of physical strength. But what is the alternative to feminism? The Taliban?
Feminism is destructive because it is highly dysgenic - the females who should be reproducing the most are the ones who are reproducing the least. It's fine for gays and trannies to take themselves out of the gene pool but it's not fine for highly intelligent women to do so.
BTW, the birth rate in Russia, esp. among the white population, is just as abysmal as other European countries.
It really wouldn't take a massive revolution to slightly rearrange things and say return to the order that prevailed until the 1970s - highly intelligent women should FIRST get married and have 2 or 3 or 4 kids and THEN return to the workforce. But no one has figured out how to do this.Replies: @BB753
The alternative to feminism is pre-suffragette Western tolerance of feminism. That is, zero. Call it Taliban if you like but it’s 100 % in accord with Christianity.
Perhaps you’re too old or out of touch to not downplay the deleterious effects of “gay” marriage and LGBTQ everything including transmania. Believe me, it’s gonna destroy the fabric of society faster than feminism.
Mannerheim comes to mind because Finland (newest NATO member - heckuva job you did there, Puttie) was also a country that bravely resisted Russian aggression. As for Mannerheim being Nazi adjacent, war makes for strange bedfellows. Is Putin now Ayatollah adjacent because the Iranians are suddenly his best friends/drone suppliers?
As for WWII victory euphoria, it's Putin that has made WWII victory the centerpiece of Russia's legitimacy. Nothing like the Russian WWII cult exists in America. For most Americans today, WWII is a distant memory.Replies: @BB753, @David In TN
Asking for weapons and troups he knows are not available is code for: “we’re screwed but I can’t say it overtly. Let me get rid of Zelensky so I can reach an agreement with Russia, like Mannerheim did with Stalin. We may yet get to keep half of our territory like Finland did”
BTW, Finland lost 10% of its territory in WWII, not half.
Your contention has been that Russia should come apart at the seems and that it is filled with crypto-turks. The only part of the country that put up armed resistance to the central government was a dirt poor segment where < 1% of the population lives. Understanding the implications of that for your thesis is not that difficult.
About an hour into Amsterdam I thought “I Heart Huckabee’s was good” then turned that movie on.
Now that I think about it, David O. Russell isn’t the most stable character. He was hot in the 1990s, then was a jerk on the set to the crew and got into a fistfight with George Clooney when the star stood up to defend the little people. That put him in movie jail for awhile but then he made three good movies in a row in 2008-2012, one of them with Bradley Cooper acting out Russell’s own mental illness.
Mannerheim comes to mind because Finland (newest NATO member - heckuva job you did there, Puttie) was also a country that bravely resisted Russian aggression. As for Mannerheim being Nazi adjacent, war makes for strange bedfellows. Is Putin now Ayatollah adjacent because the Iranians are suddenly his best friends/drone suppliers?
As for WWII victory euphoria, it's Putin that has made WWII victory the centerpiece of Russia's legitimacy. Nothing like the Russian WWII cult exists in America. For most Americans today, WWII is a distant memory.Replies: @BB753, @David In TN
The Soviet Regime also used the WW II cult. In the 1970s American journalists and others who talked to regular citizens would say their loyalty was due to “World War II.” They believed the Regime beat Hitler and saved them. Among some, there was also a residual reverence for Stalin for the same reason.
I recall an article along these lines in Human Events.
For example, he can't say he is invading Ukraine to oust the capitalists, but he can say that he is invading to oust the Nazis.
“I find most of them to be just drooling idiots and contrarians.”
Agreed. Every time Ron Unz runs his “CIA and Israel assassinated JFK” articles hundreds of comments appear. They think JFK was against the establishment. He was the most vulnerable president to expose and destroy by scandal imaginable had they been desperate to do so. They even think JFK wouldn’t have passed the Civil Rights bill and the 1965 immigration act.
Not much different regarding Putin. They are too stupid to make a serious case if they had one.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/12/25/hollywood-lost-more-than-500-billion-in-market-value-in-2022/
You'd better hit the theater, as it's up to you to do the job that wipipo don't want to do.
Netflix isn't fat and happy anymore.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/netflix-customers-could-face-criminal-charges-sharing-their-passwordReplies: @Truth
I probably go to a movie Theatre every other year and haven’t had a A TV since 2018.
Absolutely, but Putin has taken it to new heights because it’s the only thing he has going for him. The Soviets could at least pretend that they were acting in the name of the Proletariat in order to achieve Socialism. There was a whole ideological, intellectual framework to Bolshevism which Putin completely lacks . Of course it was BS but people really believed it. The WWII Victory Cult also existed but it was only one aspect of Soviet legitimacy whereas for Putin there is no other ideology to fall back on so he has made it the centerpiece of Putinism.
For example, he can’t say he is invading Ukraine to oust the capitalists, but he can say that he is invading to oust the Nazis.
Like I said, maybe you read a different article than I did. I saw no hint, coded or otherwise, that Zaluzhnyi wants to get rid of Zelensky or that he wants to make a deal with Russia. You’re not reading between the lines, you are just projecting your own wishes onto him.
BTW, Finland lost 10% of its territory in WWII, not half.
Like I said, this is Galeev’s contention, not mine. Like I said, I suggest you take it up with him on Twitter because I think he will have interesting responses because he is very knowledgeable on this particular subject . You still might not agree with him, but you might learn something.
Perhaps you're too old or out of touch to not downplay the deleterious effects of "gay" marriage and LGBTQ everything including transmania. Believe me, it's gonna destroy the fabric of society faster than feminism.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
Of course this is not going to happen. Neither women nor men want to go to the old dreary days.
Speak for yourself. It might have been boring but it was a precious thing called civilization. It's shameful that backward countries in the Muslim world look saner than our putrid and decadent West. Our own women look and act like whores while Muslim women are by and large still ladies. As a Westerner, I find this sad state of affairs humiliating. And it can't go on..
Just about the best damn song they ever did. And of course it’s all Paul.
The US DOD War Manual expressly states that destruction of power infrastructure can be a legitimate military objective and activity. Do you disagree with the US Department of Defense?
And when will we start the human-rights/war-crime prosecutions for the military and political rulers of the US for their intentional widespread destruction of power plants, water treatment plants, and hospitals serving civilians in countries 5,000-plus miles from our borders?
Crickets, eh Jackie?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/when-are-attacks-civilian-infrastructure-war-crimes-2022-12-16/
and my earlier response to Johann. Whether destruction of power infrastructure is a question that will be determined at the war crimes trials. It's not a black and white thing because sometimes power infrastructure has dual civilian - military uses and other times it can be purely or primarily civilian. But there are many clues that Russia is not taking out power in order to impede Ukraine's military but in the hope of bringing the civilian population to its knees.
Putting aside all moral and legal questions (as Putin surely has), the only questions that remains is, will this tactic be effective? Russia uses this tactic because it worked for them in Chechnya and in Syria (and because Putin thinks that there is little chance that as the head of a nuclear armed power he will find himself in the dock at the Hague). However, Russia (even with the support of Iran) may not have the ability to fully bring down the Ukrainian grid for more than a few days. And as Ukrainian capabilities increase with Western support (and these attacks only deepen Western support) Russia needs to consider that drones can fly in BOTH directions.
And when will we start the human-rights/war-crime prosecutions for the military and political rulers of the US for their intentional widespread destruction of power plants, water treatment plants, and hospitals serving civilians in countries 5,000-plus miles from our borders?
Crickets, eh Jackie?Replies: @Jack D
I again refer you to this article:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/when-are-attacks-civilian-infrastructure-war-crimes-2022-12-16/
and my earlier response to Johann. Whether destruction of power infrastructure is a question that will be determined at the war crimes trials. It’s not a black and white thing because sometimes power infrastructure has dual civilian – military uses and other times it can be purely or primarily civilian. But there are many clues that Russia is not taking out power in order to impede Ukraine’s military but in the hope of bringing the civilian population to its knees.
Putting aside all moral and legal questions (as Putin surely has), the only questions that remains is, will this tactic be effective? Russia uses this tactic because it worked for them in Chechnya and in Syria (and because Putin thinks that there is little chance that as the head of a nuclear armed power he will find himself in the dock at the Hague). However, Russia (even with the support of Iran) may not have the ability to fully bring down the Ukrainian grid for more than a few days. And as Ukrainian capabilities increase with Western support (and these attacks only deepen Western support) Russia needs to consider that drones can fly in BOTH directions.
“Neither women nor men want to go to the old dreary days.”
Speak for yourself. It might have been boring but it was a precious thing called civilization. It’s shameful that backward countries in the Muslim world look saner than our putrid and decadent West. Our own women look and act like whores while Muslim women are by and large still ladies. As a Westerner, I find this sad state of affairs humiliating. And it can’t go on..