When diplomacy fails, there's only one alternative...
Violence.
Hyperreality
joined 2 years ago
A lot of fine art is basically porn. And that's not entirely unproblematic given some paintings and what we know of some painters.
It wasn't even subtle.
I remember posts with thousands of upvotes from this website called thedurian. I googled the people who ran it, one of them had a linkedin which mentioned his location as Moscow and that he had previously worked for RT.
Given I was banned for posting screenshots, I suspect the mods of /r/thedonald were in on it.
Azov was founded by nazis, western media and ukrainian reports that all the nazis have magically dissapeared are exagerated for obvious reasons.
This being said, there does seem to be some truth to them being less virulently fascist once they were integrated into the regular army, and maybe after so many of the original members died. The lack of anti-semitism for example, is telling. Ukrainian (orthodox) jews and members of Azov fight alongside each other.
I think the branding stuck because they were undisputably heroic and fighting Russia, and also as a fuck you to the Russians. Also, still plenty of nazis.
We have similar issues in Belgium, where flemish nationalists make excuses for collaborationists. During the first and second world war, the Germans exploited long held (and often legitimate) grievances held by Dutch speaking Belgians. So for example, they opened the first Dutch/Flemish speaking university in Belgium and offered Flanders a high degree of autonomy. During WW1 the Belgian army was also very francophone, which IRC caused some dutch speaking soldiers issues, this was exagerated by flemish nationalist and IRC german propaganda. The end result was that hardcore nationalists ended up collaborating with the Germans even during the second world war. After the war the flemish movement made excuses for them, suggesting they weren't overwhelmingly true believers.
Something similar happened in Ireland. The blue shirts were a paramilitary organisation in the Irish free state which was opposed against the IRA. They provided physical protection to political groups which would go on to form Fine Gael, what is now a mainstream and moderate party. There's also a debate about the blue shirts being fascists. What is true that many went on to fight alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War and that they did the whole hand in the air thing. Their leader O'Duffy was also fascist, admired Mussolini, attended an international Fascist conference in 1934, but then perhaps crucially used the opportunity to argue against anti-semitism.
TLDR: it's complicated.
I strongly suspect that if he'd admitted he'd made a mistake, said it happened in the heat of the moment because he was so excited at their achievement, earnestly apologised, and perhaps offered to do some training, take a break or donate some money this would have all gone away.
But no, the moron doubled down. Macho morons.
I wonder who they'll blame. My money's on the CIA. Even if it's obviously a lie, suggesting Ukrainians were able to breach security at Moscow airport might be too embarassing.
Always seems to come as a surprise that a contract goes both ways, doesn't it?
Especially when there are labour shortages, flexible contracts are actually very advantageous to employees.
If you don't like something your boss says, you can simply walk out the door and find something else.
Gives an astonishing sense of freedom. You have power in that relationship too.
Europe.
Winter 20C/70F, but we only heat the bedrooms or rooms we mostly stay in. Kitchen, etc. can go as low as 10C/50F
Summer: no heating/AC at all. Open a window when cold air is coming inside. Close the windows when hot air is coming in. It's never gone above 35C/95F, and that's during a heat wave. Usually it's 25C/80F max.
Sometimes when it's too cold. You wear a sweater and thick socks. Sometimes it's hot. Fan or live with it. Adapt our schedules accordingly, perhaps do groceries when it's super hot or go on an errand that requires the car a drive so we can cool down in the supermarket/AC.