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[bloop_bleep]

Over the course of the war I have started becoming ashamed of even being Russian, culturally. I hate my country's culture, I mean most Soviet and some modern stuff is okay but I fucking despise just about anything from before 1914. I hate Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky's books for example. Even destroyed the few I still had.

I wouldn't demand from anyone to hate Pushkin or Dostoevsky for the war. Just being associated with the idea of Russia is not a conduit for guilt, especially if it's something one cannot choose. Existing in a context doesn't mean something is part and parcel of everything in the context. Each place and time on Earth cannot be consistently made into its own uniform gestalt. And I try to take an approach that errs on the side of compassion.

[Strongpoint]

I am witnessing a lot of people with similar attitudes to KittyTac's. Remember, Ukraine had (had, no has) 17% who self-identified as Russians.

I know a 62-year-old person who has zero, I mean zero Ukrainians among recent ancestors, who never spoke Ukrainian went for total self-derusification, doesn't address Russian without using slurs, learned to speak very decent Ukrainian and refuses to use Russian, had time to volunteer to the front, get wounded (lost something like half of his liver and one kidney) and come back home and broke all contacts with all relatives on the other side of the border. Oh, and if you'll call him a Russian you will be punched in the face. I guarantee you that.

I wouldn't wish anyone to get into a situation where you have to deny your nationality like that. When you actually lose connection with your nation to the point when you don't want to have anything in common with those people. But at least I know that the idea of one can't change the nationality (ethnicity) they were born with is total bullshit.

[EuchreJack]

A lot of American Dutch in the early-mid 20th century were closet Germans.

[Lord Shonus]

The Pentagon has released a statement saying that they've overvalued the amount of aid sent to Ukraine, which means that they now have more room to send more under existing authorizations.

The sum is a paltry 6.2 billion dollars, but will likely be useful.


Seriously, this is basically the Pentagon claiming they found the value of an aircraft carrier under the couch cushions.

[Eric Blank]

No surprise that they're overvaluing everything, as usual. Question is whose pockets was that money going to disappear into. At least it'll be spent on defending someone's freedom now.

[Strongpoint]

It is hard to evaluate an actual market price for equipment\ammo from storage. Some of it may be negative because disposal is not free.

[Strongpoint]

Among other news, our head of military intelligence said that Russian mined the spent nuclear fuel cooling pond at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station.

I see the probability of a 100-400km radius irradiated zone in the center of Ukraine as something around 90% and it will be way worse than Chernobyl. I simply see no reason why Russians wouldn't do that. It benefits them and they have no moral limitations whatsoever. I already recommended everyone I know who lives anywhere close to that area to evacuate. Sadly most are answering something along the lines "you are spreading panic."

Honestly, I boult be less worried if ISIS had control over a NPP, they have some moral limitations and the world would be doing something.

[King Zultan]

Honestly I never even read War And Peace lol, I chopped it in half with an axe because it's a symbol of a culture I despise.

How can you despise it if you've never read it?

Destroying a book just because you don't like it is stupid.

It's because I don't like what it stands for: our "high culture". I don't even care what's in the book itself.

Then if you hate it so much why not ditch it somewhere like a bus station or something?

[KittyTac]

I can't think of any book (even Mein Campf, Mao's LRB, any version of the Anarchist's Cookbook or the most objectional[1] directory of perversions) that I would so prejudicially deface. If I burn a book, it'll only be because I need fuel. Banishment to some secure backroom of a library, maybe, but you can't actually counter that which has (effectively or actually) undergone total extestential failure. Books are paragraphs, paragraphs are words, words are letters and (give or take the precise alphabet/glyphs, lexicon, grammar and themes in use) all of these are pretty much the same morally neutral building blocks as any other example. The problem is what one does with them, not the things themselves.

If you really can't stand a set of books, just don't read tyem. Or perhaps put them on a special bookshelf, under a special filing system...


[1] Well, isn't that a loaded term? To some, that'd be Harry Potter (which to me is a sufficiently entertaining read that somehow found a zeitgeist), to others it'd be <insert some opposingly creed>'s Holy Book (to me, they're all meh), to yet others it'd be something like deSade (to which I've never had the pleasure; or the pain!). I'm not even sure I have an example that I could fit here.

Nah if I could outright destroy all copies of classic Russian literature, physical or digital, I would. I'd also destroy Mein Kampf, Turner Diaries, Victoria... and so on. Pretty long list. I stopped caring about information preservation long ago. Destroying them isn't even about what is inside, it's about sending a message: I hate this and I want it reduced to smoldering ashes.

Over the course of the war I have started becoming ashamed of even being Russian, culturally. I hate my country's culture, I mean most Soviet and some modern stuff is okay but I fucking despise just about anything from before 1914. I hate Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky's books for example. Even destroyed the few I still had.

I wouldn't demand from anyone to hate Pushkin or Dostoevsky for the war. Just being associated with the idea of Russia is not a conduit for guilt, especially if it's something one cannot choose. Existing in a context doesn't mean something is part and parcel of everything in the context. Each place and time on Earth cannot be consistently made into its own uniform gestalt. And I try to take an approach that errs on the side of compassion.

Oh I know, that's why I don't hate all of Russian culture. The classics are just hate-provoking for me.

I am witnessing a lot of people with similar attitudes to KittyTac's. Remember, Ukraine had (had, no has) 17% who self-identified as Russians.

I know a 62-year-old person who has zero, I mean zero Ukrainians among recent ancestors, who never spoke Ukrainian went for total self-derusification, doesn't address Russian without using slurs, learned to speak very decent Ukrainian and refuses to use Russian, had time to volunteer to the front, get wounded (lost something like half of his liver and one kidney) and come back home and broke all contacts with all relatives on the other side of the border. Oh, and if you'll call him a Russian you will be punched in the face. I guarantee you that.

I wouldn't wish anyone to get into a situation where you have to deny your nationality like that. When you actually lose connection with your nation to the point when you don't want to have anything in common with those people. But at least I know that the idea of one can't change the nationality (ethnicity) they were born with is total bullshit.

I'm not as radical as that guy but yeah. Once I move and get a different citizenship, I'm burning my Russian passport with a blowtorch so I can't easily go back even if I wanted to in the future.

Honestly I never even read War And Peace lol, I chopped it in half with an axe because it's a symbol of a culture I despise.

How can you despise it if you've never read it?

Destroying a book just because you don't like it is stupid.

It's because I don't like what it stands for: our "high culture". I don't even care what's in the book itself.

Then if you hate it so much why not ditch it somewhere like a bus station or something?

Because I have a vendetta against the "revered classics". And if I just gave it away then the book would still be readable and I don't want that. I want to vandalize.

[Lord Shonus]

No surprise that they're overvaluing everything, as usual. Question is whose pockets was that money going to disappear into. At least it'll be spent on defending someone's freedom now.

It wasn't being grafted. The issue is that this war is the first time in decades (I can't find a time it was used since the Yom Kippur War in '73) that the drawdown regulations have been used, so most of the people who actually knew how it worked have long since retired. Because Congress keeps iron track of every single penny spent by the Pentagon to make it damn near impossible for any money to disappear into anybody's pocket, the rules for how this sort of thing has to be tracked are incredibly byzantine, and the Pentagon had been calculating it wrong.

[Strongpoint]

As for the offtopic of Russian classics, I do did appreciate some parts of it. Usually, those are ones you won't find in the Russian school curriculum

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. the feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat

Not that I think that Russian classical literature is a major part of modern stagnant Russian culture.


Also, knowing how Russia loves to copy stuff from the West and make a horrible, twisted version of it "Christianity, Marx's theories, capitalism, etc." I expect that, if Russia will not collapse, the next stage will be the "woke" one. Take the worst, most exaggerated and caricature version of "woke" and make it more extreme. This will be Russian ideology at some point.

[Great Order]

I can't think of any book (even Mein Campf, Mao's LRB, any version of the Anarchist's Cookbook or the most objectional[1] directory of perversions) that I would so prejudicially deface. If I burn a book, it'll only be because I need fuel. Banishment to some secure backroom of a library, maybe, but you can't actually counter that which has (effectively or actually) undergone total extestential failure. Books are paragraphs, paragraphs are words, words are letters and (give or take the precise alphabet/glyphs, lexicon, grammar and themes in use) all of these are pretty much the same morally neutral building blocks as any other example. The problem is what one does with them, not the things themselves.

If you really can't stand a set of books, just don't read tyem. Or perhaps put them on a special bookshelf, under a special filing system...


[1] Well, isn't that a loaded term? To some, that'd be Harry Potter (which to me is a sufficiently entertaining read that somehow found a zeitgeist), to others it'd be <insert some opposingly creed>'s Holy Book (to me, they're all meh), to yet others it'd be something like deSade (to which I've never had the pleasure; or the pain!). I'm not even sure I have an example that I could fit here.

Honestly (to go off-topic) I can't understand the sort of... sacredness? of books nowadays.

Could understand waaaaaaaaaaay back when, when each book had to be transcribed rather than printed and thus you might actually have the only copy, but we mass produce books to such a stupid extent nowadays that when I was working in a charity shop we had a shed full of books for recycling that just got dumped in there willy-nilly because nobody'd buy them. They're a dime a dozen and so long as society doesn't collapse it'll stay that way.

[KittyTac]

Also, knowing how Russia loves to copy stuff from the West and make a horrible, twisted version of it "Christianity, Marx's theories, capitalism, etc." I expect that, if Russia will not collapse, the next stage will be the "woke" one. Take the worst, most exaggerated and caricature version of "woke" and make it more extreme. This will be Russian ideology at some point.

I'll take that, honestly. As long as it exterminates the current mindset of our country and makes it geopolitically irrelevant. As a bi neurodivergent man I wouldn't mind an arch-progressive ideology taking over Russia, if that's what you mean. "We will lose our culture, our traditions!" That's fucking great, I want that. When Putin talks about LGBT people wanting to undermine Russia from the inside and burn what makes us Russian to the ground, I say yes. Yes I do. I am merely doing what you say Mr Huilo.

[EuchreJack]

Also, knowing how Russia loves to copy stuff from the West and make a horrible, twisted version of it "Christianity, Marx's theories, capitalism, etc." I expect that, if Russia will not collapse, the next stage will be the "woke" one. Take the worst, most exaggerated and caricature version of "woke" and make it more extreme. This will be Russian ideology at some point.

I'll take that, honestly. As long as it exterminates the current mindset of our country and makes it geopolitically irrelevant. As a bi neurodivergent man I wouldn't mind an arch-progressive ideology taking over Russia, if that's what you mean. "We will lose our culture, our traditions!" That's fucking great, I want that. When Putin talks about LGBT people wanting to undermine Russia from the inside and burn what makes us Russian to the ground, I say yes. Yes I do. I am merely doing what you say Mr Huilo.

Russia has already imitated Anti-Woke sentiments, even identifying themselves as such. They picked the opposing side to Woke, don't see them going the other way.

[EuchreJack]

No surprise that they're overvaluing everything, as usual. Question is whose pockets was that money going to disappear into. At least it'll be spent on defending someone's freedom now.

With the new focus on liability for Burn Pits, you might be onto something.