Soviet Union was a state where most people didn’t have access to goods, fresh food, fine education, sturdy clothes or footwear.
Nomenclature was a very small class of people with privileged exclusive access.
It’s either families with relatively short ties to Kremlin: people with high positions, spies, diplomats, nuclear scientists, state journalists, pro-government writers.
Or people like heads of grocery chains, import shops who controlled access to goods and clothes.
People like these could put their children at most successful universities without exams, buy them Western cars and spoil with caviar while most people stood at the queues for hours to get sour milk or bones for soup.
Yeah, he was heading actual Nazi parades. There are enough videos on YouTube with him at the rallies wearing a leather jacket with saluting neo-Nazis around. He also uses N-words and F-words freely.
He first gained notoriety at 2003 parliament elections leading a pro-Putin ultranationalist party Rodina.
One of Rodina’s TV ads were comparing Caucausus people to street trash.
People say though that Rogozin is not a big believer in anything, he’s just a huge cynical careerist coming from a very privileged nomenclature background riding any wave that brings him to the top. Right now he’s one of the major pro-war hawks.
Hm... my English is not good enough to guess it :-(
As for the N-word, there is a similarly sounding but fairly neutral Russian word which was OK to use until the influence of the US culture tarnished it.
Thanks, now I get it. Now... what's the Russian F-word that Rogozin was apparently using? гомик? педик? these are pejorative rather than grossly offensive. пидорас is probably the best translation, but it is more of a slur than a contentful word.
In Russia homophobia is such an integral part of society and day to day life (due to prison culture) that those horrific, dehumanizing and derogatory words you’ve mentioned are actually considered “pejorative rather than grossly offensive”
N-word as well. Ordinary Russians will fight tooth and nail for their right to use this word.
>> N-word as well. Ordinary Russians will fight tooth and nail for their right to use this word.
To be honest I believe the americans promoted the n-word and they still do it MORE than anyone else(i.e russia). Just listen a random rap song or watch a movie with black people. It seems part of the american culture. As someone from a small European country I couldn't really understand how a word can be both "forbidden" and widely used by the offended party.
Nevertheless offensive words are offensives and we should try to avoid using them but talking about F word and N word and B word and M word even in a neutral context seems a bit too much censorship. We are not kids to be told we are not allowed to say specific words.
And it looks like now another word is going to be forbidden: H word.
> Yeah, he was heading actual Nazi parades. There are enough videos on YouTube with him at the rallies wearing a leather jacket with saluting neo-Nazis around. He also uses N-words and F-words freely.
> One of Rodina’s TV ads were comparing Caucausus people to street trash.
This seems to be a common trait across the political spectrum in Russia. The darling of the west, Alexei Navalny, is just as nationalist and xenophobic, and while he doesn't compare people from the Caucasus as trash, he did compare them to vermin that need to be exterminated in his TV ads.
It’s because there’s a huge support for these views in Russia.
And any politician who actually wants to succeed is bound to channel this energy or at least address it.
Russia has severe ongoing problems with national tensions and conflicts.
Not only between Russians and other nations but among those nations as well (e.g. ingush vs chechen).
Main reason is that Russia was built as a colonialist empire. Most ethnic regions had nothing in common except for being conquered.
That led to bad blood such as ongoing ethnic conflicts, disputed regions and insurgencies being crushed by Kremlin using mostly ethnically white army.
Multiple bombings of Grozny easily rival current destruction of Ukraine, along with mass rape and pillaging.
Conscripts were executed and tortured by locals which led to army’s brutal retaliation leading to cycle of violence.
Ethnic crime also contributed with some diasporas having immense powers in Moscow.
This boiling cocktail leads to a huge albeit suppressed anger amongst general population.
A politician who proposes disbanding Russian Federation and imposing a visa regime with ethnic regions will ride a wave of support not seen by Putin.
That’s why Putin crushes any nationalist opposition much harder than liberal one. It’s the biggest threat to his rule if there’s one.
Rogozin served mainly as a spoiler. His fake party sponged some dissent votes in 2003 and then disappeared. Once again even if his Nazi views are genuine, he’s a power hungry Machiavelist first.
No, he’s been a very vocal proponent of war, so it’s a logical career step. The guy probably sees himself as a Putin’s (or at least Medvedev’s) successor at some point.
Europe pays billions for gas daily basically sponsoring invasion.
It’s enough for Russian elite to flourish and pay people and companies reliant on state (most of Russia).
Putin’s bet is that sanctions will be lifted before tech embargo hits anyway.
Western politicians already drag their feet on arming Ukraine. Just mentioning unrest and refugee influx from North Africa due to hunger is enough. They will pressure Ukraine to surrender and gradually lift sanctions.
Thanks for trying to whitewash him, but no, we Russians know him very well.
Sterilization of anti-invasion people is one of the mildest things he suggests. He’s also a huge homophobe standing against “Western homosexual values”.
He’s been an almost weekly speaker on Russia 1 channel since 2000’s. His views were on clear display for years.
He’s one of the most hawkish anti-Ukrainian and ultraconservative Russian filmmakers save for Mikhalkov.
In exchange he’s been given tons of state awards and kept as a head of largest filmmaking company (Mosfilm). Also budgets for productions like this.
He had a couple okay-ish films during perestroika (Courier) but afterwards his sole job is a person shouting on state TV how he hates Western gays and Ukrainians.
Please assume good faith; your arguments will carry more weight. I googled the guy, and that came up which clearly countered the invective against him here.
I will repeat comment you responded to: Series director Shakhnazarov is one of the ultra pro-war and pro-Putin celebrities. He’s almost daily on Russian TV spewing hatred against Ukrainians, Americans, minorities. Be careful. It’s tempting to say “not all Germans”, but this case is clear-cut.
Your link is not showing ANYTHING to cancel out the above or undo the damage. He is still spewing hatred. There is literally no goalposts movement, except yours.
Lets quote Shakhnazarov in state TV saying approvingly: "The opponents of the letter Z must understand that if they are counting on mercy, no, there will be no mercy for them. [...] There will be concentration camps, re-education, sterilisation of those who oppose the letter Z". This is him saying what should happen.
People in Russia felt much safer using iCloud, Gmail or Google Drive. Of course they comply to some requests by Kremlin or police. But Yandex or VK just give information straight away often times without much procedure.
You misunderstand. The NSA went out of their way to tap Google's lines outside of the US, which made the leadership at Google furious. It accelerated the work to encrypt international fiber (I think many people were really bothered by the tcpdump of a bigtable RPC containing a user ID). I was at a conference shortly after an saw a SVP rip an NSA rep to pieces.
If Google is doing anything that is required of them legally as a US corp, I don't have a problem with that.
That's what Google claims, however the leaked slides claimed "direct access".
edit: Does it really matter if they setup an FTP server instead of direct access, when we know a request can literally ask for "all" data (see Verizon).
> When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the US government — generally through secure FTP transfers and in person," Google spokesman Chris Gaither told Wired, among other news outlets. [1]
right, you're discussing the mechanism by which Google shares information with the US government- when required by law.
These systems don't give access to "all" data. Telephone companies are different- AT&T had a long standing, off the books agreement with US intelligence agencies (see Idea Factory for a fact-based discussion of what AT&T did) to share large amounts of information illegally.
We know that at least some companies were ordered to handover all data, continuously [1].
edit: I think we have enough evidence that I would assume that it's valid for the other companies on the slides, and if it's not true you'll have to provide some proof of that.
edit 2: [2]
> It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."
> Greenwald explained that while there are "legal constraints" on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.
> "There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans," Greenwald said. "You can't target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents."
> "And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst," he added.
edit 3:
> Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” [3]
...has become such a huge tinfoil-hat kook that it taints anything he's ever said and done. I have no way of knowing when his brain-rot started to affect his writings, so I can't really trust the shit that seemed so convincing back in 2003 any more.
Weird how there is limited hard evidence of a secret, illegal government program... It's a lot more than I've seen than evidence for the claims of Yandex proactively sharing data with the Russian government.
> The difference is that checks and balances are much stronger in US,
You say that after we were talking about the NSA literally spying on US citizens, and without any proof? C'mon, are you really going to badger me about not having having the exact "hard evidence", and not even read my sources or provide ANY evidence yourself.
edit: Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked by a whistleblower that still can't return to his home.
> Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act has no whistleblower protection. If the courts were allowed rule honestly and without political entanglements, there's no way the Espionage Act is constitutional at prima facia.
There's a world of difference between Five-Eyes and being harrassed, mobbed, jailed, having a "Z" and "traitor" spray painted on your apartment door or being murdered.
By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand what's going on Russia and its Putin-controlled satellites like Belarus.
"Despite all the difficulties created by the Kiev authorities, over the past day, 29,733 people, including 3,502 children, were evacuated from dangerous areas of Ukraine and the Republics of Donbass to the territory of the Russian Federation without the participation of the Ukrainian side. And in total, since the beginning of the special military operation, there are 1,936,911 people, of which 307,423 are children," Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Control Center of the Russian Federation, said at a briefing on Saturday.
https://www.interfax.ru/world/846957
There's a world of difference between living in Russia and using Yandex to search for how to kill Putin and living in the west and using Yandex to search for how to spin up a FastAPI server.
By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand that everyone isn't in the same situation as yourself.
It’s has a few connotations. The mildest is proposing to throw all colored people out of the cities. The most severe is to exterminate them.