Päevapoliitika

[vaikiv mees]

Iltalehti tsiteerib tegelikult Atlanticu kolumnisti

(et Musk on bully-miljardär, kellel on raha ning võimalust oma plaanide elluviimiseks nagu Putinilgi)

Parempi vertauksen keksii The Atlanticin kolumnisti Ian Bogost, joka selittää Muskin käytöstä Harry G. Frankfurtin Paskapuheesta-pamfletin avulla. Teoksen väite on, miten valehtelu ja paskapuhe ovat kaksi eri asiaa. Valehtelu on totuuden tahallista vääristelyä, paskapuhe on sitä, ettei edes välitä totuudesta.
Musk sen sijaan luo uuden paskapuheen muodon. Siinä missä paskapuhe saattoi ennen olla joko totta tai ei, Muskilla on aina mahdollisuus muuttaa paskapuheensa todeksi – ostaa vaikka joku Twitter!
Bogostin mielestä Musk on kiusantekijämiljardööri – englanninkielinen uudissana on bullionaire – jolla on valtaa ja rahaa toteuttaa harhaisimmatkin suunnitelmansa. Toinen samanlainen on Vladimir Putin.

[gizmoduck]

ega see konktekst seda steitmenti paremaks ei tee

[Maarek]

Uudistest jäi kõrva, et lisaeelarve võeti vastu ning ühe lisana langetatakse ka käibemaksu. Mai tea, pigem võiks a la meediaväljaannete kmi vähenda, sest sellest oleks palju kasu... kui nüüd aasimine kõrvale jätta, siis mis muidu on ratsionaalne seletus antud mv kmi kärpimise otsuse taga?

Km tõus majanduskriisi ajal oli ju ajutine meede ja kuigi kriitikat on juba mitmeid kordi tehtud, siis on see siiski üsna püsiv olnud.
Vbla siis Reformierakond otsustavalt käsile võtnud oma populaarsuse hoidmise ja tahab selle sammu ära teha Valimised pole ju enam eriti kaugel


Selge on muidugi see, et tuleks alandada energia käibemaksu, sest see lööb praegu kõige tugevamalt.

[Nasfal]

Elon Muski Twitteri ostmine Boardi vallandamine ning Vijaya Gadde suguste elajate fakepisarate valamine on selles sõjast räsitud traagilises maailmas üks ilusamaid ja südantsoojendavamaid hetki. #FuckCancelCulture

Elon lubab nüüd Coca Cola osta, et Kokaiin tagasi Cocasse panna. That guy is a fucking G.O.A.T and LEGEND.

[JuriM]

I only just realised there's a political thread for newbies, and since I've been almost exclusively a lurker on this forum for the last 8 years I obviously don't have the ability to post in the main Current Events forum. But I'm a Brit (born in Manchester) who moved to Russia in 2001 and I've been here ever since. I live now in St Petersburg (been here since 2008). Prior to the war and immediately after most Brits left Russia on the advice of the Foreign Office but a bunch of us remained behind for various reasons.

I'm not especially intending to post about the politics of this war here but rather to offer whatever insight I can into the actual situation here in Russia from a social perspective. I know there's another user here based in Russia (‘harms’) but for understandable reasons he isn't posting as much as he used to, and over the last 2 months there have been a lot of questions in the main thread about how Russian people are reacting, what the social and economic situation is here, and so on. I can offer my perspective to anyone interested.

I’ll start here. Someone in the main thread asked this today:

"There's been less reporting lately (to my knowledge anyway) as to what the sanctions are doing to Russia's economy. How bad is it at the moment? Signs of default? Shortages of basic needs?"

For now (that's a very important caveat) the sanctions have had a negligible effect. Firstly as regards products, supermarkets are all fully stocked despite those (frankly silly) tweets you see of an empty shelf somewhere. Where I live all the supermarkets are still stocked full of Western stuff like - to give deliberately trivial examples - Coke, Skittles, Toblerone, Budweiser. Even Boddingtons bitter is sold here at my local store. Prices have increased but not by much, and less than in Manchester (my parents live there). I know this is an unpopular opinion at a political level but sanctions of these kind don’t and won’t work in the way that is hoped. Not in a country like Russia and certainly not in this particular situation. The only way they will work is if China and to a lesser extent India turn on Russia. That may happen down the line (China has spent way too much on its Belt and Road Initiative to have Putin mess up the whole of Europe’s economy) but for now it isn’t.

As an example my wife's company - who have contracts with the major Western tobacco companies like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco - relied on the Czech Republic for components it uses in its machines (her company prints the cigarette packets for the Russian market). In early March the Czech Republic sanctioned Russia and so the supply of components was cut off, but within literally a day her company had cut a deal with a Chinese firm to act as go-betweens. More expensive of course but not to the extent it significantly harms operations. In addition to that the government of this country are literally gangsters and getting around import bans is not a challenge for them. Stuff is streaming in across the Chinese (and also Mongolian and Kazakh) borders, and while that continues to happen Russians aren’t going to be seeing shortages of Western perks.

The 2nd factor is that since the start of the war Russia’s revenues from oil and gas have not only remained constant, they’ve actually doubled:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-ukraine-began

Joe Biden just announced a planned $33 billion of aid (and suggested that it’s got to last Ukraine for the next 5 months) but for perspective Russia has taken in 63 billion euros for its oil and gas since the invasion started (see the article). Again, while that situation remains unchanged, the war machine will be financed (tweets posted in the main thread about how the Russian military can’t get parts for its weapons are nonsense). Economically things are more or less stable, for now. Most of the people in the Russian government are drawn from the military or intelligence services, they’re in their 70s, they have their positions due to cronyism, and they’re not especially intelligent, but as long as Elvira Nabiullina is running the economy there’s a decent chance she’ll steer it to some kind of safety, albeit via unorthodox methods. She was supposed to retire this summer but Putin (I quote) “requested” that she stay on for another 5 years and Nabiullina (I quote again) “happily agreed to do it” (sarcasm obviously, he ‘pressured’ her to stay on because he knows nobody else can do the job that needs doing).

So that’s about the economy, but as I said at the start, that’s the situation only now. What will be in the future depends entirely on how things go on the ground in Ukraine. The Russian Central Bank has been doing some ludicrous things to keep things afloat, everything from currency manipulation to allowing stuff to be imported without the copyright owners’ permission. Short-term it allows the war machine to carry on but long-term it obviously isn’t how any healthy economy is supposed to work. It's not sustainable for long, which is why Putin is in a hurry to 'win' the war and then hold various entities to ransom.

About the people and their attitude to the war. I can only speak of my own circle but I think it’s representative of broader opinion. When the invasion began there was bemusement here as to what was happening. The messaging leading up to the war was surprisingly badly done, focusing on Putin’s strange hour-long lecture about Ukrainian history which nobody I know listened to for more than 15 minutes. For months the propaganda machine had convinced everyone, including myself, that Putin was going to go into the eastern 'republics' under the guise of a "peacekeeping mission" (and most people here were supportive of that because the war in Donbas is a major issue over here), but what on earth happened in the days that followed nobody quite knew. From February 24th to about the beginning of March the state media here went mostly silent, making occasional references to a “special military operation” in Donbas, but this was before Twitter and Facebook were banned, so what all young people here were seeing was the Russian army attacking Kiev and seizing the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Given Putin’s own words about how he was not seeking to replace the government in Kiev (he directly said that in his war declaration) it was clear that he’d been lying, which is fair enough, he does that a lot, but nobody understood why he was lying about this. The aims of this apparent full invasion made no sense to anyone with any degree of understanding of history. Occupying a nation of 44 million people, most of whom want nothing whatsoever to do with Russia - did Putin sleep through the Afghan debacle?

I’d say the mood at the time was very sombre (pretty much every person in St Petersburg has either friends or relatives in Ukraine), very stressed (everyone – including me - ran to withdraw their savings from banks), and not supportive of the war, but also not actively against it either (I emphasise that nobody had any clue what was actually happening in those first few days). For years our propaganda and media have been preparing people in various subtle ways for Alexey Dyumin to take over as president in the next few years (he almost certainly will be the one who replaces Putin, he’s ‘completed’ all the usual career trajectory points – Putin’s personal body guard, then FSB, then the guy who orchestrated the annexation of Crimea, then governor of a relatively small city to see how he handles administrative work). Now it seems that Putin is going to try to see this project of his through to the end himself and we’re heading for a years-long war. Everything we were expecting about the future of Russia was upended in the space of about 4 days.

So that was then. Now 2 months on the prevailing mood is mostly apathy. That may be judged as disgraceful given the atrocities being carried out but people aren’t designed for this level of bad news and it gets tuned out as a defense mechanism. Everyone is still using Twitter and Facebook (VPNs), sites like CNN and all the European news networks except BBC are freely available here, and now and again I take public transport and look at what people are looking at on their screens, but compared to early March it’s rare now I see anyone paying attention to the war. Like I said, in terms of how this is affecting people’s day to day lives, it isn’t (for now), other than flying to Europe is more expensive now (you have to go via Turkey or Israel), cinemas are closing because of a lack of repertoire (though illegal streaming is rampant here), and some Western brand shops are "temporarily" closed. If the internet didn’t exist and you're not the kind of person who eats at McDonalds and buys clothes from Zara (in other words the vast majority of Russians) then most people here wouldn’t even know anything was happening, which (I’ll keep saying it: for now) means the state news can continue to mostly downplay the severity of what has begun. People here know a war is happening in Ukraine and they know Russia started it, but in my opinion based on conversations with people, they don’t grasp the scale of this (quite frankly neither do the vast majority of people in the West, it seems to me).

There’s a lot more I’ll add later on - some other posts in the main thread I want to respond to - but for now that’s enough. This is all only my own perspective but it’s based on actually living here and being deeply involved in the country and culture for 20 years (almost the entire period of the Putin regime’s ‘rule’). If anyone has any specific questions relating to life here during this war, let me know and I’ll answer as best I can.

[JuriM]

Siiani vist kõige paremini artikuleeritud ülevaade "Lääne" inimese silmade läbi Venemaal toimuvast - võetud Manchester Unitedi fännifoorumist Redcafe.

[_AI_]

Siiani vist kõige paremini artikuleeritud ülevaade "Lääne" inimese silmade läbi Venemaal toimuvast - võetud Manchester Unitedi fännifoorumist Redcafe.

miks? miks see siin on?

[JuriM]

miks? miks see siin on?

Pakkumas perspektiivi olukorrast kellegi silmade läbi kes on hetkel seal?

[JuriM]

[lorenzo]

Lavrov siis oskas ka korralikult Iisraeliga tülli minna, läheb järjest huvitavamaks. "Vene tõde" täies hiilguses

[JuriM]

Not all
But we can't
Ja kõik see muu demagoogia

[Wingback]

Inimkõnts!

[lorenzo]

Not all
But we can't
Ja kõik see muu demagoogia

need Anton Gerastsenko avaldatud kõned on päris head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ZGEn9DTyk&list=PL8ao2ZjeM9mslBOATvDa87lvgELw281lF&index=4

[Fc.]

https://www.err.ee/1608587269/venemaa-naftaembargo-erisusi-soovib-ka-tsehhi

Saan aru, et ungari. Päris tugevalt toetanud venemaad.
Aga teised riigid?
Kas praegult ei peaks ahju minema kõik mis põleb? Praegult ei ole koht mitte mingiks aruteluks. Euroopas on sütt, metsa jne. Kõigega saab kütta. Ja gaasi/ naftat tuua laevadega kust iganes.
Kraanid kinni ja las upub oma nafta/gaasi kätte.
Päeva pealt ära lõpetama. Iga päeva eest mis makstakse venemaale, pikenevad ukrainlaste kannatused.

[JuriM]