That’s awesome to hear, because they seem to be extremely common in Germany – at least in Berlin, in 2010. Probably now as well. It seemed that wherever I was connecting to WiFi at friends’ places, there were always three to ten available WiFi networks with names such as FritzBox-FG42KF1EE or similar.
What? Are those actually made inside the EU, not just by a German company but overseas?
Uh, what? Something like 80 % of their economy is now government spending.
Latvians kind of must do just that. They’ve got an archaic notation system for writing down their oldest fairy tales that are used to convey important parts of the culture to the next generation. That notation system has symbols for the about 20 most important figures of the old stories, just to help remember the whole story. There are no other symbols in the system. And it has been in use actively and continuously for several thousand years uninterrupted. And one of the very few symbols happens to be the swastika.
This Latvian-Lithuanian tradition (that had largely died in Lithuania at one point) is where Hitler stole the swastika from, that decision supported by its use as far away as India.
Latvian traditions include embroidering those symbols to mittens and such, believed to protect and support the wearer. And indeed, by far the most common of those symbols has traditionally been the swastika. That’s precisely why it caught Hitler’s eyes.
Those symbols are a very integral part of their culture and the pressure Hitler has caused for Latvians to stop their use is a way for 1930’s Nazi Germany to kill Latvian culture from beyond the grave. Since Hitler considered Latvians “Untermensch”, he would definitely be happy of that.
But yeah: good luck with that, Latvians. You have no choice, but you’ll still get trouble for that.
The drone attacks make Ukrainians very afraid of the Russia they know that if they don’t win, they will soon end up living in the Russia. In a country that is that scary.
The Shaheds are scary but not as scary as the torture the Russia is doing to Ukrainians in areas it has occupied.
The Shaheds are a constant reminder of why Ukrainains need to do everything possible to stay away from the Russia.
I was also very confused, so I looked it up now. So, here goes:
So, to bend the knee means several things. In the context of this post it means submitting to authority, in this case specifically, doing whatever Trump tells to.
The flag has been a libertarian symbol for a few decades, but in the last five-ish years fascists and MAGAts have started using it so much that it gets associated with them by default.
Historically, that flag has been a symbol of the war for freedom from British rule.
I see you simply skimmed through my comment and commented without actually reading it.
Yes oh my god some of them were children
As I said in my comment, that is a horrible thing. Please read the comment and then reply again. It is ridiculed that you just randomly accuse people of being heartless without bothering to read what they actually think about the matter.
Also, you can be sad without being very very horrified. Those children were brought to death by their own parents. Why would that not feel bad?
that doesn’t mean they deserve to die in a plane crash!
True. I completely agree with you regarding this. As I wrote in that comment. Please, just read it. If somebody is robbing a bank and gets shot in the process, that is a bad thing, because it’s a dead human. A bank robber does not deserve death, because nobody deserves death. But, I won’t expressly explain that I’m very sad about a robber dying, because the robbery does decrease my sadness. And even if the robber also kills their own child during the robbery, it of course makes me angry at that horrible parent, and sad about a child dying, but it doesn’t make me actively write that I’m angry and sad. Because there are other thingsore relevant about the event.
Arguing against a really bad argument does not make the arguer’s “empathy is conditioned on where somebody comes from.”
If you now read my comment, you will notice that I’m saying my empathy is conditioned on what somebody has done. (And, to clarify: absolutely regardless of where they are from! It tells a lot about you that you even end up assuming it might be because of where that someone is from! That looks a lot like projecting.)
Furthermore: how have you successfully managed to completely skip the connection to the extreme suffering in Ukrainian homes? Based on you apparently projecting there, it’s hard to not notice how you’re voicing your compete apathy to the death and suffering of innocent civilians in the terror attacks the Russia is now committing on an almost hourly basis.
Please elaborate what in my text gave you such an impression.
Something in the ballpark of 90 % of those civilians support the war of genocide in some form. Some 30 % are against the war, but most of those are angry about how Ukraine was invaded: They would have wanted it done in a much less bloody fashion.
You talk with Russians, and they keep telling you how “you must look at both sides of the situation”, in other words trying to defend the genocide their country is doing its best to commit. So, of course at least 5 %, possibly almost 10 % of Russian civilians are innocent, but out of the 44 adults that died, that is statistically about 2 to 4 people in the whole plane, plus the five children. Are we supposed to be very very horrified that 9 innocent people died in a plane crash?
In the other hand, the Russia is doing its Human Safari attacks against civilians, hunting them down with drones for fun. And they are targeting mainly civilian homes in their terror attacks with drones and missiles. If the death of those 7 innocent civilians and 40 guilty civilians (because of course, every death is always a sad thing – always to at least some extent!) helps end the war earlier and that saves the lives of 200 innocent civilians in Ukraine (being attacked by the army most of the plane’s passengers were happily supporting), then as a net result that crash has then saved lives of a bit over 150 people. And yes, I prefer 49 dying over 200 dying, absolutely! Especially if those 200 are innocent and about 42 out of those 49 are not. Even if we were to assume somehow all of the 49 were innocent (HOW?! What are the chances for that?!), the balance would still make sense.
And then: They chose to enter a plane, fully aware of the existence of very severe safety problems in Russian aviation. A Ukrainian living in their own home and getting killed there hasn’t really chosen their death as a victim of a terror attack. But someone willingly choosing to use the airplane under the current circumstances has made a completely free decision. They could have taken a train or a bus, but they preferred the risk in order to save time. First they decided not to do anything against Putin, in order to have a comfortable and safe life, then they decided to enter a deathtrap.
Nope. Not terribly sad. Not even for any of the approximately four innocent adults on the flight, because they chose the flight. I am sad for the 5 children, though. But even their deaths easily hasten the end of the war enough to save lives of 20 other children, which does diminish (but doesn’t remove!) my sadness. It’s 5 absolutely innocent people who didn’t know of the risks and even if they did, could not do anything to mitigate them, and that’s always sad. But 5 innocent children dying unfairly is something that happens more often than once per decade.
This war must end. It will only end when Russians get fed up with it. Everything that pushes them that way is more good than bad.
Possibly. Has there been a specific risk those two have been aware of without forbidding the dangerous operations?
After Jimmycakes’ comment I checked leaverussia.kse.org for Coca-cola and Pepsi as “barcodes”, and it turns out that Coca-Cola still produces beverages with some local brand names that probably don’t get recognized as inostranets by Russians.
And Pepsi has been expanding to fill the gap left by Coca-Cola company.
This could be largely because Pepsi has been expanding in the Russia and many are boycotting it for that. So, if the combined market share of those has risen, then we are not doing so badly :)
You’re still opening it.
But if you have your friend open it, then you are not opening and consuming the product.
Of course, with such draconian rules, one should not drink that stuff anyway.
We’ll see how that will go in the States. I just read a text about why there are so few pickpockets in USA, and someone mentioned that during the Paris Olympics people had tried pickpocketing spectators from USA, and got so frequently immediately beaten up by spontaneously formed mobs of Americans that the French police had to start actively intervening on the side of the pickpockets O.o
Not everyone on this planet is like the Chinese and Russians. But, we are about to see.
Might be a cultural difference.
A Finn would be too scared not to react under the contemporary Russian circumstances. They’d work with the motto “I’m basically dead anyway, so this way I at least bear a chance to maybe survive.”
Can someone explain why the inner circle doesn’t take this as a warning sign that Putin is dangerous and must be liquidated as soon as possible?
They will all get killed (or “persuaded to suicide”) one after another if they don’t end the madman. Appeasing Putin will bring you nothing good in the longer term.
Some people remember things as images and see stories in books as images. Do you have a memory from that time that is preserved as images so that you can actually see what the world looks like from the perspective of a 2-year-old? Also, can you recognise things in that memory that have caught your 2-year-old attention that would not catch the attention of an adult who already has answers to many questions? Or the other way around, is something missing in the memory that by all logic should be there, because a two-year-old doesn’t recognise it as significant?
(My oldest memory is from about that age as well. It’s me looking at a pavement made of 30 cm (~1 foot) wide concrete slabs while sitting in a stroller, observing how the lines between the slabs are recognisable when I look further away but turn into a blur if I look as straight down as I can)
A Russian propaganda win is a win the sense that it enables Moscow to start a new war in a near future. If the Russia can make the 300 000 lost human lives look justified to its own population, it is able to make a micro-invasion into a NATO. In such a scenario, it takes the city of Narva and stops, hoping that at least Germany will refuse to help Estonia regain the city, thus functionally ending NATO. Even if Germany will turn out to help Estonia after all, the terror the people of Narva will have to endure in such a scenario will be horrible, and it also means there is a war between nuclear powers, which is a thing I’d like to avoid. And of course: Refusing to defend Estonia would not avoid the war, but helping Ukraine block the Russia from getting a propaganda victory does.
The Russia must be prevented from getting a propaganda win, because if it does, there will be a war in EU.
Such an exemption would be moot: The tariff income goes to the US federal budget, and in this case, the extra costs caused by the import tariffs are paid from the US federal budget. It’s ±0 all the same with the import tariffs. However, there will also be import tariffs in the other direction, and those need to be paid to EU. Anything that needs to be brought from USA to EU in order to be processed there into an F35 component causes extra money to go to EU.
he US federal budget doesn’t really win or lose anything through the import tariffs alone, but the opposing import tariffs go to foreign countries in the EU and there’s no reason why the US federal administration would exempt from those tariffs.
Of course, when EU countries are buying F35 planes, it matters more: There the components being brought from EU to USA are subject to import tariffs paid to the US federal budget, and are money lost from the perspective of EU. But at the same time, how is the price of the F35 agreed upon? If the price is already fixed, then Lockheed Martin has to pay the EU import tariffs from its own pockets and might get the US import tariffs compensated as federal subsidies. But, if the agreements say that the variance in prices are covered by the buyer, then the US import tariffs actually benefit the US.