Maxwells Demon posted:

This is good but there was the WisCon (Wisconsin Feminist Sci-Fi con) that a LF goon went to and photoshopped frowny faces over the real people's faces that was so much better than this recap. All I can find is the wiki from their side of it: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Wiscon_troll_incident

Dang It Bhabhi! posted:

i dont know what this is but going to a place to make fun of people who don't deserve scorn and are just having fun in private is low poo poo for scumbags imo.

Maxwells Demon posted:

This is good but there was the WisCon (Wisconsin Feminist Sci-Fi con) that a LF goon went to and photoshopped frowny faces over the real people's faces that was so much better than this recap. All I can find is the wiki from their side of it: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Wiscon_troll_incident

Oscar Wild posted:

https://twitter.com/musicstruggles1/status/1496883001447567360?t=iAXoVOesfHTIc-wn_0YIhQ&s=19

DO SOMETHING PAUL

Delthalaz posted:

https://twitter.com/iamannalynnemcc/status/1496877541772062727?s=21

quote:

First Person
An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin
With NATALIYA GEVORKYAN, NATALYA TIMAKOVA, ANDREI KOLESNIKOV

The Son


Putin talks about his parents, touching on his father's World War II sabotage missions, the Siege of Leningrad, and life in a communal flat after the war. It isn't easy—no hot water, no bathroom, a stinking toilet, and constant bickering. Putin spends much of his time chasing rats with a stick in the stairwell.

I know more about my father's family than about my mother's. My father's father was born in St. Petersburg and worked as a cook. They were a very ordinary family. A cook, after all, is a cook. But apparently my grandfather cooked rather well, because after World War I he was offered a job in The Hills district on the outskirts of Moscow, where Lenin and the whole Ulyanov family lived. When Lenin died, my grandfather was transferred to one of Stalin's dachas. He worked there a long time.

He wasn't a victim of the purges?

No, for some reason they let him be. Few people who spent much time around Stalin came through unscathed, but my grandfather was one of them. He outlived Stalin, by the way, and in his later, retirement years he was a cook at the Moscow City Party Committee sanitorium in Ilinskoye.

Did your parents talk much about your grandfather?

I have a clear recollection of Ilinskoye myself, because I used to come for visits. My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life. My parents didn't talk much about the past, either. People generally didn't, back then. But when relatives would come to visit, there would be long chats around the table, and I would catch some snatches, some fragments of the conversation. But my parents never told me anything about themselves. Especially my father. He was a silent man.

I know my father was born in St. Petersburg in 1911. After World War I broke out, life was hard in the city. People were starving. The whole family moved to my grandmother's home in the village of Pominovo, in the Tver region. Her house is still standing today, by the way; members of the family still spend their vacations there. It was in Pominovo that my father met my mother. They were both 17 years old when they got married.

Why? Did they have a reason to?

No, apparently not. Do you need a reason to get married? The main reason was love. And my father was headed for the army soon. Maybe they each wanted some sort of guarantee.... I don't know.

Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich (Vladimir Putin's schoolteacher from grades 4 through 8 in School No. 193):

Volodya's parents had a very difficult life. Can you imagine how courageous his mother must have been to give birth at age 41? Volodya's father once said to me, "One of our sons would have been your age." I assumed they must have lost another child during the war, but didn't feel comfortable asking about it.

In 1932, Putin's parents came to Peter [St. Petersburg]. They lived in the suburbs, in Peterhof. His mother went to work in a factory and his father was almost immediately drafted into the army, where he served on a submarine fleet. Within a year after he returned, they had two sons. One died a few months after birth.

Apparently, when the war broke out, your father went immediately to the front. He was a submariner who had just completed his term of service ...

Yes, he went to the front as a volunteer.

And your mama?

Mama categorically refused to go anywhere. She stayed at home in Peterhof. When it became extremely hard to go on there, her brother in Peter took her in. He was a naval officer serving at the fleet's headquarters in Smolny. He came for her and the baby and got them out under gunfire and bombs.

And what about your grandfather, the cook? Didn't he do anything to help them?

No. Back then, people generally didn't ask for favors. I think that under the circumstances it would have been impossible, anyway. My grandfather had a lot of children, and all of his sons were at the front.

So your mother and brother were taken from Peterhof, which was under blockade, to Leningrad, which was also blockaded?

Where else could they go? Mama said that some sort of shelters were being set up in Leningrad, in an effort to save the children's lives. It was in one of those children's homes that my second brother came down with diphtheria and died.

How did she survive?

My uncle helped her. He would feed her out of his own rations. There was a time when he was transferred somewhere for a while, and she was on the verge of starvation. This is no exaggeration. Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses. Luckily Mama woke up in time and started moaning. By some miracle, she lived. She made it through the entire blockade of Leningrad. They didn't get her out until the danger was past.

And where was your father?

My father was in the battlefield the whole time. He had been assigned to a demolitions battalion of the NKVD. These battalions were engaged in sabotage behind German lines. My father took part in one such operation. There were 28 people in his group. They were dropped into Kingisepp. They took a good look around, set up a position in the forest, and even managed to blow up a munitions depot before they ran out of food. They came across some local residents, Estonians, who brought them food but later gave them up to the Germans.

They had almost no chance of surviving. The Germans had them surrounded on all sides, and only a few people, including my father, managed to break out. Then the chase was on. The remnants of the unit headed off toward the front line. They lost a few more people along the road and decided to split up. My father jumped into a swamp over his head and breathed through a hollow reed until the dogs had passed by. That's how he survived. Only 4 of the 28 men in his unit made it back home.

Then he found your mother? They were reunited?

No, he didn't get a chance to look for her. They sent him right back into combat. He wound up in another tight spot, the so-called Neva Nickel. This was a small, circular area. If you stand with your back to Lake Ladoga, it's on the left bank of the Neva River. The German troops had seized everything except for this small plot of land. And our guys held that spot through the entire blockade, calculating that it would play a role in the final breakthrough. The Germans kept trying to capture it. A fantastic number of bombs were dropped on every square meter of that bit of turf—even by the standards of that war. It was a monstrous massacre. But to be sure, the Neva Nickel played an important role in the end.

Don't you think that we paid too high a price for that little piece of land?

I think that there are always a lot of mistakes made in war. That's inevitable. But when you are fighting, if you keep thinking that everybody around you is always making mistakes, you'll never win. You have to take a pragmatic attitude. And you have to keep thinking of victory. And they were thinking of victory then.

My father was severely wounded in the "Nickel." Once he and another soldier were ordered to capture a prisoner who might talk during interrogation. They crawled up to a foxhole and were just settling in to wait, when suddenly a German came out. The German was surprised, and so were they. The German recovered first, took a grenade out of his pocket, threw it at my father and the other soldier, and calmly went on his way. Life is such a simple little thing, really.

How do you know all this? You said your parents didn't like to talk about themselves.

This is a story that my father told me. The German was probably convinced that he had killed the Russians. But my father survived, although his legs were shot through with shrapnel. Our soldiers dragged him out of there several hours later.

Across the front line?

You guessed it. The nearest hospital was in the city, and in order to get there, they had to drag him all the way across the Neva.

Everyone knew that this would be suicide, because every centimeter of that territory was being shot up. No commander would have issued such an order, of course. And nobody was volunteering. My father had already lost so much blood that it was clear he was going to die soon if they left him there.

Coincidentally, a soldier who happened to be an old neighbor from back home came across him. Without a word, he sized up the situation, hauled my father up onto his back, and carried him across the frozen Neva to the other side. They made an ideal target, and yet they survived. This neighbor dragged my father to the hospital, said goodbye, and went back to the front line. The fellow told my father that they wouldn't see each other again. Evidently he didn't believe he would survive in the "Nickel" and thought that my father didn't have much of a chance either.

Was he wrong?

Thank God, he was. My father managed to survive. He spent several months in the hospital. My mother found him there. She came to see him every day.

Mama herself was half dead. My father saw the shape she was in and began to give her his own food, hiding it from the nurses. To be sure, they caught on pretty quickly and put a stop to it. The doctors noticed that he was fainting from hunger. When they figured out why, they gave him a stern lecture and wouldn't let Mama in to see him for awhile. The upshot was that they both survived. Only my father's injuries left him with a lifelong limp.

And the neighbor?

The neighbor survived, too! After the blockade, he moved to another city. He and my father once met by chance in Leningrad twenty years later. Can you imagine?

quote:

Vera Putina (Russian: Вера Николаевна Путина; born 6 September 1926) is a woman who has since 1999 stated that Vladimir Putin ("Vova") is her son. The woman's claims contrast with Putin's official biography, which states that Putin's parents died before he became president. The Telegraph concluded that while the woman might be simply wrong or part of a public relations effort, the story "identifies the holes in the known story of Mr Putin's past". The official story is that Putin's parents were already in their forties when Putin was born, which leaves a gap of over fifteen years since the births of their previous sons, Oleg and Viktor, neither of whom survived childhood. Details of the first ten years of Putin's life are scarce in his autobiography, especially when compared with other world leaders."

Putina lives in the village of Metekhi, about 18 kilometers East of Gori, Georgia. Putina says that Putin's father is a Russian mechanic, Platon Privalov, who got Vera pregnant while he was married to another woman. A "Vladmir Putin" was registered at Metekhi school in 1959–1960. Records show that his stated nationality is Georgian. Putina married a Georgian soldier Giorgi Osepahvili. Her husband pressured her to abandon her son, Putin. In December 1960, she delivered "Vova" back to his grandparents in Russia. Putina believes that the St. Petersburg-based "parents" referred to in Putin's official biography adopted her son from his grandparents.

Through her contacts, she learned that Putin had become a KGB officer. In 1999 she spotted Putin in television. Putina says that Russian and Georgian people visited her village to pressure her to remain silent. A school teacher, who says she taught Putin, stated that she too had been threatened. Putina says she is ready to do DNA tests. Russian journalist Artyom Borovik's plane crash coincided with the documentary he was making about Putin's childhood, including a report about Vera Putina. Italian journalist Antonio Russo was reportedly also interested in Vera Putina before he was murdered.

Delthalaz posted:

Inceltown posted:

https://twitter.com/in_ternationale/status/1496535077987430400

Nonsense posted:

https://twitter.com/terrelljstarr/status/1496932683372548101?s=20

Azathoth posted:

clifford also frequently destroys distribution hubs with his antics. he is history's greatest monster

Nonsense posted:

https://twitter.com/terrelljstarr/status/1496932683372548101?s=20

more falafel please posted:

am i wrong or did the faction that became the current Ukrainian government in 2014 decide to take the swastika off their flag in like 2013

Inceltown posted:

Screenshot for posterity

Inceltown posted:

StashAugustine posted:

Actually Azov Battalion is merely supported by the government not literally the government! Also allegedly mostly fled to Poland by now lol

Oscar Wild posted:

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1496865420485169158?t=2mfRLnqSlcffSdQQOwlhxQ&s=19

I KNEW it! It was so obvious all the time

change my name posted:

https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1496988246190047239

Oscar Wild posted:

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1496865420485169158?t=2mfRLnqSlcffSdQQOwlhxQ&s=19

I KNEW it! It was so obvious all the time

Oscar Wild posted:

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1496865420485169158?t=2mfRLnqSlcffSdQQOwlhxQ&s=19

I KNEW it! It was so obvious all the time

Oscar Wild posted:

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1496865420485169158?t=2mfRLnqSlcffSdQQOwlhxQ&s=19

I KNEW it! It was so obvious all the time

Azathoth posted: