This blog has survived for 20 years, and this is A Good Thing™ by measures of modern web. Plenty of blogging platforms, plenty of discoveries, plenty of frustrations, the ups and the downs. But what was appropriate for a 20-years-old person is not necessarily the right thing for a 40-year-old.
What happens here? Maybe I will go back to writing in Russian too. Maybe not. Either way - wiping the slate clean is not something I aspire to. I don’t want to take most of my words back, as it might be cowardly - and the value of the pre-walled-gardens Internet (to me) is that it doesn’t forget. Or, at least, that folks are mindful that “what’s on the Internet is forever”.
I’ve also disabled Disqus on this website because I found its pricing a bit off, and all the obnoxious ads they place on the blog were quite appalling too. The comments have been archived and comments may return - just using a different toolkit.
Onwards!
]]>Like calling my relatives and sending those messages and not getting a response – did they make it through the blockades alright?
Like asking whether the relatives of my best friend managed to escape the shelling.
Like quite a few of my friends collecting the last possible dimes from their close ones to make the escape out of Russia.
Like a student getting beaten, humiliated and molested by police officers – not “secret police” officers, because if you can torture and belittle someone in the open, especially a woman: why bother making it a secret? In the town I grew up in.
Did I tell you that the proper Russian way of expropriation is either extortion or robbery, never theft? What use it is covering your traces if you can have it all just by force (or thuggish threat) of unabashed, naked violence?
So let’s set a few things straight, and I hope this lands properly.
The last 6 months (and yes, Russia is conducting a fascist colonial war of conquest in Ukraine for 6 months now) have been an absolute horror thrill ride, yet I could only imagine what it has been like for Andrii, for Zverok, for others I know and love. I am sorry we didn’t do what we had to do. I’m sorry Russians who don’t want to live in a backwards religious barbaric shithole society were not in sufficient numbers to have a civil war, to remove both the dictator and his supporters from where they always were. It would have been at least a 50/50 population civil war alright, more likely even 30/70 – yet it seems that it had to take place. Or it is inevitable in the near future. I hope and pray that the situation will improve, and I hope and pray the proper unfolding of this shitshow is going to happen in 8K ultra-zoom view of all the live TV the modern technological prowess has to offer.
Fascism (and more so: the late-Soviet boomer fascism, because late-Soviet boomers are significantly worse than Western boomers - just since I know them so much better) has no place in the XXI century. Its place is in that museum where they store deposed oppressor busts, to rot and patine forever. Or – ideally – in prison. But I’ll take the Târgoviște barracks too – for the most notorious ones.
Obviously – during times like these it is a bit hard to write either about corporate opportunists, about Ruby language proposals or “how our lib … is so much better than not having our lib …”. I hope I can find candor to speak about such things soon.
I hope. Слава Україні!
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