You are so funny
1 Like
Can someone give me a brief summary of what’s going on and why?
Tonight is going to be brutal.
Any word on the Chinese attacking Taiwan? Or will that more likely be in a few months time?
Should all Russian athletes & teams be immediately banned from all sporting events?
Why should they be allowed represent their Country on any field of play whilst the Russian army are in Ukraine?
Same goes for there Presidentship of the UN, how the fuck is that still allowed?
4 Likes
The Russian public should be embarrassed into taking action against their leadership.
700 brave people arrested today for protesting against their Armies invasion into their neighbours land.
They need to be treated as pariahs like SA during apartheid * exception being the team of us shamefully touring in 1981
2 Likes
Few years away yet I’d say. The soundings of the Chinese guy who was on C4 News last night were not encouraging at all though.
1 Like
The Eurovision say they are not throwing them out. Absolute joke. Then again it’s hardly a surprise given they allow Israel a platform to promote itself every year.
1 Like
They’re going to flood his Gmail account with penis enlargement ads.
10 Likes
Whilst their athletes are innocent of crimes it’s the flag they represent.
If Putin wants to lead aggression then let them play umongst themselves.
1 Like
One more thread today, and then I’m going to take a break and decompress for a while. This one’s about protests and Russian public opinion.
Per @OvdInfo, there have been ~1700 arrests at anti-war protests across Russia today. Given the propensity of these numbers to lag, the actual number is probably higher.
We don’t know how many people came out to protest. It may not have been very many, but it will likely have been 10-20 times the number who were arrested, at least.
Bear in mind that the Russian protest scene has been dormant since riot police more or less wiped the streets with Navalny supporters in the early months of 2021. After that, the opposition called off protests, out of concern for the physical welfare of their supporters.
Given the level of ambient repression, the fact that anyone is coming out at all is striking.
Striking as well is the fact that the riot police came out before the protesters did – especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but not only, according to reports.
And the police didn’t exactly behave themselves. At least one of my friends in Moscow was delivered to a police station unconscious, with a fractured skull.
Now, here’s what my research suggests about protest in general, and in Russian in particular: People are most likely to turn against the state when it presents an immediate and unavoidable threat to their ability to imagine a future better than the present.
When threats are diffuse, people find individualized ways of coping. When they are concentrated, they have no choice but to come together to seek a solution that helps everyone.
We also know that protests are driven by moral shock – when the state begins to do something that not only offends a person’s sense of right and wrong, but that alters their sense of what the state might do in the future. This can cause a panic and a ‘now-or-never’ response.
Without the ability to interview protesters, I cannot know what’s driving the mobilization in Russia right now, or how much it might grow. But we can form reasonable hypotheses.
We know that this war presents a concentrated threat, in the form of the damage it will do to ordinary Russians’ livelihoods for decades to come. So it is possible that some protesters are mobilizing to prevent their futures and those of their children from being foreclosed.
Indeed, that idea – that Putin has just robbed Russia of its future – is one of the most common refrains I’m seeing in anti-war posts on social media.
We also know that this war may cause a moral shock. Anecdotal evidence – and a bit of survey evidence – suggests that most Russians didn’t take the prospect of war seriously, and have thus been caught off guard.
While Russia has been to war before, Russians are mostly accustomed (like Americans or Brits) to seeing their bombs fall on far off places of which they know little (a category that includes, for most Russians, Chechnya). Ukraine, on the other hand, is both close and familiar.
Tens of millions of Russians have Ukrainian heritage or, indeed, were born there. They have family and friends there. The cities they are bombing are cities many of them have visited.
The violence in Ukraine coupled with the violence in the streets at home may – and I emphasize may – make many Russians very uncomfortable. It may suggest the potential of both sites of violence to escalate. That, too, may be a future many Russians will want to avoid.
Clearly, Putin will have thought about this. This was a risk everyone knew about going into this war – that’s why he had the riot police ready to go. Putin will have calculated that he’ll survive. He may well be right. He often is.
But not always.
1 Like
I think if they were kicked out of the Olympics, World Cup, UEFA club competitions, Eurovision etc., - ie. a total sporting and cultural boycott like South Africa, it would make a difference. It’s part of the reason why Israel takes Eurovision so seriously, and so has Russia itself. It’s a platform to sell these countries as being like anywhere else.
It’s the reason why Abu Dhabi and the Saudis do sportswashing. To fool people.
7 Likes
Is he the lad that gave ruud guillit an awful time of it ?
I’d have to Netscape that.
Them may as well just kill Putin altogether. Cut out the middle man
You are spot on with the above it needs to happen
2 Likes
Kicking the children of shithead oligarchs out of the private schools in the UK would turn the pressure up on Putin. There’s 2300 of them.
4 Likes
They need to Iran them. Banks are afraid to even send a bank transfer to an Iranian bank account for fear of the US.
But the Russian Web is deep.
Ze Germans showing their true colours at the minute. The Brits are up to their necks in it. And sure the US is easily bought