Joy

But no. Russians are human. Nobody forces them to murder 84 year old gradmas and their goats. Or shoot random civilians for fun. They choose to do it. It's their culture. It's what Pushkin, Lermontov and Dostoyevsky taught them to be proud of and at no point was there ever a conversation that this is wrong actually. Instead the whole world has picked that culture up with outright orientalist fascination and zero actual analysis.

It's funny how so many people in the West clutch their pearls and scream that those bad nasty Ukrainians want them to stop reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, when in reality all we ask is to actually THINK about what you are reading.

About how in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, the main character commits murder and we're then supposed to sympathise with him because he suffers a lot while trying to avoid punishment for it. At no point does he come to the conclusion that there is inherent value to a human life and taking it is wrong. His suffering alone lifts the blame off him, but he never feels guilt for what he did.

Same ideas are then perpetuated in The Idiot. It doesn't matter how much harm you do to others. If your life is shitty, you are automatically an uwu bean, and the harm you cause doesn't matter.

In Tolstoy's War and Peace, the main "good" characters we are supposed to admire slavishly worship the tsar. Any shred of personal dignity, an aristocrat's honour that we see in, like, French novels, in that regard is seen as bad and wrong. Another scene depicts them catching a live wolf during a hunt and proceeding to just pretty much torture it for no reason. Just because they want to feel stronger than someone else. By abusing those who are in a weaker position.

Then there is Pushkin with his constant glorification of russia's brutal imperialist conquests. And Lermontov with the same, but with additional focus on rape as a part of them.

This is russian culture. Even those in russia who haven't read any of this (except for maybe learning some of the tamer Pushkin or Lermontov poems at school) are still raised within this value system, which has never been re-evaluated at any point by them, and is blindly fetishized in the rest of the world.

Post-colonial Algerian architecture (Algiers and Constantine):

Mozabite architecture (from Ghardaia, Algeria):

MAGA is so desperate.

rival setters by day, camboys crushing on each other by night 💘

Vincent….Vince….Vin…..Vinnie~💚