Life is Dada. Life is art. The meaning of life can be summed up in paintings, photographs, musics, musings, theatre, dance, and a myriad mosaic of people just waiting to be.
With his war in Ukraine going badly, he may soon face another quagmire in Chechnya.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has a lot to worry about these days. What he originally planned as a quick regime-change operation in Ukraine has now gone on longer than the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany, and Kyiv is increasingly bringing the war to the Russian heartland. (On June 3, guests at Putin’s showcase international forum in St. Petersburg awoke to the sight of blazing fires from Ukrainian drones.) The Russian economy is showing serious signs of strain. And even China, Putin’s most important friend and patron, has shown that it’s not willing to give Moscow unlimited support.
But there’s another problem brewing in the background—one that could produce serious instability at a time when Putin can least afford it. The Kremlin is confronting a potentially explosive succession crisis in Chechnya, the North Caucasus republic that has a long history of generating turmoil entirely out of proportion to its tiny size. The problem: Chechnya’s all-powerful leader, President Ramzan Kadyrov, 49, is suffering from a serious illness, probably terminal, that could remove him from the scene at any moment.
Kadyrov’s favored successor, his 18-year-old son Adam, is too young to assume the throne. Putin could try to keep the Kadyrov family in power by allowing Adam to exercise nominal control under the guidance of a trusted ally or even a regent from Moscow. But such a solution could turn out to be harder than it looks. Ramzan’s harsh rule over the past 22 years—prompting some to dub him the Kim Jong Il of the Caucasus—has left behind countless grievances in a clan-based culture with deeply ingrained blood feud traditions. He has also driven many of his rivals into exile, where they have been patiently waiting to even the score.
And over the past four years, another complicating factor has joined the mix: the war in Ukraine, where Chechens are fighting on both sides. The Ukrainians, who officially recognized Chechen independence from Russia in 2022, have been doing everything in their power to embolden the opposition to Kadyrov—knowing full well that sparking a new war in the republic would cause a massive drain on Russian resources at a time when Putin is already facing a dangerous new phase in his war on Kyiv.
The Ukrainians remember something that many Westerners have forgotten. Putin rose to the presidency on the back of his reputation as a ruthless suppressor of Chechen rebels in the late 1990s.
The ex-KGB man boosted his popularity with Russian voters by promising to pursue Chechen separatists without mercy—“if we catch them in the toilet, excuse me, we will wipe them out in the shithouse,” as he once famously put it. In reality, he combined that tough-guy approach with pragmatic outreach to one of the leaders of the resistance movement: Akhmad Kadyrov, who served for six years as the republic’s top Muslim religious official.
Kadyrov had fought on the rebel side during the first Chechen revolt from 1991 to 1994, when Chechen nationalists took advantage of the weakness of the central government under then-President Boris Yeltsin. Chechen insurgents fought the Russian army to a standstill in a brutal conflict and declared de facto independence that lasted until 1999, when the Second Chechen War broke out.
Then-Prime Minister Putin took a hard-line course against the rebels on the battlefield. The Russians’ indiscriminate tactics, which killed countless civilians, previewed their brutality in their war on Ukraine. At the same time, Putin made overtures to Kadyrov, who had come to oppose the radical jihadis who were coming to dominate the independence movement. He and Putin gradually worked out a deal. If Kadyrov and allied clans could suppress the insurgency and recognize the Kremlin’s sovereignty, then Putin would allow the new ruler to run the place as he saw fit—an autonomy no other Russian province enjoys. When Akhmat Kadyrov was blown up by a bomb in 2004, power passed to his son Ramzan—who has kept a tight grip on it ever since.
Ramzan Kadyrov has managed to pacify his notoriously fractious kingdom through unremitting brutality. Human rights groups have accused him of torturing, killing, and abducting his critics (including journalists) and of deploying collective punishment against the families of his opponents. The United States, the European Union, and Britain have sanctioned him for overseeing the abuse and murder of LGBTQ+ people.
Most strikingly, Kadyrov has imposed an ultraconservative regime of sharia law, including the promotion of polygamy, which is outlawed in the rest of the Russian Federation. Putin might well have taken offense at this crass violation of his carefully cultivated image of a Christian traditionalist; instead, he has showered the Chechen dictator with accolades and cash. The Kremlin transfers $3.8 billion to the republic each year, making up around 92 percent of its total budget.
This amounts to a giant slush fund for Kadyrov that he wields according to his personal whim. Aside from financing his lavish personal lifestyle, he’s used it to build up his own security forces—totaling 33,000 in all and loyal solely to him. They could become a major factor in any post-Kadyrov transition. He’s dispatched many of them to bolster the Russian war effort in Ukraine—though by most accounts they have turned out to be more effective at posting videos of themselves than taking part in combat.
Indeed, recent statistics show that Chechnya has suffered the lowest war casualty rate of any province in the Russian Federation—which, said University of Texas professor Michael P. Dennis, shows just how much slack Putin is willing to give his minion. Dennis noted that Putin has demurred from criticizing even the most outrageous of Kadyrov’s moves, such as the appointment last year of his teenage son Adam as the head of the Chechen Security Council. Putin has also refrained from auditioning potential candidates for Kadyrov’s job.
These are striking omissions. Putin is perfectly happy to publicly berate or summarily fire other regional leaders when he sees fit—but he clearly regards the Kadyrov problem as one to be handled with delicacy. Ramzan Kadyrov himself is clearly worried about what comes after. His moves to appoint his children to high positions despite their obvious unpreparedness suggests that he’s in a hurry to shore up power for his heirs while he still can. In recent years, he’s also made a concerted effort to marry his own children to representatives of other leading clans, another move designed to safeguard his legacy for his progeny. (Not to mention their personal safety—Chechen disagreements can have a tendency to get nasty in a hurry).
Nor has Ramzan Kadyrov stopped there. Over the years, he has cultivated close ties to a number of potentates in the Islamic world— his most notable friend being Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates. It turns out that this charm offensive goes beyond merely burnishing Kadyrov’s Islamic credentials. He’s also parked vast sums of money in the UAE and encouraged members of his clan to invest heavily in the Emirati real estate market. One of his nephews has already applied to obtain Emirati citizenship—and others appear likely to follow. Were the Kremlin to topple Kadyrov from power, he’s already got a safe haven well-prepared. If he dies before the succession is secured, his family will know where to go.
It is hard to imagine that anyone in the Kremlin harbors the illusion that a post-Kadyrov transition can be smoothly managed. Recall that Ramzan Kadyrov, after so many years of his father’s unchallenged rule, needed at least five years to subdue his enemies after he came to power—even though his father had thoroughly prepared the way. In 2008, four years after Ramzan Kadyrov took the throne, his troops fought a gun battle with guerillas loyal to warlord Sulim Yamadayev, one of the Kadyrovs’ sworn enemies, that left 18 people dead. A year later, Yamadayev was shot dead in a Dubai parking garage.
The Kremlin knows this history well. Its Caucasus experts are undoubtedly working overtime on post-Kadyrov contingency plans. For now, though, one thing is for sure: The potential for serious volatility in Putin’s Russia is growing by the day.
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One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism
That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.
Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.
I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.
There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.
The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.
(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)
There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.
“When I speak of Indigenous peoples surviving an apocalypse, I’m not speaking metaphorically. The colonization of the Americas represents the largest genocide in human history. Indigenous populations declined by an estimated 90% in the century following European contact, which was about 1/5 of the world’s population at the time. This over just a one-hundred-year period. Entire civilizations vanished. Languages died. Sacred sites were destroyed. After that culturally genocidal policies were enacted like banning religious ceremonies and children being stolen and forced into boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian, save the child.””
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I'm imagining a world where RPGMaker somehow made it as the de facto codebase for software and you have to navigate your banking app by walking around in a huge room full of NPCs named "make deposit" and "make withdrawal" etc and there's loud as fuck stock music playing
By Benjamin Njoku The 12th edition of the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards delivered yet another successful outing, one that continues to
The 12th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards (AMVCA) took place on Saturday, May 9, 2026, at Eko Hotels and Suites in Lagos, Nigeria. The star-studded event celebrated excellence in African film and television across 32 categories, with "My Father’s Shadow" emerging as the night's top winner.
The Red Carpet: The 2026 edition focused heavily on themes of honoring craft and celebrating culture. Stars like Toyin Abraham, Osas Ighodaro, and Nana Akua Addo delivered highly talked-about, avant-garde fashion moments.
Shoutout to the people who grew up in a house where being gay or trans was just never talked about.
Shoutout to the people whose parents support lgbt rights but never told their kids until they were in their teens or twenties because they said it was “difficult to explain to children”.
Shoutout to the people whose religious communities came out in support just a little too late.
Shoutout to everyone afraid to come out just because they know they’ll be safe physically but they don’t know how everything will change socially.
Shoutout to everyone whose internalized homophobia that they’re trying to overcome came from subtle cues and not explicit statements.
Shoutout to the in betweeners. The pain you felt is real.
Image is black text on a white background, image text reads: Millennials watched their parents lose everything in 2008. Then got handed $100K in student debt. Then got called entitled for wanting a living wage. Then survived a pandemic in our prime years. Then got priced out of every neighborhood we grew up in. And y’all really wonder why we’re not okay? We’ve been in survival mode for 20 years straight and nobody even noticed.
End image transcription. Attribution and time/date info have been cropped out of shot: an X-twitter post by Maryam @hell_line0, 12:38 pm April 5th 2026.
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autism tests are so funny. I'm extremely literal most of the time, but people don't tell me that generally, so I'm inclined to answer disagree. because I'm taking the statement too literally
“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”
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I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while they’re growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think they’ll get bulky as though bulking isn’t a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density 🥀
if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like you’re insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like “girls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]” nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old
the first osprey is the father, the one that comes later is the mother.
ospreys are not eagles, they're ospreys
ospreys only eat fish, that's why they don't register this starling as possible food
the starling got home safely
the starling was not trying to eat the eggs, it was mostly curious and you can see it trying to hop under the osprey every time the osprey tries to sit down again--this is because the starling is still a baby and has the instinct to get under an adult for warmth, even though it mostly has its feathers. this scares the osprey because that is a Foreign Creature near its eggs.
at the end of the video you can see the ospreys starting to turn the eggs. birds do this so the yolk and/or embryo don't stick to the shell of the egg, which is bad for the egg's health.
ospreys have eyes adapted to seeing beneath the surface of the water!
