Reinforced concrete shelters will be installed across the Kursk region, local Russian authorities announced Thursday as Ukraine keeps up its daring attack on Moscow’s territory.
“Today we began to install reinforced concrete shelters in Kursk. On my instructions, the Kursk city administration identified key points for placing concrete modular shelters in crowded places,” Aleksey Smirnov, Kursk’s acting governor, said in a statement.
Ukraine’s surprise cross-border incursion earlier this month caught the Russians on the hop, and Kyiv’s forces have expanded their offensive, capturing more towns and territory with little resistance.
And generally they want proof that one specific thing literally happened when that isn’t really the issue.
“Oh yeah? Quote Xi Jinping saying he doesn’t like being compared to Winnie the Pooh!”
… dunno if there’s a quote of it. but like… Winnie is one of the most heavily censored things in china.
Which is funny. Because Pooh is cute, and aside from being a bit daft, isn’t particularly offensive. Now… Erdogan has it bad. he Keeps having to have people arrested for being compared to gollum.
Right. That’s what I’m saying. They demand proof of something that you don’t need to bother proving because that specific thing does not matter.
Yeah because Winnie the Pooh is an American propaganda machine. Show me a quote of xi jumping saying that it is because he doesn’t like being compared to a cartoon bear!
(I’m cosplaying as a lemmy.ml)
Can’t be a big bad dictator while being compared to a silly cartoon bear. Compare Tim Walz to Winnie the Poo, and he’d probably run with it.
Damn, if this is China’s idea of heavily censored, they must have the most free and open society in the world.
We always have that video of Erdogan getting kicked in the nuts by that horse, at least
I’m gonna need a link on that.
You know. For, uhm, a study on internet censorship.
Also, uhm, anyone know a good AI to change Someone’s voice into a high pitched gollum voice….
…. Asking for a friend….
Got you
Oh that’s even better than I imagined.
Bro, there are people in a local groupchat that think the great leap forward was a good thing and are self-proclaimed history buffs obsessed with the years 1939-1945, specifically in Russia and China.
They harken back to it as a better time, not realizing the irony of it while being a queer American. It’s exquisitely painful to watch 💀
I mean the west was sterilizing and imprisoning gay people around that time. Communist countries tend to be way more progressive.
Neither was great, as written about by David K. Johnson in The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. That said, having read much about this time period and the history of the early gay rights movement in the US, I would pick the US any day of the week over the nonexistent gay rights movement in Russia and many other communist countries, who still give people like me the cold shoulder.
Still, forming a gay civil rights group in 1948 was a progressive step in the right direction (the Mattachine Society), and the leaders paved the way for the more well known gay rights movement in the 1970s. They walked so our ancestors could run.
Russia hasn’t been communist for almost 35 years.
There’s gay rights groups in communist countries too. They tend to take different forms though, due to different cultures and circumstances; you don’t have to form protection groups if you’re not in danger of getting hate-crime’d.
In China for instance, they’re more focused on gaining familial acceptance than government persecution. In Cuba, they had a referendum to enshrine LGBT+ rights in the constitution.
I always confront those people with “and what do you think would happen to YOU in such a place? History doesn’t think it will be good” but then they double down or make some mental gymnastic leap to why it’s okay.
Surely the leopards won’t eat THEIR face.