Update on Mother Russia’s (You Have No) Human Rights Front (NSFW)
As Dubya’s approval ratings demonstrated, nothing consolidates the political status of an underperforming Leader like having all the media outfits shriek “OMG look, over there — THE ENEMY!!” Even, or especially, when the propaganda can be aimed at The Enemy Within. Guess Putin’s feeling a little underappreciated recently…
Dan Savage embeds a “new Russian anti-gay propaganda video”, Gays and Lesbians Adopt Children in Order to Rape Them:
… Anti-gay propaganda attacking gay parents lays the groundwork for passage a yet another anti-gay law in Russia, one that would rip children from the homes of their gay or lesbian parents and place them in notoriously awful Russian orphanages. (“Of course [a lesbian parent] should definitely be deprived of her rights to the child,” Alexei Zhuravlev, deputy of the Russian Duma, said in an interview. “Homosexuals must not raise children. They corrupt them. They do them much more harm than if the child were in an orphanage. I am deeply convinced of this.”)…
Kat Stoeffel, in NYMag:
Incarcerated Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova kicked off a hunger strike today, protesting the slaverylike conditions and human-rights violations at Penal Colony No. 14 in Mordovia, where she has been held for a year. In an open letter published in the Guardian today, Tolokonnikova writes that her brigade in the sewing shop (which manufactures police uniforms) works sixteen to seventeen hours a day (the legal limit is eight), seven days a week, to meet production quotas, which were increased by 50 percent two weeks ago, despite defective machinery….
“I will [strike] until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle ejected from the realm of justice for the purpose of stoking the production of the sewing industry; until they start treating us like humans,” she wrote.
Bet Putin wins the Iowa straw vote. He knows how to appeal to real Americans.
@Groucho48: LMAO. Win.
I wonder how our friend Snowden is doing. Enjoying his freedom, I presume.
It was hard for me to say to my parents “Pussy Riot.” I think their music sucks, but I was talking to them about what was done to these women. Case in point here. I read the entire letter ….
She isn’t in jail which would be bad enough, she is in a prison camp.
A (straight, white, male, liberaltarian) friend of mine was kind enough to point out that because Putin is sheltering Snowden, none of this actually counts, because that means Russia is a country where truly men are free or something.
Now I’m looking forward to reading what RT has to tell me about the human rights crisis in US jails on my ‘radical’ friends’ feeds. What a stupid fucking world we live in.
Well, no wonder Putin is so popular with Rethuglicans. He gets to treat labor the way the Rethuglicans think they should be treated.
Any of you homos touch my stuff and I’ll kill ya……………. You queers, and your ridiculous expectations of equal rights, as if you’re some type of human beings.
It is a choice, pure and simple. I remember when I chose. Back in like 4th or 5th grade I didn’t like girls at all,in fact I was pretty sure they had cooties. Then, eventually, I chose to like them, and except for a few periods in my life when I was pretty certain all women were bitches, (which still didn’t deter me from wanting to see them naked, and touch their naughty bits) I have chosen to continue to like them.
@moderateindy: I’M NOT TOUCHING YOUR STUFF!!! I’M NOT TOUCHING YOUR STUFF!!!
(waves finger just above stuff)
@Richard: Heh. U funnee.
Has “civil liberties” columnist Glenn Greenwald ever commented on the situation in Russia, even before his present meal ticket Snowden got there?
Speaking of RT, Assange hosts a program on it.
Well, obviously, she’s still being all militant forming a brigade and all.
@Richard: Hah. Like that matters to him. I don’t know what the ax to grind is for him, but really, that’s all it is. I keep wanting to believe these guys are really about freedom, but no.
@ruemara:
What could POSSIBLY compel you to think such a thing? What ONE freedom have they worked tirelessly to ensure ever?
@Tommy:
I take a certain pleasure in those awkward moments with my parents and kids, much to all of their dismay. I found the key is to make it as completely unremarkable as possible when you say it, in order to maximize the awkwardness gradient between you. They’re awkward, and you present as if it’s not at all awkward, and that disparity makes it even more awkward as they try and understand why you don’t find it awkward and you get this awkward feedback loop going which you can sustain through an entire Thanksgiving dinner with practice.
Even better is when you can serve merely as the catalyst and driver for it, maximizing the awkwardness between kids and grandparents, distracting both and being able to stay back giggling through it all.
Something my departed grandmother taught me when she once broke up a heated family argument during Thanksgiving by (with the appearance of obliviousness that an 70 year old woman can pull off) telling a tale of a trip to Africa and commenting on the remarkable size of a rhinoceros’s erect penîs, which you could easily appreciate even at long distance. She later confided in me that she had saved that story for just such an emergency. I warned her that I now wanted to start family fights just to learn what other good stuff she had stashed in the emergency story box.
FYWP Moderation!
@Yatsuno:
Weed. I think the whole movement is just a ruse to lower the price of weed, because liberty.
Donovan’s probably attempting to burn the white smoke for Putin I at this very minute.
@👾 Martin: Tish pshaw.There was an article in the Seattle Times about “finding a bank to process Pot Revenue.” That is hilarious considering decades of laundering Cocaine/Heroin/Et Al. money.
Nothing like the old standby of “It’s not Fascism because we don’t call it fascism.”
With the Internet and all the info ‘out’ there about how untrue all that BS is,; are the Russian people so conservative that it will succeed? If so for how long, as for all intents and purposes it is a western(ised) country after all,
I have relatives who adopted two children from a Russian orphanage. They were horrified by the condition of the place, and the general malaise of the all the kids and staff members. Russia made them show up, meet up, and then leave. Then they had to come back maybe a month or so later. Said they had to really brace themselves for the 2nd visit because of the overall horror show.
They’re a well off family who can afford anything. The kids bumped into trouble a few years on with adjusting. One of the kids not doing well. They’re thinking of placing this kid into foster care because there’s apparently nothing left to do, which stuns me.
But I’ve heard with astonishment other stories like this about kids from Russian orphanages.
Russia’s a far ranging place with loads of people. I just wonder what the future will look like with a country having such a problem as this.
1. What does RT stand for?
2. Does this mean that the Teapublicans are A OK with communism now?
Harper’s has a good article this month that touches on the shit hole that the Russian orphanages are and the corrupt system that depends on them.
@Groucho48:
WIN!!!
Why the NSFW? “Pussy Riot” has been printed in family publications all across this great land.
@karen: Russia Times, RT.com.
It and Al-Jazzera are the only places you can see an American progressive on TV.
@J.Ty: Well, yeah, the men are free. If they’re straight men. The women are not. Nor are gay men. That’s the whole point. Russia is quite the patriarchy.