

To be fair there’s several ‘types’ of Chess, like Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, etc…, and it’s not uncommon for high-level players to specialize in some of them. But given that they didn’t know what a GM is they probably didn’t know that either.


To be fair there’s several ‘types’ of Chess, like Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, etc…, and it’s not uncommon for high-level players to specialize in some of them. But given that they didn’t know what a GM is they probably didn’t know that either.


I was not making any judgement about the socialists, nor was I only referring to that party.


They don’t play well with any leftist parties, not necessarily the socialists (who are iirc pretty center these days). LFI is quite abrasive.


why do we have these
It’s the LFI, it’s leftists who don’t play along well with other leftists (along with some other problematic traits).


Not anymore really, the Taiwanese government has abandoned claims to the mainland.


Model train building can be considered a bit weird, but it’s one of the most wholesome and welcoming communities you can find.
Sometimes I visit the subreddit for it and am reminded of what that site used to be. Genuine engagement, people just happy to show things off and providing really in depth feedback or tips when asked.


Not sure if he quit or was fired, but he updated his employment status with FUTO on LinkedIn.


Rossman doesn’t work for FUTO anymore. FUTO has done some weird shit and Rossman has made some missteps in the past, but at least for him his heart seems to be in the right place. I don’t think it’s in his nature to want to screw you over so to speak.


I live in the Netherlands. We have excellent pedestrian infrastructure, I can safely walk anywhere.
We also raise our kids explaining them to always look both ways, to never suddenly cross the road and never to assume a driver has actually seen you. It’s basic road safety, you so the same for crossing a bicycle path or railroad tracks.


Green Book maybe? It’s not really about modern-day racism as much as recent-history racism, but perhaps it helps to show what people had to deal with (and still do in many cases).


IMO it’s fine to wear dark, but be aware that drivers will have a harder time seeing you and you should be careful crossing the street.
Just don’t cross a road without looking and you should be good.


These attacks can happen through server impersonation as well. The actual cloud servers need not be compromised, just the user’s browser has to be. This attack can then leak passwords and allow malicious parties to even gain access on the actual cloud servers apparently.


That would make more sense if we also counted in base 12 in general, which we don’t.


If you look at just about any country anywhere, you’ll find that party membership does not really correlate with election success, but rather with more radical beliefs or activism. The national election results of the CPRF had been on a downward trend well before the war broke out as well. Their membership may have increased, but electorally they lost about 70% support. Even in wartime that’s hard to ignore.
I also don’t think you’ve been paying attention to what the propaganda efforts of the Kremlin have been putting out. As a result, you have cause and effect reversed. They’ve been boosting national pride through the “great history of Russia”, which inevitably means highlighting the Soviet Union and the great patriotic war. But the Soviet sympathies created through it are a side-effect of this.
This also explains why polling suggests that sympathies for the Soviet Union mostly (not fully) consist of cultural and military pride. Yet sympathies for the Soviet economic system is low in comparison. It’s also heavily influenced by current geopolitics. Ukraine used to be the most pro-communist member state, but these days the majority no longer regrets its dissolution. In East-Germany, there’s a significant chunk of people who believe life was better in the GDR, yet that effectively translates into nationalist support for parties like the AfD (who of course are fascist, not communist). In Hungary, a large majority believe they were better off under communism than they are now, yet a large majority of 70% supports the move to a market economy. Uzbeks believe the Soviet government better responded to their needs, yet only a tiny minority believe life was actually better in the USSR.
But this is all largely besides the original point, which is that the graphic showing the Soviet referendum results is used in a misleading narrative that suggests people did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve, as that wasn’t on the ballot and subsequent referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence and dissolution. And as election results in former Soviet states prove, support for a return to communism or a more socialist system is fairly low, despite a complicated nostalgia for the Soviet Union in some member states.


Party membership is a bad indicator for national popularity, as evidenced by the historically bad election result that followed the first article you linked.
The second article does not have anything to do with the popularity of the party.
The third article contradicts the sentiment you express in your own paragraph; you suggest the Russian government is taking advantage of rising Soviet sympathies, as if it’s “just happening”. But as your article explains, those Soviet sympathies are being expressly fuelled and created by the Russian government, as part of their propaganda efforts to promote the great patriotic war (which Putin now claims they’re in another one of course, fighting the west). It’s artificial, not natural.


CPRF support rising rapidly? You must live in a fantasy world. Their electoral results have rarely been worse, their 2024 presidential election candidate receiving a mere 4% of the vote (a record low for the party).


Protests were already widespread in the Union. Several member states had already declared nominal independence from Moscow. Gorbachev was doing damage control and trying his best to keep the Union from fracturing further. Elections in member republics saw huge rises in popularity for noncommunist parties.
The referendum was an attempt to gain the political momentum required for reform, in an ultimate effort to keep the Union together. It was essentially a kind of propaganda attempt to display large support for the reformed Union, made possible because dissolution was not on the ballot.
There was widespread civil discontent before the referendum. Elections saw noncommunists rise to power and several member states declared independence. Then I am somehow to believe that the population first swung all the way back to “actually the Soviet Union is great and we don’t want to leave it” and back to “we should leave the Soviet Union” in a matter of mere months? That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which you don’t have. The truth is far simpler: at every point once the civil unrest started, the population voted in favour of less Soviet Union and for more independence, and not the other way around.
My point regarding the phrasing of post-Soviet polling is that the wording drastically changes the outcome. Sure, people aren’t happy about how the 90s turned out and they feel they’re not part of a superpower anymore. They’re not happy with being screwed over by western nations. They say those things were better under the Soviet Union. But ask them if they would go back to such a Union, and suddenly support evaporates. And in several former member states even the first few questions don’t find much Soviet sympathies (eg the Baltics). They want to live in a stronger nation, akin to the Soviet Union, but they do not want to go back to what once was. It isn’t a simple case of “boy we sure had it good”, that does a huge disservice to the diverse and complicated opinions of the Union.


such as in the US Empire, where within a single month sentiment on Israel flipped from overwhelmingly positive to majority negative.
It didn’t go from +90% to -90%. That’s what I mean with the huge ‘swing’ seen here. Negative attitudes on Israel went from 42% to 53% in 3 years time. Yet this supposed “total reversal of opinion” happened in months? Nonsense of course. Remember, the Soviet referendum did not have “dissolution” as an option. People picked the option closest to it.
the large majority of people in post-soviet countries feel worse off and/or regret its fall
This is irrelevant to the false notion that the Soviet Union dissolved against what the people wanted at the time, which that graphic is often used to misleadingly suggest.
Even then, opinion polling on the subject is highly unreliable. Even the same pollster slightly rephrasing the question nets wildly different results. In the Baltics opinion is pretty consistent that the fall of the USSR was a good thing. But Belarusians tend to disagree with that. But when Belarusians are asked if they prefer to follow a Soviet system or a western democratic system, they choose the latter. And when another pollster asks them again in the same year, opinions flip again.
There’s certainly a strong sentimental nostalgia towards the Union, though not in all former member states. Yet it seems unlikely the population would be willing to vote it back into existence.
As if these are the only two options lmao