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Neruz
Jul 23, 2012

A paragon of manliness
I dunno; losing a farm that has been in your family for generations is A Pretty Big Deal, or at least was.

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GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?

Neruz posted:

I dunno; losing a farm that has been in your family for generations is A Pretty Big Deal, or at least was.

Yes. But exhibit A on "why the Nazis were better"? I mean maybe the informant just didn't know about all the Jewish property the Nazis seized but I have a hard time not side-eyeing it when someone's first indication that this brutal regime is worse than the goddamn Nazis is "no respect for property rights" rather than "killed many more people" or "cast a much wider net of bigoted exclusion from the definition of human."

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
Recollections work like that. Moral concepts are nice and all but it's not going to hit you in its entirety. Losing all you have, that stays with you.

Thesaya
May 17, 2011

I am a Plant.
Also, the article was specifically about this one woman's experience in Slovakia. It is quite subjective, but at least it isn't presented as being anything else than that.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
Ah, but you see, It's not "killing and taking property of the Jews vs. taking property", it's "killing and taking property from Jews vs. killing and taking property". Plus, we had time to see what the Soviets would do. For example, Nazis stayed in Lithuania for 2 years. The Soviets for 50. 10 of those early years had a bloody partisan war going. Some of the earlier years had Soviets showing the best and finest into animal cars and shipping people off to Siberia. Plus, the Soviets very happy to "burgeois-out" the rich people/big farm have-rs (hey, guess what's important in an agricultural country?), and torture intellectuals, priests and whoever else was suspected to be connected to partisan movements.

The only upsides about Soviets is that their plan of to destroy Lithuanians was more about killing us culturally than actually killing all of us.

Neruz
Jul 23, 2012

A paragon of manliness
The only real upside to the Soviets is that they weren't insane, unfortunately that was also a significant downside in the long run.

Of course the fact that Putin appears to have gone to the Stalin school of governance isn't helping in the present either, seriously Putin stop killing your political rivals this is getting ridiculous.

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all
Putin took over that investigation himself. He'll surely bring the political agitators, who are trying to destabilize Russia by making it look like Putin is killing any potential rivals, to justice any day now.

Neruz
Jul 23, 2012

A paragon of manliness
Part of me is actually impressed by the sheer gall Putin shows, he's not fooling anyone but he still keeps pretending all those deaths are accidents.

We believe you Putin, definitely.

FinalGamer
Aug 30, 2012

So the mystic script says.

Neruz posted:

Part of me is actually impressed by the sheer gall Putin shows, he's not fooling anyone but he still keeps pretending all those deaths are accidents.

We believe you Putin, definitely.
I'm pretty sure he believes his people are definitely THAT stupid to not think worse of him and knows anyone smart enough to see through him are too frightened to speak out against him. And he knows also no one outside of Russia will dare come at him for fear of causing a conflict.

What do you expect from a guy who rigged the Winter Olympics to be in Sochi, despite NOTHING being relevant in Sochi other than it's on the border of his enemies so he could be like "LOOK

LOOK HOW MUCH MONEY I CAN SPEND YOU ARE loving NOTHING you worthless degenerates :smug:"

Ignoring the fact that he just literally hired a big shell with nothing in it except burning hot taps and electrical wiring not seen since Home Improvement.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
I was going to say the housing conditions in Sochi were just barely this side of "it would be a war crime to force someone to live like this".

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Neruz posted:

Part of me is actually impressed by the sheer gall Putin shows, he's not fooling anyone but he still keeps pretending all those deaths are accidents.

We believe you Putin, definitely.

From all the time I've been spending in the Eastern Europe thread, the reason Putin can get away with so much is because Russia is very much under the thumb of a major propaganda machine. Remember life back in early 2000s America, where we willingly elected a president as awful as George W. Bush for a second time and many people in the country gleefully supported invading two foreign nations because we were still terrified by 9/11 to the point where blatant lies about Saddam Hussein being ready to nuke us were eaten up without question? Where the government was able to introduce such awful things as the PATRIOT Act and put innocent people in torture-filled prison camps because of "public safety"? Where as long as the government said that the guys in Guantanamo really were terrorists and that waterboarding "doesn't count", a lot of normal people were cool with it for the "greater good"? Or even today, where American police can repeatedly gun down unarmed black and Hispanic people or smash their heads against the curb on false accusations of a fake ID and the media just needs to say that the victim was "going for the gun" or "too tough to take down without killing him because he was so big and coming right for our proud hero officer" or "He came from a broken home and once stole a pack of cigarettes from 7-11 so he was clearly a hardened criminal and it was a good thing that we shot him before he hurt someone" and a lot of people will buy it?

Modern day Russia is not unlike that. Approval of Putin is surprisingly high and the public perception of the many problems Russia faces is that they're caused by outside forces like NATO/capitalism, Jews, criminals, and the gay Nazi thugs of Ukraine ("Homonazi" is a running gag in the thread but sadly based in some real perceptions in Russia of gays and the reality of the kinda awful Ukrainian government). He's a pretty clear-cut wannabe dictator and sociopathic KGB rear end in a top hat from an outside perspective, but he's allowed just enough freedom and displayed just enough public kindness to his people that a lot of them don't really question his leadership when the propaganda just finds new ways to blame outsiders for everything going wrong. You can't just pop Putin in the back of the head and install a new, nicer president because a good portion of the Russian population honestly believes the bullshit.

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 23, 2015

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Don't forget a lot of legitimately bad poo poo went down under the Yeltsin government and the rise of the Oligarchs and the mafia. The sudden privatization of so much hurt a lot of Russians who were used to surviving in the old system, which had entirely different sorts of rules. Scared people who are confused and having economic difficulties are to dictators and far right movements what stagnant pools of water are to mosquitoes.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
Still doesn't excuse celebrating every Olympics with an invasion.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

anilEhilated posted:

Still doesn't excuse celebrating every Olympics with an invasion.

Obviously not. More that it's an explanation for why they're back to a crazy dictator shithead. I swear there's something about Russia that makes it so that at every juncture in history, if things could go well, they automatically go bad.

BgRdMchne
Oct 31, 2011

Putin's gearing up to invade Lithuania again to make a land connection to Kaliningrad like he's doing in Ukraine to make a bridge to Sevastopol. He just threatened to nuke their warships if they joined in on the NATO nuke shield. He's really interested in connecting the major Black Sea and Baltic Sea ports to the motherland right now.

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all
So, who's ready for the World War Reunion Tour? It'll be just like old times.

FinalGamer
Aug 30, 2012

So the mystic script says.

BgRdMchne posted:

Putin's gearing up to invade Lithuania again to make a land connection to Kaliningrad like he's doing in Ukraine to make a bridge to Sevastopol. He just threatened to nuke their warships if they joined in on the NATO nuke shield. He's really interested in connecting the major Black Sea and Baltic Sea ports to the motherland right now.
I...I'm not sure if YOU'VE been playing too much Command & Conquer or if Putin has.

JackNapier
Jun 20, 2014

Neruz posted:

That said even by war standards the First and Second World Wars were loving nightmarish, which is saying something.

I can say this from Familial experience, World War 2 was a literal hell on earth, My family had members on both sides, Allied and Axis, and it was an honest to god living hell, it wasn't as bad for the part of the family that had been on the Allied end, but I almost didn't exist over Hitler's mass insanity of thinking he was invincible, my great grandfather was part of the suicide march Hitler launched into Stalingrad, from what my grandmother told me, He barely made it back to Germany, and after that, he was a completely different person, the World Wars were the worst wars we've ever seen and I hope to god we never see something like them again

Lazyfire
Feb 4, 2006

God saves. Satan Invests

I'm planning on shutting down this thread in the next week or so, but if you are interested in talking about hosed up backstabbing neo-feudal politics you can talk about Russia's Mordor's political system in the LP I'm doing of Shadow of Mordor for now.

zxqv8
Oct 21, 2010

Did somebody call about a Ravager problem?
Thanks for the link. I quite enjoy your LP's and I've seen that's supposed to be quite a good game!

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Lazyfire
Feb 4, 2006

God saves. Satan Invests

Ah, jesus christ this thing is still open. Truth be told I completely forgot until someone asked how to archive threads in the Sandcastle.

I didn't realize what a loving behemoth this thing was, 60 pages would be like the combined page count for any three of my other LPs to this point and somehow the thread went gold which was a surprise to me. I think that speaks more to how excellent the game was rather than how I did as a commentator, it really was one of the best games of 2014 and I have stupid high hopes for the Old Blood when it comes out at the end of May.

Thanks for watching, everyone.

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