Maciej Piotrowski

@postsocialismus How is "critical mass" of Belarussian speakers doing? And they're technically not even in Russia, which, historically, fantastic at preserving the rights and cultures of subjugated nations. Yeah, Scandi\Balti nationalists, that's the real problem here. Man... Your onions. Amiss.

By all means revitalize Karelian and protect its heritage, but even in Finland 1% of Karelian speakers are children and lack access to primary education in Karelian. There's more critical mass within Russia to push for maintenance of distinct cultural-linguistic identity. 2/2

Could it be to do with white supremacist fantasies of the Finn and Balt nationalists who basically set the agenda of this 'umbrella' organization and who behind closed doors denigrate the 'non-white' indigenous groups? 1/2

Dear Twitter followers: my friend and colleague @panyiszabolcs is under attack by Viktor Orban’s camp for exposing how Hungary’s foreign minister conspires with Sergei Lavrov to promote pro-Russian politics not just in Hungary but other countries in Europe. Szabolcs brings receipts in the form of transcribed phone calls (see below). This comes at a pivotal time, with Hungary facing a national election in less than two weeks and Orban trailing far behind @magyarpeterMP. Support Szabolc’s journalism here: buymeacoffee.com/szabolcspanyi/…

No, I am not joyful about killing of Larijani, who likely masterminded killing of thousands of Iranian protesters in January. You know what I would be joyful about? If he was put in a fair trial in a democratic Iran. And you know what would even make me more joyful? If an officer slapped him once during the interrogation process and then that officer was put on trial himself and had to answer because in a rule-of-law, democratic country, you can't slap a prisoner. Even if he killed thousands of people. Call me delusional or holder of luxury beliefs but I won't give up on the quest for basic decency.

@fpl_tactician No interest in Gakpo?

Plan was to buy Wirtz this week but with the news he’s likely out, I’m wondering doing I buy Rayan and Dango?

@iycsts @Ukrainische Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz would be exactly what you're looking for. He was called the Emperor of Poetry... by other Nobel Prize winning poets. Also wrote prose, and translated, and taught at Berkeley.

@Ukrainische i like classical, introspective and philosophical literature. i’m also interested in reading non-fiction especially with regards to these kinds of authors!

would love to read more european books outside of russia, especially those that were historically oppressed. does anyone have recs of ukrainian, polish, baltic, hungarian, and other similar authors?

@ASPertierra Have you read Miłosz's Captive Mind? It's not a review of policy in a meaningful way, but a very good insight into the mindset of those in charge and implementing in the period right after WWII.

Tbh I would love to read a global history of socialist cultural policies during the Cold War. The shared hatred of the Beatles and, most bizarrely to me, Elvis as somehow symbols of 'bourgeois degeneracy' across different socialist countries would be especially interesting.

The famous Cuban poet Heberto Padilla began his political evolution when he visited the USSR in an official capacity in the early 1960s Seeing how Soviet officials in the culture ministry talked about cultural policy made him worried about similar policies being applied in Cuba

What’s fascinating about this -and I’m sure we’ll be getting an essay-long treatment of it in Quincy- is that it actually doesn’t really back up the “NATO expansion” theory at all. /1

@s33_us3rnam3 @pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion What do you mean by "pissing it away" and what is "it" as you mean it? I may regret genuinely asking. Oh, well.

@tesamedni @pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion This is so embarrassing. Y'all inherited one of the greatest historical gifts in the world and your happy to piss it away to Africans for internet points. Humiliating.

It was not a lie. And the fact that you’re upset about this but not about tens of thousands of Haitians being airdropped into a struggling white working class town…does not speak well of you.

@TophCoins @pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion High housing cost is not a problem where I am, or (I'm guessing here, as the town has been depopulating since 90's, since when, as I understand it, the jobs had been getting more scarce. Little to do with Haiti) in Springfield, Ohio. In neither place immigration is unfettered.

@tesamedni @pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion Our biggest problem is objectively low employment and high housing costs. How does unfettered immigration from the third world help those two problems?

@pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion No, it's not. Stop. "EMPATHIZE"... how woke of you. See, I don't need to, I talk to these people, they're my neighbours in my Sicilian town. Just as N.Afr. immigrants. There might be more than 10k here. Noone cares. Our biggest problem is a native who shouts at his wife all day.

@tesamedni @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion Everything I described is a documented fact. Answer me: are you able to ***empathize*** with the people who lived in Springfield OH when it happened? How would you feel if it happened to you? These are simple questions.

@pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion You are too deep to realise that you are doing exactly what you accuse me of doing. While doubling down on the lies and failing to realise real life consequences of said lies. You're really concerned about "driving up housing costs" in a small depopulating town? A grip. Get it.

Tend of thousands of Haitians dropped overnight, living 5-10 per apartment driving up housing costs, crashing cars because they can’t drive, and yes, making animals from the public park and local pets disappear. Do you have *zero* EmPaThY for people who find their lives completely overturned overnight by this kind of, yes, invasion? Can you not imagine how you would react if that was your town? (I bet you live in a nice upper-middle income town where the demographics are carefully curated and migrants safely kept at bay, makes it easier to virtue signal on the internet.)

@pegobry_en @j_brucestewart @Noahpinion "alien invader" ... "ethnic cleansing" ... and you ask others if they hear themselves? For your sake, I hope it's some drugs, that you can stop using.

@j_brucestewart @Noahpinion Do you hear yourself? You care about the "incredible angst" in the alien invader "community" but not the angst in the actual community of Springfield OH which was the victim of an attempted ethnic cleansing by their own government. Truly extraordinary levels of hate.

@dundereloise Find a good Indian restaurant. Experiment. Indian food has levels and even what I'd call textures of spiciness. Enjoy.

What's a good spicy food for someone just getting into spicy food

@MichaelVPina I remember watching this and thinking something just wasn't right, thanks for articulating what I felt perfectly, Michael.

watching in real time i couldn't believe amen did this. it's like the moment in a horror movie when someone thinks the killer is dead, exhales, and is immediately murdered

@zachlbaker Check what Nikola is doing tonight to see why it is your tweet that is dumb.

This is why the MVP convo is dumb… it’s not close

This deserves a serious answer, because I think Ihab is totally honest here. A serious answer isn't short, but hopefully it's interesting. If you don't read it, you'll save yourself another interminable round of Israeli-Palestinian wrangling. Hopefully Ihab will read it. This response is sad, Ihab, because you know what Hamas is, you know what it wants and what it's capable of, and you want Israelis to somehow pretend that none of the things you yourself know to be true are true. Most of the complaints you list here go back to Hamas. Gaza's borders are closed because of Hamas. Gaza has borders with both Egypt and Israel and managed to go to war with both during Hamas's rule. Israel doesn't "control" Gaza's electricity, it *provides* Gaza's electricity - because Hamas bent the entirety of the Gazan economy to build a tunnel system unprecedented in the history of war instead of a proper energy infrastructure. Gaza has natural gas reserves, something that never for a moment suggested to Hamas that maybe it should stop seeking endless war for a few years to develop that energy source and develop Gaza economically. It's depressing that Israel must provide Gaza with electricity, and not Gaza itself. But that part isn't Israel's fault. Gaza could have taken a very different path. The population registry question is similarly a function of Hamas. Israel won't work with Hamas, mainly because it wants to murder all our children. But nothing prevented Hamas from running its own population registry and coordinating it for travel purposes with, for example, Jordan or Egypt. Or, heck, from coordinating with the PA, which itself imposed sanctions on Gaza under Hamas rule. Even the PA. Hamas's refusal to actually run and build Gaza is the main cause of half this list. But there's a deeper problem with this answer. It doesn't actually address my point about the catastrophic effect of the Second Intifada and Second Lebanon War and other assorted violence from Hamas and its fellow travelers on the politics of ordinary Israelis. You accuse me of a "comforting illusion" of Palestinian rejection (I'll respond to that in a sec), but here's your comforting illusion: "Yes, Palestinians have made mistakes, and leadership failures have cost dearly." No, Ihab. The 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada weren't a "mistake" or a "leadership failure." It was the heart of it all, it was what Arafat always was. The bombings were popular, the discourse in the Palestinian street - discourse Palestinians expressed to my face on countless occasions and still say today in Arabic social media - was that the very fact that we were willing to withdraw for peace proved we weren't authentic inhabitants in the land and could be removed by violence. You know that's how they talk in actual Palestine, away from the coddled Westernized elites we usually read on Twitter. But you pretend the Second Intifada was some aberration of a failed leadership, and that peace would be available if only the Israelis weren't assholes. "Palestinians have never rejected a genuine peace deal. Even in 2008, Ehud Olmert himself admitted that the Palestinians never said “no.”" They never said no to Olmert, perhaps, but they also never said yes, or provided their own map for Israel to consider. That kind of non-answer can reasonably be interpreted as refusal. Someone who isn't refusing generally provides a counter-offer. No Palestinian leader ever provided that counteroffer, that Palestinian map, a specific delineation of the end of the conflict. No Palestinian leader ever had the courage to say, "this is the line, and after this line is drawn there are no more refugees, no demand to dismantle Israel or flood Israel with descendants or end Israel in any way. This is the end of war, and from now on we build new and better things." That is not a thing any Palestinian leader has ever offered. "And the story of 2000, endlessly recycled as proof of “rejectionism,” is far more complicated than Israel’s convenient myth — it wasn’t simply that Palestinians refused." Of course it's complicated. Also, the Palestinians refused. Arafat didn't just refuse Barak's specific suggestions (warning stations in the Jordan Valley or whathaveyou), he never offered a specific map for Barak to consider. It was always a tease waiting to be offered more. That's rejection. Pro-Palestinian scholars explain that his options were limited by Palestinian politics, pro-Israel ones that he never actually wanted peace. I don't know which is right, but it hardly matters. He couldn't accept anything being offered - and in Arabic explained that nothing he accepted would truly end the conflict in any case. But even this endless back and forth that Israelis and Palestinians have been doing for 30 years wasn't really my point. My point was that my little brother stood in the Ben Yehudah Market in central Jerusalem and watched a suicide bomber blow up. My point is that a friend of mine died in another bombing - and 20-year-old me, fresh from voting for Barak and a Palestinian state, had no explanation for that Palestinian response. I was willing to fight half of Israel to build a Palestine, and Palestine's only message to me - no Palestinian leader has ever actually spoken to the Israeli people in any serious way - was that I and everyone I love should be lying dead in the street. Fall back on your comforting narratives about Netanyahu's "schemes" for eternal occupation. Palestine's problem isn't the Israeli right, it's the collapse of the Israeli left, a collapse I witnessed, a collapsed that took place in my own heart and mind in 140 little increments of fire and blood, and then hundreds more little brutalities in the ensuing years. Until the goal of Palestinians on the ground stops being our eradication, none of the world's love and sympathy, none of the blatant antisemitism that swings into action for you at each war, none of the rage and horror and anger and marches will matter. No more comforting illusions. I accept that there's no peace without ending the military rule, without independence and freedom. Now where's the Palestinian political faction that can win Palestine over by accepting that I too deserve to be here?

@slwstr Ej, no. Zaraz "udaje".

@leonidragozin "...resembles Putin's Russia..." You seem to spend most of your time bemoaning "falling standards" in Europe, supposed (by Havryshko et consortes) rise of RW in Ukraine... and (besides false equivalence) very little on your homeland. Not a word on desinfo it puts out. Why?

How it works: You claim the elections are a civilizational choice between the West and Russia, you frame the opposition as Russian stooges. When you feel you are losing, you start suppressing the opposition and free speech. Then you drop the opposition from ballots and suppress the opposition vote, as they did in Moldova. At the most desperate moment, you annul the results of elections, as they did in Romania. And oops - you find yourself in what strikingly resembles Putin’s Russia. Czechia will remain at stage one, I hope.

Thread of the year.

@jud_czyta Znaczy, jak rozwiniesz 2, dostajesz 2-2,5?

@tesamedni Standard, zawsze są trzy kropki, które trzeba rozwijać. Za rozwinięcie są 4 punkty na 10.

Zaburzenia uwagi i trudność z czytaniem ze zrozumieniem to jedne z największych problemów dzieci w szkole obecnie. Klasy 8 pisały pierwsze w tym roku wypracowanie pod egzamin. Większość prac nie na temat. Piszą, że klasa zaprosiła, ale nie ma dlaczego. Albo nauczyciel zaprosił.