Chernobyl painted a vivid picture of a time and place, but it was fictionalized, sensationalized, too. Pripyat didn’t really exist under an oppressive green fog, and the Soviet Union of the day wasn’t the Stalinesque nightmare the show suggests.
By all means, enjoy the show, it’s awfully well-done. But I beg you to bear in mind that:
These are some of the lamest insults I’ve ever heard. You can’t even explain to someone how dumb they are, because you’ve already forgotten what they were.
Maybe ChatGPT should take Cheung’s job.
I’m sympathetic, I think media that can be borrowed, lent, sold and otherwise transferred is better. But I’ve given up on video games being that way years ago. I don’t have a “collection” of video games any more than I’d have a collection of used chewing gum.
The other side of that coin, though, is that I never pay more than $20 for a game. Almost everything I buy is even under $10. (I think the Orange Box was the last time I paid anything like a retail price for a game. And that was three games.) The games are ephemeral, they could stop working at any moment for any of a million different reasons, and I’d have no recourse. So I’m not going to pay crazy archival prices.
Even if we gave him the benefit of every doubt, we’d still be left with a situation where
“Put the president on experimental drugs” is completely bonkers. Never would have been contemplated in other administrations in my lifetime. Obviously, the simplest explanation is that the patient is someone else.
But it’s so much fun to speculate: Maybe someone in the king’s court is hoping to fill him up with so many drugs that he collapses.
It’s easy to imagine scenarios where something like this could be useful. Sometimes very, very useful. “Hey Google, I spent the last 20 minutes speaking to a police officer, be sure to keep and transcribe all that.”
But no one’s going to trust it (no one should trust it) because it’s offered by a big tech company. “Of course this new service is designed to be used against us,” we correctly assume.
Let us bear in mind what even the abstract points out, that less-healthy people were becoming noticeably more “conservative” even before COVID, even before the current president got elected the first time.
That is, people who felt they were getting the shaft were looking for something new and different, politically.
Which is part of how Fascism got its start in 20th century Europe, too.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that those Westerners moving to Russia aren’t terribly reflective, imaginative, or as plugged-in to world events as they might think they are.
I was explaining to a young person today that totalitarian societies have always portrayed themselves as safe, orderly, and free of crime, supposedly because of the iron grip their law enforcement has on the public. That has never been true, though. Totalitarian societies have always been full of corruption and grift, and have used the image of draconian, ruthless, theatrical, arbitrarily-arrived-at punishments as a cover story to distract the people from that reality.