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That's one hell of a story – almost unbelievable, but you're trustworthy. I've had a comparable amount of thuggery and injustice happen to me in all of 2008- early 2022. (Well, plus a couple fights using knives, that were, honestly, easy to opt out of if not for bad temper). Months ago you've said «welcome to Europe», and I've already had worse law enforcement interactions here in Istanbul, borderline-lethal; maybe that's more an issue of culture clash. All said, it's an okay-ish city, a livable, if petty, tumor bursting out of Eastern Rome's fossils. I still think it'd have been better by this point, had we conquered it back then; but Brits had other plans with regards to Orthodox Christians and Ottomans.
It's true that mainstream Russian culture is atrocious (well, we've fixed the part with drab clothing, more or less). But is it even meaningfully Russian or anyone else's? It's another generic segment of disenchanted global squalor powered by racing rats squeezed between street hustling and institutionalized corruption, a shitty shallow pastiche of the West plus some uninspired marketable kitsch reified by tourist eyes; McDonalds and shaverma topped with lubok, klyukva and khokhloma. To me, the symbol of its true form is a gopnik in MARVEL t-shirt; they've switched over to those from Abibas knockoffs. There's more to be liked in the Baltics or say in Germany.
I can't feel that Germans or Balts are alive, though. Prosocial, content, competent last men, serious about all transient matters, wheels of culture busily spinning in the air, smug sense of moral, civilizational and racial superiority serving no point, detached from any lofty ambition. Anglos have more «soul»; they only need like 1 SD and two diplomas extra to come across as real as Russian randos from imageboards and group chats that I've collected as friends over my life, shards of what we were to be as a people.
Maybe that's just nationalist cope. After all, Estonians have made Disco Elysium.
So it goes. It amazes me, and depresses much more, that USSR could be inspiring to anyone, that this sort of sincerity and seriousness proved to be special. Our sort of «soul» is the crudest thing, sorely lacking in dimensionality. But it appears to be a real thing. And it's still suffocating to be surrounded by people who don't have it and only rarely feel the lack, while noticing all of our tangible shortcomings.
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