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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Friday Evening Open Thread: Return of the (Ex)-Russian Rebels

Friday Evening Open Thread: Return of the (Ex)-Russian Rebels

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Okay, listening to their accents on the YouTube clip, at least *one* Russian rebel. Given the current crop of Texan politicos, they’ve maybe got an argument:

… The group was able to pose for a photo with the banner, with their fists held high and masks covering their faces, though it’s not clear how long it remained. In a press release, they said the “gopnik” tracksuits and green scarves they wore were popularized in Latin America during protests for reproductive rights.

The masked protesters also filmed a YouTube video capturing the moment. “We believe that every person with a womb has a f—king right to decide what to do with their own body,” one protester said in the video. “Bodily sovereignty for all,” adds another.

“My body, my choice,” says another protester. “Respect our bodies or expect us.”…

Pussy Riot said they collaborated with web crypto-anonymous feminist group Unicorn and Lakota Indigenous femme-led Ikiya Collective on the effort. The group explained that the banner’s message calls for body autonomy for “people with wombs.”…

Pussy Riot said it chose Texas for the protest because it is a battleground state for abortion rights. “Whatever happens here, whatever we allow to pass in our state sets the trend for whatever else in America is going to happen,” said one of the protesters in the video. “Florida will follow. Oklahoma will follow. Ohio will follow.”…

(NSFW, of course)

Reader Interactions

54Comments

  1. 1.

    sab

    So Pussyriot has gone expat?

    My absolute favorite moment in watching 50 years of Snoozehour was when Judy Woodruff read the name of the group after their arrest, thinking the name referred to kittens, and all the younger reporters were choking in response. They admired her, so they weren’t laughing. They were choking in shock.

  2. 2.

    sab

    @sab: Sorry they had to go expat, but very relieved that they are safe.

    ETA Don’t want to harsh their mellow but Ohio won’t follow. We are what we are, and that is quite red.

  3. 3.

    Gin & Tonic

    @sab: I’m so old I can remember when you couldn’t even type their name on a moderately popular leftish politics, gardening and pets blog.

  6. 6.

    Baud

    On my TV, two gay black guys are looking for a home in Atlanta on House Hunters.

    A good antidote to the daily GOP.

  8. 8.

    Mike in NC

    Haven’t heard from this group in a long time. Surprised Putin hasn’t served them some nice polonium tea.

    Hope they know Texas is literally a battleground these days. Keep your heads down, ladies!

  10. 10.

    Origuy

    I was in Moscow in March 2013 and visited the Alexander Garden, on the outside of the Kremlin. In a grotto directly under a guard tower, someone had written “Free Pussy Riot” on a wall. Small letters, but they still stood out.

  11. 11.

    Betty Cracker

    I got a haircut from a professional for the first time since the pandemic started, and damn, did I ever manage to pick the most bizarre stylist in town! A guy who believes in a literal horned devil who wages spiritual warfare against the unwary. He also doesn’t believe Biden runs the country. I was wishing Biden was cutting my goddamn hair!

  19. 19.

    Ken

    Anyone want to start a pool as to which politician or pundit will be the first to “both sides” this, by comparing Pussy Riot’s banner to the January 6 insurrection?

  20. 20.

    Betty Cracker

    @zhena gogolia: I’m a middle-aged Southern white lady, so strangers here tend to assume I’m a fellow Fox News-addled wingnut until I disabuse them of that notion. I was gentler than usual about it since scissors were being wielded on my head!

  23. 23.

    sab

    @Betty Cracker: My hair guy is a very hip older Black man who actually carried Rita Dove’s schoolbooks home. And she wanted to know why he didn’t have more books ( they were in his locker.

    ETA I always liked him because he is extremely competent and very nice. I had no idea he was hip.

  24. 24.

    geg6

    @Baud:

    I was with the cozy guy.  Glam guy and all that marble?  No thanks.  Hideous and my personal nightmare.  House #2 would have been my choice.

    Yes.  I am a House Hunters addict.

  26. 26.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @Ken: The odious Marc Thiessen has a column in the WaPo headlined “If Trump incited Jan 6, what about Schumer’s threats against Kavanaugh?”

    What a piece of shit.

  28. 28.

    geg6

    As for Pussy Riot, I think I read the other day somewhere that not all of them left Russia.  Anyway, I love their stuff and I would have joined them when I was a young woman.  They are my kind.

  30. 30.

    trollhattan

    I remember the old FYWP spam filter would spike posts containing their name. Less prosaically I remember Putin’s actual cossacks whipping them, literally using whips on the Pussy Riot members, as they protested at the Sochi Olympics.

    And then the Maidan Revolution happened at a time Putin would not, presumably for optics and Olympic bad vibes, wade into Ukraine militarily to bail out Yanukovych, who was instead ousted and now here we are, eight years hence with Putin trying to take back his precious.

  34. 34.

    sab

    My grandmother grew up in a small town in Wisconsin near Milwaukee.

    Everyone in her town spoke German. Grandma’s family was Canadian and Irish. They spoke English at home and Germsn in town. After WWI nobody spoke German. After WWII absolutely nobody spoke German, even in Church.

    Putin may have done this in eastern Europe. Lots of languages to speak. Just not his.

  37. 37.

    Scout211

    Since this is an open thread . . . Arredondo is now talking to reporters.

    Here are some of the highlights of his CYA story about what happened in Uvalde that day. He has an attorney now, of course.

    Arredondo told the Texas Tribune’s James Barragan and Zach Despart that he dropped his police and campus radios outside the school seconds after arriving at the northeast entrance of Robb Elementary, stating that he believed the tools would slow him down while responding to the shooter. Arredondo said that one of the radios had a “whiplike antenna” that would hit his side as he ran. Another he claimed was likely to fall off his tactical belt.

    “My mind was to get there as fast as possible, eliminate any threats, and protect students and staff,” Arredondo told the Tribune. 

    The chief pinned the blame for the 77-minute span between his arrival at the school and the elimination of Ramos primarily on officers’ inability to find the correct key to the door of the classroom in which the shooter had locked himself. Over the course of the attack, he says he was given two different key rings to try.


    The Tribune’s report includes claims from the police chief that he had no idea he was in charge of the police response inside the school. Arredondo denied previous reports from The New York Times that stated the group of officers that ultimately killed Ramos had been     ordered to stand down before making their move against the shooter. The chief claims he did not tell these officers to stand down.

    I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo told the Tribune. “I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”

    According to Arredondo, the classroom door had a steel jamb that could not be forced open, and he focused on evacuating students in other classrooms while waiting for keys to the room. He says he ordered officers to shatter windows from the outside and extract those inside. Arredondo’s attorney, George E. Hyde, who is not an expert with regard to mass shootings, told the Tribune that attempting to use a similar window tactic to engage the shooter in the locked classroom would’ve been “reckless” and “guaranteed all the children in the rooms would be killed.”

    This conflicts with comments offered by FBI Agent Katherine Schweit, one of the bureau’s chief researchers on mass shootings, who told the Tribune that going through a window is proper police protocol during an active shooter event.

  40. 40.

    David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch

      nearly 20 million people tuned in for last night’s January 6 select committee hearing, per preliminary Nielsen ratings. That’s much higher than viewership for previous TV coverage for congressional hearings. For example, 9 million people watched Trump’s impeachment trial in 2020. The final number is likely to top 20 million when viewership from streaming services are added in.

    More from the Nielsen numbers:

    ABC brought in the largest number of viewers at 4.8 million.

    MSNBC was second at 4.1 million, which The Hill notes is “nearly four times what the network averages on a typical weeknight.” Yay for MSNBC.

    NBC and CBS carried 3.5 million and 3.3 million viewers, respectively.

    Those amazing numbers for a summer telecast, especially on a night when high school graduation ceremonies were happening all over the country.

  42. 42.

    Ohio Mom

    I am all for this sort of protest needless to say, but this was something like a tribute band, or one of those touring oldie groups that has only one or two of its ancient original members with studio-type musicians filling in for the others.

    As Anne Laurie points out, maybe one original Pussy Rioter. Or maybe I should think of this group as a franchise? The world could use many Pussy Riot groups.

  44. 44.

    Geminid

    @Scout211: It’s not like that classroom was a vault. Setting aside the presence of windows, someone with a sledgehammer could knock a hole in the cinderblock interior wall in a minute, at least a hole big enough to shoot through. Five minutes and they’d have a hole big enough for a child to crawl through, or five holes to shoot through.

    I’d be terrified trying to knock those holes. But that’s because of the shooter’s high powered, high capacity rifle. That rifle was the problem, and Officer Arredondo’s unwillingness to say that is a second problem.

  46. 46.

    Roger Moore

    @sab:

    There was a long period when Balloon-Juice used some kind of anti-spam plugin that looked for words that spammers liked to use and blocked comments that contained them.  It was a PITA and was eventually eliminated.  Some old-timey posters will still talk about sokalism because “socialism” triggered the filter by including the word “cialis”.  See also Scunthorpe Problem.

  52. 52.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Betty Cracker: 

    I got a haircut from a professional for the first time since the pandemic started, and damn, did I ever manage to pick the most bizarre stylist in town! A guy who believes in a literal horned devil who wages spiritual warfare against the unwary. He also doesn’t believe Biden runs the country. I was wishing Biden was cutting my goddamn hair!

    Yipes! Makes me glad we’ve had the same hairstylist since we moved to this part of the world, nearly a quarter-century ago now. During the pandemic, we started paying her a good bit above market rate to stop by our house and give haircuts to all three of us out on the back deck. And we’ve kept it up, even now that things have eased up a bit. So no mystery hairstylists with weird rants, thank goodness.

  53. 53.

    Soprano2

    @Betty Cracker: But did he do a good job on your hair? My hair stylist is a mid-30’s gay guy who is liberal like me. He’s also talented. He and his husband have friends who live near our bar, so they come in sometimes.

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