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the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

This really is a full service blog.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

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I really should read my own blog.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

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It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Foreign Affairs Open Thread: “Traditionalists”, Retvrn Come to Russia!

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: “Traditionalists”, Retvrn Come to Russia!

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Seems like satire, and yet the ‘advertisement’ is apparently quite serious…

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68Comments

  3. 3.

    Mike in NC

    Spent a few days in St Petersburg several years ago. All of the churches are still operated as museums. That was pretty much the case in all of the Eastern European countries we visited. Apparently the only good thing to come from 50 years of Communism was a lack of interest in religion.

  9. 9.

    Chetan Murthy

    I’ve watched the vid a few times, and sure, I know they meant it in earnest, but geez, you couldn’t get a better demonstration of Poe’s Law if you were *trying*.  Sheesh.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: Is it me or do those “beautiful women” look like minors?

    Nope, not just you!

    Thus the ‘Tradcon loli’ (traditional, conservative lolita – childwife) reference in the DIG THE HOLE! cartoon…

  11. 11.

    dr. luba

    Saw this video on Twitter last night, and was hard pressed to decide if it was real or parody.  Now that I’ve seen an actual parody…..all I can say is WTF?

    I’ve often said our far right would be much happier in Putin’s Russia, until they ran afoul of Putin.

  12. 12.

    FlyingToaster

    If the ad would actually draw all of our Moonbats, I’m all for it.

    Unfortunately for Rossiya, they want young men for cannon fodder, and our cosplay warriors won’t risk themselves on an actual front line.  Especially when they can T into Boston and harass families at drag queen book readings and stomp filmmakers on their way back to the T.  Also, they barely speak English, good luck getting them to understand Russian.

  13. 13.

    Ken

    I hadn’t seen “tradcath” before. I wonder how many of these tradcaths know that Russia is tradorth?

    Also, when I read James Palmer’s “moving to Russia after the government makes utopian promises” tweet, I wondered if I still have a copy of “The Marching Morons”.

  14. 14.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Anne Laurie: The adult blonde female has a real submissive vibe to her, too.  Or so it seems.

    Russia: come for the submissive women, stay for the vodka-fueled benders!

  18. 18.

    dr. luba

    @Mike in NC: Did you ever venture outside a major metropolitan area?  Or attend a service? When I’ve traveled in western Europe, I’ve visited a lot of churches/cathedrals, and they always seemed like museums to me…..

    I can’t speak for Russia, because I vowed in my youth never to visit, and nothing has changed my mind on that score, but I’ve traveled throughout Ukraine.  Churches became active as soon as it was allowed, with local people pitching to refurbish them–most weren’t museums, but were used for storage or locked up and allowed to run down.

    And there is new church construction everywhere……well, was, prior to February 24th.

    There are many areligious people, and many who are believers but not really church goers.  Even so, a large part of the population does attend church, especially on major holidays.

  20. 20.

    Subsole

    I thought it was very nice of the one black lady in Russia to volunteer* for the “no cancel culture” part of the ad…

     

    *It’s Russia. Volunteer can be a very flexible word, there…

  26. 26.

    Leto

    We’re talking about Russians? Have we spoken about how the Russian asset buried his wife at his shit golf property for tax breaks?

    Brooke Harrington@EBHarrington
    As a tax researcher, I was skeptical of rumors Trump buried his ex-wife in that sad little plot of dirt on his Bedminster, NJ golf course just for tax breaks.

    So I checked the NJ tax code & folks…it’s a trifecta of tax avoidance. Property, income & sales tax, all eliminated.

    Ivana Trump was buried near the first hole of Trump National Golf Club. Her gravesite could offer tax breaks for the business.

    The location of Ivana Trump’s grave — near the first hole of the golf course at Trump National Golf Club — may have tax implications for the business owned by the former president.

    Tax documents from the Trump Family Trust, published by ProPublica, show the trust sought to designate a property in Hackettstown, New Jersey, as a non-profit cemetery company, though the course itself is 20 miles away in Bedminster.

    Ivana Trump, former President Donald Trump’s ex-wife, is the first person known to have been buried at the Trump-owned golf course.

  27. 27.

    bjacques

    @Immanentize:

     

    @Ken: I seem to recall Mad Magazine’s “Stalag 18”, a POW camp full of sergeants, with Archie from Riverdale and the Russian women’s camp next door being major plot points.

  29. 29.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: People like you and me?  I kinda doubt it: without significant money, your life in Russia is bound to be materially worse than in any Western country, and by a lot.  And that’s before all the other issues (which by themselves ought to be dispositive).

  30. 30.

    Ken

    @Leto: Dare I hope TFG’s lawyers stopped with the tax code, and forgot to check other state and local regulations regarding cemeteries? It would not surprise me if there’s something inconvenient like, oh, must be open to all members of the public between dawn and sunset

    (And I have to love the phrasing “first person known to be buried there”.)

  32. 32.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Leto: Reading this, I wondered to myself: “if it’s that easy to escape all taxation, *hell*, I don’t see why it isn’t commonplace for richies to set aside a little burial plot and bribe some poor person’s heirs to have that person buried in that plot, instantly making the entire property a cemetery, Hey Presto! no taxes!”  I gotta believe there’s a catch, and TFG hasn’t thought of it, b/c for him (and his kids) he’ll just apply the universal lubricant, vexatious litigation.

  33. 33.

    Dan B

    @Liminal Owl: Reminds me of closeted gay men who deny they’re gay and turn out like Roy Cohn or Peter Thiel.  Monstrous what people will do for power over others.

  35. 35.

    Subsole

     

     

    @Leto: Wow.

    Those troglodytes really did elect the sorriest piece of shit in the entire hemisphere, didn’t they…

    I mean, what the actual…???

  40. 40.

    Chris Johnson

    @Leto: Fuck me if Trump couldn’t have ASKED Putin to whack his ex. Just when I thought the worms couldn’t crawl any lower.

  41. 41.

    Wapiti

    @Chetan Murthy: I expect one catch might be that you can’t sell a cemetery. And only the land devoted to the cemetery might count for easement of taxes.

  42. 42.

    Tony Jay

    Brief Billet-Doux from Brexitania

    “How Low, Can You Go?”

     

    Just a quick rage detonation in which I lay out reason 7,342,468 to utterly despise the leaky buckets of cold sick currently running the UK Labour Party into the ground.

    Last week I unloaded a satisfyingly large bag of rant over the anally-inserted headparts of those circlejerking centre-right braindonors whose entirely successful sabotage of the UK Labour Party between 2015-2019 enabled the Tripocalypse of Brexit, Flobalob and the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of British people from Austerity and Covid. These globs of calcified hatefulness then seized full control of the Labour Party via the election as Party leader (on a platform made up of 24-carat cynicism and 100% proof lies) of their boy, il burattino castrato, the frozen expression of mild nausea known to his friends as Sir Kier Starmer, to his masters as Peter’s Pet and to the general public as ‘that boring guy with the face like a puzzled sea-cow”.

    In the ensuing two years they’ve turned every weapon in the bureaucratic arsenal on those parts of the Party membership (and ideologically non-scummy MPs) that had the temerity, the audacity, the sheer, unforgivable effrontery to think that they, those people, those awful common people, had the right to elect a Party leader from outside of the Cult of St Anthony Lynton Blair the Omnificent. Expulsions, suspensions, demotions, whatever they had in the bag of tricks, they’ve used them all to make the NuNew Labour Party a hostile environment for anyone who doesn’t understand the cardinal rule of St Anthony’s credo – The Richer Are Better, So You Better Get Rich.

    In last week’s rant about the release and premature burial of the Forde Report I left a few things out because, despite how it might appear when you’re faced with those endless walls of text, I really do leave a shit ton of outrage on the cutting room floor. One of the things I cut was an incident that occurred recently in my hometown of Liverpool when Starmer, whose minders are always looking for the most offensive place possible to U-turn on another of his pre-election promises, was confronted in a café by 71 year old Socialist Audrey White and given a piece of her mind. I’m not sure what was my favourite part. The savaging of his shameful record as leader, the Romneyesque panic plastered across his terracotta face at being called to account by an actual flesh and blood democratic socialist, or the absolutely pitch perfect deflation of tension at the end when Audrey, having done her good deed for the day, regrets not having a few flashbangs in her purse to mask her dramatic exit.

    You’d have thought that something like that would have been a major news story. ‘Opposition Leader Harangued by Angry Granny’, or ‘OAP KO’s LOTO’ or something equally snappy.  It certainly would have been if it had happened to his predecessor, but though the UK News Media have started turning the screw slightly on Starmer’s nutsack in anticipation of a possible General Election, they’re not yet at the point where they’re willing to frontpage a geriatric left-winger detonating a truth bomb under his sniffy little nose. So across the board our marvellous ‘independent’ News Media chose to pass on an opportunity to show Starmer demonstrating all the capacity for spur of the moment thinking and ability to argue his corner of a roadkill badger, though I’m the footage has been filed away for a later date.

    Those bobbing turds in the NuNew Labour punchbowl, though, they certainly weren’t going to let such an insult pass without a vindictive response. Audrey made the mistake of saying that she was a Labour Party member, and. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who heard that and thought “Not for long, lady”, because yesterday Audrey revealed that she’s been expelled from the Party. Why? You ask. Surely not for giving her Party’s leader both barrels while he sat there silently fidgeting and wishing he had staff who knew what the fuck they were doing? That would make him look like a thin-skinned coward with a Putinesque attitude towards dissent, wouldn’t it?

    Of course not. No. Audrey was expelled because some years ago (I can’t find a definitive date, so I’m going with the timescale I’ve seen mentioned on Twitter) she gave an interview to a Labour Party affiliate group called Socialist Action. Why would that be a problem? Well, because last year, Socialist Action was one of the affiliates Starmer’s mob banned from the Party and made membership of or contact with them an expulsion worthy offense. There was an accusation made, and according to the expulsion latter sent to Audrey, the gobshite majority on the National Executive Committee decided back in January/February this year to retrospectively apply the punishment for contact with Socialist Action and expel her from the Party. Nice, eh? In the NuNew Labour Party you can be expelled for breaking rules that didn’t even exist yet. Glorious.

    And the best bit? Due to an ‘administrative error’ they ‘forgot’ to tell her they’d expelled her until four days after her confrontation with Sir Reek Cowerer. But don’t you dare suggest this might be in the slightest bit suspicious, that’s just crazy conspiracy talk and tantamount to voting Tory! I wonder if they also ‘forgot’ to stop taking her membership subs for the last four months? Nothing surprises me with these humanoid cysts anymore. I mean, how many other political parties could handle purges so consistently badly that they ‘forget’ to publicise the expulsion of a woman of such immense historical evil that she was once played on screen by Glenda fucking Jackson (not a joke – Ed)?

    I actually thought her name sounded a little bit familiar, and on checking I found that she was most recently in the public eye for taking the scumbag Jewish Chronicle newspaper (the FTF Guardian’s de facto assignment editor between 2017 and 2019) to the Press Complaints Commission and forcing them to make a humiliating climbdown over false claims of antisemitism and bullying. I just bet the soulless zeroids running NuNew Labour are spanking themselves cross-eyed at the victory they’ve achieved. After all, their path to Absolute Power was greased with the slime of the Antisemitism Scam, and given that the Forde Report, commissioned by Stiffboi Starmer and paid for by Labour Party members like me and Audrey specifically called them out for using groundless Antisemitism smears and baseless accusations of ideological misconduct as an excuse to suspend and expel Leftist Infidels, I’m sure that their Barbie smooth down-bellow areas became warm and pliable at the thought of such an overt fuck you to the very idea that anyone (other than Frank and Fiona from the Fascist-Adjacent Focus Group, any random Tory-friendly newspaper publisher or one of St Anthony of Mesopotamia’s bloody-handed spokeswraiths) can tell them what to do.

    Oh, and they’re also busy rigging the vote to get my local MP deselected, because ‘trot hunting’ is literally all these colonclimbers know how to do. Well, trot-hunting and making sure Labour loses elections. They’re really good at that.

    Sigh. Better out than in, eh?

  44. 44.

    Anne Laurie

    @Leto:  From what I’m seeing on social media, it wasn’t TFG’s call, it was Ivana’s kids who made the decision.

    And after the NYTimes report on her funeral… well, since her older son decided the best he had to share were the times she’d beaten him, she may not have been eligible for the World’s Best Mother award.

    With those parents, the nature-vs.-nurture question about The Trio may never be adequately parsed.

  45. 45.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Tony Jay: “brief” is a stretch….

    And speaking of your neighborhood, I heard “electric avenue” today.  When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come…?

  46. 46.

    Jay

     

    @JaySinWA:

    apparently, his  handler, “wife”, stayed in California, and they have since relocated to a US State that holds to “traditional values”, Arkansas.

  52. 52.

    Ken

    @Wapiti: That would work nicely. “OK, that’s the last of the forms to turn the property into a cemetery. Now I just need the escrow account with the funds to maintain the property for the next 99 years…”

  54. 54.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Omnes Omnibus: two different songs, same section of London!

    And wow am I glad I missed that comment. Hopefully she that was part of her troll persona and not a serious comment.

  56. 56.

    AWOL

    Don’t see why they took a potshot at Nabokov, whose family fled Russia in 1917 for France, and later the US, and whose father was assassinated in-exile.

  58. 58.

    JoyceH

    @Geminid: ​
     

    It certainly is creepy, but he didn’t just pop Ivana in the ground on his golf course to get a tax break – I recall reading an article a few years ago that said it was Trump’s plan to have his grave on the Bedminster property. So he was always planning a family burial site there. Makes sense that he’d want his final resting place somewhere that wasn’t open to the public – a gate and guards to vet people coming in is key when you’re as loathsome as he is.

  60. 60.

    Ken

    @Ohio Mom: Oh, it’s a farm! So Ivana wasn’t so much buried as wished into the cornfield.

    Though the goats should be nervous. Now that their usefulness as a tax dodge is over, I predict a rapid trip to the nearest halal butcher. (They pay a bit more, according to my niece who raised goats for 4H.)

  61. 61.

    Liminal Owl

    @Anne Laurie: What I’ve been seeing on social media is that burial on private property makes exhumation and autopsy much harder to accomplish.

  64. 64.

    apocalipstick

    @Chetan Murthy: There’s a fair amount of actual legal analysis that undercuts the whole tax-dodge scheme. I prefer an alternative explanation: Trump had Ivana buried on his golf course so he could cheat on her for the rest of his life.

  65. 65.

    Anne Laurie

    @AWOL: Don’t see why they took a potshot at Nabokov…

    Because the Russian ad called a couple of little girls ‘beautiful women’, which made the Lolita reference too easy to avoid.

  67. 67.

    Princess

    So Trump is potentially subject to a case in NY for fraud that will involve false declarations of his net worth, which would materially affect Ivana’s divorce settlement. Plus, she almost certainly has evidence that could be used against him. Then she dies of unexplained blunt force trauma to her torso. Then she’d buried on his golf course, a tough place to get into if you decided you needed to redo her autopsy.

    it would be irresponsible NOT to speculate. C’mon guys, you know if this were the Clintons it would be above the fold front page every day. And you know Trump has the people to do it.

  68. 68.

    Tony Jay

    @Emma from Miami:

    Sorry, I’ve been involved in British Bedtime.

    Quickly, very good. The Lib-Dems seem to have crossed that nebulous threshold where less extreme Tories seem comfortable voting for them in a caretaker/protest role while the actual Tories are led by chaotic agents of Cthulhu.

    I could easily see them getting up to 35/50 seats in a General Election, which would be enough to give Labour a real chance of taking power – if it weren’t NuNew Labour and they weren’t screwing the pooch by telling millions of people not under any circumstances to vote for them.

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