My dad’s MAGA, and I live in Germany. He was initially very pro Ukraine, then fox news got to him and he supported Russia (quietly) for a while. Recently he’s begun supporting Ukraine again.

He loves me and doesn’t want the war to spill over into central/western Europe because of me, so he’s not representative of all of MAGA, but he tends to just be quiet about things when he disagrees with the party line. The fact that he made a joke recently about how fucked Russia would be if they somehow managed to push through Ukraine and attacked Poland is a small pinprick of hope that MAGA is now at least divided about Russia.

It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.

I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).

My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.

That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.

Averin grew up in an orphanage in eastern Siberia until he was taken into foster care aged 11. By the time he was recruited into the army he was in his final year at the Buryat Republican Technical School of Construction.

Early in April, he called his foster mother to say he was being sent somewhere “with no [phone] signal”, and that she should not worry.

Initially he said he had gone away to earn money at Wildberries, a Russian online retailer, and she was shocked to find out he had signed a military contract and had completed training as a drone operator.

“He told me: ‘Nothing will happen to me, everything will be fine.’”

A week later, on 8 April, she learned he had been killed in a mortar strike near Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

I go back and forth with sympathy for the soldiers themselves (it gets harder to feel nothing for a dumb, scared 18 year old who signed up for something they didn’t understand, the further from 18 I get), but what a horrible thing for that foster mother. She must have wanted to have a child to take care of for so long, and she thought he was safe as a student and about to become qualified for a good job that supports his community, but he’s just suddenly gone.

It took a really big mustache to unify Germany.

I read through many of these and felt a little hope, but this one perfectly captured the bleakness I worry is too common in Russia:

Sergei

Moscow

I don’t care anymore. The world has shrunk to the size of my family. Didn’t get hit today — great. We hope it won’t hit us tomorrow. No regret, no compassion, no reflection, not after listening to the insane crap about a “righteous war” from the people around me.

My behavior is like a cockroach’s: survive and keep my family alive. Keep my head down, don’t stick my neck out. Heroism is a sign of desperation, when normal human principles stop working. And right now, heroism — like criticizing the authorities or sabotage — is a road to nowhere.

They killed my emotions, killed my hopes, killed my joy. And it wasn’t only, or even mainly, the authorities that did it. It was also the wretched mindset of Russian citizens, who cling in a frenzy to ideas of being chosen, of being unique, of some God-given historical role. So you live for the handful of people right next to you.

Burn in hell, all of you.

I don’t know if this is actually a representative perspective or just confirms my bias, but I worry too many Russians will just keep their heads down and worry about their own families instead of taking the risk to trust each other to stand together against their government.

Do only two pumps work or would they just prefer to let frustration and impatience thin the crowd at the cost of actually wasting gas (all those idling cars)?

Right, but it’s not a choice, it’s mandatory conscription. It’s hard to find sources, but this makes it seem like it’s not easy in metropolitan areas, but it’s way, way more difficult in rural areas.

Isn’t there a draft? Why weren’t the missing able bodied men a big enough sign? Like, I get that she’s a woman, but surely she has a father, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, or romantic partners who have either disappeared or come back broken, no?

Or is it easy for cosmopolitan Russians to get exempted from the draft?

Edit: It’s hard to find sources, but this makes it seem like it’s not easy in metropolitan areas, but it’s way, way more difficult in rural areas.

Lots of ways

Even better, Puerto Rico was rated 26 points higher than the USA (the scale technically spans 200 points, but the difference between the highest and lowest rated countries is only 55 points, so that’s a HUGE difference). I bet that makes trump mad.

Only Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Israel were rated worse.

Normally it’s too much fiber for me, but there’s a French version stewed in broth that’s amazing. It’s called soupe du journal

It took me a moment to figure out how a supplement would help with an eating disorder (entirely my mistake, because eating disorder is much clunkier without a possessive pronoun beforehand, so that shouldn’t have been my first thought).

If convicted, the suspect faces up to six years in prison.

That’s a lot more lenient a maximum punishment than I’d expect for wartime treason.

Many leftists started out as liberals, it makes sense they’d believe others could also change.

-signed, a vegan married to a butcher, so don’t listen to me lol (at least he’s a leftist)

No gods, no masters = religion, I guess, lol.

I’m calling it as a smooth sharks situation

If they fully understood it, they probably wouldn’t keep running experiments on it. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete unknown though.

Are you thinking of dark matter?

Edit: I can’t believe I fell for it. A) the username is hector, a synonym for “annoy” or ”pester.” B) going through their recent comments, they keep misspelling words in quotation marks and dropping one different, very obvious spelling or grammar mistake in each comment. C) they go a little further off the deep end and a little more obstinate every time.

People definitely tried to beat neurodivergence out of people. It doesn’t work, but it does make people mask more, which is a win for the kinds of people who beat children for being different

No worries, text makes it difficult and if you’re not sure on the culture of SLC, I can see it being unclear

It was sarcasm, yes. There’s definitely no 24 hour club in SLC