I hope Putin appreciates the strong support he’s getting from our Congressional leaders while they vacation over the next two weeks.
intercst
10 Likes
Meanwhile, the network news tonight pointed out that certain “thought leaders” have yet to say anything about Navalny meeting the same fate as other Putin critics.
Steve
4 Likes
The new industrial military complex
1 Like
Tucker Carlson leaves home
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/02/18/fareeds-take-tucker-carlson-russia-gps-vpx.cnn
My father was very impressed by the Moscow Metro when the family traveled from Berlin to Caracas in 1939.
Until Chavez arrived, the Caracas metro was the cleanest place of the city.
The Porto Metro is also beautifully clean.
Why can’t American exceptionalism clean up the NYC Metro?
The Captain
2 Likes
Because it would require a tax to hire the people to do it.
intercst
5 Likes
Because there’s really no such thing as American exceptionalism?
We’re just ordinary people doing what we can to make a buck or two.
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Actually we have. Harlem is a great place these days. Manhattan is fantastic.
1 Like
The NY Subway system is an ANCIENT cheaply built marvel. Unfortunately it came under the executive management of the New York State Legislature and of pro-automobile NYC apparatchniki over 70 years ago, and they happily let it degrade while making no significant investments or improvements.
Same old same old.
I love it passionately.
D fb
1 Like
This is some modern infrastructural ambition on the correct scale of time and space:
david fb
I was in NYC last September, rode the Subway in Manhattan and Harlem, and it looked clean to me. Had a couple of meals in Harlem, and it was a thriving, well kept up area, at least the parts I was in. People were nice,too. Manhattan was a beehive of activity, bustling to say the least. I was underwhelmed by Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, I’ve been to the MLB parks in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Chicago ( Wrigley), Boston, and San Fran, and all of those parks were a better place to see a game than Yankee Stadium.
3 Likes
A win aided by Gaia.
ralph
1 Like
Re: NYC subway and Moscow metro
People are confusing cleanliness with beauty. The Moscow metro was designed and built with beauty in mind. The NYC subway, for the most part, was built in a much more utilitarian manner. On the other hand, the original Penn Station and Grand Central Station were build with beauty in mind, and thus had/have a much different impression by those who use them.
Photographer Christopher Hertwig did a fascinating series on Soviet subway stations. He took the photos down off his Instagram for some reason (his other photos are still great) but they live on on the Internet.
The Soviets created fabulous subways for simple reasons: Impress gullible spineless idiots like Tucker Carlson.
3 Likes
It’s a lot more than that. You have to understand the Soviet understanding of the world, and especially how they viewed wide swathes of the world. The Soviets views the new west (primarily USA, but also other aligned with the USA) as “nekulturnyi” or uncultured (also in the sense of overly utilitarian). One of the pieces of evidence that they used was specifically Russian metro stations versus US subway stations. Ironically, as the Soviet experiment progressed, almost all individual expression of culture was stifled, and utilitarianism took over in nearly every aspect of life. Look, for example, at the horrid buildings that went up in the latter years, so so ugly when compared to the earlier ones.
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Hugo Chavez has some of those monstrosities built in Caracas with no parking spaces in contravention to the building codes. The economic reality of communism setting in.
The Captain
Those subways are real, not Potemkin Villages.
Potemkin Villages created to impress spineless idiots like Empress Catherine II.
The Captain
I was in Moscow briefly a few years ago on a business trip and I rode the subways. Those stations are truly works of art. Kind of ridiculous for a subway! You would expect artful structures to be aboveground where you could see them in their grandeur from a distance. But artful structures can be found anywhere, even in a tiny snowflake. The funniest thing I saw was one of the shops in a subway station - it was gun store! I don’t know if they were real or replicas, but the ones on display sure looked real. It was hilariously out of place.
1 Like