lost his wife and kids and still is inhaling the copium
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Jun 00:52
nextcollapse
I wonder if he’ll be drafted
Within weeks of arriving, Leo says they were defrauded of 5 million roubles – about £52,000 ($66,000) – by a contact they trusted, leaving them homeless.
Although he is committed to staying in Russia out of a sense of “destiny”, he now says he misses the freedoms that have shaped the American personality.
“[In] Russia you don’t have these human rights values.”
lennybird@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 01:54
nextcollapse
I guess credit to them for following through but now they’re in the Find Out phase.
Conservatives, tankies should really be careful for what they wish for.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Jun 04:23
nextcollapse
Conservatives, tankies should really be careful for what they wish for.
It’s kinda like when you see a dog barking behind a window, and it immediately calms down when you open it.
Russia is the greatest country in the entire world… Until they have to live there.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
on 27 Jun 07:06
nextcollapse
I’m not sure following through is to their credit here. It takes a special kind of dumb, and a huge pile of it, to ignore all the red flags throughout the whole process.
nope please tankies live your best life, move to mother russia today
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org
on 27 Jun 01:58
nextcollapse
i remember reading somewhere that russia is conservative because it lacks access to the sea. it’s the sea access that made england the birth land of liberalism because the sea connects more than it divides. so you get in contact with lots of other cultures. and that breeds liberalism.
I don’t think there’s a very strong relationship there. While inland areas do tend to be more conversative, I think that’s just generally due to the rural/urban divide. Cities historically have been located on the coasts for shipping purposes. And that also divides by education level, which is also related to political tendencies. And cities have historically been located on the coasts for convenience of shipping. Even inland cities are usually on major rivers.
But there are plenty of racists there too. London has been a huge melting pot of different races for a long time, but there are still plenty of racists in England.
In England, as in the US, the level of racism in an area inversely correlates with the percentage of the population who are immigrants. The white riots that recently happened in lily-white Northern Ireland are a recent illustrative example.
In London, there are a lot of racists, but not proportionally so. There also happen to be a lot of all kinds of people there. It’s a big city.
My man Russia has had access to plenty of sea. Sankt Petersburg is on the Baltic Sea and has been there for like 300 years. The Russian Empire had access to the Black Sea and the Pacific and so did the Soviet Union. It’s not the access to the sea that’s making them conservative, it’s the Russian Orthodox Church and their governments keeping them uneducated so they can control them easily. The Russian Orthodox Church is so conservative they refuse to change to the Gregorian calendar, they still use the Julian Calendar which is innacurate and keeps drifting so that they celebrate most Christian Holidays like 2 weeks later than everyone else.
And access to the Baltic Sea and to the Black Sea is worth, jack sht, if access to the Atlantic from there can be blocked by multiple countries. It is actually worse than access of Austria to the Seas. In the case of Austria goods can be delivered within the Single Market to an Atlantic port. The only access to the Oceans is at the Pacific but the Transsiberian Railway doesn’t have nearly the capacity to make that Russia’s main port and there is not that much of anything in the far east to need a huge port. It is good as a military harbour but terrible for projecting maritime power to Europe where Russia is engaged in imperialist wars of conquest.
PM_me_your_doggo@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 04:46
nextcollapse
It is way less dumb than you think it is. As long as climate change is not doing something about it, Russia’s access to international waters is a lot more compromised than many think. Russia’s main ports have access to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. In both cases other countries can block access of Russian ships to the Atlantic. Other than that, the only ports with all year round usable access to international waters is in Russia’s far east (Vladivostok primarily), which can compensate a bit but not nearly replace the ports in the European parts of Russia.
But in relation to this statement, it is not wrong. The large coastline in the north does not really provide contacts except for polar bears, the east is a completely different society, which leaves only the Baltic coast and a few, summer-only harbors in the north and the black sea.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip
on 27 Jun 15:32
nextcollapse
I think what they’re really trying to talk about are port cities. That’s where mingling and cultural exchange happen. Also lively bar scenes.
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Jun 17:43
collapse
The arctic does not free Russia from being a continental, rather than maritime, power. Their geopolitics and imperial identity is dominated by mountain and river and plains borders, and destabilizing or annexing the powers at their borders. The arctic is inaccessible except for some baltic access dominated by maritime nations.
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Jun 10:03
collapse
It’s well known cultures that are more urban, closer to the sea and thus meet more diverse people, are more open.
Also, note that Saint Petersburg is the most liberal city of Russia.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Jun 02:08
nextcollapse
These people construct a dream world in which all their problems are the result of “woke”, and in which Russia is a bastion of Conservative values. It’s delusional, and sad, but there’s a lot of influencers talking convincingly about how awful our life is. Sometimes people believe them.
Eat the rich, don’t move to Russia.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
on 27 Jun 07:11
collapse
dream world in which (…) Russia is a bastion of Conservative values
According to the article Russia is actively creating that image, and the special visa to go with it, for numbskulls like Leo.
Leo is a devout Christian who had become increasingly disillusioned with…the rise of the LGBTQ movement.
Although he is committed to staying in Russia out of a sense of “destiny”, he now says he misses the freedoms that have shaped the American personality.
“[In] Russia you don’t have these human rights values.”
I mean…
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 04:30
nextcollapse
I hate gays more than I love human rights
hope the guy gets sent to the front and barely survives just so he can share his message with all the other idiots.
bet he’ll see dudes blowing dudes for socks or boots on the front lines.
In some unmentioned corners of lemmy, they’d tell you without a hint of irony, that this is Western Propaganda and Russians are enjoying much more freedom than people in lets say Germany, where oppression has reached unheard of levels. …
or something like that.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
on 27 Jun 07:08
collapse
these human rights values
LOL, that’s just FAFO with a chef’s kiss. Kudos for honesty though. I hope he becomes reformed and much more skeptical of bullshit narratives; although the article does not read like it. More like he’s comfortable with a 50/50 divide in his mind. Christianity, I guess.
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Jun 04:08
nextcollapse
Imagine being dumb enough to think Texas isn’t conservative enough for you
They might find the Pashto boy-raping culture congenial. And the rule by religious reactionary idiots with guns will feel a bit like back home in Texas.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
on 27 Jun 06:07
nextcollapse
Many of the would-be migrants are attracted by Russia’s Shared Values visa, sometimes called the “anti-woke” visa (…)
Introduced by President Vladimir Putin in 2024, the visa offers temporary residency for up to three years to citizens of 47 countries Russia considers “unfriendly”.
There is no limit to the number of people who can apply and applicants do not need to pass the usual Russian language, history or law tests.
Instead, they must declare that they share Russia’s traditional spiritual and moral values and reject what the Russian government describes as the “destructive neoliberal ideology” of their home countries.
Imagine no alarm bells going off as you read that 🤦
Also, the USA is one of those 47 countries! Remember that the next time Trump boasts about his good relations with Russia and/or Putin being his buddy.
The whole article - Leo’s story - is worth the read.
Following their move to Russia, Leo’s family became one of the most visible examples of Western migration.
Russian state media filmed their asylum ceremony and Leo publicly thanked President Putin for welcoming them. At the time, Leo believed he was helping to pioneer what he calls “an unprecedented piece of immigration legislation”.
But the reality proved more difficult than he’d anticipated.
Within weeks of arriving, Leo says they were defrauded of 5 million roubles – about £52,000 ($66,000) – by a contact they trusted, leaving them homeless.
When I spoke to Leo earlier this year, he was living separately from his wife in the city of Ivanovo, and his older children had returned to the United States.
Asked whether Russia had lived up to his expectations, Leo describes the last two years as the best and worst of his life.
Something in the article reminded me of the Anastasia movement, one of those esoteric cults you need to look a little closer at to see the fascism.
A lot of the Brits in Spain have been leaving because the Spanish have cracked down on tax-dodging, and because Brits lost their freedom of movement in the EU when they voted for Brexit. And the expats are whining like mad about it.
Meanwhile, I know some people who’ve moved to Spain and Portugal, learned the language, assimilated and gotten the passport, instead of living in a soulless monolingual enclave, quaffing Spanish champagne, creeping on their neighbors’ wives and cultivating their melanoma like the Costa del Sol bunch.
If we get rid of those idiots that way, why should we complain? I mean, there are enough sources of information to see how a county is. If you only rely on state-issued propaganda and you fall for it, don’t expect any sympathy.
volley3744@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 10:36
nextcollapse
Ilja Belobragin, general managing partner at Move To Russia, a company which helps foreigners relocate to Russia, says something he frequently hears from his clients is that they “don’t recognise the community around me anymore”.
Some prospective migrants complain about high immigration in their own countries or what they see as declining living standards, he says.
Let’s break this down: The people say they “don’t recognise the community around [them] anymore” because of “high immigration”, so they decide to become an immigrant surrounded by people of a different nationality than them.
As I see it, this is for one specific reason only: I don’t believe it’s the different cultural values from immigration that bothers them (they are literally moving into a wholly foreign culture; although I’m sure the Orthodox church gives some perverse appeal), but I believe they are bothered by ethnicity/skin colour. I believe these people are racists more than they are xenophobes.
I believe, for these people, Russia is a better alternative only because they have a certain perception of white-skinned Russians. I don’t think these people are aware of places like Tuva, or Yakutia, or Chechnya - and I don’t think they would ever visit those places. To say their quiet part out loud, I think these “conservatives” are just people who are white supremacists, moving because it’s a “white country” in their eyes, and thinking all white people have some shared essence. This is how they can justify to themselves being a foreigner in a foreign land. How else could they justify it to themselves?
AbidanYre@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 10:49
nextcollapse
From what I’ve read in the past, a lot of them are just really homophobic.
feetandballs@lemmy.zip
on 27 Jun 12:37
nextcollapse
“Certainly this will get rid of my urge to hump butt”
Russia’s been running a massive propaganda campaign in Europe and the US for more than a decade. Including slandering the LGBT and trying to associate them with illegal activities, promoting Christian orthodoxy over atheism, depicting Europe as degenerate and failing, demonizing immigrants and trying to frame them as criminals etc.
The people who move to Russia thinking they are upgrading their lives are few according to this article, but I’m still surprised by how these people completely ignored how authoritarian and destitute that country is. Germans moving to Russia thinking it’s the better place to be is a huge propaganda victory for the latter.
Leave behind everything you own and know to go live as an immigrant in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language or understand the customs.
Don’t have gay sex.
Gay sex must be really good.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
on 27 Jun 11:37
collapse
they “don’t recognise the community around me anymore”.
I think that’s a narrative implanted in their brains by conservatives: too many brownskinned people, danger danger danger.
Just like Russia deliberately creates the narrative that they offer an alternative, conveniently ignoring the multicultural nature of Russia - and the obvious conflict of becoming an immigrant yourself.
it just constantly boggles my mind how mentally ill people (Leo clearly has some form of mental illness) and truly idiotic people (again, applies to Leo) always seem to have enough money to just blow away like this. Meanwhile intelligent and sane individuals are barely scraping by.
I mean i’m comfortable in life, more than comfortable, but i don’t have “move to another country simply because I hate a particular thing in society” money.
I also think people with the mental caliber of Leo don’t think of consequences when they spend their money, so it’s possible he sold everything he owns and built debt to leave.
GirthBrooksPLO@lemmy.world
on 27 Jun 15:28
collapse
Schadenfreudegasm
phutatorius@lemmy.zip
on 27 Jun 15:18
nextcollapse
I’m entirely in favor of a program that promotes the voluntary exit of xenophobic reactionary cunts from the US, as long as we can come up with some way to not let them return after it inevitably all goes to shit for them.
This article inspired me to check and Teddy Boy Greg (the disgruntled white power barber with a ton of ridiculous facial tattoos who moved to Russia to get away from what he called “degenerates”) has recently died in Ukraine
threaded - newest
The dumbest of the dumb.
That Leo guy is especially dumb. It felt good to read the end of his story. Scammed of money, devorced, and alone.
That dude literally walked through life like a rube on the boardwalk holding a balloon and wearing a propeller beanie. Easiest mark in the world.
At least his wife grew a few braincells
lost his wife and kids and still is inhaling the copium
I wonder if he’ll be drafted
Lmao
More like “density”.
I 100% read it as “density”. It wasn’t until I saw your comment I realised my mistake.
Russia: <img alt="" src="https://media.piefed.social/posts/eH/Zq/eHZq7PUW4kqJAPA.png">
Human rights? I thought that was “woke” /s
Good riddance.
I guess credit to them for following through but now they’re in the Find Out phase.
Conservatives, tankies should really be careful for what they wish for.
It’s kinda like when you see a dog barking behind a window, and it immediately calms down when you open it.
Russia is the greatest country in the entire world… Until they have to live there.
I’m not sure following through is to their credit here. It takes a special kind of dumb, and a huge pile of it, to ignore all the red flags throughout the whole process.
nope please tankies live your best life, move to mother russia today
i remember reading somewhere that russia is conservative because it lacks access to the sea. it’s the sea access that made england the birth land of liberalism because the sea connects more than it divides. so you get in contact with lots of other cultures. and that breeds liberalism.
Looks dubiously at Indonesia.
This makes that argument too: youtu.be/OS1NZLgKM2c
I don’t think there’s a very strong relationship there. While inland areas do tend to be more conversative, I think that’s just generally due to the rural/urban divide. Cities historically have been located on the coasts for shipping purposes. And that also divides by education level, which is also related to political tendencies. And cities have historically been located on the coasts for convenience of shipping. Even inland cities are usually on major rivers.
But there are plenty of racists there too. London has been a huge melting pot of different races for a long time, but there are still plenty of racists in England.
In England, as in the US, the level of racism in an area inversely correlates with the percentage of the population who are immigrants. The white riots that recently happened in lily-white Northern Ireland are a recent illustrative example.
In London, there are a lot of racists, but not proportionally so. There also happen to be a lot of all kinds of people there. It’s a big city.
Wait until you find out what the liberals did to all of those other cultures
My man Russia has had access to plenty of sea. Sankt Petersburg is on the Baltic Sea and has been there for like 300 years. The Russian Empire had access to the Black Sea and the Pacific and so did the Soviet Union. It’s not the access to the sea that’s making them conservative, it’s the Russian Orthodox Church and their governments keeping them uneducated so they can control them easily. The Russian Orthodox Church is so conservative they refuse to change to the Gregorian calendar, they still use the Julian Calendar which is innacurate and keeps drifting so that they celebrate most Christian Holidays like 2 weeks later than everyone else.
And access to the Baltic Sea and to the Black Sea is worth, jack sht, if access to the Atlantic from there can be blocked by multiple countries. It is actually worse than access of Austria to the Seas. In the case of Austria goods can be delivered within the Single Market to an Atlantic port. The only access to the Oceans is at the Pacific but the Transsiberian Railway doesn’t have nearly the capacity to make that Russia’s main port and there is not that much of anything in the far east to need a huge port. It is good as a military harbour but terrible for projecting maritime power to Europe where Russia is engaged in imperialist wars of conquest.
Wow, that’s a bold statement.
I think dumb is a better word. Russia has a crazy amount of coastlines.
Frozen, tundra coastlines. It lacks warm water ports, which is why it invaded Ukraine for Crimea in 2014.
The UK on the other hand is nothing but warm water ports. I think their point stands for at least modern Russia.
Right up until the AMOC collapses
It is way less dumb than you think it is. As long as climate change is not doing something about it, Russia’s access to international waters is a lot more compromised than many think. Russia’s main ports have access to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. In both cases other countries can block access of Russian ships to the Atlantic. Other than that, the only ports with all year round usable access to international waters is in Russia’s far east (Vladivostok primarily), which can compensate a bit but not nearly replace the ports in the European parts of Russia.
But in relation to this statement, it is not wrong. The large coastline in the north does not really provide contacts except for polar bears, the east is a completely different society, which leaves only the Baltic coast and a few, summer-only harbors in the north and the black sea.
I think what they’re really trying to talk about are port cities. That’s where mingling and cultural exchange happen. Also lively bar scenes.
The arctic does not free Russia from being a continental, rather than maritime, power. Their geopolitics and imperial identity is dominated by mountain and river and plains borders, and destabilizing or annexing the powers at their borders. The arctic is inaccessible except for some baltic access dominated by maritime nations.
It’s well known cultures that are more urban, closer to the sea and thus meet more diverse people, are more open.
Also, note that Saint Petersburg is the most liberal city of Russia.
These people construct a dream world in which all their problems are the result of “woke”, and in which Russia is a bastion of Conservative values. It’s delusional, and sad, but there’s a lot of influencers talking convincingly about how awful our life is. Sometimes people believe them.
Eat the rich, don’t move to Russia.
According to the article Russia is actively creating that image, and the special visa to go with it, for numbskulls like Leo.
I mean…
hope the guy gets sent to the front and barely survives just so he can share his message with all the other idiots.
bet he’ll see dudes blowing dudes for socks or boots on the front lines.
And you think they’d believe him?
Imagine hating a group of people SO much you’d rather be homeless in Russia of all god damn places.
In some unmentioned corners of lemmy, they’d tell you without a hint of irony, that this is Western Propaganda and Russians are enjoying much more freedom than people in lets say Germany, where oppression has reached unheard of levels. …
or something like that.
LOL, that’s just FAFO with a chef’s kiss. Kudos for honesty though. I hope he becomes reformed and much more skeptical of bullshit narratives; although the article does not read like it. More like he’s comfortable with a 50/50 divide in his mind. Christianity, I guess.
Imagine being dumb enough to think Texas isn’t conservative enough for you
I don’t think I can
Ive heard afghanistan is a great alternative for repubes
They might find the Pashto boy-raping culture congenial. And the rule by religious reactionary idiots with guns will feel a bit like back home in Texas.
Imagine no alarm bells going off as you read that 🤦
Also, the USA is one of those 47 countries! Remember that the next time Trump boasts about his good relations with Russia and/or Putin being his buddy.
The whole article - Leo’s story - is worth the read.
Something in the article reminded me of the Anastasia movement, one of those esoteric cults you need to look a little closer at to see the fascism.
Worried about immigration and poor living standards? Become an immigrant in Russia! Conservatives aren’t great at thinking things through.
things throughat thinking_People are so fucking dumb man. Like just take the sentence and make it into questions: traditional? values?
Nonono, he is not an immigrant, he is an expat. HUGE difference! Just ask the British pensioners in Spain and southern France!
A lot of the Brits in Spain have been leaving because the Spanish have cracked down on tax-dodging, and because Brits lost their freedom of movement in the EU when they voted for Brexit. And the expats are whining like mad about it.
Meanwhile, I know some people who’ve moved to Spain and Portugal, learned the language, assimilated and gotten the passport, instead of living in a soulless monolingual enclave, quaffing Spanish champagne, creeping on their neighbors’ wives and cultivating their melanoma like the Costa del Sol bunch.
If we get rid of those idiots that way, why should we complain? I mean, there are enough sources of information to see how a county is. If you only rely on state-issued propaganda and you fall for it, don’t expect any sympathy.
Let’s break this down: The people say they “don’t recognise the community around [them] anymore” because of “high immigration”, so they decide to become an immigrant surrounded by people of a different nationality than them.
As I see it, this is for one specific reason only: I don’t believe it’s the different cultural values from immigration that bothers them (they are literally moving into a wholly foreign culture; although I’m sure the Orthodox church gives some perverse appeal), but I believe they are bothered by ethnicity/skin colour. I believe these people are racists more than they are xenophobes.
I believe, for these people, Russia is a better alternative only because they have a certain perception of white-skinned Russians. I don’t think these people are aware of places like Tuva, or Yakutia, or Chechnya - and I don’t think they would ever visit those places. To say their quiet part out loud, I think these “conservatives” are just people who are white supremacists, moving because it’s a “white country” in their eyes, and thinking all white people have some shared essence. This is how they can justify to themselves being a foreigner in a foreign land. How else could they justify it to themselves?
From what I’ve read in the past, a lot of them are just really homophobic.
“Certainly this will get rid of my urge to hump butt”
We’ll have none of that gay stuff in my house.
Now, where should I hang my framed copy of this?
<img alt="" src="https://gdb.rferl.org/23ED2B64-E7BF-4833-B3D2-E6781E48AC49_w1024_q10_s.jpg">
Russia’s been running a massive propaganda campaign in Europe and the US for more than a decade. Including slandering the LGBT and trying to associate them with illegal activities, promoting Christian orthodoxy over atheism, depicting Europe as degenerate and failing, demonizing immigrants and trying to frame them as criminals etc.
The people who move to Russia thinking they are upgrading their lives are few according to this article, but I’m still surprised by how these people completely ignored how authoritarian and destitute that country is. Germans moving to Russia thinking it’s the better place to be is a huge propaganda victory for the latter.
Someone who is homophobic has two choices:
Gay sex must be really good.
I think that’s a narrative implanted in their brains by conservatives: too many brownskinned people, danger danger danger.
Just like Russia deliberately creates the narrative that they offer an alternative, conveniently ignoring the multicultural nature of Russia - and the obvious conflict of becoming an immigrant yourself.
Yep, and please prevent them from ever coming back. May they rot in Russia.
This is what happens when you do your own research.
Citations, please. /s
it just constantly boggles my mind how mentally ill people (Leo clearly has some form of mental illness) and truly idiotic people (again, applies to Leo) always seem to have enough money to just blow away like this. Meanwhile intelligent and sane individuals are barely scraping by.
I mean i’m comfortable in life, more than comfortable, but i don’t have “move to another country simply because I hate a particular thing in society” money.
I also think people with the mental caliber of Leo don’t think of consequences when they spend their money, so it’s possible he sold everything he owns and built debt to leave.
“Sure, I’ll borrow $100k. Good luck collecting when I’m in Russia!”
Honestly, getting rid of them for $100k is probably a bargain.
I mean he moved there and was immediately scammed out of his life savings so… you’re spot on lmao
My schadenfreude is through the roof
Schadenfreudegasm
I’m entirely in favor of a program that promotes the voluntary exit of xenophobic reactionary cunts from the US, as long as we can come up with some way to not let them return after it inevitably all goes to shit for them.
This article inspired me to check and Teddy Boy Greg (the disgruntled white power barber with a ton of ridiculous facial tattoos who moved to Russia to get away from what he called “degenerates”) has recently died in Ukraine
What a nice patch of sunflowers he’ll make.
White supremacist died fighting Russia’s war against… checks notes… alleged neo-Nazis? Dude wasn’t blessed with an overabundance of critical thinking.
White supremacists never are. By definition they are the bottom of the bell curve
Allow me to present this handy guide:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f68af6ca-21e2-4a70-9fed-ea45001cb809.png">
One of the few good things russia has done. Voluntarily pulling dumbasses into their own borders.