Russia plans to blow up massive dam (Western sources)

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So... if this happens around 80 settlements will be at risk of flooding, including Kherson and it may also affect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It would basically be worse than a tactical nuke.

[LilyLark 10,213]

Ugh. It wouldn't surprise me if Putin did this..he's lost his d*mn mind.

Honestly, side eyeing some of the coverage by some (not all) Russian journos who write for English language outlets. They're upset because one guy in the UA government said the Russian language should be pushed out...he's just one guy and it won't happen, though. But Putin, in the past, of course claimed Russian speakers were 'discriminated against' (which is insane, because President Zelensky's first language is Russian, it's widely spoken, h*ll even Azov is made up mostly of Russian speakers). So they're claiming this feeds into it....

But I don't understand why they are elevating one person, esp. when everyone else was like that's an idea no one else really agrees with, and using it as a negative cudgel against Ukraine. But even then, someone advocating for a language of their imperialists to slowly be pushed out...isn't being crazy imo. Esp. when so many Ukrainians speak Ukrainian or have a basic knowledge and are working to become fluent.

Like would people object to countries that were formerly colonized by the French, English, etc. for saying 'hey, we need to start speaking out own language more and not the one of the people who colonized us.?' I mean that's happened in a lot of the MENA regions...French is still widely spoken but there's way more of an effort to speak Arabic or Amazigh in educational systems, etc.

Anyway, I'm almost wondering if there is a bias-much like an American or Brit or Frenchman might be biased towards their own country-about the language issues. Moreover, it's kind of a reminder that people still weirdly don't want to accept that Russia colonized vast swaths of Central Asia, the Caucuses, Eastern Europe, Baltics, etc. and persecuted the people there for speaking their native languages while pushing Russian on them. Like colonization exists outside of the Americas and Africa.

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16 minutes ago, LilyLark said:

Ugh. It wouldn't surprise me if Putin did this..he's lost his d*mn mind.

Honestly, side eyeing some of the coverage by some (not all) Russian journos who write for English language outlets. They're upset because one guy in the UA government said the Russian language should be pushed out...he's just one guy and it won't happen, though. But Putin, in the past, of course claimed Russian speakers were 'discriminated against' (which is insane, because President Zelensky's first language is Russian, it's widely spoken, h*ll even Azov is made up mostly of Russian speakers). So they're claiming this feeds into it....

But I don't understand why they are elevating one person, esp. when everyone else was like that's an idea no one else really agrees with, and using it as a negative cudgel against Ukraine. But even then, someone advocating for a language of their imperialists to slowly be pushed out...isn't being crazy imo. Esp. when so many Ukrainians speak Ukrainian or have a basic knowledge and are working to become fluent.

Like would people object to countries that were formerly colonized by the French, English, etc. for saying 'hey, we need to start speaking out own language more and not the one of the people who colonized us.?' I mean that's happened in a lot of the MENA regions...French is still widely spoken but there's way more of an effort to speak Arabic or Amazigh in educational systems, etc.

Anyway, I'm almost wondering if there is a bias-much like an American or Brit or Frenchman might be biased towards their own country-about the language issues. Moreover, it's kind of a reminder that people still weirdly don't want to accept that Russia colonized vast swaths of Central Asia, the Caucuses, Eastern Europe, Baltics, etc. and persecuted the people there for speaking their native languages while pushing Russian on them. Like colonization exists outside of the Americas and Africa.

The thing is, Ukraine banned schools teaching minority Languages (in Russian, but also other in indigenous ones like Romanian). Zelensky said the decision will be reversed, but it was real thing and played a part into the reasons of why Putin decided to invade. The decision was an attempt to ukrainianize minorities, Russian and non-Russian. It was wrong.

Otherwise I agree with you, this is my only ammendment. 

Russians are an alogene population in most of the former URSS. This is why they mostly live in the cities and not the countryside. And they are racist to the indigenous population to this day, I heard accounts of them refusing to speak Romanian in Bălți (Moldova) even though they are actual colonizers. It boils my blood, and this gets a pass to some Westeners because let's face it... people are uneducated. "Colonizers need to come from a boat and speak English/French/Spanish" is what most people are think and The most knowledge many Westerners have acces to.

[LilyLark 10,213]

50 minutes ago, FfFfFfFF said:

The thing is, Ukraine banned schools teaching minority Languages (in Russian, but also other in indigenous ones like Romanian). Zelensky said the decision will be reversed, but it was real thing and played a part into the reasons of why Putin decided to invade. The decision was an attempt to ukrainianize minorities, Russian and non-Russian. It was wrong.

Otherwise I agree with you, this is my only ammendment. 

Russians are an alogene population in most of the former URSS. This is why they mostly live in the cities and not the countryside. And they are racist to the indigenous population to this day, I heard accounts of them refusing to speak Romanian in Bălți (Moldova) even though they are actual colonizers. It boils my blood, and this gets a pass to some Westeners because let's face it... people are uneducated. "Colonizers need to come from a boat and speak English/French/Spanish" is what most people are think and The most knowledge many Westerners have acces to.

Interesting point. I can sort of understand the idea that schooling should only in Ukrainian with minority languages offered as electives/supplemental classes, but it sounds like it went too far in the other direction in trying to establish Ukrainian as the dominate language. There's a similar thing going on right now in South Africa with an attempt to basically get rid of Afrikaanas language schools, from what I understand, and I know that something like that happened in Algeria which caused a backlash as they thought they were going to far in the other direction in an attempt to sort of minimize French and then some of the indigenous languages caught caught up in it, too. 

It is interesting though how the Kremlin seizes on a legitimate issue/problem related to a different country, but then blows it up and makes it worse or takes it out of context. This is a weird comparison, but it's almost like how the propaganda machine approached Syria. There were some extremists who were against Assad with ties to ISIS. The majority though were not like that...but the Kremlin made it seem like everyone was an extremist.

Yeah, I feel like maybe it's education/the media but there seems to be a weird thought that only the French/English/Spanish can be colonizers. I mean even the Dutch were super brutal in Indonesia, etc. and it feels like 95% of Americans are completely unaware of that...

[LilyLark 10,213]

Did you see this...I thought it was interesting. Luhn is also quite sympathetic to Ukraine for the most part, but can be very 'y'all are overreacting' to people worried about Russia invading other countries/using tactical nukes...so for him to find this suspicious is telling (and worrying).

 

 

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13 minutes ago, LilyLark said:

Interesting point. I can sort of understand the idea that schooling should only in Ukrainian with minority languages offered as electives/supplemental classes, but it sounds like it went too far in the other direction in trying to establish Ukrainian as the dominate language. There's a similar thing going on right now in South Africa with an attempt to basically get rid of Afrikaanas language schools, from what I understand, and I know that something like that happened in Algeria which caused a backlash as they thought they were going to far in the other direction in an attempt to sort of minimize French and then some of the indigenous languages caught caught up in it, too. 

I would also go as far as saying optional classes are not good, instead education should be in given Language (because most of the times people don't become fluent in secondary languages learned in school, in Romania Russian had was the secondary Language, but only 0,0004% were actually able to learn it (thankfully ). Even now people learn English on the Internet and not at school, but I disgress.

There are portions of Ukrainian territory which has never been Ukranian until 1945. Among them are compact areas where you would basically only hear non-Ukrainian languages (Hungarian in Transcapatica, Romanian in Maramures, Cernauti, Budjak and Odesa and Bulgarian, Gagauz in the SW of Odesa. These people's primary and mother's Language is not Ukrainian. It's unfair to make them learn Ukrainian as a primary Language. They are not newcomers like the Russians, but have been living here for thousands of years (Gagauz and Bulgarians are only here for centuries, but still). In Romania there are Hungarian minorities that only speak Hungarian, and rightfully so, they should not be pushed to speak a foreing Language even the national one. 

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27 minutes ago, LilyLark said:

 

Yeah, I feel like maybe it's education/the media but there seems to be a weird thought that only the French/English/Spanish can be colonizers. I mean even the Dutch were super brutal in Indonesia, etc. and it feels like 95% of Americans are completely unaware of that...

Or the Belgians in Congo!

8 minutes ago, LilyLark said:

Did you see this...I thought it was interesting. Luhn is also quite sympathetic to Ukraine for the most part, but can be very 'y'all are overreacting' to people worried about Russia invading other countries/using tactical nukes...so for him to find this suspicious is telling (and worrying).

 

 

I saw some articles about Norway recently. I don't know what to make up of them, other than the fact in the past there was some talk about how valuable Norway (and precisely Finnmark) are to NATO in the contex of ''the battle'' for the Arctic, climate change opening up economic passages in the region etc.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, LilyLark said:

French is still widely spoken but there's way more of an effort to speak Arabic or Amazigh in educational systems, etc.

Im impressed u know amazigh  if u r amazigh hit me up

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45 minutes ago, AnnaNicoleSmith said:

Im impressed u know amazigh  if u r amazigh hit me up

Amazigh is cool! The melting pot of Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, FfFfFfFF said:

Amazigh is cool! The melting pot of Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Well it's not middle east at all, even the arabic some talk, people from middle east cant understand it, it's a weird thing going on

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2 minutes ago, AnnaNicoleSmith said:

Well it's not middle east at all, even the arabic some talk, people from middle east cant understand it, it's a weird thing going on

Demographically they are a mix of the three continents. There have been many migrations from the Sahara region into Sinai, Levant and Arabian Peninsula (in both directions). And coastal Mediteranean area was also heavily inter-connected: people think seas separate groups of people, but they actually unite them. 

[Guest]

Just now, FfFfFfFF said:

Demographically they are a mix of the three continents. There have been many migrations from the Sahara region into Sinai, Levant and Arabian Peninsula (in both directions). And coastal Mediteranean area was also heavily inter-connected: people think seas separate groups of people, but they actually unite them. 

Amazigh have zero middle eastern blood in them, it's just facts. But there are some who have a bit of middle eastern in them in morocco but they are not called amazigh. Amazigh are a very distinctive people  Just saying that a lot of the culture in amazigh is just theirs, not middle east, but for some reasons many people misunderstand it. For example ive done a DNA test for fun and I am 80% amazigh, the rest spanish and nigerian with traces in Ukraine, South Korea & Norway so yeah, it's not an arabic country by any means

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2 hours ago, AnnaNicoleSmith said:

Amazigh have zero middle eastern blood in them, it's just facts. 

This is wrong (although what you are saying about culture and mixture of various of influences and geographical spaces is on point). Amazigh are the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Middle East: they have something from all, but are neither at the same time.

Spoiler

 

The paper Recent Historical Migrations Have Shaped the Gene Pool of Arabs and Berbers in North Africa by Lara R. Arauna et al. (2016) says:

North African human populations are the result of an amalgam of migrations due to their strategic location at a crossroads of three continents: [...]  and the connection to the Middle East by the Arabian Peninsula and the Sinai, which has permitted constant migrations by ground. + Historical records affirm that North Africa was populated by different groups supposed to be the ancestors of the current Berber peoples (Amazigh), by the arrival of Phoenicians in the second millennium B.C., and the posterior conquest of the area by the Romans. + There is scanty genome-wide data in North African groups that can help to unravel the complexity of human migrations in the area. The pioneer study of ∼900 K SNPs by Henn et al. (2012) showed an amalgam of ancestral components (i.e., sub-Saharan, Maghrebi, European, and Middle Eastern) in North African groups.

Mitochondrial DNA analysis of Northwest African populations reveals genetic exchanges with European, Near-Eastern, and sub-Saharan populations by J. C Rando et al. (2003) says The majority of the maternal ancestors of the Berbers must have come from Europe and the Near East since the Neolithic. The Mauritanians and West-Saharans, in contrast, bear substantial though not dominant mtDNA affinity with sub-Saharans.

Wikipedia is citing other articles saying: According to Macaulay et al. 1999, "one-third (33%) of Mozabite Berber mtDNAs have a Near Eastern ancestry, probably having arrived in North Africa less than 50,000 years ago, and one-eighth (12.5%) have an origin in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe appears to be the source of many of the remaining sequences, with the rest having arisen either in North Africa". Maca-Meyer et al. 2003 analyze the "autochthonous North African lineage U6" in mtDNA, and conclude that: The most probable origin of the proto-U6 lineage was the Near East. Around 30,000 years ago it spread to North Africa where it represents a signature of regional continuity. Subgroup U6a reflects the first North African expansion from the Maghreb returning to the east in Paleolithic times. Derivative clade U6a1 signals a posterior movement from Western Asis back to the Maghreb and Noth Africa. This migration coincides with a possible Afroasiatic linguistic expansion.

 

I think what happens is that you are tired of people thinking Algerians, Tunisians etc are Middle Easters, not knowing North Africa is a different region of the world and lumping everything together without trying to learn about it.

2 hours ago, AnnaNicoleSmith said:

For example ive done a DNA test for fun and I am 80% amazigh, the rest spanish and nigerian with traces in Ukraine, South Korea & Norway so yeah, it's not an arabic country by any means

I wish I would do one too, but I don't know what to feel about companies storing my DNA.  I would like to because DNA tests never just show one country, you are bound to find something unexpected or ''exotic''.