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General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: May pub - 30th or 31st?
« Last post by Jubal on Today at 09:41:31 AM »Ooh, do let us know how that goes though!
Teachers take after their worst-behaved students: tell them not to do something and they're possibly more likely to do it. Speaking from experience.I think that's true in terms of attitudes, but threatening people's jobs can have a certain chilling effect on that sort of thing, and make it harder to get time when it's not on the curriculum: teachers are also in my experience very stretched! It would almost need a level of full civil disobedience to get it to work on a "you can't fire all of us" basis, and I don't know if that's something anyone's quite prepared to organise sadly.
There's one thing that one should keep in mind as he or she follows the developments in Ukraine.
The people of Ukraine are actually fighting two wars at the same time. Apart from the Russian invasion, the largest war of aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler, there's another war -- a domestic war of our people against so many things that undermine us from within.
It's about corrupt officials, it's about incompetent and populistic decision-makers, it's about those who embezzle our money allocated on fortifications and defenses, it's about those who give exemptions from military conscription to sports-betting firms (with very murky tax records), and don't it to charity foundations providing the military with fast and vital aid.
It's also, for instance, about entire departments of the SBU security service spying on anti-corruption investigating journalists during the war with Russia.
It's a war against so many things that try to drag us back to what we used to be - a weak and corrupt informal Russian colony.
Just like the "military" war with the foreign invader, this internal war for saving this country from its own dark side has had its victories and setbacks.
Every time high-profile malpractice is exposed in the open, it is fought daily, triggering a scandal and a public uproar.
And these two wars are interconnected.
A favorable outcome of the war against Russia's aggression is not possible without significant victories in this domestic war of ours.
That's our life and the struggle for national survival in the last... ten years!
And I must say that sometimes I look through the news, I can't help but keep thinking about the fact that so many of those insolent pen-pushers in high cabinets don't deserve to even hold a candle to all our men and women who save this country every single day and do the impossible on the fronts of Russia's war.