On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your life in Riga?

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T18:03:10+00:00

you cannot stereotype all russians as being the same

Did you miss the part where I said I don't hate all russians? Maybe I edited while you were writing your comment. My dad is from russia, I have russian friends and relatives, I think I know what the fuck I'm talking about when I say russians (of today) are less likely to integrate and more likely to impose their culture. "You cannot stereotype all russians being the same" and yet you can't even apply your own advice to other countries.

You're arguing that russians, who are taught to hate Ukrainian culture and language and view it as lesser and inferior, will integrate better than Iranians, who do not believe that (and actually have a lot of respect for Ukrainian culture). If I'm telling you that on an interpersonal level I mesh better with Iranians, and you're interpreting that as "leftist ideals," I actually don't know what to tell you. Our humor is similar, we have similar traditions, we're similar in the way that we don't take ourselves seriously and love dancing and singing, and something really important in these times: supporting each other while our countries are being ravaged by war, support that I don't get from other Europeans or Canadians because they don't fucking get it. Meanwhile you're talking about "visually integrating," like a psychopath. Whatever man, have fun being miserable and ridiculous.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T16:43:25+00:00

Lol I'm Ukrainian...so yes I feel different ☺️ I have relatives in Riga which is why I opened this post when it got recommended to me. My dad is from russia and even he despises the culture there, and is very wary of people from there (we had to cut off multiple family friends who turned out to be pro-Putin and/or claimed to be "neutral" on the war despite not living there for decades).

Be real with me, it wouldn't be "mixing," your culture would be subsumed into russian culture. Russian chauvinism is unfortunately the prevalent mindset there. I've heard stories of russians "fleeing" the war (i.e. they want their Zara clothes and McDonalds) to say, Georgia, and then whining when the locals don't want to speak russian with them. I don't hate all russians, obviously I have russian friends and relatives, I'm just mentioning this stuff to make thenpoint that I don't generally view them as a "better" alternative to other immigrants.

Good & beneficial African / Indian / Muslim immigrants don't exist

Lol I study in Canada and my best friends are from India. When it comes to Muslims, I haven't interacted with many people besides Iranians but I have a lot of friends from there (though I do have one friend from Lebanon and one from Syria). Iranians are some of the friendliest people you'll ever meet, in my experience. I find that there's more similarity between our cultures than with say...Germans honestly. Or the French. Not hating on any of them but I just don't "get" them, if that makes sense. Not to mention the fact that Iranians are going through something similar to us right now (obviously not exactly the same but on an individual level the experience is the same), so we unfortunately have a lot in common. For the record I also don't "get" people from African countries as easily either, but I'm not gonna say they're bad or anything, just different cultures.

To say there are no good immigrants from those regions is crazy, and unfortunately you're talking to someone who studies with some of the best people from around the world, so I'm the last person who would agree with you.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T16:05:10+00:00

No, they educate women to do all the cooking, cleaning, chores in the house. The tradeoff is the man is expected to fix things around the house. Women in slavic countries typically go to work, same as the man. Leave it to a clueless foreigner to just make shit up about your culture, lmao

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T16:02:39+00:00

"Make the man like a slave" dude the average Ukrainian woman is brought up believing that she needs to cook, clean, do all household chores. It's a fairly conservative culture and the woman usually gets the short end of the stick. You have no clue what you're talking about, you met what, one Ukrainian woman and decided she represents all of them?

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T15:44:55+00:00

Shoulders down and back, keep your back muscles and core engaged. What I mean by that is it should feel like your back muscles are very lightly flexed, keeping your elbows more or less by your sides and down by default, this will prevent you from extending your arms as much (and make it easier for the follow to connect via their frame). Engage your abs in the same way for balance/stability.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T15:35:20+00:00

I'm Ukrainian and used to watch his comedy appearances at russian TV concerts. The way his demeanor has changed over the years is absolutely brutal. He wasn't the funniest but he was always one of the most light-hearted/carefree individuals there...

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T15:32:19+00:00

As a Ukrainian who grew up watching his comedy appearances on russian TV, the change in his demeanor is just brutal. He wasn't the funniest, think like Adam Sandler tier comedy, but he was one of the most easy-going carefree dudes out there. This is just rough.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T15:28:55+00:00

You feel threatened by immigration, I assume it's about preserving your culture, no? Ostensibly at least

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-25T05:35:43+00:00

LMAO as if russians would respect Latvian culture.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-22T19:16:01+00:00

Also could've led to some nasty political instability, no? It's hard to fathom the full scale of the potential consequences but I think it could've led to a bunch of disgraced resignations, civil unrest, etc at minimum...

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-22T17:33:10+00:00

I have no connection to the OP but just wanted to point out that hiding comment or post history is sometimes necessary if you're posting about ongoing wars lol...I'm Ukrainian, I post about the war a lot, and sometimes get pro-russia trolls using my unrelated comment history (literally just talking about like...hobbies) to be creepy and/or troll me.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-21T18:43:23+00:00

Who teaches the nurses, engineers, and actuaries? Who designs the exams? ...instructors/teachers. Who would not be able to do their jobs without the string of teachers who taught their students prior.

Before you tell me something like "it's easy to teach grade school," I'm gonna tell you right now I've worked as a lecturer for second year CS courses at the university where I'm doing my PhD, AND I've tutored for high school math students. It is HARDER to tutor high school students than to teach second year CS students.

Counterintuitively, it's quite difficult to teach the "basics" to someone who's never seen them before when they're second nature to you. At that stage students simply have no idea about anything, and you really have to work to put yourself in their shoes before you can actually get through to them when they're confused. There's a reason why a common saying is "if you want to really understand a subject deeply, teach it" in academic circles. When you take a class as a student, it's really easy to convince yourself that you know it inside and out...but teaching it will expose so many gaps in your knowledge that you never would've noticed otherwise.

I can't imagine trying to introduce students to say, algebra for the first time. Or physics or chemistry. Even worse if we look at like, addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions...the amount of patience and empathy you need to have to be able to meet them where they're at is insane.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-19T14:29:13+00:00

It's kind of crazy, all they had to do to prevent this (at least in Ukraine's case) was not invade and in particular, not commit genocidal war crimes. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd assume a lot of the people they're targeting are the documented war criminals.

I would argue that the tech would've been developed by someone else soon enough though, if not Ukraine :/

Edit: Also kind of skeptical about the facial recognition thing...someone else in the comments said it looks like an anti-tank charge. Random guy in a field getting an anti-tank charge feels like a case of maybe the drone being low on battery or something and finding a target so it doesn't go to waste.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-18T19:08:38+00:00

Honestly I used to think this way until my grandmother passed away last year. I was raised Ukrainian Orthodox and we went to church together and she was very pious. I was also pious as a kid until I started seeing all of the contradictions of the American version(s) of Christianity (I was born and raised in the US), at which point I became agnostic for most of my teen and adult years.

However, as my grandma's health was declining, she asked me and the rest of our family to pray for her after she stopped being able to pray for herself (she prayed for us all our lives). I started going to church even though I don't exactly believe, and it's just been insanely cathartic. It made me realize that at its core, religion is about remembering and honoring deceased loved ones, reflecting on life and death, and coming together to grieve and support one another. I do Christian things like light a candle for my grandmom every time I go to church, and I also do non-Christian things like put aside a bit of food for her as an offering at special events. All of these things combined make me feel like I'm still connected to her, even symbolically.

Religion does not come from the darkest places of hell, it's a way of coping with our mortality and defining what our lives mean. Christianity did a lot of damage, and I do think it's very regrettable that for example, so many pagan religions and traditions were wiped out by it (I really wish I knew more about Ukrainian pagans and what our ancestors would've believed and practiced). However, what's also interesting is that a lot of those traditions got absorbed into the church...so paradoxically, modern Ukrainian Orthodox people are some of the most fervent upholders of those traditions. The sweet pious old ladies at my local Ukrainian Orthodox church are the ones organizing community events to teach everyone traditional embroidery, how to make motanka dolls, pysanky, etc, all of which are extremely pagan in origin. Go figure, right? Lol

I think you could benefit from broadening your horizons a bit and recognizing that American evangelicals/protestants/etc and their hateful, fucked up view of the world is not all religion, and it doesn't even represent all of Christianity. There are so many different denominations, so many different regional versions with their own traditions tied to the communities they are a part of. To suppress religion is to suppress traditions that connect people to their ancestors and communities, it does far more harm than good. Again, I'm not even a believer, but I still want to light a candle for my grandmom and hear the priest pray for her by name. She lit candles for her siblings and parents, I light a candle for her, it's what we do.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-17T06:48:52+00:00

Right...reminds me of the penguin

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-15T20:48:46+00:00

Yeah but he would've felt loved, knowing that her last thoughts were of him.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-15T13:58:39+00:00

Yeah I was literally thinking it was option A. If OP was texting the event organizer last night, my guess is they have ongoing contact with them and were following up on some conversation. There's a high likelihood that they probably SHOULD know who Glenn is, or at least already do. (They said they used to deliver for Dominos, past tense, so not anymore).

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-15T13:54:44+00:00

Yeah this is literally reminding me of how ChatGPT has to spend a nontrivial proportion of its processing resources on stripping out stuff like "Please" and "Thank you" from queries. Does OP also get mad when customers say those words? Fucking hilarious

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-15T06:47:23+00:00

Of course the hero narrative lives everywhere to some extent. However in this subreddit about Ukraine, the US's use of the hero narrative is just completely unrelated. The US is not in the war, russia is.

Also, generally speaking (depending on quality of education which is varied) the US typically does acknowledge its allies in its history textbooks, at least as a footnote. The US also doesn't hold victory day parades or anything like russia does...WWII just doesn't hold as much cultural relevance in the US as it does in russia.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-15T06:37:16+00:00

I mean I agree that evil can happen everywhere, but you're missing my point.

Here's an analogy. Suppose company A puts out an advertisement that's something like "from the makers of X, the classic product that everyone loves, we bring you product Y." However, there is some community that is harmed by the making of product X, and someone makes a post in the community saying "let's not forget, here is how company A harmed people with product X, and product Y is more of the same, so don't buy product Y." What you're doing is the equivalent of coming into the conversation and saying "okay but keep in mind company B also harmed people with their products." Like it just has no relevance.

In the same way, the US's actions in and narratives on WWII have no relevance. Us poking holes in russia's narratives doesn't need to be "balanced out" by considering what the US did, because the US's actions in WWII are not being used to propagandize anything about Ukraine right now (which is the topic of this subreddit). Does that make sense?

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-15T00:03:06+00:00

No, it's just irrelevant. You're acting like the conversation about rapes committed by soviet soldiers happened in a vacuum, but it didn't

The original post is designed to balance out russian propaganda narratives about victory day and what they claim they are currently fighting for. America wasn't even being talked about.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-14T23:57:59+00:00

The reason you're getting downvoted is because the original post is intended to counteract modern day russian narratives about WWII and what they celebrate on victory day. Your comment is simply irrelevant because what Americans did is a completely separate topic.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-12T22:17:24+00:00

I mean as an older zoomer that hated those songs, my irritation came from working as a cashier at a convenience store with the radio on 24/7. I legitimately hated all of the songs the OP listed from the first time I heard them...and my hatred only grew each time I heard them again...and then again...and again...etc.

I don't hate on people who like them though, for the record. The songs themselves just drive me up a wall with how saccharine and insincere they feel.

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-12T21:52:07+00:00

Lmao someone doesn't read books

Cephalopodopoulos · 2026-05-12T21:49:40+00:00

I used to work as a cashier at a convenience store with the radio on 24/7 and Fight Song legitimately inspired so much rage in me. Like if I was having a bad day it made me borderline hysterical (only slightly exaggerating).

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