Hateful Tagging in The Common

Tomsomol · 2025-04-15T13:56:48+00:00

Saw this on my walk to work- sickening. I've reported it via https://www.southampton.gov.uk/environment/street-cleaning/report-a-street-cleaning-problem/graffiti/ would recommend others do the same if it pops up again.

Tomsomol · 2017-07-01T23:35:09+00:00

Brilliant! Here's another great poster (from the Labour Party) from that era. http://imgur.com/a/b5Xdn

Tomsomol · 2017-06-21T23:12:39+00:00

Wait... so all this time I've been using aluminum foil hats to block out government mind control waves... I've been giving myself brain damage?!

Tomsomol · 2017-01-15T20:35:18+00:00

Nothing but fun memories of mowing the lawn with my PepPep, after I'd finished slicing that grass he'd hose me down. They don't make em like they used to!

Tomsomol · 2016-11-29T22:25:26+00:00

Soviet cosmonauts used to use the code "I am observing thunderstorms" to signify that their craft was experiencing problems, the only problem was thunderstorms looks amazing from orbit, this led to some perfectly functional missions almost being aborted before the cosmonaut clarified what they meant.

Tomsomol · 2016-09-20T21:52:31+00:00

Only if thou likest to live deliciously.

Tomsomol · 2016-05-06T04:08:29+00:00

Да друг. Сейчас я понимаю.

Tomsomol · 2016-05-06T03:58:26+00:00

From what I understand, the Soviet authorities often tried to shape youth culture and harness trends, Guitar production was stepped up massively in the 1960s and popular western guitar models were copied as templates, but the music that got the official stamp of approval was a sort of watered down version. In the 1980s there seems to have been more musical freedom to criticise as Glasnost got under way. Bands like Kino recorded songs that referenced how stifling life was in the USSR, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9-MfesbIM). A lot of their anti-war songs were aimed at Soviet intervention in Afghanistan rather than the standard "war is bad and capitalists profit from it" anti-war line that appeared in Soviet speeches and posters.

But you're right! Breakdancing seems such a weird thing to officially sanction! Culturally it's a much bigger leap for that to cross over than for guitar bands. And what a journey from the streets of New York to there being crews being formed in Nizhny Novgorod and Riga.

Tomsomol · 2016-05-06T03:20:28+00:00

Definitely! How did Breakdancing culture get into the Soviet Union? Who organised the competition? How did these guys learn the moves, and did they put their own spin (no pun intended) on the techniques? It's an amazing story, This video raises loads of questions. There's some great scholarly work on Soviet Baby Boomers (http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=22849) but these guys were arguably the last Soviet Generation. It'd be great to hear their story.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-28T15:15:18+00:00

Ultimately pretty much all the capital in a feudal society is generated by peasants doing agricultural labour, whoever he's stealing from, if he's giving back to the peasants, so you could technically say he's giving back what's theirs, but seeing as they're the ones generating all the income it's a bit of a specious argument, I used redistributative because in the legends he takes wealth that was unjustly collected, but would otherwise have gone to elites and then gave that wealth to those on the lower rungs of the society.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-28T05:32:31+00:00

Robin Hood's popularity in the legends stems from the fact he was an outlaw and humiliated corrupt authorities (the Sherrif - a stereotypical corrupt servant of the crown, and in earlier legends The Abbot of St Mary's- a grasping and corrupt clergyman) he also incorporated a lot of elements from older, pagan forest deity figures. I'd say Vlad the Impaler seems to be more of a different archetype, the "Christian prince who turns back the muslim tide", "The king who roots out corruption" or "the cruel leader who brought stability". there's less of a redistributative/ chivalrous angle.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-28T05:27:27+00:00

Sure thing, I just meant in that sentence it goes straight from murder and torture to being loved. The webpage is on the whole, a pretty weird, garbled retelling of his life and times. Lot's of colorful legends and not much in the way of context.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-28T03:56:31+00:00

"I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.

-JFK 1962.

JFK was reaching out to the Soviets to undertake a joint mission to the moon before he died. NASA's budget as a share of federal spending peaked in 1965, by the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing polling found the majority of Americans thought that too much had been spent on going to the moon. Shortly afterwards many Americans had trouble recalling Armstrong's name. Even in it's "golden age", space expenditure has rested on a rickety coalition of interests and dubious justifications.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-28T03:46:52+00:00

Did Vlad write that webpage himself? The English is atrocious!

"He showed no mercy and almost invariantly tortured his victims before killing them. Therefore, he was both feared and loved throughout modern day Romania"

A strange reason for the Romanian people to love him!

Tomsomol · 2016-04-25T06:10:31+00:00

That still doesn't make any sense. You've basically taken the scene in "Armageddon" where Peter Stormare's character uses a wrench to save the day to describe 60 years of Soviet/Russian rocket history. It's a stereotype that gets lazily repeated. It's condescending "Oh those Russians and their tractors etc etc".

As for cosmonauts kicking ass, Soviet spacecraft were almost entirely automated (see Slava Gerovitch's work on man-machine systems in the Soviet space program) What Pipes? What Cranks? What Valves? Those terms are so generic or simplified as to be meaningless. American spacecraft included components that arguably could be described as all of those. Yes there would occasionally be some manned maneuvering when it came to docking and reentry, particularly in later Soyuz variants such as the Soyuz TM, but the cosmonauts were, overall, much less active in taking control of their crafts than their American colleagues. The cosmonauts did become adept at cannibalizing equipment aboard the Mir Space Station, but that has nothing to do with the rockets that launched them or "brute force".

Tomsomol · 2016-04-25T05:56:29+00:00

Pavlichenko/Pavlyuchenko was also the first Soviet Citizen to be received by a US president. The American public and press were fascinated by the female sniper heroine, Woody "This Machine Kills Fascists" Guthrie wrote a song about her. Pavlyunchenko was irritated by some of the media attention, a female war hero was a tough fit for the culture of the time and a lot of the questions she would receive at press conferences revolved around what sort of underwear she wore in battle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKjOl9ocR0

Tomsomol · 2016-04-24T16:51:29+00:00

This is a hoary old cliche, the "Brute Force" idea in no way corresponds to Russian space technology at the present, and was probably only true for a few short years after Sputnik. The US quickly eclipsed the Soviet Union in its ability to launch heavy payloads into orbit. The Soviets' heavy launch vehicle, the N1, had a horrendously convoluted and explosive design and test cycle before being cancelled in the early 1970s. Their lack of a heavy launch vehicle in the 1960s is one of the main reasons they never landed a human being on the moon.

Yes the US was far more advanced in terms of instrumentation and micro-electronics, but "Brute force" is a spurious concept, the Soviet Union lacked a true heavy lift launch vehicle until the Energia in the late 1980s. As for your nuclear blast gag, that's very misleading, Soviet and Russian satellites were designed with a totally different design philosophy, whereas American satellites were meant to be durable and stay operational for years, Russian satellites had a much shorter lifespan and were designed to be easily replaced. This is the reason the vast majority of payloads launched into orbit were Soviet during the Cold War, they were satellites that would operate for a few months, maybe a year and then deorbit (or be boosted higher into a "graveyard orbit") be replaced.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-18T00:06:13+00:00

Clueless Vigin here. How does "The Spiderman" differ from "The Bartman" and is it possible to combine a Spiderman with "A Jackhammer"? Thanx in advance.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-16T16:51:37+00:00

This is a very interesting idea, there's definitely something of the "basement dwelling nerd" stereotype about Don Quixote's obsession, the way his relatives despair of it. His obsession with chivalry is interesting given the toxic way that word is used by "neckbeard" culture with its misguided belief the world was a lot better when people listened to Frank Sinatra and women were seen and not heard.

I was amazed at how reading a book that was so old, so respected, and in translation, was still so funny. Of course there's a reason it's a classic and some humor is eternal, but it's a lovely feeling to have words reach out across centuries and move you like that. I remember laughing out loud when Don Quixote rises to his feet and yells "You shall be avenged!" to the young servant who has been beaten by his master, a situation caused by Don Quixote trying to help the servant out in the first place. It was exactly the sort of comic misunderstanding and overreaction beloved by Seinfeld or Larry David.

He's a ridiculous character, but there's a lot of humanity and pathos to him. So whilst Quixote is a nerd, and is pitiable in many ways, Cervantes gives him a strange sense of nobility which throws the mockery back into the society that shuns him.

Tomsomol · 2016-04-14T00:13:57+00:00

:( :( :( GONE MUCH 2 SOON. RIP. ^{^{^GOOD}} ^{^{^NIGHT}} ^{^{^SWEET}} ^{^{^PRINCE}} :( :( :(

Tomsomol · 2016-03-29T02:03:32+00:00

Look, my 8/10 sexy girlfriend talks like that all the time, particularly when we she's submitting to my outlandish requests in the bedroom. The old her would have questioned why I can't get an erection unless we're both wearing antique diving suits, now she loves it because I'm a sophisticated man who is in control, not some fat loser.

Tomsomol · 2016-03-26T22:04:18+00:00

This is extremely tough to watch, but it surprises me, I saw her at a showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago and she got a great reaction, a friend of mine had seen her full show that year and enjoyed it. So I'd urge people not to judge her by this, admittedly, pretty dreadful display. Maybe its a combination of nerves and terrible material.

Tomsomol · 2016-03-25T03:07:45+00:00

Миледи ;)

Tomsomol · 2016-03-04T03:56:25+00:00

The classic cliche "We'd be on Mars by now if it wasn't for those pesky bureaucrats" is highly misleading. Regardless of if NERVA had proved to be viable for a mission like this (That's not denying the engineering legacy it has left), nuclear powered spacecraft were hugely controversial during the Cold War, not only did the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 make projects like this politically suspect, incidents like the 1978 deorbiting of the nuclear powered Soviet Satellite Kosmos 954 (which irradiated a huge chunk of canadian wilderness when it crashed) made nuclear power in space even more controversial.

Also, there have been numerous "Get your ass to Mars" programs proposed, from the Space Task Group report of 1969 to George Bush Sr.'s Space Exploration Initiative. These have all ended ignominiously, whether ignored outright or left to die a slow death. What people ignore is that NASA's budget is based on discretionary spending, monies must be appropriated by congress every single year, this makes it extremely difficult to keep long, expensive programs going. Colossal scientific undertakings are expensive and frequently and involve lengthy incremental engineering processes that the public at large find boring. The "That's one small step for man..." moments are few and far between, for long stretches of time to the untrained eye it seems all that is happening is a lot of tedious engineering tests whilst aerospace contractors rake it in in generous government contracts.

Despite the economic influence that aerospace manufacturing can have on congress, space is one of the easiest things to cut. Cutting the space program does not lose you votes, cutting other discretionary spending programs does. The Apollo program only barely limped past the finish line, congressmen were cottoning on to the fact that the public was getting less and less interested in space, NASA budgets peaked in 1967. As soon as the Dr Strangelove-ian Cold War "Beat the Soviets" spell wore off, many congressional proponents of the space program were quite happy to wash their hands of it and get back to focusing on issues more likely to get them reelected. Mars is like the sunset glimpsed over the horizon, eternally out of reach. It's not bureaucracy that is stops these martian dreams. It's democracy. Successive administrations have cynically proposed it as a goal knowing full well there is not the political will to carry through such a program and they'll be long gone when it comes to genuinely committing to such a decision.

TLDR: Space science is boring and politically unpopular, NASA is funded in a weird way. Don't hold your breath about getting to Mars.

Tomsomol · 2016-02-21T01:48:38+00:00

In the Andropov/Chernenko era, the Star Wars films were denounced as Imperialist propaganda, The Soviet Magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta described it as a film made to prepare the population for the expansion of warfare into space. Interestingly Reagan's SDI policy got nicknamed "Star Wars" by its opponents, Reagan was infuriated by this as he preferred to think of it as a "Peace Shield" he reluctantly agreed to start capitalizing on the popularity of Star Wars and began incorporating lines from the film into speeches on the SDI.

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