[quote="Carbo
good, now fvcking stay over there, where reporters get murdered for investigating the wrong thing, where chechens and kazakhstanis etc are subject to an average of 5 racists attacks per week in moscow alone, where the very idea of democracy is a joke, where old women scrap for a living selling fags on the streets, where the far right is on the rise, where the levels of corruption are so high that Gov't officials have to be bribed to get anything done and where the protection of gangsters is needed just so your business doesn't get petrol bombed by other gangsters, where the Police basically don't investigate smaller crimes and can easily be dissuaded from investigating the bigger ones if bribed with a big enough wedge[/quote]
Hey, it sounds if you actually have first hand experience of Russia. All very accurate.
Meantime, I think that the issue that I have is that whoever said "a man born in England has won first place in the lottery of life" was largely correct.
We don't realize how made we have it in the UK. Certainly, the poverty I see in Russia, juxtaposed with vulgar, ostentatious displays of outrageous wealth, makes you realize what a great country in which you were born. Further, while it is true that Russia has been at the forefront of the arts, literature, mathematics, engineering and science for much to the last hundred years, I feel that no country can compete in terms of its contribution of man's knowledge and exploration that the country that produced Newton, Adam Smith, Darwin, Maxwell, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Dickens, Shakespeare and the rest.
It's not that I don't like Britain. It's my home and I'm proud to be British. But what I loathe is the are the unthinking, dimwitted chavs that roam the streets.Bereft of any drive toward self betterment, apathetic, unproductive, and chronically disenfranchised who seem to be ready for nothing but what they're currently doing, and yet manage to terrorise and intimidate.
Moscow is a far, far more violent, dangerous place than Newcastle, but how many bar fights have I seen in three years here? Zero. How many street fights? Zero. How often have I felt unsafe on the streets because they're filled with piss-heads looking to crown a night of greedy drunkarness with a good old fight? Zero.
There seems to be a whole class of people who just don't give a toss. My friend's ex-fiancee had a younger brother who just didn't go to school. He had a rare kidney disorder, so his parents mollycoddled him, but he was perfectly fine to go to school. He claimed bullying. He claimed to be sick. But most days he just sat in and played on his playstation, his Xbox, his game cube, his PSP, or one of the other gadgets his parents had for him. When he turned 16, the Job Centre found him a job, but he left after 2 days, saying that people weren't being nice to him. So he just say around playing on games.
And when I go to the council estate my mum lives on, and talk to her, I see a whole class of people like that.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a heartless Tory -- far from it. In fact, I spend most of my life these days battling against hard line conservatives (the political group, not the party) and libertarians.
But what gets me is that, as I say, being born in Britain, with the opportunities that brings, is about as good as it gets, and people are wasting it, and being impolite and going out to spoil it for others in the process.
And when I read about an ugly 15 year old girl, who has obviously had if off with half the neighbourhood already, including, appallingly, although nobody seems to care, with a 13 year old who looks about eight, and now she's knocked up, and thinks it's the 13 year old's but isn't sure, I just wonder, I really do.
Sorry to blab off about the country. And I really didn't mean to make it that Britain wasn't Great, but I just get irritated and hacked off by some of the people who live there and don't realize, to paraphrase Harold McMillan, how good they've got it.[/quote]
excellent answer, my hat is tipped to you sir
interesting point on the drunken violence. if you talk to a Chechen, or at least to the one I talked to once, you might hear a slightly different take on things. to this guy, drunken fighting in russia was much more common than in Chechen culture.
i'll try to quote directly, "the russians will get drunk and fight over all kinds of things, they will insult each other's mothers and sisters. In chechnya no such things happen. you don't insult someone's mother because you know what the consequences are (IE considerable chance of gunplay)"
edit: damn i fecked up the quote function.