During Joe Biden’s visit to Ukraine, Russians tried to show their military might and conducted a trial launch of their vaunted ICBM “Satan II.” The launch failed, like everything in Russia.
There’s an important lesson here for everybody’s individual lives: don’t make threats if you aren’t certain you can deliver.
After experiencing American public schools, a 13-year-old Ukrainian refugee girl wants to go home:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/american-school-war-zone/
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Proxy war, eh? The guy just doesn’t quit but at least he stopped admiring Putin. Now he needs to see some of the viral videos of extreme violence in Russian schools, and reason will finally get a chance.
To the larger point, I have a feeling our Ukrainian student is also not going to be sorry to go back home. We have no violence or lawlessness but she’s frustrated by the complete failure of sociability. People live in such terror of offending or saying something microaggressive that they end up not saying anything at all. Like me, she discovered that the only people you can have normal conversations with are African Americans and those who served in the army. Obviously, also Hispanics but we have very few, so she hasn’t met them. White Anglos are lovely people but they are so terrified of offending that it’s painful to communicate with them. Curiously, the older generation is perfectly fine in what concerns sociability. When I go to children’s or church events, I always seek out 70-year-old grandparents and parishioners because we have great conversations. People make jokes, ask questions, share stories. But with the crowd of under-fifties it’s seriously painful. I can come in a burqa, a clown costume or with both legs amputated and they’ll pretend that they aren’t noticing anything unusual. I don’t know why there’s such a generational breakdown. But it’s real and hard to get used to.
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// Now he needs to see some of the viral videos of extreme violence in Russian schools, and reason will finally get a chance.
This teenager is from Ukraine, not Russia.
Do you think an average Ukrainian school is similar to one in Russia and just as violent?
In Israel I saw no violence at (relatively good) schools.
I would expect a school in a bad neighborhood full of children from disfunctional families to be a horrible place in general, even leaving aside the question of learning levels. So can easily believe a FSU school in a good area is better than a failing American school.
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I know the kid is from Ukraine but Dreher is saying that Putin is somehow correct in his criticisms of the West.
In Ukraine the discourse on domestic abuse and treatment of children is light-years ahead of Russia. Russia decriminalized domestic violence and spent years glorifying domestic violence on countless TV shows. I can’t imagine anybody in Ukraine saying publicly 0,5% of what’s routinely said in Russia regarding domestic violence and still having an audience. It’s a different world.
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“Dreher is saying that Putin is somehow correct in his criticisms”
Someone should point him to this youtube channel… where the moderator tries to deal with extreme dysfunction in the russian countryside…
https://www.youtube.com/@vasyainthehay
the fact that these stories happened in a country receiving vast amounts of money that could have easily raised living standards to European levels is all the more telling… russia could have been prosperous but stealing and invading are apparently more important for most russians….
Putin keeps talking about “Parent 1 and 2” in Europe but conveniently forgets to mention that in his country Parent 1 and 2 aren’t mom and dad but mom and grandma as an overwhelming number of kids grow up without father’s involvement. Obviously, as a result of the war, there will be even more such kids. The entire army with which Russia entered a year ago – 250,000 soldiers – is gone. Dead, maimed, etc. And more idiots are coming. These are the Russian family values Putin keeps chirping about.
Yes, the West has many flaws. But Putin’s Russia, with its sky-high abortion rates, zero family stability, and extraordinary drug addiction rates among teenagers should shut its cake hole about Western problems.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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