At 5 am, in my native city of Kharkiv, high school students are practicing for the graduation ball:
What are you noticing the most about these young people?
Graduation Ball
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
At 5 am, in my native city of Kharkiv, high school students are practicing for the graduation ball:
What are you noticing the most about these young people?
Clarissa's Blog 
Organized?
Capable of happiness despite the war?
Young and beautiful? Are American high students fatter?
Wait, are they practicing in the middle of the road?
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It’s 5 am, so there isn’t much traffic. This is Sumskaya, the historic center of the city, and the most famous street in Kharkiv.
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\ Tattooed-up Gen X Irish snowflake dressed as the devil with a keffiyeh
The trick is to put everyone into their place, just look at the last paragraph in the quote below:
// Danish LGBTQ+ group faces sponsor exodus after Israel boycott call.
Major firms like Maersk and Google pull sponsorship from Copenhagen Pride after demand to reassess ties with Israel, dealing financial haymaker to local Pride parade organizers
…
The decision deals a significant financial blow to the organizers of the parade whose budget last year stood at 7.6 million Danish kroner ($1 million), with half of that amount coming from now-withdrawn corporate sponsors.
…
Speaking to Ynet, an Israeli academic living in Copenhagen and part of the local LGBTQ+ community expressed deep shame about the situation. […] “Copenhagen Pride simply overestimated their influence,” he added. “They thought that because they represent a minority population, everyone should heed their statements. But no one is interested in what an LGBTQ+ organization has to say about the war.”
…
Copenhagen Pride responded: “We apologize if our messages were not clear. We have no intention of forcing anyone to choose sides in a conflict, and our sole aim is to improve the quality of life for the LGBTQ+ community in Denmark.”
https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/s19npf6ga
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“improve the quality of life for the LGBTQ+ community in Denmark.”
I spent two wonderful years in Copenhagen studying for my MA in Scandinavian philology.
I can’t really see what “improvements” the “LGBTQ+ community in Denmark needs. They have everything already, really. They do not need anything to improve the quality of their life.
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They follow instructions, and all of them dance better than I do 😉
Also, a lot more long natural-color hair than anywhere around here in the same age group. It’s nice.
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…and typical of Europeans, every one of them has better posture than the average American.
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I noticed their clothes (of course!). Girls are dressed all alike in modest dresses, not tarted up in skimpy gowns as happens at prom in the US, and the boys likewise are dressed alike. And they’re working on the moves of folk or traditional ballroom dance, not freeform.
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That’s the first thing I noticed. 🙂 The whorish outfits of my youth in the 1990s are gone. Good taste is back.
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Hah! That never occurred to me, I only saw “school-admin-picked-uniforms” and skipped right over it. They did, however, do a really great job of picking a color and style of dress that’d look good on most girls. It’s always sad when somebody picks uniform dresses (bridesmaids, flight stewards, whatever) that are guaranteed to make 90% of everybody look horrible.
Did they used to pick trashy uniforms, back in the day, or was it that they let the kids choose?
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When the USSR fell, we were all really into freedom, all of a sudden. That was a good thing. But we’d had no chance to develop good taste. So we went for garish to counteract the Soviet greyness and vulgar to counteract the Soviet prissiness.
I’m glad people got cured of that and have realized that freedom has nothing to do with letting body parts hang out of over-tight, over-exposed clothes. You can be completely free while dressed in a way that doesn’t scream “Truck stop sex trade.”
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It is… not an uncommon thing, in the developing world. When we lived in Peru, the lady cashiers at Christmastime all had to wear these strapless Santa-themed red minidresses at our favorite grocery. I felt so bad for them.
In VN that shiny-new-thing tackiness took on a whole different form. They were still really conservative in clothing, but you could tell that first flush of money and goods flew straight over any fences built around good taste. They had bog-standard cast-concrete catholic saint statuary at the local church, but they’d gone in and given them all crazy halos made of circular fluorescent lightbulbs, neon tubes, or disks of flashing LEDs. The little grotto outside was a nice place to sit in the daytime, but at night it looked like it was going for a Vegas strip aesthetic. The worst part was that as a visitor, everybody wanted to show it to me, and I had to say something nice. Ba Ma-ri-a, give me grace. The churchyard had very beautiful mango trees, though.
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They are confident and elegant!
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Wow, what stood out to me now was that the teacher / instructor speaks Russian.
I thought with the war and throwing out Russian books from the libraries, Kharkiv had become only Ukrainian too.
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People have always been and are now bilingual. It never bothered anybody. The existence of a linguistic problem in Ukraine is 100% Russian propaganda.
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Agreed. In fact, I suspect that the younger generations of Ukrainians will be speaking Russian less and less in future years and decades. The only value in knowing Russian for Ukrainians would be for Ukrainians to understand their enemy better (and to communicate with any relatives of theirs who still live in Russia, of course).
AFAIK, Ukraine’s language laws aren’t any worse than those of either France or the Baltic countries, and there is the option of suing Ukraine in European courts if Ukraine is ever violating any of its international treaties in regards to language, which I don’t think that it is but I am merely speaking hypothetically here.
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Yes, this is true. Ukrainians are massively abandoning Russian in daily life. But those who aren’t are completely fine.
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Agreed. And the decline of Russian in Ukraine also makes one realize just how badly Russia has blundered in Ukraine over the last 10 years. Russia could have left Ukraine alone after Maidan and simply opened its doors wide open to any and all Ukrainians who were dissatisfied with the new Ukrainian government. Nowadays, not even Ukrainian mobsters are actually willing to work with their Russian counterparts, unlike even in the 2014-2021 time period, because being perceived as a traitor in Ukraine is much, much worse than being perceived as a “regular” big-time criminal:
https://www.economist.com/international/2023/04/24/how-the-war-split-the-mafia
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That’s an interesting video, the girls certainly dress better than many of the middle school and high school girls I’ve worked with. But don’t let anyone on Free Republic or other mainstream conservative forums see this, they really believe there’s no real war in Ukraine and this is all some sort of money laundering scheme by Biden and Zelensky. According to these folks, the kids in this video should be cowering in a bomb shelter and being pitiful victims shivering in fear, not making dance videos in prom outfits. Trust me, don’t go on Free Republic if you care about your blood pressure
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The kids were dancing after an air raid that had gone on for 19 hours, the longest so far in the city.
Nobody can cower in an air raid shelter for 2+ years. People have jobs, school, lives. They graduate, get married, have children, etc. It’s hard to understand when one is from a culture that locked itself up over a virus and missed out on two years of its life but other people are less timorous.
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That makes sense, too many Americans cower in fear over every little thing and don’t understand the concept of Keep Calm and Carry On.
But what I meant is that many mainstream conservatives don’t actually believe there’s a war going on in Ukraine, if they saw that video, they would think there’s no war because the kids look “too happy”. I saw a video on a mainstream Republican page on Instagram where the posters were seething that young people in Kyiv were going out clubbing recently, the poster claimed this was proof that there was no war if people still went out clubbing. They don’t understand that even during a war, people still want to have some fun. During the Blitz of London during WW2, people still went out dancing and had fun and weren’t just huddling in the Tube tunnels
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There are definitely some very low-IQ people out there who are attached to all sorts of conspiracy theories. The followers of Glen Greenwald and Co. I feel compassion because they live in a world that they don’t have the capacity to comprehend, let alone inscribe themselves into. These people are being preyed upon my dishonest operators. It’s all very sad.
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I notice two things: They are all dressed alike, in uniforms, and not all of them know the choreography.
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