Everything about the loss of the Kursk in 2000 prefigures the 2022 invasion of Ukraine: the Kremlin's lack of interest in its own people; their shodd… - John Sweeney

What the fuck was Navalny doing?
The evidence points to the videos being made when Navalny's fury at the ineffectiveness of the liberals to land a punch on Putin was at its most extreme and irrational and that he later regretted them but, Navalny being Navalny, he couldn't bring himself to take them down. Over the next three years he pursued his grand strategy of trying to get the nationalist right to wake up to the threat from Putin's fascism. When he realised that strategy wasn't working it was, for him, too late, and a tad embarassing, to delete the videos, so they stayed up. He didn't get it, that the liberal world hates this kind of stuff and the stink of it followed him down the years even though he had turned himself into something quite different. [...] When one avenue of fire failed, he would pursue another, and then another. The goal was to defeat Putin; he didn't realise that with the NAROD videos he ended up defeating himself.

By common consent Ceausescu went mad during his and Elena's trip to China and North Korea in 1971. He went out an unstable paranoiac; he came back a madman. People close to him debate which had the more pernicious influence, China or North Korea. Terrible as Mao's China was as it emerged from the throes of the Cultural Revolution, North Korea was then and still is the more totalitarian society, and enjoys the distinction of being the most pyramidal society on earth.

Virtually any description of life under the monarchy makes anyone who knows Ceausescu's Bucharest wince with regret for the good old days. Architecture, cuisine, culture, press freedom, prison conditions, freedom to travel, to go to church: all seem to have been better before the communists. Only the quantity of whores in Bucharest appears to have remained constant.