I’m not a big enough SW fan in general to spend my precious little reading time on SW comics and books.

Yeah, well, your first paragraph reads so impressed that I’m certain you haven’t read at least X-Wing books (all my favorite, Stackpole’s ones are sometimes too comfortable, Allston’s ones are sometimes cringe in technical and logical regards), the Thrawn trilogy (the part of the EU usually recommended first) and the Death Star (to compare the old and the new). I liked Andor, once again, and I would like it without Disney’s dark years, but those things were very good and deep too.

I’m sure there’s lots of merit in them, but not for me when there’s so much else to read in far more interesting universes.

To each their own.

Prequels are weird, not bad. What people criticize about them can be said about Babylon V even more, but I haven’t seen many people calling it a bad show.

I’m not impartial - I’ve grown on “prequel EU” as much as on “original EU”, but started with the former, trying to really interpret Jedi philosophy and such. My brain is not agile enough to separate pieces of EU and their closest movies by now.

But there’s that moment that with prequels the EU and the movies were being created simultaneously, there were official layers of canon and Lucas himself would even refer to EU. So - I don’t know. Maybe as self-contained movies they are bad. Their aesthetic gave me a lot, their emotion feels more real than Andor’s second season (its first season is better though), their music.

Dunno, the languages seemed AI-generated based on French and German, or something like that.

Would make them similar to Mando’a, so no complaints, not the first time in Star Wars.

But - for me it’s good because it resembles the old EU.

So if you have little acquaintance with the old EU and liked Andor - I recommend delving into it.

Eh, we’ve had books involving characters like Mon Mothma, Garm Bel Iblis, Wedge Antilles, Tycho Selchu, Korran Horn and many others. We’ve also had comic books. We’ve had the “Death Star” novel, the previous version, so to say, of how those plans got out initially. The EU path involved a few hops at each of which the rebels were barely able to slip it further, with a few very lucky coincidences. Ending in the transmission to Tantive IV. Except the Rogue one moment with Vader literally having seen the ship and tried to board it, IIRC, was kinda inconsistent with how they talk in the 1977 movie, as if it’s still perfectly plausible that Tantive IV has nothing to do with the plans.

I appreciate Rogue One for trying to tread the same path, leading to a good story and maybe more good stories with the same approach, but its not the first on it.

KotOR II is mature. Last of the Jedi books are mature. X-Wing books … vary, some are very stupid, but some are very good.

SW EU is kinda big, words like “best” shouldn’t be thrown lightly.

But yes, even with the old stuff being so burnt into my brain I can’t be impartial, I accept Andor is real Star Wars and it’s good.

It’s obviously inspired by quite a few EU books and comics. Which are not worse.

(One thing I like about it, it manages to pretend Disney sequels just didn’t happen, and makes looking directly at Disney SW things optional. And makes a lot of EU references.)

Maybe if you mean on screen, then yes. I still think it’s not better than 1977 and 1980.

I agree, but sometimes one can encounter trekkies and other dubious types pretending it’s better than prequels or even OT, that is too much.

BTW, I want an unpopular advice - where to you legally get these shows as seamlessly as torrenting?

Suppose I’m a Linux or FreeBSD user, and don’t like too many steps being required due to being autistic and thus easily irritated.

Because with Andor specifically would really want to pay for it.

You hear the sound of your own brain asking for fuel to actually function.

Eh, well, I’m not a communist, actually I lean to the ancap side, but you also don’t know much about communism.

Living in the USSR wasn’t nice, but it was a kinda functioning state and society. Less evil than today’s Russia, and led by less evil people. And it was an honest attempt at building something good, that failed due to architectural faults and deadlocks eventually.

There’s a difference between intentional evil and evil by mistake. USSR’s the latter, today’s Russia’s the former.

take over large parts of europe and replace their populations with russians

I’d need sources for something like that. There’s one “large part of Europe”, namely a piece of East Prussia now called Kaliningrad Oblast, where that happened.

The rest of East Prussia was ethnically cleansed in favor of Lithuanians and Poles. Both nations don’t seem eager to fix that, and you don’t seem eager to mention that.

And other areas were ethnically cleansed of Germans, Hungarians in favor of Poles, Czechs, Romanians.

There was also a mutual “population exchange” between Western Ukraine and Poland, where Poles were resettled from Ukraine to western areas of Poland cleansed from Germans, and Ukrainians from Poland were resettled to Ukraine. Ethnic cleansing as well.

Except for the first and the last things mentioned, those weren’t initiated by the USSR. Like the name “Benes decrees” kinda hints, being literally connected to Czechoslovakia, but in fact sometimes used for all of those crimes in Eastern Europe after the war.

Commies are literally palette swapped nazis.

No. In the USSR itself after Stalin they loved to low-key compare Stalin’s USSR to Nazi Germany, doesn’t make it true.

The kind of people who’d want Stalin back were a rarity, it seems, in the USSR itself after his death, unlike now in Russia. It was common knowledge, confirmed by party assemblies and many people being let out of prisons and rehabilitated, that repressions happened and were terrible, and that they shouldn’t happen again. It was also common knowledge, confirmed by official ideology as if that were needed, that war is terrible and no sane person wants war, and starting a war is unthinkable.

And even Stalin’s USSR wasn’t as similar to Nazi Germany as you think.

After Stalin it was the same leftist ideology, about workers having jobs and food on table, peaceful united humanity reaching for the stars, civilization and knowledge. Just with a memory of trauma and a belief in planning and centralism.

During Stalin it was about heroics and sacrifices made to have the same somewhere in far future, but that first a powerful socialist state should be built to demonstrate the advantages of socialism, and for that a lot of things could be considered necessary.

Before Stalin it was the same leftist ideology with too much trust into its success.

Sacrifices and heroics are typical for fascism, but not similar otherwise at all.

The whole fucking point is that this wasn’t

that specific group of people

, it was much bigger in scale. Before thinking you’re being ironic or calling others names you might want to check such things.

That’d be bad, always hurts the elites negligibly and the rest substantially.

Veto right suspension is better. At least we’ll see which other EU states will use that veto.

Hungary is simply the poorest and weakest and least valued of Putin’s friends inside, which is why it’s taking all the hate. We may see Germany or Austria or Belgium or Italy using that veto.

Music, art style, socrealism in portraits. Soviet architecture (the monumental and decorative kind). All that.

Ukrainians have the same problem with neo-Nazis as other ex-Soviet countries.

Holodomor is a bit of a fuzzy matter, it’s picking a part of the more wide scale events relating to Ukraine and calling it genocide of Ukrainian people, while genocide involves intention to wipe out an ethnic group.

This was more of Stalin’s USSR treating people as expendable and hunger as acceptable when he needed the resources to build heavy industries for the military. Most of the grain producing areas of the USSR were in Ukraine and south of Russia, which is also where most of the victims were, because grain was taken by force according to planned norm and to fake reports (as it happens in such systems, administrators overreporting gains and underreporting losses).

So I somewhat feel strange when people talk of it like genocide example, but people arguing against that are usually worse, so let it be.

Anyway, the point of this comment was - those people don’t even think of such things, they act purely on vibes. Most of Soviet propaganda was intended for people literate in the first-second generation, it relied on vibes even more than, say, Nazi German propaganda or Western propaganda of that time and of our time. That allows it to work on people very far from Soviet reality or knowledge of USSR’s history. (Of course, there were more intelligent levels of Soviet propaganda, they seem almost fully forgotten, include marxist dialectics, optimism of the future, dreams of a united peaceful planet of intelligent people using their lives for learning and creation, and no war and violence. Would be weird to expect tankies to be familiar with anything of that.)

You can’t reason with people acting on vibes. Your comments’ vibes for them are predefined, you don’t affect them.

If folks have to do their own healthcare they should be unfettered.

And closer to evolutionary mechanisms of having favorite pills taken every time you feel bad, and eventually winning the Darwin award.

Not sure.

A lot of countries have prescriptions required, but without such prices for everything as in the USA. Maybe that’s not the problem.

Not because they won’t admit it, but because they won’t unpair their core identities from it.

For the same reason Japan has options, while these two don’t.

Turkish resorts. They are mostly in places where people were taken in bunches to the sea and thrown off board just a bit more than 100 years ago. And anything Turkish tbh. Oh yes, there is a lot of friendliness of the “oh so your ancestors are from Ispir, mine too, I have friends in Ispir, come visit” kind. It feels mind-bending, because it’s always orthogonal to whether the person saying it thinks that genocide is, you know, not okay.

I would probably want to see the less tourist (less inhabited honestly) parts, where villagers follow you with suspicious looks.

Various despotic monarchies attracting scammers and whores. That is, I’d probably be interested to take a look, but the fact that there are places where you can be jailed arbitrarily technically doesn’t instill confidence.

Israel. Being part Jewish too, I’d kinda feel like complicit in evil. I’ve felt that once, don’t want to repeat yet.

TIL.

Anyway, I meant the general logistics, but now that you said this, it’d be common sense for Ukraine to have it all earlier, because of how populace is distributed.

Russia has a few humongous centers of population and everyone trying to get closer to them from remote areas. Ukraine compared to Russia isn’t all that centralized.

About automated post cells - frankly I haven’t been paying attention. But there was a short period around 2013, I think, when you could pay with BTC in some places.

But it’s Moscow close enough to center, so - not very relevant experience.

That’s not really necessary anymore, it seems. No need to recapture what will be surrendered in a peace treaty.