Alexander Boldizar @Boldizar Twitter profile

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Alexander Boldizar

2 months

"Made me think of early Pynchon and of Neal Stephenson at his best. The most interesting novel I’ve read in a long time."

Lose sleep turning pages with this fast-paced but cerebral thriller.

amazon.com

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@MarinaMedvin As both a lawyer and a BJJ black belt, I'm certain I would step in to help--I also know that my biggest fear in doing so would not be the two punks but the police and legal consequences of stepping in.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@McFaul Every Eastern European country with Russian experience has been trying to explain to the West that culture matters. Russians escalate in the face of weakness and compromise only in the face of strength. It's astounding how difficult it is to explain this cultural gap sometimes.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

10 days

@wartranslated When he says, "We are losing" he presumably means him and Putin?

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@eyeslasho If by the "most selective" you mean Harvard, I had a very different experience. At McGill, my undergrad, the top students all thought outside the box--they were weirdos, eccentrics, interesting. At Harvard, the defining attribute was risk aversion. The name was too heavy for

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

8 months

@mjuric @Google Even in their explanation, this sentence shows their priorities: "Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive." It's clear that they consider "offensive" a higher order error than "inaccurate." That's the core problem.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 months

@ChrisO_wiki This is such a fitting sentence, summing up Russia in one line: "...imprisoned and tortured in the basement of the House of Culture..."

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

20 days

@Denys_Shmyhal I'm Slovak, but I'm with Ukraine on this. It's shocking how quickly Slovaks forgot what it's like living under the Russian boot.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@NatalkaKyiv And yet there are still so many Russian apologists all over the West. It's depressing.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

8 months

@IAPonomarenko The Dutchy of Muscovy didn't grow to span 11 time zones by being a victim of world history. How can these people not get it?

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@NeilPHauer That's a false framing that belongs in a video game, not a serious discussion of war. War isn't just about the maps. It's also about assets, and the Ukrainians have seriously degraded the Russian army at a much lighter cost to themselves.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@randymot4 Ignore the threat--it's empty. On the very unlikely chance that he actually attacks a Turkish escort, blow up whichever ship is shooting. How have we forgotten the lessons of the Cold War so quickly? When facing Russia, strength is the only thing that de-escalates them.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@TheBrometheus Although I'm generally with Feynman in calling psychology a "cargo-cult science," these are all excellent psychological truths.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@francis_scarr It's amazing how Nazi-like they sound even when they're accusing others of being Nazis.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 years

@jonkay @UBC Damn, that's condescending! They're treating black people like they're developmentally challenged children. I don't find many things offensive, but if I were black I'd find this offensive as hell.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

3 months

@thecontradan @stillgray Not just stole attention. She actively made a mockery of athletes sacrificing years of their life to compete at the Olympics, and then was smug about it with comments about how merit is a sign of colonialism and patriarchy.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 years

@valaki_berlin @SteveStuWill As an immigrant from the former Czechoslovakia, I loved that sentence until I came to understand what "fruit flies" are. Then it lost much of its absurdist beauty. There was also a joke about tomatoes crossing the street that lost all humour when I learned what "catch up" means

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@wartranslated What 1917? They haven't evolved since the Golden Horde controlled Moscow. Read the Marquis de Custine's "Journeys Through Eternal Russia." Published in 1839, it could read like a description of the USSR under Stalin or Russia under Putin.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

10 months

@TheRickWilson He looks like he was just shaken out of bed.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@KuldkeppMart It's not a lack of fear. It's understanding that Russia escalates when it senses weakness and only de-escalates when faced with strength.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

5 months

@Tendar It is mind-boggling. Like telling someone they have to defend against a bully by only blocking punches, never by hitting the bully back in the face.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@StevenBalbus @PhillipsPOBrien The Russian army has always survived by sheer numbers alone.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@MaximeBernier We defected to Canada during the Cold War, after 6 months in a refugee camp. From that day forward, if anyone asked my father where he was from, he said "Canada." If they asked, "You have an accent, what kind of accent is it?" He answered, "Ottawa accent." They'd have to ask

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@NatalkaKyiv This is a great example of a cultural difference that Americans struggle to understand. If an American admitted that they'd killed hundreds of thousands of children, it would include a sense of guilt. When a Russian admits it, it's a justification for more war because otherwise

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

11 months

@ChrisO_wiki That deep Russian soul.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@davidfrum So we get a motte and bailey defense that retreats to the motte of how bad the residential school program was. Which is true, but doesn't justify false facts. If the politics aligned differently, the same people would be shouting about "misinformation" and demanding censorship.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@eyeslasho -ly adverbs don't take a hyphen when forming a compound modifier.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@randymot4 @mattgaetz While I agree with your more nuanced historical analysis, it's also irrelevant. Ukraine is Russia's first bite at Europe. If Putin had taken it in 3 days, he'd have gone after the Baltics = WW3. Stopping Russia has more relevance for US interests than stopping Mid-East barbarians

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 months

@NOELreports And yet people in the West still keep clamoring for negotiations with Russia, as though that would bring peace.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@Tendar Some of these guys look exhausted. Walking slowly even after a shell goes off a few meters away. Good sign.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

23 days

@nguyenhdi You can write cleanly--Kafka, Hemingway, Carver--without having every sentence be the same length and cadence. And boring.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@rupasubramanya Canada used to have one of the most rational point-based immigration systems in the world. Then JT came in and replaced immigration that brought massive value to Canada with immigration that made him look good. (I'm also an immigrant, though that shouldn't matter to the point.)

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

9 months

@glukianoff I was born in what's now now Slovakia, under Soviet occupation. When we defected to Canada, one of my father's biggest surprises was the realization that snot is not naturally black. The air was so polluted, none of us had ever seen snot any colour other than black.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 years

@jonkay Finding a sense of humour at a Canadian university is extraordinary! A modern-day unicorn.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

3 years

@CheriJacobus @elonmusk @SenSanders Though this isn't true for most billionaires, every $1 @elonmusk spends privately will generate more long-term benefits for the human race than $100 spent by the gov't. Give the man a waiver--he's clearly more competent to decide how to allocate money than folks like @SenSanders

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

10 months

@wartranslated How cold is it there right now? With all the corruption, I keep expecting (hoping) the Russians to freeze during January.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@coldxman Maximum leeway for speech, no matter how boneheaded. Minimum leeway for physical violence, no matter how righteous the cause. Why is that so difficult for both the left and right to understand? Thank you for being a voice of integrity and rationality.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@secretsqrl123 @MatBabiak good

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@jonkay Except in Cuba everyone knows the government is lying. In Canada, almost nobody is aware of the fact that no bodies have been found. My friends get shocked and weirdly dissonant when I point this out, or they dismiss it as, "Well, that's the NY Post." They don't believe it.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

8 months

@eyeslasho Marcus Aurelius.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

23 days

@SarahTheHaider As a refugee myself, all I can say is that her statement reeks of entitlement, ingratitude, and a soul that is so small it needs a prosthetic to give her life some sort of simulacrum of meaning. She's a spoiled brat. I will never lose my gratitude to Canada for taking us in.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@publicinsanidad @ChrisO_wiki Even the Volksturm only took 16 to 60.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

10 months

@jonkay How is this legal?

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@eliasmakos I miss plastic bags that I could re-use as garbage bags. Instead, I have to buy new garbage bags while accumulating useless stacks of ripped paper and forgotten cloth bags in the house.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@McFaul I'm pro-democracies and thus pro-Israel, but they proved themselves a very one-sided ally over the past two years. They should have supplied Iron Dome to Kyiv on the second day of the Russian invasion.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

9 months

@Gerashchenko_en Everything outside of the Dutchy of Muscovy is a colony. Everyone except the Russians and the Chinese have had to cough up their colonies.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 month

@wartranslated The seat belonged to the USSR, not Russia. So it should rotate between former members of the USSR. One year for Russia, one for Ukraine, one for Estonia, one for Latvia, etc. Russia already had its turn (and then some).

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 years

@casualcactii @CityofVancouver @steeletalk @PaulDoroshenko @IRPlawyer @jillreports @kennedystewart @sarahkirby_yung @christineeboyle @CitizenYan @pattibacchus @glenhansman "I love JK Rowling" is a message of hate? Huh? Someone buy the man a dictionary.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

11 months

@KimPigSquash This reminds me of my own youth. In communist Czechoslovakia.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

9 months

@McFaul Start with people from neighboring countries. They understand Russia far better than westerners. But even the Russia expert we have, we don't listen to. We listen to international policy experts who think everyone follows WEIRD-country cultural norms. Russia doesn't.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@MerriamWebster "Merriam-Webster"

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@KonstantinKisin I agree with you on most things, but not here. This isn't just about Ukraine. Russia invaded a sovereign neighbor in a pure land grab, despite signing the Budapest Memorandum where it guaranteed Ukraine's security in exchange for 1200 nuclear warheads. Letting them gain

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@Mylovanov It's time for Chechnya, and about 200 other states still colonized by Moscow, to declare independence.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@HoumanBarekat What the hell happened to writers?

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@Podolyak_M Americans and Western Europeans cannot wrap their minds around the Russian worldview, where losing a few hundred thousand men simply doesn't register as a major cost. If they gain territory, the deaths will just become a source of pride for them, and the whole thing will repeat.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

3 months

@EmbassyofRussia After the Nazis invaded their neighbours, they eventually had to fight (and lose) on their own territory. Russia is the Nazi Germany of the 21st century.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@forevaeva79 In Canada, we've put weakness on a pedestal to such a pathological degree that a self-sufficient province, like a self-sufficient individual, is presumed to be "toxic."

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@KonstantinKisin Fluency in the language of DEI is an advantage. It's a marker of class, status and education, in the same way that knowing which fork to use in Victorian England was a marker. That's overwhelmingly the whole point.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 months

@BriannaWu Great summary here from Wait But Why.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@RobertKennedyJr "Peacefully" like in 2014? Or Georgia in 2008? Or Moldova? Or Chechnya after the first Chechen war? So the Russians could regroup, invade again 2yrs later & win? The Cold War showed us how to achieve peace with Russians--through strength. Compromise & weakness just invite war.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@nolanwpeterson A Russian victory--and they'll consider gaining even one square meter a victory regardless of the human cost--will also unwind the relatively new international order where big countries could no longer just take land from small ones. That could have disastrous consequences.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@NOELreports Did anyone track the turret? We may have a new leader in the Russian turret-toss.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 month

@eyeslasho Of course it's Vancouver (I live in Vancouver). She is every second person here.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@WeLoveNATO My dad tells stories of travelling in the USSR. In a train station, there was a row of vending machines. He put money into one & nothing came out. When he complained to the train station attendant, she banged on the vending machines & yelled, "Ivan, wake up!" Ivan was inside.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@Gerashchenko_en Don't Russians hide all their handicapped in a Siberian camp? Or at least an institutional basement? They always did in the past.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

5 months

@Stanovaya Useful analysis, but oy, please either make one long post or keep each element under 280 characters. Half and half is annoying to read.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@NatalkaKyiv The "Mongol yoke" is real. Russian mindset, culture and ethics haven't changed since 1382, when the Golden Horde took over Moscow. They're not European and they're not of this century. Read the Marquis de Custine's "La Russie en 1839." Nothing has changed.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@yasminalombaert Finally! This sort of thing should have happened across the West long ago.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@RealCynicalFox @divan_division As a Slovak, that is incredibly depressing.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 months

@BBCSteveR "Reaffirm Russia as a great power." That is what Russians have always cared about--more than their sons' lives and certainly more than western humanitarian ideals. It's the reason they put up with Tsars, with Stalin's terror, and now with Putin--and will until he shows weakness.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@mysteriouskat That's the 2nd argument for free speech. The 1st argument is that a neutral & stable definition of "good speech" is impossible. As soon as you have the category, it will just reflect power. Even if free speech absolutism isn't perfect, it's less imperfect than the alternative.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

5 months

@HistoryBoomer Conservatives are wrong about Trump, abortion, health care, aspects of the environment and the importance of equal opportunities. Liberals are wrong about identity politics (all of them), incentive structures, and the dangers of seeking equal outcomes.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 years

@glukianoff A lot of the problems with American discourse, especially around identity issues, boil down to extreme parochialism and American ethnocentrism. Americans act like history started 300 years ago.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 months

@IAPonomarenko We knew this. During the Vietnam war, Russian pilots flew thousands of sorties in Russian planes marked as North Vietnamese against the US. Same in the Korean war. We know how to fight proxy wars without triggering WW3.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

10 months

@Saikmedi When we defected from communist Czechoslovakia, among the crimes that my parents were convicted of were two counts of kidnapping--because my brother and I were officially property of the State. This mindset always tends towards a totalizing worldview, where in the end the family

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@lvalentinf @wartranslated That's not enough to isolate Russian DNA because lots of others also drink vodka. What you need is a combination of misery, death and vodka. Only those with sufficient misery, death and vodka in their DNA would be immune.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@emeriticus I looked a bit like this guy in undergrad at McGill. Played rugby, drank, had fun. I encountered girls like this often, convinced I was dirt dumb. It became a game. I had my IQ formally tested young because it was high, but I enjoyed playing into their stereotype--I made myself

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 years

@kevinnbass In that case, you misunderstand what Wokery is. It's religious, psychologically conservative & almost neo-Victorian. Taking your kids to church will just teach them the same sort of certainty & sanctity that the woke display. To inoculate, teach them Bayesian reasoning instead.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@danielc27712614 @ChrisO_wiki @Michael14140889 It's not budgets. It's the value of human life. In Russia, throughout its history and still today, it approaches zero.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 months

@betelgeuse1922 Nazi Germany had to be completely broken in WW2 before German culture could shift away from the sort of genocidal national arrogance that is still present in Russia--anything for the Motherland to appear strong. The Russians never had that sort of reckoning, and they need one.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

5 months

@azamatistan

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

11 days

@glukianoff Free speech always ends up supporting those without power vs those who have it (& the power to declare certain speech taboo, blasphemy, hate, etc.) In all our cultural & academic institutions, it's those with power who oppose it. When the right had cultural power, the left was

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@Gerashchenko_en Putin's squad of gold-toothed Baba Yagas wants to "take this friendship all over the world."

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

3 months

@davidfrum I think you're misreading it. Look at the way the media has reacted. As usual, he's stumbled onto a way to make the conversation a juxtaposition of him vs an identitarian politics that most independents are sick of. Instead of issues, we're all discussing wokeness (again).

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

3 months

@Der_Parrot But the word slave does come from the Slavic slaves that the Moors kept.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

9 months

@WilliamShatner Rooted in ignorance. "Man" has two distinct etymological origins: 1. Man as male comes from the German "der Mann" 2. Man as human comes from "humanus," (of the earth) the genetive form of "humus" (earth), which distinguishes mortals (male & female) from the gods (e.g., Shatner)

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@ChuckPfarrer Possibly a stupid question, but how are they getting their armor through their own minefields?

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

23 days

@nguyenhdi Agreeing, mostly. I love Melville (less so Dickens), but I do prefer a cleaner style generally. I'm not a fan of the purple stuff that often comes out of MFA programs these days. But the paragraph in your screenshot isn't just underwritten--it's also simply bad.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

9 months

@randymot4 Russian pilots flew thousands of missions in Vietnam against the US. Chinese pilots flew in Korea against the US. The idea that sending empty planes would "escalate" is nonsense. If any western pilot wants to go fly as an individual, they should be allowed to go.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

9 months

@TristinHopper I always self-identified as "liberal" because I disliked the sort of church ladies who would complain about kids dressing in witch hats for Hallowe'en. Then I blinked and it was the left's neo-church ladies complaining about sombreros. I somehow became "conservative" w/o moving.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@elliotmedaglio @nexta_tv Russia has never helped anyone but themselves. Any short-term benefits that may come from being allied with them have usurious interest rates attached. It really is the geopolitical version of a deal with the devil.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

3 months

@wanyeburkett I've always (deliberately) lived in slightly dangerous neighborhoods. When I moved to Vancouver, Canada, it was disturbing--almost existentially irritating--to see men walk past each other just looking at their feet or cell phones, with no situational awareness, no judgment of

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

6 months

@eyeslasho You need an option for "Weird but excellent."

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 months

@MsMelChen I was asked on a podcast if there's any "conspiracy theory" I believe. I cited the lab leak theory. I try hard to decouple beliefs. But how many people did this push permanently into a general distrust of all institutions, media, etc.? Public trust is precious & they wasted it.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 months

@BriannaWu I saw him live at MIT for a talk on Manufacturing Consent. By the end of it, I thought something similar to you: "Brilliant insights, but why are they only applied to one side?" 25 years later I withdraw the adjective "brilliant." Chomsky's the sort of guy who seems brilliant to

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@anno1540 I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Russian child in each one, trained to walk like a little robot.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

8 months

@eyeslasho Trump breaks things. I've been arguing that since the aftermath of his election that he broke the reasonable left even more than he broke the Republican party.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

1 year

@SwipeWright Anywhere else in the world, anywhere with more historical experience, a land acknowledgment would be seen as a manifestation of extreme-right "blood & soil" fascism.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

2 months

@WarintheFuture Yet despite all this legitimacy, the US still won't let Ukraine fire ATACMS at Russian air bases, and much of the Global South still sides with Russia. I support Ukraine fighting within the rules, but the world needs to stiffen its spine to reinforce those rules.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

4 months

"The Man Who Saw Seconds is a wildly ambitious masterpiece of speculative fiction that fires on all cylinders. With its blend of audacious ideas, blistering action, emotional heft, and sparkling prose, it instantly establishes Alexander Boldizar as a major voice in sci-fi.

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Alexander Boldizar

@Boldizar

5 months

@djrothkopf I wonder how many Russian Stormies are out there. If Trump can get shaken down by a porn star--enough to risk committing a crime to cover it up--then what would he do to avoid the "kompromat" that Putin must have on him? Somehow, everyone's skipping that part.

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