The famine took part in Belarus and Russia as well, the Ukrainians claiming it a genocide against them is not justified. At least they stopped using Great Depression photos from the US to illustrate their point (not joking, they've been trying to after the orange revolution).

Keep in mind, the protester's leaders made a Nazi Deputy Secretary of the National Security. That's representative enough for me. The protesters themselves were fucked, of course. Many thought they were fighting against corruption, but they still didn't do anything to banish the Right Wing from their midsts. That's what led to Hitler's takeover in Germany: people either doing nothing or considering the Nazis to be useful idiots against the Communists.

As far as buffers go, I couldn't agree more.

Czechoslovakia's strong production was providing a great deal of war supplies to the Germany (one in three panzers were produced there), both Hungarians and Romanians were part of the Axis as well not to mention Ustase in Croatia. You may consider marionette governments as a form of penance.

They also took parts of Belarus and Ukraine in 1919-1920.

I know the history, all the countries that aligned with Hitler or supplied him with war production. I know that more Frenchmen fought on the Eastern Front than in the Resistance. But the point is, all these countries have denounced Nazis or were forced to. Some of them have got marionette governments an additional penance and had to serve as a military buffer to the Soviet Union. Finns managed to turn around and fight the Nazis just in time, so they were left alone.

The point is, there are no Nazis in power in those countries nowadays (some Baltic countries may be considered an exception though). In the Ukraine, there are some now.

>they guaranteed Ukraine's teritorial integrity for getting back USSR nuclear weapons
The treaty in question was signed but never ratified, neither by Russia, nor by US or UK.

Besides, US has guaranteed non-expansion of NATO to the Eastern Europe once. The Russians may be just learning from the world's leading democracy.

The famine was not in Ukraine only, parts of Russia and Belarus have suffered as well. The matter is highly disputed, it didn't help that the Ukrainians ones used the photos from US Great Depression to illustrate the atrocities of the Russians.

The protest leaders did nothing to banish Nazis from their midst, they relied on them heavily and made their leader Deputy Secretary of the National Security. So yes, in this case I don't care how noble their goals were. I sympathise with the Ukrainian's struggle for a fair government, but I will not support this uprising.

> The point is that the graffiti was not there the day before (when, presumably, those "Nazis" were in charge), and now it is.

2009, for example, a German synagogue was defaced with swastikas. Does that make Merkel a Nazi? She was in charge of the country, after all.

>In any case, there's plenty of Nazi-like talk coming from Russia and easily seen in comments on YouTube and elsewhere on the Net. How about Sergei Lukyanenko: "There is no such country as Ukraine, and what's there is destined to be either a part of Russia or a Polish protectorate".

You're comparing a writer to a Deputy Secretary of the National Security. Do you really fail to spot a difference?

Crimea's transfer to Ukraine was a socialist experiment by Khrushchev. Ukraine was firm in the Soviet Union at that time, didn't actually need a bribe. But, as many socialist experiments this one has failed too.

Except the synagogue was not taken over by "pro-Russian self-defence forces". According to the Jewish association director someone climbed over the fence and made this "graffiti". I saw no claim that pro-Russian forces are behind this.

A singular act of an unknown individual is a far stretch from openly praising Nazis and using their insignia.

Crimean Tatars were known Nazi collaborators during WWII. Nonetheless, they still live on the peninsula.

They even had non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. A mistake that the Russians have ultimately paid for with 20 million of their lives.

Therefore the Russians in power don't praise the Nazis. The Ukrainians do.

I don't care who is right or wrong in the Ukraine, I don't care who is more manipulative: EU, USA or Russia. I don't care who has stolen more: Yanukovych or Tymoshenko. I pity those who died in this conflict, but I don't even care who has started the bloodshed.

There is one thing that I care about though. On one side of this conflict are Nazis. The "Right Wing", one of the main pushing forces in this uprising, are Nazis. They use Nazi symbols and slogans, they praise WWII Nazi collaborators as their heroes, their leader Yarosh (now the Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine) said that Russian people will never give up their ethnics and culture and therefore have to be eliminated.

So, if the Nazis are on one side, I'm on the other. No corruption can justify aligning with Nazis. I don't give a fuck how decent the majority of the protester might be. They. Fought. Side-by-side. With. Nazis.

Used WhatsApp as an alternative to SMS, but security issues and acquisition by Facebook drove me off. And I didn't want to pay a subscribtion for something as trivial as an unencrypted chat.

After looking at alternatives, I made a decision to switch to Telegram, looks and feels almost exactly the same, has an open source, free and open API, desktop client, end-to-end encryption and is free. For now it is financed by Digital Fortress fund (although I would donate should the need arise).

Why not Telegram, then?

As someone who has worked at a casino for several years, I would say that the opposite is the case: game addiction is in some aspects worse than substance addiction *because* it does not have a chemical substance. That means no nicotine patches, no alcohol-free beer, no replacement therapy.

UMO, MMOs and farmville-like games are built on the same psychological principles as slot machines. They extract money on a slower rate therefore they end up consuming more of addict's time. But the principle of pressing a button and getting a reward is very similar.

Anyway, as it is the case with any addiction: simply trying to cut off the incentives won't help if you don't deal with underlying psychological problems. Bootcamp is a rather radical attempt of treating the addiction, it might be overkill. Would be interesting to see the stats on remissions though.