If the pro-reality side put up a sign that said “keep puppies and kittens safe”, the trantifa would boo that as well. 

 Tito was a horror in his own right, but I’m culturally predisposed to appreciate anyone who could muster credible threats of murder against Stalin.   

Not that I would want him next door to me either. 

 Here’s a handy-dandy map that shows the location of Berlin in East Germany. The borders were heavily guarded and border guards on the East side had orders to shoot anyone who tries to leave. Lots of harrowing stories of people escaping this way or that. 

That’s how we ended up with the Iron Curtain; those were countries Stalin wanted the USSR to have control over.

That’s essentially it. And the results of that divide are still visible in Europe. Some anomalies to this were Austria and Finland. Austria somehow got insanely lucky and managed to negotiate a neutrality for itself, whereas Finland had put up enough of a fight to make it clear to Stalin that any attempt to take over the country by force would end up in a miserable, drawn-out quagmire of a resistance war.  Plus Stalin clearly perceived some advantage to having an officially neutral buffer zone there. That of course didn’t stop the Soviets from doing everything they could to bully Finland for decades to come. Never got real control over the country, though.
A different anomaly was Tito’s Yugoslavia. While both were communist and one arguably as bad as the other, Tito wasn’t willing to play Stalin’s lapdog, and had the means to back that up. There’s a well-known anecdote about the two, that after capturing yet another assassin sent by Stalin, Tito sent him the following message: 

“Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send another.” 

Quite possibly apocryphal, but makes a good story. And also illustrates Stalin’s determination to rule over all of eastern Europe. At least. And a lot of the present day realities in Europe, especially the eastern side, can be traced back to that particular determination and its manifestations in policy.

https://media.spinster.xyz/19b8b5ab3f99d2a27c8a77b493a7d174e4f4cac3fb8765419f1bebfcffb02925.jpg 

 Finnish sweets for the win!! 

🇫🇮 🇫🇮 🇫🇮
Courtesy of your resident expatriate Finn.
Enjoy your Fazer. I still have a couple of their chocolate bars stashed away in our pantry. 

 I didn’t know either. It seems this hasn’t really been heavily publicised until now. 

Whatever one thinks of Linehan, I think it’s a very good sign that his book shot up to bestseller charts. For one, it means that more people are paying attention to the whole T mess. Secondly, it means that even those who hadn’t been paying attention but just are interest in Linehan because of his career, will now hear about the T mess. Thirdly, the more popular this book, the harder it will be for the pro-T crowd to behave as if Linehan is a fringe bigot to whom nobody is interested in listening. 

In the larger scheme of things, this is good. 

 So I had to go both through VPN and archive.is, but here’s the text. 

https://archive.ph/kRFrU 

Yes, I saw someone posted it already. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to not post it after all this effort. 

 Normally I'd say a person suggesting such things needs to be introduced to Chesterton's fence. 

But I think that would be far too complex a concept for Mr. Milliband.  I think we'd first have to tell him about the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". 

 It was a contrast to how he was supposed to come home, and now she not only has to do all the work on her own, she will have to do it alone in the future too. Not only that, the whole family will now have to start over again, with her as a war widow at the helm.