As a Russian who's been thinking about what could've been done about Putin's many moves towards authoritarianism, I say this: I don't know. I dint think anyone knows either.

indsight is 20/20, so good luck trying to convince people to act now, before the far and distant future is here; it's probably part of our nature to not be that much concerned with the long-term, as it's the short- to mid-term that keeps us alive, i.e. fed, sheltered, hopefully healthy etc.

At this point, it feels like history is indeed very cyclical, at least society is, and now anyone left of outright fascism seems to be in minority, with many others either failing or refusing to recognise what's likely coming. I don't think it's new, either - I'm sure people of our ages had things to compare their situation to during the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent events, just like we look back to their times and wonder how in the world could we possibly let that happen.

It's probably best to vote and to protest and to be politically active and all that, before the right-wing or some other authoritarian group manages to manipulate its way into your government, local or higher, and start doing all it can to make you not even think of voting or protesting or being politically active. The caveat is you just don't have any guarantees that any of that is going to work.

What's even more important to remember is the fact that we cannot come up with some universal solution that's going to always work the best way possible in every political and economical and social circumstance. This is what makes recording history and experience so important - it will allow us and those that will be after us to analyse the multitudes of factors and tendencies that lead to things and hopefully figure out reliable and effective and predictable mechanisms for society to function and prosper in mutual respect, egalitarianism, support, etc.

My last take is probably a little controversial: I think we shouldn't ostracise people we see as fascist or right-wing or authoritarian, etc., but rather be welcoming and supporting, giving them respect, community and opportunity to speak and be listened to with kindness and understanding; many turn to violent and inhumane ideologies because, well, they don't value themselves, feel threatened, humiliated, afraid, or something along these lines. It doesn't have to be true, because it's about how people feel, and we must work with how people feel and influence that on emotional level so they feel like they being in a group that's based on being "anti-woke" or just "anti-" something - that's a dead end; they should feel like they belong to groups that envision future and prosperity, where people know they can be trusted and can trust, where they can respect and be respected. You may not like it, but you have to understand that the human psyche can be very flexible and eventually turn a person you could easily turn into a human-loving ally into a bloodthirsty fascist just because they couldn't find their place anywhere else, so instead they're easily picked up by a group that manipulates confused and lost people into a sense of community and belonging.

Fascism has to be the unappealing option for them, and that requires a mind healthy from trauma and loneliness, the lack of that feeling like you've been played and robbed of something you own - like some great historical period the mouthpieces promise to get you back into if you yell at teenage girls for wearing bright-colored hair and rainbow pins.

You're welcome and пожалуйста. I consider my English skills one of (if not the) most important assets of mine and try to use it to offer some perspective from within the anti-war/Putin population; I can't say I've seen many other Russians doing the same in places I visit, so I try to be the voice when I can.

Sometime ago I considered making a blog for that kind of thing or something, but ultimately fell out of it as I doubt I'd keep it well enough to gain proper traction; and it's much more work than writing comments and talking to people on a more personal level, which may divert a huge chunk of my attention, too, resulting in a clouded perspective.

It is, partly. Nadezhdin has been part of the Russian politics for decades, authored and co-authored many laws and took part in many initiatives; him running for president is basically him exercising his passive right to be elected, but as he himself said, he's been thinking about running for president since Summer 2023.

He's been invited to the Russian propaganda TV shows numerous times as a liberal scapegoat of sorts - they'd just try to portray him and people like him (anti-war or anti-Putin or both, basically people who want freedom and peace for their own country and for everyone else), often failing, as there never was any clever way to make him shut up; the man knows many of Putin's cronies because he's been in politics for that long, and he's very smart with what he's saying because he knows what kind of narrative gets you assassinated or jailed.

From everything I've heard from him, Nadezhdin just wanted to act in the most influential way he saw for himself and for others, coincidentally being the safest one, too. He had hesitated at first, but quickly joined the race to get the signatures after Duntsova got turned down, and he really believes in change and progress and a brighter, non-violent future for Russia. It's a good thing, too, because as we've seen times and times again, resorting to violence to deal with one regime in hopes of building a new, better system for each and for all is a sure way to attract and amass even more people who should never bear anywhere near any sort of power, and do so precisely in and around power, ultimately leading to greater terror.

To me, Nadezhdin seems like a pragmatic man who can believe, which is important, and he readily pursued the chance to become a candidate for the elections because of it, but also because he did speak, extensively, with the current Russian opposition (the ones that haven't been murdered or jailed, at least) and cooperated with them (one would be more accurate to say that it was vise versa, actually, so props to them putting weight on the attempts and spreading the word, as well as assisting him during the process) under some shared understanding that, in times of great despair and misery and seemingly inescapable reign of darker, evil, greedy, murderous forces, when calling for peace and life is a crime, when people have been carefully manipulated into disunity and feeling small - it's in these times that it's important to do something to make people realize that they're not alone, they're not few, but that they're many, that there's something they can try and do to show the regime that they do not agree with it, nor do they want it.

Apart from this pursuit, very important and uplifting and very much needed by the Russian populace evident by the last several weeks, there is also an important factor of actually putting pressure on the regime - despite what many may believe, the current regime doesn't completely ignore everything; very few regimes do or can, actually, but the Putin's regime especially so, as we've seen time and time again through various displays and in various forms. Of course, it is far from perfect, but it's not insignificant or minuscule for many reasons: it makes the regime move under pressure and uncertainty, which leads to rushed decisions, which leads to mistakes, which leads to opportunities... which is ultimately good for everyone, as without Putin and his regime, there is no war, for he's the sole "benefactor", if there's anything of benefit left for him in this stupid mistake.

Last but not least, when the regime sees that some "irrelevant and small" candidate manages to gather an absurdly large and arbitrary number of signatures (try and find another country where you need to get 100,000 perfectly prepared signatures along with names and addresses and passport numbers before you can run for president), with lines of people popping all over the country despite what felt like its coldest days of the year (for larger parts, at least), then you know that there's still a significant chunk of people that won't be happy with, say, another broad mobilization or martial laws or anything like that - for every person who managed to go and leave their signature (along with some sensitive personal data), there's who knows how many more people who felt too scared or simply couldn't leave their signatures because there weren't any collectors or posts near them (some had to travel 100+ km, some don't have the opportunity, as Russia's very, very big), and there's even more people who probably could've signed if they had known about the whole thing if Nadezhdin had access to TV and radio to spread the word, as it should be during election such as these (in more democratic country). Nobody can say for certain what's going to come out of these last several weeks, but Putin and his lapdogs surely have enough to consider now - and a lot of stress that, again, will ultimately help in turning things for the better.

Ranting is just a detail here, focus on the point - it's a place of discussion. Like a tavern back in some older days. People talk here, come up with ideas, act on some of them, and it's through this ranting, too, that some people may eventually pursue political or otherwise influential careers, try and bring changes they want to see, exerice their rights.

You can't just get up and go to vote without having discussion either. This is all part of the process.

That's amazing, thank you!

Has it already been confirmed or it's still a hypothesis?

Please share any material proving it if you have any, I love space.

Lemmy, too, has algorithms that determine what you see - how many upvotes a post has, how many comments, how recent, etc. The communities you subscribe to may have some high-quality, niche posts that you're very likely to miss because they're overshadowed by bigger, more active communities where posts simply gain more traction - RSS lets you circumvent that.

Catered feeds, for example.

You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.

It's much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you're interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you're basically on the algorithm's mercy as well.

My bad, I see now.

Still not a Slavic problem primarily, as far as I know - it's just the Russian language being kinda bad at spelling, especially when it comes to Ё. Learning German made me realize the true value of Umlauts and clear, consistent rules for using them in a given language with definite alternatives for cases when they can't be used as is, such as email addresses and other tech areas dominated by the Latin/English alphabet.

I'd make it a strict rule to never use Е instead of Ё - they're not interchangeable in any way; maybe there was a period of time when typewriters couldn't conveniently take this letter into account, but in the digital era, with its greater ease of typing, there's really no excuse in going with Е instead of Ё, ever. If that was the standard, I'm sure some relatively short time in the future the inconsistent transliteration could be much less of a problem for all the Russian-native Artyoms out there.

As for the international documents... I believe a proper standard would suffice, one that would define proper and correct translations for names. There probably is one (or one thousand) already, but it doesn't seem like it's that definitive after all.

Diacritics: the bread and butter of the Slavic languages.

My source of credibility is that I've studied linguistics and translation/interpreting and got a BA on the matter, so I'm not talking out of my ass entirely.

Get ready for some dorky read.

Artyom is pretty much the expected translation, regardless of the original spelling: like with Sapkowski becoming Сапковский in Russian, which may not be what the original pronunciation or spelling intended, but that's fine, because it's intended to be used in a different language.

If you want to follow the spelling example, then every language is fucked because King George is very far from the Russian equivalent of Король Георг, let alone the fact that individual vowels and consonants and then their combinations are all, in fact, different sounds between languages. None of it means a translation isn't accurate or right - it's about ideas and legibility, comprehension achieved with the means of a target language first and foremost, no matter the limitations or differences of the source language.

Back to Artyom, regardless of the spelling I Russian, either Артём or Артем, you pronounce it the same, so it makes most sense to spell it as Artyom in English.

@x4740N@lemmy.world said languages should translate words phonetically, but that's far from practical or comprehensive in general - but it has applications in proper names, and even then there are exceptions to handle stylistic or purely linguistic aspects.

And none of that is strictly a solely Slavic problem. It's not even a problem, actually.

Very much this.

The suffix at the end of that last name is also causing some trouble:

• In Ukrainian, it's Зеленський (note the "ь", a silent letter supposed to soften the consonant before itself)
• In Russian, it's Зеленский (no "ь", the "н" is not soft)
• In Polish, it's Zełenski (no "й" or anything similar, resulting in a different pronunciation again)

Now compare it to the last name of a Polish author: Сапковський (Ukrainian), Сапковский (Russian), Sapkowski (Polish).

Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles all have examples of last names like these, but the rules of our languages dictate that we handle them differently, even in terms of spelling and pronunciation; for people not speaking a Slavic language naturally, it understandably is a nightmare, as neither spelling is objectively the right one in terms of linguistics.

For now, it's probably best to either go with one of the following:

• Zelensky or Zelenski, akin to Polish equivalent spelling of similar last names
• Zelenskyy, as seems to be the more or less official or judicial spelling of this Ukrainian last name

As messy as it seems, I believe it's going to stay the same. Romanization of the Russian language is already an equally messy phenomenon despite multiple efforts to standardize the process, yet it only resulted in several ways of tackling the difficult cases, which is of very little help; Ukrainian seems to be an even more complicated case for romanization as it has some features that would either require intricate rules to create accurate spellings, or make greater use of diacritics.