The first question for the @davidagraeber's Pirate Enlightenment panelists @piercepenniless, @ayca_cu, @OwenJones84 was great:
"Why do we need all these half-baked stories? We need the truth."
1/ The questioner more or less said: we need to fight for justice right now, not waste time on entertaining literary tales and speculation.
For me, the best answer to this is the screen adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons (1988).
2/

My childhood image of coziness, safety, and comfort came from the Soviet Sherlock Holmes series, portraying brave heroes in traditional English interiors.
But in reality, London houses are damp, cold, uncomfortable places.
1/ Every winter I am endlessly sick. When I complain about the dampness in my bedroom, my London friends say: "What do you want? We get rid of the black mold in our bathroom every month."
2/

It seems that one of the goals of developing countries is precisely to raise the price of commodities whose low value helped create inequality in the distribution of the world's wealth.
And this goal has now been achieved.
1/ Why is it that Ukraine and Russia (and other developing countries), feeding the whole world, supplying the vital resources on which the world's wealth depends, are poorer than the countries of the North?
2/

#dokumenta15 is first and foremost a truly anti-colonial exhibition. There are almost no Western artists and even fewer individual celebrities.
Most of the artists of #dokumenta15 are collectives.
1/ Significant Western exhibitions of recent years have struggled to dilute their decades-long menu of white famous men with women and men of color, to make as many postcolonial gestures as they can.
2/

Europeans colonized the earth, not because they had guns and germs, but because they invented the social machine that destroyed fellow human beings and reached unprecedented levels of seizure and brutal exploitation of natural resources.
1/ Not everyone, in possession of a bacterial weapon, would consider using it.
2/

What has been for working-class Ukrainians, a slow and depressing three decades of class decomposition, immiseration, and depopulation, has for the last two months accelerated into massacres, destruction, and forced displacement.
1/
lefteast.org/frontiers-of-w… as fleeing Ukrainian women with children are welcomed in Europe while undeserving ‘Others’ are barred from entry, we are told time and again by Western and Ukrainian elites that ‘Ukraine is fighting a European war’ and ‘Ukraine is defending Europe’.
2/

What is the difference between Carnival and War?
1/ Violence is an essential part of carnival: masks fight, swear, and commit acts forbidden to normal life. In Russian villages, "wall-to-wall" fights were practiced during the festivities. Getting drunk or being openly promiscuous was common during European carnival week.
2/

World "slavery" is forbidden and as an open practice unacceptable. By attempting to restore open slavery, ISIS has condemned itself to imminent death. Yet modern slavery continues to flourish, taking the forms of domestic violence, army draft, or wage labor.
1/ After World War II, the word "war" was banned, but it was replaced by "cold wars," "proxy wars," "war on terror," "special operation," and "providing military aid to the needy."
2/

Ukrainian friends tell different stories about the price tags for those who want to leave Ukraine to avoid taking part in the war. Some say one asked to pay between 2,000 and 5,000 euros, while others say it costs between 15,000 and 20,000 euros.
1/ Some say that deserters caught at the border are put in jail, along with their supporters, while others say they are lectured and released.
2/

The artwork of A. Molodkin is a portrait of Putin, filled with the blood of Ukrainian soldiers.
My question to the artist is: Where is the blood of Russian soldiers? Or does their blood doesn't count because it is their "own fault"?
1/ I hung out with the artist Andrei Molodkin in Paris back in 1994.
I remember him talking about his childhood in the mysterious town of Ples (or maybe Vologda?).
I grew up in Leningrad and spent my summers in Odessa.
2/

@OlegYasinsky
From the aquarium
Consciousness continues to deny the reality of what is happening.
1/ This crime and the terrible mistake of Russian power, is a direct consequence of a series of criminal actions from the West, previously calculated.
2/

My Russian friend from Berlin, Nune Bars wrote:
another homeless man from our neighborhood passed away, and only after his death did it become known that in his youth he had been a famous bassist with the punk band disorder from Bristol.
1/ he lived in berlin for five years, the residents of his neighborhood loved him, one even got permission to build a booth in front of the bench where Steve Robertson lived for the winter.
The authorities allowed the booth to stand until the end of March.
2/

Hey friends, can you tell me how do you make yourself finish projects? How are you avoiding rushing or jumping from one case to another? It is a problem for me. That said, I am a rather diligent person, brought up in the traditions of Soviet puritanism. 1/ I can make myself do almost anything. But as soon as I start to force myself, the result (and the process) become pitiful and self-defeating. I get pitiful texts, tortured drawings and so on. David and I talked a lot about it.
2/

While watching the "Black Sails" series, I wondered how the pirate communities are reminiscent of criminal groups in Russia in the 90s.
There are many similarities:
- Numerous folklore: from music, poetry, visuals, to their own language that surrounded both of these groups 1/ and continues to exist after they ceased to exist
Both groups occupied the counter-culture space, so DIY content (self-description and self-production of culture)in which they were able to compete with the dominant culture and assert their own. 2/

I am traveling with this puppet everywhere. I call it wondering Jew. To clarify: this is actually me. I am aware that it could be depicted as an anti-Semitic image, but for me it is very romantic. And who said that a romantic hero should look like a young European hipster? Actually my puppet: bald and nosed in a poor suit is much more dear to me.