Skip to content

A good trick

With independent media virtually eradicated in Russia, locals speculated that passengers, who travelled from Moscow via Minsk, Belarus, are kept on board to shield them from the truth about the war while on European soil.

So much so, that while their train is parked up for more than an hour, passengers are offered access to a “free Wi-Fi” network. The catch? Before they are granted access to the web, would-be browsers must scroll through a series of graphic images of Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

Large posters featuring similar depictions of the war await those brave enough to peek through the curtains of the train.

8 thoughts on “A good trick”

  1. Hmmmmyeah…. How well did the Gruesome Pictures on fag packets work again?… Ah, thought so..

    Also “With independent media virtually eradicated in Russia,”…
    I can’t help but be under the impression that there isn’t much in the way of “independent media” here in Western Europe, including, or rather specifically, in the UK.

    So….meh….

  2. Well yes Grikath. With all the efforts to get rid of ‘hate speech’, the media seems to be getting less and less independent day by day.

  3. “How well did the Gruesome Pictures on fag packets work again?”

    I don’t actually know the answer to that one, it’s an interesting question. I don’t see many people smoking these days, I think that vaping is just as common now. That is just a very unscientific observation I know but I think that smoking is in decline.

  4. “while their train is parked up”: are The Young going to subject us to the American habit of scattering redundant prepositions throughout their writing?

  5. “How well did the Gruesome Pictures on fag packets work again?”

    Smoking has been in decline for over seventy years, and there’s no indication that the increasingly hysterical statutory warnings and prohibitions have had any effect on that long-term trend at all.* Despite CRUK publishing that chart with the explicit intent of demonstrating otherwise, it simply doesn’t. It began even before the ICRF’s (as it was then) study proving the link with cancer. Not that I’m denying the importance of that study; it may have helped continue the pre-existing trend, but it didn’t start it.

    And note that although CRUK highlights the increase in the late ’90s among men, saying that ”Smoking rates don’t come down on their own”, that seems to be exactly what did happen: the reversal of that blip didn’t coincide with any of the active measures taken by the government. The larger health warnings didn’t appear until 2003, when the rate was already lower than it had been before the rise.

    *At least, among men. It’s arguable that the 1965 TV advertising ban may have had some effect on the, then rising, prevalence of smoking among women. But, given that the rate among women started to track that among men as they converged, it could simply be coincidence.

  6. Large posters featuring similar depictions of the war await those brave enough to peek through the curtains of the train

    Like despotic New Zealand then where Large posters featuring grinning St Jacinda on billboards everywhere

    Biden, Albanese & Truveau to follow soon?

  7. Many male cigarette smokers started in the Trenches when cigs were handed out free. WWII saw a lot taking up the habit – my father did then. Smoking for women was considered common and unseemly, but come 1920s, votes for women, it was risqué, fashionable, a symbol of liberation and equality with men.

    So it may be that cigarette smoking was a generational thing which started to die out as the generation in which it blossomed died off.

    Modern generation do drugs and get rat-arsed with their money instead.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *