After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That's why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we're applying for dual US-Russian citizenship. https://t.co/cCgT0rr37e
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 1, 2020
Well, good for Snowden on making use of Russia’s reformed citizenship laws, which as of April 2020 no longer obligate you to give up your previous citizenship in return for a Russian one.
It also legally rules out the possibility of Russia extraditing him back to the US, remote as the possibility may be right now.
Here is how Julia Ioffe projected Snowden’s life in Russia turning out back in 2013:
The reality that lies before Snowden, however, is not that of a Petersburg slum or a cherry orchard. More likely, he will be given an apartment somewhere in the endless, soulless highrises with filthy stairwells that spread like fields around Moscow’s periphery. He will live there for five years before he will be given citizenship. He’ll likely be getting constant visits from the SVR (the Russian NSA) to mine the knowledge he carries in his brain. Maybe, he will be given a show on Russia Today, alongside the guy who got him into this pickle to begin with, Julian Assange. Or he, like repatriated Russian spy Anna Chapman, might be given a fake job at a state-friendly bank where he will do nothing but draw a salary. (Chapman, by the way, recently tweeted this at Snowden: “Snowden, will you marry me?!”) Maybe he will marry a Russian woman, who will quickly shed her supple, feminine skin and become a tyrant, and every dark winter morning, Snowden will sit in his tiny Moscow kitchen, drinking Nescafe while Svetlana cooks something greasy and tasteless, and he will sit staring into his black instant coffee, hating her.
But I digress.
But tell us how you really feel, Julia. 🙂
Well, she was right on the citizenship question, though off by 2-3 years. Not so much on the rest. Though I can hardly claim to have any kind of connection to Snowden, a couple of acquaintances who are familiar with his acquaintances tell me he lives in picturesque central Moscow and hangs out with a bunch of hippy types who are conscientious about keeping him sheltered from the press. He does not seem to have expressed any interest in a public media profile. Besides instant black coffee, he has access to a world-class gastronomic scene, and while the winter weather in Moscow is indeed cold and gloomy, a Mediterranean climate and mountain skiing are just a $50 flight to Sochi away.
The funny if sad thing is that seven years on, it is Julia Ioffe who has become the female version of her own bitter fantasies with respect to Snowden.
Julia Ioffe in 2010 vs. recently.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
A really tragic development for the US. This man sacrificed almost everything to warn the American people that the Deep State is vastly overstepping its constitutional boundaries. For this, he is thanked by being hounded out of the country, threatened with lifetime imprisonment and the ungrateful amnesia of the American public.
Right now, Assange is risking living out the rest of his life in a hellish supermax prison in the US, where he’d be locked in alone in a small confined space for 23 hours a day with no human contact for daring to expose US warcrimes. His trial is currently in the UK.
Who can defend the US in this day and age?
Oy vey!
Ms. Joffe’s “shapeshifting” seems no more spectacular than your own, Anatoly! 🙂
And a far as instant coffees go, Nescafe is probably right at the top of the food chain. I grew up drinking it along with a good spoon or two of honey and whole milk – this combination helped me make it through the long, cold Minnesota winters. Taster’s Choice, came in a close second though. 🙂
What is your take on who will win your state? Do you know any who have changed their minds since 2016? (sorry for off topic)
Good to see Edward finally accepting reality, only wonders me what took him so long.
But doesn’t the US cancel your citizenship if you deliberately take on another one? Whatever.
All the best for his forming family!
It’s really hard to say. But as a close friend of mine, an Orthodox Bishop here keeps pointing out, the crowds for Trump, wherever he goes are incredibly large, for Biden, who mostly stays put in your neck of the woods, incredibly small. There’s a huge senatorial race going on here in Arizona pitting the incumbent Republican Martha McSally against Mark Kelly. Kelly seems to be better funded here, and this just might tip the scales in his favor. I didn’t vote for Trump last time, but I certainly did this time. He really got a raw deal from the Dems and the nefarious “Deep State” and deserves a second chance to finish his program.
If I were a white guy in Russia I’d head straight to Siberia to look for a wife.
https://transformsiberia.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/dsc_6738.jpg
The sheer level of yellow fever of burgers never ceases to astound me
Wise man.
That doesn’t sound too bad compared to US supermax prison. I bet her cat would apply for Russian citizenship too if he could – he has this resigned look on his face, just like the one Julia must have imagined Snowden would have. The cat would gladly eat something greasy in a Russian apartment if it would get him out of that blanket.
If you keep your US citizenship overseas you’d better be filing your income tax forms every year.
In silhouette, Snowden’s wife looks like a Chinese. But (I think) she is not one.
Here, Ioffe seems to be making an analogy to the lizard-like aliens of the TV miniseries V (1984-1985), who hid behind fake human skin and ate hamsters. But I have to say that I do not really get the rest of it.
Winter mornings are dark where I live (although colder in Moscow, no doubt). I don’t see what is so wrong with black coffee, greasy food, or small kitchens. Seems to me, if a woman is cooking you breakfast, then she hasn’t shed all her feminine characteristics. Would Ioffe cook you breakfast? More as like, she would make you clean the cat litter.
You lose US citizenship upon accepting another one if you are a naturalized US citizen. I think you do not if you are US citizen by birth, but I might be mistaken.
Her pic made me remember a comment of a Russian-born Israeli on one of Russian-language sites: “We are used to Jewish women being ugly”.
I might too, but Snowden already had a surprisingly attractive girlfriend to whom he was very committed before he got stuck in Moscow.
I say “surprisingly” because one doesn’t expect much of nerdish guys. Of course, he was doing pretty well ($) as an intelligence contractor, but according to his autobiography, they got together before it was obvious he had a glamorous career ahead of him, so maybe she genuinely likes him. And apparently she stuck by him through his travails.
Good luck to them.
Julie Roginsky?
Maybe one of Ioffe’s more believable pieces.
https://www.gq.com/story/julia-ioffe-false-negative-covid-testing
In the US, if you’ve been clear of Covid-19 by the start of next year (after Halloween, Election Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas), it should be a relatively smooth sailing on that affliction.
“Fuckin’ hot”…
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=snowden+girlfriend&ia=images&iax=images
If Snowden’s living in central Moscow, mustn’t the Russian gov’t be taking care of him financially? Probably, his girlfriend doesn’t mind that so much.
The “2010 vs. recently” comparison is the most depressing thing I’ve seen all day.
poor cat baby, indeed!
Putin’s high IQ immigration plans coming into effect.
Like so much of the America that people remember from the 1950s, not anymore.
In 1940 Congress drew up a list of actions which, if you did any of them, then the State Department could cancel your citizenship: foreign military service, foreign naturalization, foreign oath of allegiance, etc. In the 1960s the Supremes started striking items off the list (see e.g. Afroyim v. Rusk), and then in 1980 (Vance v. Terrazas) they invented the concept of “specific intent” to give up citizenship and said that State had to investigate every case and consider all the evidence: not just evidence that the person did one of those actions, but their whole mental attitude towards US citizenship.
Back then, most Americans who’d moved abroad and applied to naturalize in another country (usually Canada or Australia) still thought loss of citizenship was automatic anyway. So even if State didn’t investigate, they assumed they were no longer US citizens, and if they got a letter from State they didn’t fight it. But enough sued the State Department that it started to cost them too much employee time, so in 1990 they quietly adopted the policy of refusing to investigate “specific intent”, except when a person shows up at a consulate and demands an investigation of their own “specific intent”. That effectively ended enforcement of any prohibition against dual citizenship.
Exactly. General public perceptions of foreign countries are usually 50-60 years out of date.
See how people all over the world still see United States as “land of freedom” “land of racism” “land of lynching” “land of highest living standard in the world” “land of unlimited opportunity” etc.
All stereotypes accurate in the past, but long obsolete by now.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Beys_Afroyim_with_son.jpg
Yea. If you are Americans, give big thanks to Mr. Beys Afroyim, the hero who made you free. You are not anymore mice caught in trap that can spring at any moment, but free birds that can fly whenewer they want – if you make the effort needed to get another passport – and it is easier and more affordable you think.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/style/golden-visa-second-passport-dual-citizenship.html
The New American Status Symbol? A Second Passport
Many U.S. citizens whose families immigrated from Europe are eligible, and the pandemic has caused an uptick in applications.
See my comment at the ass end of some boring Caucasian thread no one will ever read, lots of typing and link posting time wasted 🙂
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/habbening-armenia-azerbaijan-close-to-war/#comment-4197184
No US citizen should have more than 3 passports.
People with more than 3 passports tend to be criminals, like Marc Rich.
This sounds cosy
…then the ghost of Kim Philby will enter to share last night’s cutlet with him.
I bet he has a kitchen island.
I bet Assange would much rather be eating mashed potatoes and sausages in a tiny flat in Omsk and bang some mildly slit-eyed plump local tyotka, then be where he’s at now.
Omsk for Assange!
Not just burgers.
Literally yesterday had covfefe with a half-Slavic/half-Asian young woman.
Gorgeous, mild mannered, sober, composed, erudite, and quietly confident.
I’d be happy for any of my single friends to rope her in and make more kids of this type.
Not all mixed types combine the best of both heritages in themselves, but when they do, reality warps around them.
Oh noo the US is being destroyed and it’s people are being scattered how sad wow
Have you seen American women?
Sochi does not have a Mediterranean climate. Its climate is humid subtropical with lots of rain all year round( 170cm – 67 in – to 200cm -79 in- depending on the station.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Sochi
If you lot wanted a Mediterranean climate, you should have conquered Constantinople in WWI and held onto it.
1.What type of moron poses for that type of photo with his pregnant wife? I hope he does get extradited because of that. He should have missed the worst of “woke” or whatever it is called type of culture in the last 10 years in America
Although it should be said that most of these Soviet “defectors” were just selfish scumbags who cowardly abandoned their families for no valid reason
Since Jews are historically a pretty motile people, there is probably a pronounced gradient in their attractiveness and agreeabilty.
I’m not sure what it would be, but, unscientifically, I’ve always thought that Jewish women from New York were the least attractive and most disagreeable, on average. I say that with the disclaimer that I knew most of them in a certain environment – so it was a selection which had moved from NYC, rather than one in NYC.
But what is the national ranking, between America, Israel, and Russia? I don’t know. I have never been to Israel or Russia, and, based on my limited acquaintance, it strikes me that pictures of Israeli women might be chosen with a bias.
Good luck to this guy.
I wish him a peaceful life, with a healthy and happy family.
Sounds pretty wet, but, as long as it doesn’t have tropical parasites, hurricanes, or blacks, it will still be attractive to a lot of people.
Can you really only get instant coffee in Russia? This guy is American. Someone needs to import him some roasted arabica beans before he tweaks out and kills everyone.
The meanest and craziest women I dated, among an ample sampling, acted just like Ioffe sounds, and they were also of her heritage. They were only good for one thing, which did not compensate for the rest past a few weeks’ time.
Snowden and Assange should be awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom…and pardons.
One of my friends who lived in Israel for a few years and even got Israeli citizenship told me that in Israel people consider Jewish chicks from Yemen the prettiest, closely followed by Jewish chicks from KSA. Note that both are from ME.
Ashkenazi harridans tend to be ugly and obnoxious, but genetically speaking, they are not quite Jewish (don’t tell Jews this, they would vigorously deny the evidence).
For that to happen, the US needs a decent person as president. Did not happen in living memory.
You can get more types of coffee beans in Russia than in the US (speaking from personal experience). BTW, you can get many brands of instant coffee, too, among which Nescafe is far from the top (speaking from personal experience again).
LOL, gourmet coffee shops and cafes are a dime a dozen here.
In fashionable evening areas of Israel, I saw a lot of beautiful young women (and there exists a layer of bourgeois youth in Israel that has money for wearing nice clothes and going out in the evening).
But in the more unfashionable daytime areas of Israel – much of the Israelis are generation from medieval peasants, and one of the most unglamorous (and noisy) peasant populations. And then there are many strange religious cults in Israel among Jews and Muslims (which are covered with modest clothes and inbreeding).
Attractiveness of women is much more a result of youth and availability, than nationality, While Israel has a lot of young women of every different nationality, and the secular women walk around in very immodest clothes – my sense is that it is a very Middle Eastern tribal culture, where most attractive women will have a boyfriend already (and 10 pushy Middle Eastern men chasing them), and in their thirties pushing a baby carriage.
–
It’s like opposite of the situation in larger Russian cities at the moment – in Russia young single women are currently flooding the cities, and it’s such a Northern culture where most men are unpushy and awkward (especially at university time), and there are plenty of single young women in the cities, especially when you are in university.
From what I hear from a relative, the dating and social life in America almost does not exist for non local people or foreigners who visit the country. I have a close relative, that is working in Palo Alto, and was living there as a single man with a good job and quite a lot of spare time. He didn’t manage to date anyone for two years, and then now is after less than year of dating planning to marry a Russian girl who is a student he met there (he didn’t date any American girls, and I’m not sure he has managed to even make friends with real white American people).
Assange shared alot of information and collaborated with Novaya Gazeta.
Maybe that is why he never tried to escape to Russia as Snowden did.
It does not help when in Gessen, Novodvorskaya and Politkovskaya you have the 3 ugliest freaks possibly to have existed, who are/were all unmistakably Jewish and all clearly anti-russian filth involved in political journalism/activism.
On the other side… Anna Chipovskaya who is also Jewish is possibly the most beautiful Russian actress in the last decade – easily in the top 10
Karlin, Laugh out Loud, but true.
And you would have let a lot more Greeks and Armenians remain alive !
Because profession of actor selects for more good looking people (who have narcissistic personalities) that want an excuse to display themselves physically; while profession of blogger/political writer selects for the ugliest people who have narcissistic personalities and yet still need an excuse to attract to attention to themselves in a different way (it’s a profession which selects for those people who try to generate attention to themselves using words, politics or abstract symbols).
To see what people look like in general, then you need a much larger and more random sample which isn’t selecting by profession – i.e. just look how the people look in the centre of the large city at the busiest time. Even then it’s not that perfectly accurate for countries, as there is significant divergence of kind of people you see in different cities (and more or less glamorous areas of the same city) in the same country.
Think of it as like North Carolina, without Darkies or Hurricanes. Downside: earthquakes, Muslim immigrants.
Even if american women are as ugly as is claimed by many disenfranchised Americans, that doesn’t explain why someone in Russia would go for some Asians instead of non Asians more immediately available. The user I was replying to has a terminal case of serial masturbation I am afraid.
That’s an unwarranted generalization. There are quite a few pretty non-obese American women. It’s just white women in blue cities tend to be uglier and bitchier than average, whereas white women in red smaller cities tend to be prettier and more feminine. There are pretty black women, but too many of them are obese. There is a greater fraction of pretty Hispanic women, and a smaller fraction of obese ones among them. Asian women are rarely obese or stunningly beautiful. They tend to know how to behave to make men like them. So, overall it’s a mixed bag.
That comment by Ioffe makes me remember my few failed dates with Jewish women who seemed to have a superior attitude to me. I don’t know, maybe they were superior, but it didn’t make the date succeed. They weren’t very good looking anyways. I did have a very good female friend in Israel (before I got married) who I did everything with, and maybe was good looking by some people’s metrics, but the thought of sleeping with her made me have ED or something…
Ioffe might think her passage is funny, but it’s kind of hateful a bit as it generalizes. It just reads as idiotic and unnecessary, although I don’t want to call it ‘racist’. I have a Russian wife and I think she actually got better looking in her 30s. We get along pretty well, so that passage is a bit of an affront. And if she ever tyrannizes me too much during the day or looks over my shoulder while I comment on questionable websites such as unz, instead of cleaning the bathroom, fixing some toy, or taking care of the youngest kid, I just take the oldest kid and go somewhere for a bit (since that counts as a valid household job). Works in bad Moscow weather too probably since you’ve got lots of malls and movie theaters. And we also have more cats than Ioffe on top of the children, so she’s even more of a failure in life on that front too.
Breakfast is also over-rated. Better to do caloric restriction like Jack Dorsey and save empty eating time (also works for lunch with colleagues who don’t have much interesting stuff to say). Sugarless instant coffee helps if you feel hungry to get rid of that, but hunger should not be a problem if it’s a constant diet. Greasy and tasteless means you’re eating too much sugar and if you cut down on that, greasy food made by Svetlanas will taste great and will be objectively good for you.
Not much of a breakfast person and prefer black coffee as well. Haven’t added salt to food for decades. Add only a tad of sugar when brewing decaf green tea, which I drink cold with lemon, ginger and turmeric.
I have only ever known Ashkenazim in real life. I would say that the prettier ones tend to be among ones that look like Italians (as opposed to Northern Euros), but, as a subgroup, they might be uglier on the whole. It is an interesting question what sort of European women Jews in Europe married, whether they were, in the looks department, high or low status.
It is interesting to think about this on different levels.
In one sense, I wonder if Western countries have ever been uglier than they are now. Hard to say definitely, as living conditions were definitely harder and more crone-ifying, at times in the past. (I mean, think of smallpox scars.) But let us specify modern times. What effects might it have? When brutalist architecture started to make inroads in the US (1960s), the average age of women was around 30. Now it is closer to 40, but that is not considering white women separately, which would drive it much higher.
Kids, in high school and college, segregated with young women, might not understand the dire demographic situation.
Gotta wonder about the DNA of many calling themselves Jews. Know someone who is half Greek Sephardic (both grandparents from mother’s side coming from families living in Greece for quite some time), whose DNA came out more Italian (14%) than Ashkenazi (9%) even though:
Her Greek DNA is in a low single digit. The DNA test she took has no Sephardic designation. One source I checked said that Sephardic and Ashkenazi DNA are close. She says the DNA test she took is considered one of the more accurate.
My lengthy experience of viewing notes that many (not all) Jews with links to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, have typical features from that area of the world. Likewise with Jews from Arab countries looking more like Arabs than many Jews from some other parts of the world.
In Jews (and other dispersed minority religious groups) will be a biological result of inbreeding, due to the religious restriction causing a small group of Jews to marry itself (to be able to marry only within a set of related families).
This will in areas where Jews are a smaller minority, as set of marriage partners becomes even smaller than in larger populations of a dispersed religious cult. So the less Jews in any city, the more restricted number of families they will be able to marry from, so the inbreeding becomes higher.
It’s the same inbreeding effect wherever marriage is restricted between a small subset of families. This can be aristocracy (where marriage is restricted by only being able to marry a limited set of families), in rural villages in Russia (where marriage restricted by geographical immobility), or in minorities religious groups (i.e. Jews, Muslims) where marriage is restricted among the few families in each area which belong to their cult.
–
There’s a classic scene in Visconti’s film “The Leopard”, about the Italian aristocracy, where the character says “we need to stop marry each other, as our women are starting to look like monkeys”.
At 1:52 in clip
I believe that I see more beautiful women in Israel, than in countries like Spain or Italy. But the question varies very much upon the particular area you were in, and also the time of year and day.
I’ve been in areas of Israel, where I say to myself “these are the worst peasants of Europe and the Middle East”. But there are other areas of Israel, where my impression is that women seemed very good looking and glamorous.
It can be strong function of where I was visiting. For example, I think that English women are not ugly, but everyone else disagrees with me on the internet forums, and says English women are particularly ugly as nationality. My impression can be a function of the area of England I visit (I am in a bourgeois young student area).
From my memory, I would have thought the country where I see the least number of beautiful women (aside from USA) is in Switzerland and France. But this impression doesn’t make any sense really (French women have reputation for being beautiful, but my travel impression does not match – probably because of areas and times I was visiting France).
The young women definitely look better now in Europe, than in the past, because of the increase in public health and income levels. Cosmetics and clothing, are also more attractive each year – in Eastern Europe this will be noticeable even in the last twenty years. On the other hand, the proportion of young people in Europe is falling.
When visiting London as a tourist in mid 19th century, Dostoevsky thought that English women are the most beautiful in the world, and was amazed by how attractive women he saw (including working class women). The reason for Dostoevsky’s impression, would be because England had the highest public health investment, and there would be reduction in diseases
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1830s, that American women were the most beautiful in the world. It’s similarly because of American women would on average have much higher nutritional status and public health, compared to the French streets. And if we believe Baudelaire (and he probably has quite a poetic exagerration), even in the 1850s, most people you see in streets in Paris were nightmarishly miserable, unhealthy poor and unhappy.
In Jews (and other dispersed minority religious groups) will be a biological result of inbreeding, due to the religious restriction causing a small group of Jews to marry itself (to be able to marry only within a set of related families).
This will in areas where Jews are a smaller minority, as set of marriage partners becomes even smaller than in larger populations of a dispersed religious cult. So the less Jews in any city, the more restricted number of families they will be able to marry from, so the inbreeding becomes higher.
It’s the same inbreeding effect wherever marriage is restricted between a small subset of families. This can be aristocracy (where marriage is restricted by only being able to marry a limited set of families), in rural villages in Russia (where marriage restricted by geographical immobility), or in minorities religious groups (i.e. Jews, Muslims) where marriage is restricted among the few families in each area which belong to their cult.
There’s a classic scene in Visconti’s film “The Leopard”, about the Italian aristocracy, where the character says “we need to stop marry each other, as our women are starting to look like monkeys”.
I believe that I see more beautiful women in Israel, than in countries like Spain or Italy. But the question varies very much upon the particular area you were in, and also the time of year and day.
I’ve been in areas of Israel, where I say to myself “these are the worst peasants of Europe and the Middle East”. But there are other areas of Israel, where my impression is that women seemed very good looking and glamorous.
It can be strong function of where I was visiting. For example, I think that English women are not ugly, but everyone else disagrees with me on the internet forums, and says English women are particularly ugly as nationality. My impression can be a function of the area of England I visit (I am in a bourgeois young student area).
From my memory, I would have thought the country where I see the least number of beautiful women (aside from USA) is in Switzerland and France. But this impression doesn’t make any sense really (French women have reputation for being beautiful, but my travel impression does not match – probably because of areas and times I was visiting France).
The young women definitely look better now in Europe, than in the past, because of the increase in public health and income levels. Cosmetics and clothing, are also more attractive each year – in Eastern Europe this will be noticeable even in the last twenty years. On the other hand, the proportion of young people in Europe is falling.
When visiting London as a tourist in mid 19th century, Dostoevsky thought that English women are the most beautiful in the world, and was amazed by how attractive women he saw (including working class women). The reason for Dostoevsky’s impression, would be because England had the highest public health investment, and there would be reduction in diseases
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1830s, that American women were the most beautiful in the world. It’s similarly because of American women would on average have much higher nutritional status and public health, compared to the French streets. And if we believe Baudelaire (and he probably has quite a poetic exaggeration), even in the 1850s, most people you see in streets in Paris were miserable, unhealthy poor and unhappy.
Bit of topic to discuss diet since Ioffe mentioned it only briefly, but at least I’ll say that I trust her as much on that as I do her views on Russia and Russian women. I follow an extreme leftist on twitter sometimes, Yasha Levine, who is also an immigrant Jew from Russia, but what he says about people like her is right. She is basically whoring her knowledge of the language and culture to make her new hosts feel good about themselves and reinforce crappy tropes about her former country. So she’s a basic weaponized immigrant who is good for reinforcing the bipartisan line on Russia and her articles are useless as an accurate view of the country.
Normally I don’t comment on a lot of posts due to time constraints and not being much of a commenter. I read them to get my money’s worth at least. But this passage by Ioffe about Snowden and his Russian wife felt like some sort of personal insult. Now that I think about it more actually, screw her.