Pussy Riot Found Guilty

  On 8/18/2012 at 2:59 AM, jefferoo said:

  On 8/18/2012 at 1:42 AM, RadarJammer said:

It reminds me of Alex Jones: talk LOUDLY on a megaphone in public, get arrested for being a general obnoxious dick, brag about it and say things like "they can't never shut me up"

 

Of course 2 years sentence is too much but now they have street cred and inspired lots of youth so I think this time everyone wins

 

2 years is what they were sentenced. Who knows how long it will actually be. I wouldn't be surprised if these girls vanished.

You probably have a point there.

I seem to remember somewhere in this documentary someone said that Soviet prisons were better because they were more systematic and organized than they are now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9JDJdaMs-Y

Yesterday other members of PR released a new single that is their best in musical terms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2012/aug/17/pussy-riot-release-new-single-video

Anyway, it's all bullshit about murders, arrests, vanishing in jail. There is no real dictatorship yet, not that of western media propaganda (yeah, it works both ways). They didn't knew they would go to jail.

Before PR there was a decades long tradition in russian performance art called moscow conceptualism. The most recent art group is called Voina (War) where one participant of PR is from (Nadezhda, dark haired girl with pretty face). She was excluded from the group with her husband because he is thought to be police informer behind arrests of art group members. One of the funniest things they've done was drawing penis on a moveable bridge that was going up in the view of FSS (modern times KGB) headquarters.They were also sentenced for serious hooliganism and now hiding from criminal prosecution. Banksy heard about them on BBC and gave them money ($140k) from selling one of his drawings.

There's much more to it than just heroic standing against authority. There is high possibility that this case is used by the government to shift attention of public from real political protests and upcoming prosecutions. They just couldn't imagine that it would be so hyped in the West. Government did this not only because of their own will and strategy but also because a lot of the population are supporting this case.

So what you are possibly saying is,

pussy riot could be freed early. Russian government seen to be lenient. Other cases that nobody knows about deal out harsh sentences.

When putin visited the london games, he watched judo with cameron. Cameron joked that they would only be spectating. Shame!

Im typing this on my crap phone, but could someone link to the prodigy live video filmed in red square where they performed their law. Massive moment. Not sure how they got away with that to be honest.

  On 8/17/2012 at 11:15 PM, Awepittance said:

*cough* Bradley Manning *cough* , oh wait we've been conditioned here to believe he was a traitor, carry on!

and Bradley Manning is a (i hate the word but that's what he is in a way, considered what he gave to wikileaks) hero. Truly sad what is happening to him. i blame obama for closing down megaupload BEFORE guantanamo & for Bradley Manning.

  On 8/17/2012 at 11:21 PM, Awepittance said:

well the president says he's guilty so that's the end of it, because you know it's normal for a president to declare you guilty before your trial has even started. In other words Russia is so much more fucked up than the US, at least we respect due process here.

haha

  On 8/19/2012 at 10:16 AM, feltcher said:

could someone link to the prodigy live video filmed in red square where they performed their law. Massive moment. Not sure how they got away with that to be honest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlItmmCW87w

  On 8/19/2012 at 5:04 PM, jasondonervan said:

  On 8/19/2012 at 10:16 AM, feltcher said:

could someone link to the prodigy live video filmed in red square where they performed their law. Massive moment. Not sure how they got away with that to be honest.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlItmmCW87w

They got away with it because money was being made off of it.

that was 1997, not 2012 & evil putin times...

I don't understand the heck about it. If you do something in a country, which is forbidden, you have to face consequences. Even if the rules are stupid, outdated and or the punishment is to hard or something, it's your fault. Is it wrong to see it as simple as that?

(It doesn't mean you shouldn't fight to change something, but seriously, what did they expect?)

it's a bit pathetic that there are thousands of political prisoners all over the world yet the western media only really raises an eyebrow when it happens to involve the word "pussy"

no, not really. it has more to do with interest in russia's ongoing post election discontent rather than just "pussy"

i keep opening this thread and wanting it to be about Pussy Galore

they were much better at upsetting people than these girls

well the news people sure like flashy stuff but i think that "russia and democracy" has been a hot topic for a while, there are other factors too, they are musicians (sort of) so they get the attention of western musicians, madonna, bjork and so on. it's a big thing among russian liberals which are relatively few but are very active in the internets. the act itself is very provocative (by many people's standards) so it naturally gets the attention. im pretty sure it got viral before anyone saw their faces.

Yeah Neil Hagerty would've been all like "DICK JOHNSON" and made Putin cry

(edit: in response to luke viia)

  On 8/21/2012 at 1:49 PM, tokn said:

I don't understand the heck about it. If you do something in a country, which is forbidden, you have to face consequences. Even if the rules are stupid, outdated and or the punishment is to hard or something, it's your fault. Is it wrong to see it as simple as that?

 

(It doesn't mean you shouldn't fight to change something, but seriously, what did they expect?)

that's what heroism is about dude... tyranical rules are meant to be broken. (thanks god, people didnt think that way in 1989 in east germany : some went to jail, some were beaten up but the wall collapsed...)

russian police hunting more members of pussy riot http://www.factmag.com/2012/08/21/russian-police-hunting-more-members-of-pussy-riot/

  On 8/21/2012 at 5:36 PM, k h o v said:

  On 8/21/2012 at 1:49 PM, tokn said:

I don't understand the heck about it. If you do something in a country, which is forbidden, you have to face consequences. Even if the rules are stupid, outdated and or the punishment is to hard or something, it's your fault. Is it wrong to see it as simple as that?

 

(It doesn't mean you shouldn't fight to change something, but seriously, what did they expect?)

 

that's what heroism is about dude... tyranical rules are meant to be broken. (thanks god, people didnt think that way in 1989 in east germany : some went to jail, some were beaten up but the wall collapsed...)

Ever hear of Rosa Parks?

This woman... Mhmmm...

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/yekaterina-samutsevich-closing-statement/

  Quote

Yekaterina Samutsevich: Closing Statement at the Pussy Riot Trial

 

Yekaterina Samutsevich, defendant in the criminal case against the feminist punk group Pussy Riot:

In the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent, express regret for their deeds or enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to voice my thoughts about the reasons behind what has happened to us.

That Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, the state-controlled corporations, or his menacing police system, or his obedient judiciary system. It may be that the harsh, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; that otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more persuasive, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the pinnacle of power. It was then that it became necessary to make use of the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and any intersection of the religious and political spheres should be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society, shouldn’t it? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of the Orthodox aesthetic in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had an aura of lost history, of something that had been crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present a new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project that has little to do with a genuine concern for the preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, given its long mystical ties to power, emerged as the project’s principal exponent in the media. It was decided that, unlike in the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the brutality of the authorities towards history itself, the Russian Orthodox Church should now confront all pernicious manifestations of contemporary mass culture with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would in fact be presented, thus helping the faithful make the correct political choice during the difficult time for Putin preceding the election. Moreover, the filming must be continuous; the necessary images must be burned into the memory and constantly updated; they must create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture and that of protest culture, thus suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

Perhaps the unpleasant, far-reaching effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. At first, they tried to present our performance as a prank pulled by heartless, militant atheists. This was a serious blunder on their part, because by then we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media assaults on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The whole world now sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, the world sees Russia differently from the way Putin tries to present it at his daily international meetings. Clearly, none of the steps Putin promised to take toward instituting the rule of law have been taken. And his statement that this court will be objective and hand down a fair verdict is yet another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

 

that is a fantastic speech.