A former Wagner mercenary in July told Euronews that while he served in Ukraine one of his main duties was to ensure Russian conscripts - “barely 21-years-old” - would not run away, as they were so reluctant to fight.

Doesn’t this compare apples to oranges?

One is an aggressive war. People are shipped into Randomiskan without clear indication what’s going on, why they should be there and they are supposed to die for the glory of the state. Sorry, but that’s when everyone wants to run. That’s also distinctively different from WW2, when concrete evidence of mass murder in occupied europe was available.

The other would be a defensive war. An outside aggressor wants to wipe out your culture and accepts killing or deporting anyone you consider important in your life. Putting it like that, WW2 was very much a defensive war from the allied side. That’s a very different motivation.

The thing is, I don’t have an answer to all of these questions.

On the other hand, I know pagan bands with songs about “Killing all the christian heathens coming to colonize scandinavia”. About “Crushing the roman christians coming to take germanic women with their fairy tales of a weak god”. (BTW, this is explicitly not about german nationalism. There are nazis abusing these terms of skandinavian/germanic origins, many of them, but this isn’t part of that). Those are what I meant when I said: I’m not sure if I want to discuss those with a christian I don’t necessarily trust. Because face it, norse mythology was colonized by roman christians. maybe for good, maybe not, I don’t know.

And in another direction, a lot of metal / heavy metal / rock imagery is based around pushing and prodding and poking christians. Not just subtly. They thrived on this to establish themself as counter-culture. “You are Christians. We are sons of satan. We listen to the other music.” For those, I can very much find a foundation in christian religion. Like, look at denmark. Burning a stack of paper shouldn’t be a big thing, but now they are creating laws against burning the Koran. Not sure how I feel about this.

In that light, I’d very much be in favor of a school uniform, or a specification of unicolor shirts / t-shirts without imagery, I have to say. Concessions are bound to be abused in every way, with that hat on.

The sad thing to me personally is: IMO, we should embrace diversity. Someone wearing a weird cloth on top of their hair should be a source of curiosity. It should be an exposure to something new and an option to grow and reflect and to learn they are just a person, just a bit different. Like the first time you try to cook for a vegetarian, a vegan, or try to date a lesbian.

Hm. Not sure about school, because I have little reason to go there. But I certainly have shirts that are work or grandma unfriendly, or that I would only wear around devote christians I trust. With that, I wouldn’t be opposed with a ban for shirts that are created to offend specific religions. It’s a different side of a very similar coin.

They said they will refund the tickets. They are just working about how. This is tearing me apart to a degree though.

Like, for one, this was entirely unprecedent amounts of rain. Pretty much twice the amount of rain of the worst 4 times of rain the festival received over 31 years.

On one hand, this is at least a tiny drop of salvation on the fans that cannot get into the holy grounds. You at least get these 300 euro tickets back. Though, people have spent 8 - 10 hours arriving in cars per direction, spend hundreds more in festival prep, slept in cars because of nonsense. For nothing, in many cases.

And they are losing out on what’s going to be the biggest vacation they have that year. Money doesn’t fix that.

And on the other hand, festivals are dying at the moment. Corona has killed so many cool festivals, because long-term rent contracts were not met by ticket revenue and on-site revenue. And now, 35000 out of 85000 festival guests of Wacken cannot come and have to be refunded at 300 euros / ticket. That’s a casual million euros gone. And on-site revenue from those guests is gone as well, thirty percent easily. That’s really hard.

The timing here really, really sucks, just being after the corona years. For everyone.

Wow. I’m not particularly sensitive, but that seems like the right amount of very bright strobe that gives me headaches in concerts, especially at night in the dark. That’s very much the level of trying to find out a way to get to the roof to unplug it.

It’s a pretty scary rabbit hole to go into. People have used pretty simple machine shops and fairly accessible information to build small caliber automatic weapons and it didn’t even take that long. A week or two of full time work between testing and iterating. Not reliable, or safe, but certainly dangerous.