Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 2 – One of the
invariable developments during vacation season is that stories which would not
have made the cut during the rest of the year are reported and even attended
to, be they Russian views about whether the earth is flat or the ranking of
regions according to where the most dismemberments occur.
According to a new VTsIOM poll, six
percent of Russians do not know that the earth is a sphere and two percent
think that it is flat. The latter figure represents a decline from three
percent with that perspective only two years ago (thinktanks.by/publication/2020/08/02/dolya-rossiyan-schitayuschih-chto-zemlya-ploskaya-umenshaetsya.html).
Other results from the same poll are
also interesting: 49 percent of Russians don’t believe the Americans landed on the
moon, down from 57 percent in 2018, 66 percent say the government is hiding the
dangers of genetically modified foods, down 13 percentage points in the last
two years.
At the same time, the sociologists report,
60 percent say foreign agents are rewriting Russian history as part of a
concerted effort to destroy the country, down six percent from 2018, and 54
percent say LGBTs are destroying Russian spiritual values, down nine percent
over the same period.
A second story of this type concerns
an effort to rank the federal subjects of the Russian Federation in terms of
where dismemberments are most common. Bashkortostan leads with 18 such crimes
over the last three years followed by Krasnoyarsk with 16 and then Moscow with
14 (dailystorm.ru/obschestvo/reyting-regionov-gde-chashche-vsego-raschlenyayut-lyudey-piter-ne-na-pervom-meste).
The Daily Storm survey says
that most of these crimes are committed by family members and that in at least
some cases, the guilty remain unpunished by a system that seems uncertain how
to handle such a bestial crime. But one
thing is certain: there will be more reports about such things in the next four
weeks. After that, the news may become more “normal.”
No comments:
Post a Comment