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→User:Conservative proven wrong, Again
==[[User:Conservative proven wrong]], [https://www.conservapedia.com/Special:WhatLinksHere/User:Conservative_proven_wrong Again]==
==[[User:Conservative proven wrong]], [https://www.conservapedia.com/Special:WhatLinksHere/User:Conservative_proven_wrong Again]==
[[User:Conservative]] criticizes academic theoretician and advisor to [[government]]s [[Prof. Jeffrey Sachs]] as a "[[liberal]]", yet [[spam]]s Prof. Sachs "Happiness Index" to promote [[User:Conservative]]'s own [[racist]] & [[Russophobic]] views over many pages throughout [[Conservapedia]].
[[User:Conservative]] criticizes academic theoretician and advisor to [[government]]s [[Prof. Jeffrey Sachs]] as a "[[liberal]]", yet [[spam]]s Prof. Sachs "Happiness Index" to promote [[User:Conservative]]'s own [[racist]] & [[Russophobic]] views over many pages throughout [[Conservapedia]].
[[Gilbert Doctorow]] reports: [https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/are-russians-happy]
{{quotebox-float|For the second year in a row, I am utterly stunned to read that per the findings of some expert jury, the Finns are said to be the happiest people on planet Earth.
I believe this determination is made by the same sort of experts who list the 10 best restaurants in the world and make other pronouncements that are utterly silly but generate lines of type in major print media....
Now let us turn to the question I pose in the title of this essay: are the Russians happy?
If you read the travel literature going back to the 17th century, Russians in the countryside loved to dance and sing, which suggests a predisposition to happiness. During Soviet times, of course, no one said “cheese” to produce smiles for the photographer. Grim times, grim facial expressions.
From my recent writings, you would have justification to consider that these are once again grim times in Russia, what with the war and little towns emptied out except for widows. If there are truly 350,000 Russian soldiers killed, then there can hardly be a town in this country where someone has not died in the Special Military Operation. However, here in St Petersburg or in Moscow, you don’t really feel the war except for the curtailment of internet services that I have described at length, and in the occasional sight of amputees hobbling around on prosthetics and crutches.
The people I chat up wherever I go are getting on with their lives and try not to think too much about how the war is going and other matters that are totally outside their control. All they want is for it to end soon, with a Russian victory, of course.
Except for my nearest Verny economy class supermarket, where the food assortment has slightly deteriorated, the middle middle class Pyarorochka and Magnit stores, and especially the upper middle class Perekryostok supermarket near me are very well stocked not just with staples but with luxury foodstuffs from within Russia and from around the world.
Friends from Moscow with whom we met complained that social services are slipping from the heights they had reached some years ago. The snow was not well cleared away this past winter. Here in Petersburg, the courtyards are not being kept as clean as in years past and the floral plantings in the Catherine Palace park are less abundant and impressive – there can be no doubt that budgets were cut.
But otherwise there is a lot to enjoy. Restaurants catering to the wealthier classes are doing well from my observation. The High Culture entertainments are in profusion. Free entrance to some major museums in Petersburg seems to have been reinstated. And pensioners can get half price tickets to the most fashionable and sought after opera and ballet performances. To be sure, when half price for a ticket is 40 euros and your monthly pension is 350 euros, you have to love culture very dearly to go to the ballet in a leading venue.
Happy in the heel clicking sense is not what I see around me. But there is quiet contentment in people that is evident and the knowledge that things could be a lot worse.}}
[[Category:User:Conservative proven wrong]]