Prince’s Mad Money

[topum]

As many of you know, after I joined LJ slightly over two months ago I was surprised how strong the Russian segment of it was. I could barely find active journals in English but there seemed to be an ocean of super active journals in Russian. I got interested. Many of you also know how much I am into Google Translation. I read Russian journals via Google Translate sometimes, you might remember these.

Today I was looking at a couple of their top journals and saw a post about Prince. I got curious what the Russia's top blogger's take on it would be. Below is that post Google Translated from Russian with some minimal tweaks only to the bits which did not make sense at all after GT. I had to make those using a vocabulary.

I thought you might be interested too.

Google Translated from this post by miss_tramell, Russia's top blogger.

Prince’s Mad Money

Prince left an estate of $800 million.

-Photo of Prince-

He did not leave a will. The money will go to his nearest relative - his sister - a former drug addict and prostitute.

Here she is:

-Photo of Prince's sister-

And this is one of Prnice’s villas:

-Photo of Prince's lavish villa-

I absolutely do not care that the amount that can not even be comprehended (so huge it is), will go to a former drug addict and prostitute. It is absolutely none of my business.

What absolutely infuriates me is: why the singer Prince is worth nearly a billion dollars?

What he has done for mankind? He wrote a dozen hits in the '80s? Not just hits, but super-hits? OK. More than a dozen? Accepted. But is it really worth that huge amount of money?

Humanity is insane. I realized it a long time ago. It is unjustifiable for songs - no matter how good they may be - to pay millions. Showbiz Workers do not produce anything that moves humanity forward. They do not save lives. Their relatively light work should not be paid so obscenely high.

Every day 22 thousand children die in conditions of extreme poverty.

-Photo of a kid covered in flies-

In 2011, 6.9 million children under 5 died of hunger and thirst. Every hour took the lives of 800 children. They did not have enough food. They did not have enough water. They did not have enough basic medicines.

At the same time the singer Prince amassed a fortune of $800 million.

Showbiz in our world is severely overvalued, and human life is sorely underestimated.

Madness. Cruelty. It is, but it should not be. This is not even the way to the Apocalypse. This is the Apocalypse.

Comments

[topum.livejournal.com]

Bloggers with huge followings do things for money everywhere I think. And that might include political stuff too.
I have to say that I saw a surprising number of really really anti Putin stuff on Russian LJ, and it is there freely, not taken down. I was surprised. This is definitely not North Korea or even China in this respect. Propaganda...they can say what they want I guess, it is just their point of view, no? And it has a lot of real supporters in Russia? As long as they are not shutting down other voices and I expected them to do so much more than I actually see it happening, it seems pretty free when it comes to criticising Putin on LJ. And I saw pro-Putin journals dismissing the anti-Putin ones as "propaganda paid for by the West" too.
All of that is based on the very limited time I spent on Russian LJ of course.

Thank you, I'll check ivan_petrov out.

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

"Propaganda...they can say what they want I guess, it is just their point of view, no?"

Of course, there are many sincere people, but you can easily see the difference in style between them and propagandists. Standard formulas from the instructions they receive, standard manipulative tricks (change of subject etc.), compulsive behaviour etc. In most cases, the difference is obvious. I don't mind people say what they want. But propagandists have another purpose: to make any discussion place disgusting and unbearable. This is the tactics. I'm lazy to search examples, but believe me, I saw many times how an interesting discussion begins, and in one hour hundreds agressive comments make people stop talking and run from there. And all this is not a secret: ru-net knows where the offices of the blog-propagande are, what are rates and salaries of these bloggers, how to detect them etc. etc.

LJ is the last platform of free communication in Russia (together with microblogs like FB, but LJ communication is deeper, and texts are just longer), so it's not completely North Korea, no.

[topum.livejournal.com]

We have what you call propaganda too from all sides, if you just mean attempts at manipulation, etc. It must be happening from the other side too, no? And trolls and irrelevant and angry comments happen everywhere, very often the majority of them are like this. Defending your point of view is never easy, I do not think though that we can do it not by debating but just by branding our opponents "propagandists" (in most cases).
Oh FB is hardly a free platform in my book, the censorship there is unbelievable. You couldn't upload Rubens there because it was 'nudity' I think.

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

...from all sides

Of course, I understand it and agree with you. And I don't think that all my opponents are propagandists because they look at politics differently.

I mentioned this propaganda thing by one simple reason: it is VERY massive in ru-net, and so it distorts the picture of political opinions so strongly that I myself from other continent cannot get a real picture...

I don't like political discussions because they never lead to some sort of "result" whatever you could mean by result. I read them only because I want to understand what happens in my country. Many things changed in the course of last 3 years, and I want to know how. But I can't get a realistic picture.