Russian balconies and windows seem very dangerous. So many people slipped and fell to their death. When you visit Russia, you’ll need to be especially careful near a window in a high rise building, make sure the floor is not slippery and there are no strange men behind your back.
So Putin was mad his little probe crashed on the moon because of his orders that he killed the top scientist in his country, to make sure they never reach the moon now… Sounds about Putin
We can all thank our lucky stars for that. Totalitarian regimes are usually corrupt, and talent is based on how much you pay rather than your actual talent. They usually do alot of own goals that benefit the leader and it’s cronies rather than the population at large. And constant purges which again helps the upper echelons but causes the country to go backwards.
We can thank their corruption for their ‘3 day special operation’ taking almost 2 years and counting now.
Similarly China now has a population and economic crisis of their own doing to please their leader. Disallowing tutoring causing alot of younger generations to lose their job and killing the tech industry jobs because of beef with jack ma. And the one child policy which was a large part of the population decline.
We’re lucky that people can’t speak up to their leader when they make mistakes. Imagine if these regimes were competent. We just need to look at Germany in WW2 to see how that can turn out.
They’re very nationalistic especially China. There’s no guarantee they don’t want to conquer the world even if they were not authoritarian. Just ask any of them about the 9 dash line, instead of saying something neutral like no comment they say yeah it belongs to us.
So the best thing is even if they democratise, for the moment never interrupt your enemy whilst they’re making a mistake.
Yeah but it’s a similar situation as to Russia where the majority of people think their “special operation” in Ukraine is a good thing because that’s all anyone on TV and social media ever says. Because no one is allowed to question the authoritarian regime. If someone questions anything they disappear.
If you never heard anyone ever say China’s “nine dash line” thing is bullshit (which it is), why would you ever question it? You’ve never heard any evidence or any counterpoint to it, you just hear that various countries in Southeast Asia are trying to take away Chinese territory. The only way you’d hear otherwise is if someone questioned it publicly on TV or at least on social media. But who’s going to do that? Didn’t Naomi Wu get disappeared for just questioning security on the products made by Chinese tech companies? If they disappear someone for something as small as that, who’s going to happen to someone that publicly questions foreign policy in China?
To all the people in this thread saying this was probably an accident:
Imagine you’re an operator inside a totalitarian regime, and you want someone assassinated. Maybe this person isn’t themself a critical target, your objective is to instill fear in a particular department to increase compliance on a morally abhorrent skunkworks project. You already know everything about this person, of course including details of their personal life and hobbies. Hey they’re a mushroom hunter. Mycotoxins are readily available and can be lethal in small, undetectable doses. Not difficult to figure out what happens from there. Everyone who knows Vitaly knows, hey he wouldn’t pick and eat a poisonous mushroom. The message is sent to the people who you want to hear it.
at the same time… why all the effort to make it look like a plausible accident. Why not stick to the fell out a window that has been the regimes calling card so that noone could possibly be confused about what happened. My thinking is that the operator who got the order missed the point and got creative instead sticking to the script. He or she is probably going to fall out a window soon.
I see your point. On the other hand, chaos is a powerful terror tactic. If you’re a dissident, not knowing what angle you could be engaged from is stifling.
Also, people need to eat and drink daily. Poisoning is a horrible threat with multiple daily reminders.
The USSR especially knew this. If everyone who speaks out gets a matching pair of lead brain piercings, you know to be on watch for dudes with silenced handguns. If everyone who speaks out gets: shot, hanged, thrown out a window, has their vehicle blown up, poisoned, burnt alive, etc, it suddenly becomes much harder to be on guard, and thus it’s harder to even organize and grow a dissident movement because everyone’s terrified that everyone else is there purely to assassinate everyone else.
The real story is that the guy bought a mushroom foraging book off Amazon. But it was a real, legit one, not one of the erroneous ones. The sad part is that he used ChatGPT to translate it into Russian, and that’s when it all went south.
Interesting, I’ve recently read about generative AI-made mushroom foraging books and that sounded scary enough. There are some fantastic translation services, odd he went with ChapGPT and that he would trust his life to an automated translation.
You’re “joke” had no setup or subversion of expectations. The scientist wasn’t even in AI research. Nothing about it singles it’s a joke. It just reads like you read the same story on a different site with different details.
The relationship to current news about AI mushroom books with the subversion by saying that it was an translation error and not chatgpt making things up. But, mostly, the ridiculousness of it.
That link was posted after my reply to the original comment. I had done some quick searches for “melnikov mushroom amazon” and didn’t find anything that looked right.
As someone from East EU, this is actually plausibly accidental, though the timeline is suspicious.
Mushroom foraging is cultural, you can buy foraged mushrooms in farmers markets and in general it is a fairly popular leisure activity to go foraging in the woods.
I hardly know anyone over 50 who isn’t excited for the mushroom season, sometimes people do end up picking up a death cap as it can be mistaken for a couple different edible ones at its various stages of growth, though you have to be fairly inattentive to do so. That said we treat a couple of poisonings a year in our toxicoligy ward.
Do grown adults accidentally fall out of windows though? Children and people fleeing a building on fire maybe. But the only example of an adult accidentally falling out of a window in non-suspicious circumstances I can think of is that guy who was trying to demonstrate the shatter-proof glass in his office building. Even that wasn’t really an accident, he did it on purpose.
Not that crazy, also depens on what type of Windows you have… And other reasons why you might put your ass on the window frame to check/clean/fix something on the window or near it.
True. I’ve only ever lived in building where the windows open from the side to about 45° so you’d really have to go some to fall out of them. But sash windows are much more dangerous.
Two men were drinking in the bar at the top of the Empire State Building.
One turns to the other and says: “You know, last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building, by the time you fall to the 10th floor, the winds around the building are so intense that they carry you around the building and back into the window.”
The second man says: “What…… are you a nut? There is no way in hell that could happen!”
The first man says: “No, it’s true, let me prove it to you.”
He gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and careens toward the street below. When he passes the 10th floor, the high wind whips him around the building and back into the 10th floor window, where he takes the elevator back up to the bar.
The second man tells him: “You know, I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one-time fluke.”
The first man says: “No, it isn’t. I’ll prove it again!”
And again he jumps and hurtles toward the street where the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window.
Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.
The second man says: “Well, what the hell, it works, I’ll try it.”
He jumps over the balcony, plunges downward, and passes the 11th……. 10th……. 9th……. and hits the sidewalk with a ‘splat.’
Back upstairs, the bartender turns to the other drinker and says: “You’re an asshole, Supeeman"
Yeah, but foraging for wild mushrooms is something y'all are taught from a very young age. You're taught what kinds are safe to eat, and what ones to absolutely avoid. I highly doubt anyone with a scientific background would just randomly eat mushrooms without positive identifications.
Given that this is Russia, he probably refused to stand near any windows and had an affinity for wild mushrooms so someone took advantage of the situation lol
Iirc it is the russula that is commonly confused for the deathcap and its variations (amanita) people usually report feeling like they have confused for amanita. The russula is a very common one to forage and I can kind of see the resemblance, but I also have not encountered an amanita that is too convincing at passing for russula, at least to me, especially if you actually look beyond the cap. So realistically you are right, I don’t really feel like you could forage the wrong one with experience, but people from all different backgrounds still manage to do it with a certain regularity, which is why I say this is plausible as an accident. It feels like too much work and they would probably have to cook the medical record since he was probably in the hospital for a bit before he died (yea, two weeks).
I don’t deny that the timing seems suspicious, would be awfully stealthy compared to the case of the killer windows and literally blowing up a plane. But I do suppose getting some powedered deathcap into his food would not be too difficult.
I do wonder if the motive would really be the recent moon failure, like would they really assasinate someone over something so petty? Maybe Putin was so desperate for a public win and he can’t afford to try again?
That is if it was the mushroom that killed him. It took 22 days for Litvinenko to succumb to the poisoning given to him. If it is state sanctioned murder, then it shows those around Putin are hitting levels of gross stupidity. The brain drain from Russia is at a very high rate since Perestroika and Gorbachev.
Some friends of mine were hosting an East EU exchange student and were excited to take her “mushroom hunting” as we are in a place where chanterelles can be found if you look hard. She couldn’t get over the phrasing, every time someone said it she would cackle and go “mushroom hunting!! BANG BANG!!!” while making finger guns.
At leadt in my language, hunting is not generally used in other contexts, so I can see why someone wouldfind it funny, maybe.
Also, chanterelles are an absolute staple, probably the most common one. Others are russula and boletes (this one being the favourite for people generally). Some others commonly picket are milkcaps and parasols (personally their resemblance to deathcaps makes me uneasy).
Deathcaps could be confused for Rusulas, some milkcaps and parasols.
That’s neat, chanterelles are a real treat to find here (northern California). If someone finds a good spot for them, they keep it a secret. If someone has a big haul of chanterelles it’s borderline rude to ask where they found them. She probably didn’t have the heart to tell us our special mushroom was her common one.
We only have one edible species of Russula, it is parasitized with a fungus that turns it orange- together it’s called Lobster Mushroom. Boletes are probably the most common here. Morels are the really rare and special ones.
While it very much tracks for assassination, it also seems to be a cultural thing to eat random mushrooms they find.
I have several Russian and Ukrainian friends in the states, and they always act like they’re seriously considering harvesting mushrooms we find in the wild and eating them. Every damn time, and it’s like a 2 minute conversation every time of me convincing them it’d be foolish and to just buy from the store.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was real. But I’ll just assume Putin anyway.
Wait, there’s noone collecting mushrooms there? It’s not random stuff of course, it’s species they know. And there’s a good chance you won’t find those is the shop.
No, relatively very few people in the US collect mushrooms.
Also, the “it’s species they know” thing is often exactly the problem: there are species on one continent that look exactly like a species on another continent, but one of them is edible and the other is deadly. So some poor dumb bastard comes over here from Europe, sees some mushroom he “knows,” eats it, and then – whoops! – dead.
If you want to forage for mushrooms you need to find a local guide to teach you, and even then you’re putting your life in their hands so you’d better be damn sure they’re a good one.
I grew up collecting mushrooms (US), but definitely restricted to only a few varieties which basically couldn’t be confused with anything deadly (some lookalikes maybe, but gastrointestinal distress — not death — would probably be the worst case). And yep, learned by going on mushroom hunting walks through the woods with local old timers who knew what was what.
Also, the “it’s species they know” thing is often exactly the problem: there are species on one continent that look exactly like a species on another continent, but one of them is edible and the other is deadly.
Yeah, I’ve heard this is a thing with some immigrants with East Asian background. There’s a species of mushroom in Asia that is totally edible, but its look-alike in North America is deadly.
So every year there’s a handful of people who accidentally poison themselves, because they didn’t do research on local mushrooms (or the info that’s available is in English and they’re not all that fluent in the language.)
“Relatively few people” may be the standard for your part of the US but in my experience PA, MD, VA all have mushroom hunting as very normal and popular activities.
People do that on the regular here in Iowa, granted its a very well known kind of mushroom that gets collected and eaten and not random Super Mario mushrooms.
So I was going down a mushroom rabbit hole one day and found a Polish documentary that was very detailed regarding mushrooms. Apparently selling wild mushrooms on the side of the road is a billion dollar industry in Poland, as well as a seasonal cultural event.
But this is just an assassination over the botched moon landing. When you fuck up publicly in Russia, you die publicly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was real. But I’ll just assume Putin anyway.
I’m sure there was a mushroom involved somehow. Perhaps tripped on a mushroom which caused him to fall, get his head caught in a noose and inadvertently pull the trigger on a shotgun that just happened to be sitting there. The resulting blast blew him out of a 4th story window.