"Something good..."

There is an English-language phrase about "something good coming out of something bad". Such sentiment would only serve as a fallacy with regard to gravely horrible history anywhere, as if this kind of wording were to justify the means to an end.

Language code

In reaction to “Igal tibil on auto tänapäeval”

@Giustino:
If the two men spoke Estonian with you, then it's best not to switch code.

I can bet the dude who you told "Thank you" to in Russian did understand what you said, yet I am sure was also dismayed that you spoke Russian to him by assuming he was Russian, only because he spoke the language with his lady friend. How and which tongue is he going to use in the public with his romantic interest after such an incident? Their speaking Russian with each other is their thing, even if the lady friend was potentially proficient in Estonian, too.

And in parts of Estonia that are not Tallinn and Ida-Virumaa, Estonian is lingua franca anyway. In Tartu, you don't encounter people asking which language do you speak, because the assumed language is Estonian.

Your situation reminded me of what AnTyx not so long ago wrote about.

I can well vouch as to what most patriotic Estonians now think of your friend Kristjan, who thinks our right-of-centre politicians to be neocons while they are not. I can even guess what party he is supporting.

Giustino's best

Comment to Giustino's writeup "the missionary position" and comments to it, just in case it again fails to appear after I've deleted my original comment.

@Giustino:

I guess The ERR interview, where you describe Estonians to other people who might not know much about us, was odd, yet only so much fits into one article (or a blurb).

Your current writeup is very good and I then realized that your attitude was very Estonian (someone has concurred, also).

Indeed, there are some things in Estonia that can be changed and then some in this country that can't be changed (overnight).

The petty things might change over time; the more pressing stuff may require citizen action. (See the Raha lastele campaign, wherein parents are protesting against the Centrist-ruled Tallinn earmarking more money to its own propaganda-tv thing than the kindergartens, and then also ignoring numerous roads needy of repair and other high-priority stuff.)

I do agree with some of what Piimapukk wrote regarding age, where the oft-youthful need to change the world is replaced with things closer to the heart.

• The Tallinn-Tartu highway tames itself, with speed cameras and reconstructions (there will be less of those around Estonia this year because of cuts).
• "Missionary position" = "The White Man's Burden"... (?)
I remember a very uptight personality who was Swedish and who in late 2007 instead of concentrating on work thought himself to be so much holier-than-thou that he could imply in his lectures to a nice group of fifteen local people about how the way of life here in Estonia was wrong. With this and many other antics I believe he lost all trust of the class.

Fixed a glaring mistake in the original comment, with minor other rewordings and updates.

Breastfeeding in the public and my take on it

In terms of breastfeeding as such and the debate around breastfeeding in the public, then I have mixed feelings about this. While I support a woman's right to breastfeed her child, I still think that it should be performed with some level of discretion. There's probably a fine line between this and that. Maybe discretion should be expected of the people who notice this, given that it's a natural thing to do between a mother and a child.

Then again, we have separate and often compartmentalised facilities for exerting bodily fluids (toilets), eating (cafe or restaurant or whatnot), smoking, children's areas in shopping malls and so on.

Unfortunately, people too absorbed in themselves being moral compasses can roam almost everywhere.