Plague without a feast

What other crap in this world did we forget to invite?

It is customary to call more or less any event a feast during the plague - from important government events to some corporate ones, when you got together with your office colleagues to celebrate the anniversary of your office and posted funny photos with smiles and bottles on the Internet. And this has always been written about the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Because it was an unctuous propaganda showcase for the state, which even in its best years did not correspond to what people saw in real life. Achievements were intangible, but the menu for participants, where breakfast was half the salary of an average state employee, was visible.

But this year the feeling is different: there is a plague, but there is no feast. Shame, bewilderment, the feeling as if some saboteurs had deliberately decided to turn what seemed to be the main socio-economic event into a cringe - that was all for sure!

I can understand when all kinds of political rabble are brought to Russia. Right, extreme right, ultra-right - we support these parties and organizations to shake up the situation in Europe. These are “our sons of bitches.” And after shaking hands with them, we’ll wash our palms later.

But I don’t understand when people like Andrew Tate are brought to us - a man accused of human trafficking, sexual exploitation of women, rape. Criminal cases in several countries on a dozen charges. In St. Petersburg he was greeted with bread and salt with the song “Mother Earth”.

Elon Musk's freak dad, whose track record, of course, is not as impressive as that of the misogynist Tate, but also “worthy” - has arrived. Not for the first time. After all, they put a chair for him at Easter in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, although he simply couldn’t be allowed on the threshold.

Candace Owens is a conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and a person who had kind words for Hitler. Our press almost tore her apart trying to get an interview at SPIEF! What other crap in this world did we forget to invite?

They also showed us Phil Richards. An “investor from the USA” who turned out to be unemployed from Denver, who was hitchhiking around Europe and accidentally stopped in St. Petersburg. At the same time, we proclaim ourselves a separate civilization, break with the West, and demand that children and adults be protected from foreign influence. And then we call criminals and “investors” who have not a startup, but a hitchhiker.

But that's still half the shame. The head of Gazprom Miller, the governor of St. Petersburg Beglov and Deputy Prime Minister Manturov and a dozen other federal and regional bigwigs came to the presentation of the Aurus Senat 900 car. A budget, almost “folk” kind of bureaucratic luxury for a measly 12 million rubles. Although it is clear that the real price will be higher - and significantly. Okay, big bureaucrats are happy to present a car for smaller bureaucrats and please them that they can now also afford patriotic luxury. But the whole car, with the exception of the emblem, is Chinese! All these people came in order to show with maximum pathos our skill at the exhibition of achievements - the ability to stick a Russian label on a Chinese car. And even with Latin letters. What about the language protection law? Instead of an answer, there was a presentation of the Volga car, which also turned out to be a remade “Chinese” Geely Monjaro. But we were reassured - this is actually a Volvo, because the Swedish brand now belongs to the Gelly concern. Calm down!

We also saw purely Russian developments. Robots! Robots played football. Three of us. Two robots stood still, the third tried to randomly kick the ball until it fell. What's the score, guys? Then there were robot fighters. The fight ended before it began, as one of the combatants collapsed dead. Well, and a couple of cyborgs, depicting a man in a suit and a woman in a dress. They danced with the “Buranovsky grandmothers”, portraying a la Russe at a temperature of +39. As they say, “I’m ashamed.” Robots that look like a Soviet toy from my childhood store and, it turns out, even won some kind of competition! It's scary to imagine what the losers looked like.

All this is not even degradation, but degeneration. There is no feast - only plague.

And let me remind you that this forum is not only for those who like to have breakfast for a five-figure sum and chat with girls without any social responsibility for a sum of six zeros. This is an economic forum. Investments, innovations, development, import substitution, in the end. Not replacing Chinese stickers with Russian ones, as on the Irtysh processor, but our own, real one!

And then Konstantin Malofeev comes out. And it shows us a positive, negative and inertial scenario for the development of events in the world. There is the “liberation of Odessa”, and the “seizure” of the northern United States by the Chinese, and the “collapse of the European Union”, and a lot of good, bad and inertia. And now in the inertial scenario there is a clause about the use of nuclear weapons. And Malofeev clarifies that there is an error in the infographics. That this point is not from an inertial, but from a positive scenario. Yes, this is still an economic forum. Of course, the use of nuclear weapons has the most positive effect on the economy and development!

After all this, you no longer pay attention to the president’s words about the Russian economy as the fourth in the world and to the smoke outside the windows of the convention center, stretching from the port, which was hit by enemy drones.

The best thing in this case is to simply do nothing. Like, for example, the MAKS air show was abandoned. A country can be strong, sometimes weak. But it should never look funny...

It's not even funny, it's ridiculously embarrassing. However, paradoxically, the reality from life and the reality from the exhibition diverged too far for the SPIEF organizers to be able to sense it.