I'm disappointed to see someone as smart as David casually leaning on a stereotype like "shady Russians".
I'm confident that he wouldn't have said "sneaky Jews" or "naive Canadians" or "cheap Mexicans".
I'm confident that he wouldn't have said "sneaky Jews" or "naive Canadians" or "cheap Mexicans".
And is it just my bad luck with Russians (what are the odds?), that i do prefer Moscow-Paris flights when majority of passengers are French than the flights of Russian airlines with majority of passengers being Russians?
My country has an healthy measure against correctness. We have lots of terrible jokes exploiting stereotypes off all nations. We still delightfully tell jokes about Nazis (well we were the first they attacked during WWII and also a most deserted country afterwards), though the war ended so long ago. We have jokes on Russians (hundreds of years of conflicts with those people), Jews (yeah even on how Germans killed them in out land), Americans, Muslims and so on.
And you know what.. it turns out to be extremely healthy. The foreigners (esp Americans!) are frightened on how terrible and rude these jokes are, but in fact such jokes dissolve many tensions instead of accumulating them.
The trick is: we also laugh of ourselves. Intensively.