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Comment by BrandonMarc | Hacker News Reader

Can the map tell me why this guy's wearing a pasta strainer for a hat?

http://twitter.com/JohnPugh/status/426369689216745472/photo/...

The riot gear I understand. The other, not so much.

The government banned people from wearing any form of headgear (eg masks/blalaclavas) during protests. Some protestors have been wearing silly things in their heads as a form of humorous defiance.

I just looked it up, and it's pretty much the same law all over Europe. Oddly it's much harsher in e.g. Germany (top penalty, 1 year prison) than Ukraine (15 days).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws

(Not a commentary on Ukraine; just curiosity).

The German law was introduced in 1985 by the conservative Kohl government; it was very controversial at the time but is not much discussed now, perhaps because police and courts are rather lenient in enforcing it. I've never heard of a case where it actually led to a prison sentence.

Many localities in the US have similar laws. Not really contrioversial b/c in many cases, they were specifically targeted at the Ku Klux Klan. If you see any recent (past 50 years) of Klan marches, you'll see they have to wear modified hoods which show their faces.

But not all over Europe people can get into prison for 15 years :)

And especially they wouldn't be: 1. kidnaped; 2. beaten up; 3. found dead somewhere in a forrest, miles out of the city And after that police states - death occurred due freezing, and has nothing to do with kidnaping :)

Please be respectful of religious headgear. This man is clearly a Pastafarian.

This has nothing to do with anti mask law. The guy is "pastafarian" priest, a self proclaimed religion announced by some RUSSIAN geeks recently, I have heard about it only in 2013, as a response too invasive and aggressive promotion of Ortodox Christianity by Mr.Putin&Co. google for pastafarian church. Couple of days ago read about him being beaten heavily by Ukrainian SpecOps BERKUT. Guy has got couple of broken ribs and nose. At the same time, Orthodox priests standing between rioters and Berkut, weren't harmed in any way.

> This has nothing to do with anti mask law. The guy is "pastafarian" priest, a self proclaimed religion announced by some RUSSIAN geeks recently, I have heard about it only in 2013, as a response too invasive and aggressive promotion of Ortodox Christianity by Mr.Putin&Co.

Pastafarianism (the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) was created in the US in 2005. But, yes, I can see how aggressive promotion of Orthodox Christianity in Russia could cause it to spread there as a counter-current.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

The dogma is actually quite fantastic.

As it was once summarized for me, I'll give my best tl;dr for those who might not want to read the Wikipedia article, as off-topic as it might actually be.

Heaven is a stripper factory and a beer volcano. This is well known. Gravity is not real. What keeps us here on Planet Earth is the great almighty press of His Noodly Appendages. The FSM actually loves us all, but he loves us who are diminutive in stature the most, and that's why he presses them harder, to keep them closer to the ground.

The first person created by the FSM was in fact a midget.

The Wikipedia article touches on the correlation between pirates and global warming, but does not appear to mention this Scientific™ explanation of Gravity. There's also no mention of Last Thursdayism, an orthodox division of the Church of FSM, which preaches that the world was created last Thursday, as evidenced most obviously by the fact that when I ask, you can't remember what you did last Wednesday.

I am not making this up. There is a lot of information missing from the Wikipedia page.

Thank you, always good to learn something new.

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