Iirc most of them are Olympics branded and get taken home because they're a super popular souvenir

Snow White was also one of the most popular German fairytales for centuries before that.

> Siberia was colonized by Russia at around the same time, and using many of the same methods, as the British, French, and Spanish were using in North America. In this case the Indigenous population would be whatever native Siberians were living there before Russian settlers came.

I think in many ways it's much less comparable to the British, French and Spanish colonialization of North America and more like the European expansions within Europe (for example France with Alsace or Spain with the Basque country). The area of the JAO for example was under Chinese control (as part of Manchuria) until the mid-1800s. After that, it came to Imperial Russia, who settled Cossacks from Transbaikalia there to secure the border, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians also moved into the area. But these settlers came in the Imperial Time, long before the JAO was officially established in 1934.

So before the JAO was established, there were Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians plus some Koreans and Tungusic people - but it was relatively sparsely inhabited. Since the Soviet Union was also afraid of the border being vulnerable, they wanted to settle people there in larger numbers.

At the same time, the big Jewish settlements in the USSR at the time were in Ukraine (before the war, Jews were the largest population group in Odesa, for example) - but there were also pretty frequent pogroms against them and the situation was tense.

So the long-term plan was to have the Jews live in a new Autonomous Oblast (giving them an amount of self-determination, though mostly on paper, thus counteracting Zionism which was a pretty popular ideology among Soviet Jews in the 1920s-30s and simultaneously appeasing tensions with antisemites in other places) and therefore bringing development to the border.

Birobidzhan (the capital) is a relatively young city and was mostly developed under Stalin. In the early years, relatively many Jews came (but again, they were always a minority), but the problem was that Stalin was very antisemitic, so the Jewish political institutions were very often targeted.

As far as I know, the people who were already living in the area were never supposed to leave and in fact, non-Jews also migrated there along with Jews the whole time. Making it Jewish was more of a prestige object, but on the whole, the Soviet Union at the time was quite suspicious of religion, so it's not like it was supposed to be an actually culturally Jewish place in the sense that it was supposed to have Jewish inspired laws or anything.

The Jewish population of the JAO was never more than 25% and most Jews who moved there didn't stay for long (nowadays the Jewish population is below 1% - and the Oblast has existed for less than 100 years now).

In the area, it's kind of hard to tell who the "Indigenous population" are exactly (just like with the rest of Europe/Asia, because the term usually involves a distinct population group being colonised), but the majority of the Oblast was always non-Jewish, even when the Soviet Union tried to encourage Jews to settle there.

It was a relatively undeveloped area and the Soviet Union had hoped to bring in people to develop agriculture there and thought that they could find something to do with the Jews as a sort of 2 for 1 solution.

Yeah exactly, also a lot of debates and arguments are not based on evidence to begin with, but rather values, ideals or goals. Facts are important in debates, but usually the debate is not about facts but about conclusions/opinions. You can also often have the exact same evidence and come to different conclusion.

If somebody asked me "What evidence would change your mind that gay people should be able to get married?", "What evidence would change your mind that women should have access to abortion?", "What evidence would change your mind that religion and state should be separate things?" my answer definitely would be "none".

There's no amount of evidence that you could show me to change my mind on these topics (even though for example I've seen statistics about the risks of abortion or whatever), because these are in the end opinions and not facts and they are just as much about the (inherently in provable) value judgement about how things should be, rather than how things are.

Btw, I can really recommend Museum Lichtspiele as a cinema. It's the oldest cinema of Munich (it was opened in 1910), always had a bit of a ~subcultural flair and it's really pretty. They often show movies in English.

It really depended on the circumstances. Being punk itself wasn't forbidden (though it could get you in trouble with schools or employers since in many contexts the look was still a very scandalous thing). Generally, in the mid-late 80s, in the whole East German system became a lot more lax, they also started easing up on travel restrictions at the time, so a lot more people got to travel into the West for example, there were big concerts by Western artists like Bruce Springsteen etc.

But obviously, punkness often comes along with a general fuck-the-authorities attitude and that in turn made punks more likely to be controlled (kinda like even today a police officer will be MUCH more likely to search a punk for drugs compared to a suit-wearing banker). In general, the government was not too thrilled about that attitude.

This specific guy was an artist/photographer who at the time did photography for an East German fashion magazine, so he had more leeway than most.

Source: both of my parents were punks in East Berlin and my aunt actually knew this guy quite well

At least in East Germany, it wasn't that rare to have Western jeans, since many if not most people had family in the West who regularly came to visit and/or sent packages. With the rest of his outfit, I'd be surprised if those weren't "real" jeans, since he's obviously using clothes to make a political statement.

I didn't ignore that part, I wrote

> Someone who produces both sperm and eggs shows characteristics of both sexes.

That isn't a different sex either though since there is not a different form of gamete that they produce. And as far as I know, there has never been any known case of a person producing both viable sperm and eggs.

Klinefelter men also have a penis and testicles so they are male by anatomy and many do produce sperm, though often not enough/not viable (but there are also some Klinefelter men who produce viable sperm) and most have clearly male secondary sex charactetistics. Globally, only something like 1 in 4 Klinefelter men know they have it and even in the West, many only find out about the condition in adulthood when they realise they have trouble conceiving.

Sex is gametes. That's how biological sex is defined. That's why there are only 2 sexes in humans.

However that doesn't make people who cannot produce gametes non-sexed, any more than the fact that humans are defined as "bipedal mammals" makes people with one leg less human. They are just humans with a specific condition. Someone who produces both sperm and eggs shows characteristics of both sexes.

> Its easiest to lump all atypical sex into one and call it ”intersex”

Easiest for whom? It's not an actual sex (because intersex people do not produce a third form of gametes) and if you look at intersex activism, many intersex people are strictly opposed to the idea that they could be one. The vast majority of intersex conditions are sex-specific, so they only occur in males or only occur in females.

There's absolutely no benefit to lumping all intersex conditions together and calling it a new sex, any more than throwing all conditions that cause aberrations of secondary sex conditions together and calling them a new sex. No one would argue that men with gynaecomastia and women who grow excessive facial hair (which are both quite common) are really a different sex.

Just fyi, sex and gender are different things. On one hand, turkeys probably don't have a concept of gender at all, since gender is a human society thing and turkeys are birds. On the other hand, sex refers to gamete production and since human procreation has only 2 gametes (eggs and sperm), there are only 2 sexes for humans.

On an unrelated third hand, the vast majority of intersex people identify with the genders male or female (usually the ones they were assigned at birth, though you can also be intersex and trans). Intersex conditions are also usually sex-specific. For example, Klinefelter's (XXY) only exists in men.