nourishing obscurity

Over at Sackerson’s:

Jesse’s running a vid on Russian roads and drivers:

There is a quite violent part in the vid where the driver jumps up, beats a pedestrian who has fallen over and drags him off the road before returning to his car. As a reader noted:

He didn’t “trip”. It’s a common scam in Russia for people to do that in front of cars, then claim they were knocked down. The driver clearly isn’t falling for that nonsense and… makes it clear. Good on him.

Jesse speaks of dashcams and it’s true we used to run all manner of equipment. One of the most important was the radar detector on the dash or windscreen, afterwards made illegal.

It was basically war over there between drivers and the GAI [afterwards renamed], i.e. the traffic police, and between drivers themselves. The GAI would take to hiding behind roadside kiosks and the like and spring out at you after having tracked you with radar guns. So there was this phenomenon where traffic as a whole would go at breakneck speed, slow to 40 kph – the whole road full of traffic, not just some cars – and then speed up again – that’s how people got around.

Continue at Sackerson’s …

Filed under: History & Culture