On March 16 2014 08:15 Sub40APM wrote: So how do you think the Croats/Poles/Slovaks got over their parasites? And what do you mean responsible people in a responsible fashion? I am genuinely curious
on this subject, i think that this is pretty accurate also for Croatia:
On March 16 2014 17:23 maybenexttime wrote:
What do you mean? Most politicians in Poland are rotten to the core. One scandal after another, all swept under the carpet. :<
but then again, so is this:
On March 16 2014 17:29 Sub40APM wrote: Corruption exists in every country in Europe -- outside of like Scandinavians I think. And obviously ex-Soviet states are generally much worse because the tradition of rule of law, free media, etc is even weaker there than anywhere else while wealth concentration is higher because unscrupulous douches of the late 80s, early 90s helped themselves to a lot of stuff. The point of joining it though is that EU normalization begins the movement from an even more corrupt state to a less corrupt state even if still corrupt state. Especially now that the Germans are pissed at certain countries who manipulated their stats to get access to that sweet sweet German tax money.
So I was just curious why/how zoe thought that Poland/Slovakia -- for whom EU ascension is an indisputable triumph -- overcame the same forces that plague all ex-Communists states and why places like Serbia/Ukraine cant.
Again, its not like once you join EU you are insta cured of all the societal problems, but at least while you are trying to join you end up jumping through a lot of hoops for the EU that otherwise your politicians will never jump through at all, and especially not in the EuroAsian Union were ideas like media independence and rule of law arent even taken nominally seriously.
it's actually one of the best analysis how euro process affects ex-soviet states in this thread so far (even tho former yugoslavia wasn't one per say). just to further his point, i would like to offer examples, in which i unfortunately must include comparisons to serbia, so the point becomes clearer.
let's start. go back 10 years and you have right extremist party with 15+ seats in the croatian parliament, now they have 0, and their influence is so marginalized, i can't even phantom the circumstances where they would get in a position to have political power again. in comparison, the equivalent of our HSP (link), the Serbian Radical Party (link), split up into a party that is tipped to win today's elections (16.3.), and already has a radical president in seat. Croatia on the other hand is led by a party often times considered not-patriotic enough (by the significant part of the population that is influenced by nationalist ideas), whose political views are aligned with Merkel's party in germany.
the difference between our two political eco system becomes even more clear when you look at how international diplomacy in being handled, in example the relation with international court of justice in two states.
Several EU member states, including the United Kingdom and the Netherlands made the surrender of Gotovina a precondition for Croatia's accession to the European Union.[27] This stance was criticised by the Croatian government, which claimed that it did not know where Gotovina was, that he was probably outside the country and that it was doing all it could to bring him to justice. Accession negotiations with the EU, scheduled to start on 17 March 2005, were postponed pending a resolution of the issue.[28]
In September 2005, ICTY's chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte claimed she had information that he was hiding in a Franciscan monastery in Croatia or in Bosnian Croat territory.[29] She went to the Vatican to ask for help in locating him, but told The Daily Telegraph that Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo had refused to help, telling her that the Vatican was not a state and thus had "no international obligations".[30] Her comments infuriated the Church in Croatia[31] as well as the Vatican, whose spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the archbishop asked Del Ponte what evidence she had to her claims, but she didn't provide any.[32] Del Ponte was later criticized for making self-contradictory statements about Gotovina's whereabouts in September 2005.[33]
Croatia's bid for accession was finally accepted in October 2005[28] as part of a deal with Austria and some other countries, which gained Croatia's admission in exchange for dropping its opposition to Turkey's candidacy.[citation needed] The ICTY announced at the same time that Croatia was then "cooperating fully" with the tribunal, but did not provide further details.
(cut)
On 7 December 2005, Gotovina was captured by Spanish police and special forces in the resort of Playa de las Américas on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
However, ICTY Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte denied the rumors that Mladić had been arrested, saying that they had "absolutely no basis whatsoever". She urged the Serbian government to find him without further delay, saying that Mladić was in reach of the Serbian authorities and had been in Serbia since 1998. She said that failure to capture him would harm Serbia's bid to join the European Union (EU). The 1 May 2006 deadline established by Del Ponte for Serbia to hand over Mladić passed, resulting in talks between Serbia and the EU being suspended. The EU considered Mladić's arrest, along with full cooperation with the ICTY, preconditions that had to be met before Serbia could join the organization.[38]
(cut)
Ratko Mladić was arrested on 26 May 2011 in Lazarevo, near Zrenjanin in the Banat region in northern Serbia
a sad fact remains, serbia's first real pro-eu politican literally got assassinated in 2001. link. but that's beside the point i'm trying to make. two days ago, former prime minister of croatia (imprisioned on the suspision of corruption) got ruled against and will spend 9 years in jail, even tho many in the country consider that to be too low of a punishment. i for one, don't think this would at all be possible if it wasn't for "eu normalization" that Sub40 mentioned. in fact, i think the same guy would probably still be in office, because you wouldn't get a chance to come near him. you also have other stuff like gay prides and how they are treated today by general public in comparison to how they were treated before, or in serbia, how they got banned by the government. link.
and so on and so on (i must go, lunch is ready), the point is, yes, corruption is still a huge, huge problem in croatia, but i think Sub40's point about parasites stand in full if you don't compare yourself to countries like austria, but the countries you shared political system with, or even yourself few decades ago. and the same should then hold true for Poland, Sloavkia.........
Everyone agrees what Russia is doing is wrong, not everyone agrees whether they are the "baddie" of the world or just acting like everyone else. So what's your point, rather a discussion on the part people disagree on, should we just all circlejerk about how wrong Russia is and high 5 each other?
How the hell did you manage to COMPLETELY ignore the part about the Kosovo War?
I'm not getting into the pointless argument that you or whoever responded about it wants to have, when there's so much ideology here no one is being convinced of anything,
So you realized that you fucked up hard when you said that Russia's invasion of the Ukraine isn't "nearly as bad as Kosovo" because it was probably the one war you can't call the US as evil imperialists out for and now try to say that you don't want to get into it because there's too much ideology involved? Since you obviously didn't know anything about the war I hope that you atleast read the wikipedia link I provided you with by now, everybody likes to bash the US sometimes, but please atleast stick to wars you know something about before condemning the US for them.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth, you must feel so accomplished now LOL.
I directly quoted you.
On March 16 2014 02:56 Feartheguru wrote: Any rational thinker would realize what Russia is doing now isn't nearly as bad as Kosovo or Iraq, since no lives are lost in their pursuit of interests. But again, western media I applaud you.
In case you haven't noticed the no lives being lost part isn't true either since Russia is atleast partially responsible for what Yanukovich did by backing him before and during the revolution already.
By that logic, the US is at least partially responsible for much of the Islamic terrorism in the world for backing Gulf Arab states and other nations that breed and support Islamic terrorism.......
The US is partially responsible for that for not paying attention or not paying enough attention to what the oil sheikhs were doing with all that money the US and Europe and Japan were pouring into their bank accounts.
The demise of communism has left a void in the place where socialist fervor once animated the Soviet dupes. In the absence of any positive motivating force, Putin’s Russia, which has positioned itself as America’s main rival, has sponged up whatever motley collection of outsiders it can find. Russia is not the vessel for their ideological fantasies, but merely a placeholder for their accumulated discontent.
Meanwhile the Politburo in Beijing is delighted as can be that Russia is focusing on its western border rather than trying to shore up the 6 million Russians in the Far East who have 90 million Chinese right over the border...
On March 16 2014 06:13 Roman666 wrote:
On March 16 2014 06:06 Feartheguru wrote:
On March 16 2014 06:02 SilentchiLL wrote:
On March 16 2014 05:58 Feartheguru wrote:
On March 16 2014 05:55 SilentchiLL wrote:
On March 16 2014 05:46 Feartheguru wrote:
On March 16 2014 05:41 SilentchiLL wrote: [quote]
How the hell did you manage to COMPLETELY ignore the part about the Kosovo War?
I'm not getting into the pointless argument that you or whoever responded about it wants to have, when there's so much ideology here no one is being convinced of anything,
So you realized that you fucked up hard when you said that Russia's invasion of the Ukraine isn't "nearly as bad as Kosovo" because it was probably the one war you can't call the US as evil imperialists out for and now try to say that you don't want to get into it because there's too much ideology involved? Since you obviously didn't know anything about the war I hope that you atleast read the wikipedia link I provided you with by now, everybody likes to bash the US sometimes, but please atleast stick to wars you know something about before condemning the US for them.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth, you must feel so accomplished now LOL.
I directly quoted you.
On March 16 2014 02:56 Feartheguru wrote: Any rational thinker would realize what Russia is doing now isn't nearly as bad as Kosovo or Iraq, since no lives are lost in their pursuit of interests. But again, western media I applaud you.
In case you haven't noticed the no lives being lost part isn't true either since Russia is atleast partially responsible for what Yanukovich did by backing him before and during the revolution already.
In case you haven't noticed you said more than what you quoted. So if a country backs a leader than kills some citizens, the country that backed the leader is partially responsible? That's rich. I guess you agree every major country in the world is responsible for endless deaths and Russia is doing nothing out of the ordinary.
The fact that is nothing out of the ordinary does not make it right.
It absolutely is out of the ordinary despite what America-haters would have you believe, since the dissolution of the USSR there have been fewer wars in the world and fewer deaths from war. It's no coincidence that Russia weakened and feeling that it was weak resulted in less wars, and Russia feeling strong again has brought more conflicts Russia is directly or indirectly participating in.
They also like to ignore the fact that well more than 3/4 of the dead civilians in Iraq were killed by jihadis not Americans, and Americans were dying fighting those jihadis. But it's not even worth arguing about because the US invaded Iraq so it's at fault 100% and you're not going to convince anyone who thinks so otherwise.
The US is DIRECTLY responsible for much of the Islamist Terrorism from things like
-Staging a coup on a democratically elected Iranian govt and installing an extremely unpopular autocrat which led to the Islamist revolution that resulted in the current government of Iran -Funding and directly supporting the Mujahideen, who would eventually evolve into many of the terrorist groups prominent today, including Osama Bin Laden -Backing Iraq, under the rule of Sadam Hussein, with large amounts of weapons, cash, and intelligence while taking the nation off the "nations that were "supporting terrorism" during its war with Iran
Simply put, Russia isn't bombing the Crimea, the US bombed Kosovo, that in of it self puts the two situations in completely different levels of intensity and military escalation. That's not to say that things might not reach that point, but at the moment things have yet to get to that point.
That's terrible analysis. A unilateral occupation and thus forceful annexation of a territory is something that has not happened in Europe in a huge number of years. This crisis is much bigger than NATO's mission in Serbia as it will redraw Europe, and change the entire security situation for years to come. If you want to measure death toll then 9/11 is a much greater crisis than the bombing of Yugoslavia as it had 5x more deaths. And the 2011 Libyan war was more than 10x greater.
This crisis has escalated to a much greater intensity, both in terms of its impact on global politics and in terms of the sizes and capabilities of the armies currently facing each other.
Also, any statement such as yours tells Ukraine that it's wrong to show restraint and to call for the international community for assistance instead of fighting back. `Hey, there isn't shooting, so it's not worthy our attention...' But you should realize how dangerous such a message is. Do you really want to encourage Ukraine to start fighting the foreign occupation, leading the hundreds of thousands of troops poised against each other to engage each other? I think not.
Redraw Europe? Change the entire security situation? Don't lie to yourself, noone cares about Crimea besides Russia and Ukraine. All this Europe's interest is only because they want to earn some more votes before Europarlament elections. And US have their own problems and Venezuela's oil nearby to really think 24/7 about Crimea or Ukraine.
And about who cares - it seems that previous 310 pages 90% cared.
On March 16 2014 20:32 ImFromPortugal wrote: Russian forces in Crimea now number up to 22,000 servicemen, Ukraine's acting defense minister says - @Reuters
Increase of Russian troops violates basing agreements covering Russia's Black Sea fleet in Crimea - @Reuters
On March 16 2014 05:50 Roman666 wrote: [quote] Except US had no national interest in Kosovo, so your argument does not hold here. And please, can we stop the derailment with "But USA"? USA is not saint, people got it, people know it, let us stop right here, and discuss the matter at hand.
Their national interest is they are weakening Serbia, a Russian ally.
Really, Serbia is a Russian ally? And that is why they started accession talks with EU, right?
To deny that Serbia isn't very cozy with Russia is absurd.
To deny that a tiny country joining a nearly-continental economic union is a godsend for a country in terrible shape (though not as bad as Ukraine's) as Serbia is further absurd. EU isn't a political/military alliance group, as much as toy poodles like Germany and Britain would like to make it seem as such.
I'm not quite sure I understood what you said. Serbia joining the EU would be good for us? Yes, of course it would be. It's just that the people running the pro-EU show in my country are a complete farce just like the ones in Ukraine. They have absolutely no idea what they are doing and try to cover up all their monumental fuckups with 'it will all be ok, we just need to get into the EU, just 10 more years'. Serbia has absolutely no plans to join NATO, though being surrounded by NATO countries means we have to just shut up and stay neutral. Everyone is perfectly fine with that.
what political party are you affiliated with? You oppose the old Milosvecic party that is currently in power and signed the further EU protocols but you oppose the EU ascension which the Democrat Party signed up for. I am confused.
I made a post about this a few pages back. The Democratic Party, yes. There is no problem with going into the European Union as long at it is done in a responsible fashion by responsible people. It's a very complicated situation but if you look deeper, not even that deep, just break the crust of these pro-EU parties in eastern post communist Europe you will find something that is very rotten. My own party was rotten to the core but not being in power anymore has freed us from the incredible amount of parasites and petty profiteers that built up, believe me when I say I used to spend more time hating the embarrassing people from my own ranks than anyone else. Don't think for one second every pro-EU party in Ukraine isn't corrupt as shit, especially now.
So how do you think the Croats/Poles/Slovaks got over their parasites? And what do you mean responsible people in a responsible fashion? I am genuinely curious
What do you mean? Most politicians in Poland are rotten to the core. One scandal after another, all swept under the carpet. :<
Corruption exists in every country in Europe -- outside of like Scandinavians I think.
A minor point. Recent trends in Scandinavia says corruption is on the rise (can't find source again). It still rates in the top on the international lists, but not everything is perfect. http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results/
I agree with your core point though. Countries that went through the process to get EU acceptance and is under the EU system of law has less corruption compared to similar European countries. I was surprised by how badly Ukraine scored. (Near the bottom of the rated countries.)
On March 16 2014 20:32 ImFromPortugal wrote: Russian forces in Crimea now number up to 22,000 servicemen, Ukraine's acting defense minister says - @Reuters
Increase of Russian troops violates basing agreements covering Russia's Black Sea fleet in Crimea - @Reuters
Russia has said its 25,000 and Ukraine said it was something like 11,000 since the beginning.
yea when russians are laying mines and 'traveling' to ukrainian bases let's focus on the 25000 number because clearly that's not a loophole we are actively taking advantage of. wait what, if we do not even acknowledge the presence of any troops how do you expect us to acknowledge having over 25000 troops?
Don't call me a liar without proof. Most European leaders agree with me that a) Russia is redrawing the borders of Europe, and b) the security situation has changed. + Show Spoiler [list of links to prove it] +
In short, there is more than adequate reason to say both point (a) and (b) and calling me a liar for them is ridiculous.
Edit:
And regarding that Russian troops can be up to 25k.. They are supposed to remain within their bases, it IS a violation the existing treaty on bases having howitzers on the streets of Crimean cities, Russian troops attacking Ukrainian military bases, mines being laid outside of Crimea, gas stations attacked with paratroopers from outside of Ukraine.
I have a gut feeling that regardless the result, Kremlin will not allow Crimea to join RF, leaving it in limbo like Transnistria. That will give it another blackmail opportunity should it has anything to negotiate with Kiev in the future.
Once the Crimea is isolated, it will need the support from Russia. Then slowly Russia can bring it under their influence and slowly build Putin's dream of a new Soviet Union.
About the voting 1) voting papers are being handed over to those who are not in the lists, including russian citizens. 2) those who don't want to vote are pressured by "visitors" (with police support) to actually do so
3) In mental clinic patients who are unable to vote due to health issues are "helped" to vote properly. 4) Numerous facts of journalists being not allowed to cover the referendum, on some occasions violence was used 5) The voting lists are sometimes dated as far as 1999. They are being updated on the spot without proper procedures. 6) Propaganda didn't stop before the referendum. Even voting cabins are of the colours of the Russian flag (at least some of those). Edit: ok, it's a Crimean flag. 7) "Mobile voters" on buses are having numerous votes at different locations.
On March 16 2014 23:47 oneofthem wrote: wait do they really have the russian flag colored booth in there. lmfao. i guess the ordering is not the same but still
Heh isn't that also a Crimean flag?
Actually pretty sure it is. Crimean flag blue white red, russian white, blue, red. So if anything that's Crimean.
Since its independence in 1991, the American people have supported Ukraine’s transition to democracy and a free market economy with over $5 billion in assistance.
On March 16 2014 16:56 semantics wrote: Conspiracy crap taking really out of context words into suggesting money the US foreign aid and investments over the year somehow equates to money used for a coup. By that shitty out of context not factually backed up logic Putin was offering the yanukovych Ukraine "assistance" money only to take Ukraine into Russia as a puppet state of moscow. Because apparently all you have to do is take words out of context and spew random crap for it to be true. As if a person would flaunt CIA involvement for a speech at a nonprofit event.
thinking this skrill isn't spent empowering whatever political party that is willing to bend over for it (in this case the opposition) and labelling it as 'conspiracy crap' is dellusional. why do you think f.ex NED-money is flowing into ukraine? charity work? boy scouts?
NED was founded in 1983 at the initiative of Cold War hardliners in the Reagan administration, including then-CIA Director William J. Casey. Essentially, NED took over what had been the domain of the CIA, i.e. funneling money to support foreign political movements that would take the U.S. side against the Soviet Union.
Since its independence in 1991, the American people have supported Ukraine’s transition to democracy and a free market economy with over $5 billion in assistance.
On March 16 2014 16:56 semantics wrote: Conspiracy crap taking really out of context words into suggesting money the US foreign aid and investments over the year somehow equates to money used for a coup. By that shitty out of context not factually backed up logic Putin was offering the yanukovych Ukraine "assistance" money only to take Ukraine into Russia as a puppet state of moscow. Because apparently all you have to do is take words out of context and spew random crap for it to be true. As if a person would flaunt CIA involvement for a speech at a nonprofit event.
thinking this skrill isn't spent empowering whatever political party that is willing to bend over for it (in this case the opposition) and labelling it as 'conspiracy crap' is dellusional. why do you think f.ex NED-money is flowing into ukraine? charity work? boy scouts?
NED was founded in 1983 at the initiative of Cold War hardliners in the Reagan administration, including then-CIA Director William J. Casey. Essentially, NED took over what had been the domain of the CIA, i.e. funneling money to support foreign political movements that would take the U.S. side against the Soviet Union.
Which one of your sources proves that the US has built up the Right Sector using 5 billion dollars, I might need a bit more hand holding than a link showing that the US spends money on foreign aid -- Canada does too, where are their fascists coups ? -- and the right sector. I'd also like some evidence showing that the national endowment for democracy's programs to strengthen things like rule of law or freedom of expression translated into fascist coups, perhaps one that doesnt make unsubstantiated claim that the NED caused the coup or that relies on who the founders of the NED were to prove NED is forever tainted by evil.
EPT![[image loading]](http://news.liga.net/upload/resize_cache/iblock/a88/380_230_2/a888164252fea547e8bf0963fb5560c2.JPG)
