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Elizabeth Cluppins posted:This might be a big ask, but I need some help to better understand the mindset that blames 'The West' for forcing the privatization and shock therapy that the post-USSR countries, especially Russia, went through in the early 90s. Some reading material would be fine. So, the fall of the Iron Curtain wasn't just a political reform, but basically failed states giving way, right? Things were desperate when you wanted to keep the ship running and events like selling a factory to a guy who just rolled in with a briefcase full of money to close the monthly budget. Hell, as ridiculous as it sounds, I know it to be an open secret circling among the power grid people that a big reason behind not picking up the stalled Żarnowiec nuclear power plant project was the Minister of Agriculture going apeshit that Russia would embargo apple exports. Now at this point, with a bunch of people having to figure out the whole market economy fast, they were thrown into a world of neolibs at their peak. We're talking missing Reagan's presidency by a handful of years. So to start with, even if assuming complete good faith, it was just the kind of poo poo the western economists would push, the zeitgeist of the time - and people were eager to eat a lot of it up out of a general strong "like West = good, like soviets = bad" sentiment, which understandably was pretty strong at the time. But it wasn't all done in good faith, as anyone the states turned to for much-needed loans knew they had a knife put to their throats. The big financial institutions in particular (IMF, World Bank, etc.) were pretty lovely about pushing their neolib vision of westernization, such as forcing mandatory participation in (the disastrous failure of) private pension funds. As if often the case with these kinds of economics, it's debatable how much of it was legitimately ideology-driven and how much a grift to set up their banking buddies to have new toys to play with on the stock market. Though it's much easier to tell who ended up benefiting from it. Having said that, some of the anger at the western capital is likely misplaced for the shortcomings of governance, such as the failure to support dying industrial towns. Private factories might come and go, but there's ultimately only so much you could expect from a private business: don't be evil, perhaps, but it's ultimately not your job to arrange for the region's greater wellbeing. For example, there's some distressing accounts from Łódź - often dubbed 'the Detroit of Poland' - where regular textile workers were so desperate about keeping their production plants running they were asking for a chance to pitch in from their own meager savings, for as little as it would do. When begging the government to help somehow, they merely got a suit from the capital to come over and tell them directly that there's little use for that, that their life's work is worthless because western textiles are of a higher quality and they wouldn't be able to compete on a Real Market anyway. So when all major employers in your city are either dying or get bought in a shady deal and then maybe restructure or fold as well, but sure are doing whatever the gently caress they want, thanks to raging unemployment, it's not unreasonable for some folks to perceive it as a bunch of dudes suddenly appearing to rob your land for all it's worth. Alas, don't have any decent writing in English to recommend.
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Feb 22, 2022 11:30
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Kikas posted:But the narrative of "we don't have any program aside from 'Move PiS away from the parliment" which everyone is currently promoting isn't working. It sure would work better if the self-professed opposition leaders didn't spend literal decades backpedaling on any statement or proposal contrasting PiS the second they get a whiff of maybe snatching a percent or two of their more casual voters. While simultaneously rejecting the mere possibility of having any identity other than "how about not-PiS?".
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Mar 13, 2023 14:29
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Let's not forget he's a man who spent several decades throwing law at a respected surgeon because he came up with a tinfoil hat theory that he murdered his father. To be clear for those who don't know the story: there was absolutely no whiff of malpractice, nor did anyone die during the procedure to what-if over. An old, diseased man died and the surgeon had the gall of not magically healing him of all ills a couple weeks earlier.
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Mar 14, 2023 12:59
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It also bears mentioning that the 'famous private investigator' has lost his license back in 2010 and just... kept going regardless, throwing money at courts telling him to stop every once in a while.
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Apr 12, 2023 10:06
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:Different, but related phenomena: Yeah. Polonia in the US is one of the worst about it, since there's a lot of really old emigration, like pre-world wars, leaving a lot of people that are really detached from anything but broad fantasies about the country. There's a certain kind of brainrot that sometimes hits at 3+ generation of immigrants where you're long past concerns of fitting in the new place, they're past anyone in the family trying to teach them the language (and by extension, any cultural contact being long dormant) but they've got this heritage that can become *their thing*. Think of the Plastic Paddies, but with extra layers of solipsist detachment due to being outside of the anglosphere. In a true horseshoe theory fashion, there's two ways this can develop. The first is that sort of right wingish turn, because that kind of person living with a vague fantasy of a place on another hemisphere, is naturally more vulnerable to the conservative golden age/exceptionalist rhethoric, leading to Trad Values (leaning on the cultural baggage that makes the place feel unique and not just one more country). In case of Poles in the US it sure doesn't help that a lot of them live in midwest and that those OG old emigrants were fleeing either Partitions or communist rule, so the whole thing was extra primed for passing down nationalist sentiments. The second way is using one's ancestry to crowbar one's way to the cool progressive crowd as a self-proclaimed cultural expert, steadily falling down a rabbit hole of increasingly mad twitter manifestos over things the home country doesn't actually care about all that much. Of course this isn't meant to generalize all immigrant communities or something, it's just a specific flavor of terribleness. 
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Aug 30, 2023 11:26
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Mokotow posted:Mildly fascinated with what he expected to happen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-EOwiBlno0
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Aug 30, 2023 14:51
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Torrannor posted:A quick search shows PiS being projected to be the strongest party again, is there any real hope they get ousted? Only once the party implodes due to its internal politics, which is unlikely to happen as long as Kaczyński is alive and politically active (this is not an investment advice). Even if we crossed the threshold for some minority government shenanigans, there are still useful idiots (PSL, Konfederacja) happy to make a deal with them and get devoured like everyone who tried it earlier. So that would be more of a hopeful symptom of possibly ever weakening rather than any real change.
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Sep 15, 2023 14:10
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Anne Frank Funk posted:here's an article from a few days ago, a couple new guys were ousted since then: https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/metoo-w-swiecie-polskiego-youtubea-stuu-gargamel-i-wielu-innych/ Including the very one who wrote this article. https://vxtwitter.com/JasKapela/status/1708386494048596034 It was really kind of amazing, some #metoo dirt came up concerning a youtuber (sorta idubbz copycat) then the twitter did the time-honored ritual of requiring everyone who ever did a collab video with him to make a statement, then it sort of dominoed into four other youtubers being revealed as underage girl connoiseurs the very same day and then it still kept going for a while. A real week-long avalanche out of nowhere. [edit] If you want a wild ride, check out stuff that came up about Gonciarz. Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Oct 3, 2023 |
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Oct 3, 2023 21:42
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Mokotow posted:Edit: beaten badly. Also, Gonciarz is one of those people I react negatively towards from the first time I saw him. I never made it through a single thing he’d done, glad to know I was right. I know from another YTuber he apparently moved to Japan, so make of that what you will. Oh, that was a long time ago (in fact he quietly got so infamous there that gals from Poland going to Japan to work as models/hostesses etc. were explicitly warned against him). He's long since back, like seven stages of seemingly-eternal youtube career later (including an NFT phase) and these days he's... uh... brain damaged by years of drug abuse on camera. I don't even know how to better describe it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyb2EDQfpzg
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Oct 3, 2023 22:07
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Mr. Apollo posted:I thought the comment about a "monthly wreath laying ceremony" was an exaggeration. What the hell. Yeah, it's been some real cult poo poo for signalling hardcore party allegiance. For the rando seniors attending, I mean; Kaczyński has been legitimately brainbroken by Smoleńsk in a fairly understandable way. Also for some clarifications of varying importance: - it wasn't protesters, just a particular dude who's been at it for several years now. - it's not the first rodeo, there's been bunch of incidents with military cops over this and a number of defamation cases. - the courts were swatting all of said cases down and it eventually turned to quietly removing the wreaths the dude (with his court-mandated approval for laying these) left the scene. So, as cringe of a scene it was, it wasn't really anything all that new if not for the pre-voting amplification. Now, other than Kaczyński's nerves cracking and going more personal with this the spicy bit is whether: - it was just bad timing with Jaro feeling acting very entitled in public, or - it not being a coincidence that the military police failed to keep playing along in the midst of a fairly open act of military discontent. Also, it's been a group of 11 officers that all quit together, but the two generals are the big headliners.
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Oct 11, 2023 23:25
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anilEhilated posted:Wouldn't the new government just turn it into a propaganda organ for their side? That would still be an improvement. State TV was never 100% unaligned, but there was always some degree of dignity to it, somewhat biased towards the owners but not outright inventing an alternate reality. PiS went full Orban/Putin with how shameless they subjugated the state media. But at the very least, if we assumed the new government will go "gently caress it, war has changed" and chose to be just as shameless with it (which they won't, it would be a massive, fundamental compromise of their "gently caress PiS" platform, both in substance and optics), it would still be better because it's a coalition of several parties, several of whom can and will be bratty about some issues. You either give some leeway for them to peddle their differing viewpoints, making it inherently more open and honest, or go full Subjugation Under God-Emperor Donald Tusk, which would very quickly antagonize coalition partners, who are all able to paralyze the government.
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Oct 16, 2023 11:21
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Bemused Observer posted:Not that the government will need much paralysing, considering the presidential veto and the constitutional tribunal. If they have any balls, they could brute force changes by claiming/reminding everyone that the nominations were illegal. Like PiS, just... do it, call them null and void and have security pack their things into a box. What helps is that they would generally have the backing of EU and the judiciary community (and, tbh, their own supporters at the peak of PiS-purging sentiment). Just get those lawyer friends to cook up some nice legal excuse so everyone can pretend this nullification is more rooted in rule of law. Just gotta strike iron while it's hot, keep the new nominations clean.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:08
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Guildencrantz posted:Sadly opposition voter concerns of the past 8 years have been overwhelmingly strategic rather than substantial, all about "how can my vote most effectively topple PiS". The left isn't really an option for your regular voters (SLD was turbolibs and the sort of pensioners that ended up falling into PiS's arms, Razem is spooky pope-hating plankton screeching about the pronouns and wanting to take our money to give away to lazy bumbs) and given that Left is Lava assumption, your options are either PO or equally spineless flavor of the month "I swear it'll be different this time" PO clone: your Palikots, Petrus, Biedrońs and Hołownias. Right now we were at the tail end of Hołownia's five minutes of fame, but there's no-one mainstream pushing for a more center-left position steadfastly. Biedroń sort of was in the best position to do that - even if it would largely end at throwing a bone to gay rights because that was his centrist feelgood gimmick - but even he has immediately crumbled in the run-up to last elections. Alas, other than waiting for all of the solidaritypilled boomers to finally die out, the only way out is for the next flavor of the month centrist to try pulling a Mentzen and really bank on mobilizing discouraged non-voters. To be clear, I agree as to Third Way voters honestly getting what they voted for, but I also believe that a big chunk of them doesn't really think about fine details beyond "what's the current not-PO?". PS. If you really need some hopium, consider that perhaps Kosiniak-Kamysz is running his mouth before anything is signed to make a little show and cover his rear end before agreeing to more moderate proposals (civil unions instead of marriage, reverting previous abortion laws as they are). Civil unions are really what Tusk promised (once again, lol) so by bitching about gay marriage that wasn't ever really on the table they could have their cake and eat it too, doing the cool progressive thing while also steadfastly defending against the spooky gay menace.
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Oct 17, 2023 13:26
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Tevery Best posted:We've just had 73% turnout in parliamentary elections. I don't think there's any more discouraged non-voters to mobilise at this point, not in any significant numbers, anyway. People who did not vote this year are people who have no capacity to vote for whatever reason, no interest in politics, or no willingness to compromise on radical positions. But that turnout is the discouraged voters. It's those very people who sat back and didn't vote through Schetyna's bullshit. PiS did a great job antagonizing everyone, leading to 10+% election-to-election rise in turnout, but that's not going to last forever. As the numbers inevitably go down eventually (you can only go so far on PiS panic, Tusk-less PO has proven time and time again) here's hoping that the next PO clone will figure out those same people could very well return instead of banking on the LaBiLnY eLeKtOrAt bullshit time and time again.
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Oct 17, 2023 15:18
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My bet is more that PiS is hoping to cook up some last minute hail mary transfers from Trzecia Droga or the Nazi part of Konfederacja. Just get another Ziobro/Czarnek/Gowin figure to shower in power and riches for whichever tiny swing they can bring.
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Nov 7, 2023 19:39
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Fairly reasonable. A good rule of thumb in these matters is whether anyone in the region other than Poland and Hungary is also getting mad. Trucking already has been a fairly unpleasant race-to-the-bottom exploiting the drivers for what they're worth that already struggled with coked out immigrants pulling all-nighters being the only ones to really hit the quotas. And this is essentially pulling an EU-mandated Uber situation, where Ukraine can essentially ignore all of the administrative nickel-and-diming and further undercut the prices in a way nobody else is allowed to. The earlier grain debacle was sort of similar, in that it allowed dumping it at greatly reduced costs, while also being exempt from the usual food safety/quality regulations, which as you might imagine is not great. Of course, Poland being Poland, they played it in the least diplomatic way possible. These regulation-wavering initiatives, while probably passed in good faith, really tend to impact neighboring countries the most - while the idea sounds great in that it offers economic support for no direct expenditure, in practice the costs have to be borne by CEE economies. It's hard to appraise in terms of raw numbers, but at the very least it checks out in principle. And of course that stirs some unpleasant sentiments of the exploitative West dumping the problem on the East, a region that already tends to feel as second-class member states. It's not easy to regulate this kind of support propertly, as it's inherently forcing a competitive advantage, but then on the other hand one cannot just say "lmao, just become fully EU-compliant in a couple of weeks during wartime to the point where you don't need special treatment anyway". But since this is a repeat drama, hopefully some talks are being held to develop some somewhat rationalized angle.
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Dec 10, 2023 17:01
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Bright Bart posted:I was going to say it seems wild, but not unexpected, that doing this doesn't automatically exclude you from the Sejm. And was wondering whether the difficulty in punishing a sitting member is a holdover from Communism or a reaction to it. It's one of those protections like you see in judiciary that might seem really generous, but kind of have to be to prevent abuse. Like, imagine you could just banish an MP for that, with some seemingly reasonable precautions like getting a parliamentary majority on the motion. It's great in reasonable circumstances, but then imagine Ziobro just being able to do that on a whim for the past 8 years, given both voting power and general legal bullshit of PiS. It would be a complete disaster and, for better or worse, it just has be gated by a bunch of hoops to jump to ensure it's some real, no bullshit, near-unanimous decision. Thankfully, Braun is no stranger to losing immunity and nobody likes him or his antics. Even PiS doesn't seem particularly eager to cover for him. And that's important, because they do still have sway in the prosecution and could possibly try obstructing the process of actually stripping him of the mandate, should things go that far (and since it requires a court, it's sort of independent from whatever the Sejm itself is able to dish out immediately). The only people with some stake in covering for Braun is his Konfederacja pals, but even they are stuck in a Korwin situation where they really have to run some calculations which way out of this scandal would prove costlier.
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Dec 13, 2023 16:01
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Bright Bart posted:Not sure how the average American or Soviet comrade felt. Horny.
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Dec 14, 2023 23:03
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The party funding one gazillion lovely right-wing newspapers ran by their cronies: there are no other media ready to represent us.
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Dec 15, 2023 17:45
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It's ugly, but I think necessary in the end. The 'proper' way to handle this would take until Duda is ousted in two years to even begin thinking about all the other legal obstacles PiS had prepared and the government cannot really just sit on their asses for half of their term. I can definitely see fighting fire with fire being a somewhat uncomfortable here, because where's the point of having cleaned up for realsies this time and going back to respect the rule of law, but this was probably one of the better fights to pick - the sorry state of TVP has been universally despised by all but most devoted brainwashees and it doesn't have quite the gravitas of, say, mucking with the Supreme Court. I'd say unfucking the judiciary will be the really uncomfortable fight, but then again when PiS was pulling its bullshit it ultimately blew over in the end so what do I know. It sure helps that all the PiS squealing about it is pretty funny and the new stoic karateka director has some gigachad energy to him. It's a real meme timeline we're living in.
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Dec 21, 2023 14:16
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Mokotow posted:Polish people apparently love to emigrate there for work. Polish people love to emigrate there for the lack of an extradition treaty. Well, at least used to, the EU eventually took care of this. Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Feb 6, 2024 |
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Feb 6, 2024 17:07
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Bright Bart posted:How can a large flat white cost €3.50 in Amsterdam but 24 zł in my second tier city in Poland? Where retail rent, business licensing fees, and especially labour costs are lower? Barriers to entry too. The wage gap (as compared to the West) is really shrinking rapidly for programmer-adjacent jobs and the rest can get hosed and buy their coffee at Biedronka. Not sure about oil change though.
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Feb 12, 2024 18:33
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Idk, I lived all over Warsaw (Mokotów, Sadyba, Jelonki, Ochota, Muranów) and spent a good chunk of time in various adjoining towns (Piaseczno, Piastów, Otwock) and I have constantly found the water to be quite hard. Try buying a glassed electric kettle and see how much poo poo gets stuck on it in half a year's time. Having said that, this is my only complaint against local tapwater (along with being uneasy at just how terribly rusty it gets every single time they stop the flow for an hour or so) and it is perfectly solvable with a filter.
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Feb 27, 2024 14:57
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Bottled water is cringe, but then again I do miss Muszynianka sometimes.
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Feb 27, 2024 14:58
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It's really simple. East = fake Russians Central = equal to Germans Northern = equal to Sweded Central-Eastern = remain politely indecisive so everyone can quietly sub in the descriptor they believe in West is "equal to Germans, but gently caress off with that Central poo poo"
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Apr 2, 2024 12:43
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Don't forget that we're talking about people who during Covid decided to secure broken respirators from a weapons dealer blacklisted by the UN. This administration wasn't exactly a stranger to running shady deals.
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Apr 29, 2024 22:24
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Generally speaking, the EU wanted the region for reasons both economic (export markets) and geopolitical (keep it from regressing back to Russia-adjacent bullshit after riding out the 90s in a decent shape). Having said that, a notable trait of the EU is that it's in a much, much stronger position to make demands on potential candidates than it is able to police current members. So of course it had to play hard to get for a while to get everyone to clean house. South was messier, so they had to wait a couple more years to get up to shape. Balkans haven't really resolved the constant genocidal tensions, so nobody really wants to touch that. The two notably thorny countries are Ukraine and Turkey. For various reasons, both good and bad, they've been kept at an arms length with a loose promise of accession talks, but nobody really wanted this to happen and rather just didn't want to burn bridges. The attitude to Ukraine might change because the war is such a shake-up, but it'll be a proper messy situation anyway.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:42
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Rinkles posted:Tangentially, I wonder how Holender (Dutchman) became a mild curse word in Polish. As a vaguely similarly sounding euphemism for cholera.
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May 1, 2024 10:42
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Bright Bart posted:No landlord would consider allowing you to register in a million years. They often put up roadblocks to even temporarily registration. Basically during part of Communism apparently being registered as living somewhere meant a right to live there (because your registration was the allocation of a domicile). And even at other times there were certain rights like you might not own the house/flat or have the right to live there, but the owner needs your permission to sell the property. So actually even family who like you might not do it for you if they're old and remember commie days. Yeah, it's a common misconception that getting the tenant registered changes anything (it doesn't really, as of now) and some landlords freak out, but it's still worth a try if they're not an omegaboomer. Especially since there are a million legal advice SEO shitticles on the web you can point towards repeating that it does indeed grant the tenant zero extra rights.
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May 2, 2024 21:38
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Bright Bart posted:As for tenously enforceable agreements, just after COVID restrictions eased I came to see a few rentals and the agents asked for a signed, notarized (!) statement from a family member saying that at any point in time you have their permission to move in with them and stay indefinitely, along proof that the relative owns that property. They were worried that the government might just make it harder to evict people even if they don't pay rent or are disruptive so long as they have nowhere else to go. Yeah, that one's the new meta. The notary is a necessary element of pulling off this legal trick, which is essentially removing safeguards on evicting you. This, in itself, is fairly reasonable: if you acted in really bad faith about reneging on the contract and just squatting in the place the landlord can't quite just call the cops and throw you out and it'd all become a nasty extrajudicial spat of changing locks, cutting off power etc. unless you fancy a legal case that goes as long as any legal case in this country while they're probably using the rent to pay off mortgage because Poles don't have a better idea for how to invest their savings crumbling against the inflation. For the vast majority of the time it's just a regular rear end social protection for people not to get kicked to the curb after missing a payment after 10 years in a place, but of course the people are concerned about getting saddled with that one actual bad faith case. Much like some don't want to rent to foreigners because what if they just gently caress off abroad and any overdue payments become unenforceable. But in this case there's a readymade legal trick that costs you next to nothing and makes the hypothetical bad faith tenant actually evictable, and it's become a de facto market standard so nobody will be really able to turn you down over it - so it becomes a no brainer to do it just for the peace of mind. It's kind of like with the civil law contracts supplanting actual employment agreements: they come from a place that's not completely unreasonable, but it sure sucks that they've become the new standard.
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May 3, 2024 18:28
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