[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[RadiantPhoenix]

Sadly, Ukraine going up in flames is not important enough for Australian news, because Justin Bieber got arrested for DUI!

I sincerely hope this is the news criticizing him for drinking and driving, not people being upset with the police for arresting him.

[Longes]

Honestly, the police are being really restrained there. They were putting up with a lot of shit that, even if your orders as a group are to not fight, would personally provoke a lot of people into cracking a skull or two. I'm really impressed with their self-control in that particular video.

And no offence to Longes, but could someone with less crazy ideas explain why it's all happening? Is it a direct result of Merkel and McCain talking with opposition elements? Were they also pushing AUSTERITY to the breaking point as has happened in Greece? Something else? Just that time of year where it's fashionable for people to riot?

Sadly, Ukraine going up in flames is not important enough for Australian news, because Justin Bieber got arrested for DUI!

None taken.

It's worth remembering, that it's mostly Western Ukraine that is rebelling. Mostly young people and students. In Nikolaev citizens fended off an attack on the regional administration building.

http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... ml&act=url

[name_here]

And no offence to Longes, but could someone with less crazy ideas explain why it's all happening? Is it a direct result of Merkel and McCain talking with opposition elements? Were they also pushing AUSTERITY to the breaking point as has happened in Greece? Something else? Just that time of year where it's fashionable for people to riot?

From what I've found, apparently the current president decided to back off on a trade deal with the EU when Russia threatened to raise their gas prices. The deal had been years in the making and apparently the citizenry were hoping that trade with the rest of Europe would help their economy and either didn't think the gas price bump would matter or wanted to stick it to Russia, so they started protesting. Then, on November 30th, the police attempted to disperse a peaceful protest by force. Predictably, that just made things worse. Then a week or two ago, the government passed legislation banning wearing of masks to protests and otherwise restricting their actions, which seems to have kicked off the fighting. January 22nd had the first fatalities when the police fired live ammunition into the crowds, and that's apparently when things really got out of hand.

[Longes]

First of all, gold reserves? Are you fucking kidding me? Does it look like 1924 to you? Do you know when the last time any country's fucking gold reserves factored into anything? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't in this century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves

[Username17]

First of all, gold reserves? Are you fucking kidding me? Does it look like 1924 to you? Do you know when the last time any country's fucking gold reserves factored into anything? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't in this century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves

Hint: you should actually read the links before you post them.

Foreign-exchange reserves (also called forex reserves or FX reserves) are assets held by central banks and monetary authorities, usually in different reserve currencies, mostly the United States dollar, and to a lesser extent the euro, the Chinese yuan, the United Kingdom pound sterling, and the Japanese yen, and used to back its liabilities, e.g., the local currency issued, and the various bank reserves deposited with the central bank, by the government or financial institutions.

So FX reserves are usually in currencies, not commodities.

In a pure flexible exchange rate regime or floating exchange rate regime, the central bank does not intervene in the exchange rate dynamics; hence the exchange rate is determined by the market. Theoretically, in this case reserves are not necessary.

The floating exchange rate regime is the international standard and has been almost all over the world since the nineteen seventies. In fact, here's a list of every single country on Earth that still maintains a fixed exchange rate. And you'll note that none of them try to maintain a fixed real value any more, they just have a single more-internationally-recognized currency that they have an official convertibility with.

And no offence to Longes, but could someone with less crazy ideas explain why it's all happening? Is it a direct result of Merkel and McCain talking with opposition elements? Were they also pushing AUSTERITY to the breaking point as has happened in Greece? Something else? Just that time of year where it's fashionable for people to riot?

There's a little bit of background: the country is roughly divided in two, with Western Ukrainians being basically Slovaks who write in Cyrillic while Eastern Ukrainians are basically Russians. As a rule, the Western Ukrainians would like to be part of the Eastern group of the EU, while the Eastern Ukrainians would like be the Western fringe of the Russian Federation. The two main oppositional blocs in parliament are pretty much divided along those lines, and their core voters are roughly equal in number. So elections between the groups that see each other as being extremely different from one another are contentious and close - but there's still only one President either way.

The last major election handed a decisive (though narrow) win to the Eastern faction. This gave the presidency to Yanukovych, who is literally exactly the guy who probably tried to steal the 2004 election that prompted the Orange Revolution in the first place. So even though Yanukovych probably won the last election legitimately and for-reals, a lot of supporters of the opposition believe that Yanukovych's presidency is fraudulent. But of course, Yanukovych was able to win the last election because the other people had been in control for five years and had been massively corrupt, so pots and kettles and all that.

Now, the breaking point happened last year when the Ukraine declined to sign a trade deal with the European Union. This may seem really weird to you, because the trade deal that the EU was offering was basically "We get to sell stuff in your country without being taxed, but your people still have to stay the fuck on your side of the border, also go fuck yourself." It was, in short, a really bad deal, and was basically offered in bad faith.

But the fight is not actually over whether the trade agreement was a good deal or not. Yanukovych did not refuse the deal because it was a shitty deal, he refused it because Putin gave a carrot-and-stick incentive involving gas subsidies to strongly encourage him to refuse the deal (which he did). Now that the deal is off the table, the pro-EU faction can pretend that it was all sunshine and rainbows and that signing it would have allowed them to enter the EU and allow Ukrainians to freely travel across the borders to visit their family members in Poland and Slovakia. Which is exactly what the rabble rousers are claiming despite that being provably false. Now that the trade deal has been scuttled, it's no longer a technocratic discussion of tax policy and import regulations, it's a purely symbolic discussion over integration with the EU and subjugation by Russia.

Now don't get me wrong: I don't actually like Yanukovych. He's not "the good guy," he's not even a good guy. His party cut the social benefits for Chernobyl workers for the lulz. But it's important to understand that the rallying cries of the opposition are in fact false. Yanukovych didn't "steal" the 2010 election, the EU trade agreement he rejected wasn't a stepping stone to greater integration with Europe, rejecting Putin's natural gas offer wasn't something that the Ukraine could afford.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Right. Had you told me there actually was one group of good guys in this and one group of bad guys, I would have laughed at you, because it's not an episode of Ninja Turtles. Although that would be pretty cool.

The last I really recall happening over there was the bit where Yulia Tymoshenko stopped being friends with the then-president and was put in jail because "reasons", and it was all vaguely related to the almost-war with Russia. And while it's hard to actually find anything nice to say about the Russian government and its arms and cronies and leader, nor do I have faith in a leader who says "Dude, let's pick a FIGHT with them!", and I'm sure that all Merkel wants is one the Ukraine united! (Under German rule)

Thanks for covering the basic stuff that happened.

[Longes]

http://youtu.be/-I6CFM1ATT8

France cannot into maidan.

[Starmaker]

Two points.

It was part of Russia until 1954 when Khrushchev transferred it into Ukrainian control as part of a gerrymandering project (putting more Soviet sympathizers into "Ukraine" in order to dilute nationalist movements). The Soviet Union really should have kept Crimea and South Ossetia for Russia when the empire broke up.

Historically, votes in Russia haven't served their primary purpose since the 17th century at the latest. You don't dilute anything meaningful by redrawing the border of USSR Jr.* to attach a region of [questionable] Soviet sympathizers, because nationalist uprisings don't poll the legal residents before deciding to happen: if Lviv was sliding toward a pogrom, the Russian majority in Crimea (50%) wasn't going to be more of help than if they stayed in the Russian SFSR. The acceptable method of dealing with a nationalist hotbed was deportation.

"Sovietization", erasing ethnicities as a general policy: I don't think it holds water, because, one, it wasn't Khruschev's policy regarding other ethnicities, and two, it was Stalin's latest (from 1935 onward) policy, right after the enforced nationalism period of 1928-1935.

Really, the most likely reason is that Khrushchev (like Stalin before him - see Ossetia, Abkhazia) thought his native republic would look better with moar territory.

As a rule, the Western Ukrainians would like to be part of the Eastern group of the EU, while the Eastern Ukrainians would like be the Western fringe of the Russian Federation.
(...)
Now, the breaking point happened last year when the Ukraine declined to sign a trade deal with the European Union. This may seem really weird to you, because the trade deal that the EU was offering was basically "We get to sell stuff in your country without being taxed, but your people still have to stay the fuck on your side of the border, also go fuck yourself." It was, in short, a really bad deal, and was basically offered in bad faith.

Svoboda, color-coded black and red** for your convenience, does actually realize it's a bad deal -- but for the wrong reasons. Basically, they think Europe, whose 'degenerate' whites are infected with teh gay (and infertility, as a consequence of teh gay) is losing a breeding war to scary brown people and wants them in for all that fertile and virginal white [EDITED]. So they don't want EU membership, but they aren't going to pass up a chance to grab power in the Ukraine.

*Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
**The pro-Russia faction, on the other hand, is supported by pan-Slavic neo-Nazis, whose preferred colors are

and, I shit you not,

Pot, kettle, all that stuff.

[Longes]

http://youtu.be/EWyFL011D5U

Empire is joining in on the Ukrainian fun.

Those people represent Internet Party of Ukraine, and want the government to acknowledge their party as legal

[Longes]

http://youtu.be/1Aac4liSM0o

Nobody expects a spanish berkut!

[Username17]

So Russia taps the phone lines of American diplomats in the Ukraine. Not really news, but they released a recording on youtube. Stay classy Russia.

Interesting information from that: American diplomats are shockingly level headed and reasonable. They believe that the Punch movement should not be part of the government because they don't know what they are doing (true). They think that Yulia's people should be in the government because they do know what they are doing (also true). They want to broker an agreement with the Fatherland party and the Party of Regions and get the UN's blessing (reasonable). Also: fuck the EU (again, reasonable).

A bunch of people are passing the smelling salts around because an woman used a swear word, but I'm honestly not sure what Russia hoped to get out of this. All the call shows is that the US's private positions match their public positions.

Note: I believe this was in response to the deal Yanukovych offered, which the Ukrainian opposition parties refused on January 25th at the behest of the EU. The United States clearly wanted something like that deal to be accepted. So the United States wanted less chaos in Ukraine and the EU wanted more. Fuck the EU indeed.

-Username17

[Longes]

So Russia taps the phone lines of American diplomats in the Ukraine. Not really news, but they released a recording on youtube. Stay classy Russia.

Interesting information from that: American diplomats are shockingly level headed and reasonable. They believe that the Punch movement should not be part of the government because they don't know what they are doing (true). They think that Yulia's people should be in the government because they do know what they are doing (also true). They want to broker an agreement with the Fatherland party and the Party of Regions and get the UN's blessing (reasonable). Also: fuck the EU (again, reasonable).

A bunch of people are passing the smelling salts around because an woman used a swear word, but I'm honestly not sure what Russia hoped to get out of this. All the call shows is that the US's private positions match their public positions.

Note: I believe this was in response to the deal Yanukovych offered, which the Ukrainian opposition parties refused on January 25th at the behest of the EU. The United States clearly wanted something like that deal to be accepted. So the United States wanted less chaos in Ukraine and the EU wanted more. Fuck the EU indeed.

-Username17

There's also one from EU:
http://youtu.be/kOjrACdTQE8

[Longes]

So Russia taps the phone lines of American diplomats in the Ukraine. Not really news, but they released a recording on youtube. Stay classy Russia.

Interesting information from that: American diplomats are shockingly level headed and reasonable. They believe that the Punch movement should not be part of the government because they don't know what they are doing (true). They think that Yulia's people should be in the government because they do know what they are doing (also true). They want to broker an agreement with the Fatherland party and the Party of Regions and get the UN's blessing (reasonable). Also: fuck the EU (again, reasonable).

A bunch of people are passing the smelling salts around because an woman used a swear word, but I'm honestly not sure what Russia hoped to get out of this. All the call shows is that the US's private positions match their public positions.

Note: I believe this was in response to the deal Yanukovych offered, which the Ukrainian opposition parties refused on January 25th at the behest of the EU. The United States clearly wanted something like that deal to be accepted. So the United States wanted less chaos in Ukraine and the EU wanted more. Fuck the EU indeed.

-Username17

Frank, you consider USA discussing how they should split power in Ukraine and who should be given which post normal? After all the screams "Russia, stay out of Ukraine business"?

[Username17]

Frank, you consider USA discussing how they should split power in Ukraine and who should be given which post normal? After all the screams "Russia, stay out of Ukraine business"?

Of course it's normal. Why the fucking fuck do you think the United States and Russia participate in these negotiations if they didn't have opinions about what they thought the outcome should be?

The question is not whether countries should have opinions on what the settlement should look like, the question is what kinds of pressure are acceptable to influence the negotiations. What was caught on tape there was US diplomats discussing having dialogues with Klitschko, Yanukovych, and Yatsenyuk to urge them to accept a deal that the United States liked and to get UN envoys to set up meetings to make it happen. This is clearly reasonable behavior. The United States may or may not be doing shady and underhanded things in the Ukraine, but nothing discussed on that phone call qualifies.

Russia, meanwhile, is very obviously taping peoples' private phone conversations and then airing them publicly in order to embarrass them. Which is dickish to a degree that very probably crosses the line of acceptable negotiating tactics. The US was just shown to be participating in good faith negotiations. Oh noes! Russia just voluntarily released the fact that they were tapping peoples phonelines for the purpose of extortion. Russia crossed a line here and the United States did not. And in the future of the Ukraine, people will probably eventually realize that.

-Username17

[name_here]

If this does start to gain ground, I'm sure the Russians will be working behind the scenes to torpedo it

Well, it's good to know that our diplomats can make accurate predictions.

[Fuchs]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26108597

[Username17]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26108597

Switzerland just voted to scrap their treaties with the EU. If the EU had any balls, they would declare the treaties so abrogated void and immediately impose sanctions on Switzerland. However, the EU doesn't have any balls, and will almost certainly limp along holding up their end of the treaties while Switzerland picks and chooses what parts of the treaties it feels like honoring today.

Normally, you'd think this would be the end of the EU. The European Union is a collection of treaties. If people can simply decide to unilaterally nullify the parts of the treaties that they don't like that day and not face reprisals, that's it. There's nothing fucking left. However, I'm pretty sure that despite the EU being shown to be nothing but a set of empty promises, it won't collapse. Because this isn't the first time the EU has been faced with an existential crisis and failed the simplest tests of statecraft more abysmally than anyone thought possible. This won't even be the fifth such failure since the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Remember when they responded to the Cypriot debt crisis by declaring unilaterally that money wasn't safe in EU banks and they were just going to confiscate it whenever they wanted? Remember when Hungary rewrote their constitution and declared their main opposition party to be retroactively responsible for high crimes, forfeiting the barest pretense of being a functioning democracy and the EU didn't do shit? Remember when Ukraine unilaterally cut fuel shipments into Poland and EU citizens fucking died in the cold and the EU couldn't get off their dick to do anything about it? Remember when the EU declared that their belief in a thoroughly discredited economic doctrine was so total that they were willing to accept youth unemployment of over fifty percent in Spain for five years straight?

If this were a just or sane world, any one of those events would simply spell the end of the EU. Doing any of those things should cause you to lose the mandate of heaven. But Europeans are so snivellingly afraid of the fire and darkness of continental war that even the step into the unknown of seceding from an empire that has no legitimacy and no competency at all is too much.

This vote by the Swiss people is an overt declaration that the treaties which make up the European Union aren't worth the paper they are written on. And the European Union is going to whine and mope but ultimately just going to take that lying down. And the people in the European Union are just going to accept that as the way things are. It is fucking mind blowing.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

The people in the EU "accept" such things because they do not have a choice. Whenever the possibility of a state having its citizen vote on a EU treaty comes up the politicians go all out to avoid it - or, if it still happens and is not aceptable, repeat it until it comes out "right". EU politics, if you can call that, are decided in backroom deals between a few ministers and lobbyists, not in a democratic process.

The EU is doing what the big businesses want. If that's excluding the Swiss, then that'll happen. If that's ignoring the breach, then that'll happen. If it means acknowledging that having a yearly immigration of 1% is a lot and causes problems, and brokering some exception (as usually happens for everyone else with a problem) then that'll happen. I don't really know what will happen.

But given how the law is bent over backwards each time "there is no alternative" to save the Euro, I do not really think the EU leaders care even a tiny bit about the law.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, what policies did Switzerland flaunt exactly? On DailyKos, there's some crap about Switzerland flaunting the treaties because of immigration xenophobia.

[Fuchs]

They voted to return to immigration quotas. Though no exact number was given - most bandied around number was "40-45'000 per year", which would mean half the current rate, about 0,5% of the population, and about 4 to 5 times the projected maximum number of immigrants per year that was expected by the government when they removed the quotas (after a vote).

Theoretically they could simply set the quota at the number of immigrants we already get per year.

As far as xenophobia goes, that's just part of the picture. A large number of the green voters are against immigration to stop the additional pressure for the ecology (there's another initiative getting ready to limit immigration much more for ecological reasons).

Interestingly, this was the first time in 20 years that the swiss voted against the good of the economy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Fuchs, Frank, and anyone else living in Europe:

Is immigration hysteria from North Africa/Middle East/Eastern Europe really that big of a deal in EU politics? Or is it just like the BNP/Golden Dawn and they're waaaay overblown?

[Fuchs]

Well, hundreds (or thousands) of people die each year trying to reach Spain and Italy from North Africa. The EU spends billions on border defense trying to hold them back.

The German conservatives rant about bulgarians and romanians trying to immigrate into their social security. Right-Wing Le Pen might get the best results for the European Parliament's election in France. The Finnish people voted very strongly (I think over 20%) for a "Finnish first" party. Etc. etc.

My personal opinion is that immigration is that big an issue in politics since the established parties strongly tend to deny that there is a problem and blame racism for everything. The these days so prominent SVP in Switzerland rose to prominence and influence by playing the immigration card - the other parties kept denying that there were troubles in certain areas between foreigners and natives and blamed the natives each time for being racists, so the people who were fed up with seeing their issues (such as there were) marginalized and being blamed themselves for everything voted for those catering to them. After about 10 years, the established parties started to react with harsher laws and measures, but never really got rid of the "there is no real problem, stop being racist, young foreigners treating your daughters as whores for not dressing as if they were in saudi arabia is no problem" propaganda, and now we have pretty harsh laws and a significant part of the population still feels they are being marginalized since each time someone mentions problems, a significant part of the political parties reflexively blames racist thoughts for people having problems with asylants dealing with drugs.

If the majority of the party had managed to take the fears and issues seriously, and worked on dealing with them the whole hysteria wouldn't have taken root in my opinion. More "Yes, we see, that's a bad thing, we'll do something about it" and less "stop being racist! Loud parties at midnight in your neighbour's flat and live goats being butchered in the bathroom is a cultural enrichment" would have done a lot to lessen issues - even without actually doing much about it.

I compare it to lethal car accidents due to speeding young drivers. There are very few of them, but those who happen are usually quite the front page material. Yet contrary to immigration issues, people don't get told "there's no problem" even if, statistically, there really isn't a big issue. People get told "We'll do something about it!" by politicians each time a child gets killed by some illegal car race and some rather placebo measures are taken, and people are content.

[PhoneLobster]

Wow. Fuch's you're kinda really racist aren't you?

Your entire post is nonsense and whining about people daring to call racism for what it is.

I mean really.

"Because people called racists racists the only option they had to address their racist paranoia was to vote for racist parties and then the mainstream parties increasingly adopting creeping racist policies that pandered to racists for no reason but someone somewhere still calls racists racists which isn't fair and will only lead to racists getting more racist policies implemented!"

Really now? REALLY?

Go back and rethink things. You're stuck in some sort of incredibly stupid pretzel of denial and mental dissonance.

At the very least try again until you have an explanation that has an even remotely plausible internally coherent narrative. Like oh, I don't know, "Racist policies and pandering have increasingly been mainstreamed as cynical vote winning policy by various assholes but there remains a large amount of vocal anti-racist resistance".

[DSMatticus]

I'm pretty sure Fuchs is trying to acknowledge that immigration is a non-issue (like, the whole last paragraph explicitly compares immigration problems to oversensationalized tragedies), but suggesting that it would have been a better political move to pay empty lip service to the morons obsessed with immigration than call those people racists and drive them to vote for actual racist fucks who do actual racist fuck things. He still manages to say some disconcertingly racist-ish things, but I think that point's worth engaging. Because it's wrong, and involves being suckered into parroting a bit of racist propaganda.

See, modern racism recruits by pretending every single person who disagrees with them is the worst kind of tumblrite. No matter what you say or advocate, your actual position isn't going to reach them: you will be branded with the SJW label and then they will levy the power of memetics and strawmen to discredit you without engaging you. Here: start naming politicians endorsing acid attacks among minorities as a valid expression of their culture and who would accuse you of being a racist for wanting to curb them. That's going to be a short fucking list. But when acid attacks come up in the racist echochamber, that's exactly the sort of position they're going to bandy about to parody and mock (even though no one fucking holds it).

So when you say things like "My personal opinion is that immigration is that big an issue in politics since the established parties strongly tend to deny that there is a problem and blame racism for everything," you're repeating actual racist fucking propaganda. Mainstream politicians do not blame any and all immigration issues on racism. That's something racists made the fuck up and repeated over and over and over and over until people started believing it was true. Not only is paying lipservice to those people in itself dangerous and vile, you literally can't fucking gain anything by doing so because they're just going to dub over you with something else that helps maintain the narrative they want.

[Whipstitch]

It becomes most obvious in the US when people discuss drug trafficking. If you don't talk like the Mexicans and Drug Traffickers Venn diagram is just one big circle the racists break out the straw men pretty much immediately even though everybody damn well knows that Mexico has fucking problems.