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

[Maj]

But Russians wear cool fur hats! I have always wanted one of those.

You can probably order one over the internets. The fluffier ones are around $300. I bought mine the day I went to see the second D&D movie (so, nine winters ago) and it still looks like new.

Thanks for the link. I don't think it's in the budget for this week, but I'm putting it on my wish list.

[tussock]

Why is Russia such a terrible place?

It's really fucking cold, which totally just kills people. Beyond that they had a shitty repressive Tzar with actual peasants and stuff up until a hundred years ago and had a massive civil war or two when he went down. The Nazis then exploded the shit out of their most profitable farmland and cities for years just a couple generations ago, while killing millions of working-age men, and unlike Germany they got no western money to rebuild with at all. The Germans were surprised as fuck that Russia was able to become an industrialised nation during the course of the WWII, it was quite a feat, and ludicrously costly in terms of future potential in that it mostly went on weapons.

Their post-war leader murdered millions more for basically no reason at all, or no better one than roads made of dead people make less mouths to feed while also helping open up oil and precious metal reserves to keep the new industry and soviet-block trade network on track. Trying to match the cold war production of military gear of the entire western world for a generation made for ludicrous amounts of wasted capital from their scarce and difficult to draw down resource pool.

Eventually the command economy turned itself to shit, as they do, and the place got functionally taken over by the Mafia-like groups that had run the black markets under it (they're your "Russian billionaires"). The former army generals and KGB officers decided to pick teams amongst the chaos and the KGB won. Putin is the old KGB head, they run Russia now, politically if not economically. Elections are fair, but they just strait up murder popular opponents of government and critical members of the press, so it doesn't help. With endless propaganda about enemies at the gates, fake wars that kill real people, and other typical spy bullshit, people essentially don't trust government and the press at all, and religious extremists who mindlessly block vote have some say as a result.

Russia's exports are raw materials. Wood, metal ore, gas, coal. You can't be a rich country doing that, and so they're not. The government cannot provide shit for people because their tax rate is tiny (Mafia own everything, so proposing more tax is a death sentence). They have a lot of police because they have a lot of crime (Mafia, high murder rate and so on). There's also a high incarceration rate (over half the US rate, which leads the world by far).

And yes, you can't run gay pride parades any more, but it's a small fine and no one in Russia actually cares because they weren't doing that anyway. Bigger problems.



Meanwhile, also quite good at science and technology and have the best space program on the planet, and do still sell quite a lot of guns to people. That's the cold war legacy in action, shame they weren't as into things that would make them rich instead.

[Starmaker]

The former army generals and KGB officers decided to pick teams amongst the chaos and the KGB won.

I'm surprised people know this. (The former army people are now a very hardcore for-profit telecom company.)

Meanwhile, also quite good at science and technology

Not for long, trust me on this. The new generation of scientists (those born after 1980) are very much looking forward to emigration. They think of it as winning the lottery. For someone who graduates with a perfect GPA from the #1 physics university, the best-paying job the state can offer is custserv. I'm sorry, this thong is sold out. In Russia itself, techpriests try to prevent meltdowns with holy water. The guy who invented the concrete from which the first Chernobyl sarcophagus was made (no names, because google alerts) said, "Until something else explodes, young people are basically fucked."

[Longes]

Russia's exports are raw materials. Wood, metal ore, gas, coal. You can't be a rich country doing that, and so they're not.

Norway's main exports are fish, oil and gas. More oil per person than Russia sells, in fact. Is Norway a poor country?

Not for long, trust me on this. The new generation of scientists (those born after 1980) are very much looking forward to emigration. They think of it as winning the lottery. For someone who graduates with a perfect GPA from the #1 physics university, the best-paying job the state can offer is custserv. I'm sorry, this thong is sold out. In Russia itself, techpriests try to prevent meltdowns with holy water. The guy who invented the concrete from which the first Chernobyl sarcophagus was made (no names, because google alerts) said, "Until something else explodes, young people are basically fucked."

Weird. People I studied with in MIPT didn't seem to hold immigration as a holy grail.

[Koumei]

Is it really so hard for people outside the US to figure out in what ways the US is deceptive?

Not really. We might overestimate the deceptiveness of your government a little (due to a track record of getting caught, I guess), but that's mostly when joking. Amongst people who don't post "The truth behind chemspray!"* links, the general consensus seems to be "Yes, the US has the capacity to intercept all your _____ data. They probably actually don't care enough to for nearly everyone. Obviously they have spies everywhere in the same way everyone else does, and they tend not to get caught (Australia could learn from this)."

Mostly we accept the CIA factbook as being more of a "big pile of research a bunch of people did" rather than "propaganda and lies by the CIA". Most people even understand that if the president can't keep a secret about where his penis is, there's no way a moon-landing-faking could be kept under wraps with that many people working on it, so that one is obviously real.

It's less about calling bullshit on things your government does say, more about wondering what they aren't saying (and not in the lizard-people sense, rather the "All those close files on stuff that may have been happening during the latest war, care to do some talking?")

*Yeah, I know such a person. He literally linked a chemspraying thing. And an article about how doctors will tell you that fluoride in water will actually kill you and turn your children into deep ones. And then the usual "burning jet fuel can't 9/11". And a hilarious "10 conspiracy theories that turned out to be TRUE!" Which put "Pro wrestling is fake" right next to "GM foods cause liver damage". And one of those "shill is paid by Republicans to pretend to be an independent-voter who is merely terrified of the overreach and the police-state that the Democrats are enforcing with their witch hunts!" videos.

[DSMatticus]

Elections are fair, but they just strait up murder popular opponents of government and critical members of the press, so it doesn't help.

They are not really fair. The Russian government refuses to give independent parties any means to investigate or verify results and you will just have to take their word for it that it's not enough to matter, but pretty much every election (especially the 2011 ones) they have is accompanied by evidence of widespread fraud. Putin and United Russia probably wouldn't lose fair elections, because they don't really have any significant competition and they fund their reelection campaigns out of the government's pockets if need be, but the elections also aren't fair because fuck you. Corruption is just a thing they do - I don't think they could stop themselves if they wanted to. Democracy in Russia was always a long shot, but Putin's rise to power was the eulogy.

[Whipstitch]

Norway's main exports are fish, oil and gas. More oil per person than Russia sells, in fact. Is Norway a poor country?

Norway isn't poor, exactly, but any conversation about it must take into account that you're talking about a country nearly half the size of Belarus. Around here, people routinely call countries bigger than that bullshit small in OSSR threads.

[Koumei]

Putin and United Russia probably wouldn't lose fair elections, because they don't really have any significant competition and they fund their reelection campaigns out of the government's pockets if need be, but the elections also aren't fair because fuck you.

As Good News Week put it, "Putin is so popular he doesn't even have to rig the elections - he just does that for fun!"

Granted, that was back during his first run, when he seemed to be at least halfway serious about tackling corruption, making oligarchs and plutocrats piss themselves with fright, and doing silly stunts involving shirtlessness or flying dicks. Before the whole "Polonium assassination" incident, and all that. And before it was completely obvious that he was interested in simply adjusting the corruption so that the person benefiting was him.

Although it's possible everyone except me already knew the last bit back then.

[Starmaker]

Granted, that was back during his first run, when he seemed to be at least halfway serious about tackling corruption, making oligarchs and plutocrats piss themselves with fright(...)

And before it was completely obvious that he was interested in simply adjusting the corruption so that the person benefiting was him.

Although it's possible everyone except me already knew the last bit back then.

Pretty much. Which reminds me:

Decades ago, Putin served in East Germany with a guy whom history did not remember, but I can tell you his name was Sergey Solovyov, also known as Komrade (for the way he used to introduce himself over the phone).

Komrade drank a lot even by Russian standards, and Putin had to occasionally drag him back to his hotel apartment (they lived in similarly furnished apartments across a hallway). When drunk, Solovyov would talk exclusively about the hotness of women and remember what everyone else was saying, so the habit never interfered with his career -- until one fateful day in the 90s, when he got into a car accident and was locked up for hooliganism. As soon as he was able to tell the cops they were dealing with a FSB colonel, he was let go -- but not soon enough to have been present at a veteran's funeral, and of course everyone knew why he wasn't present. And that was pretty much the end for Solovyov.

A year before his death, he decided to give out the stuff he didn't need. I got two classy stackable armchairs and a lamp he stole from Putin's Dresden apartment when their mission ended and they had to vacate the premises. It's a pretty ordinary lamp, very 80s and very Soviet, with the exception of the euro plug. Komrade couldn't use it in Russia and had forgotten about it by the time electrical adapters became ubiquitous.

...I could have been Vice Minister for Atomic Energy or something. Sigh.

*Yeah, I know such a person. He literally linked a chemspraying thing.

Before the whole "Polonium assassination" incident, and all that.

Speaking of chemtrails, I raise you:
- Yeltsin was dead the whole time!!!!1!!, and
- Americans killed Litvinenko as payment for failing to protect a Russian consulate on "their" territory in the Middle East.

[Username17]

What's the cause of Saudi Arabia's high mortality rate?

http://www.who.int/nmh/countries/sau_en.pdf
Also, poor driving habbits.

Those statistics tell a lot of the story, but to understand them, you have to compare the numbers to a non-shithole country like Canada.

First of all, your country should (if it isn't fucking up) have non-communicable disease causing something north of 85% of your nation's deaths. Because that's the category that diseases of old age and "natural deaths" fit in. If considerably more than 15% of your people are dying from other causes, that means that you have a statistically significant portion of your population dying due to the failure of your public safety and/or public health systems. That's bad. We rag on Russia, and we are right to do so - but their NCD death rate is 82%, and while that's bad, it's not even in the same ballpark as Saudi Arabia's 71%. Seriously, like a sixth of the population can expect to die because the state fails to provide basic security for its people. That's madness.

But of course it goes beyond that. There's a movie out on DVD now called Wadjda. It's about a girl who wants to get a bike. If you want to understand on a visceral level how messed up that country is, go watch that movie.

Saudi Arabia is essentially running multiple parallel systems. The women get a different health and security system than the men, and it's explicitly inferior. The poor people get a different health and security system than the rich, and again it's explicitly inferior. This means that care for the upper echelons of male society is actually not that good because of bulk rate effects, and the care for everyone else is worse.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

What's the cause of Saudi Arabia's high mortality rate?

http://www.who.int/nmh/countries/sau_en.pdf
Also, poor driving habbits.

Those statistics tell a lot of the story, but to understand them, you have to compare the numbers to a non-shithole country like Canada.

These links are a blast. On checking my place's data, a number immediately came to attention: 12% of deaths due to "injury". Incidentally, the same proportion found in Russia. On better places to live, this number seems to remain around 6%. USA, that gets a lot of flak for being a violent place, clocks at a worrying 7%.

[Shatner]

This means that care for the upper echelons of male society is actually not that good because of bulk rate effects, and the care for everyone else is worse.

-Username17

Can you expand on that, because I don't quite follow. I understand the whole "vaccinating the poor makes the rich healthier because there isn't as deep a local reservoir of disease", but I assume this is about some economies of scale thing... or something.

[Username17]

This means that care for the upper echelons of male society is actually not that good because of bulk rate effects, and the care for everyone else is worse.

-Username17

Can you expand on that, because I don't quite follow. I understand the whole "vaccinating the poor makes the rich healthier because there isn't as deep a local reservoir of disease", but I assume this is about some economies of scale thing... or something.

Providing high quality care requires experienced doctors. Doctors get experience by treating people. If you want to have destination hospitals (and you do), you need to have a large patient base so that there can be enough patients with specific diseases that you can put them into a cohort and provide specialized care. There is a reason that when people in the United States travel for medical care, they have a very high chance of going to California or New York and a very low chance of going to Montana or Wyoming. That's where the people are, so that's where the sick people are, so that's where the sick people who have the same kind of problem you have are, so that's where the doctors who have experience in dealing with your problem are.

Denmark has, by all accounts, a very nice medical system. But they still have to send their cancer patients and such to Germany for medical care because Denmark is a very small country and Germany is not. So Germany has the patient base to support more specialized care, and Denmark doesn't, so when Danes need more specialized care they often have to go to Berlin or Frankfurt, or some other city with a metropolitan population quite comparable to Denmark as a whole.

So when you take your population and divide them up into arbitrary categories that can't visit the same doctors, you devastate your ability to have medical specialization. Even though Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency is relatively common in Saudi Arabia (both because the mutation is frequent in Arab populations and because 30% of marriages in Saudi Arabia are between 1st cousins), it's still hard to have a practice that specializes in that sort of thing when the potential patient base is divided up between Men and Women, Rich and Poor, National and Foreign (less than 69% of people in Saudi Arabia actually have citizenship papers).

The whole country is over twenty nine million people, but for the purposes of making hospitals and treating diseases it's more like six different countries with less than five million people in them that aren't allowed to share patients. It's like "what if Ireland couldn't send patients to the UK for specialized treatment?"

-Username17

[Shatner]

Got it. Thanks for the clarification. Saudi Arabia's a weird place.

[tussock]

Woot! NZ, NCD: 91%. 6% Injury. Fuck all y'all communicable diseases, we be an island nation.

And to a fair extent Norway isn't rich. But they have a fuck-tonne of oil, and they distribute the wealth of that very broadly. Their GINI coefficient is like 0.25, which is super low, means they basically don't allow poverty.


Saudi Arabia is ... the people who were unfortunate enough to be born on the USian supply of cheap oil. Divide and conquer on a massive scale, a system of white English-speaking oil workers draining the country of it's wealth out of sight of the natives, who are kept poor and ignorant with artificially backward religion and massive state repression programs, all while giving ludicrous kickbacks to the tiny ruling families.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Armed Guards Blocking Ukranian Airport
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wir ... t-22713535

Associated Press journalists in Crimea spotted a convoy of nine Russian armored personnel carriers on a road between the port city of Sevastopol, where Russia has a naval base, and the regional capital, Simferopol. The tensions at two Crimea airports apparently caused the closure of airspace over the peninsula.

Russia's Interfax agency cited Serhyi Kunitsyn, a Ukraine presidential envoy to Crimea, telling ATR television that 13 Russian planes carrying 150 Russian troops each landed at Gvardeiskoye air base. That report could not be confirmed.

[Whipstitch]

What Frank was talking about only gets more exaggerated when you're talking about the truly silly rare shit people come down with. Take the primary Mayo Clinic campus, for example. It's hardly a bullshit practice--Fucking Mr. Burns went there when he got sick on the Simpsons--but there's still neurological issues that can get you referred to some dude in Johns Hopkins. Some things really are just that rare (or so hard to detect that they may as well be.)

[Redshirt]

Yeah, my inlaws are Georgian, and this all looks pretty familiar. The interim Ukrainian leadership is so far being very cautious about letting this escalate though, which is good.

[Username17]

BBC has started running propaganda pieces for UDAR. Almost every part of that article is false save for the raw facts about his boxing record. Odd that they would paint such a glowing picture of a man who is the appointed figurehead of the third largest party in the Ukrainian parliament right after he started calling for the Ukrainian army to be mobilized to fight Russians.

Oh wait, that's not odd at all.

I think at this point the question is how big the two parts of the Ukraine are going to be. The opposition groups in control of Kiev right now crossed a line by not honoring the truces they agreed to. Now there's no way the Eastern parts of the country are going to accept a unified country. The guy they voted for in 2004 was deposed by a Western uprising, and they voted him back in in 2014 and he was deposed in a Western uprising. They just aren't going to accept being in a country with Lviv anymore, and they can call on Russian troops to secure their secession. The big question of course is how many oblasts go into each successor state.

That map looks pretty likely to me

-Username17

[Koumei]

Yeah, our PM has started saying mean things about Russia, and saying how important it is to stay out of other countries and not interfere with their business and infringe on their sovereignty. Which is fascinating, coming from him - Indonesia would love for him to actually listen to that advice himself.

And Obama told Russia not to interfere with the Ukraine, but apparently has not spoken out about the whole thing starting based on the EU interfering with the Ukraine. Because there's a cold war on, damnit, and someone needs to put the USSR in their place! It's 1975 here, wake up!

It saddens me to see the BBC now stooping to "making shit up for political propaganda". I'm not actually sure if there is anyone left as a bastion of "you can read this news and it's actually true".

[Chamomile]

The only source of truth in news appears to be sifting through YouTube looking for primary sources.

[Redshirt]

And Obama told Russia not to interfere with the Ukraine, but apparently has not spoken out about the whole thing starting based on the EU interfering with the Ukraine. Because there's a cold war on, damnit, and someone needs to put the USSR in their place! It's 1975 here, wake up!

The EU doesn't have any troops in Ukraine, it hasn't seized any airports or cut communication lines, it hasn't boxed in Ukrainian troops and ships. EU "interference" barely rose above negotiating a failed association agreement and tsking at Yanukovych for imprisoning his political opponent. That is not remotely equivalent to Russia's most recent actions.

[Chamomile]

I guess since "barely rose above" is a relative term which could mean anything that is technically true. But the whole mess was apparently caused by German agents provocateur.

EDIT: Although I suppose it should be noted that it is not necessarily hypocritical to condemn Russia's actions but not the EU's/Germany's, seeing as how Russia's actions are still altogether more extreme.

[Redshirt]

But the whole mess was apparently caused by German agents provocateur.

That's a new one. Even the Russian PR spammers on Gawker and elsewhere haven't tried to convince me that the protests were fomented by German spies. Do you have a link?

[Koumei]

Redshirt: given the riots were sufficient that the actual president fled the country, of course Russia is putting people in there:
A) Putin is a dick and wants to shove neighbours around
B) The actual part neighbouring Russia has a lot of Russians (or descendants thereof) as citizens, and that's the part that voted in the actual legitimate leader who was chased out, so if anybody is going to protect their interests (by which I mean "prevent out-of-control mobs from killing them"), then it's going to be Russia.

In this instance, it actually makes sense and is justified up until the point where they decide to hang around, put their own hand-picked person in power and completely convert the Ukraine into an extension of Russia. And yeah, they probably will go ahead and do that and then we can condemn them for that.

But no part of that would have happened if, in response to a pro-Russia government being elected who then decided to accept a Russian gas deal rather than a get-fucked-by-Merkel deal, Merkel hadn't pushed riots into action.

That's a new one. Even the Russian PR spammers on Gawker and elsewhere haven't tried to convince me that the protests were fomented by German spies. Do you have a link?

If you went back all of one whole page you'd see the following:

There has undeniably been outside money and political pressure supporting the Ukrainian uprisings. Much of it has clearly come from Germany. There is footage of people on German payrolls playing the role of agent provocateur: breaking shit, attacking police, starting fires, and so on. The KGB released "proof of US involvement," but it was really small scale bullshit and confined to the US state department providing consultations with opposition leaders, acting as mediators in high level negotiations, and handing out bread in the demonstrations.

And then:

@Frank
Could you point me to some publication supporting your statements, please? I'm from Germany, and like to think that our media is rather free (see Press Freedom Index), yet I have never heard much about our own involvement in this crisis except the official stuff (Steinmeier trying to negotiate, Gysi proposing to send Schröder as diplomat).

Have you tried looking at UDAR's wikipedia page? The Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform is a "partner" of Germany's Christian Democrats. Which is a polite way of saying "they are almost completely funded by Angela Merkel's political party." If you want stuff auf Deutsch, that exists as well. Sorry, meine Deutsch ist schlecht und ich kann nicht auswerten die Webseiten. I genuinely don't know whether that particular website is a reputable source of information in German or not, but I figure it might be a place to start because with my really shitty German it seems to be talking about the events in question.

The basic gist is that both through the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and directly, the German CDU has basically financed and trained UDAR from nothing in 2010 to a major political force today. Every time you read reports of UDAR busing in supporters to Kiev, those tickets were paid for with Merkel's money. When I say "Germany," I really mean "the Christian Democratic Union of Germany." Given that Merkel is apparently chancellor for life over there, I feel that's a tolerable exaggeration.

So every time you see this man's mouth moving:


Remember whose hand is moving to make his mouth move:


-Username17