Re: Off-topic: Nationalism on the rise again?

[QAston via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 30 April 2016 at 16:14:10 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
The sentence right before where you cut the citation captured 
what I was thinking of:


  […] frustration with the establishment leads to the rise of
  people who favor a single opinion, prejudice, distrust,
  controlled press and weak courts.

You'll agree with me that parts of the media reform and the 
changes to the constitutional court in December were heavily 
criticized by people inside and outside the country for 
touching the last two points. On top of that, the party took 
control of the secret service from the parliament.


Media reform was just a public (i.e. govt paid) media controll 
change from prev govt friendly people to new govt friendly 
people. Done by almost every govt before as soon as it got 
presidential support. We have lots of private media (vast 
majority is private) who are free to do whatever they want. Most 
of them choose to attack new govt by all means possible including 
"Party leader has mental problems because he doesn't have anybody 
to fuck" (that's actuall quotation from a newspaper likely to be 
cited abroad) or freudian analysis of his childhood. Yep, that's 
how govt controlled media looks like.


Constitutional court crisis is a series of law violations by: 
prev govt, current govt, president, the constitutional judges 
themselves, starting in june 2015. The institution didn't 
function properly even before that but nobody cared. We not only 
have shitty politicians, we also have shitty judges. It's a 
political dispute, nobody really tries to solve it because both 
sides think they'll gain from polarizing society.


Chief of parliament commission about secret services (whose job 
is to create the reports and analysis of the work done, not to 
govern) is going to be from govt party for 4 years instead of 
usual round robin between all parties. Parties are still involved 
in the comission as usual. Bad, but far far from Russia.


I'm sorry that I offended you. I didn't go into details, 
because I didn't want to write an essay. Of course there is 
always something else going on. In many cases a rising 
unemployment rate and dwindling identification with the 
political elites for different reasons is involved.


No problem. I get you got this simplistic narrative from the 
media, I've heard something similar in the media too. The problem 
is that media are not doing their job properly anymore and create 
such convenient, clickbaity narratives. Words loose their meaning 
and now fascist/nationalist/sexist/racist no longer mean 
anything, they are just convenient emotional smoke granades used 
to slander political opponents or to make accusers feel good 
about themselves.

Off-topic: Nationalism on the rise again?

[Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d]

Am Sat, 30 Apr 2016 13:08:28 +
schrieb QAston :

> On Friday, 29 April 2016 at 09:07:47 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
> > It might be difficult with your daily
> > experience in Berlin to look at the world from above, but if
> > you do it should become obvious looking at Turkey, Russia,
> > Poland, Austria and Germany's own past or Donald Trump, that
> > if we let these people take over, everyone loses.
> > So what's your way forward without becoming a nationalist,
> > narrow-minded society like the one you criticize?  
> 
> What a lovely broad brush you have here. It's not like anything 
> else is going on in any of those countries - it's all nationalism 
> and narrow-mindedness and you're so virtuous and enlightened to 
> point it all out.
>
> I'm going to speak for Poland because I live here and I've spent 
> significant amount of time to try and figure out what the hell is 
> going on in our politics. You know, because I actually vote here.

I'm sorry that I offended you. I didn't go into details,
because I didn't want to write an essay. Of course there is
always something else going on. In many cases a rising
unemployment rate and dwindling identification with the
political elites for different reasons is involved. The
sentence right before where you cut the citation captured what
I was thinking of:

  […] frustration with the establishment leads to the rise of
  people who favor a single opinion, prejudice, distrust,
  controlled press and weak courts.

You'll agree with me that parts of the media reform and the
changes to the constitutional court in December were heavily
criticized by people inside and outside the country for
touching the last two points. On top of that, the party took
control of the secret service from the parliament.

> The goverment was changed because the last one did not deliver on 
> it's promises and there were many scandals involving it. Just 
> this week there was a leak with recording of past govt 
> representative asking one of the richest buisnessmen in the 
> country to intervene in an independent newspaper to make it more 
> govt friendly. And mysteriously the head of the newspaper was 
> fired after the chat took place. Hopefully with the new govt 
> these things won't happen anymore, when they do it's likely we'll 
> have another govt change.
> 
> The party which lost last elections still has a strong position 
> in EU parlament (their representative is the president of EU 
> council) and from there they make campaign about the new 
> goverment to delegitimize it. Yeah, it's a shitty move, but out 
> politicians can't see past next 4 years so they don't care for 
> ruining reputation of the country. Ironically, this tactic was 
> also used by party currently in power in Poland, but it was much 
> less effective. We have really shitty politicians.
> 
> Last elections were not a result of sudden "nationalism" and 
> "narrow-mindedness" emerging.

That was meant to be directed at the anonymous poster's
projected picture. But I confess that the local media
portrayed PiS as nationalist/conservative and the December
changes seemed typical for parties that try to silence
opposition to their views. The same media also interviewed
pedestrians that objected the EU's planned sanctions as
unfounded. Now if you say that the sanctions were pushed by
the opposition, that gives the whole thing a bad taste. But
the points above remain.

> The winning party didn't emphasize migration crisis much,
> they were much more focused on social issues. Their
> sollution is to redistribute money more, I personally
> disagree with that, so I hope they'll lose power in next
> elections.

I don't know about Poland, but in Germany the money
distribution is getting worse. Leaving fairness questions aside
and exempting money invested in companies, it is an economical
problem, since a few million € in one person's private
property don't buy as much as the same money spread on more
people.

> Still, there were parties which emphasized
> stopping migration much more, they didn't even make it to
> the parliament. Poland took refugees from Ukraine and
> Caucassus while EU didn't give a shit. Nationalism my ass.

I agree, that the EU ignored the situation for too long and
left it up to Poland and Hungary to handle the refugees. It
was a pretty shitty crisis management.
The government numbers on refugees are heavily skewed though.
One source reports 5328 Ukrainians were granted asylum up to
March this year while another said only 4 people got refugee
status in the last two years (according to Euromajdan
Warszawa). The numbers were filled up to ~1 million with
Ukrainian guest workers and students.

-- 
Marco