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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:In this video courtesy of TV Rain, the head of the Moscow Orthodox Church announces Pope Francis wants to repent and return to the fold of the Holy Orthodox Church. I bet he conveniently he forgets to mention that his church is in subjugation to the Ecumenical Patriarchy of Constantinopole, and therefore even if the Pope accepted the supremacy of the ecumene of Orthodox churches in full communion, the Russian patriarch wouldn't benefit from it, being a lowly bitch in the ecclesiastic hierarchy.
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Feb 26, 2016 20:46
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Disco Infiva posted:Uhh, excuse me! Putin being a submissive little boy at Mt. Athos, the monastic theocratic state under direct authority of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.   BTW, I think if a Russian citizen decided to apply for place in the monasteries of Athos and were chosen for initiation, I believe the Russian government would be obliged by international law to let them go. I wonder if there are any politically motivated de facto immigrants among the many Russian monks living there.
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Feb 26, 2016 22:51
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A Pale Horse posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lf-mAeXH_w Why can't Poles be as smart as dogs?
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Feb 27, 2016 22:16
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Flocons de Jambon posted:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/world/middleeast/22saudi.html?pagewanted=2 If anything, this goes against your point. The Saudis use oil for political leverage, and as a weapon. In the quoted case they elected to approach the US out of their own volition to coordinate actions against a common enemy. That shows the Saudis are willing to work with the Americans when their interests align, but doesn't show they don't retain control over their own policy. The current price war, aimed against the US and their fracking investments, demonstrates further that the SA has free hand in picking their economic policies and economic partners.
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Mar 1, 2016 10:58
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loving Starship Troopers is starting to look peachy compared to Russia.
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Mar 1, 2016 20:17
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Aumanor posted:Eh, That's probably the first change introduced by the new government I agree with. Those laws are there as much to protect the prosecution from discrediting itself with stupid blunders, as they are to protect citizens from extortion and underhanded tactics.
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Mar 5, 2016 20:35
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Judging from the quality of that rebuttal, I guess all those rabid online comments we thought were written by professional trolls were actually official press releases of Russian ministries?
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Mar 8, 2016 12:44
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White Phosphorus posted:He is incompetent stupid and complicit. Putin is a pro-western shill who was hand-picked by Yeltsin and was universally hated when he was trying to suck up to the west. It is no surprise that he keeps hand-picking pro-western shills into his government. His recent experiments with nationalism are pacifying the populace but true patriots see right through that sham. Agreed, the problem with Putin is that he's too progressive and liberal. Russia should be based entirely on the foundations of serfdom and misery with no glimmer of light getting in from outside just to give the slaves false hope.
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Mar 9, 2016 09:24
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Friendly Humour posted:Goddamnit Poland, stop being the Alabama of Europe this rzeczpospolita is WAY more organized and together than I gave it credit for
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Mar 10, 2016 22:30
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Personally I think you are grossly overestimating the size of the actually combat capable Russian military vs. the dead weight being kept on paper.
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Mar 12, 2016 12:55
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I don't understand how that twitter video is owning the Russians. You just reproduced their own material.
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Mar 12, 2016 23:04
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I kinda wish for Poland to test their new stealth tank against Russia (joking). Also I think Russia is a paper tiger that would lose war against any moderately competent NATO military such as Turkey.
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Mar 13, 2016 00:33
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Discendo Vox posted:I think that might be possible too, but I'd also really like to not find out. Neither would I, but I think the military alarmists in the west need to be rebuffed with a frank reality check in the form of a proper military strength assessment. And frankly Russian military is a relic of the 80s with little potential to even dent a military based on the current US state of the art weaponry.
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Mar 13, 2016 01:18
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Friendly Humour posted:Don't you think it's a bit weird you're having to teach this poo poo to accredited and degreed journalists? I get that the information age is a comparatively new thing in human history, but I would have thought these people were already way ahead of you. I guess it says something about the current state of journalism, or perhaps it doesn't. wHAT IS EVEN YOUR POINT.
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Mar 13, 2016 03:43
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Gantolandon posted:Unfortunately, they treat pretty much everyone but the US and UK like lepers. Their treatment of Russia isn't really unique. Poles are destined to become the Sardaukar of Europe - hardened by their nation's insufferable politics, led to blind loyalty to authorities and indoctrinated to hate Russia unconditionally, they will be the bulwark against Russia, and the shock troops of our future push against the Bear. They have already started the process of turning themselves into a militarized, cult-like society. Now we just need to hope there are no Fremen in Siberia.
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Mar 21, 2016 19:24
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Darth Walrus posted:What do we know about the Savchenko case? Is it a total show-trial, or do they have any vaguely plausible dirt on her? There's no substantial case to be made against her based on anything I've read, and even if there were signs of some sort of a crime, her human rights have been grossly violated, which completely undermines the Russian case. She's been held in a cage like an animal, for Christ's sake! In addition to that, you need to understand that there's no independent judiciary power in Russia, all justice is subject to government interests or to petty profiteering of involved persons.
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Mar 21, 2016 23:58
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This Pope isn't even Polish, what a fraud.
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Mar 25, 2016 22:03
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:gently caress those pretend Catholics. poo poo like this makes me almost as angry as the Prosperity Gospel. The Pope should start excommunicating people again, imho.
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Mar 25, 2016 22:10
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drilldo squirt posted:It's honestly amazing how far back the Soviet Union set back leftism around the world with their bullcrap. Yeah, Bolshevism turned altruism into a dirty word. Nowadays having any sort of social agenda in the formed Eastern Block is like being a mutant product of incest.
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Mar 28, 2016 00:55
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Pierogi posted:Truth be told I only skimmed this topic, but wasn't there an article in Polityka (decidedly not pro "good change") which kinda, sorta said that there's something to this years long mismanagement of Bialowieza forest and the beetle plague? It would be similar to the time where U.S. National Park Services put out any and all fires in National Sequoia Park, causing an imbalance in the ecosystem. Now they purposely set fire to parts of the park or just don't suppress the ones which occur naturally and the forest is healthier for it. Cutting down bark beetle infested trees has been the standard operating procedure for decades, and attitudes change slowly. Experience from Germany shows that unattended spruce forests infected by bark beetle regenerate naturally faster than forests where infested trees are removed and replaced with saplings. The reason is that the earth in infested areas is naturally saturated with spruce seeds, so a die-off of diseased trees triggers their growth in greater quantities than can be achieved using artificial means. In contrast, planting tree nurseries in infested areas suppresses the natural growth of already present seedlings. This is all new information, however, and only a couple years ago most people were convinced that spruce forests had low viability in Central European climate, and could only be protected against diseases through human intervention. And maybe it was even correct, back when forests were decimated by acid rains and other corrosive industrial agents. But nowadays forests have regained their natural vitality, and there's little need to protect them against part of their natural conditions.
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Mar 29, 2016 12:40
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Meanwhile bitter old men with burning hatred against environmentalists are keeping the old, misguided methods alive - and I'm not talking just about PiS, just last year the Czech state clown Zeman threw a hissy fit about not surrendering to "green fanatics" by approving a new forestry / national parks charter. http://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/politika/proti-zelenym-fanatikum-zeman-nepodpori-zakon-o-parcich/r~ffaccd4c084a11e59db2002590604f2e/
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Mar 29, 2016 12:46
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drilldo squirt posted:What's democracy like in the czech republic? I can't see bussing in foreigners to beat up citizen protesting with police aid to suck up to china being good for a reelection campaign. I don't think anybody has been busing in foreigners, afaik just a bunch of Chinese expats from Prague organized a welcome gathering or something, and when they got into contact with anti-Chinese human rights activists, things went poorly. The police weren't sure what to do because they didn't want to start arresting Chinese people on day of their president's arrival, so they ended up taking the most aggressive protesters to the station and immediately released them without charges. According to one arrested journalist who was in the middle of the brawl, the cops were just kinda hapless and told him that they picked him up for his own safety, then they released him in time to catch his train home. Here's an interview for anybody willing to run it through a translator: http://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/policie-me-zatkla-aby-me-chranila-rika-fotograf-ktereho-napa/r~1d7b39d2f59711e591da0025900fea04/ Also a vice-prime minister has refused meeting the president just a couple of minutes before their scheduled appointment, citing human rights concerns.
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Mar 29, 2016 16:39
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But, but... Russia deserves a sphere of influence 
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Apr 1, 2016 19:36
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There's very little common history between the Hungarians and the Slavs of the Habsburg Empire. If anything, the relationship is one of historical antagonism, with the Slavs often uniting with the Empire's Germans against the Hungarians who tried to subjugate Slavs within their domain. Notably during the 1840s rebellion in Hungary, Czech leaders lobbied at the Viennese court to be allowed to field a volunteer army of Czechs and Slovaks against Hungarians who were seen as more of a menace than the Austrian Germans.
steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 21:08
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Actually, on the topic, how is the Habsburg Empire viewed in the Czech Republic today? I'm guessing much less negatively than Poland vis-a-vis Russia? Not that that might not be damning with faint praise. To a large extent the rule of Franz Joseph is seen with a misty-eyed nostalgia, as a halcyon days period of our national history. This, however, has less to do with actual political history, and more with the way the period has been romanticized as a sort of a naive, lazy and innocent, pastoral era only slightly marred by the benign dictatorship of a kindly Emperor by popular authors, including pillars of Czech pop culture like Hrabal, Hašek, and the Jára Cimrman people. I think it's fair to say that in the popular subconsciousness the late Habsburg monarchy became an idealized counterpart to the Communist regime, a call back to a period when the nation still had its full potential, both economic and moral, unspoiled by wars and ideological dictatorship. As for a more serious view of the overally period of Habsburg rule, it's been traditionally negative among scholars, seen as a dark age, but there's been a growing faction since the 19th century basically rehabilitating the modern Catholic history of Bohemia under Austria, and the cohabitation of Czechs and Germans as essentially a product of reciprocal forces between the Czech and German elements, and I think nowadays this camp has more credibility than the traditionalist view of the quintessentially Protestant Czech nation, descended from the Hussites, being suppressed by the xenophobic Austrians.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:56
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Please stand firm against the Counter-Reformation. It has more to do with the fact that the Czech Lutherans were quite happy to dissolve the Kingdom of Bohemia during the 30y war and divide it among Protestant kingdoms, the post-Hussite utraquists actually sided with the Catholics because they shared virtually nothing with the German Protestants, and were actually stabbed in the back by them (repeatedly), there were many Czechs who never left the Catholic side and were overlooked by history, Moravia was always firmly Catholic, and the greatest figures of national restoration were Jesuits. So the Catholics had the counter intuitive dual role of both being the enforcers of the Austrian absolutism and centralization (though the Habsburgs never wanted to fully suppress Bohemia as a political unit, since the legitimacy of the Austrian branch within the HRE stemmed from holding the title of the first elector, bestowed upon the king of Bohemia), as well as working towards restoring and maintaining a Czech national identity, meanwhile Catholic Czech aristocracy played an important role in Imperial administration and Viennese court politics instead of being silenced.
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Apr 2, 2016 12:37
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Turkey, a NATO country, intentionally attacked and destroyed a Russian military plane and WW3 did not happen. hth More importantly, the USSR, which actually held the pretext of wanting to defeat the capitalist world, collapsed while fighting American-paid insurgents in Afghanistan without resorting to nuclear weapons as the last means of tipping the global balance to their favour. If the actual global empire went through a period of literally struggling to stay alive in a competition against its ideological opponent without using its nuclear arsenal, why should a petty dictator use it for some nebulous goals.
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Apr 2, 2016 12:44
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I don't know about religious policies in Communist Poland - were their show trials against the church and priests? What level of control over the Church was there? In Czechoslovakia all priests and religious organizations were subject to state approval and control, there was essentially no way for them to maintain a dialogue between the Church and the public without losing their "accreditation" and funding. The Church was effectively limited to serving the existing population of church-going believers with no way of proselytizing among the non-going and the non-religious (and I'm not talking about aggressive preaching to the public, I'm just talking about the local priest being able to engage his parishioners in any way that would be common in a civil society, or e.g. a priest leading a pilgrimage or another religious festival of parishioners was not allowed to perform a mass to them). Meanwhile the state actively discouraged people from going to church, bullied priests and in the 1950s led trials against activist church members for deceiving the public or undermining the state.
steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 14:23
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Gobbeldygook posted:While we're on the subject of Czech's and religion, is their practice of turning Easter into a surreal public spanking festival observed anywhere outside of the former Czechoslovakia? You mean spanking ad watersports. It's also practised in some parts of Poland and Northern Hungary, allegedly.
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Apr 2, 2016 19:31
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I sort of agree about the outcome, but the repression wasn't minor, dozens, possibly hundreds of people died, thousands were imprisoned or tortured. Also people aren't magically enlightened by virtue of being cut away from the church, they've turned to bullshit alternative healers and other charlatans instead, which may be worse in the long term than simply belonging to Catholicism.
steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 21:32
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Pierogi posted:Don't take it from me, take it from the people who want to bully imprison women for believing in the right to decide about their bodies. There's virtually no link between this and the religious persecution under Communism. If anything the Communists were just as conservative on this issue as the church.
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Apr 2, 2016 21:51
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A Pale Horse posted:I don't know about Czechia but in Poland, the abortion law was the most liberal its ever been under the commies. Now it looks like its going to be the most restrictive since 1932. I'm not a huge fan of on demand abortion and actually like the Polish law the way it is now, but the Polish communists were certainly not near as conservative as the church on this issue. In Czechoslovakia the Communist policy on abortions was pretty much what the US GOP wants to institute nowadays. It was legal in cases approved by medical commissions, illegal abortions were persecuted by indicting the persons performing them, not the women seeking them (that is, afaik, literally the GOP stance on abortions today). From a philosophical and discoursive point of view, it can be argued that women were discouraged from interruptions and shamed away from "weakening the state" by failing to live up to their role as the reproductive agents of the Communist society: http://www.genderonline.cz/uploads/a77283b65d2e3a466e00fef691c4b9182bcf7a18_interrupce-v-socialistickem-ceskoslovensku.pdf
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Apr 2, 2016 22:36
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Baronjutter posted:What's wrong with "on-demand" abortion? Believe it or not, some people don't think abortion is a standard medical procedure.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:37
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fishmech posted:Well then some people are really stupid, or don't understand what the words "standard medical procedure" are. Most medical procedures are aimed at removing a pathology. An abortion isn't.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:42
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StandardVC10 posted:Counterpoint: cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is a luxury, not a human right.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:47
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Anosmoman posted:Preserving bodily integrity is an excellent reason. Sure, but I still think it should be coupled with counselling.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:48
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fishmech posted:No they are not, unless this is some strange means of translation from your native tongue. Do you often go into surgery when there's nothing wrong with you?
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Apr 2, 2016 22:49
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A Pale Horse posted:Cosmetic surgery doesn't result in the loss of a human life. Not intentionally anyway. Well, neither does an abortion, depending on your personal ontology.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:50
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sparatuvs posted:Yeah? What about people with cleft lips. That's a cosmetic surgery. quote:I'm very pro-choice, but arguing a fetus is not a human is pretty stupid.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:56
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fishmech posted:Getting your blood pressure checked is a medical procedure, in english. So is having your piss tested, or having your eyes examined. And there's tons of those procedures that don't actually do anything to alleviate a pathology in themselves. So again I ask: are you actually badly translating some term from your own language? OK, i would not consider that a procedure, as it is a mere preliminary examination. Let me change this to "surgical procedure", for the sake of context, also tune down your smugness, please. Also: A Pale Horse posted:Everything you've mentioned is done in furtherance of testing for, diagnosing or removing a pathology but I realize you're the king of pedantic dipshits so its futile to argue with you.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:58
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