Me calling you living in fairytale isn't attacking you. You're one of the smarter people on this forum. The only people I attack and can't stand are the low life MAGATs who want to destroy this nation. Sorry if I offended you
Oops. NZ elected a center-right government for a lot of reasons unrelated to Ukraine (WTF?) and Poland just kicked their far-right government out of office today for the first time in nearly a decade and elected pro-Europe centrists. Maybe standing up against Russia doesn't play as badly as you think, especially in a country routinely threatened by Russia.
Poland Shows That Autocracy Is Not Inevitable The ruling party tried to use the Polish state to hold on to power, but voters rejected the effort. By Anne Applebaum October 16, 2023, 3:38 PM ET https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...parliamentary-election-autocracy-tusk/675656/ Thirty-four years ago, in June 1989, Poland woke up to a surprise. Despite a voting process rigged to favor the Communist Party, despite decades of propaganda supporting Communists and smearing anti-Communists, despite the regime’s control of the army, the police, and the secret police, the democratic opposition won, taking all of the seats that it was allowed to contest. A team of former dissidents took control of the government two months later—the first non-Communist government in Soviet-occupied Europe. In the decade that followed, Poland slowly decentralized the state and built a democracy. This morning, Poland woke up to a similar surprise. Since first winning power democratically in 2015, the nationalist-conservative party Law and Justice, or PiS, has turned state television into a propaganda tube, used state companies to fund its political campaigns, and politicized state administration. In the run-up to this election, it altered electoral laws and even leaked top-secret military documents, manipulating their contents for electoral gain. Even so, the party appears to have won only just over a third of the vote. Three opposition parties will likely have a parliamentary majority. Barring unexpected surprises, and perhaps some attempts to block their victory, they will form a center-right/center-left coalition. ...
There are roughly 150 million Russians and there are roughly 45 million Ukrainians. Russia isn’t close to running out of troops and the fighting at this point is IN Ukraine. Taking all of Ukraine would be a massive game changer for Russia and the world.
Interesting information. I will say a 10% decrease in a year really isn’t much for a year of war. I expect those numbers will change depending on what happens over the next 12 months.
Right. Right…. but check it.. so imagine that Ukraine invaded Russia - would that change your mind? See you are letting some facts get in the way.
Re: NZ, it was the promised tax cuts for families. Global inflation has gone wild. Fruits & veg prices went up by over 20% there this year.
The Polish elections as I understand them are basically contested between parties that argue about who opposes Russia the most. Like you'd never find a Polish Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz or Jim Jordan who openly cheers for Putin and Russia - that guy would not have a future in politics in Poland. Only the US warped system allows those losers to even stay around here. Ukraine is broadly popular here still - even if it has faded somewhat. It's a losing issue for Republicans, but they don't seemingly mind because they plan to ignore the losing and seize power by force It's not really a good parallel to anything in other countries
Nah, you see about 15-20 losers (a few with obvious alt accounts) that spend their entire life on here. Some are trolls, but most are suckers that change their ideology to whatever Reddit, etc. wants them to think any given day. It’s easy to be consistently full of **** on the internet. Hell, it takes a special person be someone like astros123, Deb, what have you. They spend all their free time talking about Trump. LOL.
Also to note Poland’s Right Wing government came to power before the invasion of Ukraine, high inflation or even COVID.
Yeah look at all these "special someones" or, as I refer to them high iq avid book readers. To be serious though as a white male from Texas. I would NOT enjoy being around these losers. I bet almost all of them have sh*t taste in music as well.
Straight from the mouth of someone who supports the party of tolerance and acceptance. Absolutely no difference from the hard right and the hard left. For the record, I don't disagree with you. I also view the hard left like yourself in the same manner.
Yep, the most recent march to the far right started around 2014, IIRC. If anything, it has shifted left since the Ukraine war. Here is an article that discusses the more recent "backsliding" and talks about the new style or flavor of authoritarianism today. I had never heard the phrase "autocratic legalism" until now, but it struck me as what the Republican party has been trending toward. Democracies Are Not “Backsliding” Sep 27, 2023 Jan-Werner Mueller https://www.project-syndicate.org/c...-spin-dictators-by-jan-werner-mueller-2023-09 With a democratic recession underway in many countries, one now commonly hears talk of democratic “backsliding” on a global scale. But not only is that term misleading; it also breeds fatalism, diverting our attention from potential paths out of the new authoritarianism. PRINCETON – It seems that 2023 will be another dismal year for democracy. There have been several coups in Africa. Tunisia – long touted as the Arab Spring’s one democratic success story – has seen the consolidation of an authoritarian (and xenophobic) regime. And Donald Trump appears on course to secure the Republican nomination for the 2024 US presidential election. How we describe such developments matters. After all, words have consequences. Unfortunately, some of the language used to analyze the global democratic recession is having precisely the wrong effect. The term “backsliding” – which has contributed to a curious passivity among pro-democracy forces – is a case in point. The world is not moving “back” toward some regimes familiar from the past, nor even toward dynamics and circumstances that we have seen before and can easily comprehend. The conventional wisdom has long been that, while democracies make mistakes, they also learn from those missteps and adjust accordingly – a feature that sets them apart from all other political systems. But authoritarians have now shown that they, too, can adapt, learning from their own mistakes, those of their antecedents, and their peers. In fact, modern autocrats have devised a new playbook for consolidating, exercising, and maintaining power – one that depends significantly on keeping some trappings of democracy. As the social scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have shown, these so-called spin dictators are a far cry from the violent or even genocidal “fear dictators” who dominated the twentieth century. They eschew the use of overt repression to fortify their positions. They also avoid committing obvious breaches of law, and even deploy the law to achieve their own aims, in what scholars call “autocratic legalism.” These autocrats focus on manipulating public opinion, while gradually weakening the democratic norms and institutions from which they claim to derive their legitimacy. For example, rather than engage in old-fashioned blunt repression, they might use modern surveillance technologies, such as spyware, to identify possible dissenters. And rather than deploy security services to knock on dissenters’ doors late at night, they might send the tax authorities to find fault with an NGO or newspaper. Spin dictators also fabricate new “facts” on the ground. For example, far-right populists in Poland and Hungary managed to fool the European Union for long enough to restructure domestic institutions and change personnel in service of consolidating their own rule. While undoing this damage is not impossible, it gets harder every day. This is not to say that today’s autocrats are political magicians capable of fooling all the people all the time. They also make plenty of blunders that can endanger their rule, and they hold violence and other means of overt repression in reserve. Russian President Vladimir Putin had no problem abandoning all pretense of legality or tolerance for dissent after he ordered the invasion of Ukraine. However, the point remains: we are not simply returning to a kind of authoritarianism that we have seen before. If “back” is misleading, so is “sliding.” Much like the phrase “erosion of democracy,” the term sliding suggests that we are dealing with a kind of accident, or even a quasi-natural process. But many aspiring authoritarians have a plan, and that plan often includes elements copied from others. Once Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán demonstrated how to fool the EU and play for time while he consolidated his autocracy, others could easily imitate him – as Poland’s ruling party has done. “Backsliding” also suggests that the current democratic recession is a linear process. As Seán Hanley and Licia Cianetti observe, this “risks reproducing, in reverse, the intellectual constraints of the transition paradigm of the 1990s.” In both cases, there has been an assumption that everyone is moving inexorably along the same path. But unjustified optimism (everyone is pursuing more robust democracy) has given way to unjustified pessimism (everyone’s democracy is being “eroded”). In reality, the world today is not experiencing a comprehensive, let alone inevitable, shift toward autocracy any more than it is experiencing the conclusive rescue of democracy. The fact that authoritarian populists are sometimes – but hardly always – voted out of power makes this blatantly clear. One can see these fluctuating dynamics at work in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the latter, after a period of liberal resistance to authoritarianism and corruption, pro-Putin arch-populist Robert Fico could return to power in the upcoming snap election. Perhaps we should replace the term backsliding with “careening,” a term proposed by Hanley and Cianetti to capture an often-unpredictable zig-zagging trajectory. If we assume that democracies are on a linear, practically inescapable, path back to old-style authoritarianism, we will fail to give adequate thought to potential paths out of the new authoritarianism. Prior to elections with authoritarian incumbents on the ballot – such as in Hungary last year, or Turkey earlier this year – liberal observers are usually clear about their desired outcome; but they rarely offer much of a plan for the day after the vote. One might attribute this failing to fatalism: no one really expects power to change hands. But it might also be a sign of intellectual laziness, with observers assuming that one can simply apply off-the-shelf lessons from previous transitions – thus showing scant regard for the novel elements of today’s autocratic systems. They would do well to acknowledge that the new authoritarians’ supporters may have very different incentives and motivations than those of the communist-era nomenklatura, for instance. Those with a stake in kleptocratic mafia states and corrupted militaries may well be reluctant to sit down at round tables to negotiate. Such generalizations – like those based on past experience – might be misleading, but that is the point. To preserve, restore, or promote democracy globally, we need careful analyses of individual cases, not just broad assumptions about “global trends.”
The thing you need to understand about these folks in the USA supporting Russia over the Ukraine, are the same folks that would smile while Putin farted The White Album on their forehead.
Autocratic legalism sounds like an ancient Chinese thing, but I can see it ensconced by SCROTUS if the current majority lasts long enough. Anyhow, this trend will continue as Western economies weaken and their governments are squeezed by multinationals. The internet and social media has made it even cheaper to peddle targeted messages that goes beyond what a normal government can control, contain or rebut at an appropriate rate. People are given a false choice between stability or an unfettered chaos of unending choices. It's that opening or plea for simplicity that lets autocrats slide in and seize votes/power.
