Yakoob on 6/4/2016 at 22:06
Here is the cliff notes on what the new Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice)-led Government is doing
* Passed laws that effectively renders the Constitutional Tribunal useless. AKA they can break the constitution now, yay!
* Refuse to publish laws written by the Tribunal, thus preventing them from becoming law
* Refused to appoint the chosen judges, placing their own part-aligned ones in place
* Passed a law allowing Churches to buy and sell lands, which is normally heavily restricted. Regular citizens can't.
* Passed a big Media Law which puts them under supervision of a government-controlled body, potentially transforming top media channels into an excellent propaganda tool
* Implemented a new law that grants 500zl to any mother with a child (arguably a good thing, but mostly criticized for running entirely on budgetary deficit)
* Support prohibition of abortion (currently it's allowed if the woman was raped, has a risk of death during birth, or the fetus has incurable defects)
* The minister of justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, is working new police laws that would allow using illegally obtained evidence in trials, eves-dropping on unsuspecting citizens, and a greater degree of physical abuse to extort information. Oh look, it's the Polish version Patriot Act!
* Effectively "declared war" on NATO by having the minister of defense break into their counterintelligence office at 3am to steal some documents, explaining they were crucial for national security
* Re-booted a closed investigation into the 2010 Smolensk plane crash flying into Russia where majority of Polish government leaders died, implying Russian conspiracy
* Plan to implement "Bicycle Cards," a required documentation to ride bicycles one needs to take an exam for
... I'm probably forgetting a few, but you get the idea. And the elections happened less than a year a go :|
Judith on 6/4/2016 at 22:07
Quote Posted by Yakoob
On a side note, being in Poland for almost a week now I've been catching up on the local news TV and newspapers. I can basically sum up the current political situation as TROLOLOLOLOLO. The new government is bonkers on the un-progressive, pro-religion side and it's gotten everyone around us (including Obama) worried. The only silver lining is the media at least stays fairly "rational" and most criticie the crap out of it (which may not last long if the governments new media laws come into fruition). Well, not going into specifics of the situation here but anyone let me know if they want me to elaborate.
Welcome to the jolly land of no abortions! (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3FuDxwFQ8o)
Not that the previous ruling party was great and awesome, but for the last few months there have been more demonstrations, rallies, and marches than in the last decade or so.
demagogue on 7/4/2016 at 01:05
I blame Internet for this. It's happening everywhere. My parents used to be perfectly apathetic about politics like God intended, and now one's a raving trotskist and the other a raving fascist, not just them but the whole neighborhood, the whole state, state after state, and I don't recognize what's happening at home.
Oh memes are so clever, they said. It's all look at Epic Fail Guy fails again, they said. No. No, it's not. It's ungrammatical text slapped on to bad photographs that make saps so livid they start shaking and want to hang somebody, either a banker or CEO or a brown skinned person or the gay, depending on which side of crazy they fall. But not before they forward it to all their sap friends and get them shaking mad too.
FFS, people, I want to tell the saps, stop getting emotional over bad photoshop skills and pick one, either care about politics and start reading books, or don't care and watch old anodyne 80s TV shows that wrapped up their whole arcs in 26 minutes and left you in a happy apathetic stupor. Don't mix the two.
I suppose I can't assume the Trump idiocity is related to Europe's or Poland's, but I still blame Internet, and it seems to fit here as well as there.
Tony_Tarantula on 9/4/2016 at 14:04
Quote Posted by demagogue
I blame Internet for this. It's happening everywhere. My parents used to be perfectly apathetic about politics like God intended, and now one's a raving trotskist and the other a raving fascist, not just them but the whole neighborhood, the whole state, state after state, and I don't recognize what's happening at home.
It's pretty consistent EVERY time you have an economic downturn, you see extremism rise in response. Desperation begets crazy and stupid. If you think internet memes are bad you should go to a World War 1 museum to look at how insane the propaganda was back then.
Regards to my previous post, we were talking about this elsewhere on a closed forum and someone said this. Explains in a nutshell why a lot of social trends in the US and Europe are troubling to me.
Quote:
I currently still live in Brazil, where I was born and raised, but I've been thinking more and more about moving to the U.S. Most of my family has already emigrated there and it's remarkable what they've managed to build in a couple of years.
It's indeed hard to explain but like ***** wrote, saying that money grows on trees in America is almost an understatement. The daily grind of bureaucracy, incompetence and corruption that one faces in a third world country is what really gets you. Every interaction with the government seems designed for the worst user experience possible. And that's without mentioning the quality of our public services (transportation, health) and of our dear politicians.
Every adult on both sides of my family is either an entrepreneur, self-employed or business owner. The amount of taxes they pay is remarkable and most of all the bureaucracy and the hurdles they have to go through means that you have to either be a masochist or a madman to open up a business here.
Just to add to the point, here's two examples.
Time required to start a company (data from the World Bank):
United States: 6 days
Brazil: 83 days
Ease of doing business (World Bank) - the lower the number the better:
Singapore: 1
United States: 6
Brazil: 116
Again I've lived and worked with third world government actors previously(for an extended period of time) and I can confidently say that the biggest thing holding them back is corruption. It is, very literally, impossible to get anything done requirement government approval unless there is a substantial bribe involved. I encountered any number of bright young men, with huge ambition and drive, who had absolutely no prospects of success because they lacked the resources to bribe local government officials and get their plans started. In a western nation they would have had very little problem getting a line of credit and opening a shop and at least earning a living. Instead they get forced into working in drug production or in militias.
You know who does VERY well when you have a huge, powerful government that controls everything? The exact same rich that people think a big government is going to cut down to size. As it turns out public salaries don't pay that much so inevitably what happens is government officials become bought and paid for by the "rich"(relatively speaking) and those "rich" are the only ones whose families have any opportunity whatsoever.
Tony_Tarantula on 9/4/2016 at 14:17
Quote Posted by faetal
The elite view other people as a resource to generate their wealth.
I don't have the time immediately to research those events, but can I hazard a guess that the preceding commonality involves de-regulation of the wealthy and blaming of everything on a minority demographic?
You don't even need to imagine a
conspiracy to understand what's happening, it's simple maths - the only way to have predictable and continual return on investment is for a small group to control everything - otherwise it's too much like a casino - you can lose.
Aside from the irony of you saying that after accusing me of tinfoil hattery, no.
What ALL of those crisis have in common is a series of events: military adventurism leads to large government debts. The government begins treating it's citizens abusively attempting to extract wealth to pay for those debts, and eventually the behavior results in an economic implosion followed by violence in the form of either civil unrest or more traditional armed conflicts.
The form's different but it's pretty consistent what actually happens. Hell the current USA's "asset forfeiture" practices are almost identical to the "writs of assistance" that caused the revolutionary war. Both laws allowed the government to seize your assets with no due process and spend the proceeds however they please.
Tony_Tarantula on 9/4/2016 at 14:22
Quote Posted by faetal
The elite view other people as a resource to generate their wealth.
I don't have the time immediately to research those events, but can I hazard a guess that the preceding commonality involves de-regulation of the wealthy and blaming of everything on a minority demographic?
You don't even need to imagine a
conspiracy to understand what's happening, it's simple maths - the only way to have predictable and continual return on investment is for a small group to control everything - otherwise it's too much like a casino - you can lose.
Aside from the irony of you saying that after accusing me of tinfoil hattery, no.
What ALL of those crisis have in common is a series of events: military adventurism leads to large government debts. The government begins treating it's citizens abusively attempting to extract wealth to pay for those debts, and eventually the behavior results in an economic implosion followed by violence in the form of either civil unrest or more traditional armed conflicts.
The form's different but it's pretty consistent what actually happens. Hell the current USA's "asset forfeiture" practices are almost identical to the "writs of assistance" that caused the revolutionary war. Both laws allowed the government to seize your assets with no due process and spend the proceeds however they please.
Quote:
I think Tony's point is that the consolidation of power and wealth eventually leads to political revolution. It's a cycle which hasn't yet led to the perpetually dystopian end state you implied.
I do think a revolution of sorts is coming sooner or later. The question is whether the current democratic systems in the West are going to hold up long enough for it to be a gradual and mostly peaceful one, like when the "gilded age" in the US ended with the progressive movement. If not then we're probably headed to facism when much of the public loses faith in our system and gets behind some charismatic autocrat.
More or less. Every system implodes, it's just a coin toss whether that extreme reaction is libertarian or fascism. Neither tends to work out very well (for libertarianism, look at what happened to the articles of Confederation).
Quote:
I agree, but I also think that the elite aren't stupid - they know their history. The mistakes of the Roman Empire etc won't be repeated verbatim - there'll be considerations taken to avoid the standard cycles if possible. Worse than this, if the revolution does happen, existing wealth will be sure to batten down that hatches and weather it. A revolution may oust 1% of the 1% but the rest will simply sit still, wait for it to blow over and then resume when it's safe, much like through history. Think how many revolutions old wealth have survived.
Yes and no. Historically the elite has always known what is likely to happen, and they begin beefing up their police and military assets in advance (what do you think the NSA is actually about and why it catches no terrorists?). In practice that rarely works and the system collapses anyway. Old wealth typically has survived when said "old wealth" are smart enough to leave ahead of time...and what's happening now is that a lot of that money is moving into the US.
faetal on 10/4/2016 at 09:14
Where did I accuse you of tinfoil hattery? I'm just stipulating that conspiracies aren't necessary to drive this kind of thing, not that they don't or can't exist.
Yakoob on 11/4/2016 at 20:23
In more fun news, the minister of justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, is working new police laws that would allow using illegally obtained evidence in trials, eves-dropping on unsuspecting citizens, and a greater degree of physical abuse to extort information. Oh look, it's the Polish version Patriot Act!
Meantime, the EU is about to issue a resolution urging Poland to stop effectively breaking the constitution by ignoring the Constitutional Tribunal rulings.
Harvester on 12/4/2016 at 10:13
On the Dutch news yesterday, there was an item on a really large, really old forest on the outskirts of Poland. The new government wants to cut a lot of ancient trees, presumably to combat some tree-killing beetle. Environmental protectors argue that they just want to make money off of the wood of the trees. The EU is thinking about urging Poland to keep the forest as it is, since it's the last 'primal' forest in Europe.
