4 ms·

who do you think is being manipulated? Statements like that are useless without some elaboration.

mladenkovacevic 13y ago
The protesters are manipulated into thinking that joining EU and getting rid of Yanukovich is somehow the first step to prosperity... And the blogosphere is manipulated into buying this as some kind of completely spontaneous grass roots movement. Sure people want change.. But this is bankrolled elsewhere.. I bet it wasn't that expensive either.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I agree (see my other post in this thread). But I don't know much about Ukraine. It would be great if you would post a detailed analysis as a top level post.
- spikels 13y ago
  Bankrolled by who? EU? US? Who? And do you have any evidence? BTW-Do you get your news from RT?
  - memracom 13y ago
    It could even have been bankrolled from Russia. Even though I speak Russian and some Ukrainian, and I have followed current events in both countries for years, I can't figure out what is actually going on here. Yes, it could be another dumb move by the Americans who have a real habit of foot in mouth internationally, but it could just as well be part of a clever complex multi-year gambit by the Russians who have a strong tradition of playing chess, not just around a table with wooden game pieces, but in international politics as well.
    - smsm42 13y ago
      Yeah right, that's John Kerry (under orders from Barack Obama) who is orchestrating Ukrainian revolution. That's one of the funniest theories about that whole mess I ever read. >>> but it could just as well be part of a clever complex multi-year gambit by the Russians who have a strong tradition of playing chess You realize that not all Russian are the same, not all of them drink vodka, are chess grandmasters, wear ushankas with red stars, play balalaykas and dance with bears on the streets? Traditions of chess have absolutely nothing to do with modern Russian politics (actually The Godfather would be much more instructive there than The Luzhin Defense), though of course Russia meddles with Ukrainian affairs - it's a huge country neighboring them and having centuries-old ties, along with the little fact that it also carries a lot of Russia's gas lines. But that is a trivial conclusion, not very illuminating.
      - memracom 13y ago
        I have been to Russia more than once. And I speak Russian well enough to travel there on my own, with no support from any travel agencies or guides. On one occasion a couple of guys wanted to steal my suitcase, because I foolishly left the airline stickers on it so they knew it had to contain something worth stealing. But they didn't grab it. They didn't pull out a weapon. Instead they smiled and laughed and try to talk me into going with them to some place nearby. It was like a game of cat and mouse. Or chess. I have heard of other people who ran into similar thieves. Rather than using force they try to outwit you. If you don't fall for their tricks, then you are free. That is how chess works. So I think that the multilevel strategic and tactical thinking of chess is more widespread in Russian society than you claim.
        dualogy 13y ago
        > If you don't fall for their tricks, then you are free. That is how chess works. It is? We should play some time, this could get interesting.
        smsm42 13y ago
        Yes, you've been to Russia a couple of times and you've encountered a couple of Russian con men. That makes you an expert in all things Russian and gives you deep insight into Russian soul and Russian politics. And gives you the right to tell people who grew up there how it really is. I get it.
  - abrahamsen 13y ago
    Seen from Russia, there is a power struggle between EU and Russia about border drawing between their respective empires. Thinking in "empires" is popular in Russia. So seen from Russia, it is beyond doubt that the Kiev uprising is bankrolled by EU. Seen from EU, EU hasn't really enough coherence to deal effectively with its internal problems, much less participate in any international power struggles. And the population is deeply tired of expansion. The only empires in the minds of EU are the ghosts of the British and French colonial empires. So EU has neither the will nor the capability to do something like this.
- arrrg 13y ago
  Joining the common European market would be a great step towards prosperity, sure, with mutual benefits for everyone, as well as increased security, stability and peace. Having a large common market you can buy from and sell to is pretty awesome, actually. Add the pretty great more human benefits (freedom of movement, freedom of labor) and it’s a pretty great perspective. As it stands, however, the Ukraine is probably decades away from that – but I can’t see how that could possibly be a bad thing to work towards.
  - csomar 13y ago
    Joining the common European market would be a great step towards prosperity, sure, with mutual benefits for everyone, as well as increased security, stability and peace. Big claims need big justifications, I guess. The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example.
    - rosser 13y ago
      The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example. Having to defang their military a bit to be considered for EU admission didn't exactly work out ideally for Turkey, either...
    - stdbrouw 13y ago
      Well, Greece kind of shot themselves in the foot didn't they? http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis... http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/07/greece-and-euro http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/07/greece-a...
    - claudius 13y ago
      > The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example. Greece got itself into a bloody mess by overspending, and while low interest rates due to Eurozone membership may have made that easier, it is in no way the fault of the EU that the Greek people elected an inept government. OTOH, EU membership now helps them get out of this mess with billions and billions of euros.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Bankrolled by who? EU? US? Who? And do you have any evidence? It's naive to ask for evidence in such issues. As if they put out official statements and bank account transactions. These kind of things are exposed years or even decades after the fact. That said, we do have evidence and hard facts for similar sponsoring of other "orange revolutions" and under-the-table deals in the past 2 decades. It's a constant presence in the history of lesser states, when the interests of superpowers collide with theirs, a practice as old as the "Voice of America". In practice, when you see sponsored foreign "organisations" working in some place to help "bring democracy", just think "change the regime to some puppet who will do us favours". Superpowers don't do such things out of the goodness of their heart. That's why you only see them in places like Ukraine and Iraq, and not, say, Arabia or Latin America dictatorships [1] >BTW-Do you get your news from RT? I don't know about him, but I get "my news" from studying the political climate and being in the middle of decades of European and Eastern European history. And I'm not even Russian/Ukraine, I'm from EU. Now, don't get me wrong, the protesters are genuinely believing that they are doing the right thing and fighting for change etc. It's just that that's a feeling that's very easy to create and manipulate in people, selling them "change" and "hope" and offering them the same shit in a different package. Quite like people thought this Obama guy was the "Hope" that would change everything once he gets elected, only to get mostly same-old, same-old. [1] From Wikipedia: Activists in each of these movements were funded and trained in tactics of political organization and nonviolent resistance by a coalition of Western pollsters and professional consultants who were partly funded by a range of Western government and non-government agencies but received most of their funding from domestic sources.[nb 2][2] According to The Guardian, the foreign donors included the U.S. State Department and USAID along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society Institute.[34] The National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supported by the U.S. government, has supported non-governmental democracy-building efforts in Ukraine since 1988. Former president Leonid Kravchuk accused Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, of financing Yushchenko's campaign on 14 September 2005.[36][nb 3] Yushchenko denied Berezovsky financed his election campaign.[36] Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine.[37] At first Berezovsky refused to confirm or deny Kravchuk's allegations, but in November 2005 he did claim that indeed he had heavily financed the Orange Revolution.[38][nb 4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution#Involvement_of_outside_forces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution#Involvement_o...
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Joining the common European market would be a great step towards prosperity, sure, with mutual benefits for everyone, as well as increased security, stability and peace. Having a large common market you can buy from and sell to is pretty awesome, actually. Add the pretty great more human benefits (freedom of movement, freedom of labor) and it’s a pretty great perspective. LOL, just ask the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, and co. Here's how this "freedom of labor" works in practice: """Humiliating wages, inhuman working conditions and coercion in a country that has declared itself the leader of the EU,” writes Jurnalul National in the wake of an investigation on working conditions of east Europeans in Germany, published by Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and aired on German public television channel ARD. The probe revealed the existence of a mafia-like organisation, which recruits Romanian workers for German companies, and then confiscates their identity papers and threatens them with death if they go to court to have their employment contracts enforced.""" And it's not just some isolated "mafia like organisation" -- the same things happen to migrant workers from all countries and accross tons of fields. The "common European market" is a lure for smaller countries to become Germany's satellites and for Brussels bureaucrats to rule over the will of the seperate nation-states. Imagine a Washington tens times more in bed with big corporations and Wall Street, ten times more bureaucratic, and favoring a few states while fucking over the majority of the others. Oh, and with bodies that nobody voted for in power.
  - rosser 13y ago
    Aside: you can reply to a comment before its "reply" link has appeared by following the "link" link in the comment's header (next to its score and age/timestamp and such), instead of replying to its parent and breaking the conversation's flow.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Thanks, didn't knew that!
- bluekeybox 13y ago
  > And the blogosphere is manipulated into buying this as some kind of completely spontaneous grass roots movement Completely absurd. All my extended family in Ukraine (plus all my former friends, classmates, and teachers) support the protests. Some were involved in parties such as Klitschko's Udar and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna. Please keep listening to Radio Moscow. The protests are not about prosperity or even about joining the EU. They are about preventing Russian-controlled mafia from running the country.
- memracom 13y ago
  Manipulated is the right word. Turkey has been trying to get into the EU for 30 years and it is still waiting. If Ukraine had signed that agreement, their politicians would right now be churning out new laws every week and the country would likely to be even more up in arms about the vastness of the changes. And they still would have the same strict visa requirements to get into the EU to work because those don't even have to change when a country is an official member. Rumania and Bulgaria learned this when they became EU members and many countries implemented strict visa quotas that prevented these new Europeans from working in other EU countries. Anytime you read about a nationalist movement or an independence movement, someone is being manipulated. Independent nations are no longer possible in the modern world. Every country is now dependent on, and must cooperate with its neighbors. For Ukraine, that means its largest trading partner, Russia. Even the other EU countries are busy coming to all kinds of agreements, accords and treaties with Russia.

The protesters are manipulated into thinking that joining EU and getting rid of Yanukovich is somehow the first step to prosperity... And the blogosphere is manipulated into buying this as some kind of completely spontaneous grass roots movement. Sure people want change.. But this is bankrolled elsewhere.. I bet it wasn't that expensive either.

yetanotherphd 13y ago
I agree (see my other post in this thread). But I don't know much about Ukraine. It would be great if you would post a detailed analysis as a top level post.
spikels 13y ago
Bankrolled by who? EU? US? Who? And do you have any evidence? BTW-Do you get your news from RT?
- memracom 13y ago
  It could even have been bankrolled from Russia. Even though I speak Russian and some Ukrainian, and I have followed current events in both countries for years, I can't figure out what is actually going on here. Yes, it could be another dumb move by the Americans who have a real habit of foot in mouth internationally, but it could just as well be part of a clever complex multi-year gambit by the Russians who have a strong tradition of playing chess, not just around a table with wooden game pieces, but in international politics as well.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    Yeah right, that's John Kerry (under orders from Barack Obama) who is orchestrating Ukrainian revolution. That's one of the funniest theories about that whole mess I ever read. >>> but it could just as well be part of a clever complex multi-year gambit by the Russians who have a strong tradition of playing chess You realize that not all Russian are the same, not all of them drink vodka, are chess grandmasters, wear ushankas with red stars, play balalaykas and dance with bears on the streets? Traditions of chess have absolutely nothing to do with modern Russian politics (actually The Godfather would be much more instructive there than The Luzhin Defense), though of course Russia meddles with Ukrainian affairs - it's a huge country neighboring them and having centuries-old ties, along with the little fact that it also carries a lot of Russia's gas lines. But that is a trivial conclusion, not very illuminating.
    - memracom 13y ago
      I have been to Russia more than once. And I speak Russian well enough to travel there on my own, with no support from any travel agencies or guides. On one occasion a couple of guys wanted to steal my suitcase, because I foolishly left the airline stickers on it so they knew it had to contain something worth stealing. But they didn't grab it. They didn't pull out a weapon. Instead they smiled and laughed and try to talk me into going with them to some place nearby. It was like a game of cat and mouse. Or chess. I have heard of other people who ran into similar thieves. Rather than using force they try to outwit you. If you don't fall for their tricks, then you are free. That is how chess works. So I think that the multilevel strategic and tactical thinking of chess is more widespread in Russian society than you claim.
      - dualogy 13y ago
        > If you don't fall for their tricks, then you are free. That is how chess works. It is? We should play some time, this could get interesting.
      - smsm42 13y ago
        Yes, you've been to Russia a couple of times and you've encountered a couple of Russian con men. That makes you an expert in all things Russian and gives you deep insight into Russian soul and Russian politics. And gives you the right to tell people who grew up there how it really is. I get it.
- abrahamsen 13y ago
  Seen from Russia, there is a power struggle between EU and Russia about border drawing between their respective empires. Thinking in "empires" is popular in Russia. So seen from Russia, it is beyond doubt that the Kiev uprising is bankrolled by EU. Seen from EU, EU hasn't really enough coherence to deal effectively with its internal problems, much less participate in any international power struggles. And the population is deeply tired of expansion. The only empires in the minds of EU are the ghosts of the British and French colonial empires. So EU has neither the will nor the capability to do something like this.
arrrg 13y ago
Joining the common European market would be a great step towards prosperity, sure, with mutual benefits for everyone, as well as increased security, stability and peace. Having a large common market you can buy from and sell to is pretty awesome, actually. Add the pretty great more human benefits (freedom of movement, freedom of labor) and it’s a pretty great perspective. As it stands, however, the Ukraine is probably decades away from that – but I can’t see how that could possibly be a bad thing to work towards.
- csomar 13y ago
  Joining the common European market would be a great step towards prosperity, sure, with mutual benefits for everyone, as well as increased security, stability and peace. Big claims need big justifications, I guess. The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example.
  - rosser 13y ago
    The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example. Having to defang their military a bit to be considered for EU admission didn't exactly work out ideally for Turkey, either...
  - stdbrouw 13y ago
    Well, Greece kind of shot themselves in the foot didn't they? http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis... http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/07/greece-and-euro http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/07/greece-a...
  - claudius 13y ago
    > The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example. Greece got itself into a bloody mess by overspending, and while low interest rates due to Eurozone membership may have made that easier, it is in no way the fault of the EU that the Greek people elected an inept government. OTOH, EU membership now helps them get out of this mess with billions and billions of euros.
coldtea 13y ago
>Bankrolled by who? EU? US? Who? And do you have any evidence? It's naive to ask for evidence in such issues. As if they put out official statements and bank account transactions. These kind of things are exposed years or even decades after the fact. That said, we do have evidence and hard facts for similar sponsoring of other "orange revolutions" and under-the-table deals in the past 2 decades. It's a constant presence in the history of lesser states, when the interests of superpowers collide with theirs, a practice as old as the "Voice of America". In practice, when you see sponsored foreign "organisations" working in some place to help "bring democracy", just think "change the regime to some puppet who will do us favours". Superpowers don't do such things out of the goodness of their heart. That's why you only see them in places like Ukraine and Iraq, and not, say, Arabia or Latin America dictatorships [1] >BTW-Do you get your news from RT? I don't know about him, but I get "my news" from studying the political climate and being in the middle of decades of European and Eastern European history. And I'm not even Russian/Ukraine, I'm from EU. Now, don't get me wrong, the protesters are genuinely believing that they are doing the right thing and fighting for change etc. It's just that that's a feeling that's very easy to create and manipulate in people, selling them "change" and "hope" and offering them the same shit in a different package. Quite like people thought this Obama guy was the "Hope" that would change everything once he gets elected, only to get mostly same-old, same-old. [1] From Wikipedia: Activists in each of these movements were funded and trained in tactics of political organization and nonviolent resistance by a coalition of Western pollsters and professional consultants who were partly funded by a range of Western government and non-government agencies but received most of their funding from domestic sources.[nb 2][2] According to The Guardian, the foreign donors included the U.S. State Department and USAID along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society Institute.[34] The National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supported by the U.S. government, has supported non-governmental democracy-building efforts in Ukraine since 1988. Former president Leonid Kravchuk accused Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, of financing Yushchenko's campaign on 14 September 2005.[36][nb 3] Yushchenko denied Berezovsky financed his election campaign.[36] Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine.[37] At first Berezovsky refused to confirm or deny Kravchuk's allegations, but in November 2005 he did claim that indeed he had heavily financed the Orange Revolution.[38][nb 4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution#Involvement_of_outside_forces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution#Involvement_o...
coldtea 13y ago
>Joining the common European market would be a great step towards prosperity, sure, with mutual benefits for everyone, as well as increased security, stability and peace. Having a large common market you can buy from and sell to is pretty awesome, actually. Add the pretty great more human benefits (freedom of movement, freedom of labor) and it’s a pretty great perspective. LOL, just ask the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, and co. Here's how this "freedom of labor" works in practice: """Humiliating wages, inhuman working conditions and coercion in a country that has declared itself the leader of the EU,” writes Jurnalul National in the wake of an investigation on working conditions of east Europeans in Germany, published by Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and aired on German public television channel ARD. The probe revealed the existence of a mafia-like organisation, which recruits Romanian workers for German companies, and then confiscates their identity papers and threatens them with death if they go to court to have their employment contracts enforced.""" And it's not just some isolated "mafia like organisation" -- the same things happen to migrant workers from all countries and accross tons of fields. The "common European market" is a lure for smaller countries to become Germany's satellites and for Brussels bureaucrats to rule over the will of the seperate nation-states. Imagine a Washington tens times more in bed with big corporations and Wall Street, ten times more bureaucratic, and favoring a few states while fucking over the majority of the others. Oh, and with bodies that nobody voted for in power.
- rosser 13y ago
  Aside: you can reply to a comment before its "reply" link has appeared by following the "link" link in the comment's header (next to its score and age/timestamp and such), instead of replying to its parent and breaking the conversation's flow.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Thanks, didn't knew that!
bluekeybox 13y ago
> And the blogosphere is manipulated into buying this as some kind of completely spontaneous grass roots movement Completely absurd. All my extended family in Ukraine (plus all my former friends, classmates, and teachers) support the protests. Some were involved in parties such as Klitschko's Udar and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna. Please keep listening to Radio Moscow. The protests are not about prosperity or even about joining the EU. They are about preventing Russian-controlled mafia from running the country.
memracom 13y ago
Manipulated is the right word. Turkey has been trying to get into the EU for 30 years and it is still waiting. If Ukraine had signed that agreement, their politicians would right now be churning out new laws every week and the country would likely to be even more up in arms about the vastness of the changes. And they still would have the same strict visa requirements to get into the EU to work because those don't even have to change when a country is an official member. Rumania and Bulgaria learned this when they became EU members and many countries implemented strict visa quotas that prevented these new Europeans from working in other EU countries. Anytime you read about a nationalist movement or an independence movement, someone is being manipulated. Independent nations are no longer possible in the modern world. Every country is now dependent on, and must cooperate with its neighbors. For Ukraine, that means its largest trading partner, Russia. Even the other EU countries are busy coming to all kinds of agreements, accords and treaties with Russia.