81–88 of 88 posts
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Too bad, I'd have loved to read this astrology debunking. And to forward it to a friend or two :P You sure you don't still have a copy of it somewhere? 0:-)
You can use the famous Carl Sagan book The Demon Haunting World instead. Voja's book was inspired by it and covers the same topics in similar manner.
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Most people who grew up in Yugoslavia are fond of it, and they rarely factor the wars in their opinion. That said, prewar Yugoslavia was 1000x better than anything Warsaw Pact.
Slovenia was the richest federal unit within Yugloslavia and I guess that makes them the most successful experiment in socialism like ever. I think at that time they were doing better than the current Greece and Portugal. However, the rest of Yugloslavia wasn't that great.
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You should look at this from the point of view of a simple citizen. The old government (king and families) capitulated and some fled. So the country was left on the mercy of the fascists. The people self-organized and self-liberated their country. Those who were the true leaders of this fight, got to lead the newly freed country in 1945. This is why people trusted all these leaders until they died. Tito was one of th…
Yes, it was a system that benefited the ordinary citizens, and all the people loved it. All decent people, anyway. If someone came up to criticize it, obviously they were a criminal, and the benevolent Tito, in his love and mercy, would have them locked away so as to prevent them from further damaging glorious Yugoslavian society and harming the people with their corruptive influence, and rehabilitate them into a bet…
Do you have any examples of such people "locked away"? I don't believe you'd find any as soon as the years of breaking up with Stalin passed.
The politics of the country was such that it was really between NATO countries and Soviet-Union countries, and people from there were able to travel freely in both directions, so it was opposite of needing to "lock away" anybody for something.
Only Stalin's sympathizers were "locked away" at these post WW-II break up times, around 1948. There is enough material about that. But for some other ideas?
One of the most interesting story from these times and these places was "Purloined Yak":
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0604yak/
"Tito believed that survival of his government depended upon getting the support of Western powers, particularly the United States. The US saw an opportunity to use a split in the communist bloc to its advantage, including gaining a foothold in the Balkans to help defuse the communist problem facing NATO member Greece.
Starting in 1949, Western nations began limited economic support to Yugoslavia. Two years later, the US began shipping weapons to Tito. Some unofficial sources claim that US military personnel were also sent to Yugoslavia in the early 1950s to help train the Yugoslav Air Force.
In October 1953, the opportunity to provide the US with a Soviet-built fighter aircraft—even temporarily—would have seemed a ready-made way to further cement US-Yugoslav relations."
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Yes, it was a system that benefited the ordinary citizens, and all the people loved it. All decent people, anyway. If someone came up to criticize it, obviously they were a criminal, and the benevolent Tito, in his love and mercy, would have them locked away so as to prevent them from further damaging glorious Yugoslavian society and harming the people with their corruptive influence, and rehabilitate them into a bet…
It may not have been a paragon of freedom and free speech like America but it was also very much not East Germany or the USSR.
those geniuses broadcast computer programs via airwaves during a radio show. listeners would record it on cassette and play the program on computer. anybody else did that ?
A few aphorisms about Voja Antonić: 1. He was involved as a skeptic and wrote a well-received (among my friends at least) book debunking psychics and various kinds of nonsense. As a teenage boy in Serbia (in the late 90s?), I asked him to translate a portion of the book to English and put the translation on my website. He graciously allowed me to do so. Part of why I wanted to go through that massive effort was to co…
Too bad, I'd have loved to read this astrology debunking. And to forward it to a friend or two :P You sure you don't still have a copy of it somewhere? 0:-)
"In order to understand astrology well, it is necessary to know it from the very roots. It originated in ancient Babylon, around 1000 BC, although some historians claim that astrology was conceived by the Sumerians, a whole millennium earlier. The precondition for the existence of large cities was well-developed agriculture, and this required knowledge of a precise calendar, as agricultural who had to know when to start sowing and how to adapt all agricultural work to the seasons. Establishing an accurate calendar is not it was possible without a good knowledge of mathematics and constant astronomy observations, and these jobs were most suitable for priests (the picture shows a stone on which is a record of the movement of the Moon, found in Mesopotamia). Thus the first astronomers were clergy, and it is logical that celestial bodies, which they discovered, were named after the then Babylonian gods. We we still use those names, actually theirs Roman translations: Mars instead of Nergal, Venus instead of Ishtar, Jupiter instead of Marduk and so on further.
Here we come to the first paradox which is an integral part of astrology: although the names of the gods were assigned to the planets in the random order in which they were discovered, the meaning and the significance that each particular planet carries with it bears is firmly attached to the role of the god by whom it is got its name, and it has remained unchanged to this day. For example, Nergal (Mars) is the god of war, so the summers that began with a stronger the radiance of the planet Nergal in the sky was immediately women as particularly suitable for military campaigns, and the springs in which the splendor of Ishtar (Venus, the goddess of love) was emphasized, were destined to be concluded marriages.
Same as for the planets, and for the stellar constellations the rule was that people born in a certain sign of the zodiac were attributed traits derived from the name of the sign. In the Babylonians, the number of characters that consisted of constellations initially changing between 6 and 18, but stabilized at about 600 BC 12. Soon the first horoscopes appeared: the oldest known dates from April 29, 410 BC. By the way, the division of the zodiac into 12 signs is not even today valid worldwide - Chinese and Indian horoscopes have 28, and Toltec cultures (in Central America) 20 characters. However, he respects all these horoscopes is the principle that the characteristics of people born in someone character directly depends on the name of that character. The oldest surviving critique of astrology was written by Cicero in 44 BC new era. His philosophical skepticism could not relate human characteristics to astronomical parameters at birth. He states that he would it would be more logical to establish the influence of meteorological conditions on the child at the time of birth, but not to notice any connection there either. The Greeks learned about astrology when they conquered Babylon in the fourth century BC, and the Romans took it from the Greeks. Before the end of the twelfth century ideas were taken over by northern Europe, so astrology soon entered the then school system. Around the seventeenth century, the sudden rise of science (primarily astronomy) caused the expulsion of astrology from European universities, so thus we come to another great paradox: its “golden age” astrology not experienced during the Middle Ages, when people were deeply religious and knowledge was transmitted mainly orally, but only since 1930, when British astrologer Naylor (R. H. Naylor) received an entertaining column in the daily newspaper in which he introduces an innovation: the horoscope! The interest of the audience in reading the fate was such that in record time all the papers got theirs horoscopes, and astrology experts sprouted like mushrooms afterwards rain. Today, for example, 96% of people in Europe know in which sign they were born, and only 34% know their blood type."
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Depends, us old people who saw both sides of the coin feel like today’s youth is crippled, they have no motive to study or be competitive, it’s mostly look pretty and be out with friends all day long.
I was born in late 70s in Croatia (then Yugoslavia), moved in early 90s to Belgrade, Serbia, due to rise of nationalism and violence of official Croatian regime against Serbs. Not that official Serbian regime was any better in that regard, just against other nations, mostly Croatians and Bosnians. I don't consider myself old, but I'm no "modern kid" by any measure. What I observe among today's people of these regions…
My personal experience (mainly from visits to Bosnia) confirms that. In my opinion, the ongoing brain drain is a main reason behind it. It's a rational choice for talented and motivated young people to move to a Western European country, thus many do so. Unfortunately, the result is that those not leaving have a very hard time forming a critical mass which could break through the various deadlocks left behind by the war years.
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The introduction in the article is historically accurate, compared to the countries behind the so called “iron curtain” that land was indeed different. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain “Soviet-installed governments ruled the Eastern Bloc countries, with the exception of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which retained its independence and changed its orientation away from the Soviet Union in t…
Correct. Croatian-American here who has family that emigrated from former Yugoslavia. While Yugoslavia was east of the iron curtain, it was never actually behind the iron curtain. It was never an eastern soviet bloc state, and it was never a part of the USSR. This whole page deserves a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cominform#Expulsion_of_Yugosla... There were inherent flaws in the soviet system from the beginni…
I only don't understand why "east of the iron curtain" when the country is on the west of the countries behind the iron curtain, as per Wikipedia link I've given?