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Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

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Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#101

Post by emergentcypher »

3pt14159 wrote: post #71
dijit wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an inverse story from yours. I'm a citizen and former resident of the UK, the UK for many reasons has a very loving relationship to the US, our young people are fashioned by the image of Television, and more than half of all English speaking entertaining media is american. We like America/Americans, by default before we learn politics. I travelled to the US in 2013, and to Russia the same year. What I saw was…

We're different. Part of American foreign policy is that "truth is the best propaganda" not the only propaganda, mind you, but the best. The West also does have a policy of expanding liberal democracies and integrating them into a world trade frame work. Cases where we don't follow this policy is in areas where we're afraid of a counter weight emerging. For example, the Middle Eastern policy is one where we foster in…

> The Russian mindset is different. It's more... brutal? I'm struggling for the right word.

Severe is the word I use. If I were permitted to generalize the Russian people, I would generalize them as severe. Extremely warm and loyal people, but quick to swing to the opposite end of the spectrum when disturbed.

I'm married to a Russian and spend lots of time with Russians. My wife tells a joke about a westerner hanging out with some Russian friends. The Russians spend the night joking around telling him shit about Russians, being heavy drinkers, quick to violence, as if it were a competition to see which culture drank more. The westerner disagrees and says no, you are a great and warm people. And they continue to try to convince him with their stories, saying "we're all friends here". At the end of the night he finally agrees, "OK, you're right, maybe you guys are heavy drinkers". So they beat him up.

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#102

Post by ck2 »

cdash wrote: post #48
ck2 wrote: post #8

Is this the same missile that was launched from a mobile carrier that arrived from across the Russian border and then days later was driven back across the border? Putin is extremely manipulative and dangerous. Like a Kim Jong-un without anyone like China to tell him "no". I'm surprised no-one points out he is basically on the third term of what should be a two term limit. That alone removes all legitimacy from his r…

Except Russia does not have a two term limit, it only has a two consecutive term limit. Putin did not have 3 consecutive terms.

He was also Prime Minister, because "modern" Russia has this crazy PM + President system where the President is not even the executive.

And somehow his first term was 8 years despite the limit being 6 years.

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#103

Post by lambdadmitry »

3princip wrote: post #100
lambdadmitry wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I add yet another story to this thread? I was a member of municipal polling board during last Putin's election. Honestly I did my best to prevent fraud, and yet the voting protocol (a paper where all ballots are summed up, it goes to an higher-level board) was rewritten right under my nose (+25% to a leading candidate, guess which one), with police covering it up. I tried to warn a friendly member of higher-level…

This is very suspect and very hard to believe. I've been on polling boards in a much (much) smaller country, and it would be logistically impossible to carry out fraud on that scale (25%) without it being widely documented. The suggestion that there are enough police (including SWAT none the less) to watch over tens of thousands of polling stations and enforce this is even stranger. And this is from a miniscule count…

>This is very suspect and very hard to believe

Here is my blog post on that elections [1]. It's in Russian, so please use Google Translate to make sense of it.

>without it being widely documented

It is widely documented. Now what? There is no such thing as "class action lawsuit" in Russia. The only two entities that can file a lawsuit are candidates (because they are directly harmed by fraud) or public prosecutors. The former are filtered [2], and the latter one don't care. So what exactly can be done with the documented fraud?

>The suggestion that there are enough police to watch over tens of thousands of polling stations

All polling station have at least one policeman during voting day in Russia (at least in big cities). There are about 700 000 policemen in Russia, so there are more than enough to handle this.

>logistics challenge of such an endeavour

What do you consider a logistic challenge? There are a lot of police stations in Russia, it's not like they're all concentrated in a few places. If you mean the logistic challenge of the fraud itself, it's also pretty straightforward: the biggest part of county's funding comes from Moscow, and it depends on election results. Incentives for local authorities are here, combine them with deteriorated social institutes and all branches of authority fused together and you get widespread fraud without much coordination.

Heck, just look up Chechnya's voting results, with 99.59% turnout and 99.89% of votes for Putin [3]. It's just plain impossible in any electoral situation. Nothing is done about it, guess why.

[1]: http://si14.livejournal.com/23943.html

[2]: you need to get an absurd amount of signatures to become a presidential candidate, and even if you manage to collect them, they can be easily dismissed by some anonymous expert as "forged" ones

[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/europe/fraudulent-vo...

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#104

Post by lambdadmitry »

datalist wrote: post #98
lambdadmitry wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I add yet another story to this thread? I was a member of municipal polling board during last Putin's election. Honestly I did my best to prevent fraud, and yet the voting protocol (a paper where all ballots are summed up, it goes to an higher-level board) was rewritten right under my nose (+25% to a leading candidate, guess which one), with police covering it up. I tried to warn a friendly member of higher-level…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...

Look, even this article is titled "controversy". I personally have a videofile from my own polling station, where you can hear loud and clear true results of the voting, and then look up "official" results with 20%+ difference. It's not even a controversy here, it's a wide scale fraud in broad daylight, and not even one official was persecuted for this.

I understand an attraction of reiterating how corrupt America is, but it's not even close here.

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#106

Post by chei0aiV »

3princip wrote: post #58
korisnik wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. My country was created by the democratic independence referendum of 1991, in accordance with Yugoslavia's constitution. Altho sadly, after the declaration of independence and its international acceptance, a guy named Milosevic who committed coup d'etats in Montenegro, Kosovo, Vojvodina and attempted a coup d'etat in Slovenia decided that he disagreed with our independence and started a bloody war. But thanks for…

Slovenia, sorry, my mistake. Yes I remember when your militia shot unarmed surrendering conscripts, using weapons provided by NATO members. All of which was a strong catalyst for the bloody wars which followed in neighboring republics.

I'd like to recommend the documentary called "The Weight of Chains (Težina lanaca)" [1] for more in-depth arguments behind the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia.

>"The Weight of Chains" is a Canadian documentary film that takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in the tragic breakup of a once peaceful and prosperous European state - Yugoslavia. The film, bursting with rare stock footage never before seen by Western audiences, is a creative first-hand look at why the West intervened in the Yugoslav conflict, with an impressive roster of interviews with academics, diplomats, media personalities and ordinary citizens of the former Yugoslav republics.

Following articles talk about how the US officials went on privatizing strategic domestic industry in the countries they've helped to destroy. The same happened in all post-Soviet countries which became enslaved under their new Western owners, always excused under the blanket statement of "democracy". Yet, no one talks about one million working age people that died as a direct result of the social vacuum it has created [2]. The average income levels in the EU, 25 years after the "liberation", tell the story in one picture [3]. People in post-Soviet countries / former Yugoslavia today have access to more products, but most of the people are not able to afford any of them, they are basically just window shopping in the capitalist society.

>"Privatizing" Kosovo: The Madeleine Albright Way [4] Americans Who Helped Free Kosovo Return as Entrepreneurs - The New York Times [5]

>"The Prime Minister of Ukraine has urged U.S. partners to actively use the investment opportunities offered by the privatization campaign in Ukraine, particularly in the energy sector," a statement posted on Ukraine’s governmental website said on Monday. [6]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw49iL6zGyQ

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130425211507/http://www.ox.ac....

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

[4] http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3516/kosovo-privatization

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/world/europe/americans-who...

[6] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/05/25/yats-to-was...

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#107

Post by cpncrunch »

datalist wrote: post #3

"Put another way: Propaganda works. Putin has understood that from Day" We can be only glad that Western media (including the NY Times) has never been used for propaganda and all information is absolutely objective, reproducible, and a hundred percent trustworthy. Has anybody already found the WMDs in Iraq?

>Has anybody already found the WMDs in Iraq?

The media (at least in the UK) was saying there were no WMDs in the days leading up to the vote in parliament.

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#108

Post by cpncrunch »

dang wrote: post #105
arpa wrote: post #60

Lots of shills here. How's the pay?

Accusations of shillage without evidence are not allowed on Hacker News.

I assume the OP is talking about this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-i...

Of course, given that 97% of people in Russia believe the propoganda, it could just be plain old brainwashing rather than shilling.

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#109

Post by cpncrunch »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #42

One side note: The trouble, I see at least in my (Western) country: The main (public) TV programs are in the hand of the state (via regulatory control of the TV channels through political parties) or of two to three big corporations (many channels belong to one big corporation controlling them and also other news media). From Italy, I heard, that many TV channels are controlled by one media mogul that also was the pr…

Perhaps Italy is different, but in countries like the UK and Canada the press is constantly bashing the government.

Re: Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters

#110

Post by cpncrunch »

To be honest I'm not really surprised by this. Given the Milgram experiment results (where 100% of people gave a lethal 300V shock, and 65% gave a 450V shock), it's not really surprising that 97% of people believe whatever ridiculous nonsense they are told by the authorities.
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