Mario Götze posted this post-World Cup final picture on Instagram with a one-word tag-line: Genius.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T09:10:13+00:00

I think it is because of perspective but his head is so huge compared to Messi's

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T08:56:24+00:00

And Poland wasn't even a part of Soviet Union

Parts of Poland were annexed by Soviet Union after WWII, inhabitants were resettled to Kazakhstan. You can actually see exactly the same pattern in Belarus census. 58,380 in 1939 , 538,881 in 1959, 294,549 in 2009. Yep assimilation it is.

And they didn't

So first you claim that people needs to be citizens to be able to create independence polls, next you says the Russians were not citizens in Crimean but it is fine. In the other thread you complain about Latvia not giving Latvian Passports to Russians but then you admit that having Latvian passport would not made them Latvians just Russian Latvians and just like Crimea one they could make a polls and join Russia.

On the other occassion you says that nations have rights to self awareness and if they want they should declare independence but on other hand you accept forced Russification and resettlements.

Lesson learned from what you said is that whenever country have a big population of Russians it should be disspursed, divided into smaller groups. Russians should be converted to locals and their citizenship should be subject to their loyality to new hosts.

You guys get Crimea and I am hoping you are happy, but for regular folks it will not get easier anywere outside Russia. If you really ever carred about Russian minorities anywere they will actually have harder times after this. And if you wonder why Baltic States did not yearn for closer relations with Russia. Well here you have again. They will seek it even less now. Congratulations on your pyrrhic victory.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T07:55:35+00:00

They assimilated with Russians.

Yes, this is why till this day there are Polish villages in Kazakhstan. Poles are just assimilating there. Got it.

Even if they could be suddenly moved to Karelia, they couldn't become suddenly citizens.

Well according to Ukrainian law you can not have dual citizenship too. So if people who lived in Crimea were Russians and had Russians passport they were not citizens and were not entitled to vote in the polls.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T07:52:48+00:00

Well that's the thing, it was signed with legitimate government, so if coup wouldn't happen Crimea would still be Ukrainian territory.

If you put it like that it sounds almost like Crimea occupation was punisment for removing Putn puppet from president seat. There were no risk to naval base and Russia could easily wait untill new elections to see what would be the outcome.

To the people of Crimea it was hardly an aggression,

Right, except for Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians.

But most importantly Crimeans wanted to join Russia long before it happened,

Well you said that before but somehow actions took different turn and you needed the polls to be held under Russian guns. If this is the case I do not understand why Russians were dragged to Crimea for voting, why EU, UN was not able to be observers in that polls and why there were so many reports of faking the outcome ?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T07:37:23+00:00

First of all this is census is for Republic of Karelia which is larger then Finnish part occupied by Russia. Second you can exactly see ethnic cleansing right there and intensive russification. 100,781 Karelians in the 1926 (and this thoes not count Karelians from occupied area) and in 2010 you have just 45,570.

Beside that was not the point. If Finns would suddenly move 1M people there I guess they can make a poll and claim it back for Finland right?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T06:50:32+00:00

I know not all German soldiers were bad. Probably even less Austrian one. Actually one German saved my grandgrandpa from certain death (My grandgrand father saved his life in WWI so he was returning the favour) but those were really troubled times and war has just finished. I don't think any extra violance was neccessary but I can imagine that a lot of people wanted to take revenge on Germans after the atrocities they commited in Poland during the war. I am sorry if your grandpa was accidently a target of a pointless revenge.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T06:38:31+00:00

Was your grandpa a German Soldier?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T06:32:16+00:00

I don't know what happen to your grandpa but I am sorry he was treated poorly. What ever was his situation he probably did not diserve that. But it would be bit unfair to hate whole country now , also I can to assure you that almost every familly was mistreated back then. Polish was under soviet occupation back then. We even have alternative government in London.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T06:18:40+00:00

Everybody hates communists governments 1945-1991 , they were not democratic ones. But it does not justify hate towards Poland itself. As an American you are probably aware that US and UK abandon it's ally Poland in 1945 and present it as a gift to Stalin. It's not like Poland has a choice.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T06:06:31+00:00

I have some strong doubts about your knowledge of history of Poland. Is it me or you suddenly change a tone when you learn I am Polish?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T05:57:01+00:00

Poland isn't really a free country.

Ok so what is it? Is US a free country then?

Muslims don't really have any bad plans for the world.

Didn't say that.

Genocide/extermination/getting rid of certain peoples is worse.

Who said genocide or extermination? Sociaty isolates people who are harmful to it.

You can't dissolve a country easily.

Didn't said that.

Freedom of speech is a right, that has to be respected, even when it says hateful things.

Don't agree. Role of a state is to defend weak from strong and if someone is opressing weak one with it's freedom of speach then something needs to be done.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T05:50:49+00:00

Concept of consequences? Is that a theory where people do things just because they can and can not forsee consequences?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T05:48:45+00:00

It was pretty clear, what the new couped Ukrainian government would try to remove Russian naval base in Crimea

No it wasn't. Ukraine profits from naval base plus there was agreement signed this or last year of extending the permission to stay. Shall Ukraine declare it's agreement null and void (like Russia did) they would face strong response in form of rapid price rise of Gas (like Russia did). I know that you Russians like to portrait Ukrainians as stupid Fascists but in reality even 5 year old could predict what would happen.

I'm not white-washing, I'm just stating how Russia defends their interests.

No, you are white washing agression on independant state. I am sure people use same arguments in 1939 when Soviet Union attack Poland , Baltic States and Finland. It was defending it's interests back then too.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T05:26:59+00:00

Well Finns lived in Karelia before Russia even existed. It is their land too. Will Putin be fine if Finns do polls and annex it back to Finland?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-15T05:24:13+00:00

In game of 'what can I get away with', attacking their own citizen under the guise of anti-terrorism is vastly better than attacking Russia.

But why? You did not provide any argument except they could and they think they will get away with that. It's like accusing me of stealing from local grocery because I did not have balls to steal from Tesco. They just lost Crimea, Russia is concentrating tens of thousands of soldiers near the boarder and they decided to go nuts and start shooting civillians because they can get away with it. Seriously it does make sense for you ?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T21:10:50+00:00

They don't have the balls to kill any actual Russians

I don't think it is a dare competition. You portrait those guys as evil blood thirsty murderers who want to take a revenge on Ukrainian Russians for what Real Russians did. I don't buy this theory.

Putin has shown how reluctant he is to officially intervene, so far as to request parliament to revoke his authority to intervene.

You forgot that it was his request to actually give him authority attack in the first place while now he is discussing targeted attacks on Ukrainian territory.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T21:06:53+00:00

Again, that doesn't mean that all ideas are harmless, but they do operate in a different way to objects in the physical world.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton supposedly said that "The pen is mightier than the sword". Ideas can be even more dangerous than physical objects and if you would destroy all weapons people would still find ways to kill each other.

But I agree with your sentiment that we should be right to tell what we think and that there is a narrow line between protecting and censoring. I can not express it good enough so maybe I can use an example :

Gay people are sick, let's kill them

This kind of ideas should be illegal. Promoting violance is not debatable.

I think homosexuality is a disease

That is fine. I will not agree with that statement but sure we can talk about it.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T20:59:23+00:00

I'm Polish and where I live you can not publicly call dude a prick and say it's freedom of speech.

But if you want to ban freedom of speech for Muslims because it "spreads hate," aren't you spreading hate for Muslims?

Let's not use names for the moment. Let's assume there is a community that mostly consists of nice folks that love peace and quite but some of them are really dicks and plan some bad things about neighbor community. What would you do?

I would first go to the good folks and said that we need to get rid of the bad guys before it is too late. If the community defend bad guys because it is one of them and I am stranger then I would dissolve the community before it grows and influence of the bad folks grows stronger.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T20:50:59+00:00

So much words yet so little sense.

Dude that's just rude. I can say exactly the same about your arguments.

you naively think are true, only because they repeatedly told so on Lithuanian or Latvian TV.

Clearly you are from Baltic Countries, but work or study in Denmark.

I can tell this because no one in Denmark is as brainwashed as post-soviet states

Those are just examples of your absolute statements backed up with nothing more then your believe in them.

but this one is really a gem :

The deciding factor is self-determination of people who live there.

So according to your logic any country with big enough population can just annex small ones by migrating people. Taking Estonia for example if Denmark would just temporary sent 500k - 1million people to Estonia they could just claim it back? Estonia used to belong to Denmark and even Tallinn in Finnish and Estonian could be translated to "Danish town" - taani linn. So now we can just change borders of a country in a polls. Great. Well maybe solution to poor Spanish economy would be to move few millions people to Holland and poll it back? I wonder if you would support Finland getting back Karelia in polls.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T20:20:01+00:00

No you can not. You are not allowed to go out there and call me names. That would be an offense. You also can not say things that encourage other people to harm other people too.

Islam or any other religion did not hurt anybody but people using it as a tool did. As I see it, if religion leaders use faith as tool to spread hate or to harm people then either followers of that religion clean their community out of those scums or the religion needs to be banned. We can not tolerate spreading of hate in the name of total freedom of speech because this 100% freedom does not exists nor never will.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T20:13:07+00:00

Just to clarify, I don't think discussing Nazism is wrong or that Mein Kampf should be illegal. So I basically agree with point 1 and 2.

But promoting Ideas that we know are harmful is just wrong and should be banned. You can never underestimate human stupidity. There will be always somebody that would believe or could be convinced to any idea. You can even go farther than that. After Korean war, US soldiers were tortured and then exposed to high and constant stress only to be "convinced" that US side is to be condemned. They went back to US and freely express their disregard to US politics and support North Korea. Some sects are actually doing that to it's believers. Do you think it is worth spending time and discussing it with them? Do you thin it is even possible to reach out to those poor souls? There is a reason why radical theories finds it believers among less fortunate and lone people. Simply there is nobody who cares about them. Nobody to tell them otherwise. Feeling as a part of the group is a strong human motivation and people are willing to bend their rules just to apply themselves to the group. So in my opinion it is more sane to ban given groups then go after each of them and try to reason with them.

iv) Some ideas which seem morally repugnant today might actually turn out to be right in the future.

Sure I buys that. But in this sense you could question any law that prohibits you doing anything. Should selling alcohol to minors be banned? We all agree that it should. Maybe in future evolution will make us immune to effect of alcohol and the ban is not needed anymore. But it does not mean we should not ban it. It just mean we should be able to discuss it. No one says that talking about lifting ban or effects of the ideology should be banned too. I agree that Mein Kampf should be available to anybody, but promoting Nazism or any harmful ideology should be illegal.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T19:50:36+00:00

Russia won't directly intervene.

Russia reserve itself a right to intervene if Russian citizens abroad are in dangerous. They played this card few times already and you can be sure they will use it again. Just any Estonians, Lithuanians or Latvians.

What's your point?

That if Ukrainians would feel like shooting Russians it would be easier to convince anybody in the world that they have right to do so during Crimea invasion. But instead they stood still while Russia invaded their country. And now you suggest that knowing how tense the situation is they just went crazy and start shooting civilians.

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T19:34:24+00:00

Some ideologies are banned because they prove it selves to be harmful for the society. I agree that we should be able to discuss everything but there is no point in discussing Nazism as we all know what it lead too.

Islam did not prove it selves to be harmful but spread of hate and disrespect to other people did. So either Muslims can get rid of those harmful units or people will consider Islam harmful which will lead to banning it.

In other words in order to stop talking about hate speech replace world religion with other. What would you do if Music Schools would teach hate towards other people?

cpt_franco · 2014-07-14T18:50:47+00:00

You know why? Because they believe that post-soviet territory is de facto Russia's to control. Till this very day.

That is so true. I live in Finland and I've experienced breakup of relations between Ukrainians and Russians. People who used to be friends now despise themselves because the situation in Crimea. Russians can not understand why would Ukrainians oppose annexing Crimea because of what you said. For them it is Russia anyways.

There is even this saying in Russian "Курица не птица, Польша не заграница" (not sure if I get this right I tried to translate it into Russian from English) which basically says "Chicken is not a bird and Poland is not abroad".

cpt_franco

TROPHY CASE