Food / What Polish foods do foreigners generally not take to? [140]


I've only had it once and it wasn't lumpy, but just thick and more or less like sour cream so it probably wasn't authentic.

Food / What Polish foods do foreigners generally not take to? [140]

I visited Poland for the first time in my 20s.

Of foods that were different from what I was used to, I took immediately to were pierogies, chłodnik, tatar, żurek and bigos. Flaczki were a tougher sell (though I like them occasionally). Pickle soup took a little longer, and kaszanka an even harder sell (I don't mind it cold but only like it cooked if it's not plain - in Hungary they make wonderful liver kaszanka). I'm still unimpressed by fish in jello (who thinks up something like that?) and herring in general (I only like it done a few ways). I almost threw up the first time I had ozorki (biting into a tongue.... but then I chopped it up into tiny pieces and it tasted okay).

I like Polish horseradish though I hated it before coming to Poland.

Pickled pigs feet and head cheese / souce were already well known to me from the south

One weird thing is I don't like peas and carrots (I like both but the way Poles prepare them drains the taste from both) spinach also

Americans mostly don't understand the difference between soured and spoiled milk (pasteurized milk doesn't sour it goes straight from drinkable to spoiled) and tend to use the word sour for both which makes zsiadłe mleko a tough sell.

News / President Duda rules out homo marriage in Poland as banned by the constitution [172]


Wouldn't it be a kick in the head of longterm resident foreigners were told to get citizenship or get out?

News / President Duda rules out homo marriage in Poland as banned by the constitution [172]


It must be a bitter disappointment that he wasn't burnt alive for the sin of having a non-Polish parent....

News / President Duda rules out homo marriage in Poland as banned by the constitution [172]

not enough to change the constitution legally, but then when has PiS ever cared about the law? it's all about using the frustration of losers to build a base to rob them blind while blaming on other people

News / Poland has accepted over a million Ukrainian refugees. Why does the EU keep telling propaganda about Poland? [304]


I think the classic term is "benefits immigration" ('welfare immigration' for Americans). Most Sub-Saharan Africans are "fleeing" countries that are at peace and no more corrupt or violent or oppressive than the (admittedly high) Sub-Saharan norm.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"his office's crimkinal neglect of Smolensk presidential flight preparations"

Since when is the prime minister's office responsible for presidential flight preparations? Is the PM also supposed to follow the president into the toilet to make sure he wipes?

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"What crimes do you think Tusk has committed?"

Don't go askjing awkward questions... his handlers haven't told him yet.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"Admit it, your ulterior and sole motive is PiS-bashing -- giving it some semblance of thoughful debate is mere window-dressing."

I'm in favor of what works. Any attempt to settle accounts in 1992 would inevitably have ended up as a nightmare and result in massive investment flight and set economic development back (at a time when Poland could not afford that).

I have no problem with a dispassionate examination of who did what and punishing the guilty, but again this requires careful, dispassionate examination (and being ready to deal with lots of shade of grey) and not wild cat releasing of documents and trying to turn a normal political process (an incompetent and failing government losing a no-confidence vote) into some dark conspiracy.

The problem is that there is no one really qualified to lead such a process (least of all Kaczyński and his unstable posse).

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"One thought that you pooh-poohed conspiracy theories"

One does, does one?

I don't believe in conspiracies per se, I believe that different groups have different agendas that they are not entirely.... open about.

"what does a "competent" government do when it needs to sack a member privy to a huge amount of the most sensitive classified information on national defence and security?"

Depends on why they need to remove him and how stable he is. If the member in question gives signs of being dangerously unstable the traditional solution has been to arrange for him to stop breating. If he's more or less stable then a reclusive retirement is probably enough.

nb this is meant to be descriptive (what I think happens) and not a prescriptive (what I think would be moral).

But then a competent government doesn't normally go around appointing mentally unstable kooks to positions that give them asscess to sensitive classified information on national defense (much less put them in charge of it). But we're talking about PiS and so 'competent' is not the first word that comes to mind anyway.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"Sacking someone might seem so easy and starightforward to a dilletante or wannabe observing things from afar, but such a move might hypothetically pose a security or other threat to the country"

So you _do_ believe that Macierewicz would try to mount a coup if JK tried to dismiss him?

Getting to the point where firing an incompetent is a threat to national security is nothing something that happens with governments who are even remotely competent.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"Free" speech need not automatically mean hate or purposely offensive speech! "

Of course it does. If free speech doesn't extend to dangerous and offensive speech then it does not exist.

"people such as Ms.Coulter, the Bell curve author, Murray etc. is that the latter are merely freeing up the airwaves in order to polute OUR space with their pestilent garbage!!"

So? Don't listen or counter them with better arguments (including better data).

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

"there's a very good chance for President Duda's vision to come true"

The only vision he has is of Jarosław Kaczyński's anvs as he keeps his head close by for kissing purposes...

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Yes, almost all political parties in Poland are primarily power vehicles for a single, charismatic leader. Anyone who develops their own power base will be kicked out (Rokita from PO, Marcinkiewicz and Ziobro from PiS) and they don't survive the departure of the leaders very well.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


(yes, I'm actively mocking the new quote limit)

What? Years of enforced religion classes have alienated many young people from the faith (and there is a small but growing group of evangelicals, god help Poland). It's still nowhere near as bad as western europe but that's definitely the direction (and trying to promote religion won't work).

Putting religion in schools was the biggest mistake the church made after 1989, if you want to kill young people's enthusiasm for something make it part of the established order and make them take classes in it.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Pope JP II said there was no conflict between the bible and the theory of evolution.... (I hope they're not going US bible crazy)

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


I don't like them but I don't think they're going to go anywhere very soon. I will look for efforts to fire up the base somehow (since they've lost most of the rest of the country, at least temporarily).

A side issue that is probably hurting them is the school reform - not wanted by much of anyone, and by almost no one actually involved in education that they are doggedly pursuing in their goal of recreating the PRL in a Catholic-nationalist mode (a very weird goal but it seems to be the end game).

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Into Polonius mode: Soros! Nocna zmiana! Magdalenka! KOR!

In normal human mode: What kind of sick fvkkers are against charities that collect money to treat sick children?

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Latest Millward Brown polls on party support

PO - 31
PiS - 29
Kukis - 10
SLD - 6
Nowoczesna - 5

All others less than 5

The probable reason for loss of support is JK's jihad against Donald Tusk, a personal grudge that he seems willing to burn electoral bridges to pursue.

Calling Tusk in to testify seems to have backfired (as did their attempt to oust him from Brussels).

Will DT be the next president?

source: wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/sondaz-millward-brown-dla-faktow-tvn-po-wyprzedza-pis

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Yes, both sides on this are prone to exaggeration and distortion. Kaczyński is't "first secretary" as that title no longer exists. But he is the party leader (indisputably) and the most powerful person in the country (without any of that pesky responsibility that others face). That is a PRL model.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Like you?

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Do you live in a garden shed or something? No honest observer can look at what's happened over the last 25 years and claim that some shadowy elite was "milking the country for what it was worth". Maybe those formed in the PRL (and thus prone to see the world through a prism of victimhood) without marketable skills or the mental acuity or agility to thrive in a capitalist system would think that because they suddenly expected German style prosperity without actually having to do anything.

There are plenty of countries that fit your description but... Poland is not one of them (for starters no where close to one fourth of the population thrives in such places).

Of course there were mistakes and wrong turns in the process, those are a normal part of any political evolution, but I am _so_ sick of people who blame their own unhappy lives or failures on some weird idea of a shadowy cabal (with no real, verifiable evidence of its existence). Why don't they just stam "I'm a big fat loser!" on their foreheads and spare the rest of us their drama?

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


So tragic that a parliamentary system worked.... if only they hadn't abandoned the PRL principle of rule by party leader!

Travel / Which places in Praga, Warsaw are MOST DANGEROUS at night? [15]


The Czech city is Praha (or Prague or Prag if you wanna be Deutsch about it)

It's clear he's referring to Warsaw east of the Wisła.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


The ends justify the means..... who was it who said that?

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


There often is when sane people are dealing with mentally unbalanced ones....


You don't believe in rule of law (preferring rule by party leader) and now you're in favor of violence to prevent the normal functioning of parliament?

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


It's people like Macierewicz who have always weakened Poland enough so that Russia could get their hooks in. He'd sell the country in a heartbeat for the security of eternal victimhood.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


You think JK or AM want to "solve" the case? That's hilarious!

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


I, sir, am from the South and would never call myself a "yank" (a British and not American word anyway). The correct term is "(Damn) Yankee"

Don't complain about pollack if you insist on using kraut and frog - they're roughly the same level of insults.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Can you write about any nationality without using slurs? Apparently not. How do you square your supposed Christianity with your seeming need to demain other ethnicicites at every opportunity?