News / Karol Nawrocki - the New President of Poland [458]


Because you are still at Stage I or II of the cancer.

In America Republicans and Democrats also used to intermarry, have barbecues together, and even pass bipartisan legislation. It was not shameful, for a Republican Congressman to attend the wedding of his Democrat colleague. Nobody tried to hide the fact that they went to the same fraternity, at the same university.

In America people used to actually have to think before providing an answer to something, rather than picking the ready-made argument from a list of party approved talking points.

The cable news channels and social media ended all that. Now if they see you shaking your Democrat colleague's hand, they'll cancel you on Twitter. If you allowed 1% of nuance into your actions - like disagreeing with Trump on some issue important to your local voters - then the national party will put $25 million dollars behind a campaign to primary you out of existence.

So yes - Americans also used to not hate each other. Now it's like two parallel countries living side by side.

Wait, and give the hate time to grow. You have things like monoethnicism which will act for some time as a break on the hate, but eventually it won't be enough to hold back the demons of American style politics.

News / Karol Nawrocki - the New President of Poland [458]

Beyond just simple mimicking - Poland has itself been penetrated by the forces that made American politics into a circus.

Ownership of media - same people. AxelSpringer - whose most valuable asset was Politico. Politico.eu, is now incidentally spreading the same toxic venom it grew up on in Washington. Warner Bros owns TVN - and it's operated exactly like an American cable channel.

The way elections are covered - I could have sworn I was in America. Midnight updates with by the minute reports on demographic makeup, and millions of charts - and breathless hosts urging viewers to "stay in front of the TV as Poland goes to vote in the most important election in a generation."

All this is poison, and it leads to nowhere good.

Soon you'll be like America, where the only thing you can all agree on is that you urgently need to raise the debt ceiling to "pay for the mistakes of the previous administration". Nothing else will be possible to do, as it will be hopelessly mired in gridlock.

Most real growth will come from whatever free cash Brussels drops from the sky.

News / Karol Nawrocki - the New President of Poland [458]


I mean the 50/50 nature of things.

America used to go "all out" for certain candidates. You had genuine "landslides" in American politics.

Now, it doesn't matter who is contesting the elections. The Democrats could put forth a macaque and the Republicans a chimpanzee - and the results would still be 49/51 at best. People would begin to wear t-shirts with "I Was Macaque Before It Was Cool" and "Chimp for Life".

The same happened in the Byzantine Empire, where politics at one point largely boiled down to which team you supported at the chariot races.

Just think about it - how bizarre is it that America has so many elections decided by razor thin margins? Between Bush and Gore it went down to hundreds of votes, in a country of several hundred millions. It's statistically improbable, and logically broken. The only "good" answer is that the American system is so perfectly designed, that it yields the most optimized candidates every single time.

The "bad" answer is that Supreme Court decisions have made it so, that the American elections are just a wall-on-wall competition of tug of war. Any ammunition and any weapon is fair in this fight.

It doesn't matter that it literally splits American families in half. Americans don't realize how bizarre they look to outsiders. I have a colleague, who says that him and his wife "don't have any Republican people in their immediate family or circle of friends".

The story of someone dreading to go home for Thanksgiving, because they will see their Trumpist family is already a cliche. People think it's normal - but in reality it shows what an absolutely sick country it is.

This Americanification is what is coming your way - I think. Discussing bullshit problems all day, and being ready to kill each over it.

News / Karol Nawrocki - the New President of Poland [458]

@CMS Neuf

You said Poland has been voting the same way since 1815. I did some Googling around right now - and history does not support your claim.

Let's forget about 1815, and look at things post 1991 (since these are election results we can all trust). Over this stretch of time, these election results represent the narrowest margin of victory for the winning candidate.

To me - this 50/50 result means Poland is entering a very "American" style of politics with maximum polarization and endless culture wars. The only winner from such a set-up is media companies - these work diligently to ensure that every subsequent election result is also decided by the thinnest of margins. This keeps the electorate's eyes glued to their phone screens, as they anxiously scroll for more arguments about why the other side is made up of irredeemable idiots.

PiS is obviously the Fox News crowd - to continue my American parallels. Their bread and butter is "Nationalism" and "Catholicism".

PO people watch CNN - because they are "Cosmopolitan" and "Pluralist".

Any time the people begin to lose interest and actually start paying attention to real problems - TVP (Fox News) and TVN (CNN) will begin pouring battery acid on people's brains with the same three subjects as in America:

1) LGBT
2) Abortion
3) Migration

People will go mad, and ready to claw each others throats out debating the difference between a 4 week and a 12 week fetus (if even this applies to only 0.1% of abortions). Alternatively, whether or not a man can go into a women's bathroom.

The end result is that you will be like America - where everybody hates everybody, and every election is 50/50. A perfect 50/50 hate ratio is needed to maximize advertising revenue for media companies. Otherwise, with a 60/40 or 30/70, people may begin to tune out and watch National Geographic instead.

Everyone has to be maintained in a state of perpetual psychosis. Poland A vs Poland B. Urban dandy vs Village idiot. Noble Catholic vs Dirty Jew.

Poland shouldn't feel alone. This Americanification of politics is also happening in France. They even found themselves a candidate with the name "Jordan", and discuss the same inane drivel that Americans discuss in their politics.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]

@Torq

I was watching Stonoga again earlier this evening, and when he reaches the crescendo of his monologue: "Wy, Polacy, to was trzeba jebać, jebać was trzeba, kurwy!" - I imagined you.

I'm sorry but it gave me quite a laugh.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


This guy went from extinguishing menorahs to kingmaker of Poland.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]

@amiga500

Are you purposefully trying to rile Kania up?

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


Well then yes, Brat Rafal is cooked! I see now 52/48.

What a wild election.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


Hold your horses! It's just an exit poll.

It's good that it's Nawrocki leading with a small lead, and not the other way around - because I suspect that with such a thin margin there would have immediately been challenges in the courts by PiS if they lost... and then if it escalated you'd get potentially your own January 6th.

As a neutral observer - expect the mayor of Warsaw to concede gracefully and not test the durability of Polish democracy, as they did in Romania.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


You are feeding the American antisemitic cohort.

There is no "your people".

They are Americans.

Why is it considered an ultimate injustice that Americans put Japanese in concentration camps during WW2? Why did Clinton apologize for this?

Why can Japanese, Germans, Russians - all become 100% Americans with no substitute, while Jews always have to have some kind of extra landing strip to land on?

History / Where did Poles spend summer vacations in the PRL era? [63]


Somehow, China managed to co-opt Albania, turning it into Mao's little outpost in Europe. Truly bizarre.

Muslim Communists, in the heart of Europe, supported by a patron half a world away with an agrarian economy.

My grandma also travelled with my grandpa to Saddam's Iraq, shortly after he seized power in a coup. My grandpa was one of the men involved in setting up a factory, ostensibly for putting together tractors from kits shipped from the Soviet Union, but in reality to make an Iraqi copy of the T-72 tank using Polish and Czech parts. I believe this tank was called the Babylon tank.

She told me, that she saw Saddam's political enemies hanging from lampposts. But also that it was the freest she had ever felt in her life, up until that point. A level of glamor which she had never seen before. Hotels with swimming pools, and smart waiters. Exotic fish and fruits. Lots and lots of Americans and Brits (Saddam was fighting Iran at the time, or getting ready to, and as such was friend of both the USSR and USA).

But that's not tourism, but work.

This was my "tractor" grandpa. The other, maternal, grandpa was a lifelong trade unionist. He went on lots of trips, like Italy and Japan, where he met with local communists and trade unionist leaders. He brought back one of the first VCR's in our neighborhood, from a trip to Tokyo. Then my mom sold it, and it helped finance the purchase of an apartment for the young family (yes this is how expensive VCRs were in the USSR).

History / Where did Poles spend summer vacations in the PRL era? [63]


Not exactly true. My grandparents and parents generation travelled - not much, but on several occasions.

It was considered a prestigious thing to do. Also, an opportunity to make lots of money buying Czech/German/Polish goods and then reselling them back home.

You first had to come up with a reason for why you were going. Most often, these trips were linked to party exchanges, student delegations, scientific cooperation, or some kinda heavily chaperoned group tours. Through bribery and favors, you could get yourself "written into" some delegation.

After some Googling now, I found a blog article with numbers for internal and external Soviet tourism.

Internal Soviet Tourism: 100 million people annually. Main destinations: Sochi, Crimea, Lake Baikal, the Caucasus, and the Baltic States.
Purpose: Most trips organized through work, by the Trade Union.

External Soviet Tourism: 500-700k annually (1980s).
Main Destinations: Bulgaria (the lion's share), GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania.

What's curious is that Poland was low in the ranking, second from the bottom from Romania. Apparently, this was due to Solidarity and the overall complicated political climate. The Soviet government did not want citizens exposed to this.

Romania - surprisingly - simply had a bad reputation as an uninteresting and deeply unfriendly country. Caecescu's government did not particularly welcome Soviet tourists, and there was a huge language barrier. In addition, the author writes that Romanians came across as "aloof" and "deeply nationalistic" to Soviet tourists raised on the idea of Internationalism.

Albania left the Warsaw Pact in 1968 and was off limits to Soviets.

Yugoslavia was semi-accessible, but trips there were tightly controlled. The favorite destinations there were along the Adriatic coast.

The real Soviet "elite" could of course travel to places like New York and Geneva, as "members" of various UN delegations.

If you were some kind of untouchable star like Vysotsky, you could even live in Paris with your girlfriend.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


No, Mississippi! I was writing about it above.

My friend was getting a history degree at Ole' Miss and I visited him a couple times there.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


Yes this!

Also, to Paulina - regarding drug trafficking. A lot of skinheads/punks were/are famously straight edge. They take zero drugs, and zero alcohol - and it's all about physical fitness. Personally, these guys scare me. A former one of these married one of my cousins recently, and he is a partner now at White & Case - a white shoe law firm. As respectable as can be.

Personally I don't understand how you can go to a concert, and stay totally sober for hours, while doing somersaults off the mezzanine. Weird people.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


Skinheads are not Nazis. Some are, but most aren't. In fact, most of the OG skinheads were Leftists. Some skinheads are antifascist, some are instead fascist. Many are completely apolitical - which was kind of the point of being a skinhead originally.


I'm not defending anything, just explaining the truth as I see it. Hooligans (as in, organized fans of a sporting team, that travel around with the team, and frequently get into fights with the other side) are not usually stupid people. They have a good memory for dates and names. Usually a pretty historical bent of mind. Use complex structures to argue the validity of their points of view.

Nearly always, its a phase that people grow out of and then carry on to be responsible adults.

They get exploited by organized crime, in the same way that boxing clubs or judo gyms do. You have a bunch of impressionable young guys that are physically fit and full of testosterone - an easy force to direct. But an absolute minimum of hooligans actually get involved with organized crime. I would say, only those, that were headed that way anyway - either through family problems or some other misfortune.

It's just people trying to have some fun - 99% of cases.

There's always some idiot that takes things very seriously, and will go chop someone's arm off with a machete and make everybody else look like an idiot. Like in your story.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


First of all - you don't have to be smart to get a PhD in history. You have to be very good at sucking your professor's penis. You have to find some obscure subject nobody has ever cared to write about. And you have to be able to live on a very small budget, and not care about it. That's it.

Second - I never said Trump is stupid, or that Nawrocki's similarities with Trump indicate he is some kind of idiot.

No man that has more than a billion dollars and is President of the United States can be called stupid.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


Unfortunately for this I do not have a link - just my eyes and my ears.

In this part of the United States, you have a lot of weird Evangelical denominations. These poor people, earn very small salaries, barely get by - and still donate like hell to support Israel. When you ask them, why they are sending money to support a state in the Middle East, they give the most entertaining explanations.

Many of these explanations are probably not very pleasant for a Jew to hear. A lot of them involve the Apocalypse, and the total destruction of Israel.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


Some people might argue that people fighting for the right to gender reassignment surgeries are "normalizing pathology".

Kania here, has mentioned several times his skinhead past. He seems a level headed guy to me.

In my professional circle in New York, you also have a lot of former punks, skinheads, hooligans (Europeans, not a thing really here). Usually very smart people. Like - almost you could treat it like an indicator if the person is interesting.

Leave alone, that "wall on wall" fights, are a big part of Slavic tradition - going back a thousand years. It's part of the culture.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


Hello


What's the problem? You don't like being more Jewish than the Jews?

The world's most rabid zionists live in Mississippi, and have surnames like Smith and Miller.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


I know man - I can't believe it myself.

What a time to be alive!

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


Wow I agree with Lyzko for once!

And he is a Jew!

Food for thought.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


I am always right Iron - here, there, and everywhere.

Jokes aside - this has been a revelation to me.

Russia is a pretty antisemitic country. Poland I imagine is very antisemitic too.

So then I arrive in the United States, and everybody loves Jews - especially Conservative Evangelical Christians.

In the beginning I was scratching my head trying to understand what was going on. Maybe... Americans really are just amazingly good natured people living in some New World paradise, while we in Europe are just disgusting troglodytes? Why do we feel this deep hatred for Israel, while America seems to be willing to lay down its own life for its survival?

Then after many years of living here I finally understood. They just hate brown people. Mexicans, Muslims, Africans, Indians - doesn't matter. They hate them. Israel is a little White Island surrounded by ugly brown masses. Like a white virgin, making her way past the hoodlums of the ghetto.

Their noble Christian hearts soar at its chivalric example. The heart of a Crusader beats in the chest.

Doesn't matter that they don't know anything about Israel, or have never seen a Jew in their life. This is not important, because what is important is narratives.

You kill Arabs? Good. Let's be friends.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


This - while the Israeli conflict is many times more brutal.

I recently read in an academic paper that the Russo-Ukrainian War is an absolute anomaly when it comes to the ratio of military to civilian casualties. The ratio is close to 100:1.

I think this same ratio is 1:100 in Gaza.

Reasons:

1) Ukrainians have blonde hair and blue eyes, and are Christians

2) Gazans are brown and Muslim

3) Many Western voters (like BB) are tired of living under siege by Muslim immigrants that don't want to integrate. There is no safe place to vent this hatred, so they vent it by proxy. In the brutal tactics of Israel, they see the decisiveness that is absent in their own governments.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]

How come nobody mentioned that Nawrocki went on television, in disguise, with blurred out image and altered voice, to discuss his own book about the criminal underworld and to praise its author (himself)?

This is like the final brushstroke, to complete this man's list of similarities with Trump. Trump famously used the name "John Barron" to leak favorable news stories about himself to the press. He even called into TV shows, as John Barron.

Very impressive. Bobko is intrigued!

A poll from AxelSpringer does not look good at all, for friends of PO. They needed the elections to be held a week ago, but now every coming day leads to a bump for Nawrocki and a decline for Trzaskowski.

It seems the Tusk anchor is dragging the mayor down, and fast.

For this - one has to blame only Tusk, I imagine. Biden did something similar last year, when he told Kamala as she was preparing to run: "Not an inch of daylight, kiddo." That is, Biden provided his blessing on only one condition, that Kamala hew as close as possible to the policies his administration had pursued - and publicly "own" them. This pretty much doomed the poor lady, who already had very sh*t chances.

I think something similar is going on here. This mayor guy needs to desperately distance himself from Tusk - at least for the crucial week or two between elections. Instead, not realizing how unpopular he is, Tusk keeps popping out of every corner with some nasty sound bite about Kaczynski and some words about what a very nice boy Rafal is.

Lock Tusk up in a box, and don't show him to anyone for a few weeks. How hard is that? Let Trzaskowski have a bit of space and breathing room to show why he is not Tusk 2.0.

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News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


If the Kingdom of Judaea (which as I explained orchestrated the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel - read the Bible, it's your friend) - is a modern nation state... then we definitely don't have much to discuss.

With this logic, the Mongols can claim Baghdad, and Moroccans can take back Spain.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


There never was a Jewish nation state either. In fact, the modern nation state only appeared after the Peace of Westphalia.

The Kingdom of Judaea collapsed in 70 BC, destroyed by the future emperor Titus. It was not a modern nation state, but rather a theocratic monarchy. It was defined by dynastic rule, religious rites, and tributary systems. Not by civic nationalism, borders, or mass participation in some collective identity.

All of its institutions, political coherence, and EVEN POPULATION was dismantled. No modern state would accept such a 2,000 year gap as constituting "continuity" for legal or diplomatic purposes.

The population part is especially important when discussing the Palestinians, and why I want to bring up biology. Logically - I'm sure you will agree BB - every living person is concrete proof of an unbroken chain of survival and reproduction stretching back to the emergence of Homo sapien, let's say roughly 300,000 years ago. If even one of your grandpas failed, you would simply not exist today. So... with this resolved, let us first establish that Jews and Palestinians are equally old biologically. That is, the Palestinians did not arrive from Mars in 1948.

Now let's return to the collapse of the Jewish population in Judaea. It literally collapsed, to a tiny fraction of what it had been before. Who continued living there instead? That's right, Palestinians. They are the product of millennia of adaptation, reproduction, and continuity... whether under Canaanite, Philistine, Israelite, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Ottoman, or British rule.

Since their little piece of real estate happened to be the most desirable real estate in the world, they did not have the good fortune of carving out their own little place, and instead spent their entire time living under massive empires.

Do you think the Jews would have better success than the "Palestinians" at ejecting the Roman or Ottoman Empires? Something tells me, no.

So this argument of no "Palestinian state" is completely ahistorical gibberish deployed by Israeli propaganda. The simple fact is there was no Israeli state either (in fact ancient Israel was destroyed by Assyria, on Judaea's request), and that Jews had not lived there for a much longer time than the amount of time the Soviet Union has not existed. Nonetheless, your Ukrainian allies view these 35 years as being as wide as the galaxy. I wonder what Ukrainians would say if we made claims that were 2,000 years old - hahahaha!

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


It is - hugely - but it still has to play the notes which are acceptable to the Russian people's ear. Blunt propaganda won't give shoots, if you plant it in barren ground. It still is, in the end, a job of reading the Russian people's desires correctly. Putin is a master at this, at giving people exactly what they crave. He reads the emotions of the Russian people like some savant.

People that hate Putin, that spent their entire career fighting him, and have been locked up in jail for it - still admit that Putin has some Mephistopheles level of ability to understand the people.

So in the end - you can only mold opinion so much, in the end you still have to provide the items that are most in demand.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


This is not true. Putin is a slave to Russian public opinion. In many scenarios, he acts not with the confidence of a leader with a bulletproof mandate, but like the "mediator in chief". A sort of Don Corleone role, where it's his job to sit everyone down and work out some kind of ugly compromise.

The people that oppose Putin are a genuine minority, confined to the large cities, and politically impotent. Ignoring them constitutes no serious effort on Putin's part. But when Putin's base is upset about something, then he reacts with lightning speed - down to flying out to some remote factory and negotiating on the spot.

He really is a "man of the people". A populist - and I don't mean it in a bad way. Orban, Trump, Le Pen, Modi, Xi are all copying this new model that Putin invented. Putin's long term ideologue, Surkov, calls it Sovereign Democracy.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


First - let's begin with the fact that Hamas is a child of Netanyahu. Grew up on his corrupt teat.

Here's a link to an article in the Times of Israel, with the nifty headline of "For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas, Now It Has Blown Up In Our Faces":

timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

Another illustration:

"'Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,' he told a meeting of his Likud party's Knesset members in March 2019. 'This is part of our strategy-to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.'"

A genius strategy. Prevent the formation of a Palestinian state, by fostering enmity between the secular Fatah in the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas in Gaza. Let's forget, that Hamas even first appeared, because of elections on which Netanyahu insisted.

Netanyahu understood full well, that Hamas is an "unsupportable" entity, and did everything in his power to strengthen them. This included negotiating with the Qataris for a infusion of billions of dollars into Gaza - a lot of which surely went into tunnel construction.

Netanyahu made his own bed, and now he has to sleep in it.

News / Presidential elections 2025 - the race has commenced!!! [665]


Of course!

The Kremlin has many blind spots. For example, I spent about 8 years telling people on Russian online forums to stop laughing at the Ukrainians, and instead pay closer attention to their preparations. Absolute xenophobia towards Ukrainians blinded practically everybody else to what was happening in their society. A typical Russian military-engaged "patriot" - had such a low estimation of Ukrainians, that he scarcely thought they could wipe their own ass without external help.

This is a long line through Russian history - "shapkazakidatelstvo" (literally 'hat throwing') - a sort of cavalier attitude towards the enemy and his abilities ("Whatever! If things go hard, there are so many of us - we can bury them with our hats alone!"). It bites Russia in the ass - every single time.

That is, you could have thousands of people whose sole profession is to study and understand Ukrainians, and still... as a whole... the Institution could not understand them. But I could, from thousands of kilometers away, being engaged in a completely unrelated field.

What blinds Russia is arrogance and hubris, just as with the United States.