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Posts by Bobko  

Joined: 13 Mar 2017 / Male ♂
Warnings: 1 - O		 Last Post: 12 hrs ago
Threads: Total: 27 / Live: 23 / Archived: 4
Posts: Total: 2059 / Live: 1983 / Archived: 76 		From: New York
Speaks Polish?: Y
Interests: reading, camping

Displayed posts: 2006 / page 65 of 67
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Bobko   
20 Sep 2021
Life / Where do the wealthy class live in Warsaw? [32]

Not entirely on-topic, but this generational wealth accumulation idea is precisely the reason why the West should stop freaking out about China. Going by GDP numbers alone, it may seem to an observer that China is close to overtaking or has already overtaken the United States (if one goes by purchasing power rather than nominal dollar to dollar comparisons). But GDP is only a measure of output, not wealth. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines are paid for not with GDP but wealth. In this regard America is at least twice the size of China, and the lead is actually INCREASING. American national wealth in 2019 was approximately $118 trillion, whereas China's was $64 trillion. This lead was at least $12 trillion larger than in 2011.

China is still a very poor country, and will remain so for a long time. Building steel plants and aluminum smelters may look good in aggregate GDP numbers, but if they are not useful and productive they do not add to wealth.
Bobko   
20 Sep 2021
Life / Where do the wealthy class live in Warsaw? [32]

The definition capgemini used is, as you said, inclusive of primary residence and not just liquid assets. I did not find any information for the $5-10MM+ cohort you mentioned, but I did find something for UNHNWis (Ultra High Net Worth Individual) in Poland from Credit Suisse for 2020. UNHNWis are defined as $30MM+. It appears that there are only about a thousand of them in Poland, whereas their number in the States is 100k. Basically there's a hundred times more of them. Hence, the absence of millionaire towns in Poland. I think this is just a function of time. Wealth is built over generations. World wars, revolutions, transitions between different economic systems has prevented Poles from accumulating.
Bobko   
15 Sep 2021
Life / Energy - Poland [71]

Truly, there is an inverse relationship between the time people spend discussing a subject and it's complexity/importance. If it's another retarded discussion between JohnnyReb and Maf, it'll make a thread a 1,000 posts long. If it's something material to actual business life in Poland, or anything that matters to real people - opinions dry up. Some popular sociologist once created a model for this, based on an imagined example of discussions around the construction of a new nuclear power plant. The less intellectually taxing the discussion - the more opinions - since everyone wants to "contribute" with their two cents worth of ****, while the more complex it is the more deafening the silence.
Bobko   
14 Sep 2021
Life / Energy - Poland [71]

One note - there is, at this time, no thorium fuel used in the commercial nuclear industry anywhere in the world.

Otherwise, you've answered a lot of the questions yourself here. My personal belief is that the West (at large), and Poland specifically, are being completely delusional at this moment in trying to completely diversify away from hydrocarbons. The weather over Poland means wind turbines and solar panels will never be able to cover 100% of needs, and that traditional generation will continue to have an important role in the overall energy mix. For this, investment needs to happen at an appropriate pace, but at the moment it seems the climate camp has the upper hand and western corporations are being shamed by governments and shareholders into scrapping exploration and extraction CAPEX. All this means is a shifting of power to Russia and the Middle East, where people still have enough common sense to continue developing these resources.
Bobko   
30 Jun 2021
Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]

I smell the rat

What the hell man? I like that you think it's insulting to accuse Poles of Russophobia (I agree). However, I gave Poland more compliments than I did to Russia, and the purpose of my post was to show that there is in fact grudging respect. I didn't expect this, and was remarking on it. The original question was a joke to begin with - essentially are Polish people the ones that have the worst opinion of Russians amongst all the peoples of the world? I do think that the answer to this is affirmative. It's a curious fact, when you consider that there is an active Russian military presence in Ukraine, a frozen conflict in Moldova, similar issues in Georgia, etc, etc. I haven't recently checked opinion polls, but I remember that despite those issues sentiment regarding Russia remains split in those countries, while Poland is pretty monolithically anti-Russian.
Bobko   
29 Jun 2021
Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]

Really? Where did you get this one from? I suppose you are simply biased against Poles.

Seriously? I don't think you have to be biased against Poles to be able to state that they are generally dismissive of all things Russian. This is true across the political spectrum. You don't have to look for a Smolensk-conspiracy nut to find a Russophobe. This forum is good proof, that the perception of Russia is of a country that has zero to offer the world except oil and gas, political assassinations, and nuclear sabre rattling. The general sentiment is that Europe would do quite well if Russia just disappeared off the map.
Bobko   
24 Jun 2021
Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]

I read the article on Lurkmore.to

Here's a link for others interested: lurkmore.to/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8F%D0%BA%D0%B8

I don't think Poles get an unfair treatment, all things being said. The article is written much more respectfully than those for some other nationalities. Specifically it treats honestly the periods when Poland was "on top", and acknowledges the fact of Poland's more ancient provenance - and this surprised me. Poland's relative geographic misfortune is also given a decent treatment. All in all, I think the article actually reveals some things about Russian attitudes towards Poland, which I was not aware of. In the same way that Poles are dismissive of all things Russian, I assumed it would be the same in the other direction. Instead, there seems to be a grudging respect to the "number 2" country in the Slavic world, with allowances for the fact that it was not always number 2. Very surprised!

Edit:

Response to Pawian: To my own regret - yes - I did imagine this scene in my mind. It made me laugh even harder.
Bobko   
3 May 2019
History / Heritage of partitions still present in Poland [107]

I don't know.

Pavian wrote: "...next one was Russian with medium level of advancement and the poorest Austrian where people actually starved to death." I understood he means that Russian lands were more developed, and thus people that vote there have more progressive views (albeit, still PiS voters), than those in Austro-Hungarian lands, where people literally starved.

You're probably right. It did seem strange to me too. Not only because of an anti-Russian bias, but because of demographics too. The population density in the west, and rate of urbanization had always been higher. Historically, and at present, urban dwellers are more liberal in their views than their rural cousins.
Bobko   
3 May 2019
History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

Guys, let's not have the mod shut down our thread.

How do you feel about Ukraine's direction at present? Georgia? Moldova? As Poles, do you feel any commonality with these peoples - as Christians, as Europeans, as Democrats?

Where does Russia fit into this picture? Will we ever see a Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, as Putin sometimes says? Is Russia destined to always play the role of the spoiler and the playground bully? Can it be brought into the fold through something like German Ost-Politik.

So many more questions. Let's not get derailed with discussions of Nationalism and interventions in the Middle East.
Bobko   
3 May 2019
History / Heritage of partitions still present in Poland [107]

The fact that Russian lands are better developed than Austro-Hungarian ones is certainly puzzling.

Completely off-topic, but the part of China that experienced the greatest growth '79 to roughly '00 was the former Russian, and then Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Similarly, Korea turned into the Tiger it is today, in large part due to 40 years of Japanese occupation, however unpleasant it is to admit to modern day Koreans.
Bobko   
3 May 2019
History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

Unfortunately, Ukraine missed an important moment in history when Russia was weak

Damn, that sentence is straight from Putin's speechwriter, if you just substitute the word "Ukraine" for "Poland and the Baltics", and "missed" for "used". Props for calling it like it is.

Russian officials always reference informal agreements between Gorbachev and Bush Sr. regarding no further enlargement of NATO to the East following the fall of the Wall. The admittance of former Eastern Bloc countries is thus interpreted as the West exploiting Russia's temporary weakness.

This Russian line of thinking is usually dismissed out of hand by Washington and Brussels as nothing other than Moscow's paranoia. Thus, the official Western line for why NATO didn't just close shop following German reunification (like the Warsaw Pact did), is not because it is inherently an anti-Russian alliance, but because the organization's mandate had transformed with the times to be able to answer to new challenges. This is probably how... even though NATO did not take part in a single military operation throughout the entire duration of the Cold War, it has since 1991 intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya. New mandate. New realities.
Bobko   
2 May 2019
History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

Do you suggest a disintegration of Russia might take place?

Sorry, no, but I see how what I wrote is confusing (mind you, a lot of Ukrainians do think Russia will fall apart any day now). I just wanted to use the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the disintegration of the USSR as spectacular illustrations from recent history of how it's dangerous to dismiss certain hypotheticals as totally unlikely. Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO is just such a hypothetical - seemingly impossible, but given past volatility not improbable.

To Ukrainian minds it's pretty preposterous to say that they have to wait decades more before being allowed into the club. Poland joined NATO in 1999, and the EU in 2004. Being 20 years behind Poland is a fair enough number to Ukrainians, I think, though they would have liked things to happen even faster of course. If they were told they were going to be 50 years behind Poland, that would certainly be very hard for them to swallow. One of the tropes you hear most often from politicians and laymen that lament the current state of affairs on UKR tv is - "in 1991 Ukraine had 50 million people, a territory larger than France, and an economy larger than Poland's". That is, it's immensely embarrassing to Ukrainians how Poland has leapfrogged them in development and now plays a much weightier role in Europe. If they need to wait 50 years, they just might do an Erdogan and go back to Russia/China.

Ukrainian politicians talk every single day about how they are the "Shield on Europe's Eastern Frontier", "the only thing between Europe and the Horde", and all sorts of other points about how the Euro-Atlantic community basically owes Ukraine a big one for doing all the heavy lifting in combating Russian malign influence. They definitely expect to be let into NATO soon, not decades from now. When and if the realization that that is not happening sinks in, there'll be a nasty, nasty backlash.
Bobko   
2 May 2019
History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

Ukrainian membership won`t take place within decades

Ouch! Don't tell any Ukrainians this. The outgoing president, Petro Poroshenko, had been promising NATO and EU membership by 2024. (pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/3/7205633/)

I agree with you, Pawian, that membership is a very distant prospect. First and foremost, because of the unresolved territorial conflicts in both countries (Donbas, Crimea; Abkhazia, South Ossetia). Admitting these countries while the conflicts remain unresolved means putting NATO on a collision course with Russia. This is totally unpalatable for the French and Germans. However, there may be some appetite for this in the States, the Baltics, and Poland.

I didn't want to premeditate the result of the thread by opening with the above, disqualifying facts. This is because, you and I could be completely wrong. In 1985, very few would have predicted the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of the USSR into 15 countries just 5 years into the future. Similar things can happen in the not so distant future. We live in an interesting world.
Bobko   
1 May 2019
History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

I spend a lot of time following the discourse inside Ukraine and Georgia regarding potential future NATO membership. There's a definite plurality in favor of membership in both countries (something like 50%+ in Ukraine, 70%+ in Georgia).

The United States, the three Baltic countries, and Poland have been the champions of Ukrainian/Georgian membership, while Germany and France are resolutely opposed.

To what extent is Poland's support for Ukrainian membership a product of PiS's hawkish foreign policy on Russia? Is this, in fact, a bipartisan position that won't change regardless of who is in office? Is there actual across-the-board support among the population?

If Ukraine joins the alliance, and is then later attacked by Russia - how do average Poles feel about the prospect of sending Polish soldiers to protect Ukrainian sovereignty?
Bobko   
27 Dec 2018
History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Sorry to say, Pilsudski was not a huge fan of Jews either, and was only slightly less Nationalist than Dmowski.

To a great extent it was the noises that Pilsudski was making about building an Intermarum that provoked the Soviets to act on the scale they did.
Bobko   
27 Dec 2018
History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

at some points of 1919-1920 they controlled just a territories around Moscow and St-Petersburg and were on the verge of collapse.

In very early 1919 perhaps, but by the beginning of 1920 the Bolsheviks had defeated their enemies on practically all fronts.

The Whites had been crushed by the Reds in the South, and no longer presented a credible threat. The British, French, American and Czechoslovak forces of the "Allied Intervention" also gave up and started pulling out through the port of Vladivostok. Peace was made with Estonia and Lithuania. Central Asian separatist movements were crushed.

By the Spring of 1920 Poland had become the main focus of the Bolsheviks. They were able to put together a front consisting of more than 700,000 men and thousands of pieces of artillery.

Basically, I want to point out that this was a much closer call than you describe. Indeed, at one point Poland's fortunes in the war looked so bad that Pilsudski's government was teetering on the verge of collapse, as Roman Dmowski's opposition grew in power. They don't call it "The Miracle on the Vistula" because it was a miracle how the Soviets made it so far, but because it was a miracle Poland survived.
Bobko   
20 Dec 2018
History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Goddammit.... My precious thread has become derailed... once again.

Folks! Distilled - the question boiled down to: "Would Poland be better off if it never gained independence in 1921?" Not whether or not Hitler would attack anyway, as suggested by Lyzko. Not whether or not Poland belongs to the West. Not even regarding the geographic origins of the Enlightenment, and so on and so forth. Bah!
Bobko   
13 Dec 2018
History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

no it wouldnt have, quit patrionizing the polish propaganda. theyre now west or euorope and esp in the 19th and eaely 20th century.

I'm not saying Poland is the West, but that it protected the West from further communist encroachment by erecting a sort of cordon sanitaire on the USSR's western border. In the first years of the Soviet state worldwide revolution was the number one driving force. It was considered an accident that Communists had first triumphed in an agrarian and semi-feudal Russia, rather than the much more industrial Germany or GB (workers > peasants for Communists). From this, came the thinking that if a major industrial nation could not be flipped to join the communist international in the very nearest future, then the project of the Soviets in Russia was doomed. It was considered that the two systems (capitalism and communism) can not coexist, and one would have to defeat the other. This is present in Marx and Engels' writing, all the way through to Lenin and Trotsky, and then even young Stalin.
Bobko   
12 Dec 2018
History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Not sure if you're trolling Jon, or are just an avowed socialist ;)

There's an argument out there, that Poland's victory in that war is what saved the West from Bolshevism (see: "Miracle on the Vistula"). Weimar Germany was in a very weak state, and was the true target of the Polish campaign. If Germany fell, France with its enormous communist electorate would have been the next target to flip.

The other argument is that the Bolsheviks didn't give up on the idea of exporting revolution all around the world up until Roosevelt and Churchill asked Stalin to stop, because... you know... it's not cool to try to overthrow the government of your allies. At that point, Stalin decided on the idea of first building "socialism in one country".
Bobko   
12 Dec 2018
History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Big historical counterfactual I found myself thinking about while reading about the Nazi-led Siege of Warszawa (1939, not 1944).

Here's what I think:

Pros:
Germany may not have attacked in 1939, or at all, as the USSR would have be much closer to the German heartland, and stronger demographically and industrially.

Poland would have preserved an enormous part of its population (Jews and Poles), and might have had a population of 45-50 million people today.

Poland would probably still control the Western Ukraine, in addition to any territories it would have gained in the West. Logic here is that if Poland is already part of the USSR, there is no need to transfer territories internally to Belarus and Ukraine.

Though it would have still had to live under decades of Communist rule, Poland would likely still be an independent country right now, because even small constituent republics of the USSR like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have gained independence since the failed social experiment collapsed.

Cons:

Poland would have likely still lost a great proportion of its population to famine, labor camps, elimination of political undesirables etc., just like Ukraine did. But still probably far fewer people would have died than under the German occupation.

Without the 20 year period of independence between the wars, Polish national consciousness might have been stamped out completely and would not survive to the present.

If the USSR had won the Polish-Soviet War, it likely would have continued rolling West until it reached the English Channel. We'd all be speaking Russian right now!

Finally, the Wehrmacht advanced over thousands of kilometers in the first year of Operation Barbarossa, before the Russians managed to finally stop them right at the doorstep of Moscow - so whether or not Poland was part of the USSR, it's very likely it would have been rolled over just the same, if Hitler had still decided to attack the USSR.
Bobko   
31 Jan 2018
History / What are Polish opinions regarding Felix Dzerzhinsky? [17]

he is known as Bloody Feliks which sums it all up

It seems that he was a more complex character, than the way he's been popularly remembered. I was surprised to read in his wiki biography, what Pilsudski wrote about him in his memoirs: "[He] distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon... Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie."

In other places, he is described as a peculiar murderer, in that he wasn't driven by any of the usual impulses, i.e. lust for power, or banal cruelty/sadism. The consensus being that what defined him was his fanaticism. Now whether this makes much of a difference is a different question.

It's interesting to me that you say he is remembered in Poland as Bloody Felix, when in fact he spent very little time involved in Polish affairs, and for most of the duration of him being a member of the Soviet government Poland was an independent entity outside of his reach (remember, he died in 1926). I thought that the Polish people may have a sort of grudging respect for a former compatriot that had laid the foundations for one of the most powerful and feared intelligence agencies of the 20th century. On the other hand, another thing he is famous for is being a Great Russian chauvinist and an opponent of the right for self-determination for the varied peoples of the Russian Empire. Even Lenin once accused Dzerzhinsky of crass Great Russian chauvinism, to which Dzerzhinsky replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists."

It's quite hilarious imagining Lenin, a Russian, accusing Dzerzhinsky, a Pole, of being a Russian nationalist and getting "well you're a Polish nationalist" thrown back at him!