Because they are entrusted by the state (which has a monopoly on the legally sanctioned use of force) to carry out duties that may require force. And the overwhelming majority of the citizenry (probably well over 95%) are okay with that.
Why are American police so incompetent that a large percentage of the citizenry feels compelled to carry around guns?
And for Mirek, something more rock-like (for those that like that sort of thing)
Bank was formed in Silesia in 1980 and after two weeks of rehearsal made their first recording (in a Wrocław radio studio) which led to their first hit.
In October 1981 they recorded the album "Jestem Panem Świata" which was released in 1982 and became a mega-hit selling 960,000 copies.... sometime arounrd 1983-84 the two frontmen Mirosław Bielawski (vocals) and Marek Biliński (keyboards) left the group which led to a rapid loss of popularity and the group disbanding.
My own history with the title song is kind of humorous.... when I was still learning Polish I thought that it meant something like "I'm a man of the world" and only figured out the real meaning.... many years later.
The song is about an old homeless/beggar on the street who shouts out "I'm the master of the world!" to passersby and sleeps on the grass in front a building. There may or may not be a political message..... does the man represent the PRL? Maybe... or it might be simply a street scene that made an impression on the songwriter....
lyrics: Grzegorz Tomczak, music: Marek Biliński
So here's that title song with my (quick non-singing) translation and then the original.
Note that the song seems to be in free verse without much in the way of meter and no real rhyme...
Also note the very tinny sound that was characteristic of most PRL recordings (and which some seem to try to recreate to evoke that era)
Why did the US object to Cuba receiving Soviet arms?
A little thing called the "Cold War".... and the fact that the leader of the USSR had said of the west "We will bury you". a few years earlier, was obviously mentally unstable (see shoe-banging incident).
None of that is remotely like 2022 when russia had very lucrative deals with a very (too) supportive Germany and an international order that was all too willing to let Crimea (and maybe the Donbas) to as a fait accompli.... (quite wrongly it appears). He had hooked into the international money train but that wasn't what he wanted...
And of course it had nothing to do with NATO.... cultural insiders (russophones) pro- or anti- putain all dismissed NATO is inconsequential and peripheral pointing out his general rhetoric of russian empire and his desire to 'gather in' the russian peoples (the triune nation).
But russian propagandists are like cheap psychics doing cold readings... they throw out 10 ideas and see which one their mark falls for.
A certain kind of westerner who had come to hate the west and western values jumped on NATO and so they built that up.
Congratulations! You feel for the oldest trick in the book!!!!!
Soldier is killed in Ukraine. But what really steams his mother's hams are the fact that he had let his girlfriend live in his apartment and she stole all the furniture. Apparently mom thought she'd be getting a fully furnished place... She's contacted the police but they don't care...
Such a mystery why Ukrainians don't want to "live" like russians....
My guess is that since he was American some russians thought he might be worth some money so they kidnapped him... raped him apparently and then killed him....
twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1781731943597388196
And his wife pleaded for him to be found because he was helping.... ha ha ...... show Americans that russia isn't the enemy!!!!! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!
twitter.com/fatimatlis/status/1781695498589458518
russians as 'friends' is just about as bad as russians as enemies.....
A lot of Americans are incapable or realizing that different countries.... are different and people in different countries have different values. They're heavily invested in the idea that their values aren't shaped by history or culture but are universal ur-values that all humans share.... nonsense but that's what many Americans believe.
The group VOX was formed in 1978, sort of an Eastern Europe answer to the Bee Gees.... while they never caught on internationally (despite releasing an album in English... at a time where singing groups were no longer a thing) they had a number of hits in Poland.
The two co-frontmen were Witold Paszt and Ryszard Rynkowski (who left the group for a solo career in 1987 and is maybe best known as the singer of the theme song to the (far too) long running soap opera Klan "Życie jest nowelą" (life is a novel)
One of their best known songs is from 1984 - Rycz mała rycz (wail baby wail) with lyrics by Maria Czubaszek (1939-2016) a lyricist and screenwriter, essayist, satyrist, journalist and political commentator. Weirdly their is a slight calypso vibe to the instrumentation. But the highlights are the harmonies and the hook, a well-known earworm that can follow you around for days...
The song is about a guy telling a girl that all he can give her is tears and so she shouldn't expect any more from him.
The video is probably state of the art for the PRL of the time though it's..... pretty weird now. Rynkowski shows off his not very well-developed arms in a sleeveless t-shirt and his hair is already thinning at an alarming rate and he would later shave his head.
Meanwhile Paszt is maybe trying to look Japanese? With a red head band and the other two members look like they were late to the studio and wandered onto the set in their streetclothes.
There's also lots of tragic choreography (including an assisted flip by Rynkowski at the beginning).
Still. for the time, the song is a banger (as they kids now say).
first comes my rough (non-singing) translation (with parts that aren't really in the original but help the English version in parentheses). and then the original
everything the russian oligarchs did, so did the ukranian oligarchs do
yes, adversity doesn't create character.... it reveals it.
Ukraine evolved into a democratic society that wants to join the west.
russia devolved into tyranny and a desire for military hegemony.
The problem with russia isn't one 'bad' leader... it's 140 million people seething in hatred at the rest of the world and wanting to make the rest of the world suffer worse than they do...
They have no national story to tell themselves while at the same time believing that they're better than everyone else....
The west didn't help make things better but the blame for russia's dysfunction falls on russians themselves and no one else.
...to provoke Russia, make them woke and LGBT, and accept the snake as a harmless pet...
a bunch of stuff you made up...
Z is deadman walking
Z is the symbol of russia in the invasion of Ukraine... one more thing you don't know....
I told you to talk to Vlad
Not what he's called in russian.... you don't even know that!!!! what a moron!!!!!!!!
You lack all kinds of knowledge about what happened 1989-1999 and are completely ignorant of the most basic facts of the current invasion yet you expect to be taken seriously?
russian oligarchs.... not foreign russian.... they could have decided to be legit but they decided to fleece the country for everything they could...100% a russsina caused problem and nothing for westerners to feel bad about....
I was in Poland in the early 1990s and it was very wild west with lots of privations (despite western help) but without the total descent into lawlessness and crime that russians alllowed....
again, adversity doesn't create character it reveals it. Poland and even the DDR passed the test of adversity while russia failed miserably and externalizing its failure onto other countries.
russians, collectively, are self-pitying losers who try to take their loserdom out on other countries...
fter the end of the USSR alot things did go the wrong way and nobody in the West truly cared...
Are you kidding? The collective west bent over backwards trying to give russians a soft landing and they blew it because stealing was more important to them than having a functioning society....
Every single thing that went wrong in russia was due to choices made by russians. Prove me wrong or shut up.
Novi hates foreigners who volunteer for Ukraine and has frequently wished death upon them...
Which is a nice introduction for Russell "Texas" Bentley, a pro-russian American who travelled to occupied Donetsk in 2014 and became a local celebrity.
Last week, according to his local wife, he was abducted by soldiers of Russia's 5th Tank Brigade and now he's dead..... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!
If not for the US this war would have been over a long time ago
Laurels.... resting..... not a thing that real superpowers do and it's clear Europe needs to remilitarize in a very big way (one of the things NATO was created to prevent) so.... good job republicans!
Do you know who made China #2 econ and mil power it is today?
Yes the rest of the world (led by the US)
And I know who's driven the country to the brink of depression (if it's not there already) and his name looks like eleven in Rome....
China has hit and bounced down back from the dictator's ceiling.... an economy can only develop so far under a strongman leader. Investors want stability and contrary some fantasists dictators are very unpredictable.
Up until Xi's takeover China was developing at light speed (despite many social/human rights problems) and he's reversed that and dragging the country back to the cultural revolution.....
russia is aligning itself with the worst governments in the world....
Iran is an Islamic theocracy in a country where most (especially younger people) no longer even identify as muslim and where for the last five or six years periodically millions of people take to the street against their government.
The government beats young women to death if they show their hair in public... that's a russian ally....
The greybeard fossils running the country hate Israel but everyday Iranians probably not so much.
Iran is a bit like Poland in the late 1970s.... everybody knows the system doesn't work but no one knows how to get out of it....
Iranians eating in public in the middle of ramadan
no one here is talking about Ukraine aid going to a vote on Saturday morning
About effin' time....
According to Zeihan Europe has provided more aid for each of the last nine months than the US... as they realize what a danger russia is and how little they can count on the US.
It's nowhere near where it should be but it's started and hopefully it can continue. I'm all for Europe being a lot less reliant on an unreliable ally which is headed for a terrible government no matter which candidate wins in November.
