[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[Username17]

Tzor, none of that made any sense. You are not going to cause anyone to Go Galt over a top marginal tax increase from 40% to 45%. But I'm going to stop you on the first paragraph:

Actually I wasn’t even thinking about healthcare, except in the abstract of the “socialist” notion that government is the enforcer of an aspect of a citizen’s quality of life which is then considered a “right” (having nothing whatsoever with the inalienable rights such as life, liberty and property … hey this is a French thread, I might as well use the French and not the Jeffersonian ones) of the citizen.

Liberty, Property, Safety, and Resistance Against Oppression

Life, Liberty, and Property

John Locke was British, and not French.

-Username17

[sabs]

Tzor knows absolutely nothing about French Culture. But he likes to invent doom and gloom.

[Whatever]

Actually I wasn’t even thinking about healthcare, except in the abstract of the “socialist” notion that government is the enforcer of an aspect of a citizen’s quality of life which is then considered a “right” (having nothing whatsoever with the inalienable rights such as life, liberty and property … hey this is a French thread, I might as well use the French and not the Jeffersonian ones) of the citizen.

Liberty, Property, Safety, and Resistance Against Oppression

Life, Liberty, and Property

John Locke was British, and not French.

-Username17

Even better:

[N]or shall any person...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

[sabs]

The French Revolutionary Motto was:
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality

We didn't really give a fig about some rich bastard's property

[Ted the Flayer]

Tzor knows absolutely nothing about French Culture. But he likes to invent doom and gloom.

french culture? one one hand, you get to eat all you want and not get fat, then drink all the wine you want and not be an alkie

on the other hand, your women have hairy pits and dont bathe

im not sure which side to root for

[Kaelik]

I'm frankly confused how Tzor thinks that property is an inalienable right that the government has nothing to do with degrees of property distributed amongst people.

I mean, wtf.

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

Tzor knows absolutely nothing about French Culture. But he likes to invent doom and gloom.

french culture? one one hand, you get to eat all you want and not get fat, then drink all the wine you want and not be an alkie

on the other hand, your women have hairy pits and dont bathe

im not sure which side to root for

Wow, there are people who actually think this sort of thing is funny?

Not that I'm offended, mind. It's just a bit...lame.

[Juton]

Tzor knows absolutely nothing about French Culture. But he likes to invent doom and gloom.

french culture? one one hand, you get to eat all you want and not get fat, then drink all the wine you want and not be an alkie

on the other hand, your women have hairy pits and dont bathe

im not sure which side to root for

All lower case, bad spelling and grammar, obvious troll is obvious.

[tussock]

NZ has a far-right conservative government currently looting the state for its political donors. Their latest policy push is to remove various indigenous rights from law so that they can get a slightly better price for said assets.

Basically, before 1986 it was only illegal for the government to steal land from white people, now they also can't steal it from Māori without them getting the sort of judicial review which has lead to some fairly pathetic compensation (because it's not the same law).

Now, they're still stealing great lots of land from Māori, and now they want to sell the bits that have things like power stations built on them, so they have to remove the bit of the law that would make them buy it back if the courts did indeed find they'd stolen it. But not just for this sale, no, for basically all such claims forever more.

Because this is a former British colony, so property rights are something that only white people really have.

[sabs]

Not to mention the idea the French people don't bathe is actually completely ludicrous.

[tzor]

Tzor knows absolutely nothing about French Culture. But he likes to invent doom and gloom.

Everything I know about French culture I know from a local liberal writer who lived there for several years and who wrote books about it.

Everyting I know aout French politics I know from my conservative uncle who was a CEO (he is actually retiring this year) for a company that sold their products in France (among other places).

I don't think I was talking about French Culture, although the two have direct impacts on each other. Living close to New York City I know that the French Culture is the exact polar mindset of the Manhattan Lifestyle. I also know that it makes the Key West Lifestyle seem hectic.

But if you want to talk about socialism, yes I am all about gloom and doom. This is true whether it is in France or in New York City.

[Starmaker]

Ted the Flayer? Holy fuck that meme is oooooooold.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Any chance that Putin gets punished in the near-future?

[Username17]

Any chance that Putin gets punished in the near-future?

How near?

The elections are rigged. Putin can't lose them. Come March, he is in for another five year term.

The thing is that like all election fakery, it could collapse like a wet paper bag at any time. If he does something stupid like claim 95% of the vote, mass protests could bring down the administration inside of a year. If he shows health problems and has to step down for a while or even worse refuses to step down even though he obviously isn't running things - the other people in power could turn on him and throw him to the wolves.

And then there is the fact that in five years he probably will have to let someone else be the man in charge, and whoever comes in next may decide that they need to throw Putin to the wolves in order to retain cred. Putin may end up with a giant sack full of money living in a mansion full of Moldovan whores in the South of France. But he has a roughly equal chance of ending up in a cage like Mubarak sometime in the next ten years.

The Fair Elections Now people basically don't have a chance of accomplishing anything by themselves. They forfeited any chance of actually taking over the country when they adopted White instead of Red as their movement color. You don't accomplish shit waving a white flag around, especially in Russia. Their only hope is that their presence is going to cause Putin's people to panic and do something monumentally retarded that brings down the regime. They are coming kind of close with getting businesses owned by friendly oligarchs to mandate that their employees attend pro-Putin rallies. That kind of shit backfires fairly often. But they won't really be in for it unless they do something like fire live ammunition at peaceful crowds or arrange a laughably implausible result for the next election.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Of course, this assumes that Putin doesn't manage to start a vote-grabbing lopsided war a la the Falklands.

[Fuchs]

Well, that could backfire, as it did for the Argentians, who never expected that the UK would actually fight, much less win.

[Starmaker]

The elections are rigged. Putin can't lose them. Come March, he is in for another five year term.

Six years now. Anyway, even if the elections aren't rigged (of course they are), Putin is going to win because he's every anti-Putin voter's #2 choice. Consider that not a single candidate has declared any sort of economic policy except "Everything is going to be better! Higher wages, lower prices! Glory to Russia! Vote me next election!"

(No, Zyuganov's "Nationalize everything!" does not count.)

Before someone points to president2012.ru: it's a private site where people pay $0.10 per vote, one vote per cell phone - so the selection is "people who have cell phones, internet access, and believe the selection is representative and useful". If you look at the old rating, Zyuganov leads, but his 50k votes is nothing to fucktons of votes for Stalin for national hero several years ago, so even script kiddies don't care about the site.

And then there is the fact that in five years he probably will have to let someone else be the man in charge

Business makes politics. If the dominant shadow faction decides to remove Putin, then he'll go. As a government agency, we're one committee's decision from being wiped by the Feds because we're commanded to funnel a Target Programme to a particular front firm and the Feds' own pet corp wants a slice of the $200M/year pie. So there are at least two factions at war over the FTP who answer to the same powers, and the powers are indifferent enough to let the factions give the boat a good rocking until such time that they have to force some sort of agreement on them or let them sink the boat (and the tiny people who depend on it to provide bread and purplz) and find another FTP to embezzle.

Once again - Putin is not the evil, he's the figurehead. If you're looking to actual slime to wait for comeuppance, consider the Orthodox Church. What's so bad about them? Well, they have finally found Russia's main enemy, and it's surprisingly not America.

And not Muslims.

SPOILER ALERT:

It's the Jews.

Seriously.

Sputnik and Gagarin have been unsafe topics for quite some time, but you could always punch Hitler's missing rotten corpse to get those patriot juices flowing. And now, bam, Nazi priests call to oppress Jews on morning talk shows:

Hot lady: Bawwww old [Russian] people are robbed of their property by their asshole [Russian] children. Today in the studio with us is our cherished guest Father Asshole, let's ask him what he thinks to be the reason of this moral bankruptcy...
Father Asshole: IT'S THE JEWS!!!! THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME!!!!

Political parties do something when their members start verbally shitting themselves, but the Church doesn't give a fuck. In years past, when they have been called out on their bullshit, they got away with "he's entitled to his own opinion". Today, people take their daily dose of Nazism with morning coffee, uncontested, unprotested.

Okay, are there any Russians qualified to be president who are actually vote-worthy and not a lesser evil of any sort?

Yes. The official English bio is kinda meh, so here's the non-buzzword version: that dude founded Russia's least-scammy mobile network (Beeline), raked in money, then resigned and created a fund to promote science (translate and print books, buy rights to science books to e-publish them for free, organize lectures, hand out grants and the like).

[Ted the Flayer]

Ted the Flayer? Holy fuck that meme is oooooooold.

Im an oldfag at heart.

[Ancient History]

Czech travel agency offers "corruption" tour.

[Username17]

Czech travel agency offers "corruption" tour.

If this makes it any better for you, Šourek means "scrotum". That guy is literally "Mr. Scrotum".

A lot of people have names that are insults. The prime minister is named "Bad Weather". The original car manufacturer here is named after the owner, who was named "A Pity". Apparently, this is because the Czechs and Slovaks were forced to adopt last names at sword point by the Austrian Empire, and if someone swore at the guards, that would be their family name in the official records.

-Username17

[Datawolf]

The Canadian economy is heavily resourced-based, which explains our reasonably sustained prosperity.

[sabs]

That is until said resources run out
Which isn't yet.. but if your economy is built on strip mining and deforestation..eventually that shit will run out.

[Dr_Noface]

Is Canada's economy based on strip-mining and deforestation?

[rampaging-poet]

Fortunately, we don't need to base our economy on deforestation. If you have a lot of trees (check) and a lot of land (double check), you can just divide your forest into thirty or so reasonably large plots, harvest trees from one plot per year, and then have new trees ready in the first plot by the time you've logged the last.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn't provide the same immediate returns as just logging all the trees now, so ranking members of logging companies have little incentive to do so.

[Datawolf]

That is until said resources run out
Which isn't yet.. but if your economy is built on strip mining and deforestation..eventually that shit will run out.

It isn't. There's also oil (we have the third largest oil reserves in the world, second if you count the Alberta oilsands), fishing, our massive fresh water reserves, and diamond mines. Not to mention coal, beef, wheat and a surprisingly large amount of fruit (I know, right? ). I don't know if that stuff counts as resources though.

Then there's also the heavily subsidized film industry, so a lot of american production studios will film up here for the tax credits. But that's a whole other keg of Molson.