Interesting times.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
Like dead people? We wouldn't want to disenfranchise them.
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
Delusion.
One cannot assert something doesn't exist on the basis that it's never verified.
It's like saying there's no fare-evaders on the train if you never check tickets.
No one cheats in the diamond lane either, because they're never pulled over and ticketed.
Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud.
This could be in the top 3 most hilarious cope I've ever read.
Last time I voted, my "verification" consisted of someone glancing up from a newspaper to look at my signature for 0.25 sec and going "yeah looks good". That's it. No ID, no nothing, all I gave them was a name.
When the ID check to buy a pack of smokes at Safeway is way more stringent than voting, the system is fucked.
It takes more KYC to open a goddamn GMail account.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
It's not hacking, it's just surprise maintenance of someone else's computer.
It's not fraud, it's just maintenance of someone else's money into my bank account.
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
Also, some (not me), have survived regimes like Tito, Assad or Saddam, they definitely would have different perspective on word oppression.
(A thing to get us on the same ground, lets call him extremely corrupt, very few will dispute that)
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
You could replace the constitution of North Korea with that of the United States without a single thing changing in practice.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
Many hours ago, I had a half-written email to you in my drafts, and have now sent it to you.
Your English is fine.
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Lots of Europeans are turning "right" because they want easy answers to challenging problems, same as here in the US. For example, appeasing Russia is way easier than accepting that you need to fight Russia. Russia is at your doorstep, rabid, and ready to eat you up. And the European "right" wants to buy its gas. Hot diggity dog. That's scary.
Look this is just a start, but it is great that dissatisfaction that is expressed throughout the Europe, can be expressed in such constructive and clear way in Serbia.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone right now. Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries right now.
Most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans see decent economic growth currently.
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
Edit: Hopefully this ages poorly. It's a tight race
https://www.reuters.com/live/brazil-election-live-lula-bolso...
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
* Forint 363 to the euro compared to 400 in 2023
* Homophobic law repealed
* Term limit introduced for MPs and PMs
* Rail overhaul plan
* No more kowtowing to Russia
(2) The most important thing is that power was handed over peacefully. New guy, new team, new ideas and approaches.
I don't chitchat with defenders of same so I won't respond further.
And that's exactly why there's a thought bubble here. Also the first thing cult leaders tell you to stop doing.
The strategy is call them a Nazi enough and then wait for them to do something that looks like a Nazi salute. I mean it worked really well, to be fair. But of course it had to throw out all of the context that would suggest Elon is not, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer.
Also, I don't need an analyst to tell me how to use my brain.
FWIW some of the most crazy, hyperbolic stuff comes from the oldest accounts. Maybe they've gone senile.
Hopefully, wounds are healing, and more productive friends can be found.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
Disrupting the incumbent authoritarian while surviving LRAD attacks is pretty darn bad ass, and teaches lessons to us all.
On the incumbent side, even when you seem to have all control on your side, you can go too far in your corruption(civility/product/whatever) and lose.
___
meta: I don't think the parent should have been just downvoted. Otherwise, genuine discussion is crushed. I updooted your question.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.