Democracy in Russia - the stifling of dissent and opinion

Russia is in theory only a new country. For years living under one of the most oppressive regimes and as centre of the USSR the people of Russia suffered brutal conditions and freedom of speech was severely restricted . Protests were crushed and dissent was stifled through force but have things changed? Russia is in its prime. They have a young population and are coming to form one of the biggest economies in the world and most industrialised making up the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) but at what price?
Elections in 2011 were widely believed to be rigged with various spokespersons and oberservors noticing ballot stuffing in and around Moscow and other polling stations in the region. Even before this though the people were afraid to speak as was the case with gay rights activisits who were banned from holding gay pride marches in 2010 in St Petersburg and this was followed suit in Moscow this year with the Mayor Of Moscow ,Yury Luzhkov ,stating in 2007

Quote:
"For several years, Moscow has experienced unprecedented pressure to conduct a gay pride parade, which cannot be called anything but a satanic act,"

Numerous reporters have been threatened for being critical of the establishment and in more serious cases reporters were shot which do not certainly needed to be mentioned as they are well known but what is not as well known is cases like that of Sergei Sokolov who was allegedly driven to a forest by a top investigator and threatened with his life. There has been denials of course of this but the fact that there has been sixteen journalists killed in the last few years means there could be something to it.
Finally in a show that the establishment wants an autocracy and is afraid of the people , draconian legislation has been brought in that bans marches that are not authorised. This has been brought in to combat the growing tide of what the Russian establishment sees as dissent, a move by the people to empower themselves. People who gather with "authorisation" are subject to a fine of €5900 .

As Thomas Jefferson said
Quote:
“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”



Judging by the Russian establishments actions, they are very afraid...
References:http://abcnews.go.com/International/...ory?id=9663327http://www.channel4.com/news/moscow-...sian-electionshttp://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...6bV_story.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...V_story_1.htmlhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5b1bbf82-b...#axzz1xmcgCJv4

Reviving Irish - a different approach

There is a classic case in point where Hebrew was brought back from the dead to become a living language. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language) This is a unique case as it has not really been replicated anywhere else and it was done at a time when Hebrew was a pidgin language. It was spoken in the markets as Arab speaking traders and those who spoke Yiddish and other languages needed a common lingua franca and Hebrew was it. The revival took place after there was a shift in grammar and a strong influence in Hebrew from Yiddish which became like a substrate for Hebrew. Most parents raised their children speaking Hebrew but it took a lot of standardising to do such a move (which was audacious to say the least). Hebrew had a helping hand from Zionism which was the nationalist movement in Israel and unfortunately Hebrew became a stick with which was used to beat Palestinians .


What do I propose for Irish?
What I propose is to regularise all the 11 verbs to create all regular verbs and tweak it slightly. Grammar be changed so that it follows English standard grammar but pronounciation becomes a key element in defining it and separating it from English. At the moment Irish is making a comeback but its all being done horribly wrong. The opposition to my idea would come from two sides. The first would be the general public who would kick up at money being spent in such a way and would seek to undermine such efforts by calling such an example a waste of money. The Irish language purists would then come around and say that I am diluting the language and changing years of history but lets make the language accessible to all .


Language does influence thinking ina lot of ways. In Stephen Frys “The Word” he discusses how feminine gender casing on language (in the example used it was Russian) mellowed out men and influenced them in a way. In Afrikaans , they dropped the gender casing completely and it took on words from other languages to become a separate language in its own right albeit it was a language of the oppressors under apartheid. Simplifying Irish to a degree and making it open to access may influence a new generation. I would be interested to know how thought patterns would be influenced by Irish and if such a language change would bring about different changes. I think Irish inspires people in terms of music and literature but its also a language of nature, the druids etc

US Military - Does it attract the wrong sort of people?

www.rollingstone.com/politics...-team-20110327


Read the above article and then read what follows.


American troops tend to come in to the American army from an educated background as they put it in simple terms. A report showed that 90% of people had a high school diploma (I take this to be a leaving cert) and were well educated with a lot of them coming out with degrees . This in itself is I imagine pretty much a standard in a lot of military careers out there, they get degrees and as a result get good jobs and off they go. Im not disputing that. What I am disputing though is the type of intelligence that they are seeking. All entrants must undergo AFQT (http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...s-and-officers)




Quote:
More evidence of the quality of America's enlisted forces comes from the standardized Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) that the military administers to all recruits. Over two-thirds of enlisted recruits scored above the 50th percentile on the AFQT. The military tightly restricts how many recruits it accepts with scores below the 30th percentile, and only 2.3 percent of recruits in 2007 scored between the 21st and 30th percentiles (Category IVA; see Chart 3). The military does not accept any recruits in the bottom 20 percent.

This is the standard test which allows American troops to see if they are capable or not of serving in the American military.According to about.com , American military entrants are tested on four areas




Quote:
Only four areas of the ASVAB test are used to compute the overall ASVAB score, also known as the AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) score.

The four areas of the ASVAB used to compute the AFQT score are: Word Knowledge (WK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), Arithmatic Reasoning (AR), and Mathmatics Knowledge (MK).
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joini...lafqtscore.htm




The only pre checks done in terms of psychological evaluation from what I can see after that is the following . According to a recent study "an educational achievement, cognitive testing, and a cursory psychiatric evaluation". Cursory according to a dictionary definition on google means that this is hasty . The source for this is :http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17274262 .


Considering that cognitive testing is limited in its scope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_test) and that education and a "cursory psychiatric evaluation" are taken into account, do they not screen new cadets for emotional intelligence? Do they not measure them for such things like empathy, anger etc?


It would be in my opinion that such a process perhaps needs to be looked at if we have the situation that arose above such as the killing of a 15 year old boy and other such scandals such as Abu Gharib and the defiling of the bodies of victims in Afghanisatan. From the article in Rolling Stone magazine, it was a common practice to go out and want to shoot people (at random). Some of the charges are for the pre mediated murder of people , these people thought about killing others and to make matters worse tried to cover up evidence. Eg. The fifteen year old boy who was blown up by a grenade was said to have used a grenade? WTF? They threw it?


, Minnestoa Public Radio had an article recently which stated


http://minnesota.publicradio.org/dis...fghan-mission/




Quote:
Senior leaders have warned for several years about a deterioration of discipline that may have contributed to increased substance abuse, suicides, domestic abuse and other problems.

Why were a lot of these not nipped in the bud first hand and the cadets refused entry to the military?
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Is man a slave to instinct?

In the wake of the rising tide of anti immigration and racism that seems to be appearing lately a discussion came up with a friend of mine. When times are lean such as they are now and there is a competition for resources, people seem to revert to an animal like state and seem to become tribal, a bit like a lion defending their territory. They see other humans, especially those of a different culture and of a different skin colour as being rivals for resources (jobs, access to housing in modern terms). Is this reverting back to animal instincts? Can man not rise above this and instead of being a slave to instinct seek to rise above this and work with other humans to build a better society as socialism advocates.

A study a couple of years back showed that people whom are altrustic tend to have more success than those whom are selfish (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=love-thy-neighbor-evolved) so invariably is it fair to say that racists and their ilk tend to be less than successful in life?

The Rise of the Far Right in Europe - Wolves in Sheeps Clothing?

With the recent surge seen in the far right in Europe, are they promising people something they can deliver on or are they going to fall flat? In the recent French elections, Marie Le Pen promised to look at the rights of workers and played the left wing card hoping to appeal to those whom might have otherwise voted for the left. Golden Dawn came to power in Greece with the promise to deal with the immigration issues that they have made out to be a bigger deal than it is . Golden Dawn saw their figures jump from .29% support to 6.7% or thereabouts on the back of playing the anti immigration card, they vowed to rid "Athens of the stench" of what is immigrants. In Finland the True Finns are surfing in on a tide of anti European sentiment and anti immgration policies. Couple all of this with well known antics of such parties in Ireland and the BNP in the UK and other far right parties in Europe and we may be setting ourselves up for a dangerous rift in society. Already some of these parties are well known to have violent links and links to neo nazism. Are we allowing these wolves to continually dress in sheeps clothing?

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Finns

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/06/far-right-threat-extremism

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/9250885/Greek-immigrants-urge-parties-to-isolate-far-Right-Golden-Dawn.html
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Gay Marriage

A lot of talk recently on gay marriage after North Carolina in the US rejected it out right opting to define marriage as being between a man and a woman . This move in itself is an affront to the dignity of the LGBT community in North Caroline but got me thinking about gay marriage in a general context and especially here in Ireland. Ireland has as you know , civil partnership which confers most entitlements to a smae sex partner but stops short at adoption and there is an issue around inheritance. To this end I propose the government introduce gay marriage or indeed something akin to gay marriage as marriage to me has religious connotations. There is support here in Ireland from all corners of society for such a move and such a move should be granted no questions asked. As I pointed out on another thread, some rights are non negotiable and are not subjective as society sees it that way. Why should others dictate to me how I live my private life? From most quarters the religious institutions in Ireland and the right in Ireland have consistently undermined or made efforts to bring anything in by stifling it.

Random Belgian Adventures!

This post was a while coming but I had to wait till this weekend till I found out the ending which I would put to it.













A couple of months back my brother approached us all in the family with an idea . After doing some research, my brother discovered we had a great uncle whom had fought in the Somme . From what we could gather he could not find work at the time and enlisted in the British Army in search of adventure, justice, work or whatever, we simply do not know, all that we were aware of was that in November 1914 he was shot and died on the battle field in the Somme having seen just 19 years of his young life come to a very sudden end . Nothing much was known about this till my brother discovered it.













Cue the weekend just gone by. A couple of weeks back my ma had asked if I fancied going on the trip to see his grave and take in some of the sights in general (all expenses paid and money being tight I was not going to turn it down) . Once booked she then mentioned other people were going too but I was a bit worried this might cause some tension as being a gregarious sort , this lad here has been known to rub people up the wrong way.!













Come Friday morning we took a 7am flight to Charleroi in Belgium and drove the hour and a bit it was to Lille to check in and this was where the fun began. The hotel didnt let us check in till four so we decided to check out the graveyards to see if we could locate where our great uncle (we'll call him by his initials JR) was buried in Belgium. We drove for hours through lovely little towns and villages with red brick houses and stopped at all sorts of graveyards where we encountered local Flemish speakers who were only too willing to help and we had hit a snag. My brother had a grave reference and some idea as to where he may be but we were unsure about the graveyard as to its location. Having my grandmother with us who is quite frail and other family in tow we were limited to what we could do in terms of researching and exploring. Back at the hotel that night we all sank a few Belgian beers ( fuckin Leffe is like rocket fuel and Chimay, dont get me started!) but Saturday started off with a bang. We were lucky we had two hire cars with relations in one and my immediate family and grandmother/cousin/aunt in with us . Come midday I was cracking open a few beers looking for any sort of inspiration that could come to hand. I was totally indifferent to this quest before hand but now I was hooked. Most of my time was spent translating (I speak French and a crash course in Flemish before hand proved useful),with my father driving at the helm and my brother with his information to hand we started off the day in good spirits. We went to a small village called Poelkapelle to see the graveyard where he apparently died however there was no mention of him in the register. A Canadian tour guide suggested we check with the tourist office in Ypres but time was working against us pretty much and weather.































At a random suggestion my mam suggested we pulled into a town called Langenmark which could have had no more than a population of a few thousand and myself and her decided to look at a church that was interesting enough (because there was an outside pissoir as they call them in French) and to kill some time while we had a toilet break. Being in close proximity to some people for the length of time we had had caused a little strain but this search had brought us back togther as a family and pushed us closer. (Im rambling but I will continue!!). In the church my ma insisted on saying a prayer to her father to find the grave. At that very moment a pastor in the church came over to talk to us . He was heavy set and came straight over after my ma had said her prayer and spoke to us in a soft voice , making us take note as we had been quite loud before hand! We ended up chatting to him and we told him about our quest to find the grave of JR. He informed us that there was two graveyards and not one in the village of Poelkapelle and gave us excellent directions to the graveyard. We ran right out to get my brother to talk to the vicar as my brother was the one with all the information.













With a biting wind to my back and after about three cans of Juplier beer to withstand the wind we came upon the graveyard the pastor had mentioned. It was tucked away on the road to Brugges on a little road . There was rows of white crosses each one as white as the next which traversed the graveyard for a few acres and detailing those who had fallen.


















The reason that the graves are perfectly straight is that all the bodies are lying on a concrete plinth.













I checked the register of the names and let a shout out to my brother once we located the name. A mixture of excitement and sadness over came me, we found the grave and all I could do was stare and cry a small bit. Being extremely butch was not something I could ever do well . My dad had a bottle of calvados and at that moment poured a drop to our fallen relative and we stood there in the biting wind trying to absorb all of what we had found. A drop of Calvados later we took some pictures still wondering what life had been like for JR, a young man in the prime of his life as some cliches would put it.






















On deeper reflection afterwards and discussion some solid conclusions came out of it. Some soldiers joined an army then as there was no other opportunities available, a situation that is still the case these days. For me though the biggest part was not finding the grave, that was a bonus but it was the sense of togetherness that is instilled in me that I have not forgotten and have not shaken off since I got home this morning. The trip made me feel so connected to my extended family in a way that I have not experienced in years, its like an epiphany of sorts.













I apologise that unfortunately I lack the eloquence of prose that others have here but this has been on my mind all day and I have been itching to share it with you all here! I have been forumlating it in my head for a while how I would do it but it just spilled out ....













RIP JR