Anyone know what's happening in Poland?
It will teach you that we must offset the urge to have dictators/liars rule us. No matter how much urge there is for a “strong leader.”
Transparency, accountability, freedom of expression.
Not bs propaganda.
Hitler swayed the German masses. Putin’s wants to do the same thing. Both don’t care how many innocent people die in order to achieve their goals.
And it doesn’t benefit the average person one bit.
Spiralling Crow gave a good answer.
I'm under an impression that you're not talking about real Poland but about your own prejudices about a country and people you've never seen.
Emotional cherry-picking videos are not a source of any understanding of what's going on in a different culture. If you want to know what's going on in Poland, look for actual data, try to see the contexts and listen to people who are here. If you want to keep pushing your prejudices despite all the information countering it, then your actions are simply offensive.
]I do not have bias against Poland. I have had very good Polish friends and I agree that Poland was doing well before the Russian invasion. This is not the countries fault. But I have not seen it in the news for many years.
Typically, having bias is unconcious.
You're mixing things up: first you post a video compiling violent events from 2020 and earlier, then ask "why aren't they doing as well as their neighbors?" and then claim "Poland was doing well before the Russian invasion"?
It just does not hold together.
If you want a news source to keep track of meaningful problems and achievements of Poland, I suggest Politico.
Current main issues are: political-legal battle over covid recovery cash (and the "judicary reform" that lead to it), managing 3 millions of refugees in a 40 million country, incompetent moves of the government and National Bank, resulting in accelerating inflation.
Current main successes are: managing 3 millions of refugees in a 40 million country with very low level of incidents and without need for refugee camps, accelerated improvement of relations with Ukraine and Baltic States, leading role in European response to the war with unity above local polarization.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
They are, but that's the point of my original question....why aren't they doing as well as their neighbors?
Spiralling Crow gave a good answer.
I wouldn't say Poland is not doing as well as it's neighbors. But, perhaps it just has a different focus. My boyfriend is a service tech for industrial machines. He has travelled to various different countries across Europe. The vast majority of the time he travels to Germany. But never has he travelled to Poland for work. I have been living under the impression that Poland is more agrarian simply because we see a lot of agricultural products that come from Poland. Magz will be able comment more on what kind of industry is there. I'd be interested to know more.
Poland has a lot of agriculture and food processing, various branches of chemistry, pharmaceutics, cosmetics, furniture, software, clothes, building materials... pretty diverse industries. Of machinery, we make buses.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
Poland tends to organize bottom-up and NGOs are the force shaping our reality. It works well in crises - an adaptation to our historical realities, I suspect. Messy in good times, resilient in bad times.
I just wish we grew up out of the pretty absurd political polarization and went back to building on our actual strengths also on the state level. But well... we're a "nation with PTSD". Not everything is rational here.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
I am curious whether there is a "democratic country" to grew up out of this?
Japan had grew up out of it, in a very unhealthy way.
The political system in Polish history ... is not very efficient.
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With the help of translation software.
Cover your eyes, if you like. It will serve no purpose.
You might expect to be able to crush them in your hand, into wolf-bone fragments.
Collectivism and no-religion can make people industrious to a terrible degree...
In the past South Korea, and now China.
Most people here may not have seen what is true "industrious".
And these examples you listed, compared to whether they are "industrious", should consider whether they have more natural resources per capita.
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With the help of translation software.
Cover your eyes, if you like. It will serve no purpose.
You might expect to be able to crush them in your hand, into wolf-bone fragments.
Depends which part of the history - it's 1000 years and things varied enormously.
I guess from traditionally top-down societes' point of view, democracies are generally inefficient - but we have a very different philosophy of doing things in general. Polish people practically never rely on the state - we just go and do things. What we expect from the state is to just maintain space for doing things.
It works quite well here.
The crazy polarization here is not about disagreements or even hostilities - that would be natural for a democracy - but about any argument boiling down to "vote for us because they are evil and we're not them". This started with PO and PiS - initially two center-right parties that soon started to define themselves as each other's enemies. And that tumbled down a pretty bad path of more and more hate and less and less meritoric dispute.
I think we're around the climax of it, it should fall apart before the next elections, for the level of scandals of PiS is really bad, they still do strong anti-PO propaganda, which gives chances to new forces to enter the govt: Lefties, Polish People's Party (getting their countryside votes back from PiS) and a new power of Polska 2050 each have around 10% support, which means a coalition government would have to be formed.
Diverse coalition governments are better than one-party ones in Poland, because there's always more dispute before making decisions.
Generally, diversity is a strongly positive power in Poland and that's why I hate current government trying to fight against it for their concept of homogenous, Catholic Poland.
In a way, war in Ukraine is now doing a very good thing to Poland: with over 3 million Ukrainians having come (to a country of 40 million), the concept of a homogenous nation vanished like it never existed
, the government has now way more serious things to do than fighting their own citizens and a common enemy makes everyone more willing to cooperate. But they're still screwing up finances, which, I hope, will lead them to losing badly in the next elections.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
So that is another factor. When you look at Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania and Poland there is a tendency toward election of authoritarian leaders (not unlike Russia). There are less parliamentary alliances and more power is in the hands of one leader.
Naturally under such conditions there is less likely to be majority rule.
You put countries very differing in this matter into one box.
Belarus - voted for a dictator for long time but said "enough" last summer, which ended in riots, mass arrests and announcing an extremely contested poll result as valid.
Ukraine - struggled and wiggled between pro-Russian and pro-democratic up to 2014 - since then, democratic parties were always elected (though problems of corruption and oligarchs remained).
Hungary - when Fidesz took power, they imposed control on all the media. Linguistically isolated Hungarians are fed with pretty skewed picture of what's going on, of course getting a narrative that only Fidesz can keep them safe.
Romania - why did it even enter this? I hear no news indicating they had such tendency.
Poland - always voted diverse until PiS conquered all the right wing and the rest cried for uniting as anti-PiS. The strongman, Jarosław Kaczyński, stays in shadows. Duda became their presidental candidate exactly because he does not come off as a strong leader. They knew a right-wing strongman would lose in the two-round system, so they chose a weak figure.
Russia - yes, those guys really like strong leaders.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
I would cross Romania out and group the countries as following:
Russia - still imperialist, identifying a strong leader with strong country, agressive;
Belarus and Hungary - voted for dictators in a belief they would keep them safe from some (real or imagined) external threats;
Poland and Ukraine - not really liking dictators but having episodes with politicians exploiting the system.
Ukraine and Poland have elements of the "Belarus and Hungary" group - Ukraine has been at war since 2014 and war is not exactly a good moment for dissolving central power; PiS tried to follow Hungary's path but they got enormous protests and criticism from inside the country, locals asking for international help, resulting in e.g. media control attempts failing.
Both Poles and Ukrainians actually don't trust strong leaders, thus our presidents - both perceived as not really serious at the elections' time.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
