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Gary Kasparov Arrested Over Political Fight
geddes writes "World chess champion turned opposition leader Gary Kasparov was arrested this morning while leading an march through Moscow in opposition to Russian President Vladamir Putin. Kasporov is a leader of the 'Other Russia' coalition which has been banned by the government from appearing on TV, and had been denied a marching permit. From the New York Times: 'Essentially barred from access to television, members of Other Russia have embraced street protests as the only platform to voice their opposition ahead of parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections next March. Early this month, Mr. Kasyanov's and Mr. Kasparov's Web sites were blocked, though it was unclear by whom.' Kasparov was later released from detention, though he was still fined for participating in the event."
but that doesn't excuse it. It was apparently about AUD50 (from the ABC.
Anyway, this is just another example of how legitimate protests are squashed by authorities. If Putin and Co continue to suppress the opposition, I wonder if Mr Berezovsky will carry out his threat to have a "Russian Revolution"?
Meh, and you wonder why some of the old people want the Soviet Union back.
I wank in the shower.
I recently got US citizenship and was debating on what to do with by Russian passport. But, I have no desire to be in any way associated with a dictatorship. I guess I will be returning it shortly, with a note describing why.
In lots of places, even if you are denied a permit, you are still allowed to protest. And if you don't do anything besides not move on when told to ... Well you can't be legally arrested. (I believe this is the case in all of Australia, but at least NSW and Tasmania.)
That doesn't stop you being arrested however. Charged. Forced to fly across the country to one court date. Forced to get a lawyer. Get charged with other charges because the cops are trying to blackmail you into pleading guilty to a "lesser" charge (traffic charge for example). Refuse to bow to blackmail. Fly across the country again the day before the court date. Get rung up by your lawyer and told that all charges have been dropper.
Can you guess that I'm bitter? The fact is, in more civilised countries, you are allowed to demonstrate and protest. And so long as you don't break other laws (such as smashing shit up), then you are not breaking any laws. And thus the police have no right to arrest you. But as I've mentioned before, there are shitloads of examples where they will. (In the case above, that was me. I was "being annoying" according to one police officer who told another couple to arrest me.)
I wank in the shower.
there was a huge protest against a G8 meeting in florida (around '02 i think).
they had flawless preparation, including all permits.
the pro-globalist heavyweights who controlled the area simply had cops trample them anyway, declaring them "anarchist agitators" to the media, which loyally parroted their excuse to the rest of the nation, quickly burying any potential public outrage at the new police state of florida.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Francis Fukuyama was wrong. So wrong.
Liberal Democracy isn't the only ideology still remaining after the fall of the Soviet system. Neo-Facism and the cult of the leader in Russia. The One Party State in China. Theocracies in the Middle East. Tin Pot dictators ruling their roosts all across the third world. Even the "liberated" countries of eastern europe are falling back into authoritarianism.
And faced with this, what are liberal democratic societies doing? They're evolving into not-so-liberal democracies with human rights taking second place to "security" and profit. Once again, the US leads the way and the rest of the western world follows. I'd like to be more optimistic, but somedays I truely feel that the great democratic experiment is doomed to be a slow and ignominious failure.
Apathy is not the cause of democracy's downfall. The sad reality is that a great many people simply to not agree with our free society, with our rule of law or with our casteless social structure. These people are your friends, your neighbours and coworkers, and secretly they support presidents like Putin, and laws that ban street rallies and protests. They're simply waiting for the time when it becomes acceptable to voice those opinions once more. That time may be closer than you think.
May the Maths Be with you!
In the last years of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, Russians began to realize that their post-Soviet capitalistic reforms had been too much too fast, leaving the economy in even worse shambles than before, and allowing the rise of the Russian mafia from the chaos. Yeltsin decided it was time to slow down reforms and let people catch up, so he turned to a little known St. Petersburg political aide with a growing reputation for efficiency to be his last prime minister and implement the slow down. That man was ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin.
Putin slowed down the capitalistic reforms, and then some. He returned some major companies to state-control, including most of the media. The economy is much improved during his tenure. He revived the secret police en masse. When a major oil tycoon decided to form a political party to challenge Putin, the tycoon was arrested on mafia-related charges, and his company was taken over by the state. Similar things have happened to a number of major political opponents. The court system has lost much of its veneer of independence from the executive branch. Putin is well-known for cronyism and a preference for Soviet-style rule. The Bush administration and others have publicly chastised Putin for hurting democracy. In fact, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect him of close ties to major players in the mafia, though impossible to prove. Right now the favorite to succeed Putin appears to be one of his former KGB associates who is now one of his top deputies. If you want specific charges that opponents have leveled against Putin, read anything by Anna Politkovskaya, such as Putin's Russia. Just be aware she has a strong anti-Putin bias (which may be why she was murdered).
Kasparov is just one of the latest to attempt an anti-Putin political movement. Obviously Kasparov could expect a meager fine for holding a public demonstration in a spot where he didn't have a permit. The subtext is much more interesting. Pro-Kremlin youth gathering where he expected to protest? Was it really arranged before Kasparov's? I doubt it, especially the way this exact same excuse is being used repeatedly across multiple cities. Who knows; it's hard to be sure what's going on in Russia under Putin.
The source or cause of the fatality is not really relevent to the point. Think about it this way. Compare the amount of money spent on cancer ir aids research by the government to amount spent fighting terrorism. How many americans (not including solders in Iraq) die each year because of each of those? Think about it statistically. How are you most likely to die? Terrorist attack, auto accident, choking on a piece of food, or cancer? How much money is spent on prevention of each of those items listed? FUD is powerful. We think of the non terrorism items less because they happen on an individual basis or one at a time and not to a group at one time. Basically spreading out the problem over time and geographical areas therefore causing no one person to feel the overall effects as a collective group would feel. No large groups of people are affected by any one individual case.
How do you think the U.S. advanced so rapidly during the Industrial Revolution? It wasn't because they did a lot of innovating themselves - they stole a LOT of technology from Europe, over Europe's protests (with lots of outrage about "intellectual property theft").
Now China is doing the same thing the U.S. (and the rest of the Western countries), with pretty much the same we-cant-compete! whining from the "victim" countries. Funny how that works out.
Like what? Give some examples. With no proof why should anyone believe you?
Fascinating.
"Kasparov is a supporter of Anatoly Fomenko's New Chronology." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov
"Fomenko asserts that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is just a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th and 18th century Jesuits. He also claims that Jesus lived in the 11th century A.D. and that the Trojan war and the Crusades were the same historical event. He claims that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Timofeevich_
http://reddit.com/info/1hx93/comments/c1hyds
US didn't respect European patents. This was a major dispute in the 19th century. England had patented many new industrial machines, and the US was the one place where these machines could be used without paying royalties.
Giving concrete examples would be silly, since it is more or less everything: Machines, factory designs, steam engines, locomotives, etc.
I find it very noteworthy that the country which prided itself of being "the land of the free" is now bolstering about being just a little bit better than Russia in the freedom department.
That's a reality check for you.