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Organized Online, Students Storm Gov't. Buildings In Moldova
An anonymous reader writes "Reacting to allegedly fraudulent election procedures, students are storming the presidency and parliament of the small eastern European country of Moldova. It is reported that they used Twitter to organize. Currently twitter and blogs are being used to spread word of what is happening since all national news websites have been blocked. If the 1989 Romanian revolution was the first to be televised, is this the first to be led by twitter and social networks?" Jamie points out this interesting presentation (from March 2008) by Ethan Zuckerman about the realities of online activism, including how governments try to constrain it.
Russians work as peacekeepers in Transnistria.
Also, you should try to read Wiki article you're quoting:
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On August 31, 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR adopted Moldovan as the only official language, with Russian retained only for secondary purposes, returned Moldovan to the Latin alphabet, and declared a shared Moldova-Romanian linguistic identity. As plans for major cultural changes in Moldova were made public, tensions rose further. Ethnic minorities felt threatened by the prospects of removing Russian as the de facto official language, the possible future reunification of Moldova and Romania and the ethnocentric rhetoric of the Popular Front. The Yedinstvo (Unity) Movement, established by the Slavic population of Moldova, pressed for the equal status given to both Russian and Moldovan.[73]
Soviet symbols are still used in Transnistria
The nationalist Popular Front won the first free parliamentary elections in the Moldavian SSR in the spring of 1990[citation needed], and its agenda started slowly to be implemented.
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That pattern was repeated several times during the USSR collapse (in Georgia and Armenia). Russian peacekeepers were able to stop these conflicts before they turned into full-scale civil wars.
Also, Transnistria's reputation as a drug haven is exaggerated.
You can also see how fucked Ukraine is now. The government is not functioning, the presidend and the prime minister (former best buddies and orange revolution heroes) are now bitter enemies.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"Chickenshit" modifies "fax machine," not "people." As the fax machines are not storming government buildings, it is perfectly appropriate.
The story is their communist government cut down the communication tools. Cellphone coverage is off and all media "shutdown" early in the day. The radio / television employees all went home and the buildings are surrounded by the military.
The story is they were left with the internet. Here's a good read.
Just take a look http://unimedia.info/ ! These guys are serious...
To anyone who understands anything about economics, this statement, honestly, looks like a troll. It's like reading someone saying "I thought Windows was better? Isn't that what 95% of businesses use?" or something like that. Yes, there are many, many people who thought (and perhaps still think, although OS X and even linux have made tremendous inroads into the public consciousness now), for example, that it was "obvious" which operating system was best. For one thing, there were many, many people in the media who would pontificate about the superiority of Windows over any alternative, and then you could back that up by finding hordes of Windows weenies who would enthusiastically repeat the tired, old, canards in a way that made them sound all sarcastic and superior.
The people talking about the current crisis as a failure of capitalism understand economics in the same way that the people referenced above understand technology. They hear people talk about it, some of them sound like they know what they're talking about, they look around at other people in the crowd and go with what they think of as the consensus of the smart/informed people.
In fact, they know very little, and the people that do know are sharply divided over what is "obvious".
But if you think that you have seen capitalism fail, you just aren't looking hard enough to see past the Democrat's distortion blitz.
I agree wholeheartedly that the novelty of credit default swaps were an artifact of capitalism. A stupid investment which Buffet called a time bomb--but capitalism produces stupid investments, as it reflects the desires of individuals to get something for nothing. That's not all it produces, but because it embraces freedom, it embraces people's freedom to dumb as well as to be smart. And sometimes what one person says is dumb turns out to have been really smart.
But let's get back to the current useful-idiot-producing crisis. Where did the "money" come from that went into the bubble that just burst? It came from "money" (fiat money, meaning you aren't allowed to compete with it like you would in capitalism; political money, meaning it's produced by a quasi-government entity (the Federal Reserve) ) that was "created" when banks sold mortgages. There was a huge influx of "money" into the system. All the dizzying loads of information you can find about what happened after that--the "exotic derivatives" and so forth--is just the result of people trying to cash in on a flood of "money". Basically, yes, if you pour money into a capatilist system, it will figure out all kinds of ways to attempt to drive that money into the pockets of various players. No surprise there, and you can call it capitalism.
Over time, after a source of money shows up, once people figure out what the real nature of that source is and how to value it, the activity around it calms down. There may or may not be a bubble, depending on how risky or cautious people are, whether quality information is available, and a host of other factors. Capitalism does not instantaneously find the value of something new, it tries hundreds of different ways to measure and extract that value.
What, in the case of the current crisis, is the source of the "new money"? Well, we've already talked about the mortgages, buy why did they show up? Was there some kind of twitch in the invisible hand? Some evil capitalist corporation put subliminal messages into advertising convincing people that they should really be buying a house, it's what all the cool people are doing?
No, no, and no. Although things something like that happened once it was shown that there was money there, what started this artificial glut of money was the government. Some politicians, concerned that people that couldn't afford to buy homes by evil capitalist banking standards, well, couldn't afford to buy homes by the evil
Liberty uber alles.
You can't speak for everyone else. I'm from Moldova and I can tell you that there are a lot of people here who are still able to reason clearly.
The people want it, but the leaders find it against their "business interests". It is not _us_ who came up with the stupid Moldovan-Romanian dictionary, it is not _us_ who told the Romanian government to "keep out of our internal matters", it is not _us_ who don't even speak Romanian nor bother to learn it.
What happens now is that the people are trying to get rid of these incompetent leaders.
I am ashamed every time I watch the news and see how our politicians refuse to cooperate with the Romanian government - which has tried numerous times to offer us a hand of help.
In this context it is evident why there are people in Romania who don't see Moldovans as "brothers" anymore.
The saddest poem