Romania

[Simple Minded]

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ ... p-n1236056

Facebook removed hundreds of accounts on Thursday from a foreign troll farm posing as African-Americans in support of Donald Trump and QAnon supporters. It also removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to conservative media outlet The Epoch Times that pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories about coronavirus and protests in the U.S.

Facebook took down the accounts as part of its enforcement against coordinated inauthentic behavior, which is the use of fake accounts to inflate the reach of content or products on social media.

The foreign pro-Trump troll farm was based in Romania and pushed content on Instagram under names like “BlackPeopleVoteForTrump” and on Facebook under “We Love Our President.”

capitalist pigs stifling romanian startups :/

sounds like white, millennial privilege keeping those black Romanians down to me. RACISTS!!!

[YMix]

A relative of mine had his FB account suspended as well. He had it all: pro Trump stuff, energy wars around Earth, black ship attacks from space, fifth density, anti-vaxx, anti-mask, you name it.

[YMix]

The late "Nea Neculiță", who used to keep bees in hives made of wicker covered in horse manure, probably the way it was done 2,000 years ago.

[Nonc Hilaire]

White House Chief of Staff predicts Biden/Romanian connection

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/10 ... to-bidens/

[YMix]

That one's not ours. I'm wondering if Reuters did this on purpose or if it's far too subtle for them.

[noddy]

all you eastern yurops look the same..

generally speaking all the news ive been seeing about Romania seems more positive than the rest, seemingly things are on the up ?

[YMix]

Generally speaking, I'd say we're in the toilet, but things have already passed the toilet and are heading down the pipe. We're doing the heard immunity thing out of necessity, not because anyone wanted it. Testing was gradually reduced in order to avoid demobilizing the population ahead of the December 6 parliament election, a move didn't convince anyone. The National Liberals (PNL) managed the pandemic badly, which is why we are now above 12,000 deaths. They turned out to be lazy, ignorant, unimaginative, and just bad at management. It's true that you can't address in 10 months a situation that was 30 years in the making, but they didn't really try anyway.

The healthcare system is sort of coping with the situation, but not really. When you spend about 550 euros per capita on healthcare, you can't expect good results. The number of ICU beds was greatly increased, but we've run out of trained personnel (all those doctors moving to Western Europe? yeah...). That shouldn't be a problem anyway because, if you end up in ICU, it's a race to your death between COVID and hospital infections. You know what 550 euros buys you? Disinfectants diluted to the point they're useless. Testing is supposed to be increasing, but the entire system runs on about 1,200 lab techs. Before the pandemic, not many people wanted to become lab techs.

At least we're done with the elections. Back in January, PNL was riding high, the Social Democrats (PSD) were running for the hills and the Save Romania Union (USR) were mobilizing for victory. We had local elections in autumn, when we dumped Firea and most of the PSD gang. USR got a few high profile cities and not much else. Should have been a warning for them. Before December 6, polls were putting PNL at ~30% and USR at 20% or above. PNL was already thinking of rejecting a coalition with USR and trying to wrangle a cabinet with some of the smaller parties. But thanks to their bad management of the pandemic, as well as their naked greed and nepotism, PNL got only 25%. USR got 16% and I like to think this was because their great, amazing idea in the middle of a pandemic was to put forward an economic platform calling for "the right to choose in healthcare" (giving public healthcare funds to private companies), "the right to choose in education" (giving public education funds and assets to private companies), and "Black Sea gas money for pensions" (giving natural gas royalties to private investment funds, not the public pension system). As I predicted, USR tried to win an election with their stupid neoliberal ideas and got their assets handed to them.

The Social Democrats got 30% and basically won the election. Turns out they were just making a tactical retreat. That's not going to help them much because they have no allies in the new Parliament, so they can't form a cabinet.

The more "interesting" part is we ended up with a joker on our hands. The Alliance for Romanians' Unity (AUR - means "gold") came seemingly from nowhere and got 9% of the vote. AUR is a motley collection of the right wing and weird crap floating around public life: anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-abortion, fans of the Guard and Legion, angry Christians (who think the USR neoliberals are leftists), nationalists, women haters of all types, Dacopaths dreaming of ancient glory, a wide range of Karens, and traditional family morons who are still butthurt about their failed referendum (2018). How did they get 9%? Very low turnout. Normally they would have managed some 4%, failed to clear the threshold and been dismissed as an irrelevant fringe movement. But thanks to the incompetence, corruption and indifference shown by the main parties, things turned out differently.

The party leader, George Simion, is a former football hooligan who embraced the cause of Moldova's union with Romania and made a lot of noise on both sides of the border. Still, this is no grassroots movement and no accident. All of the new party's leaders have been in and out of the public eye, spouting their nonsense on TV and on the internet. Simion has political ties and is well-known to politicians from all parties. Their campaign tended to avoid the traditional media (the leading party figures continued to show up on TV, but did not identify as party leaders and did little campaigning there). Instead, they used social media to contact all of the above groups and turned them into an army of thousands of enthusiastic trolls. They organized a caravan and campaigned around the country, as well as abroad. The source of their funding is currently the subject of much speculation, as is their support among the intelligence community and former Securitate officers. It's assumed that Simion has been groomed for years by intelligence and political types, that their campaign strategy was run by professionals. Nothing is known for sure.

The more amusing part is that AUR got a lot of votes in the diaspora. Before the election, the USR crowd was 100% sure they represented the internet generation and the diaspora. It turns out these communities are more complex than previously unthought. AUR was voted by the poor diasporeans, the people who work the fields of other countries because they have to, not because they want to. The ones who don't register for USR types. To be fair, no party cares about those people, which is why they voted the only party that paid any attention to them. Does it matter that among AUR's new MPs is a retired general convicted for fraud? A former Securitate officer who was playing the wrong side during the 1989 Revolution? A woman (not lady) lawyer who insists the coronavirus is a hoax to get us all forcibly vaccinated? Of course not. It's all about the dream.

[Simple Minded]

Thanks for the update YMix. Not much happening in the US these days. To date, 2020 has been a pretty boring year........

[noddy]

its quite common for the diaspora/expat community to end up more nationalist than the local community - the other group thats big on that at the moment are the Turks.

immigrants being anti immigrant are the best.

[Typhoon]

That one's not ours. I'm wondering if Reuters did this on purpose or if it's far too subtle for them.

Probably a case of a recent graduate being tasked to write the piece, looked up Bucharest on Google Maps, but confused it with Budapest.

Speaking of Reuters . . .

Reuters | Vlad the Vaccinator

[YMix]

Myeah, the authorities around here are doing everything they can to promote vaccination... except building an appointment platform that could handle the traffic. Oh, well.

[Typhoon]

Came across this bit of commercial artwork.

210389978_4156036377808963_3565826601137167277_n.jpg (142.11 KiB) Viewed 30311 times

[noddy]

XiWcK8nb43Y

[YMix]

Criiiinge

[YMix]

Nokia shoes sign in Bucharest, 1930s.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Mule shoes? That’s where Nokia got their reputation for durability?

[Typhoon]

RFE/RL | Romania's Center-Right Government Toppled By Parliament In Overwhelming No-Confidence Vote

Romanian lawmakers from across the political spectrum have voted overwhelmingly to topple Prime Minister Florin Citu's center-right minority government in a no-confidence vote.

[YMix]

Yeah. I should write something about it, but it's a pretty long and depressing story, which means things are going as usual around here.

[YMix]

On October 13, Romania-- the EU member state with the second-lowest vaccination rate -- recorded 442 deaths and nearly 17,000 new confirmed virus cases.

We have the highest number of deaths per day in the EU, one of the highest in the world. So proud of my country and my people.

[noddy]

is Romania full of antivaxxers or just folks that dont care ?

[YMix]

is Romania full of antivaxxers or just folks that dont care ?

There are antivaxxers and antivaxxers. There are urban Facebook moms brainwashed by the internet and then there are people brainwashed by the church (vaccines make you crazy, they'll put a chip in you to prevent your soul from going to heaven). Plus a whole bunch of people who think: "I survived waves 1, 2 and 3, I'm going to survive this one, too. I don't need no vaccine." Then they end up in the ICU.

In some ways it's a widespread and bitter rejection of authority by people who have been abandoned by the state more than 30 years ago. That's something I can understand and respect, without approving.

The rabid FB moms are beyond my comprehensions.

Avv0fek2UVA

[YMix]

As hundreds of people die every day, our freshly ousted prime minister had this to say: "We have delivered pretty much everything that Romanians expected of us: sustainable economic growth and deficit reduction."

[Nonc Hilaire]

Antivaxxer is a propaganda identity. Intelligent people want treatments that are tested to be safe and effective.

Health bureaucrats do not want people to exercise common sense, so they slander citizens who question obviously dangerous and untested treatments as ‘antivax’.

[crashtech66]

I'd be interested to see the demographics of those who succumb there. Seems to me that Romania might be one of those countries that has a large population of elderly people largely unaffected by the toxic weird* lifestyle, though the fact that they may have extended lifespans as a result is probably no protection against COVID.

*Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic

[YMix]

Antivaxxer is a propaganda identity. Intelligent people want treatments that are tested to be safe and effective.

Health bureaucrats do not want people to exercise common sense, so they slander citizens who question obviously dangerous and untested treatments as ‘antivax’.

This is the kind of thing that will be analyzed for a long time. It sounds like common sense to say "this vaccine was developed too quickly, it's untested and I don't know what's in it". However, the same people take drugs for various conditions and have absolutely no idea how those drugs were developed and tested, nor what's in them. That's not common sense.

I can understand and respect the people's reluctance to trust the authorities, but the way that reluctance manifests itself is appalling, while the kind of justifications many people express are inconsistent, nonsensical or hysterical. Can't approve of that.