Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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"all these things are internal US politics stuff"

I do not believe your statement is correct.

Literally the first search I did was "police Poland" in a DDG news search on DDG and the third link was to earlier this month https://www.out.com/news/2020/8/10/polands-stonewall-police-... titled "Poland's Stonewall: Police Attack and Arrest Queer Protestors" :

> Nearly 50 people were arrested following the arrest of trans activist Malgorzata Szutowicz, better known as Margot, on Friday. The protests come amidst a rise in homophobic hate and rhetoric, and the recent re-election of President Duda who called LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seeks to destroy basic Polish values.

Or from https://euobserver.com/justice/149112 :

> Police were also investigating a separate case, in which a man on a balcony, next to a rainbow flag, grabbed his crotch during a World War II memorial march last weekend, Marczak said earlier. ...

> "No democratic country should allow the kind of incidents we saw, in which police enters people's private homes," [Rafał Trzaskowski] added, referring to police efforts to stop the balcony protester last weekend.

A DDG news search for "racism in Bulgaria" (literally my second search) includes this summary at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50060759 about repeated racism by Bulgian football fans. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/20/bulgaria-sofia... points out "While racist abuse of players inside stadiums attracts attention outside Bulgaria, within the country it is the Roma who are the principal targets of thugs in black and men in suits."

A DDG news seach for "black lives matter Croatia" finds https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/10/balkan-protesters-show-... where we read "Activists in Zagreb, Belgrade, Podgorica, Warsaw and Sofia rallied to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries. ... Dozens of people took part in a protest march in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica on Monday evening. “There is no doubt that racists are also hiding among all our local Balkan fascists.“"

I do believe my statement is correct.

You find some articles via google search about things like "black lives matter" in Croatia and claim it is relevant there somehow. There was a BLM protest in Lithuania too (where I am from). There were maybe 10 black people in that protest. Half of them when interviewed said they were traveling through different countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland) to create and initiate those protest. Then if you look at the people who attended - mostly teenagers. When asked why they are attending this protest they came up with "to show solidarity for US". Which is to say - they are being fed US politics over the internet and found an opportunity to join an event here.

So that's how I see it. These US political things leak to other countries. Through media, through twitter and instagram, and now even through HN.

>"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.

Another way of saying this is that Lithuania is currently either culturally or politically suppressing trans people, whether inherently or knowingly - I promise you trans people and their alternative identification exist there, too. You just dont see it and/or they are afraid to say so.

A BLM protest in East Europe looks partially ridiculous to me, the amount of black people in those countries and the police brutality is almost null. It is more an US problem.

In those countries there are more important issues to protest about, like what is happening in Belarus, and unfortunately is something that doesn't have the same news impact as the BLM protests.

Are LGBTQ+ rights a foreign ideology that seek to destroy basic Polish values?

Is Malgorzata Szutowicz an Eastern European who thinks about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts?

I quoted a BLM protesters as saying they were there "to show solidarity but also to point out the problem of racism and police violence in their own countries", which includes racism against the Roma people.

Hammering it won't make your point across. Most of this issues are not really very relevant to those societies. What you're looking for is activists (now journalists) writing pieces, and drinking from US narratives.

People in other countries is worried because every time a problem is framed under anglo-narrative constraints it becomes distorted, unnecessarily confrontational, and it distracts media from talking about the real problems people care about.

BLM protests in particular were weird in many places. In my city there was a bunch of people (mostly whites) and it wasn't very well received, because there were other very pressing issues (like people dying by the thousands by a virus).

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