Russian Federation Anti-Gay Laws: An Analysis and Deconstruction [pdf]

"10 Things You Didn’t Know About Russia’s Anti-Gay Law & LGBT Rights" on page 7 is a good summary

Finally someone who takes the time to actually INVESTIGATE a news story, who goes to actual sources (not talking heads grabbed off the street) and analyzes what is going on.

Unfortunately this guy is not a journalist, and this so-called "Putin's anti-gay law" is only one of a number of news stories in which the media seem to be driven by a hidden force to toe the party line, and therefore investigative journalism has almost disappeared. Even the most elementary investigations are no longer done by the state controlled media in the USA, namely all the major TV networks and newspapers.

Even the most elementary falsehoods are repeated and repeated. As the analysis points out this is not an anti-gay law, and it is not Putin's because it was introduced and voted on by the Russian parliament with almost unanimous support in the legislature and in society at large. Even some gay groups have spoken in support of this child protection law.

Now I don't happen to agree with the law and the way it was created because I think that child protections laws should focus more on mandating positive things and less on fining people for negative things. But that is another discussion which we are NOT HAVING because the media have hijacked this issue to tar Putin as black and evil.

Funny thing is that all of this twisted Western media coverage is just increasing the amount of support that Russians give to Putin, and is suckering Russsia's neighbors into incredibly stupid moves like Georgia's attack on Tskhinvali which led to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordering Russian troops into Georgia. Yet the media still call this Putin's war. And look at Ukraine? It doesn't take much digging to come up with a realization that Ukraine is a seriously confused country, that the EU was strong-arming them into a fat punitive association agreement and that Russia's bond purchase deal was remarkably free of strings attached. There are dozen's of questions that the media simply ignores about Ukraine. Somebody shot a couple of foreigners dead with hunting rifles and this is being painted as police brutality. Yet a study of the media reports paints a pictured of a fractured protest movement that contains factions that are strongly racist and nationalist. One should at least suspect that this is some kind of internal cleansing in a neo-nazi group and do some investigation. And what about the videos of a guy who is reported to have had his ear cut off while videos show that he has two ears on his head. And he had no bruises, just a stream of dried blood that could have come from a single cut or scrape. And the claim is that his hands were nailed to a cross, but in the video he picks up and uses a mobile phone. No visible nail holes in palm or wrist and his hands are only a bit scratched up like I myself have done by pruning blackberry bushes without gloves.

When will some journalist at least ask how Ukraine can become a part of Europe if the protest groups will not come together and democratically agree on a single position?

And when will a journalist ask the EU why they demanded Ukraine to sign a mammoth punitive association agreement instead of negotiating a series of agreements, one subject at a time like they did for the early members? Why couldn't Ukraine maintain its existing trade deals with Russia until it is ready to shift its trade flow to the EU?

And the most interesting question of all. Given that the Eurasian Union is modelling itself on the EU, and given that a core part of the EU is a large number of product standards that a product needs to meet in order to be sold in the EU, when will Russia itself be demanding its own trade partners to meet a higher set of standards than exist today? I'll bet that such things are waiting in the wings except that the Eurasian Union is looking for a collective way of bring all of its industries up to a higher level of quality rather than trying to lock out products the way that the EU tends to do.