bluekeybox

The dividing line roughly corresponds to the spread of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at its peak in the 1600s: http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/deut/EU1559.jpg

In other words, one could argue that the root of the conflict is a cultural clash between Polonized Ukrainians vs Russified Ukrainians.

> the US has a strong strong interest of the Ukraine breaking away from US influence

Sure it does. However, don't you understand that all runner-up or would-be superpowers (China, Russia, etc) have a vested interest in portraying US influence as being the driving force behind anything bad happening anywhere?

> Just recently a newspaper in Beijing had a comic showing the Ukraine as a car. Uncle Sam was shown trying to stir the stirring wheel. This gives you an idea.

So that's where you get your news from? How about you learn some Ukrainian and find out what the actual situation is on the ground?

Please elaborate your Godwin accusation, and explain, in what way you believe that I lack a complete picture. I am fully aware, FYI, that there exists a 30-50% Russian minority in Ukraine (with exact percentage depending on whether you count by ethnicity or by native language).

In addition, please explain how it is that the "friends and family" whose opinions you so adamantly declare are irrelevant are also living in bubbles. Are millions of people living in bubbles? Thousands? Dozens? Just me? How many exactly? I would like to hear your answer.

Or is it, perhaps, only people you don't agree with who live in "bubbles"?

This is getting dangerously close to "no true scotsman".

> It seems that the protestors have no other clear goal in mind except joining the EU

Incorrect, the main goal is to prevent the current government mafia allied with government-connected industrial oligarchs in Donetsk region to become even less representative and even more Russian-controlled.

> I wonder if there are Russians living in the west part of Ukraine, how violently would the protestors deal with them.

So far the protests were targeting the government, not civilians. This is a very good thing.

> Because it seems that the protestors are driven by their hatred towards not-signing the deal with Russia instead of EU

Again, incorrect, the protests are driven by resentment against the current tightly-connected pro-Russian ruling elite.

> nazi supporters.

There is indeed a party with extremely right-wing views that regularly receives up to 8-10% of the vote. However it is questionable as to whether that portion of the population actually holds those beliefs or simply uses them as signaling to antagonize Russia.

> And the EU/USA always support the more radical parts of the society(with media, weapon support etc..)

Current Western support is nearly non-existent while that of Moscow is extremely significant and some would say heavy-weight.

It's an (somewhat distorted) oversimplification to call this a Cold-War style chess game. Both groups are authentic, i.e. people in Western Ukraine genuinely feel closer to the West while people in Eastern Ukraine genuinely do feel closer to Russia. The US influence is nearly non-existent (if you discount Hollywood movies of course) while Russia exerts very significant influence by placing economic pressure (such as banning imports from "misbehaving" countries that were formerly a part of the USSR), providing PR expertise to Russian-supporting political parties, and so on.

Actually there is (or at least use to be) an idea of "progress". The hope was that people in the predominantly Russian-speaking Eastern regions would eventually "convert" politically to a pro-European direction because a primary driver of the pro-Russian leanings (other than cultural factors) was a positive memory of industrialization by the USSR which brought them jobs and a better way of life. The idea was that the older generation who remembered the glory of the USSR would eventually become replaced with a less Russia-centric one. Unfortunately this hasn't exactly played out to the extent it was hoped for.

> I've met a random Ukrainian couple while vacationing recently. They didn't speak Russian at all, so most definitely not from the east or other pro-russia kind of Ukrainians. And when asked about this uprising they expressed complete and utter apathy.

If you are Russian-speaking, it is very likely they feigned apathy so as to not offend you or to get bogged down in an extended political argument.

Note that I said "economic and political". At present, Ukraine is mostly politically sovereign. The deal with Russia would make it much worse, especially on political front.

There is an equally significant anti-Western bias among liberal university-educated people who were born in the U.S, so it mostly balances out. In addition, we now have maps like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/24...

Actually he indeed was, but one of his first steps he took immediately after was to imprison his main political opponent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia_Tymoshenko#2011_trial_and...).

> They want Ukraine to join European union

No. If you were more familiar with the situation, you would understand that EU is only being used as a token signal (not goal) of the direction the country should be heading in. What the protesters really want is for the current government to resign and not to sign a (undoubtedly corrupt) deal with Russia that would effectively infringe on Ukraine's economic and political sovereignty.

None of the people protesting have any illusion as to how long it would take to join EU or that it would be painless. Moreover, joining (or not joining the EU) is not even the main point of the protests. The point of the protests is preventing a Russian-controlled mafia government from taking over the country's future.

As someone not very familiar with the Turkish situation, would you mind sharing which specific Turkish protests you're referring to that remind you of this one? Thanks.

So far the protesters' actions have been targeting the government, not the citizens who support it. As to "demonizing a country which is a neighbor", the very fact you chose those words shows you are completely unfamiliar with the situation. Which makes your patronizing attitude not only needlessly arrogant, but also uninformed.

> Until then it is just a corner of the Soviet Union that has failed to catch up with the modern world.

Sounding a little patronizing here, no?

> And the blogosphere is manipulated into buying this as some kind of completely spontaneous grass roots movement

Completely absurd. All my extended family in Ukraine (plus all my former friends, classmates, and teachers) support the protests. Some were involved in parties such as Klitschko's Udar and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna. Please keep listening to Radio Moscow.

The protests are not about prosperity or even about joining the EU. They are about preventing Russian-controlled mafia from running the country.

I don't mean to get personal, but your post is surprisingly content-free. Everyone in the pro-government party understands what this protest is about. Yanukovich may be portrayed as non-intellectual, but he has read his Machiavelli and knows how to maneuver. In addition, he has an equally ardent, albeit much less vociferous voter base as the opposition, plus a network of government-connected oligarchs who run the show from behind the scenes. In this case, the future of the country has a clear schism. You cannot simultaneously sign a pact with Russia while opening the door to European market. It's one or the other, black or white, as made clear by Mr. Putin.

It's different because, unlike OWS, this is not an "eat the rich" protest. This is a protest against an authoritarian foreign power imposing its will on what (briefly) has been an independent country.

You are correct, it's about signaling. However, we have to think about whether one type of signaling should be privileged over another just by virtue of being particularly loud and obnoxious. (Note that this goes both ways).

The "right" of one type of signaling to suppress others is a privilege, after all.

You are using logic. Stop where you are.

Nobody is saying that generalizing is wrong in the general sense. It's just that sometimes advantages can be had to being particular. For example, I have a feeling that the culture in Estonia (including one's attitudes towards entrepreneurship) is quite different from the culture in France.

Wow, much metaphysic. /sorry, couldn't resist.

No one is talking about Soviet-style suppression of free speech. To see my direction, compare media-enabled witch-hunts and mob politics to an immune reaction of an organism. A small, appropriate dose of it is good for the body. A disproportionate immune reaction (like what we're seeing here), is an inflammation, and should probably call for administration of cortisone (while a Soviet-style reaction would be cutting out the whole inflamed tissue and harming everything in the process). It gets worse. If left unchecked, we can have an auto-immune disease. Someone has to be watching the watchers.

To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are. In this case, it is most certainly the talkers, since it is they who immediately profit from their deeds. Don't forget that every listener is also a talker (I bet there is a Nietzsche quote about it somewhere).

I'm commenting on the role of mass media in a contemporary society. This is important because I'm afraid that soon everyone is going to hear about PG/YC because "oh no, patriarchy!"

To repeat, look at engineering circa 1990s -- nearly entirely male-populated field, moderate prestige. Now look at engineering circa 2010s -- slightly more diverse field, significantly higher prestige. If you start with a 90+%-male base and you achieve moderate, growing success via entirely word-of-mouth advertising and by absorbing people from that base, you are setting yourself up for a situation where your organization reflects the base it grew out of (i.e. male engineers). And yet the media is not going to pay attention to you until your field is large and successful enough for spoils to be had from throwing rocks at you, at which point obviously they are going to criticize you for being "exclusionary". So what you have is a nearly entirely media-manufactured controversy. Why didn't the media focus on getting more women into engineering in the 1990s? Because it wasn't a prestigious enough field at the time for organized entryist action to exist.

Why is there a problem with this controversy? Because entryism exists. Entryists are interested in entering any high-prestige field and taking it over for themselves. They are not below taking up social justice banners to accomplish their goals. In fact, the most successful entryists utilize those banners to the highest effect. The whole controversy is pure manufactured evil. This is not about women's rights or social justice. It's about entryism.

> It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook

Amazing times we live in, isn't it? If this is how the average person finds out who someone like PG is, what hope is there for the world at large?

Please note that had PG been known through standard mass-media channels way earlier, there might have been even a fighting chance that more women (i.e. outsiders) had joined the tech world early on, since this way the news about YC wouldn't spread through what are predominantly male/engineering-graduate-heavy word-of-mouth channels, and we would have avoided this mess in the first place. Yet the press and the world at large is not even interested in the success of something like YC until the YC is big enough to throw rocks at because of some juicy inclusion/exclusion controversy. So what we have is a controversy that, like hundreds of others like it, is nearly "manufactured" by the press itself.

The moment you become big is the moment you become torn apart by the world.

Amazing. So when the rich try to segregate, the papers start screaming about how gated communities are bad for everyone. On the other hand, when the rich try to live where everybody else does, then the popular reaction is, "Oh my god, gentrification!" Why don't we just come together and realize that what the public/press really wish is that everyone else better off than them had died (or actually, perhaps the press doesn't want to take it that far, otherwise there would be no more "revolutionary" feelings to stir anymore, and the papers would go out of business).

Plus it tends to reward established networks of "friends" who assign each other as coauthors on papers rather than individuals doing the hard part of the work.

> And why can't both be true?

I did express that possibility (I said, "or is the truth somewhere in the middle perhaps?"). In fact I have reasons to believe that that is the case.