well, i'm "swallowing" my morning espresso right now, and i'm trying to project the act into a sentimental shpere but nay, it's not working 
chat, feelings, and random discussion thread
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Dark_Silence
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condolences. you'll live, but that might be the very core of the problem.
@cuthalion: this brings me to another question. is religion popular in the balkans? i know that here most young people would not be caught dead performing a salute inspired to a religious concept such as the holy trinity, so i suppose that christianity is more relevant where you live at the moment. also, on stormfront.org (yeah, i know, not the best source ever, but still...) there is mention of serbian fighters as "white orthodox heros" while our home-grown italian fascists/white nationalists would probably just say "white hero" and leave the reference to catholicism out of the expression.
on the other hand, in southern italy tons of people wear religious symbols on necklaces, mainly crucifixes and small icons of the virgin mary (often alongside good-luck charms such as the red horn), even if church attendance is estimated at below 25% - this is to say that the sporting of christian symbols does not necessarily correspond to an interest in religion.
@cuthalion: this brings me to another question. is religion popular in the balkans? i know that here most young people would not be caught dead performing a salute inspired to a religious concept such as the holy trinity, so i suppose that christianity is more relevant where you live at the moment. also, on stormfront.org (yeah, i know, not the best source ever, but still...) there is mention of serbian fighters as "white orthodox heros" while our home-grown italian fascists/white nationalists would probably just say "white hero" and leave the reference to catholicism out of the expression.
on the other hand, in southern italy tons of people wear religious symbols on necklaces, mainly crucifixes and small icons of the virgin mary (often alongside good-luck charms such as the red horn), even if church attendance is estimated at below 25% - this is to say that the sporting of christian symbols does not necessarily correspond to an interest in religion.
@Kathleen23 condolences, it is always sad no matter the circumstances
@Hyena
It is a difficult question to answer. I can speak about Macedonia i guess but although i have some idea about the situation in the other ex-yugoslavian republic i can not speak with certainty.
As you probably know during the communist period religions in general were kept more or less suspended if i can use that word. Many people here secretly practised the religious customs and traditions but on the other hand many other people didn't. For example i am a orthodox christian by heritage and tradition but neither I nor my brother or my parents are baptised, we all declare ourselves as atheists but do some of the traditions as dying eggs for easter day etc. More or less the popularity of religiousness (sp?) sort of bloomed after Macedonia became an indipendent country and it now differs from social class i guess (this is of course not entirely true). Poor and uneducated people here are more religious but i believe that is the case everywhere in the world. The sad thing is that belonging to a religion became even more important here with the recent events and fightings we had here with the Albanian population in Macedonia.
I am certain that this goes to someones benefits (conspiracy theories again) because people get to feel more different and more threatened if you countiniously built churches and mosques on every fucking kilometar. The Macedonian Orthodox church for example put a colossal Cross on the top of the Vodno mountain just above Skopje so in response to that the muslims put a million of those pointy things
no offense ment and it all gets pretty stupid and annoying. There are plenty of people who don't give a fuck about all of that but then again there are plenty of people who are stupid or uneducated and who would feel compeled to show the other side who is the right God or something. These people are the ones who do the actual fighting in stupid wars if you catch my point.
I believe that the same thing happened in Bosnia 15 years ago. They were constantly brainwashing people saying to the Serbs that the Catholic/Muslim scums are up to no good and are bound to come and slaughter them at their sleep any time now. They said the same thing to the Muslims and the Croatians which understandably led to a social tension and panic, after that things tend to explode easily. Nowdays i guess people there use religion as a way to more easily falsely indentify themselves or something.
I;ve got to go, maybe we can continue this discussion latter
@Hyena
It is a difficult question to answer. I can speak about Macedonia i guess but although i have some idea about the situation in the other ex-yugoslavian republic i can not speak with certainty.
As you probably know during the communist period religions in general were kept more or less suspended if i can use that word. Many people here secretly practised the religious customs and traditions but on the other hand many other people didn't. For example i am a orthodox christian by heritage and tradition but neither I nor my brother or my parents are baptised, we all declare ourselves as atheists but do some of the traditions as dying eggs for easter day etc. More or less the popularity of religiousness (sp?) sort of bloomed after Macedonia became an indipendent country and it now differs from social class i guess (this is of course not entirely true). Poor and uneducated people here are more religious but i believe that is the case everywhere in the world. The sad thing is that belonging to a religion became even more important here with the recent events and fightings we had here with the Albanian population in Macedonia.
I am certain that this goes to someones benefits (conspiracy theories again) because people get to feel more different and more threatened if you countiniously built churches and mosques on every fucking kilometar. The Macedonian Orthodox church for example put a colossal Cross on the top of the Vodno mountain just above Skopje so in response to that the muslims put a million of those pointy things
no offense ment and it all gets pretty stupid and annoying. There are plenty of people who don't give a fuck about all of that but then again there are plenty of people who are stupid or uneducated and who would feel compeled to show the other side who is the right God or something. These people are the ones who do the actual fighting in stupid wars if you catch my point. I believe that the same thing happened in Bosnia 15 years ago. They were constantly brainwashing people saying to the Serbs that the Catholic/Muslim scums are up to no good and are bound to come and slaughter them at their sleep any time now. They said the same thing to the Muslims and the Croatians which understandably led to a social tension and panic, after that things tend to explode easily. Nowdays i guess people there use religion as a way to more easily falsely indentify themselves or something.
I;ve got to go, maybe we can continue this discussion latter
@Cuthalion: thank you for the info. as i have probably said before on this forum, i strongly disagree with the idea that one has to be uneducated in order to believe in God, but that's beside the point of the discussion. i think there is something else on which i need a clarification - i can understand how war-mongering leaders incited hatred between orthodox christians and muslims, all in all there has been a war for preminence since kosovo polije in 1389. on the other hand, catholics? this sounds weird to me, since the opposition between the catholic and the orthodox church has been mostly peaceful through history (contrary to what happened between catholics and protestants, for example, but that was over and done with by the end of the eighteenth century anyway). in other words, what excuse was found to foster hostility between the Eastern and the Western church? i understand the argument about Muslims wanting to turn Europe into 'Eurabia' and the reverse argument about Christians being infidels who have to be exterminated, but really, the orthodox-catholic rivarly in arms leaves me baffled.
still, some hours ago i was talking to a bosnian woman and i asked her to give me her version of the three-finger salute story, since you had mentioned the religious symbolism and the viz had mentioned the 'serbia to tokio' image. she told me a wholly new story, explaining that catholics cross themselves using five fingers (i confirm) whereas orthodox christians use three. she also told me that the serbs during the war were keen on catching catholic croats and cutting two fingers in order to make a point - now you have to cross yourself the orthodox way. i just replied with a noncommittal 'imaginative' to this information.
still, some hours ago i was talking to a bosnian woman and i asked her to give me her version of the three-finger salute story, since you had mentioned the religious symbolism and the viz had mentioned the 'serbia to tokio' image. she told me a wholly new story, explaining that catholics cross themselves using five fingers (i confirm) whereas orthodox christians use three. she also told me that the serbs during the war were keen on catching catholic croats and cutting two fingers in order to make a point - now you have to cross yourself the orthodox way. i just replied with a noncommittal 'imaginative' to this information.
@hyena
i was talking from personal experience and here most of the religious people are undereducated, not all of them but lets say the majority of them.
It doesn't matter if the Catholic church had been in good or bad relations with the orthodox, that was the whole point of my previous post, the important thing is that you have to find a difference between people in order to make them hate each other. It would have been all the same if they were Indians instead of Croats or Hindu istead of Catholic, really everything can be used, whether it is a different religion or a different way of saying Good Morning or beeing too fucking blond, the existance of a difference is most important, what the difference is doesn't matter as long as people can slit each others throats over it.
I said the same thing but maybe i didn't eexplain it well. I was wrong about the number of fingers Catholic people use, i thought it was two instead of five.
i was talking from personal experience and here most of the religious people are undereducated, not all of them but lets say the majority of them.
It doesn't matter if the Catholic church had been in good or bad relations with the orthodox, that was the whole point of my previous post, the important thing is that you have to find a difference between people in order to make them hate each other. It would have been all the same if they were Indians instead of Croats or Hindu istead of Catholic, really everything can be used, whether it is a different religion or a different way of saying Good Morning or beeing too fucking blond, the existance of a difference is most important, what the difference is doesn't matter as long as people can slit each others throats over it.
Cuthalion said:
I said the same thing but maybe i didn't eexplain it well. I was wrong about the number of fingers Catholic people use, i thought it was two instead of five.
Vizjaqtaar
Blue!... No, yellooou..
About those three fingers upside, here in Slovenia it is used like I said but Cuthalion's explanation is correct of course.
What was it about?hyena said:
Vizjaqtaar said:What was it about?
i'm a little embarassed in relating it, but here's to documentation. three years ago, i was working on a paper on household budget surveys in countries bound to enter the EU in 2004 or 2007. i discovered that the rules for all ex-communist countries were basically set by the goskomstat, the USSR statistical office, but the level of control the soviets exerted on national statistics was different depending on the country. for example, in poland there was a guy who was a famous methodologist and the soviets were willing to take suggestions from him as to how surveys had to be designed etc., so the poles had a considerable autonomy.
i wanted to understand the situation specific to each country so i started writing to each national statistical office, saying: i am a researcher working on this and that, blah blah blah, can you please let me know to which extent you were a part of the goskomstat system in the past, and what differences there were between the soviet surveys and your own? in general people were willing to help, and provided me with a ton of documentation (sometimes in languages i could not understand, alas). the only problem? when i sent my email to the slovenes and the croats, i got a barrage-fire line of replies such as "we never had anything to do with goskomstat, other soviet institutions, or the USSR in general. yugoslavia was never a satellite of the USSR and really they didn't ever tamper with our life".
i plead guilty of ignorance, i really didn't know at the time, but my, was that embarassing... especially because i'm not out on my own, there's "bank of italy" next to my name on every email and i hated passing off the institution as stupid. well, now i know.
@cuthalion: sorry for the mixup, i really didn't understand that you were saying the same thing that other person was saying.
as for the 'any excuse is valid to slit throats', i have to learn more on these episodes... it just doesn't add up to me at the moment, it's fairly absurd that the throat-slitting should be justified by 1000 years of fighting in some cases and be totally random in others....anyway, right now i have a point of view from FYROM (Cuthalion), a point of view from Slovenia (viz), a point of view from Bosnia (a friend's friend whom i met yesterday). if rincewind ever deigns to come back on the forum, i might even succeed in getting a croatian's impression (maybe she's too young to have an opinion on these matters tho). so now i sorely need at least 1 albanian and 1 serb to have a balanced idea.
TheFourthHorseman
In The Twilight World
TheFourthHorseman said:
well, no matter how likely your interpretation is, i honestly meant 'too young'. if i understand correctly, she's more or less 16, which means she was about 10 years old during the wars.
marduk1507
Member
marduk1507 said:Thank you for not quoting her.
Can anybody please tell the fucking idiot that Taliesin - as proven by the Finnish reference - was talking to Teijo, not me, hence no reason for quoting?
rahvin
keeper of the flame
marduk1507
Member
rahvin
keeper of the flame
marduk1507 said:
well, hyena's not from finland. while i admit that the inordinate amount of vowels might make kapitaani obvioussi sound italian, i'm still convinced it wasn't a reference to her native language.
marduk1507
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