Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

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>Russian hybrid warfare focuses on stoking fear and unrest. Basically making everything more shitty

Except that everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies.

Russia didn't increase the EURO supply during covid devaluing our wages and purchasing power. Russia didn't connect our fridges on the internet without a VPN with credentials admin:admin that any script kiddie could pwn. Russia didn't open our borders to unvetted criminals. Russia didn't offshore our industry leading us to fall behind on everything manufacturing related from cars to leading edge semiconductor fabs. Russia didn't create our NIMBYistic housing policies that made our current housing shortage. etc, etc, etc.

Blaming Russia (and China and Trump) for every single shortcoming of the EU right now seems the default scapegoat for the incompetence of everyone in the EU from politicians to business leaders. Have those people ever taken any accountability for their mistakes?

This is probably why politics should stay banned here, considering a non-adjacent topic triggers rants like this.

> Except that everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies.

at risk of being autistic: no, not everything

plenty of shitty things is happening for reasons utterly unrelated to that

Some (or even all) EU policies being dumb does not make impossible to have problems caused by something else.

For example Russia was directly involved in making migrant crisis worse.

>For example Russia was directly involved in making migrant crisis worse.

Yes, obviously Russia will weaponize every single weakness of the EU (just how Ukraine, EU, US, NATO and China will weaponzie every weakness of Russia right now), but ultimately it's still a self inflicted weakness, that the EU could close at the snap of the finger if it actually cared about stopping it, and Russia would not be able to weaponize any longer.

> that the EU could close at the snap of the finger if it actually cared about stopping it, and Russia would not be able to weaponize any longer.

The part I referred to is in fact almost entirely solved, especially compared to the peak.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus%E2%80%93Poland_border_... is one of them more symbolic part, though that is only one piece of puzzle.

It was built by Poland in very non-EU fashion (see below, "shall not apply to the investment. In particular, the following are not required"), but EU at least has not sabotaged it and in fact silently ignored some topics.

https://www.sejm.gov.pl/Sejm9.nsf/PrzebiegProc.xsp?nr=1657 Art. 6. 1. - English translation below:

> Separate regulations—including the Construction Law, the Water Law, environmental protection laws, regulations on the disclosure of environmental information, the Geodesy and Cartography Law, regulations on spatial planning and land development, regulations on the protection of agricultural and forest land, railway transport regulations, and regulations concerning special procedures for the preparation and implementation of public road investments—shall not apply to the investment. In particular, the following are not required:

>1) a building permit or a formal notification;

>2) a decision determining the location of an investment of public purpose;

>3) the preparation of a construction design;

>4) the obtaining of any other decisions, permits, opinions, or clearances, or the submission of any notifications.

Most illegal EU migrants come from the Mediterranean, ferried onshore via EU funded NGOs, not from the Polish border funded by Russia.

Again, EUs problems, are EU self inflicted and they could stop them if they chose to.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337575 you claimed "everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies"

at least part of that is consequence of not only that

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